Geopolitics first:
"Visit by India’s Modi draws pledges of support from Japan" by Elaine Kurtenbach | Associated Press September 02, 2014
TOKYO — Japan and India agreed Monday to increase their economic and security cooperation as visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi won pledges of support for his effort to revitalize the lagging Indian economy.
Modi, who brought a delegation of more than a dozen Indian tycoons to Japan, said he hopes to elevate still relatively low-key business ties with Japan to a ‘‘new level.’’
In a joint statement issued after their talks, the two leaders reaffirmed the importance of upgrading defense ties, a priority for both given China’s growing assertiveness in the region.
Yeah, okay, I guess so.
Didn't India just sign a defense pact with China?
Modi also welcomed Japan’s relaxation of restrictions on exports of defense-related equipment and technology.
He and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ‘‘recognized the enormous future potential for transfer and collaborative projects in defense equipment and technology,’’ the statement said.
As part of their ‘‘Investment Promotion Partnership,’’ the two sides set a target of doubling Japan’s foreign direct investment in India. Abe also pledged to raise public and private investment and financing from Japan to $33.6 billion within five years and to provide an aid loan of $480 million to the India Infrastructure Finance Co.
Abe said he would work with Modi to ‘‘strengthen the cooperative relationship between our two countries.’’
The statement listed construction of high-speed railways and other transport systems, cleanups of the Ganges and other rivers, food processing, and rural development and construction of ‘‘smart cities’’ as priorities.
In a speech to Japanese business leaders on Monday, Modi promised to set up a team to facilitate trade and investment.
Modi became prime minister in May with pledges to transform India’s troubled economy. He is keen to win more support for ambitious energy and construction projects, including high-speed railways.
Related: Japan Joins With U.S.
‘‘When I became prime minister, there were high expectations. Not just high expectations, but people expected speed in decisions,’’ Modi told leaders of Japan’s five big business groups. ‘‘I give you the assurance that what we have done in the past 100 days, the results will be seen very quickly.’’
In the joint statement, Abe reiterated his hope India will adopt its bullet train technology, promising Japanese financial, technical, and operations support.
Japan and India agreed also to continue joint and Japan-US-India military exercises and to accelerate talks on the purchase by New Delhi of US-2 amphibian aircraft.
The two sides said they would step up talks on nuclear energy cooperation, claiming ‘‘significant progress’’ despite having failed to reach a last-minute agreement on safeguards sought by Japan.
Seriously? As Fukushima still spews 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean every day?
The two sides meanwhile pledged to strengthen work on preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons and on nuclear safety.
The statement said Japan and India will cooperate on advanced, clean coal technology, which is sorely needed to help combat the choking pollution in India’s major cities.
The two countries said they are in the process of finalizing a contract on production and export to Japan of rare earths, which are minerals used in mobile phones, hybrid cars, and other high-tech products.
During Abe’s first term in office, in 2006-2007, the two countries signed an agreement to build an industrial corridor between Mumbai and New Delhi.
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Now the garbage:
"Japan’s first lady says husband helps with chores" by Mari Yamaguchi | Associated Press September 05, 2014
TOKYO — Japan’s first lady says she has such a busy schedule that sometimes it’s up to the prime minister to do the dishes or take out the garbage.
It’s the kind of flexibility that Akie Abe says is needed for the advancement of women in Japan.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing companies and the government to hire and promote more women to allow Japan’s economy to grow and create a society where ‘‘women can shine.’’
He appointed five women to his 18-member Cabinet on Wednesday.
Even though Akie Abe, 52, openly refers to herself as a member of the ‘‘opposition in the household’’ on some issues her husband favors, such as nuclear energy, she said on Thursday that she is a big supporter of his ‘‘womenomics’’ policy of promoting women’s advancement.
In Japan, women are underrepresented in senior-level positions in companies, government, and universities.
They have long been discriminated against in salary and promotion in corporate Japan, and often face obstacles to pursuing their careers due to a lack of help from spouses.
