Submit your Article

The death toll from record rains that have devastated parts of Japan rose Sunday to at least 57, officials said, as rescue workers and troops struggled in the mud and water to save lives.Local media put the toll at 67, with dozens more people missing and the number of fatalities expected to rise.

Earlier Sunday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned of a "race against time" to rescue flood victims as there were still many people whose safety has yet to be confirmed. The torrential downpours have caused flash flooding and landslides across central and western parts of the country, prompting evacuation orders for more than two million people. 

The rain has completely blanketed some villages, forcing desperate residents to take shelter on their rooftops with flood water swirling below as they wait for rescue. Over two million people have been told to evacuate, but the orders are not mandatory and many remained at home, becoming trapped by rapidly rising water or sudden landslides. The meteorological agency issued its highest level alert for two new regions on Sunday, before lifting them after rains began subsiding later on the day. 

Roads turned into rivers 

In the town of Mihara, in the south of the Hiroshima region, a let-up in rain laid bare the devastation wrought by the downpours.Roads were transformed into muddy flowing rivers, with dirt piled up on either side as flood water gushed around the wheels of stranded cars.

"The area became an ocean," said 82-year-old Nobue Kakumoto, a long-time resident. "I'm worried because I have no idea how long it will stay like this."Several dozen residents descended into the village to inspect the damage after spending the night in a tiny shelter on higher ground. 

Masanori Hiramoto, a 68-year-old farmer, didn't bother observing the Japanese custom of removing his shoes when he entered his ravaged home, the woven tatami mat floors carpeted with mud. 
"I don't even know where to start cleaning. I don't know what is where," he told AFP. Elsewhere, work crews tried to clear multiple small landslides that coated roads, rendering them virtually impassable. 
"We are carrying out rescue operations around the clock,

" Yoshihide Fujitani, a disaster management official in Hiroshima prefecture, told AFP. "We are also looking after evacuees and restoring lifeline infrastructure like water and gas," he added. "We are doing our best." In western Okayama prefecture, rescue operations were underway to evacuate several hundred people including children and the elderly from a hospital, some by helicopter. 

Those in the building became trapped when a nearby river burst its banks and flooded the area, and a nurse inside told local media there was no power or water, and food was running short. "Around 1,000 people were seeking rescue by Sunday morning, but we don't yet have a complete picture of the disaster, which is enormous," Mutsunari Imawaka, a spokesman for the prefecture's disaster management office, told AFP. "We are working hard to rescue them as quickly as possible. Time is running out. " 

Homes washed away 

Over 50,000 rescue workers, police and military personnel have been mobilised to respond to the disaster, which has left entire villages submerged by flooding, with just the top of traffic lights visible above the rising waters."I was in a car and massive floods of water gushed towards me from the front and back and then engulfed the road.

I was just able to escape, but I was terrified," 62-year-old Yuzo Hori told the Mainichi Shimbun daily in Hiroshima on Saturday.Though the rains began last week when a typhoon made landfall, the worst downpours hit from Thursday, when a construction worker was swept away by floodwaters in western Japan.The toll has risen steadily since then, and the conditions have made rescue operations difficult, with some desperate citizens taking to Twitter to call for help.

The floods have halted production at plants across the affected region, with reports of electricity, water and mobile phone network outages. The disaster is the deadliest rain-related crisis in Japan since 2014, when at least 74 people were killed in landslides caused by torrential downpours in the Hiroshima region. AFP

For further news click here

Six boys among a group of 13 trapped in a flooded Thai cave for more than a fortnight were rescued on Sunday, authorities said, raising hopes elite divers would also quickly save the others. The first two boys emerged about nightfall from the Tham Luang cave complex after navigating a treacherous escape route of more than four kilometres (2.5 miles) through twisting, narrow and jagged passageways. They were followed shortly afterwards by four others, leading to an explosion of jubilation on social media in Thailand and around the world as the rescued boys were rushed to hospital.

