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The Unification Church in Japan was ordered dissolved by a court Tuesday after a government request spurred by the investigation into the 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.The South Korea-based church said it was considering an immediate appeal of the Tokyo District Court’s revocation of its legal status, which would take away its tax-exempt privilege and require liquidation of its assets.The order followed a request by Japan’s Education Ministry in 2023 to dissolve the influential South Korea-based sect, citing manipulative fundraising and recruitment tactics that sowed fear among followers and harmed their families.In the ruling, the court said the church’s problems were extensive and continuous, and a dissolution order is necessary because it is not likely it could voluntarily reform, according to NHK television.“We believe our claims were accepted,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters, adding the government will continue efforts to support victims of the church.The Japanese branch of the church had criticized the request as a serious threat to religious freedom and the human rights of its followers.The church called the court order regrettable and unjust and said in a statement the court’s decision was based on “a wrong legal interpretation and absolutely unacceptable.”Tomihiro Tanaka, president of the church’s Japanese branch, accused the government of “fabricating damages.” The church is “not a malicious group that should be dissoloved,” he told a news conference on Tuesday.The investigation into Abe’s assassination revealed links over decades between the church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party. The church obtained legal status as a religious organization in Japan in the 1960s during an anti-communist movement supported by Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.The man accused of killing Abe resented the church and blamed it for his family’s financial troubles.The church, which officially calls itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, is the first religious group subject to a revocation order based on violations of Japan’s civil code. Two earlier case involved criminal charges the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, and Myokakuji group, whose executives were convicted of fraud.To seek the church’s dissolution, the Education Ministry had submitted 5,000 documents and pieces of evidence to the court, based on interviews with more than 170 people.The church tried to steer its followers’ decision-making, using manipulative tactics, making them buy expensive goods and donate beyond their financial ability and causing fear and harm to them and their families, seriously deviating from the law on religious groups, officials and experts say.The Agency for Cultural Affairs said the settlements reached in or outside court exceeded 20 billion yen ($132 million) and involved more than 1,500 people.Lawyers representing those seeking damages from the church welcomed the court decision as a major first step toward redress.“We must pursue our effort to achieve redress and to prevent future problems,” head lawyer Susumu Murakoshi told reporters, demanding the church accept the dissolution order and offer an apology and compensation to all victims.The church was founded in Seoul in 1954 by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who preached new interpretations of the Bible and conservative, family-oriented value systems.Nicknamed the “Moonies,” after its founder, the church developed relations with conservative world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as his predecessors Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.The church faced accusations in the 1970s and 1980s of using devious recruitment tactics and brainwashing adherents into turning over huge portions of their salaries to Moon. In Japan, the group has faced lawsuits for offering “spiritual merchandise” that allegedly caused members to buy expensive art and jewelry or sell their real estate to raise donations for the church.The church has acknowledged excessive donations but says the problem has lessened since the group stepped up compliance in 2009.Experts say Japanese followers are asked to pay for sins committed by their ancestors during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, and that the majority of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan. Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Tomorrow, NPRs CEO Katherine Maher goes before a DOGE congressional subcommittee to defend the public media outlets case for federal funding. Maher gives a preview to her testimony, sharing how funding cuts would impact Americans broad access to crucial news and information, particularly in rural and local areas. Maher also reveals NPRs strategy for reengaging with their audience, how the organization can better frame its identity as an outlet for all Americans, and more. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. When you joined NPR last year, the organization faced plenty of business challenges: audience engagement, business model. Since then, the environment just got a whole lot more fraught. There was a high profile criticism about newsroom bias last spring from an editor on the staff. That sounds almost quaint right now though. You’ve been called to testify on Capitol Hill tomorrow to speak before the DOGE subcommittee in a hearing titled “Anti-American Airwaves,” alongside the head of PBS. What do you expect from that? What should we all expect? How do you prepare for that? Honestly, I view it as an opportunity. I view it as an opportunity to go and talk about all the great work that NPR does, but also the great work that our stations do. I think that that’s something that often gets lost in the conversation about public radio is the overall percentage of funds that go directly to local stations. The importance of the local station network, and the fact that when people are listening to public radio, they are not listening to us broadcasting from D.C., they’re listening to their local station, which is probably, chances are, attached to a local university. Or it’s a community nonprofit, and it’s making the choices about what folks hear on the air. It probably has some call-in public affairs show where you can talk about what’s going on that matters to you as a resident of your town, your city, et cetera. So, just really getting back to that, that feels like such an important part of what I’m there to do. And, how do you prepare? I mean, you prepare by making sure you know what you’re there to say, and you prepare by making sure you know what it is that you want to be able to communicate about the value of the work, and you prepare by a lot of practice. It’s like trying to go to Carnegie Hall. It’s a lot of practice. I was talking to a friend about doing this interview. He was telling me a story about talking to a colleague who’s a MAGA republican, and he mentioned an episode, he said, “Oh, I’ll send you this episode of This American Life.” And they were like, “Oh, it’s on NPR. Oh, no.” It almost sounds like there are people who are listening to NPR stations that maybe don’t realize they’re NPR stations, or don’t connect it to this conversation about, I don’t know, it being anti-American. I really want to rebuff this idea that in any way that public radio is anti-American. For starters, we are a uniquely American model. We are a public-private partnership. For every single federal dollar we get, local stations raise an additional seven. They rely on their communities, they rely on local businesses. NPR is 25% of what you hear on public radio airwaves on average. In fact, 75% of stations programming is either other shows that they purchase or local shows that they produce. And, This American Life is a great example. We love This American Life. I heard Glass used to work at NPR. But it’s not an NPR program. It is a public radio program. It’s part of the diverse texture of what is actually available. There’s 1,300 public radio stations across the country. They represent their local communities in ways that are hyper unique, whether we’re talking about high school basketball, the price of sorghum wheat. It’s easy to forget about if you’re just listening to the radio in perhaps New York or a D.C., is that all of this is very much in tune with whatever’s going on in American lives at any particular point in time in this enormous nation of ours. NPR isn’t a federal agency, as you have said. You get money from lots of different places. But, the subtext of this DOGE hearing is the prospect of losing federal funding or some important part of it. What would the practical impact of losing that funding be? I can imagine you’ve been preparing for this possibility even well before this hearing came up. We have to be prepared for all scenarios all the time. The thing that I would want everyone to know about federal funding is the impact that loss of federal funding would have on local stations. 