Relief Proceeds Slowly in Philippines, Where a Death Toll Remains Unclear - NYTimes.com by Keith Bradsher

TANAUAN, the Philippines — For Teoderico Canales and her family, survival after Typhoon Haiyan has literally meant living in a pigsty. Their only water comes from a pump next to a small river where many people drowned.

Fast-moving walls of seawater gutted the ground floors of houses here as the storm surge reached the ceilings. Powerful winds shattered practically every upstairs window and tore away roofs, sending them flying through the night.

With no better options, Mrs. Canales has covered the pigsty with a large blue and red tarpaulin. The pigsty, a rectangular area about nine feet by five feet and ringed with crude concrete walls about three feet high, is the temporary home for Mrs. Canales, her husband and her five children.

“It is so shameful: It is only for one pig normally and now it is occupied by seven people — it is so difficult,” she said, cradling her youngest, a 17-month-old girl named Hanna.

While the typhoon’s one-two punch of wind and storm surge hit outlying towns like Tanauan with as much force as they did Tacloban, some of the smaller communities seem to be faring better, at least here to the south of the city. Tacloban descended into violence for nearly a week after the typhoon, but in other towns here in the east-central Philippines, people seemed more likely to band together than point guns at one another.

Mayor Matin Petilla of Palo said that after the typhoon, she ordered the establishment of police checkpoints with the town’s three neighbors — Tacloban to the north, Tanauan to the south and Santa Fe to the west. She told the police to focus on preventing the looting in Tacloban from spreading into her town.

Tacloban might have been hit hardest by the typhoon. But mile after mile of homes and businesses in towns and villages up and down the east-central coast of the Philippines were destroyed as well.

Cross the city line from Tacloban to Palo and the difference is quickly apparent. Bloated, discolored corpses still lie along the sides of the road in Tacloban, but are nowhere to be seen in Palo or in the next town to the south, Tanauan.

Both have confirmed typhoon-related death rates as higher than Tacloban as a share of their population. But they have been able to bury at least the visible corpses, although more remain under huge piles of building debris. Sporadic looting, residents and officials said, has been limited more to grocery stores and pharmacies than in Tacloban, where appliance and furniture stores and the homes of the affluent were targeted.

The relief effort in Tacloban proceeded slowly, as did the effort to collect and identify bodies. The mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez, said Friday that the city had 801 confirmed dead. He also apologized for repeated errors in Tacloban fatalities reported earlier, On Thursday the city’s official notice board said 2,000 deaths had been confirmed, which was doubled to 4,000 early Friday, and the mayor said both of those figures were wrong.

The United Nations has also had trouble reporting on the total death toll, with its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting 3,600 deaths on Friday, a day after saying there had been 4,460. John Ging, the office’s operations director, apologized Friday for the discrepancy, saying the higher number had been an estimate, not actual confirmed deaths.

At a news briefing at United Nations headquarters in New York, Mr. Ging and Ted Chaiban, the direction of emergency programs at Unicef, said 13 million people had been affected by the typhoon, including five million children. They said the slow pace of emergency aid arrival was steadily improving. 

“Over all, it’s clear that much more needs to be done,” Mr. Chaiban said. “But it’s also clear that we’re starting to open up the logjam. And I think we can say we’re beginning to turn the corner.”

In Tacloban, the dead are being taken to a mass grave in a public cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Mr. Romualdez said just 10 percent to 15 percent of the dead had been identified.

He said the delivery of the first cycle of food packets, which is supposed to be six pounds of rice and some canned goods for each family, was expected to be completed Friday.

Some stalls have begun to sell fresh meat and two or three gas stations have opened in Tacloban, which had a population of235,000 before the storm. Mr. Romualdez estimated that 30 percent to 40 percent of the population has since left.

Mr. Romualdez reacted sharply at a news conference Friday to a question portraying the rescue effort as chaotic. “There’s no disarray in the coordination,” he said. “There are problems in resources. We lack resources. There’s no problem in coordination.”

In Tanauan, there are already 1,200 confirmed dead and almost 2,000 missing out of a population of almost 50,000, Tita Cavite, the municipal treasurer, said as she directed relief operations at City Hall. Fewer than 100 missing people have been found in the past week, raising fears about the fate of the rest, she said.

A visibly poorer town than Palo or Tacloban even before the typhoon, Tanauan has been able to send emergency food rations to 22 of its 54 neighborhoods.

“Our priority need is to create shelter,” because so many are homeless, Mrs. Cavite said. “We want an engineering brigade to clear the roads.”

In Palo, there are 815 dead out of 62,727 people, while reliable figures for the missing are still being compiled but appear to much fewer than the dead. Ms. Petilla, the mayor, said that the death toll would rise as marshy areas where bodies were washed in by the storm surge gradually drain or dry out, and as destroyed homes are removed.

