Japan moves to step up reconstruction funding in wake of Typhoon Hagibis

The Cabinet decided Tuesday to increase government funding and assistance for reconstruction in Nagano and other prefectures ravaged by deadly Typhoon Hagibis, designating the disaster earlier in the month as “severe.”

The decision is designed to reduce the financial burden being shouldered by local governments and boost central government spending by around 10 percent to 20 percent on projects to rebuild infrastructure such as roads, rivers, agricultural facilities and farmland…

The Art of the Wobble: A Year of Lessons from the Oldest of the Old

My interview subjects are remarkable not only for surviving their childhood flight from war and assimilation; they are also among the world’s oldest of the old, part of the demographic that reporter John Leland thinks of as “old age pioneers.” Leland, a New York Times reporter on old age, says that elderly people who are living into their late 80s and 90s are in “uncharted territory.” It is a function of our present moment — with its medical technologies and innovations, to say nothing of public health interventions dating back a century — that significant numbers of people are living this long. According to Dr. Thomas Perls, a physician and centenarian researcher at Harvard Medical School, people who are 100-years-old and older are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States…