Free Republic

Sen. Mike Lee called out Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for cutting off the pay of Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis while he serves a three-year prison sentence in Japan. “Secretary Austin callously informed me that day that the request for the exception to policy would not be granted. I asked him why. He believed it wasn’t appropriate for the department to do that,” the Utah Republican said last week in a Senate floor speech, referring to a Nov. 29 phone call with the secretary. The Department of Defense’s decision to not extend Alkonis’ pay and benefits while he serves his sentence...

The 175-acre site at the base of Mount Fuji will have clean, autonomous cars and 2,000 residents. While introducing a concept car is nice, Toyota chose this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to announce it is building an entire city, the roads packed with last year’s autonomous concept cars. Top that, competitors. The “living laboratory” will be built on 175 acres that used to crank out the Toyota Yaris. Efficiencies in production meant the plant was no longer necessary, freeing up all that land. Toyota said it would be “a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen fuel cells.”

TOKYO: Pressure in the magma chamber of Japan's Mount Fuji is now higher than it was the last time the volcano erupted more than 300 years ago, scientists say. Tectonic shifts triggered by last year's huge 9.0 magnitude undersea quake have left the chamber under 16 times the minimum pressure at which an eruption can occur, researchers said. Researchers at the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention studied the tectonic movements caused by the tsunami-triggering quake on March 11, 2011 and a magnitude 6.4 quake that rocked central Japan four days later, Kyodo News reported. Mount Fuji...

The Aokigahara Forest is a lonely place to die. So dense is the vegetation at the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji, it is all too easy to disappear among the evergreens and never be seen again. Each year the authorities remove as many as 100 bodies found hanging at the country's suicide hotspot - but others can lie undiscovered for years. Exactly why so many choose to end their lives in the forest remains something of a mystery, though it has been suggested that the first among them were inspired by a novel set there. Azusa Hayano has studied and...

FUJIKAWAGUCHI, Japan - If you look up from the forests at the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji, the volcano's graceful slopes rise into the distance and peak in a nearly symmetrical, snowcapped cone. If you look down in the forests, however, you see something much less elegant: trash. Lots of it. Just below the surface of leaves and topsoil are discarded microwave ovens, construction debris, broken office furniture. Even rusting refrigerators. Mount Fuji, the pride of the nation and symbol of the Japanese soul, is a huge garbage dump. "We've found everything from household trash to broken TV sets and...