The town looks like a tornado hit it, with trees snapped off a dozen feet above the ground and the tops of buildings torn away.

Ms. Petilla said that quick local government action, like its deployment of police officers to warehouses and stores as well as to the border with Tacloban, helped stabilize the town. “We were isolated,” she said. “No people could come in or out of town, so we were on our own.”

But in the days that followed, Palo may have benefited from a personal connection at the national level: Ms. Petilla’s son, Jericho, is the secretary of energy for the Philippines. “Palo is well taken care of,” Ms. Petilla said. “I can get more aid, I have a direct line to the center.”

By contrast, Mr. Romualdez is a nephew of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, and the Marcos and Romualdez clans are clearly in the national political opposition.

In destitute Tanauan, conditions are somewhat grimmer than in Palo, although still more peaceful than in Tacloban. Mrs. Canales said the pigsty was to some extent washed out by the storm surge, but they still had to scrub it. She said that she had only received a single family food ration consisting of 4.4 pounds of rice and canned sardines.

She was nervous about her family’s drinking water from the nearby pump, but said they had no clean water. “We’re forced to drink it or we would die of thirst,” she said.

The family survived the storm itself by going to an evacuation center in a gym and holding the younger children up in the deep water to save their lives. “I was so scared and I don’t know how to swim,” said Madelyn Canales, 6, who has developed a low-grade fever. “Now, whenever I hear the sound of rain, I get scared.”

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/asia/tacloban-philippines-aid-effort-typhoon-haiyan.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print

- The Washington Post by John Pomfret

In 1971, as the Vietnam War reached a critical stage, Barbara Tuchman published a book on the United States and China, “Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45,” which became a bestseller and won the acclaimed historian her second Pulitzer Prize. A vocal opponent of the conflict in Indochina, Tuchman wrote the book in part to instruct Americans on the dangers of backing an Asian tinpot dictator. The United States had made this mistake once before, she contended — during World War II, when it allied itself with the corrupt, incompetent regime of Chiang Kai-shek. It should not do so again.

Tuchman’s book was the most influential piece of a slew of scholarship about the United States and China that emerged in the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Even today, the ideas undergirding this scholarship dominate the generally accepted storyline of America’s interactions with the Middle Kingdom. The outlines of that tale are these: The United States tried to help China fight Japan during World War II. But the government that America chose to support was so corrupt and inept that the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt — led on the ground by the heroic U.S. Army Gen. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell — could do little to get China to fight. Chiang and his commanders avoided battling the Japanese at every turn.

The only ones really interested in saving China were China’s communists, captained by Mao Zedong, who even flirted with the idea of maintaining an equal distance between Washington and Moscow. But America, blind to Mao’s patriotism and obsessed with its fight against the Reds, backed the wrong horse and pushed Mao away. The inevitable result? The emergence of an anti-American communist regime in China.

Over the past decade and more, however, historians in the United States, Britain, Russia, Taiwan and even China have dismantled Tuchman’s tale piece by piece. New books — from Jay Taylor’s magisterial biography of Chiang, to a solidly researched new work on Mao by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine, to research in Chinese and English by historians Michael Sheng, Chen Jian, Qi Xisheng, Yang Kuisong, Sheng Zhihua, Feng Youcai and the late Gao Hua and Ren Donglai — are telling a very different story. First and foremost, Chiang’s armies fought and bled for China, for four years alone against Japan and then for four more years with their American and British allies. One fact alone sums up the truth of this assertion: 90 percent of the casualties on the Chinese side were nationalist troops.

Second, far from being a strategic visionary, Stilwell committed a string of disastrous military mistakes that resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers — damaging Chiang’s ability to defend his country first against Japan and later against communist forces backed by the U.S.S.R. Third, it is extremely unclear how much Mao’s forces actually fought the Japanese. Mao’s armies conducted what he called a “sparrow war,” limited to small-scale guerrilla attacks. In fact, the communists lost more troops in attacking their erstwhile nationalist allies than in fighting the Japanese. Finally, there is no ground for believing — as Tuchman did so firmly — that the United States had a chance to pull Mao away from the U.S.S.R.’s embrace. Clearly, this new thesis goes, communism’s rise in China was anything but inevitable; Mao swept to power on the tank treads of the Japanese imperial army.

Rana Mitter’s new book, “Forgotten Ally,” falls neatly into this welcome new trend and deserves to be read by anyone interested in China, World War II and the future of China’s relations with the rest of the world. A professor of history at Oxford University, Mitter argues that China’s experience during World War II — from the suffering it received at the hands of the Japanese, to the dysfunctional relationship it developed with the United States, to the new demands put on the population by both the nationalist and communist authorities — is critically important to understanding many of China’s issues today. China’s anti-Japanese demonstrations and neuralgia over the Senkaku Islands — a group of uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea administered by Japan but claimed by China — along with its love-hate relationship with America are all rooted in the war, Mitter believes.

In “Forgotten Ally,” he concentrates on the lives of three men: Chiang, Mao and Wang Jingwei, the dashingly handsome Benedict Arnold of modern Chinese history, who, believing resistance to Japan was futile, broke with Chiang in 1938 to lead a quisling government set up by the Japanese. Adding Wang to the mix was a brilliant move because it allows Mitter to explore the three paths taken by the Chinese in the early 20th century as they confronted the challenges of Japanese and Western power. Chiang established strong links to the West, first Germany and then the United States. Mao relied on the Soviet Union, albeit with a fanatical independent streak. Wang believed that China should unite with other Asian nations to counter the marauding white man. Elements of each view remain prominent in the psyche of China today.

Mitter argues that China’s war story has never been told properly. The country has always been portrayed, he writes, as “a minor player, a bit-part actor.” Yet China was the war’s first victim, he notes, two years before Britain and France were attacked and four years before the United States. And while France caved immediately, China stuck it out until the end, valiantly pinning down more than half a million Japanese troops — men and materiel that would have otherwise threatened British India and possibly even the mainland United States. The toll on China alone qualifies as a major story, Mitter notes — 14 million dead, 80 million refugees and the pulverizing of the country’s embryonic modernization.

Mitter masterfully constructs these interlocking stories of battles, famines, massacres, diplomacy and intrigue. He sprinkles his narrative with foot soldiers, missionaries, journalists and teachers, showing how the war affected all levels of society throughout China. To detail the famine in Henan in 1942, he uses the powerful reporting of Time magazine’s Theodore H. White, who wrote of “dogs eating human bodies by the roads, peasants seeking human flesh under the cover of darkness.” For Japan’s murderous bombing of China’s wartime capital, Chong­qing, Mitter describes the teams of men who pulled bodies out of the rubble and buried them along the banks of the Yangtze River, often tossing a stray limb into its eastward flow.

As for Chiang’s tragic decision to dismantle the dikes along the Yellow River to stem the Japanese advance — inundating a territory twice the size of Maryland, killing more than 800,000 and displacing between 3 million and 5 million refugees — Mitter takes the reader down to the unit level. Chiang’s soldiers first tried to blow up the dikes, but they were too sturdy. The troops had to content themselves with shovels.

The best part of this excellent book is how Mitter dismantles the myth of Joseph Warren Stilwell, the American lieutenant general whom Roosevelt dispatched to China to help lead Chiang’s forces to victory. In “Forgotten Ally,” we see a Stilwell fundamentally at odds with the man lionized in Tuchman’s biography. In Mitter’s artful telling, Stilwell, who had no command experience before his tour in China, comes off as a petulant, small-minded, strategically limited, diplomatically tone-deaf leader obsessed with one thing only: Burma, which, Mitter notes, was “a target of dubious value.”

Twice, in 1942 and then two years later, Stilwell strong-armed Chiang into devoting China’s most professionally trained soldiers to quixotic attempts to beat back the Japanese in Burma, each time with disastrous results. In 1944, he compelled Chiang to do so when a Japanese assault — the largest ever conducted by the imperial army — was plowing down China’s east coast. “Let them stew,” came Stilwell’s reply when subordinates pleaded with him for a mere 1,000 tons of supplies to reinforce Chiang’s armies in China’s east. To Mitter, Stilwell’s troubled relationship with Chiang was just the most obvious symptom of a diseased liaison with the United States — a tortured history that he believes continues to bedevil ties between the two giants today.

Still, even in a work as groundbreaking as Mitter’s, the misconceptions of the past seem hard to shake. The weakest part of the book is his acceptance of the notion that Mao’s men fought the Japanese. Mitter details only one major communist campaign — the Battle of the Hundred Regiments, which was an absolute failure. Throughout the book, Mitter quotes Mao spouting off about military strategy and even celebrating nationalist defeats. But we never see the communists actually fighting, except for stray claims that they conducted troublesome but unspecified guerrilla campaigns.

Mitter even bolsters the counterargument — that Mao kept his powder dry, grew his army and waited to profit from Chiang’s victory. If the communists hit the Japanese so hard, why then did the imperial army not target their revolutionary capital in Yenan more often? From 1938 until late 1941, Mitter reports, Japanese bombers hit it a mere 17 times for a combined death toll of 214. How can this compare with the suffering visited on Chiang’s capital, Chongqing, where 5,000 died in just two days of air raids on May 3 and 4, 1939?

“In the end,” Mitter writes, “Chiang won the war but lost his country.” And Mao walked off with the prize.

John Pomfret , a longtime Washington Post correspondent, is the author of “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.”

FORGOTTEN ALLY China’s World War II, 1937-1945 By Rana Mitter Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 450 pp. $30

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Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/11/15/3499896e-4baa-11e3-ac54-aa84301ced81_print.html

Dead of a Failed Relief Effort, as Much as Typhoon’s Winds - NYTimes.com by Keith Bradsher

TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Richard Pulga lay on a hard steel gurney for five days with only a saline drip after being seriously injured in the typhoon that devastated his country.

On Friday, Mr. Pulga, 27, died — essentially of a broken leg.

Doctors said the father of two small children could have been saved. Instead, he became a victim of the incompetence and inaction that have plagued relief efforts here for the hundreds of thousands left injured, homeless, hungry and increasingly desperate since the typhoon hit.

By the time Dr. Rodel Flores, the senior surgeon on a team of visiting doctors, found Mr. Pulga Thursday, he had received no antibiotics and his leg was badly infected. The doctor ordered emergency surgery to remove the limb and try to save his life. But it was too late.

“In short,” Dr. Flores said, “it was preventable.”

Mr. Pulga was one of the first victims of Typhoon Haiyan to be brought to the top government hospital in the city. He was there because he had tried to protect his home, sending his wife and children to a safer place as some of the highest winds ever recorded slammed into his island. Those winds sent a coconut rocketing through the darkness into his leg, shattering it.

His death is one of the clearest signs yet of the human toll taken by a slow and troubled relief effort since Typhoon Haiyan swept ashore last Friday. Like much-needed water and food, medicine — including antibiotics — was held up for days as rescue teams struggled to operate amid the chaos of a city with too few military to provide security and too little government control.Aid workers huddled for days in the airport, fearful of venturing out amid reports of sporadic gunfire and after at least one convoy was raided by desperate people. Some of those workers have since said the inadequate government response has made this disaster in some ways more difficult than such historic catastrophes as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

By Friday, a full week into the disaster, aid had finally begun to flow more smoothly, at least into Tacloban, in part because of help from better-equipped foreign militaries trained to deal with natural disasters. Field hospitals had begun to be set up, but as with the Indian Ocean disaster, aid workers worried that infections from lacerations would claim many more lives.

For Mr. Pulga’s family, the loss is catastrophic. A farmer, Mr. Pulga was one of the few men in his extended family able to earn money. In his final days, as he spoke with a reporter from The New York Times, it was that thought consumed him.

On Friday, his widow, Marycris Pulga, wept next to his covered corpse in a hallway at St. Paul’s Hospital here, a private hospital the surgeons transferred him to in the last-ditch effort to save him.

After initially being too traumatized by the storm to visit, she had arrived for his final days.

“I want to bring him home,” she said, “but we have no home left.”

Mr. Pulga arrived at Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center shortly after the winds whipped up a wall of water that flattened much of the city.

The hospital had been partly swamped with seawater, and it lost its electrical supply and most of its medical supplies. In his time there, Mr. Pulga received virtually no care.

When his wound began leaking blood during an interview on Wednesday, two health workers in orange Philippines Department of Health vests removed the blood-caked, four-day-old bandage, showed the wound briefly to a government doctor, then secured the same bandage with gauze to stop the bleeding.

The hospital was running low on antiseptics, antibiotics and painkillers, and Mr. Pulga received none. It was unclear why the hospital’s triage team had not assigned a higher priority to him from the start.

Luminada Florendo, Mr. Pulga’s aunt, said on Wednesday that the doctor had suggested she take him home because she had no money for the extensive treatment he would need to recover; the doctor left before he could be interviewed.

When the visiting medical team from Davao in the southern Philippines showed up a day later, they concluded that Mr. Pulga was the sickest person in the hospital and ordered that he be among 15 patients transferred to St. Paul’s Hospital. Dr. Mauri Bravo III, one of the surgeons who performed Mr. Pulga’s amputation, said the wound had a distinctive fruity smell of infection. Mr. Pulga’s eyes were turning yellow and his abdomen was distended.

Virginia Ausa, a nurse at Eastern Visayas Regional, said that no one there had been aware that Mr. Pulga had been interviewed by an international news organization and that he was not singled out for special treatment by the Davao team. Dr. Flores said the same.

As the doctors prepared Mr. Pulga for surgery Thursday, it became clear to them that he was suffering from septicemia and that his body’s ability to produce red blood cells was dwindling.

The hospital has lost all its blood supply in the storm, and without equipment to test for blood compatibility, the doctors decided to amputate without a transfusion. Initially it appeared the gamble worked as Mr. Pulga’s white blood cell count began to decline slightly, possibly a sign of reduced infection, Dr. Flores said.

Mr. Pulga even regained full consciousness, but on Friday his body began to shut down. By late morning, he was dead.

Dr. Flores said he did not think Mr. Pulga’s family would be billed for the failed attempt to save his life because it should be covered by the Philippines Department of Health as part of its response to the typhoon.

When told the story of Mr. Pulga’s final days, Mayor Alfred Romualdez of Tacloban — who has been widely accused by residents here of mounting an insufficient relief response — was quick to say that his death was not the result of a bungled relief effort. He instead criticized Eastern Visayas Regional hospital, saying it has long been “a problem.”

Dr. Albert de Leon, the chief administrator of the hospital, said that he was aware of Mr. Pulga’s death, but that malnutrition and other unsuspected weaknesses in people like Mr. Pulga sometimes made them hard to save.

“There are some things beyond the limits of medical knowledge,” he said. “There is a supreme being who decides the fate of every one of us.”

When told of Mayor Romualdez’s criticisms, Dr. de Leon launched into such an angry outburst that another doctor rushed over to calm him. Dr. de Leon said that his hospital was an excellent teaching and research institution and that the mayor should do much more to organize typhoon relief.

“We are in his city and yet he is not doing that — even the garbage disposal, he doesn’t do anything,” Dr. de Leon raged in a hospital corridor that was growing dark at sunset and still had no electricity.

At St. Paul’s Hospital, a security guard told Mr. Pulga’s wife that her husband’s body would have to be removed. She tried frantically to reach relatives now that sporadic cellphone service in some places has returned, but she was unable to find one with a vehicle.

The security guard said the body would need to go into one of the mass graves for typhoon victims. Mrs. Pulga sobbed for more than an hour and refused to make a decision.

Dr. Flores and Dr. Bravo gave a lengthy interview in the hospital parking lot about Mr. Pulga’s last days. Then they went back upstairs to the gray steel bed where Mr. Pulga’s body had been lying.

It was empty. No one seemed to know where the corpse or the bereaved had gone.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/asia/dead-of-a-failed-relief-effort-as-much-as-typhoons-winds.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print

七 天 天 氣 預 報@香 港 天 文 台 於 2013 年 11 月 16 日 06 時 00 分 發 出 之 天 氣 報 告 by HKO

七 天 天 氣 預 報

天 氣 概 況 ：
乾 燥 的 東 北 季 候 風 將 持 續 影 響 華 南 。 預 料 一 股 微 弱 
的 季 候 風 補 充 會 在 明 日 抵 達 華 南 沿 岸 ， 而 現 時 影 響 
南 海 北 部 的 雲 帶 將 於 下 週 中 期 移 近 廣 東 沿 岸 。 

十 一 月 十 六 日 ( 星 期 六 )
風 　 ： 北 至 東 北 風 3 至 4 級 。 
天 氣 ： 天 晴 ， 日 間 天 氣 乾 燥 。 
氣 溫 ： 19 至 25 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 60 至 80 。

十 一 月 十 七 日 ( 星 期 日 )
風 　 ： 東 北 風 4 級 ， 間 中 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 ， 天 氣 乾 燥 。 
氣 溫 ： 18 至 24 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 50 至 70 。

十 一 月 十 八 日 ( 星 期 一 )
風 　 ： 東 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 部 分 時 間 有 陽 光 ， 天 氣 乾 燥 。 
氣 溫 ： 17 至 22 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 50 至 70 。

十 一 月 十 九 日 ( 星 期 二 )
風 　 ： 東 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 多 雲 。 
氣 溫 ： 18 至 22 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 60 至 80 。

十 一 月 二 十 日 ( 星 期 三 )
風 　 ： 東 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 多 雲 ， 有 幾 陣 雨 。 
氣 溫 ： 18 至 22 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 65 至 90 。

十 一 月 二 十 一 日 ( 星 期 四 )
風 　 ： 東 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 多 雲 ， 有 幾 陣 雨 。 
氣 溫 ： 19 至 22 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 75 至 95 。

十 一 月 二 十 二 日 ( 星 期 五 )
風 　 ： 東 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 短 暫 時 間 有 陽 光 。 
氣 溫 ： 19 至 23 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 65 至 85 。

11 月 15 日 下 午 二 時 北 角  錄 得 之 海 水 溫 度 為 25 度 。
11 月 15 日 上 午 七 時 天 文 台  錄 得 之 土 壤 溫 度 為 ：
0.5 米 25.3 度 ；
1.0 米 26.8 度 。

七 天 天 氣 預 報 插 圖
第 一 天 插 圖 編 號 50 - 陽 光 充 沛 
第 二 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 三 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 四 天 插 圖 編 號 60 - 多 雲 
第 五 天 插 圖 編 號 62 - 微 雨 
第 六 天 插 圖 編 號 62 - 微 雨 
第 七 天 插 圖 編 號 52 - 短 暫 陽 光 

天氣報告@香 港 天 文 台 於 2013 年 11 月 16 日 7 時 02 分 發 出 之 天 氣 報 告 by HKO

上 午 7 時 天 文 台 錄 得：
氣 溫 ： 19 度
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 79 
天 氣 插 圖： 編 號 50 - 陽 光 充 沛 

請注意：

火 災 危 險 警 告 為 黃 色 ， 表 示 火 災 危 險 性 頗 高 。 

  
本 港 其 他 地 區 的 氣 溫 ：

京 士 柏              19 度 ，
黃 竹 坑              20 度 ，
打 鼓 嶺              15 度 ，
流 浮 山              16 度 ，
大 埔                 17 度 ，
沙 田                 18 度 ，
屯 門                 18 度 ，
將 軍 澳              17 度 ，
西 貢                 18 度 ，
長 洲                 18 度 ，
赤 鱲 角              19 度 ，
青 衣                 19 度 ，
石 崗                 17 度 ，
荃 灣 可 觀           17 度 ，
荃 灣 城 門 谷        18 度 ，
香 港 公 園           19 度 ，
筲 箕 灣              19 度 ，
九 龍 城              18 度 ，
跑 馬 地              20 度 ，
黃 大 仙              19 度 ，
赤 柱                 20 度 ，
觀 塘                 19 度 ，
深 水 埗              19 度 。

Asia Rivalries Play Role in Aid to the Philippines - NYTimes.com by Keith Bradsher

CEBU, the Philippines — The American aircraft carrier George Washington has arrived, its 5,000 sailors and 80 aircraft already busy ferrying relief supplies to storm-battered survivors, and the United States has committed an initial $20 million in humanitarian assistance. Japan is dispatching a naval force of 1,000 troops, in what officials say is that country’s largest ever disaster-relief deployment. Also on the way: the Illustrious, a British aircraft carrier stocked with transport planes, medical experts and $32 million worth of aid.

The outpouring of foreign assistance for the hundreds of thousands left homeless and hungry by Typhoon Haiyan is shaping up to be a monumental show of international largess — and a not-so-subtle dose of one-upmanship directed at the region’s fastest-rising power, China.

China, which has its own newly commissioned aircraft carrier and ambitions of displacing the United States, the dominant naval power in the Pacific, has been notably penurious. Beijing increased its total contribution to the relief effort to $1.6 million on Thursday after its initial pledge of $100,000 was dismissed as stingy, even by some state-backed news media in the country.

The typhoon, described as the most devastating natural calamity to hit the Philippines in recent history, is emerging as a showcase for the soft-power contest in Asia. The geopolitical tensions have been stoked by China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and heightened by American efforts to reassert its influence in the region.

China has showered aid on countries it considers close friends, becoming the largest lender in Africa, rushing to help Pakistan after an earthquake in September and showing a more humanitarian side to its neighbors in Asia. But the typhoon struck hardest at the country China considers its biggest nemesis in the legal, diplomatic and sometimes military standoff over control of tiny but strategic islands in the South China Sea.

Over the past year, Chinese and Philippine vessels have faced off over a reef called Scarborough Shoal, and the Philippines has angered China by taking the dispute to an international arbitration tribunal. It did not help that the Philippines earlier this year said it would accept a gift of 10 coast guard vessels from Japan and voiced support for Tokyo’s plans to strengthen its military ties in the region, or that it is in discussions with the United States about hosting more American troops there.

The challenge for China comes shortly after the United States appeared to suffer a setback of its own in the contest for Pacific influence. President Obama had to cancel a high-profile visit to the region this fall to grapple with the fiscal shutdown in the United States, an event that seemed to many in Asia to showcase American dysfunction. So when the typhoon struck an old ally, the Pentagon did not waste much time offering a robust show of assistance.

“There is no other military in the world, there is no other navy in the world, that can do what we can do,” one American official said.

Michael Kulma, an expert on East Asia at the Asia Society in New York, said the Chinese reluctance to give more aid could hurt its chances to make a favorable impression in the country.

“There was an opportunity, right up front, for China to make a commitment,” he said. “At the end of the day it could be that the Chinese end up giving more. But on the front end of it, they didn’t stand out.”

At the same time, the relief efforts by the United States could give a lift to its already strong influence in the Philippines.

Despite its longtime alliance with the United States, the Philippines has been tentative over what Washington sees as the country’s role in its so-called Asian pivot, which includes efforts to increase the presence of American troops on Philippine soil.

But the American relief effort — which is receiving a lot of news media attention in the country — might wear away at some of that reluctance, a legacy of the years when the Philippines was an American colony.

Already, some in Tacloban said they would not mind American boots on the ground there temporarily, if it would help.

“If the United States will come in, if it will be allowed to come, or if the United Nations can come in, it will really help us secure the city,” said Jerry Yaokasin, a senior municipal official.

China’s rise has been shifting geopolitics in the region for years. With China’s investments in Southeast Asia mounting, even some countries worried about being overwhelmed by their imposing regional neighbor have found it hard to resist the pull of its economy — a dynamic that is very likely to continue.

