Asia

"Nuclear power and high speed rail will top the focus of China's plan to invest $1.5 trillion in seven key industries and shift the world's number two economy away from its role as a supplier of cheap goods, sources said."

"As temperatures drop well below freezing during [Afghanistan's] harsh winter, bombs and bullets from a near-decade long war against a Taliban-led insurgency are not the only threat -- just trying to light a home and stay warm can be deadly." Heating and cooking with solid fuels like wood and coal kills some 54,000 Afghans a year, most of them children under five. By contrast, 2412 civilians were killed by conflict-related violence in the first 10 months of 2010."

"Flooding in Sri Lanka has forced more than one million people out of their homes, the government said Thursday as it began distributing emergency food, clothing and bedding."

Pollution problems are widespread in China after three decades of unbridled economic growth. Despite money and priority given to cleanup, Tai Lake stands as an example of how little has been accomplished.

"A new type of snub-nosed monkey has been found in a remote forested region of northern Myanmar which is under threat from logging and a Chinese dam project, scientists said on Wednesday."

The floods that devastated much of Pakistan have brought more blackouts in the nation's already inadequate electric power industry.

"Japanese police have launched a probe after nets on holding pens for dolphins in the coastal town of Taiji were cut during an annual hunt, possibly by foreign activists, a press report said Wednesday."

"Like generations of Tibetan nomads before him, Phuntsok Dorje makes a living raising yaks and other livestock on the vast alpine grasslands that provide a thatch on the roof of the world. But in recent years the vegetation around his home, the Tibetan plateau, has been destroyed by rising temperatures, excess livestock and plagues of insects and rodents."

"Pakistan floods have already affected as many as 12 million people and destroyed or damaged more than 600,000 homes, say Pakistani officials. That's already worse than the 2005 earthquake, but monsoon season is only half over."