121.5 million goes to public radio on an annual basis, it’s a lot of money, I want to acknowledge that. And it’s also not a ton of money relative to the total size of the American public budget, right, the federal budget, a 100 million of that goes direct to local stations. And, disproportionately, the percentage of those funds goes to support stations that serve rural communities, that serve less affluent communities, that serve communities with really large areas of service, where the infrastructure investment in making sure that broadcast airwaves reach the country is significant. I think about my colleagues in Eastern Kentucky who have to put repeaters and hollers in order for Eastern Kentuckians to be able to hear those radio broadcasts. The loss of federal funding would directly impact the ability for stations to provide coverage, which currently 99.7% of the nation has access to airwaves. It would directly affect our ability to be part of the emergency broadcast system, and it would directly affect the ability of local stations to be able to continue to support commission and purchase programming about their communities. That’s where the harm would be. The harm would be for the local stations, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid, because it’s very easy, again, in D.C. to forget that we’ve lost a third of newspapers across the country in the last 20 years. One fifth of Americans live in a news desert. Public radio, public broadcasting, your local newsroom is often the only news that folks have that actually cares about their community and covers the issues that lsteners care about. You’re for all Americans, but you had an editor at NPR say, “No, the news has been biased.” The way you talk about COVID, or the Mueller report, or whatever. There is this impression from certain people in America that NPR is not for all Americans, and obviously, that’s what the hearing’s about tomorrow. Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m here: I believe very deeply that that is our objective and our responsibility. I had someone come up to me and they said, “I’m a conservative. I grew up on NPR. I love NPR. And I’m just not sure it’s a home for me right now.” And that struck me. That cut me to the core. I want it to be a home for everyone. I want people to feel as though it’s their home for curiosity, it’s their home for understanding the world. Certainly, that’s the role it played in my life as a young person. So, for starters, we have really reoriented the organization around audience needs. Broadcast radio is not the greatest way to understand audience needs because we just don’t have that much information about how people are listening. But as we have more digital data around people who are coming to our websites, or listening to our podcasts, or even just streaming from our app, those linear radio experiences, it starts to be able to help us understand how to better serve audiences. In the past, the only audience research that we did was with people with college degrees, but only 35% of Americans have a college degree, which meant that we were not listening to the needs of all Americans. How do you run a media organization and say, “65% of my potential audience, I’m not going to ask them what they want.” So we’re doing that, which I think makes a really big difference. The thing that we’ve identified in terms of our audiences is that curiosity is the most common characteristic. And the great news is that curiosity is not a partisan trait. Curiosity exists in every demographic, every age group, every political persuasion. And so, that’s a great place for us to hone in on our curiosity. What’s going on in the world? How do we explain it? How do we give people the information to go a little bit deeper, give them that context that helps them situate themselves? And I think it’s time for us to reintroduce ourselves as if this is what we’re here to do, and yes, we’re here to do it for everyone. How’s the mood and morale on your team these days? They’re here to go to work. I just walked through the newsroom to get here to the studio, and everyone’s heads down, they’re working, they’re reporting, they’re producing, they’re getting ready to file their story for All Things Considered, or they’re getting ready for whatever band is coming in for Tiny Desk next. I think that the overall environment right now is that people really want to do the work. There’s a lot of news in the world today, whether we’re thinking about the transformative administration, whether we’re thinking about questions of space exploration. I think people feel as though, of course, this is a different moment in time, and it is really important that we show up and are responsive to people’s questions about the value of our work. I come back to the fact that when we talk about efficiency, public radio is remarkably efficient. The cost per public media per American is $1.60. It’s basically when you go to check out at CVS and you’re asked to round up to a good cause, that’s us. That’s what we cost. Public radio costs less than $1.60, the public media as a whole is $1.60 per American per year. As I said, for every dollar of federal funding, $7 of private funding. We’ve got a good story to tell, and 75% of Americans want to see public media maintain or increase its current funding levels. So, again, I think that’s the story we’re here to tell.
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A private European aerospace company scrubbed its attempt on Monday to launch the first test flight of its orbital launch vehicle from Norway.Unfavorable winds meant that the Spectrum rocket couldn’t be launched from the island of Andya in northern Norway, Munich-based Isar Aerospace said.The launch is subject to various factors, including weather and safety. The company said it could also conduct the test flight later in the week. Another date hasn’t yet been set.The 28-meter (91-foot) Spectrum is a two-stage launch vehicle designed for small and medium-size satellites.The company has largely ruled out the possibility of the rocket reaching orbit on its first complete flight, saying that it would consider a 30-second flight a success. Isar Aerospace aims to collect as much data and experience as possible on the first integrated test of all the systems on its in-house-developed launch vehicle.The startup, which says it has raised more than 400 million euros ($435 million) in capital, hopes to build up to 40 launch vehicles per year in the future at a plant outside of Munich. The launch vehicles are all to be used for putting satellites into orbit.Isar Aerospace is separate from the European Space Agency, or ESA, which is funded by its 23 member states.ESA has been launching rockets and satellites into orbit for years, but mainly from French Guianaan overseas department of France in South Americaand from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
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