Foreign

Several dead, many missing after monsoon rains in Pakistan

Published

6 years ago

August 9, 2020

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At least 13 people are dead after heavy monsoon rains and flooding wreaked havoc in several parts of Pakistan, officials said on Sunday.

Persistent rain flooded dozens of villages in the southern province of Sindh and the south-western province of Balochsitan during the last three days.At least seven people were killed in Karachi, the country’s most populous city.Additionally, six people lost their lives in Balochistan in the last 24 hours, officials said.

Hundreds of people were displaced by flooding in both the provinces.

Rescue workers were busy shifting people to safer places.

The military said on Sunday that it had rescued more than 100 people from Dadu district in Sindh.

“More than a dozen people are still missing in Balochistan,’’ Younus Aziz Mengal, a spokesperson for the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, said.

Mengal said that the flooding had damaged bridges and highways, cutting off Gawadar, a port city on the Arabian Sea.

Pakistan’s Met office predicted 20 per cent more rain and urban flooding this monsoon season and asked authorities to take precautionary measures.

Flash floods, land erosion, cloudbursts, droughts and smog resulting in low air quality have been on the rise in Pakistan in recent years.

Climate experts say it is the impact of global warming, but also due to the country’s proximity to highly industrialised China and India.

Foreign

Ethiopian PM pledges more air strikes in Tigray

Published

6 years ago

November 7, 2020

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Ethiopian jets bombed the Tigray region and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pledged more air strikes in the escalating conflict amid reports that Tigrayan forces had seized control of federal military sites and weapons.

Civilians in the northern region should avoid “collateral damage” by not gathering outside as strikes would continue, Abiy said defying international pleas for both sides to show restraint.

The developments illustrate how quickly the days-old conflict is escalating, raising the threat of a civil war that experts and diplomats warn would destabilise the country of 110 million people and hurt the broader Horn of Africa.

A simmering row between Abiy’s federal government and his former Tigrayan allies exploded on Wednesday after Abiy ordered a military campaign. Abiy, who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), of attacking a federal military base and trying to steal equipment. He said “the last red line” had been crossed.

In a step to further deny legitimacy to Tigray’s regional government elected in September against the federal government’s advise, Ethiopia’s federal parliament on Saturday approved the formation of an interim government for the region.

“A decision has been passed to remove the current executive body and council of (Tigray) region,” Ethiopia’s House of Federation said in a statement on its Facebook page.

The government cut phone and internet communications to the region, according to the digital rights group Access Now, making it impossible to verify official accounts. The government accused the TPLF of shutting down communications.

Diplomats, regional security officers and aid workers said that fighting is spreading in the northwestern part of the country, along Tigray’s border with the Amhara region, which is backing the federal government, and near the border with Sudan and Eritrea.

Abiy said on Friday that government troops had seized control of the town of Dansha, near the border area, from the TPLF.

Risks

After toppling a Marxist dictator in 1991, the TPLF led the country’s multi-ethnic ruling coalition until Abiy took office in 2018. For those decades, Tigrayans dominated the military.

Abiy, who is from the Oromo ethnic group, Ethiopia’s largest, has sacked many senior generals as part of a crackdown on past rights abuses and corruption which Tigrayans complain unfairly targets them.

Tigrayan forces are battle-hardened and possess significant stocks of military hardware, experts say. Their regional troops and associated militias number up to 250,000 men, according to the International Crisis Group think tank.

One of the biggest risks is that the Ethiopian army will splinter along ethnic lines, with Tigrayans defecting to the regional force. There are indications that is already happening, reports said.

Tigrayan forces were in control of the federal military’s Northern Command headquarters in the city of Mekelle, according to a United Nations internal security report.

The Northern Command is one of Ethiopia’s four military commands and controls the border with Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea.

Tigrayan forces have seized “heavy weapons” from several of the command’s depots, the report read.

It said that the command is the most heavily armed and contains “most of the military’s heavy weapons including the majority of the country’s mechanised and armoured units, artillery and air assets.”

The government is mobilising troops from around the country and sending them to Tigray, risking a security vacuum in other parts of the country where ethnic violence is raging.

More than 50 people were killed by gunmen from a rival ethnic group in western Ethiopia recently, reports said.

