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NATO Trucks Attacked
Translations available in: English (original) | German

A few days ago, Nato helicopters killed three Pakistani security personnel while carrying out operations in Pakistani territory. Pakistan responded by temporarily shutting down the Nato supply route into Afghanistan, which led to major protests and attacks on Nato supply trucks.

October 5, 2010 | 6:57 AM Comments  0 comments

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Drones Attacks in Tribal Belt
Related to country: Pakistan


The U.S. government increased the number of missile attacks this month against militant guerrilla groups in northwest Pakistan to the most this year, according to researchers who monitor the campaign.
The U.S. so far has launched 22 missile strikes in September, almost a third of this year’s total of 76, according to a count maintained by the Washington-based New America Foundation. The policy research group counted four such attacks in August and five in July.
All of this month’s reported strikes -- which typically are fired from remotely piloted Predator or Reaper aircraft -- have hit Pakistan’s Waziristan region, a Taliban stronghold that borders Afghanistan, the foundation said.
Nineteen of the missile raids have hit North Waziristan, a district dominated by the Taliban factions of Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and Pakistani guerrilla leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur. Al-Qaeda’s operational chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Sheik Fateh, was killed this month by a drone strike, Agence France-Press said yesterday, citing unidentified Pakistani security officials.
“The last time there was a flurry of strikes comparable to this was in January, following the suicide attack on a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in late December 2009,” said Katherine Tiedemann, a research fellow at the New America Foundation. “There were 12 strikes reported that month.”
There may be several reasons for increased attacks, said Alan Kronstadt, a Pakistan analyst with the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“There’s been a need seen to keep pressure on the Haqqani group,” Kronstadt said in an interview.
After floods that ravaged much of Pakistan, the U.S. also “wanted to send a message there would be no relaxing for them in whatever interim there is” before counterterrorism operations on the ground resume, Kronstadt said.
This month’s spike in missile attacks is part of a yearlong escalation. The U.S. has fired more than 75 missiles into Pakistan so far this year, up from 53 in 2009, according to the New America Foundation’s count.

October 5, 2010 | 6:51 AM Comments  0 comments

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IDPs In Pakistan
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

A long Q of IDPs waiting at the front of World Food Programme Food Distribution Point to get Food Items.

June 3, 2009 | 3:53 AM Comments  0 comments

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Where there is Smoke
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

'World No Tobacco Day' has been marked here, as it has been around the world. NGOs forming a coalition against tobacco have staged a walk; at seminars the dangers of the substance have been highlighted and Pakistan Railways has taken a big leap forward by banning smoking on its trains. But is the battle against tobacco really being won? Statistics indicate that smoking is growing in Third World countries even as levels drop in the developed world. The reasons are linked to the fact that awareness campaigns mean people in the west are less likely than before to take up the habit. This means that for giant companies who earn profits at the cost of health, the parts of the world where people have less access to information now offers the most lucrative markets.

Has enough been done in our country to discourage tobacco? The fact is that while laws have come in, restricting sales to juveniles or smoking in public places, implementation has been very poor. There is also a need for more aggressive effort to drive home the message about tobacco. Cigarettes and the 'sheesha' which has arrived over the last decade remain something of a fashion statement for the young and trendy. Health of course is rarely an issue teenagers think deeply about. There is also a growing rate of smoking among young women. Somewhere, despite the warnings on cigarette packets and the other efforts made, there has not been as much success as we would like to see. Surveys show people remain willing to ignore warnings. The WHO campaign for pictures as well as words on the warning labels is one we need to take up, given the high rate of illiteracy – and the fact that often, quite literally, pictures drive home messages where sentences fail. We also need to focus on spreading the 'no tobacco' message among children. They after all are the smokers of the future; in many cases they also have been able to dissuade parents who smoke. This then is a group that needs to be targeted in a more focalized manner, so that in the coming years we can have a society where tobacco is less commonplace than what is currently the case.

