This morning’s Japan-related news links:

• Hakuho took a big step toward promotion to grand champion with a win over fellow ozeki Kotooshu coupled with a loss by archrival Asashoryu with three days left in the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament on Thursday. [Link]
• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed with his Australian counterpart John Howard during a telephone conversation on Thursday to go on to work together on issues such as reconstruction in Iraq, countermeasures against global warming, and the Korean peninsula nuclear issue. [Link]
• Japan may replace the Kyoto protocol expiring in 2012 with a firmer target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. [Link]
• Japan will probably have warmer-than- average temperatures in the June-August summer season, the country’s meteorological agency said. [Link]
• Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko arrived Thursday in Estonia, on their first visit to a former Soviet republic. [Link]
• A senior Bahraini parliamentary member on Wednesday called on Japan to promote more wide-ranging exchanges with Bahrain, even though it has fewer resources than other countries in the Middle East region. [Link]
• Prosecutors on Thursday arrested six officials of the Japan Green Resources Agency (J-Green) and four public and private organizations over a suspected bid-rigging scheme described as “malicious.” [Link]
• Five people who are suspected of sneaking into dozens of restaurants and shops late at night and stealing a massive amount of money have been arrested in Nagoya. [Link]
• Former Korean Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook Thursday urged Japan to sincerely deal with the issue of wartime sex slavery, fearing any further historical dispute may undermine regional cooperation and development. [Link]
• A South Korean television network will air a program Friday featuring the controversial Japanese Civil Code’s provision that children that women give birth to within 300 days of divorce should be recognized as the children of their former husbands. [Link]
• Asahi Shimbun reports that a committee of attorneys and prosecutors appointed by the Supreme Court has released the first draft of rules to govern the upcoming “lay judge” system, where citizens are empaneled like jurors to sit on the bench with career judges and determine the fate of defendants for capital offenses. [Link]
• On May 24, Sony unveiled what it is calling the world’s first flexible, full-color organic electroluminescent (OEL) display built on organic thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. [Link]
• Hitachi Ltd and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co announced Thursday that they have agreed to strengthen their partnership in the plasma TV business. [Link]
• Daisuke Miyagawa, a member of a popular comedy duo, returned to the stage on Thursday after suffering a stroke in February. [Link]
• About 70 restaurants near Hyogo Prefectural Hall have asked the local government to extend its workers’ lunch break to 1 hour after a reduction by 15 minutes led to a loss of customers. [Link]
• The mecha version of the Nissan DUALIS SUV designed by anime creator/mecha designer Shoji Kawamori (Macross) has been spotted in Tokyo. [Link]

Afternoon Update:

• A jobless man has been arrested for stealing 20 million yen in cash from a man sleeping at JR Takamastu Station on Thursday night. [Link]
• The mayor of the bankrupt Hokkaido city of Yubari has expressed anger at the fiscal reconstruction plan mapped out by the national government, which he says ties him down and prevents him from launching his own fiscal rehabilitation activities. [Link]
• Prosecutors again sought the death penalty Thursday at the Hiroshima High Court for a man charged with killing a woman and her baby in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1999, when he was a minor, following a Supreme Court order that the high court review its previous ruling of life imprisonment. [Link]
• French investigative authorities will likely question former French President Jacques Chirac over his alleged accumulation of secret funds from a cultural organization in a bank account he opened in Tokyo in 1992, according to a French weekly newspaper published Wednesday. [Link]
• A court in Nagoya has aquitted a 32-year-old man of engaging in illegal exploitation of a 17-year-old girl, after determining that their intercourse was consentual. [Link]
• Regional phone units of NTT said that the latest in a series of service disruptions was caused by a mistake in work involving exchanging hard disks in a hookup device. [Link]
• Five people were injured, one seriously, after an 11-car pile-up in a tunnel on the Tomei Expressway today. [Link]
• Summer bonuses to be paid by big Japanese companies this year average a record high of more than 930,000 yen, reflecting the continued improvement of their earnings, an influential business organization said Thursday. [Link]
• A section of cable on a Schindler elevator at a Suginami Ward, Tokyo, condominium block was found to have frayed in late March, it has been learned. [Link]
• Manufacturers of gas water heaters and oil fan heaters will be required to conduct maintenance checkups on the products for at least 10 years after being sold, upon user request, in a new regulation likely to be set by the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry. [Link]
• Japan’s Ai Fukuhara, who was looking to make the quarterfinals in women’s singles at the world table tennis championships for the first time since 2003, fell short when she lost in straight sets in the third round to Romania’s Daniela Dodean. [Link]
• An on-duty police officer has been arrested for attempting to photograph up the skirt of a university student at a railway station in Yokohama Thursday afternoon. [Link]
• A 90-year-old wheelchair-bound man has been arrested for molesting a woman earlier this month in Kyoto. [Link]