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"Japan seeks backing for whale hunt" Associated Press September 04, 2014
TOKYO — Japan is seeking international support for its plans to hunt minke whales in the Antarctic Ocean next year by scaling down the whaling research program the UN top court rejected earlier this year, officials said Wednesday.
Whaling for research purposes is exempt from the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, and Japan has conducted hunts in the Atlantic and Pacific on that basis. But in March, the International Court of Justice ruled the Antarctic program wasn’t scientific and must stop.
Japan’s Fisheries Agency is working on a revised program to be submitted to the International Whaling Commission’s scientific committee around November. The agency will announce its intention and basic plan at a Sept. 15-18 meeting in Slovenia.
The new program will address the problems cited by the court, an agency official said on condition of anonymity, citing department rules. The court said Japan’s Antarctic program produced little actual research and failed to explain why it needed to kill so many whales for the study.
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"Fukushima Workers Who Fled May Have Received Garbled Orders, Reports Say" by MARTIN FACKLER, SEPT. 3, 2014
TOKYO — About 650 workers who fled the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plant without permission at the darkest moment of the 2011 nuclear accident may have left because they thought they had been ordered to evacuate and were not knowingly violating orders, according to new details of the episode reported in recent days by Japanese news media.
I think it is one of the most important and impactful stories and concerns of our times but the propaganda pre$$ more or less ignores it.
The Kyodo News agency and two newspapers, The Mainichi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun, carried new excerpts from the testimony of Masao Yoshida, who was the plant manager during the March 2011 accident. Some of his testimony, which was recorded by government investigators during hours of interviews before Mr. Yoshida’s death last year, was first disclosed in May by another major Japanese newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun.
Mr. Yoshida, who stayed at the Fukushima plant with 68 employees as it seemed to teeter on the brink of catastrophe after being crippled by a huge earthquake and tsunami, came to be viewed in Japan as a hero for preventing the disaster from growing even worse. His 400-page account of the accident, which had been kept secret by the government, is now scheduled to be made public as early as this month, following pressure from shareholders of the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and from other news agencies after the Asahi scoop.
Like the Asahi report, the accounts published over the last week, which could not be independently verified, appeared to come from copies of Mr. Yoshida’s testimony that were leaked to Japanese news media.
While the new reports carry much of the same information as the earlier Asahi account, they differ on the key point of whether the plant’s workers who fled on March 15 were consciously violating Mr. Yoshida’s order for them to stay where they were. The Asahi report quoted Mr. Yoshida as saying he had never given the order to withdraw, indicating that the evacuation went against his instructions.
However, additional excerpts from Mr. Yoshida’s testimony cited in the new reports suggest a communication failure, not a willful violation of orders by the employees.
That's where my printed Globe ended.
“It was like the telephone game,” in which a message gets distorted as it is whispered from person to person, Mr. Yoshida is quoted as saying in the new reports. “I said, ‘If we go, should it be to 2F?’ while the people who heard me gave the instruction to the drivers to go to Fukushima Daini.”
Mr. Yoshida was referring to the drivers of buses that were being brought to the damaged plant for a possible evacuation. Those buses helped carry the fleeing workers to the unharmed Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, also known as 2F, despite the fact that the evacuation order was never given.
The new excerpts also reveal that Mr. Yoshida feared that the accident could grow into a broader disaster that might have threatened all of eastern Japan, a region that is usually taken as including Tokyo, about 150 miles south of the destroyed plant.
As if it has not.
“Our image was a catastrophe for eastern Japan,” Mr. Yoshida said in the testimony, according to Kyodo. “I thought we were really dead.”
While the accident did spew radioactive fallout over a wide swath of northeastern Japan, it did not become severe enough to cause the worst-case scenario: an evacuation of the neighboring Daini plant, which could have caused that plant’s reactors to spin out of control as well.
Largely because of the efforts of Mr. Yoshida, who died last year of throat cancer at 58, the destroyed Daichi plant’s three melted-down reactors have been stabilized by temporary cooling systems.
Wow.
