AFP Asia

A massive rescue operation was underway in Afghanistan Monday after a strong earthquake and multiple aftershocks flattened homes in the impoverished nation, killing more than 600 people, the interior ministry said.The earthquake struck just before midnight, shaking buildings from Kabul to neighbouring Pakistan’s capital Islamabad. Near the epicentre in the east of the country, “610 people were killed and 1,300 were injured in Kunar province, with numerous houses destroyed”, spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told AFP, adding that in neighbouring Nangarhar province 12 people were killed and another 255 injured.The Taliban authorities and the United Nations mobilised rescue efforts to hard-hit areas. “The UN in Afghanistan is deeply saddened by the devastating earthquake that struck the eastern region & claimed hundreds of lives,” the UN said on X, saying teams were on the ground “delivering emergency assistance & lifesaving support”.The epicentre of the quake, which struck at a relatively shallow depth of eight kilometres, was 27 kilometres from the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, according to the US Geological Survey.Shallow quakes tend to cause more damage than deep tremors.- Frequent quakes -A series of aftershocks followed throughout the night, including a powerful and shallow 5.2-magnitude quake just after 4:00 am (2330 GMT Sunday).Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, especially in the Hindu Kush mountain range, near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. Nangarhar province was also hit by flooding overnight Friday to Saturday, which killed five people and destroyed crops and property, provincial authorities said.In June 2022, a 5.9-magnitude quake struck the impoverished eastern border province of Paktika, killing more than 1,000 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.Ravaged by four decades of war, Afghanistan is already contending with a humanitarian disaster.With the return of the Taliban, foreign aid to Afghanistan has shrunk dramatically, undermining the already impoverished nation’s ability to respond to disasters.In 2015, more than 380 people were killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan when a powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake ripped across the two countries, with the bulk of the deaths in Pakistan. In that disaster, 12 young Afghan girls were crushed to death in a stampede as they tried to flee their shaking school building.burs/lb/mtp

Bollywood, famed for its lavish song-and-dance numbers and vast production crews, now finds itself confronting a new kind of spectacle: artificial intelligence.From altering iconic endings to generating entire films, AI is shaking up India’s multibillion-dollar film industry, raising alarm for some, excitement for others.The debate first erupted when producers re-released the 2013 hit “Raanjhanaa” with an AI-modified finale, when the Hindi film was dubbed into India’s southern language of Tamil.The new ending changed the tragic death finale into a hopeful one — with the protagonist’s eyes seen to flicker open — triggering outrage from director Aanand L. Rai and star Dhanush.They decried the change as a violation of creative rights.”This alternate ending has stripped the film of its very soul,” Dhanush posted on social media, after the new version was released in August.”The concerned parties went ahead with it despite my clear objection,” Dhanush said, calling the use of AI to alter films “a deeply concerning precedent for both art and artists”.”It threatens the integrity of storytelling and the legacy of cinema”, he added.Director Rai said that while AI is “definitely the future… it is not there to change the past”.Then, days later, entertainment firm Collective Artists’ Network announced India’s first fully AI-generated feature film, “Chiranjeevi Hanuman -– The Eternal”.The mythological epic, set for a 2026 release, aims to merge ancient legend with cutting-edge technology for a global audience, telling the story of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.Not all filmmakers were impressed.”And so, it begins,” wrote filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane on social media. “Who needs writers and directors when it’s ‘Made in AI’?”- ‘Flesh and blood’ -The industry is bracing for a fight.On one side are those who see AI as a cost-saving disruptor capable of replacing armies of extras and technicians in Bollywood’s famously labour-intensive productions.On the other are defenders of artistry, unpredictability, and human expression.Some see opportunity in using AI to boost traditional films.”I don’t think AI means there can’t be flesh and blood,” said director Shakun Batra, who has created a five-part short film series using AI. “The best future would be when two skill sets merge.”But he insists that technology must complement, not override, human creativity.”I don’t encourage AI as a replacement to human endeavour of expression,” said Batra, known for emotional Bollywood dramas such as “Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu”, “Kapoor & Sons” and “Gehraiyaan”.Veteran filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, director of classics such as “Masoom”, “Mr. India”, and the 1998 movie “Elizabeth” that was nominated for seven Academy Awards, shrugged off the threat.He said AI could not replace good storytelling.”The best stories are unpredictable and AI cannot handle unpredictability,” he told AFP. “AI can’t, at this moment, create great performances on screen — because if you look at any big stars of this world, it is their eyes that act, not their face.”Kapur said AI would be destructive only for filmmakers who rely on formulaic tropes.”If your movies are predictable… then of course, AI will destroy you,” he added. “Perhaps some kid somewhere will be able to do what you are doing.”Instead, he said AI, at its best, would open the industry to new ideas.”AI is a hugely democratic technology because it gives opportunities to those who would never get it,” he said. “How many people in India can afford to go to film schools?”- ‘Level the playing field’ – The emergence of AI would initially hit high-budget films such as superhero movies where you are “relying on action”, Kapur said.Kapur is actively integrating AI into his own work, and even plans to establish an AI-focused film school in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum.”AI will empower creators, level the playing field for independent filmmakers, and even lead to the creation of entirely new, AI-generated movie stars and characters,” he said.But filmmakers also point out that the future of movies lies in the hands of the audience.”Raanjhanaa” director Rai says he was comforted by the support of his fans backing the unchanged version, even 12 years after its original release.”The way they reacted to AI is much bigger than the way I reacted,” he said. “It is more of their film than mine.”

