India and China have played down reports of renewed tension between them over a long-running border dispute. But the two Asian countries have been arguing about the demarcation of their 4000km-long border for several decades.

There is now renewed tension on the border issue over which the two countries fought a brief war in 1962.

Parts of the frontier are still in dispute, including a portion of Kashmir and the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Indian military recently accused China of launching incursions and have stepped up its presence in Kashmir.

However, in an interview with Al Jazeera’s Hamish Macdonald, P Chidambaram, India’s interior minister, did not rule out error.

“It is a disputed border. There could be navigational errors. What we think are violations have taken place and these are resolved by talking to each other,” he said.

“But please remember that the India-China border is not the same as the LoC between India and Pakistan, where infiltration takes place, violence takes place.”

In the latest development, the government of Arunachal Pradesh urged New Delhi on Tuesday to act tough on Chinese claims over the state.

“Chinese claims over Arunachal Pradesh are simply baseless and not correct. Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India and would continue to do so,” Dorjee Khandu, the state’s chief minister, told the Times of India newspaper.

Conflicting Claims

Beijing gave up its territorial claim over Sikkim in 2003 but still holds on to its stand that nearly all of Arunachal Pradesh belongs to it.

The mountainous state shares a 1,030km unfenced border with China.

“The government of India should be more assertive and make its stand on Arunachal Pradesh very clear to China. New Delhi needs to make a bold statement about frequent Chinese claims,” Takam Sanjay, a ruling congress party leader from Arunachal Pradesh, told Times of India.

Such concerns are also borne out by confidential communication from local Indian government officials seen by Al Jazeera.

China’s foreign ministry has issued an official response saying: “China’s border patrol is conducted in strict accordance with rules. Chinese border troops never trespass on other countries’ territories.

“Before the final settlement of the China-India boundary issue, the two countries should make joint efforts to safeguard peace and tranquillity along the border.”

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From All Africa:

Kenya is among countries that will be hardest hit by even more severe food shortages in coming years due to a warming climate.

Some parts of the country have already lost 90 per cent of their water.

Although almost every part of the country had lost substantial amounts of water, the hardest hit areas are Eastern and North Eastern provinces.

Sections of Central Province have lost 80 per cent of their water, while in the western region, 30 per cent of water sources have dried up.

These damning disclosures emerged yesterday during the launch of the annual World Development Report at the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Nairobi offices.

The World Bank report, whose theme this year is “Development and Climate Change”, was launched simultaneously in Nairobi and Washington and painted a gloomy picture of Earth’s future.

The disasters associated with a warming climate, such as droughts, floods and landslides, are already seeing governments diverting funds meant for health and education, says the report, whose Kenyan launch was presided over by Environment minister John Michuki.

Such diversion could involve buying relief food or buying weak animals from desperate herdsmen as is happening in most arid areas in Kenya.

Also under threat are the country’s efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals and the Vision 2030.

Indicating that the government had thought about these challenges, Mr Michuki said the Vision 2030 document was being revised to factor in the anticipated effects of climate change.

“Our plan at the ministry is to spend over Sh80 billion for the next 20 years in tree planting, with the priority going to restoring major water catchment areas,” said the Environment minister.

Even if mitigating factors are put in place today, said the World Bank, the environment would still need many more years to recover.

The study predicts that whole parts of the continent will become unsuitable for wheat farming because of droughts, pests and diseases.

This year, wheat-growing areas of the Rift Valley are facing their lowest production levels ever, with some farmers losing whole crops to drought and pests.

At best, scientists predict that if warming could be retained at two degrees centigrade, weather patterns would change completely, disorienting farmers from their traditional farming instincts.

The report warns people living in coastal areas that water levels could rise by one metre this century, casting doubt on the value of seafront properties.

People living inland, especially around Lake Victoria, require special attention because the speed at which forests are being destroyed could see the lake lose 50 per cent of its species within decades.

Though the report, built on three themes dominating the climate change debate – inertia, equity and ingenuity – paints a dark future, it is optimistic that the situation can be arrested.

