1 US to take on IS (BBC) US President Barack Obama
is to set out his "game plan" against Islamic State militants in a
speech on Wednesday. Mr Obama, who has been criticised for failing to outline a
strategy, said the US would degrade IS, shrink their territory and "defeat
them".
Meanwhile, the Arab League has vowed to take
"all necessary measures" against IS, which has seized a huge amount
of territory from Iraq and Syria. The league gave its backing to a Security
Council resolution passed last month calling on member states to stem the flow
of weapons and money to extremists in Iraq and Syria.
Mr Obama said: "I'm preparing the country to
make sure that we deal with a threat from Isil." IS, also often referred
to as Isil or Isis, has taken over large swathes of Iraq and Syria in recent
months, declaring the land it controls a "caliphate".
Mr Obama said: "This is not the equivalent of
the Iraq war. What this is, is similar to the kinds of counterterrorism
campaigns that we've been engaging in consistently over the last five, six,
seven years. "I just want the American people to understand the nature of
the threat and how we're going to deal with it and to have confidence that
we'll be able to deal with it."
2 South Africa mines in dire times (Loni Prinsloo
& Jana Marais in Johannesburg Times) Most South African gold mines are set
to close in the next 25 years. Gold mining, once the backbone of the economy,
has fallen on dire times, and the legal framework is making it impossible to
successfully close mines in the country. This has plunged communities living
around those mines into economic, social and environmental crisis.
“The gold industry is sitting with a terminal
problem, and no one is giving us the right medicine. We need hospice care, but
there are no hospices. Nobody wants to talk about death,” said Bernard
Swanepoel, chairman of Village Main Reef. Swanepoel, who made a career in
taking over marginal gold mines and extending their productive life, is now
facing fire over closures.
Without a closure certificate, the environmental
problems remain the responsibility of the last owner indefinitely, which makes
it more attractive to allow mines to apply for liquidation or sell the assets
to any willing buyer, no matter how inexperienced and underfunded. This was the
problem at Grootvlei, where an inexperienced team at Aurora Empowerment Systems
took control and ran the mine into the
ground, leaving staff and communities high and dry.
3 India PM’s river clean-up venture (Amrit Dhillon
in Straits Times) In a moment of irony during Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi's visit to Japan, an official in the beautiful city of Kyoto told Mr Modi
that the Japanese had learnt their habits of cleanliness from the Buddha who,
of course, was born in India. Mr Modi listened, then murmured: "But we in
India have forgotten all this."
Amid the unusual bonhomie that has marked this
visit, Mr Modi has persuaded the Japanese, among other things, to help clean up
the River Ganges and the sacred Hindu city of Varanasi through which the river
flows.
If Mr Modi and the Japanese are to succeed, it will
mean changing the daily habits of Indians. On this, Mr Modi has made a start by
telling Indians some home truths. For the first time in decades, a prime
minister is telling Indians bluntly that India is dirty, its cities and towns
are scenes of unbelievable squalor and filth and it is all because many Indians
have dirty habits.
Varanasi is sacred for all Hindus but they don't
mind if its special status is sullied by dirt. Experts estimate that 3,000
million litres of untreated sewage are pumped into the river every day. It's
the same all over India. Vice-President Hamid Ansari said: "Indian cities
produce nearly 40,000 million litres of sewage per day... and barely 20 per
cent of this is treated." The untreated waste seeps into rivers, lakes and
ponds, contaminating the country's water sources and turning them into, as Mr
Ansari said, a "ticking health bomb".
Mr Modi has urged Indians to make India clean as a
tribute to Mahatma Gandhi by 2019, the year they will celebrate the 150th
anniversary of his birth. If Mr Modi can clean up this country and give Indians
the civic sense they once presumably had, he will be doing a greater service
than any adding of percentage points to the gross domestic product.
http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/modis-massive-clean-venture-20140907
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