 
"Six of them came out," a defence ministry official, who asked not to be named, told AFP. 
Foreign elite divers and Thai Navy SEALS on Sunday morning began the complex operation to extract the 12 boys and their football coach as they raced against time, with imminent monsoon rains threatening more flooding that would doom the mission. 
"Today is the D-day. The boys are ready to face any challenges," rescue chief Narongsak Osottanakorn told reporters near the cave site on Sunday morning. 
The group became trapped in a cramped chamber deep inside Tham Luang in a mountainous area of northern Thailand on June 23, when they went in after football practice and got caught behind rising waters. 
Their plight transfixed Thailand and the rest of the world, as authorities struggled to devise a plan to get the boys -- aged between 11 and 16 -- and their 25-year-old coach out

. 
- 'Mission Impossible' -  

The rescue of the first six was a stunning victory in an operation Narongsak had earlier dubbed "Mission Impossible", and led to cautious optimism that the others would also be saved. Another official involved in the rescue operation said the initial six who had been saved formed a first group. 
A second group made up of the others had also begun the journey from the chamber where they had been trapped, a rescue worker told AFP.  The quick extraction came as a surprise after one of the operation commanders said on Sunday morning the rescue efforts could take several days to complete. The group was found dishevelled and hungry by British cave diving specialists nine days after they ventured in. Initial euphoria over finding the boys alive quickly turned into deep anxiety as rescuers struggled to find a way to get them out.  The death of a former Thai Navy SEAL diver who ran out of oxygen in the cave on Friday underscored the danger of the journey even for professionals. After a short deluge of rain on Saturday night and with more bad weather forecast, Narongsak on Sunday said authorities had to act immediately. 
"There is no other day that we are more ready than today," he said. "Otherwise we will lose the opportunity." Between the base camp inside the cave and the trapped boys were twisting, turning cave passageways with torrents of water gushing through. The water in the cave was muddy and unclear, with one diver comparing it to a cafe latte. Ropes were installed to help guide the boys through the darkness. Narongsak said Sunday morning two divers would escort each of the boys out of the cave. 

- Rescue efforts -

 
Officials had looked at many different ways to save the boys and their coach. One early potential plan was to leave them there for months until the monsoon season ended and the floods subsided completely, but that idea was scrapped over concerns about falling oxygen levels and waters rising too high. More than 100 exploratory holes were also bored -- some shallow, but the longest 400 metres deep -- into the mountainside in an attempt to open a second evacuation route and avoid forcing the boys into the dangerous dive. American technology entrepreneur Elon Musk even deployed engineers from his private space exploration firm SpaceX and Boring Co. to help. 
Meanwhile rescuers fed a kilometres-long air pipe into the cave to restore oxygen levels in the chamber where the team was sheltering with medics and divers. 
 

- Emotional notes - 

On Saturday, Thai Navy SEALs published touching notes scrawled by the trapped footballers to their families, who had been waiting for them agonisingly close by outside the cave entrance. The boys urged relatives "not to worry" and asked for their favourite food once they were safely evacuated, in notes handed to divers. In one, Pheerapat, nicknamed "Night", whose 16th birthday the group were celebrating in the cave when they became stuck on June 23, said: "I love you, Dad, Mum and my sister. You don't need to be worried about me." AFP
 

For further information click here

The culture of buying things online is booming, especially in Kathmandu. Huge traffic jams, bad roads, con­gested parking spaces, all add to the appeal of quick online purchase, with the products delivered right at your doorsteps. From clothes to electronics and food to baby products, the online catalogue these days is vast, and at good prices too. “In this growing online marketplace we espied the need for an online liquor store and started Cheers,” says Minesh Rajbhandari, the General Manager and one of the partners of the Cheers online liquor store. A group of five professionals with diverse experiences in IT and liquor industries started Cheers in July 2016. Although it was a slow start, the store is now becoming more popular.