However, the plant’s operator, which is also known as Tepco, is still struggling to cut off a huge influx of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings. That must be stopped before Tepco can begin an effort to decommission the reactors, which could take 30 years and cost more than $10 billion.
It's going into the Pacific, folks, and one can only imagine the damage as the body of water becomes more and more saturated.
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But never mind that. Everything's all right, everything's fine:
"Japanese nuclear plant declared safe to operate for first time since disaster" by Martin Fackler | New York Times September 11, 2014
TOKYO — For the first time since the Fukushima disaster 3½ years ago, Japan’s new nuclear regulatory agency declared Wednesday that an atomic power plant was safe to operate, in a widely watched move that brings Japan a step closer to restarting its idled nuclear industry.
The people in Japan don't want it, but you know....
The two reactors at the Sendai power plant on the southern island of Kyushu are the first to be certified as safe enough to restart by the Nuclear Regulation Authority since the agency was created two years ago to restore public confidence in nuclear oversight.
Oh, ah, oh, ah!
All of Japan’s 48 operable commercial nuclear reactors were shut down after the March 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station created serious public doubts about the safety of atomic power in earthquake-prone Japan.
Even with the approval, it will still likely be months before either of the reactors can be turned back on. In addition to further safety checks, the plant’s operator, Kyushu Electric Power Co., must also obtain the consent of local governments around the plant. The final decision on whether to restart the plant will be made by the prime minister, probably in December, according to local news media reports.
They have elections in November, too?
The approval follows intense political pressure on the new agency by the government of the current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, a pro-big business leader who wants to restore atomic energy as part of his strategy to revive the nation’s long-anemic economy.
They never learn.
He also wants to turn the plants back on in order to end Japan’s ballooning trade deficits, which many here blame on the rising cost of imported fuel to make up for the loss of nuclear-generated electricity.
What about solar and wind? I mean, an island would seem to be a perfect spot for....
However, opinion polls have shown that the public remains skeptical about both the safety of the plants and the ability to ensure that safety by Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, which has long had close ties to the politically powerful nuclear industry. Those doubts were aired last month, during a monthlong public comment period after the agency released a draft report in July that expressed approval of the Sendai plant’s safety measures.
Yeah, but who cares what people think anymore? If it is something meaningless, yeah, ask them. Important and effecting the lives of all? No. Don't wanna hear it. Only wanna hear the ru$tling of cash.
The agency said it received 17,800 comments, more than it expected. Many were highly skeptical about the safety of the Sendai plant, which is in a volcanically active area.
I'm sorry, say again?
Still, the agency on Wednesday ended up adopting its July findings without major modifications.
In a news release, the agency said it had made the decision after reviewing 18,600 pages of supporting documents filed by Kyushu Electric, as well as the results of its own inspections of the plant. It said the design and construction of the reactors and other facilities, and also the contingency plans for dealing with emergencies, met new safety standards that the agency adopted in July of last year.
And how could you ever question industry and government in Japan or anywhere else?
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Back to where we began:
"Japan’s emperor cautioned against war with U.S., documents show" by Martin Fackler | New York Times September 10, 2014
MATSUE, Japan — Before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Emperor Hirohito criticized plans to go to war with the United States as “self-destructive” and opposed an alliance with Nazi Germany, though he did little to try to stop the war that Japan waged in his name, according to the long-awaited official history of his reign, released Tuesday.
Smelling like a whitewash already. Who lines up with a loser in an age when the victor is still supreme?
The 12,000-page history of Japan’s emperor during World War II, which also shows him exalting at the victories of his armies in China, appears to contain little that will surprise historians, according to Japanese media descriptions of its contents.
That other Holocaust™?
The most controversial aspect appears to be the fact that it took the Imperial Household Agency almost a quarter of a century to release its official history of Hirohito, who died in 1989 at age 87.
The agency, which manages the affairs of the imperial family, including those of current Emperor Akihito, explained the delay by saying it took time to put together the 61-volume history from 3,152 documents and records, some of them never previously made public.
