News Headlines - 27 December 2019
▽China fines Toyota 87.6 million yuan over Lexus price-fixing - Reuters
China’s market regulator on Friday has fined Japanese carmaker Toyota Motor 87.6 million yuan ($12.5 million) for price-fixing on its premium Lexus cars in eastern Jiangsu province, according to a document on its website... The anti-monopoly bureau of State Administration for Market Regulation said that between 2015 and 2018, the Japanese carmaker set a minimum sales and resale price for its cars in coastal Jiangsu province, which deprived dealers of pricing autonomy and harmed customers’ rights.
South Korea’s Constitutional Court declined Friday to rule on the validity of a 2015 diplomatic agreement with Japan that aimed to provide funds to the Korean “comfort women” but was deeply unpopular with the Korean public and may have fallen short of being an official treaty.
The court said the bilateral agreement is a “political deal” and its legal power is unclear. Thus, the legal rights of the plaintiffs have not been infringed, the court said, adding that it does not need to judge whether, by concluding the deal with Japan, the South Korean government had violated the Constitution.
▽3 Japan Post leaders to resign over improper insurance sales - The Mainichi
Japan Post Holdings Co. said Friday its three leaders will resign en masse to take responsibility for the scandal involving a huge number of faulty sales of insurance products, vowing to restore the public's damaged trust in the former state-owned postal and financial giant.
The group said its president and heads of the units Japan Post Insurance Co. and Japan Post Co. will resign, effective Jan. 5, after the Financial Services Agency ordered the subsidiaries to suspend new sales of insurance products for three months from Jan. 1 and also slapped business improvement orders on all three companies.
▽Iran’s leader ordered crackdown on unrest - 'Do whatever it takes to end it' - Reuters
After days of protests across Iran last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared impatient. Gathering his top security and government officials together, he issued an order: Do whatever it takes to stop them... About 1,500 people were killed during less than two weeks of unrest that started on Nov. 15. The toll, provided to Reuters by three Iranian interior ministry officials, included at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police.
The toll of 1,500 is significantly higher than figures from international human rights groups and the United States.
▽Sue Lyon, Star of ‘Lolita,’ Is Dead at 73 - The New York Times
Sue Lyon, who at 14 was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita,” a film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s eyebrow-raising novel about a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 73.
Phil Syracopoulos, a longtime friend, announced her death. He said she had been in declining health for some time.
Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel, which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself.