It suggests that if people were to give up the use of environment-polluting SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) for environment-friendly saloon cars, it could greatly cut on greenhouse gases in the environment.

But environmentalist Wangari Maathai went further and called for the banning of importation of second hand-cars.

Another suggestion was for the governments to innovatively levy a green tax on foods whose production contributes to greenhouse gases, such as meat.

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Many experts fear that Somalia is becoming like Afghanistan was in the 1990s: A place for terrorists to train and gather strength. The militant group al-Shabab, which is accused of having ties to al-Qaeda and has foreign fighters in its ranks, is trying to overthrow Somalias weak government.

In recent days it has launched another deadly attack in the capital, Mogadishu, killing people as they were fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Meanwhile, thousands of displaced people continue to stream across the border into a large refugee camp in northern Kenya. The Dadaab refugee complex, with almost 300,000 people, is the largest refugee camp in the world and grows by about 8,000 Somalis a month.

Spencer Platt, a photographer for Getty Images, recently returned from a visit to the refugee camps in Kenya and shares his impressions of the camps.

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The Biblioburro is a traveling library that distributes books to patrons from the backs of two donkeys, Alfa and Beto. The program was created in the rural hamlet of La Gloria located in the department Magdalena, Colombia by Luis Soriano.

Here’s a recent profile of Luis Soriano and his Biblioburro in the New York Times:

In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.

Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.

The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.

The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.

By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia’s long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria, leading to clashes with guerrillas and intimidation of the local population by both groups.

Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Mr. Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few reading textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels from his small personal library. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups, to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.

A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.

After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.

There is little money left over for such luxuries on his teacher’s salary of $350 a month. Already the family’s budget is so tight that he and his wife, Diana, opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Política, two years ago to help make ends meet.

Even among the restaurant’s clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Mr. Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall above tables laid out with grilled meat and fried plantains, he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region’s daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events.

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The building of a case more troops for Afghanistan continues to be built unabated by officials of the American national security state. Today it was the turn of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, whose reconfirmation hearing turned into a spirited discussion of US policy in Afghanistan. Admiral Mullen told the Senate Armed Services Committee chaired by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan that success in Afghanistan would require more troops and certainly much more time.

Admiral Mullin might have added more money, though perhaps that is an underlying and unspoken assumption. It is, however, dangerous politics to ignore the financial costs of the Afghan War (pdf). The war in Afghanistan has cost US tax-payers $171.7 billion as of year 2008. The cost of the Afghan war this year alone will reach $77.1 billion. Projected costs over the long term are likely to total more than half a trilliondollars when future occupation and veterans’ benefits are taken into account. Interest payments could add another $200 billion to that figure. This financial aspect of the Afghan war remains largely absent from the debate. The question of whether we can actually afford the massive outlays that the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by the Obama Administration needs to be considered.

The story from the New York Times:

Admiral Mullen said that no specific troop request had yet been received from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

“But I do believe that — having heard his views and having great confidence in his leadership — a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces, and, without question, more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance,” Admiral Mullen said.

“We will need resources matched to the strategy,” he added.

Broad as they were, Admiral Mullen’s comments were his most specific to date in a public setting on whether more troops would have to be sent to Afghanistan, and they and seem certain to frame the debate facing the White House, Congress and the nation in coming weeks.

The hearing officially was called to consider Admiral Mullen’s nomination to serve a second term as chairman, but it immediately turned into an analysis of the administration’s broader policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular whether more American combat forces should be sent rapidly or whether it would be wiser to immediately begin shifting the bulk of the fighting to local forces.

A range of officials have said that the White House hopes to have several weeks at least before being faced with dealing with any requests for more forces for Afghanistan — and the political implications of such a request here at home.

It is to Senator Levin’ credit that he is insisting that accelerated efforts to train and equip Afghan security forces should precede any deployment of American troops beyond those already committed by the Obama administration. Nonetheless, it is clear that neither American military leaders nor much of the American political establishment is fully leveling with the American public on the true costs of this war. Each dollar spent on war in Afghanistan is a dollar not spent on human needs here at home. It is time to put country first.

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