June 3, 2009 | 3:51 AM Comments  0 comments

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Karachi a Atmospheric Brown Cloud hotspot
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Karachi and twelve other mega-cities of Asia has been declared as Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC) ‘hotspots’ by the UN environment agency as soot levels in these cities comprise ten per cent of the total mass of all man-made particles.
A three-kilometer-thick ‘brown cloud’ of man-made pollution, which stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to China to the western Pacific Ocean, is making Asian cities darker, speeding up the melting of Himalayan glaciers and impacting human health, says the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in a regional assessment report with focus on Asia.
The report on ‘Atmospheric Brown Clouds’ released on Thursday states over the Asian hotspots, the annual natural plus anthropogenic (AOD) exceeds 0.3 and the absorption optical depth is about 10 per cent of the AOD, indicative of the presence of strong absorbing soot accounting for about 10 per cent of the amount of aerosols.
The annual mean surface dimming and atmospheric solar heating by ABCs over some of the hotspots range from 10 to 25 per cent, such as in Karachi, Beijing, Shanghai and New Delhi, says the report.
In addition to Karachi, the UNEP’s new publication points out Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran as being ABC ‘hotspots’.
Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), resulting from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass, has resulted in the formation of particles such as black carbon and soot which absorb sunlight and heat the air, experts write in the study released today in Beijing.
The clouds also ‘mask’ the actual warming impact of climate change by anywhere between 20 and 80 per cent because they include sulfates and other chemicals which reflect sunlight and cool the surface.
The artificial lowering of temperature by ABCs is leading to sharp shifts in weather patterns, causing significant drying in northern China while increasing the risk of flooding in the Asian nation’s south. Monsoon precipitation over India and South-East Asia has dropped up to 7 per cent since the 1950s, with the summer monsoon both weakening and shrinking.
Meanwhile, the health and food security of 3 billion people in Asia are threatened by ABCs, which impacts air quality and agriculture.
The solar heating of the atmosphere by ABCs is ‘suggested to be as important as greenhouse gas warming in accounting for the anomalously large warming trend observed in the elevated regions’ such as the Himalayan-Tibetan region, the study says, leading to the retreat of glaciers.
The acceleration of the retreat of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan (HKHT) glaciers since the 1970s, in conjunction with the decrease in the summer monsoon rainfall in the Indo-Gangetic Plain region, is a major environmental problem facing Asia, threatening both the water and the food security of South and East Asia. Glaciers and snow packs provide the head-waters for Asia’s major river systems, including the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yangtze.
If the current rate of retreat continues unabated, these glaciers and snow packs are expected to shrink by as much as 75 per cent before the year 2050, posing grave danger to the region’s water security. This potential threat should be viewed in the context of the low per-capita water availability in South and East Asia, around 2000 - 3000 m3/cap/year, far less than the world average of 8549 m3/cap/year, the report says.
The most serious health impacts of particles associated with the ABC include cardiovascular and pulmonary effects leading to chronic respiratory problems, hospital admissions and deaths. The clouds contain toxic aerosols, carcinogens and other harmful particles. Review of the available evidence indicates that there are likely to be very significant public health impacts from the ABC.
While the effects of the clouds on food production and farmers’ livelihood could be immense, more research must be done to determine their precise role, it acknowledges, adding that the possible impact of ABCs could include elevated levels of ground-level ozone, which could result in massive crop losses of up to 40 per cent in Asia.
Concern for a worsening situation in the future is highlighted by projections which suggest that the annual surface mean ozone concentrations in parts of South Asia will grow faster than anywhere else in the world and exceed 50 ppb by 2030.
Another important characteristic of ABC forcing in Asia is that it introduces large north-south asymmetries in the forcing and large land-sea contrasts. Since these are the driving forces for the monsoonal climate, ABCs have become major forcing terms for regional temperatures, circulation and precipitation.
There currently exist only a few unevenly distributed ozone monitoring sites across the whole of Asia, making it difficult to obtain a true picture of the current Asian ozone climate and how this varies by geographical characteristics
Global ozone projections suggest that some of the largest increases in ozone concentration will occur in South and Southeast Asia from now until 2030. Such projections would see South Asia becoming the most ozone polluted region in the world, with annual surface mean concentrations reaching 52.2 ppb (parts per billion).

November 15, 2008 | 1:00 AM Comments  0 comments

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