However, the delay is also widely seen as being due to the sensitivity of the subject matter in a nation that still has not fully come to terms with its actions during the war or the responsibility of Hirohito for it.
I grieve for the generations of Americans to come that will have to grapple with that question, and the horrible lies that underpinned all AmeriKan actions.
Most histories portray Hirohito as a figurehead who was revered as a living god by Japan’s soldiers and citizens but who had little real power to decide the fate of his nation.
We call him president.
At the same time, he has been criticized for letting himself be used as a spiritual symbol for Japanese militarism, presiding over meetings of leaders at which decisions to go to war were made and reviewing parades atop his white horse.
While the agency’s official history has been long awaited by scholars, it failed to contain some hoped-for material, such as records of the several meetings between the emperor and General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US occupation forces after the war, who decided against putting Hirohito on trial as a war criminal. Instead, it contained only information about the two leaders’ first meeting on Sept. 27, 1945, that had already been made public, according to the news agency Kyodo News.
The history also shows that Hirohito opposed going to war with the United States in the buildup to the Japanese Navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, saying that Japan had no chance of winning such a war, according to Kyodo.
“It is nothing less than a self-destructive war,” Kyodo quoted the emperor as saying on July 31, 1941.
And now the U.S. is trying to get wars with Russia and China going. You would think they would have learned something, but nope.
Two years earlier, on July 5, 1939, the emperor had also criticized the army minister at the time for wanting to strengthen ties with Nazi Germany, according to Kyodo, which said the emperor supported greater cooperation with the United States.
Japan eventually joined the Axis alliance with Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. In regards to all that, it is now well known even among official historians that FDR let Pearl Harbor happen on purpose so the US could get involved in Europe. The US was already at war with Japan after having cut off oil to the island, thus forcing Japan to expand to survive.
Anyhow, history may have been completely different had the Nazi-Japan alliance been better coordinated. Hitler could hardly have warned Japan of his "invasion" of Russia -- turns out it was a preemptive attack against a Russian invasion called Operation Storm. I always wondered why there were so many Russian forces captured when they were allegedly ill-prepared for Hitlers "betrayal" -- however, had Japan used its troops in Manchuria to open up a Siberian front the troops that Stalin called back to turn the tide against the Axis it is possible that history takes a different turn there and takes the allies years, maybe even decades longer to win the war and possibly even lose it.
The same holds true for the "sneak" attack on Pearl Harbor, although one can understand the Japanese not wanting to lost anyone, not even the Germans, in on it. Utmost secrecy was to be observed. Nevertheless, it was German successes on the battlefield that forced the European powers of France, England, and Holland to recall the forces from their Asian empires and that allowed the Japanese to move in quickly. Repelling the U.S. from the Philippines and taking territory all the way to the Indian border by summer 1942 led to a peace proposal from the Japanese, but by now there was an unconditional surrender for the Zionist forces known as the Allies. The threats to the New World Order were not going to be allowed to survive in any form, all culminating with the two most monstrous individual war crimes in human history with the use of atomic bombs by the U.S.
Soon Israel would be created by the U.N. and a Cold War would make "defense" contractors incredibly rich for decades before Communism collapsed. Incredibly, the "terrorists" created by AmeriKa to fight that threat would become the new menace and bring about a Third World War in which we are currently involved.
The official history is currently available only for limited viewing by the public, though the agency plans to start publishing it in stages over the next five years, Kyodo said.
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Time to get on over and marry this back up with India:
"Wedding bus crash in India kills 50" by Hari Kumar | New York Times September 05, 2014
NEW DELHI — A bus carrying dozens of members of a wedding party plunged off a mountain road into a deep, fast-running stream in the region of Jammu on Thursday, killing nearly everyone aboard, Indian authorities said.
About 50 people were presumed dead, said Vinod Kaul, head of the disaster management department in Jammu and Kashmir state.
Torrential floods have inundated much of the state near the border with Pakistan this week and had claimed at least 18 lives before the bus accident Thursday.
