Taipei – Parts of Taiwan were brought to a standstill Wednesday as the strongest typhoon of the year skirted past the island’s southern tip, knocking out power for more than 180,000 households.

Although super typhoon Meranti did not make landfall, the storm brought record strong winds and torrential rains to eastern and southern Taiwan.

At 0215 GMT, Meranti was 30 kilometres southwest of southernmost Hengchun township, packing gusts of up to 263 kilometres (163 miles an hour).

Hengchun’s observation station recorded the strongest winds in its 120 year history earlier Wednesday, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.

“Meranti will have its most significant impact on Taiwan today,” said forecaster Hsieh Pei-yun.

Strongest typhoon of the year Meranti

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AFP

Television footage showed flooded streets and violent winds in southern Kenting, a tourist destination known for its white-sand beaches.

School and work were cancelled for most eastern and southern counties while trains running along the east coast have been halted – affecting travel for the Mid-Autumn Festival long weekend which starts Thursday.

The storm is expected to dump as much as 800 millimetres (31.5 inches) of rain in mountainous areas, potentially triggering landslides.

Close to 1,500 people have been evacuated from at-risk areas, with about half in temporary shelters, according to the Central Emergency Operation Center.

Meranti was moving northwest into the Taiwan Strait at 18 kilometres an hour.

Another storm brewing east of the Philippines may also affect Taiwan later this week.

The weather bureau’s Hsieh said tropical storm Malakas was expected to be closest to the island on Friday and Saturday, but was unlikely to make landfall.

The number of centenarians in Japan has hit another annual high, according to statistics released by the welfare ministry on Tuesday ahead of Respect-for-the-Aged Day next Monday.

According to the Japanese health ministry, the number of centenarians as of Sept. 15 had increased by 4,124 from last year to a record 65,692, extending the rise in the age group’s population to 46 consecutive years.

As of Sept. 1, the number of elderly set to reach the age of 100 by the end of this fiscal year increased by 1,368 from last year to 31,747 – 4,469 men and 27,278 women – marking another consecutive increase of 46 years.

According to the ministry, the number of female centenarians increased by 3,797 to 57,525, which comprises 87.6 per cent of citizens aged 100 or older – an increase of 0.3 percentage points from last year and another record high. The number of male centenarians increased by 327 to 8,167.

By prefecture, the population of centenarians per 100,000 residents was highest at 96.25 in Shimane, which has defended its top rank for four years in a row. Kochi was No. 2 at 87.93, followed by Tottori at 84.84. All prefectures from the top of the list to No. 9 were in western Japan.

Saitama ranked lowest of the 47 prefectures at 30.97, while Aichi was penultimate at 35.05 and Chiba ranked No. 45 at 38.27. These figures show that the concentration of centenarians residing in urban areas is low.

In general terms, the figures indicate that the density of the centenarian population is higher in areas where the younger generation has moved out and the overall population is in decline.

The density tends to be relatively lower in populated urban areas that constantly draw members of the younger generation. A ministry official says that while migration of the younger generation and other factors are unaccounted for, “the results show that [the density of the centenarian population] is higher in western Japan and lower in eastern Japan.”

In 1963, when the government started to publicly recognise citizens aged 100 or older, the number of centenarians stood at 153. It surpassed the 10,000 mark in 1998, and topped 50,000 in 2012.

The advance of medical technology and increased health-awareness among the elderly are said to be the main factors contributing to the rise in the number of centenarians.

The oldest woman in the country is 116-year-old Nabi Tajima of Kikai, Kagoshima Prefecture, and the oldest man is 112-year-old Masamitsu Yoshida of Ota Ward in Tokyo.

The Silver Cup awarded to centenarians had been made from pure silver. However, starting this fiscal year, the ministry has decided to award silver-plated cups instead to cut down on expenses. As a result, the cost per cup has fallen from ¥7,600 (S$100) to ¥3,800.

JAKARTA – Indonesia will resume land reclamation that will help prevent Jakarta from sinking below sea level, a cabinet minister said, five months after work was suspended due to regulatory and environmental concerns.

Greater Jakarta, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, sits on a swampy plain and is sinking at a faster rate than any other city in the world.

Jakarta has focused its attention on bolstering its defences with a 15-mile sea wall and refurbishing the crumbling flood canal system.

The government decided late on Tuesday to allow work to continue on a key phase of the “Giant Sea Wall”, which aims to shore up northern Jakarta while revamping the capital’s image into a Singapore-like waterfront city.

