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Digging a trench under the punishing midday sun, Thomas Lokinga stops only when he needs to wipe the sweat from his face. He is determined to find a nugget of gold amid the hard-baked ground in Nanakanak, in the eastern part of South Sudan, the world's newest nation.

He's one of about 60,000 gold diggers in South Sudan unearthing an estimated $660 million worth of gold each year, according to one international mining expert. These finds have sparked a gold rush in the nation's east — a region that long was a flash point in the country's nearly 50-year-old civil war.

With so many diggers, nuggets are getting harder to find.

Lokinga says he used to find a gram of gold a day and now it takes 10 days of nonstop work. He says the dreams of wealth have attracted hordes of people including women and children, scratching out an existence after years of poor agricultural harvests.

"All over here people are doing this work," Lokinga says. "Children and women and even elderly people inside the bushes, all just leaving their homes and looking for something to eat."

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Japan's military held large-scale exercises at the foot of Mount Fuji on Tuesday as Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera cited "deepening uncertainties" in the region as justification for expanding the role of Japan's armed forces at home and abroad.

Onodera said Japan's military would increasingly be called upon to participate in international peacekeeping operations and bilateral activities with allies.

The statement follows the recent unveiling of the largest Japanese warship to be built since World War II; plans to create a marine corps, a national security council, and possibly develop the capability to launch pre-emptive strikes against enemy ballistic missile sites.

All of these are in line with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's clearly stated policy goal of "escaping the postwar regime."

A Postwar Japan

What Abe calls the postwar regime was in fact the Allied nations' consensus on how to construct a new security arrangement for East Asia that would prevent a repeat of World War II. It was outlined in the Allies' 1945 Potsdam Declaration, and then written into Japan's Constitution by U.S. military officers under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

They took a two-pronged approach. First, Japan was disarmed, and its constitution forbids it from either waging war or maintaining a standing army. Second, the constitution was revised to emphasize popular sovereignty, democracy and human rights in order to prevent the re-emergence of militarism.

Japan has interpreted its constitution to allow the creation of "self-defense forces" and to allow their deployment in peacekeeping operations overseas.

Heard on NPR

Hundreds of samples taken from riders in this summer's Tour de France found no signs of doping, officials say. The epic race, which was put on for the hundredth time in 2013, has been at the center of recent doping scandals.

Anti-doping officials say they took 202 blood and urine samples before the race began, and an additional 419 during competition. Nearly 200 of those samples were taken with the goal of creating a "biological passport" for riders, to establish a baseline of their body chemistry.

Of the blood samples taken during the race, Velo Nation reports, 18 tests "were for human growth hormone analysis, two were for blood transfusions and 22 were ESA (erythropoiesis-stimulating agent) tests."

The announcement was made Tuesday by the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation, an arm of cycling's governing body.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports for our Newscast unit:

"Officials from the International Cycling Union say they changed strategy this year by being unpredictable in their testing.

"The news comes as a welcome boost to a sport that has suffered damage to its reputation with Lance Armstrong's admission that he cheated throughout his seven Tour victories.

"And recent testing of samples from the 1998 and 1999 tours showed a number of riders testing positive for the banned blood-booster EPO.

"The winner of this year's tour, Britain's Chris Froome, was subjected to intense press scrutiny and speculation regarding the validity of his at-times phenomenal performances.

"Anti-doping authorities say Froome was tested alot. They also say that just because no doping was discovered, doesn't mean the race was necessarily drug free."

(We most recently updated this post at 9:10 a.m. ET.)

"Two Syrian pro-opposition groups are claiming that dozens of people were killed Wednesday in a poisonous gas attack near Damascus," NPR's Jean Cochran reported earlier this morning on our Newscast. The groups are blaming the attack on government forces, she said.

"The reports have not been independently confirmed," Jean added, and President Bashar Assad's regime says the claims are "baseless."

Reuters began Wednesday leading its report this way: "Syrian activists accused President Bashar al-Assad's forces of launching a nerve gas attack that killed at least 213 people on Wednesday, in what would, if confirmed, be by far the worst reported use of poison gas in the two-year-old civil war." Shortly after 9 a.m. ET, the wire service said activists were claiming that nearly 500 people had died. "If confirmed," Reuters added, it would be "by far the worst reported use of chemical arms in the two-year-old civil war."

This news comes as a U.N. team is in Syria to investigate earlier alleged uses of chemical weapons.

The BBC's Naomi Grimley adds that opposition groups have released "distressing pictures [that] show children lying limp in the arms of adults" and adults being hosed down, allegedly to wash away chemicals. But, she says, those images haven't been independently verified.

According to CNN, "the explosions took place in eastern and western Ghouta, rebel strongholds that the regime has for more than a year been desperately trying to take back. They don't want rebels pushing into the capital."

British Foreign Secretary William Hague says in a statement released by his office that he is "deeply concerned by reports that hundreds of people, including children, have been killed in airstrikes and a chemical weapons attack on rebel-held areas near Damascus."

Hague also says that:

"These reports are uncorroborated and we are urgently seeking more information. But it is clear that if they are verified, it would mark a shocking escalation in the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Those who order the use of chemical weapons, and those who use them, should be in no doubt that we will work in every way we can to hold them to account. I call on the Syrian Government to allow immediate access to the area for the UN team currently investigating previous allegations of chemical weapons use. The U.K. will be raising this incident at the UN Security Council."