Water rushed off a mountain with such force that it was impossible for rescue workers to reach the bus, said Bachan Singh, an official from the village of Rajpur Kamila, where the accident occurred.
Police and rescue crews were at the site, but the wind and rain were so powerful that responders could rescue only three people, according to Mubassir Latifi, the police chief in the district of Rajouri.
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Related(?):
"In India, the Catholic Church this week hosted a major conference on family farms, responding to a growing crisis of farmer suicides. In the last 10 years, 300,000 Indian farmers are believed to have taken their own lives. Generally these are small-time rural farmers squeezed among mounting debts, declining yields, and pressure from large agriculture conglomerates. Led by Caritas, a Catholic charitable group, the Indian church is proposing a program of support for small farmers that includes favorable tax and credit policies, price supports, organization of rural cooperatives, and stronger social security protection."
It's also related to the GMOs, but you won't see that link in my pre$$.
Related: Suicide or protest? Hunger strike rivets India
That's just an opinion.
At least they are getting Google smartphones.
"Rain and flooding kill more than 200
ISLAMABAD — Heavy monsoon rains and flash floods killed 128 people in Pakistan and 108 people in India last week, officials said Saturday, as forecasters warned of more rain in the coming days and troops raced to evacuate people from deluged areas. The annual monsoon season has struck hard across the region, leaving people to wade through rushing water in towns and villages across Pakistan and in Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir, officials said (AP)."
"Monsoon floods kill nearly 300 in India, Pakistan" | Associated Press September 08, 2014
SRINAGAR, India — Five days of rains have triggered landslides and flash floods in large swaths of northern India and Pakistan, raising the death toll to nearly 300 people, officials said Sunday.
Rains in Indian Kashmir has left at least 120 people dead in the region’s worst flooding in more than five decades, submerging hundreds of villages and triggering landslides, officials said.
In Pakistan, more than 160 people have died and thousands of homes have collapsed, with an official saying the situation was becoming a ‘‘national emergency.’’
Rescuers in both countries were using helicopters and boats to try to reach tens of thousands of people stranded in their homes.
Rescue efforts in Srinagar, the main city in Indian Kashmir, were hampered by fast-moving floodwaters.
The rains stopped on Sunday, but officials said the water from the overflowed Jhelum River was moving too fast to allow boats to reach many people in Srinagar.
By evening, several vessels had been deployed to start rescue efforts, said Omar Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir state’s top elected official.
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"Floods claim 461 lives in Pakistan, Kashmir" by Munir Ahmed and Ashok Sharma | Associated Press September 12, 2014
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani troops used helicopters and boats to evacuate thousands of marooned people from the country’s plains, where raging monsoon floods inundated more villages Thursday, as the Indian military dropped food for hundreds of thousands of people stranded in flood-hit areas of Indian-held Kashmir.
Pakistani and Indian officials said the death toll had reached 461 in the two countries.
Flash floods have washed away crops, damaged tens of thousands of homes, and affected more than a million people since Sept. 3, when heavy monsoon rains lashed Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province and Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir on Thursday and told flood victims that his government would do whatever it could to rebuild their damaged homes. ‘‘I am grieved over the deaths caused by the floods,’’ he said in a televised speech.
Ahmad Kamal, a spokesman for Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, said 261 people have been killed and 482 injured in Pakistan.
‘‘The situation is still alarming as flood waters are entering the country’s plains in the Jhang district, inundating more villages and affecting thousands,’’ he said.
The military said it was expanding relief operations in Punjab, where the Chenab River overflowed.
We will get to other things the Pakistani military is doing later.
Troops in helicopters and boats evacuated 4,000 more people from Jhang, it said.
Kamal said high floods were expected to reach the southern Sindh province later this week.
Authorities were supplying tents, food, and other items to survivors, but many complained that the government was not doing enough.
‘‘I feel as If I am a beggar, as I have to wait for hours to get free food,’’ a survivor told a Pakistani news channel.
Hafiz Saeed, who heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an anti-India charity, accused India of releasing flood waters that caused destruction in Pakistan.