Cheers online liquor store is open from 10 am to 10 pm every day (365 days a year) and offers free delivery in Kath­mandu on a minimum order of Rs 1,000. Cheers delivers up to six kilometers outside the Ring Road, and there is an option of online payment, cash on deliv­ery and card on delivery. The company’s representatives come to your doorstep with portable Point-of-Sale machines and you can use your debit or credit card to make the payment. Convenient? Very. And the delivery takes place within an hour of the order’s placement. “We aver­age 37 minutes,” Rajbhandari informs.

The website of Cheers—www.cheers. com.np—offers a wide variety of domes­tic and international liquors, some of which you will not find in normal liquor stores. The company lists 550-plus prod­ucts ranging from different varieties of whiskey, beer, vodka, gin and wine to tobacco, mixers, soft drinks and much more. “All our products are directly sourced from importers and manufac­turers who give us the best margins,” says Rajbhandari. “Not only are we tak­ing their products to the end customers, we are also collecting data for them on the drinking pattern of people based on areas and seasons.”

Despite the challenge of low margins and high competition, Cheers’ prices are thus at par and sometimes even lower than at the regular liquor stores, and the convenience of home delivery gives them an added advantage.

Albeit with a slow start, Rajbhandari sees plenty of opportunities for business expansion, to other parts of Nepal. “Our biggest challenge is to change consumer behavior. It is still difficult to make peo­ple order liquor from their computers and smartphones. They are skeptical,” says Rajbhandari. “But on the brighter side, we have many repeat consum­ers. Once people order from us and get served satisfactorily, they become our regular clients.”

The ongoing World Cup season has also given a boost to Cheers’ business, Rajbhandari informs, with a 70 percent increase in sales. It is hard to bet against the sole exclusive online liquor store in the country.

Crime Fiction

FOOL ME ONCE

Harlan Coben

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Published: 2016

Pages: 405, Paperback

Harlan Coben is a popular name in the world of thriller writers, and rightly so. More than 70 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and his works regularly appear on the New York Times bestseller list. His trademark edge-of-your-seat and often gut-wrenching suspense is what makes his books such page-turning thrillers. Every time he comes out with a new work of fiction, Coben sets the bar higher for himself, and in ‘Fool Me Once’, his 28th novel featuring Captain Maya Stern, a former army special-ops helicopter pilot, he once again out­does himself.

Here Maya is seen grieving the loss of her husband, Joe, whom she witnessed being killed during a rob­bery and she’s struggling to keep it all together for their daughter, Lily. Then she sees footage of her ‘dead’ husband playing with their daughter on the nanny cam she has set up after Joe’s death. When she finds out that her husband’s ‘murder’ is connected to her sister’s brutal killing four years ago, she sets out to get to the bottom of the matter. The plot basically revolves around Maya trying to unravel this mystery, and unearthing other long-buried secrets in the process.

For avid readers of thrillers and crime fiction, this might seem like a simple enough plot but don’t be fooled. Or, as Coben said in a recent interview, one enjoys being fooled if it’s done correctly, and Coben, the master of precision in that matter, fools you so well into believing one thing to be true till he catches you completely off guard. It’s the ‘gasp’ moment, as Coben said in the same interview, that makes reading Fool Me Once such a bloodcurdling delight.

Critics have called Coben a skilled magician who saves the best, most stunning trick for the very end and Fool Me Once, like most of his other works, will have you under its spell. The magic in Coben’s writing lies in the fact that you never see the end­ing coming though but in hindsight it will be apparent that it was the only possible conclusion. The best part is that you needn’t have read other titles in the series to enjoy Fool Me Once.

The quality of air in Pokhara metropolis, long known for its pristine natural beauty, is deteriorating by the day. The major contributors to air pollution in Pokhara are vehicle exhaust, incineration of plastic wastes and wildfire. According to Shankar Prasad Poudel, the information officer of the Department of Environ­ment, smoke rather than dust is the main air-pollutant in Pokhara. Smoke is considered more harmful to human health compared to dust.

“But the level of air pollution we see in Pokhara is still less compared to other urban cen­ters in Nepal like Kathmandu, Lumbini and some cities in Tarai-Madhes,” Poudel said.

