It seems indicative of a return of Japanese rising nationalism and imperialism for the country to be throwing off it's obligations to conform to world law and instead throw a sop to it's politically powerful fishing industry and nationalist sentiments.

If you've been living under a rock, or worse, subscribing to the bogus claims of the Bush administration to be bringing democracy to Iraq, the recently leaked legislation for Iraq's oil (written by U.S. consultants in English and then translated) should prove the popular claim that Iraq was invaded to seize control of it's oil for multinational companies, the majority of which are U.S owned.

William Clark presciently addressed reasons for the Bush administrations drive to invade Iraq in 2002. He hypothesised the preservation of the petrodollar as the monopoly oil reserve currency as the real (under-reported) reason to invade Iraq (since Saddam in Nov 2000 changed to selling his oil in Euros). Clark recently released a new article that expanded his petrocurrency monopoly hypothesis on Iran.

The Geekcorps is a volunteer project to transfer technical knowledge into the third world, typically Africa. Courtesy of Jordan, they've updated the old trick of building unidirectional WiFi antennae out of Pringles cans into a method of supplying local video broadcasting, dubbed the CanTV.