‘‘Pakistan should take notice of this situation,’’ he told a Pakistani news channel late Wednesday, adding that he was providing food to hundreds of thousands of flood victims in Jhang.
Related: World War Coming to Kashmir
Who woudda thunk it, huh?
India says Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a front for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which it blames for a 2008 attack on the city of Mumbai that killed 166 people.
Pakistan and India have a history of uneasy relations, but relations have improved in recent years.
Each side has offered to help the other recover from the floods, the worst to hit Pakistan since 2010, when some 1,700 people died.
The Kashmir region in the northern Himalayas is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.
Two of the three wars the countries have fought since their independence from Britain in 1947 have been over control of Kashmir.
Why can't they have a vote like Kosovo or Sudan?
In India, Sandeep Rai Rathore, head of the National Disaster Response Force, said Thursday that 80 army and air force transport aircraft and helicopters were dropping drinking water, biscuits, baby food, and food packets for hundreds of thousands of marooned people in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.
Officials said the flooding has killed 200 people in India, where anger and resentment was mounting over what victims described as a slow rescue and relief effort.
With flood waters receding in parts of region, authorities prepared to cope with the spread of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea.
And worse, cholera!
In Srinagar, the main city in Indian-held Kashmir, most government hospitals and clinics were flooded and unable to treat patients.
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"KASHMIR FLOODING -- Volunteers carried relief supplies through a flooded area of Srinagar in Indian Kashmir on Friday. More than 400,000 people have been marooned and at least 215 people have died in the disaster (Boston Globe September 13, 2014)."
"Pakistan diverts rivers to save cities from floods" by Munir Ahmed | Associated Press September 14, 2014
ISLAMABAD — Military specialists blew up dikes in central Pakistan to divert swollen rivers and save cities from raging floods that have killed hundreds of people, authorities said Saturday, as officials stepped up efforts in India’s part of Kashmir to prevent the spread of water-borne diseases there.
In Pakistan, the breaches at the overflowing Chenab River were performed overnight as floodwaters reached Multan, a city famous for its Sufi saints. Pakistani news channels showed pictures of floodwaters gushing through the blown-up dikes.
Civil and military officials have been using helicopters and boats to evacuate marooned people since Sept. 3, when floods triggered by monsoon rains hit Pakistan and Kashmir, which is divided between Pakistan and India.
Pakistan’s military said in a statement Saturday that it was still evacuating people and air-dropping food in the districts of Multan, Muzaffargarh, and Jhang. It said troops had air-dropped tons of food in flood-affected areas, while the army’s medical teams were treating patients.
Ahmad Kamal, the spokesman for Pakistan’s National Disaster Management authority, said rains and floods had killed 280 people and injured more than 500 in Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
He said more than 2 million people had been affected.
Kamal said rescuers had evacuated 276,681 persons from flood-hit areas and aerial monitoring was being done through helicopters.
On Saturday, state-run Pakistan television showed pictures of men and women wading through waist-deep waters.
It also showed army helicopters plucking people from rooftops and trees in inundated villages. Pictures taken from helicopters showed submerged villages and towns in the districts of Jhang and Multan.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is supervising rescue operations, traveled to Jhang on Saturday.
In a televised speech there, Sharif said his government was exempting flood-affected people from paying their electricity bills.
‘‘I assure you that we will rebuild your homes. We will do whatever is possible to help you,’’ he told a gathering of survivors near a flooded village.
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Related: Pakistan Coup in Progress
Last I saw of it.
"Stagnant flood water raising health risk in Kashmir" by Aijaz Hussain and Katy Daigle | Associated Press September 17, 2014
SRINAGAR, India — Health workers were scrambling Tuesday to manage a mounting health crisis nearly two weeks after massive flooding engulfed much of Kashmir, and were treating cases of diarrhea, skin allergies, and fungus while hoping the stagnant waters do not create conditions for more serious disease outbreaks.
Countless bloated livestock carcasses were floating across the waterlogged Himalayan region. Many residents, warned to avoid the flood waters, were rationing water bottles brought by aid workers every few days.