The videos are strikingly lifelike, featuring bikini-clad women conducting street interviews and eliciting lewd comments — but they are entirely fake, generated by AI tools increasingly used to flood social media with sexist content.Such AI slop — mass-produced content created by cheap artificial intelligence tools that turn simple text prompts into hyper-realistic visuals — is frequently drowning out authentic posts and blurring the line between fiction and reality.The trend has spawned a cottage industry of AI influencers churning out large volumes of sexualized clips with minimal effort, often driven by platform incentive programs that financially reward viral content.Hordes of AI clips, laden with locker-room humor, purport to show scantily clad female interviewers on the streets of India or the United Kingdom — sparking concern about the harm such synthetic content may pose to women.AFP’s fact-checkers traced hundreds of such videos on Instagram, many in Hindi, that purportedly show male interviewees casually delivering misogynistic punchlines and sexualized remarks — sometimes even grabbing the women — while crowds of men gawk or laugh in the background.Many videos racked up tens of millions of views — and some further monetized that traction by promoting an adult chat app to “make new female friends.”The fabricated clips were so lifelike that some users in the comments questioned whether the featured women were real.A sample of these videos analyzed by the US cybersecurity firm GetReal Security showed they were created using Google’s Veo 3 AI generator, known for hyper-realistic visuals.- ‘Gendered harm’ -“Misogyny that usually stayed hidden in locker room chats and groups is now being dressed up as AI visuals,” Nirali Bhatia, an India-based cyber psychologist, told AFP.”This is part of AI-mediated gendered harm,” she said, adding that the trend was “fueling sexism.”The trend offers a window into an internet landscape now increasingly swamped with AI-generated memes, videos and images that are competing for attention with — and increasingly eclipsing — authentic content.”AI slop and any type of unlabeled AI-generated content slowly chips away at the little trust that remains in visual content,” GetReal Security’s Emmanuelle Saliba told AFP.The most viral misogynistic content often relies on shock value — including Instagram and TikTok clips that Wired magazine said were generated using Veo 3 and portray Black women as big-footed primates. Videos on one popular TikTok account mockingly list what so-called gold-digging “girls gone wild” would do for money.Women are also fodder for distressing AI-driven clickbait, with AFP’s fact-checkers tracking viral videos of a fake marine trainer named “Jessica Radcliffe” being fatally attacked by an orca during a live show at a water park.The fabricated footage rapidly spread across platforms including TikTok, Facebook and X, sparking global outrage from users who believed the woman was real.- ‘Unreal’ -Last year, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, found 900 Instagram accounts of likely AI-generated “models” — predominantly female and typically scantily clothed.These thirst traps cumulatively amassed 13 million followers and posted more than 200,000 images, typically monetizing their reach by redirecting their audiences to commercial content-sharing platforms.With AI fakery proliferating online, “the numbers now are undoubtedly much larger,” Mantzarlis told AFP.”Expect more nonsense content leveraging body standards that are not just unrealistic but literally unreal,” he added.Financially incentivized slop is becoming increasingly challenging to police as content creators — including students and stay-at-home parents around the world — turn to AI video production as gig work.Many creators on YouTube and TikTok offer paid courses on how to monetize viral AI-generated material on platforms, many of which have reduced their reliance on human fact-checkers and scaled back content moderation.Some platforms have sought to crack down on accounts promoting slop, with YouTube recently saying that creators of “inauthentic” and “mass produced” content would be ineligible for monetization.”AI doesn’t invent misogyny — it just reflects and amplifies what’s already there,” AI consultant Divyendra Jadoun told AFP.”If audiences reward this kind of content with millions of likes, the algorithms and AI creators will keep producing it. The bigger fight isn’t just technological — it’s social and cultural.”burs-ac/st