But China’s increasing power has also in some cases worked against it, including in the Philippines, where the battle over maritime territory, including the Scarborough Shoal, has softened the wariness of Japan and the bitter memories of World War II, when Japan invaded.

In announcing their assistance on Thursday, Japanese officials spoke of it mostly as an effort to provide humanitarian assistance, though there was also an acknowledgment of growing security ties.

“The Philippines is geographically close to Japan and an important strategic partner,” said Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera.

The donated coast guard vessels are meant to help the Philippines better patrol its waters, including those contested with China. On Thursday, officials said Japan’s military would send C-130 transport aircraft and helicopters to ferry supplies to areas that have been cut off by the disaster. Japan will also send three navy ships, led by the Ise, Japan’s largest warship. Tokyo also offered $10 million in emergency aid.

As more countries came forward with impressive aid packages — and after days of ignoring criticism that it was offering too little aid — China on Thursday said it would increase its assistance. The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said that China had never intended the amount of assistance to remain fixed, and insisted that it had adjusted its contribution according to growing needs. “An overwhelming majority of Chinese people are sympathetic with the people of the Philippines,” he said.

Analysts, however, said one factor in determining the initial size of the assistance was the hostility among Chinese Internet commentators toward foreign aid, and to help for the Philippines in particular because of territorial disputes.

“There must have been a debate” inside the government about how much aid to give and how to supply it, said Qin Yaqing, professor of international studies at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. He continued, “Chinese culture takes an incremental way of doing things so as not to cause more trouble with the domestic” audience.

In an unusual turn, Global Times, a newspaper that often projects a nationalist editorial line, criticized the initial offer of aid as too small. In an editorial on Tuesday, it noted that the Philippines was a two-hour flight from China’s southern coast, but that countries much farther away responded quickly.

“A twisted relationship between the two countries caused by maritime disputes is not the reason to block joint efforts to combat natural disaster,” the editorial said.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/world/asia/asia-rivalries-play-role-in-aid-to-the-philippines.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print

我們走在大路上（上） by 嚴浩

明珠台每週一晚上九點半的一輯節目叫「祝君健康」，傳播最新健康研究資訊，內容可觀，數據科學，邏輯理性，風格生動，深入簡出讓人喜愛。


21世紀的醫學發展，無論你幻想中是何等一派風光，可能都會讓你大吃一驚：將來主導的不再是醫生，而是病患自己。這與我的信念是一樣的，不過《半畝田》已經與讀者們一起在實戰中走在這條大路上，而且獲得了一個又一個成功，《半畝田》答應過讀者會走在醫學資訊的前沿，這是又一個旁證。根據這個科普節目，醫生的功能將不再是提供給病患某一類針對性的藥品，而是讓病患通過自己對健康指數的追蹤，從而改善飲食和生活的習慣，最終達到治病於未發，毋須藥物和手術即可回覆健康的目的。


這全是《半畝田》與讀者們孜孜不倦已經在做的健康工程。


節目裏示範了很多目前看上去很科幻的健康追蹤小設備，過去，這些設備只可能在最先進的醫院裏以龐大的體積出現，就好像第一代的電腦一樣，而且通常病患需要等待很長的日子才得到結果，但未來，這些儀器完全有可能以方便被攜帶的尺寸出現在人們身邊，甚至會簡化成手機上的程式，根據我們身體的變化提供即時數據，讓我們更加瞭解食物和運動對身體的重要。


節目中有例子：一位有高血糖的醫生在皮下植入細如毫髮的檢測器，手機便可以顯示當下的血糖值，從前要不時戳破手指測試血糖，現在他即時瞭解血糖情況，於是不會冒風險吃巧克力蛋糕讓血糖徒然高升。


（嚴浩提醒讀者：有病要看醫生）

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18509877&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131116

紅過與活過 by 李碧華

近日《半澤直樹》大紅，堺雅人奪得日視天王地位。娛樂圈誰誰誰冒起，只因不知何時遇上好角色好時勢，踏上青雲路。連木村拓哉也成他敗將。


木村自96年起，神劇《悠長假期》、《戀愛世紀》、《美麗人生》等，收視逾32%，他登上日劇之神寶座。十七年後的今天，新劇《安堂機械人》是他走紅後最低谷，只得10.3%，顏面無存。


但接着堺雅人的新劇卻滑坡了，沒前作受歡迎，各界又評論他紅不久矣。


記得我看過明星醫生奧斯卡．倫敦的書。他談到「死亡」，正如一個摩托車騎士的葬禮上，一個紅髮女子哭得死去活來，一旦屍體與型車一齊被埋坑裏，她會輕快地跳上另一輛摩托車，更型的，抱緊另一男友的腰，揚長而去，快樂地生活在一起。


