Asia in 3 minutes: A wartime bomb in Japan, ‘Godzilla’ dies, and a ticking time bomb in China’s financial system

Unexploded US world war bomb found in Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant

A suspected second world war bomb was found on Thursday on the premises of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, an official said, with police called in to investigate. The 85cm object, believed to be an unexploded bomb dropped by the United States during the war, was discovered by workers constructing a car park close to the facility’s reactors, a spokesman for Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said. TEPCO called police immediately, suspending construction work and roping off the area. There was no impact on ongoing decommissioning operations at the nuclear plant, which suffered meltdowns in March 2011 after a powerful earthquake spawned a huge tsunami.

What next? Japan’s Jiji Press reported that under such circumstances police call in bomb disposal experts from Japan’s military. Unexploded US bombs and shells are still occasionally found in Japan more than 70 years after the conflict ended, particularly on the southern island of Okinawa, where a bloody battle took place in the war’s closing months.

Child sex webcam centres shifting from Philippines to Thailand

Demand for sex with children is an emerging cause of human trafficking in the Mekong region, the United Nations said this week, as it pointed to a shift in child sex webcam centres from the Philippines to Thailand. The problem had grown so much that demand for child webcam sex tourism was “outstripping the supply”, Deanna Davy, senior research consultant at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said at the launch of a new trafficking report in Bangkok. Thailand is a regional hub for the smuggling and trafficking of men, women and children from poorer neighbouring countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar. Many are forced to work in Thailand’s sex industry and in labour-intensive sectors such as fishing and construction.

What next? Jeremy Douglas, regional representative of the UNODC, said there had been a shift in child sex abuse webcam centres to Thailand from the Philippines, where authorities have been cracking down. “It used to be the Philippines...intelligence indicates a move of people setting up operations in Thailand,” Douglas said.

Duterte asks policemen to kill policemen as part of drug war

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday announced “dead-or-alive” bounties worth US$40,000 each for policemen he accused of helping a narco-politician, saying he preferred they be killed. The call for police officers to kill their colleagues is the latest inflammatory comment by Duterte in his controversial drug war. Duterte made the offer during a speech at national police headquarters, offering 2 million pesos (US$40,000) for officers who allegedly helped a mayor killed in an anti-drug operation on July 30. “Each of those policemen carry on their heads now, I am announcing, 2 million per head and you are free to go on leave (to pursue them),” Duterte told the officers in the audience. “I’ll cut short my speech so that you will have a chance for a crack at the 2 million for those idiots.”