President Xi Jinping gathered the leaders of Russia and India among dignitaries from around 20 Eurasian countries on Sunday to kick off a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and centre of regional relations.The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit is being held in the northern port city of Tianjin until Monday, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in Tianjin on Sunday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.Xi held a flurry of back-to-back bilateral meetings with leaders including Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — one of Putin’s staunch allies — and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his first visit to China since 2018.Modi told Xi that India was committed to taking “forward our ties on the basis of mutual trust, dignity and sensitivity”.Xi, in turn, told Modi that he hoped the two countries would recognise that they are “partners rather than rivals”.If they see each other as “opportunities for development rather than threats”, China-India relations will grow steadily, Xi added, according to state broadcaster CCTV.The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.A thaw began last October, when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.”The interests of 2.8 billion people of both countries are linked to our cooperation. This will also pave the way for the welfare of the entire humanity,” Modi told Xi.- ‘Project influence’ – The bilateral talks were held at the Tianjin Guest House, an intimate venue surrounded by lush greenery.Security guards positioned themselves around and inside the venue, their eyes scanning reporters and guests carefully, as Chinese diplomats hurried through the halls.Large sections of Tianjin were closed to traffic, with a significant police presence deployed around the city.Official posters promoting the SCO lined the streets, displaying words such as “mutual benefit” and “equality” written in Chinese and Russian.China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance. This year’s summit is the first since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as the SCO to curry favour.”China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.More than 20 leaders including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are attending the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.- Talks on the sidelines -Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Erdogan and Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear programme respectively.Xi met Erdogan on Sunday to discuss the situations in Gaza and Ukraine, a readout from Ankara said. Turkey has hosted three rounds of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv this year that have failed to break the deadlock over how to end the conflict.The Russian president needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also the support of the second largest economy in the world”, said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.”Russia is also keen to win over India, and India’s trade frictions with the United States presents this opportunity,” Lim told AFP.The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp bump up in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.Many of the assembled dignitaries will be in Beijing on Wednesday to witness the military parade, which will also be attended by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In a former classroom, now a makeshift relief camp, pregnant women take refuge from the floods that have ravaged eastern Pakistan, their bodies aching, eyes heavy with exhaustion and silent despair.Waiting for the water that swallowed their homes to recede, women in Chung, a settlement on Lahore’s outskirts, have limited access to sanitary pads and essential medicines, including pregnancy-related care.Shumaila Riaz, 19-years-old and seven months pregnant with her first child, spent the past four days in the relief camp, enduring pregnancy cramps.”I wanted to think about the child I am going to have, but now, I am not even certain about my own future,” she told AFP.Clad in dirty clothes they have worn for days and with unbrushed hair, women huddle in the overcrowded school hosting more than 2,000 people, surrounded by mud and stagnant rainwater.”My body aches a lot and I can’t get the medicines I want here,” said 19-year-old Fatima, mother to a one-year-old daughter and four months pregnant.”I used to eat as I please, sleep as I please, walk as I please — that is all gone now. I can’t do that here,” added Fatima, who asked AFP not to use her real name.Monsoon rains over the past week swelled three major rivers that cut through Punjab province, Pakistan’s agricultural heartland and home to nearly half of its 255 million people.The number of affected people rose on Sunday to more than two million, according to provincial senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb.Around 750,000 people have been evacuated, of whom 115,000 were rescued by boat — making it the largest rescue operation in Punjab’s history, according to the provincial government.The flooded rivers have affected mostly rural areas near their banks but heavy rain also flooded urban areas, including several parts of Lahore — the country’s second-largest city.While South Asia’s seasonal monsoon brings rainfall that farmers depend on, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, and deadly, across the region.Landslides and floods triggered by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains have killed more than 850 people nationwide since June.The latest downpour has killed at least 32 people, the provincial minister said on Sunday.