Moscow  - Japan scrambled four fighter jets on Wednesday to flank Russian bombers on a long-range patrol over the Sea of Japan, a Russian air force official said.

"Four Japanese air force F-15 fighters escorted the long-range aviation crews as they flew over the Sea of Japan," Lieutenant- Colonel Vladimir Drik was quoted by news agency Interfax as saying.

Russia ordered out an extra two Russian Su-27 fighters to backup their TU-22 bombers, known as Backfires by their NATO codenames, while they completed their training, Drik said.

Tokyo - Shares of Toyota Motor Corporation fell sharply Wednesday after a report that Japan's leading carmaker will cut its earning forecast by 40 per cent owing to shrinking demand triggered by the global financial crisis.

Citing informed sources, the Japanese business daily Nikkei reported that Toyota has to adjust its profit forecast downwards by 40 per cent for the current business year, ending March 31.

Tokyo - Stock markets throughout Asia and the Pacific fell sharply Wednesday in response to Wall Street's plunge and mounting fears over a worldwide recession.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average nosedived to its lowest closing level since June 2003, with losses amounting to the third biggest one-day drop in post-war Japan.

The Nikkei plunged 952.58 points, or 9.38 per cent, to end at 9,203.32.

The broader Topix index of all first-section issues fell 78.6 points, or 8.04 per cent, to 899.01.

Tokyo - The Japanese carmaker Honda has announced measures to improve pedestrian safety with a new generation of crash test dummies aimed at reducing pedestrian lower back and upper leg injuries.

The car maker said the Polar III dummy improved the evaluation of the injuries common in collisions between pedestrians and taller vehicles such as SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicle) or minivans.

In 1998, Honda was the first car maker to develop a pedestrian crash test dummy to help identify parts of the vehicle most often causing injuries in collisions with pedestrians.

Tokyo - The Tokyo stoc

Stockholm - US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Their discoveries were linked to describing the smallest building blocks in nature and nature's order, the academy said.

The academy cited Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics."