TOKYO: A Japanese mayor whose city is set to be the site of a re-located US military base pleaded yesterday for the plan to be dropped, as Tokyo and Washington push ahead with the move.
Susumu Inamine, who has just been re-elected on a fiercely anti-base platform as Mayor of Nago, Okinawa, said the burden of hosting the 47,000 Americans based in Japan should be spread across the country.
“For 68 years since the end of the World War II, Okinawa, as the frontline prefecture of the Japan-US alliance, has been forced” to bear the bulk of responsibility, including accidents and crimes that come with having the bases,” he told reporters in Tokyo.
“This situations reflects (the Japanese government’s) discrimination against Okinawa,” he said.
His call came as the long-stalled plan to move the US Marines’ Futenma Air Station from a crowded urban area of Okinawa to sparsely populated Nago bay has begun to bear fruit, with an agreement in principle from the governor of the prefecture.
Beijing barely ‘habitable’
SHANGHAI: Severe pollution in Beijing has made the Chinese capital “barely suitable” for living, according to an official Chinese report, as the world’s second-largest economy tries to reduce often hazardous levels of smog caused by decades of rapid growth.
Pollution is a rising concern for China’s stability-obsessed leaders, keen to douse potential unrest as affluent city dwellers turn against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has tainted much of the country’s air, water and soil.
The report, by the Beijing-based Social Science Academic Press and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, ranked the Chinese capital second worst out of 40 global cities for its environmental conditions, official media reported.
China’s smog has brought some Chinese cities to a near standstill, caused flight delays and forced schools to shut down.
Agencies