- Infections and trauma -Sleeping in tents held together with thin wooden sticks, women displaced by the floods struggle to get sanitary pads and clean clothes when theirs are stained by blood from their periods.Menstruation remains a taboo topic in Pakistan, with many women discouraged from speaking about it.”We are struggling to get pads for when we get our period. And even if we do, there are no proper bathrooms to use,” said Aleema Bibi, 35, as her baby slept on a sheet soiled with mud.”We go to the homes nearby to use the bathroom,” she added. Jameela, who uses only one name, said she seeks privacy in a makeshift bathroom next to a cowshed.”We wait for men in these homes to leave, so that we can go use the bathrooms and change our pads,” she said.Outside the medical truck beside the relief camp, a concerned woman asked where to take her eight-month-pregnant daughter-in-law who had gone into labour, AFP journalists saw.The pregnant women are also vulnerable to infectious diseases, according to doctors in the medical camp set up by a local NGO. “I receive around 200 to 300 patients every day with different infections and water-borne diseases,” said Fahad Abbas, 27, a doctor at the medical camp. “There are a lot of patients here who are going through psychological trauma, especially women and children, after losing their homes.”Even without the crisis of a flood, 675 babies under one month old die every day in Pakistan, along with 27 women in perinatal stages from preventable complications, according to the World Health Organization.Another woman, who wanted to stay anonymous, said the medicine she once used to manage her period cramps was now too difficult to buy.”We escaped death, but this misery is no less than death either,” Jameela said. 

A fire started by protesters at a council building in eastern Indonesia killed at least three people, a local official said Saturday, after demonstrations across the country following the death of a man hit by a police vehicle.Southeast Asia’s biggest economy was rocked by protests in major cities including the capital Jakarta on Friday after footage spread of a motorcycle taxi driver being run over by a police tactical vehicle in earlier rallies against low wages and financial perks for lawmakers.Protests in Makassar, the biggest city on the eastern island of Sulawesi, descended into chaos outside the provincial and local city council buildings, which were both set on fire as demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails.Three people were killed as a result of the fire at the Makassar city council, its secretary Rahmat Mappatoba told AFP.”They were trapped in the burning building,” he said, accusing protesters of igniting the blaze.”Usually during a demonstration, protesters only throw rocks or burn a tyre in front of the office. They never stormed into the building or burned it.” Two workers at the city council died at the scene and a third person, a civil servant, died in hospital.At least four people were injured in the fire and were being treated at hospital, Rahmat added.Hundreds of people were seen in footage posted by local media cheering and clapping as fire engulfed the building Friday with few security forces in sight.One man was heard shouting: “There are people upstairs!”In footage verified by AFP, smouldering debris was seen falling from the roof of the city council building surrounded by palm trees as charred cars flickered with flames.Inside protesters lit several fires as parts of the building collapsed, while others smashed glass and chanted “revolution”.By Saturday, the building appeared to be a blacked-out wreck, with dozens of charred cars around it, as local residents inspected the scene, local media footage showed.Windiyatno, South Sulawesi’s military chief said in a statement Saturday that the situation in Makassar had “now returned to normal”.Makassar and South Sulawesi police did not immediately respond to AFP’s requests for comments.- Prabowo test -Protests continued on Saturday in different areas of Indonesia’s vast archipelago.Hundreds of students and ojek drivers protested in front of the police headquarters in Bali, Indonesia’s most popular tourist hotspot.”Bali is the centre of tourism in Indonesia, and we want to protest here to gain international attention about the legal injustice, corruption, and the impunity of police crimes,” protester Narendra Wicaksono told AFP.Hundreds of students in Surabaya also rallied outside the East Java police headquarters, according to an AFP journalist at the scene. In Jakarta, hundreds had massed on Friday outside the headquarters of the elite Mobile Brigade Corp (Brimob) paramilitary police unit they blamed for motorcycle gig driver Affan Kurniawan’s death the day before.Protesters threw firecrackers as police responded with tear gas.Police said they had detained seven officers for questioning in connection with Affan’s death.The protests were the biggest and most violent of Prabowo Subianto’s presidency, a key test for the leader less than a year into his rule.He has urged calm, and ordered an investigation into the driver’s death and that the officers involved be held accountable.Prabowo said on Friday the government was “committed to guaranteeing the livelihood” of the driver’s family, posting images on social media with them at their home.He has pledged fast, state-driven growth but has already faced protests against widespread government budget cuts to fund his populist policies including a billion-dollar free meal programme.