According to the govern­ment’s benchmark based on the Environment Protection Rules (1997), ambient air should have no more than 40 g/m³ of particulate mat­ter (PM 2.5). These days the level of PM 2.5 in Pokhara often crosses that level. The level is particularly high (twice as much as recommended) between September-October and December-January peri­ods. Likewise, pollution is also high around March-April, largely due to wildfires.

Most of the country was enthused when KP Sharma Oli became the prime minister of a strong government four and a half months ago. Particularly after the formal merger between the country’s two biggest communist parties, there was hope that the government under the newly-minted Nepal Communist Party would herald an era of stability and prosperity. With the appointment of clean and capable ministers and announcement of a slew of reforms, PM Oli seemed determined to act in the country’s best interest, even by displeasing those close to him.

This was the reason we gave his government the benefit of doubt in its early days. We have also given him credit where it is due. For instance he has done a good job on foreign policy, mostly by reducing the country’s overreliance on India. But there have of late been troubling signs too: Listing of popular protest sites as prohibited areas; the underhand way in which the government tried to roll back medical education reforms; lack of follow through on its commitment to remove all cartels and syndicates; and firing of a Nepal Television anchor who had dared question the information minister on his property details—to name a few.

There is more than a tinge of authoritarianism in these actions. They in turn have raised fears that the communist government, in the name of stability, wants to entrench itself in power and stifle dissent. Of course, not all of its decisions have been bad, even on the domestic front. We for instance support better monitoring of NGOs and proper documentation of foreigners living in Nepal. But even here regulation, not exclusion, should be the aim.

Make no mistake. The Oli government that came to power after a landslide election victory still has considerable public support. And, again, when it is doing something worthwhile, it is the media’s duty to appreciate it. But in a democracy a government cannot expect blind support of the media and the civil society, even if it doing a lot of good. Diversity of opinion and belief are in fact the heart and soul of democracy. As important are the virtues of transparency and account­ability. To start with, government ministers and ruling party MPs should develop a habit of entertaining and listening to diverse views. An insular government is also an ineffective one, or worse.

Addressing the parliament on July 4, Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa deemed the fast-unto-death of Dr Govinda KC, who has long been campaigning for cheap and reliable healthcare for all Nepalis, an “authoritarian ten­dency”. In his view, while some of Dr KC’s demands may have merit, the way he has gone about forcing the government to meet those demands most certainly is not. But the home minister was skating on thin ice. Dr KC was forced into the latest round of fasting, his 15th, after the government tried to fast-track a watered down Medical Education Bill through the parliament. The passage of the bill would have undone virtually all the reforms that Dr KC has been campaigning for in the past five years. The bad intent was evident in the way the government suspended due parliamentary process in the haste to pass the bill. The government had removed from the bill some crucial provisions: ban on opening of new medical colleges in Kathmandu valley, capping at five the number of medical college a university can oversee, provision for all medical colleges to set aside 75 percent of their seats for scholarships, and restriction on licensing of medical colleges that don’t have their own hospitals.

Civil society leaders have predictably slammed the government move. Kedar Bhakta Mathema, the coordinator of the team that had proposed the afore­mentioned reforms, said the government was trying to “deceive people” by saying that the new bill was in keeping with the demands of Dr KC. Former Chief Justice Sushila Karki accused the government of “showing authori­tarian bent” and trying to “promote anomalies” in medical education. The refusal of the government to give Dr KC a proper place to protest, a democratic right of all Nepalis, has also raised concerns.

It is clear that the only reason the proposed medical education reforms have not been enacted is that powerful politicians belonging to the ruling Nepal Communist Party have big stakes in private medical education, and any attempt to strengthen public medical education hurts their business interests. Whether or not one supports Dr KC’s method of protest, it is hard to argue against his end goals. As the con­stitution explicitly states, each and every Nepali has the right to affordable and quality healthcare. To try to deny them this basic right is a criminal offense.

Weekly Editorial Cartoon