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Built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon, about 35 miles from South Korea's capital, New Songdo City is billed as the largest private real-estate development in history. It is Korea's answer to Shanghai and Dubai. Estimates put the cost of the Songdo project, which is barely five years old, at up to $60-billion. The city's centerpiece is Songdo Global University Campus, a collaborative attempt to blend Korean, American, and European academic strengths. The founders broke ground in May and at least two American partners, North Carolina State University and the State University New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook have each received $1-million in planning money to help develop undergraduate programs. Both colleges view Songdo as a local recruitment hub. SUNY at Stony Brook currently attracts 2,000 students from Asia. The model for the Global University Campus is similar to Qatar's Education City, in which American universities will offer undergraduate programs inside a single campus, while administering them separately. Campus developers predict it will enroll 12,000 students by 2012. SUNY at Stony Brook will initially offer four undergraduate engineering programs, along with a business and a technology-management program. Students will be given an opportunity to study at the U.S. campus as well. Several more partners, including the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and George Mason University have signed agreements to start faculty and student exchanges, and, eventually, collaborative research projects. Moscow State University, Glion Institute of Higher Education, in Switzerland; the University of Surrey, in England; and Monash University, in Australia, have also been linked by the Korean media to the project. Songdo's American partners say that despite the potential difficulties, they are in for the long haul.

The article discusses the efforts of Toyota Motor Corp. in fixing the problems occurred at the automobiles of Royal Family of Japan and compares it to the attitude of the company in fixing the problems occurring at various models of automobiles in the U.S. For the Royal Family, the company took very serious efforts and fixed the problem quickly. However, to various accident that occurred in the U.S. because of technical errors, the company mainly tried to cover up the problem.

The article explores the role of Japan in the U.S.-led Iraq War in 2003 based on an inquiry into the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces to Iraq. According to critics, the participation of Japanese forces in providing humanitarian services in Iraq violates the country's no-war Constitution. The release of a short document was authorized by new Defense Minister Kitazawa Toshimi claiming that about 67 percent of Japanese soldiers deployed to Iraq wore U.S. uniforms as they transport U.S. forces into and out of combat.

The article focuses on rape cases involving the U.S. military in Japan. A woman named Jane was allegedly raped by an American sailor in a car park near the U.S. Navy Base at Tokyo, Japan, while a 12-year-old was also allegedly raped by three U.S. serviceman in Okinawa. They are said to be among the many women who were harassed by U.S. military personnel annually around the world including Japan, which has 80 American facilities. Critics said that the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) saves U.S. military personnel from arrest for crimes.

Twelve simple sequence repeat (SSRs) loci were used to evaluate genetic diversity of 109 isolates of Macrophomina phaseolina collected from different geographical regions and host species throughout the United States (US). Genetic diversity was assessed using Nei's minimum genetic distance, and the usefulness of each locus was determined by calculating the polymorphism information content (PIC). A total of 98 alleles were detected and of these 31 were unique to individual genotypes. Eight of twelve loci were highly informative with PIC values greater than 0.50. The majority of pairwise comparisons of genetic distance were greater than 0.60 indicating moderate to high genetic diversity. Dendrograms based on the genetic dissimilarities were created for the 109 isolates of which 79 were from soybean. Some clustering by host and geography was noted, but, the dendrograms generally grouped isolates independent of host or geography. Additionally, sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) for 10 isolates revealed that all of these isolates were 99% similar. Three SSR loci from M. phaseolina were cross amplified in other genera in the Botryosphaeriaceae. This was the first study of genotyping and assessing genetic diversity of M. phaseolina isolates collected from a widespread host and geographic range across the US with SSRs. With an additional 34 loci publically available for M. phaseolina, the results indicate that previously developed SSRs from one species can be used in future population, ecological, and genetic studies of M. phaseolina and other genera within the Botryosphaeriaceae.