Troop redeployments from near the border with Somalia will make that area “more vulnerable to possible incursions by Al Shabaab,” the al Qaeda-linked insurgency trying to overthrow the government in Somalia, according to the U.N. internal security report.

Foreign

Trump nominee elected to head Latin American development bank

Published

6 years ago

September 13, 2020

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee was, on Saturday, elected president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the region’s main economic development lender, making him the first U.S. citizen to lead the institution in its 61-year history.

Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s senior Latin America adviser, told the bank’s governors before voting began that he would be “a passionate advocate” for the bank, its staff and the region.

He will take office on Oct. 1 and has pledged to serve only one five-year term.

Trump’s decision to nominate a U.S. candidate to head the bank broke with a tradition for the president to come from the region and sparked criticism from some Latin American countries, development groups and the European Union.

But Claver-Carone won the backing of a majority of countries in the region.

Thirty of the Bank’s 48 governors voted for Claver-Carone, including 23 from the region, amounting to 66.8 per cent of the vote, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council said.

A source familiar with the vote said 16 countries abstained.

Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica – concerned about the longer-term precedent of the move – initially sought to delay the vote but failed to win sufficient backing to do so.

The IDB vote turned into a geopolitical battle between the Trump administration, which is keen to gain leverage in resource-rich Latin America and counter the rise of China, and some in the region who wanted to retain control of the top job.

Some countries also were concerned about Claver-Carone, a Trump loyalist, if Trump loses the Nov. 3 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, whose campaign also criticised the nomination of the Cuba hawk.

Claver-Carone said he would work with member countries to “strengthen the bank, respond to the needs of the region and create opportunities for shared prosperity and economic growth’’.

The IDB has been led by Latin Americans, with an American in the No. 2 job, since the institution’s inception in 1959.

Critics say electing Claver-Carone to head the bank and his pledge to appoint a Latin American as executive vice president sets a precedent that could harm Washington in the end by loosening its hold on the bank’s No. 2 post.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the vote raised questions about Latin Americans “charting their own future” and signalled it could have consequences for U.S. funding of the institution.

“I have always believed that to be successful, countries need to take responsibility for their own development, and the U.S. should play a supportive role.

“Those roles have now been reversed and we need to review whether this is the best use of resources to assist the people of those countries,’’ Leahy said in a statement to Reuters.

Source: Reuters

Foreign

Oil prices rise on falling U.S. dollar

Published

6 years ago

September 1, 2020

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Oil prices recover, erasing overnight losses, as investors move into risk assets and away from safe-haven U.S. dollar, which tumbled to multi-year lows.

Crude oil

Oil prices recovered on Tuesday, erasing overnight losses, as investors moved into risk assets and away from the safe-haven U.S. dollar, which tumbled to multi-year lows.

Brent crude futures climbed 49 cents or 1.1 per cent to $45.77 a barrel at 0406 GMT.

The U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose 37 cents or 0.9 per cent to $42.98 a barrel.

Both benchmark contracts fell around one per cent on Monday on worries about oil oversupply, with global demand stuck below pre-COVID levels.

The U.S. dollar was last down 0.04 per cent at 92.146 against a basket of currencies, after hitting its lowest since May 2018 in the wake of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy shift on inflation announced last week.

“It (the policy shift) really cements the fact that you’re looking at negative real rates for the U.S. which will not be great for the U.S. dollar.

“That’s good for commodities,” said Louis Crous, Chief Investment Officer at BetaShares, an Australian exchange-traded funds provider.

The weakening U.S. dollar makes oil and other commodities priced in dollars more attractive to global buyers.

Overall, the market remains focused on the stalled recovery in fuel demand as countries continue to battle the coronavirus pandemic with rolling COVID-19 lockdowns, analysts said.

“This has created plenty of uncertainty about whether demand for transportation fuels will ever return to normal,” ANZ Research said in a note.

Ahead of the release of U.S. stockpile data from the American Petroleum Institute industry group, a Reuters’ poll found analysts expect U.S. crude stocks fell by about two million barrels in the week to Aug. 28.

Gasoline inventories are seen falling by 3.6 million barrels, while distillate inventories, which include diesel and heating oil, are expected to drop by 1.5 million barrels, six analysts polled by Reuters estimated. (Reuters/Newsjaunts)