“If this Giant Sea Wall is not done, that will create a big impact on Jakarta with regards to salt water penetration,”Coordinating Maritime Minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters on Tuesday.

Living with floods in Jakarta

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Reuters

Included in the master plan is the building of 17 artificial islands off Jakarta’s northern coast, where property developers plan to build shopping malls and attractions similar to Singapore’s Sentosa Island.

But work on that project was suspended in April following disagreements between the government and the Jakarta governor over who had authority to issue permits. Some fishermen have also protested against reclamation, saying it would reduce their catch.

In response, the government plans to offer them fishing permits in waters near the Natuna Islands.

The suspension in April also threatened to delay Indonesian property developer PT Agung Podomoro Land’s multi-billion-dollar Pluit City, comprising apartments, offices and shopping malls on parts of artificial land it was constructing.

“We are still waiting for government direction,” said Justini Omas, the company’s corporate secretary. “Previously, we had planned that construction of the island would be done in 2018.”

Earlier this month, former Agung Podomoro executive Ariesman Widjaja was jailed for three years for bribing a member of the Jakarta provincial assembly to influence the regulation for the land reclamation, media said.

SEOUL – North Korea will have enough material for about 20 nuclear bombs by the end of this year, with ramped-up uranium enrichment facilities and an existing stockpile of plutonium, according to new assessments by weapons experts.

The North has evaded a decade of UN sanctions to develop the uranium enrichment process, enabling it to run an effectively self-sufficient nuclear programme that is capable of producing around six nuclear bombs a year, they said.

The true nuclear capability of the isolated and secretive state is impossible to verify. But after Pyongyang conducted its fifth and most powerful nuclear test last week and, according to South Korea, was preparing for another, it appears to have no shortage of material to test with.

North Korea has an abundance of uranium reserves and has been working covertly for well over a decade on a project to enrich the material to weapons-grade level, the experts say.

That project, believed to have been expanded significantly, is likely the source of up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of highly enriched uranium a year, said Siegfried Hecker, a leading expert on the North’s nuclear programme.

That quantity is enough for roughly six nuclear bombs, Hecker, who toured the North’s main Yongbyon nuclear facility in 2010, wrote in a report on the 38 North website of Johns Hopkins University in Washington published on Monday.

Added to an estimated 32- to 54 kilogram plutonium stockpile, the North will have sufficient fissile material for about 20 bombs by the end of 2016, Hecker said.

North Korea said its latest test proved it was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile, but its claims to be able to miniaturise a nuclear device have never been independently verified.

Assessments of the North’s plutonium stockpile are generally consistent and believed to be accurate because experts and governments can estimate plutonium production levels from telltale signs of reactor operation in satellite imagery.

South Korean Defence Minister Han Min-koo this year estimated the North’s plutonium stockpile at about 40 kilogrammes.

But Hecker, a former director of the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons have been designed, has called North Korea’s uranium enrichment programme “their new nuclear wildcard,” because Western experts do not know how advanced it is.

PAKISTAN CONNECTION

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies said North Korea had an unconstrained source of fissile material, both plutonium from the Yongbyon reactor and highly-enriched uranium from at least one and probably two sites.

“The primary constraint on its programme is gone,” Lewis said. Weapons-grade plutonium has to be extracted from spent fuel taken out of reactors and then reprocessed, and therefore would be limited in quantity. A uranium enrichment programme greatly boosts production of material for weapons.

The known history of the uranium enrichment project dates to 2003, when the North was confronted by the United States with evidence of a clandestine programme to build a facility to enrich uranium with the help of Pakistan.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in his memoirs that A.Q. Khan, the father of that country’s nuclear programme, transferred two dozen centrifuges to the North and some technical expertise around 1999.

“It was also clear that the suspected Pakistani connection had taken place, as the centrifuge design resembled Pakistan’s P-2 centrifuge,” Hecker said in a report in May.

Hecker reported being shown around a two-story building in the Yongbyon complex in November 2010 that a North Korean engineer said contained 2,000 centrifuges and a control room Hecker called “astonishingly modern.”

By 2009, the North had likely acquired the technology to be able to expand the uranium project indigenously, Joshua Pollack, editor of the US-based Nonproliferation Review, has said.

North Korea has not explicitly admitted to operating the centrifuges to produce weapons-enriched uranium, instead claiming they were intended to generate fuel for a light water reactor it was going to build.

Despite sanctions, by now North Korea is probably largely self-sufficient in operating its nuclear programme, although it may still struggle to produce some material and items, Lewis said. “While we saw this work in Iran, over time countries can adjust to sanctions,” he said