Nearly half a million people have been displaced by flooding in eastern Pakistan after days of heavy rain swelled rivers, relief officials said Saturday, as they carried out a massive rescue operation.Three transboundary rivers that cut through Punjab province, which borders India, have swollen to exceptionally high levels, affecting more than 2,300 villages.Nabeel Javed, the head of the Punjab government’s relief services, said 481,000 people stranded by the floods have been evacuated, along with 405,000 livestock.Overall, more than 1.5 million people have been affected by the flooding. “This is the biggest rescue operation in Punjab’s history,” Irfan Ali Khan, the head of the province’s disaster management agency, added at a press conference. He said more than 800 boats and over 1,300 rescue personnel were involved in evacuating families from affected areas, mostly located in rural areas near the banks of the three rivers.The latest spell of monsoon flooding since the start of the week has killed 30 people, he said, with hundreds left dead throughout the heavier than usual season that began in June. “No human life is being left unattended. All kinds of rescue efforts are continuing,” Khan said.More than 500 relief camps have been set up to provide shelter to families and their livestock.In the impoverished town of Shahdara, on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Lahore, dozens of families were gathered in a school after fleeing the rising water in their homes. “Look at all the women sitting with me — they’re helpless and distressed. Everyone has lost everything. Their homes are gone, their belongings destroyed. We couldn’t even manage to bring clothes for their children,” 40-year-old cleaner Tabassum Suleman told AFP. Rains continued throughout Saturday, including in Lahore, the country’s second-largest city, where an entire housing development was half submerged by water. Retired shop owner Sikandar Mughal attempted to access his home but the water was still too high. “When the situation got worse and the water level reached the garage of my house, I took my bike and ran for my life,” the 61-year-old said.”It’s been two days now since I left. I did not even get a chance to get my clothes so that I could change.”In mid-August, more than 400 Pakistanis were killed in a matter of days by landslides caused by torrential rains on the other side of the country, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, close to Afghanistan and the only province held by the opposition to the federal authorities.In 2022, unprecedented monsoon floods submerged a third of Pakistan, with the southern province of Sindh the worst affected area.

Chinese President Xi Jinping began welcoming dignitaries including United Nations chief Antonio Guterres and Egyptian Premier Moustafa Madbouly on Saturday before a summit attended by leaders from more than 20 countries.The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gathering will be held in the northern port city of Tianjin on Sunday and Monday, days before a massive military parade in nearby Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will be among some 26 world leaders slated to attend the parade.The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Sixteen more countries are affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are also due to arrive in Tianjin ahead of the summit.China and Russia have used the organisation — sometimes touted as a counter to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance — to deepen ties with Central Asian states.Other leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will also attend the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.- Bilateral meetings -Multiple bilateral meetings are expected to be held on the sidelines of the summit.The Kremlin said on Friday that Putin will discuss the Ukraine conflict with Erdogan on Monday.Turkey has hosted three rounds of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine this year that have failed to break the deadlock over how to end the conflict, triggered when Moscow launched its invasion of its pro-European neighbour in February 2022.Putin will also talk about Tehran’s nuclear programme on Monday with his Iranian counterpart Pezeshkian, a meeting that comes as Iran faces fresh Western pressure.Britain, France and Germany, known as the E3, triggered a “snapback” mechanism on Thursday to reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran for failing to comply with commitments made in a 2015 deal over its nuclear programme.Russia’s foreign ministry warned that the reimposition of sanctions against Iran risked “irreparable consequences”.Tehran and Moscow have been bolstering political, military and economic ties over the past decade as Russia drifted away from the West. Relations between them grew even closer after Moscow launched its offensive against Ukraine.Modi’s visit comes after a trip to Japan, and is his first to China since 2018.The world’s two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.A thaw began last October when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.

