JAPAN SCRAMBLES JETS TO HEAD OFF CHINA PLANE
TOKYO: Japan scrambled fighter jets on Saturday to head off a Chinese state-owned plane that flew near islands at the center of a dispute between Tokyo and Beijing, a Japanese Defense Ministry spokesman said.

The Japanese jets were mobilized after a Chinese maritime aircraft ventured some 120 kilometers north of the Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyus, at about 12 p.m., the spokesman said. The Chinese Y-12 twin-turboprop later left the zone without entering Japanese airspace over the islands, the spokesman added. The confrontations have become commonplace, since Japan nationalized the East China Sea islands in September, a move it insisted amounted to nothing more than a change of ownership of what was already Japanese territory.

GIANT TUNA SELLS FOR RECORD $1.8 MILLION IN JAPAN
TOKYO: A monster bluefin tuna sold for a record-breaking $1.8 million in the year’s first auction at Japan’s Tsukiji fish market on Saturday, nearly three times the previous high set last year. The 222-kilogram fish, caught off Japan’s northern city of Oma, fetched a winning bid of $1.8 million or 155.4 million yen, said an official at the Tokyo fish market. The figure dwarfs the previous high of 56.49 million yen paid at last year’s inaugural auction at Tsukiji, a huge working market that features on many Tokyo tourist itineraries. The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the company that runs the popular Sushi-Zanmai chain, who also won the auction for last year’s record-breaking bluefin.

CHINA RESUMES WORK ON NUKE POWER PLANT
BEIJING: China has resumed construction on a “fourth generation” nuclear power plant, suspended after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, which will be its biggest-ever nuclear facility, state media said on Saturday. Construction on the coastal Shidao Bay nuclear plant in Rongcheng, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province, resumed last month, the state-run China Internet Information Center reported, adding that the plant is “China’s biggest planned nuclear project.” The plant, which will be cooled by high temperature gas, will become “the world’s first successfully commercialized fourth generation nuclear technology demonstration project,” the report said. AFP