New Zealand’s best bowler since Richard Hadlee, Shane Bond, had a career tarnished by injury that probably fell into the category of unfulfilled, rather than great
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STOCKHOLM: India has been the world’’s biggest weapons importer over the last five years, Swedish think-tank SIPRI reported Monday, naming four Asian countries among the top five arms importers. The report also highlighted how the world’’s major arms supplying countries had in recent years competed for trade in Libya, and in other Arab countries gripped by the recent wave of pro-democracy uprisings. “India is the world’’s largest arms importer,” the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said as it released its latest report on trends in the international arms trade. “India received nine percent of the volume of international arms transfers during 2006-10, with Russian deliveries accounting for 82 percent of Indian arms imports,” it said. Its arms imports jumped 21 percent from the previous five-year-period with 71 percent of its orders being for aircraft. India’’s arms purchases were driven by several factors, said Siemon Wezeman of SIPRI”S Arms Transfers Programme. “The most often cited relate to rivalries with Pakistan and China as well as internal security challenges,” he wrote. China and South Korea held joint second place on the list of global arms import, each with six percent, followed by Pakistan, on five percent. Aircraft accounted for 45 percent of Pakistan’’s arms imports, which had bought warplanes from both China and the United States. Pakistan’’s arms imports were up 128 percent on the previous five-year period, SIPRI noted. Greece rounded off the top-five list arms importers, with four percent of global imports. Since the lifting of a UN arms embargo on Libya in September 2003, Britain, France, Italy and Russia had all competed to win orders from Moamer Kadhafi’’s regime, said the report. Kadhafi’’s forces are currently using tanks, artillery and warplanes to reclaim territory held by the opposition forces. Egypt had received 60 percent of its major arms imports from the United States between 2006 and 2010, said the SIPRI report. They included “M-1A1 tanks and M-113 armoured vehicles of the type present during demonstrations in the country in January 2011,” it added. A pro-democracy uprising forced Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to step down on February 11, after nearly three decades of autocratic rule, after pro-democracy uprising. But the conflict left at least 384 dead and more than 6,000 injured. Russia, Montenegro, the Netherlands and China had also supplied weapons to the Mubarak regime, said the SIPRI report. The United States remained the world’’s largest military equipment exporter, accounting for 30 percent of global arms exports in 2006-10, 44 percent of which went to to Asia and Oceania, SIPRI said. The rest of the top five arms suppliers were: Russia, with 23 percent of the total market; Germany (11 percent); France (seven percent); and Britain (four percent). “There is intense competition between suppliers for big-ticket deals in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America,” said Dr Paul Holtom, head of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme. He cited the efforts of the Eurofighter consortium to sell their plane across the world against rival warplanes, with competition particuarly fierce for the markets in Brazil and India. Britain, France, Germany and Italy were also competing for orders for naval equipment from Algeria, noted SIPRI. The think tank, which specialises in research on conflicts, weapons, arms control and disarmament, was created in 1966 and is 50-percent financed by the Swedish state. (AFP)
TOKYO: Japan mobilised 50,000 military and other rescue personnel Saturday to spearhead a Herculean rescue and recovery effort, a day after being hit by its most devastating quake and tsunami on record. Every wing of the Self Defence Forces was thrown into frantic service, with hundreds of ships, aircraft and vehicles headed to the Pacific coast area where at least 1,000 people were feared dead and entire neighbourhoods had vanished. As emergency staff in the quake-prone archipelago dug through rubble and plucked survivors off the roofs of submerged houses, Prime Minister Naoto Kan warned that day one after the catastrophe was a crucial window for survivors. “I realized the huge extent of the tsunami damage,” the centre-left premier said after taking a helicopter tour of the apocalyptic scenes, before meeting his cabinet ministers for an emergency meeting in Tokyo. “What used to be residential areas were mostly swept away in many coastal areas and fires are still blazing there,” he told them. The United States, with almost 50,000 troops stationed in Japan, sent aircraft carriers to waters off the disaster zone — just one of scores of nations that has offered assistance since Friday’’s monster quake. US forces on Friday helped Japan rapidly react by delivering a cooling agent to a nuclear plant where malfunctions threatened a dangerous meltdown. In the utter bleakness on the east coast of Japan’’s main Honshu island, where at least 3,600 houses were destroyed by the 8.9-magnitude quake, there were some rays of hope amid the carnage of smashed towns and shattered lives. Army helicopters airlifted people off the roof of an elementary school in Watari, Miyagi prefecture, and naval and coastguard choppers did the same to rescue 81 people from a ship that had been hurled out to sea by the tsunami. But for every piece of good news, there were more reminders of nature’’s cruelty against this seismically unstable nation — including the latest of a series of strong aftershocks in the morning, measuring a hefty 6.8. In large coastal areas, entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, with unknown numbers of victims buried in the rubble of their homes or lost to the sea, where cars, shipping containers, debris and entire houses were afloat. The coastal city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture was almost completely destroyed and submerged, said the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Japan’’s military started its mass deployment Friday, when it dispatched 300 planes and an armada of 20 naval destroyers and other ships, while some 25 air force jets flew reconnaissance missions over the disaster zone. The Tokyo and Osaka police forces and the health ministry also all quickly dispatched medical and rescue teams. Among the international help pledged, a team from South Korea, with five rescue personnel and two sniffer dogs, was set to arrive Saturday. Japan said it had been offered help by scores of other governments — among them Australia, China, New Zealand, Israel, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Russia, Turkey, Germany, France, Belgium, Ukraine, Slovakia, United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Jordan, Britain, the European Union, Chile, Spain, Greece, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Argentina and Iceland. The United States, which occupied Japan after World War II and is the country’’s main security ally, has many of its forces stationed on the southern island of Okinawa, far from the quake zone. Two aircraft carriers were en route to the disaster zone — the USS George Washington, which is based near Tokyo, and the USS Ronald Reagan, which was on its way to South Korea for exercises and has been redirected to Japan.(AFP)