Japan pledged Friday to invest $68 billion in India during a visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Tokyo, as the two countries agreed to deepen security ties.”India’s massive market is so full of potential that incorporating its vibrancy will help drive the growth of Japan’s economy,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters.Bilateral trade is currently worth over $20 billion annually, heavily favouring Japan.Speaking during Modi’s two-day stopover before he visits China, Ishiba said Japan would boost investment in India to 10 trillion yen ($68 billion) and would establish a cooperation initiative focusing on semiconductors and AI.The two sides also pledged to bolster security cooperation, with Kyodo news agency reporting that the two had agreed to expand drills between Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and the Indian Armed Forces.The nations also expressed “serious concern” over the situation in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, in a separate joint statement, according to Kyodo.”As the international situation grows more and more uncertain, Japan and India must join hands for the sake of peace and stability of the region,” Ishiba told reporters.Modi said that “India and Japan are fully committed to a free, open, peaceful, prosperous and rules-based Indo-Pacific”.Earlier Modi told a business forum in Tokyo that India and Japan will “shape the Asian Century”, with India “the springboard for Japanese businesses to the Global South”.Both countries have been hit by tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump, with levies of 50 percent on many Indian imports into the United States taking effect this week.Japan’s vital auto sector still faces 25 percent tariffs as a July trade deal cutting them — as well as additional “reciprocal” levies — is yet to come into force. Modi and Ishiba are set to tour a chip facility on Saturday.They will also visit a factory making “shinkansen” bullet trains, with a view to Japan assisting in a planned 7,000-kilometre (4,350-mile) high-speed rail network by the centenary of Indian independence in 2047.A joint project aimed at building a first high-speed link between the western Indian cities of Mumbai and Ahmedabad has been plagued for years with delays and cost overruns.Modi is due at a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China on Sunday and Monday, hosted by President Xi Jinping and also attended by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.The visit will be Modi’s first to China since 2018.The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.But relations began to thaw last October when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.burs-aph/dhw

Perched on her neighbour’s rooftop, Ghulam Bano gazes down at the remains of her home, submerged in murky, foul-smelling floodwater that has engulfed much of Pakistan’s Punjab region.Monsoon rains this week swelled three transboundary rivers that cut through Pakistan’s eastern province, the nation’s agricultural heartland and home to nearly half of its 255 million people.Bano moved to Shahdara town last year, on the outskirts of Lahore, to avoid the choking smog pollution of Pakistan’s second-largest city, only to have her new beginning overturned by raging floods.”My husband had started coughing blood and his condition just kept getting worse when the smog hit,” Bano told AFP, walking through muddy streets.Pakistan regularly ranks among the world’s most polluted countries, with Lahore often the most polluted megacity between November and February.”I thought the smog was bad enough — I never thought it could be worse with the floods,” she said.Her impoverished neighbourhood is home to thousands of low-lying homes crammed together on narrow streets.The nearby overflowing Ravi river flooded many of them, forcing dozens of families to take refuge in an elementary school on higher ground, where doctors were treating people for skin infections linked to the flood water. More heavy rain is predicted over the weekend, including warnings of increased urban flooding in Lahore, which borders India. With her husband bedridden from tuberculosis, worsened by the relentless smog, Bano became the sole provider in a household struggling to breathe, survive, and endure the floods.”I ate today after two days. There is no clean water to drink. I left my daughter at a relative’s place and stayed back hoping the water recedes,” she said.  – No time to pack -Landslides and floods triggered by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains have killed more than 800 people nationwide since June this year.While South Asia’s seasonal monsoon brings rainfall that farmers depend on, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, unpredictable and deadly across the region.More than 1.4 million people living near the rivers have been affected by the floods, with over 265,000 evacuated, said Azma Bukhari, the provincial information minister.The latest monsoon downpour has killed at least 13 people, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.”We just can’t get a break,” Amir Mehmood, a 32-year-old shopkeeper in the same neighbourhood as Bano, told AFP.”Children fall ill in the smog because of the extreme cold. Some become sick due to the (everyday) unsanitary conditions,” he said, referring to piles of waste that routinely line the streets.”And now there’s a flood. Our homes have collapsed, the walls have fallen, and everything is damaged.”He moved his family to a relative’s home on the other side of the town along with his 10 cows and two goats as the water crept closer.More than 300 relief camps have been set up across the province to shelter those displaced with no family to turn to.”The women you see here, and me, we had to run for our lives… we did not even get the time to get clothes for our kids,” 40-year-old widow Tabassum Suleman told AFP from the school camp.”We do not know when we will be going back home,” she said, looking up at the dark skies.”But the worst is yet to come.”