Japan lawmakers call on government to recognize Palestinian state

A nonpartisan group of Japanese lawmakers on Thursday submitted a petition with 206 signatures to Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya, urging the government to recognize a Palestinian state.The move came ahead of a high-level international conference in New York on Sept. 22 on the proposed two-state solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict."Israel has no intention of agreeing to a cease-fire, and child hunger cannot be ignored," Tomoko Abe of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan said when she and two other opposition members of the group met with the foreign minister.The…READ FULL ARTICLE