‘‘The chance of cholera, jaundice, and leptospirosis spreading are high,’’ said Dr. Swati Jha with the aid group Americares.
The scale of the disaster — described as an ‘‘unprecedented catastrophe’’ by the region’s top elected official — has stunned many in India, with newspapers running daily front-page aerial photos of rooftops framed by mud-brown waters.
Most hospitals have been inundated, their diagnostic equipment, CT scanners, operation theaters, and ventilators destroyed.
‘‘With our health infrastructure lost, any disease can be catastrophic now. You don’t need any plague for mass deaths,’’ said critical care specialist Dr. Javaid Naqashbandi while scribbling out a prescription for treatment of stomach illness on the patient’s hand.
And the global depopulation plan continues?
Both sides of the Himalayan region of Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, have seen extreme devastation, with hundreds of thousands of families losing all their possessions.
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War never waits for tragedy:
"Pakistan airstrikes hit Taliban hideouts, kill 65" by Asif Shahzad | Associated Press September 11, 2014
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani warplanes struck five militant hideouts in a Taliban stronghold near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing 65 insurgents, the military said.
The strikes, carried out in two phases hours apart, targeted areas in the North Waziristan tribal region, where the military has been conducting a major offensive since mid-June, the army said in a statement.
Here is a brief link.
The strikes came a day after the Pakistani Taliban took credit for a weekend attack on a navy dockyard on the other side of the country, in Karachi.
Also Wednesday, Pakistan’s defense minister said authorities investigating a weekend attack on a navy dockyard in the Karachi cannot rule out possible involvement of some navy personnel in the assault.
An inside job?
North Waziristan has long been home to a mix of local and Al Qaeda-linked foreign militants, including armed groups which carry out cross-border attacks on US and other NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The army launched the much-awaited operation there June 15, following a deadly militant attack on one of the country’s busiest airports in Karachi.
Related: At the Pakistan Airport
The deaths Wednesday brought to almost 975 the number of insurgents the military says it has killed in air and ground attacks in North Waziristan. The area, however, is off limits to journalists, making it impossible to confirm military claims independently.
Pakistan is a key ally of the United States in the war on terror, and local Taliban in a bid to overthrow the government often target the country’s security forces, killing tens of thousands of Pakistanis in the past decade.
In the first batch of airstrikes on Wednesday, the military reported killing 35 militants in three hideouts in Datta Khel in North Waziristan. Hours later, it said a second batch of airstrikes destroyed two more hideouts in the tribal region’s Shawal Valley, killing 30 more militants.
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Just part of the drone wars, and it's all for the women:
"10 arrested in 2012 shooting of Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan says" New York Times September 13, 2014
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Ten militants have been taken into custody in connection with the 2012 shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a teenager who defied the Taliban with her outspoken calls for girls’ education, a spokesman for the Pakistani military said Friday.
Yousafzai, who is now 17, was shot in the head by gunmen who attacked her school bus as she and her schoolmates were heading home in the Swat Valley, the picturesque northern region where the Taliban held sway until a military operation broke their hold in 2009. Two of Yousafzai’s classmates were also wounded.
Yousafzai, who is studying in Britain, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 and has won several awards in recognition of her advocacy.
The military spokesman, Major General Asim Saleem Bajwa, said the arrests were the product of a joint operation between the military intelligence agency and the police. He said the arrests had not come all at once but did not say when they had happened. It was unclear why the operation was being announced Friday.
Bajwa said the attackers had been under orders from Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the main Pakistani Taliban branch, when they attacked Yousafzai and the other students. He said the militants were based in Malakand and belonged to a group known as Shura. They were planning to kill 22 influential residents of Swat when they were arrested, he said.
The main spokesman for the Taliban until recently, Ehsanullah Ehsan, called the army’s claim “black propaganda.”
It's on my newsstand every morning.
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That marries you up with everything the Globe has reported until this moment.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Japan seeks backing for whaling despite UN ruling