一位名醫不幸仙逝，流淚的有幾人？倘若你以為自己是無可取代的，看看死後一周的門診預約表就知道了。


起起跌跌很平常，半由人力半由天，紅過比沒紅過好；生生死死亦莫測，只能面對無法策劃，只能珍惜活着的每一天。


到頭來什麼都帶不走。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18509872&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131116

鵝頸橋底的紅人 by 林夕

從愚人之仁角度看，那批被罵為狗官奴才港賊的官啦議員啦，為忠於主子，連累老母日夜慘遭問候，忠孝兩難全，日子也不知是如何熬過的。若非心如鐵石無動於衷，也不知道是如何睡得香甜的。縱然都是自找，也不能不悲憫一下。這又是何故呢？何必呢？


若如俗語說，為名為利，這幫人早已衣食無憂，貪欲雖然可以無止盡，但比起他們的身家，那份皇糧俸祿實是小菜一碟，這零食的代價，卻是日夜在火上烤的日子，嚴重者會致癌的，算盡心機者何以就算不出這買賣划不來？至於名，別開玩笑了，連民建聯中人也早早發過離騷式的千古一嘆：幹這等事，有辱無榮。


什麼，吃得這苦中苦，方為人上人，有機會成為人大政協？恕我不懂世務，又要交際應酬又要低着頭躬着腰又要捱睏開會，就為了在名片上多個頭銜，以便轉個頭來對香港的鄉里炫耀，久不久扮代傳聖旨的公公，這算威風？值得嗎？對發展國內生意有幫助？這些錢賺來有命享，夾着尾巴做人，怕也沒心情用。何必呢？


權力是鴉片會上癮？像乞丐一樣討來的那點權力，倒不如向自家的狗狗發號施令來得痛快，那才叫權力。投個票都不能自主，不嫌丟臉就算了，權從何來。


都是上了岸的，何必再濕這個身，即使居然有心為民，也要找對地方。共綁在一條賊船上，想做無間道，暗中做好事，期盼從內部改變？來不及改變大廈的結構，怕已在迷宮中找不到自己了。如此為民服務，不如歸去，為家人服務好了，為安樂茶飯順心日子服務好了。


所謂人生功業，若不能造福於人，過好自己的日子，不出來當反面教材，就是社會之福。想當大人物，結果反成小人，鵝頸橋底的紅人，人生不是這樣給浪費的。


不惑之年仍甘心幹着令人困惑的蠢勾當，實乃千古疑團。權貴們，光陰可貴，去日苦多，來日無常，不如集體投一次棄權票吧。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18509880&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131116

捐款文化 by 陶傑

在喧嘩文化、打尖文化、搶奶粉文化等諸多文化之中，還有一種討厭的「捐錢文化」。


香港在殖民地時代，培養了捐款文化。殖民地行低稅制，一九五○年前後湧入一百萬大陸難民。一九六二年大饑荒，又湧入一百幾十萬。英國祖家戰後沒有錢，經濟學家凱恩斯多次飛美國，向白宮求借。殖民地紛紛獨立，收入大減。中國的內戰和飢餓，又是中國的內政，香港大量貧民，向工商加稅也不可以，沒有理由讓英國人替你埋單。


那麼錢從何來？殖民地政府很巧妙利用手上的皇室爵位，誘使香港的華商捐錢。怡和、匯豐、太古，英資不必捐，只有華資要盡點義務。大家看見大陸這個樣子，海角這個小島有得庇蔭，稅交得少，哪裏會推搪。


七十年代之後新興中產，又多了個電視台，群星耀保良、博愛照萬家，捐款文化在民間植根，向草根打主意，什麼為善最樂福有攸歸之類，但那時的社會，管治良好，利益分配比較合理，而且沒有「血濃於水」這組名詞，一切比較簡單。


捐款不要變成常態。捐款要希罕，像四年一度的閏月，才會有激情。不要天天都講大愛，不必個個星期要製造一點「感動」。愛和感動，像印鈔票，濫印就貶值。譬如有稀客從遠方來，你招待他，就會殺一隻雞，熱情盛宴。當他來了一次，時時摸上門，你會漸懶得招呼，發現他另有目的。這不叫涼薄，而是人性之正常。


到處有天災，但睜大眼睛看清楚，天災三分，七成人禍：貪婪、搶掠、剋扣，愛心受到汚染，善良的人被視為傻瓜。這時你要小心：捐款只會加深人禍，於根治禍惡無補，而且開始有人在嘮叨嚕囌，裝出一副笑臉。你要洞悉，不要上當。


今天不一樣。貧富懸殊，當權的人沒有公信力。捐款的呼聲越來越多，而且滲入了政治。不捐會是「涼薄」，就涼薄好了。交稅已經是捐獻，一切回歸常識。其他各等名目的打荷包，套一句老話：Give me a break，可以休矣。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18509869&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131116