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Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.

" And a particular image or fact can start with one person online and inevitably become more distorted as it gets further down the line. Errors are inserted-sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident-until it winds up completely distorting our understanding of the original message. P "

"Right-wing political forces in Japan, encouraged by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, are waging a campaign of intimidation to deny the disgraceful chapter in World War II when the Japanese military forced thousands of women to serve in wartime brothels. Many mainstream Japanese scholars and most non-Japanese researchers have established as historical fact that the program allowed Japanese soldiers to sexually abuse women across the Asian warfront - based on widespread testimony from the "comfort women." Now a political effort to treat these events as wholesale lies concocted by Japan's wartime enemies is gaining traction, with revisionists trying to roll back the government's 1993 apology for the coercion of women into prostitution. The Abe government, intent on stoking nationalistic fervor, was rebuffed earlier this year in its effort to have revisions made to a 1996 United Nations human rights report on the women Japan forced into sex slavery. But, at home, the right wing continues to hammer away at The Asahi Shimbun newspaper, seizing on the paper's retractions of articles published in the 1980s and 1990s that turned on limited aspects of its coverage to deny the larger historical truth of the "comfort women" program."

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone's condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology

"In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific. "Sensory perception," Constance Classen, the author of "The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch," says, "is a cultural as well as physical act." It's a controversial claim made famous by Marshall McLuhan's insistence that nonliterate societies were governed by spoken words and sound, while literate societies experienced words visually and so were dominated by sight. Few anthropologists would accept that straightforwardly today. But more and more are willing to argue that sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity."

"It uses an "emotional engine" and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones. The firm said people could communicate with it "just like they would with friends and family" and it could perform various tasks. It will go on sale to the public next year for 198,000 yen ($1,930; £1,150). "People describe others as being robots because they have no emotions, no heart," Masayoshi Son, chief executive of Softbank, said at a press conference. "For the first time in human history, we're giving a robot a heart, emotions.""

Uploaded on Mar 21, 20089-11 Chile (september 11 1973)

"Today, the spot where this happened is marked with a small plaque bearing the name of Georges Loiseleur, who "died for France". A 19 year old, Rene Dova, who was killed in the same incident is also remembered. Across the city there are about 500 of these memorials dating from the week of fighting exactly 70 years ago, when Parisians won back their lost honour and threw off the Nazi yoke. The earliest ones were put up spontaneously by families or comrades. Later, a law of 1946 set out strict rules about proof of merit, and about appropriate language. Thus, while the first plaques use emotional phrases like "lachement assassine par les Boches" (victim of a cowardly murder by the Hun), the later formula "Mort pour la France" reflects an official appropriation of the act of memory. Each memorial evokes a personal story from the liberation of Paris. But time is passing, and the memory of what actually happened at each of these 500 spots is fading."