World Archives - Page 1036 of 1962

Tens of millions battle Pakistan floods as death toll rises

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

Tens of millions of people across swathes of Pakistan were Monday battling the worst monsoon floods in a decade, with countless homes washed away, vital farmland destroyed, and the country’s main river threatening to burst its banks.

Officials say 1,061 people have died since June when the seasonal rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off after flood-swollen rivers washed away roads and bridges.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it can also bring destruction.

This year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — said the National Disaster Management Authority.

“What we see now is an ocean of water submerging entire districts,” Climate Minister Sherry Rehman told AFP Monday.

“This is very far from a normal monsoon — it is climate dystopia at our doorstep.”

This year’s floods are comparable to those of 2010 — the worst on record — when more than 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, on a tour of the north to oversee relief operations, said the monsoon rains were “unprecedented in the last 30 years”.

Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonial-era barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.

Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as torrents of water course downstream from tributaries in the north.

“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP.

“All that is finished.”

– Landscape of water –

Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.

“There are no landing strips or approaches available… our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer told AFP.

The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where soaring mountains and deep valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.

Many rivers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — which boasts some of Pakistan’s best tourist spots — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help, and on Sunday the first aid flights began arriving — from Turkey and the UAE.

It could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

In Washington later Monday, the International Monetary Fund executive board was scheduled to meet to decide whether to green-light the resumption of a $6 billion loan programme essential for the country to service its foreign debt, but it is already clear the country will need more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.

Prices of basic goods — particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas — are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

The met office said the country as a whole had received twice the usual monsoon rainfall, but Balochistan and Sindh had more than four times the average of the last three decades.

Padidan, a small town in Sindh, was drenched by more than 1.2 metres (47 inches) of rain since June, making it the wettest place in the country.

– More arriving daily –

Across Sindh, thousands of displaced people are camped alongside elevated highways and railway tracks — often the only dry spots as far as the eye can see.

More are arriving daily at Sukkur’s city ring road, belongings piled on boats and tractor trollies, looking for shelter until the floodwaters recede.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Aziz Soomro told AFP the main headway of water was expected to arrive around September 5, but was confident the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.

The barrage diverts water from the Indus into 10,000 km of canals that make up one of the world’s biggest irrigation schemes, but the farms it supplies are now mostly under water.

The only bright spark was the latest weather report.

“Dry weather is forecasted for this week and there is no chance of significant rains,” said met office spokesman Zaheer Ahmed Babar.

NASA shoots for the Moon, on its way to Mars

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

NASA’s most powerful rocket yet is set to blast off Monday on the maiden voyage of a mission to take humans back to the Moon, and eventually to Mars.

Fifty years after the last time astronauts set foot on the moon in 1972 as part of the Apollo 17 mission, the space program called Artemis is to get under way with the blast off of the uncrewed 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at 8:33 am (1233 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Tens of thousands of people — including US Vice President Kamala Harris — are expected to gather along the beach to watch the launch, which has been decades in the making.

Hotels around Cape Canaveral are booked solid with between 100,000 and 200,000 spectators expected to attend the launch.

The goal of the flight, dubbed Artemis 1, is to test the SLS and the Orion crew capsule that sits atop the rocket.

The capsule will orbit the Moon to see if the vessel is safe for people in the near future. At some point, Artemis will see a woman and a person of color walk on the Moon for the first time.

“This mission goes with a lot of hopes and dreams of a lot of people. And we now are the Artemis generation,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Saturday.

The massive orange-and-white rocket has been sitting on the space center’s Launch Complex 39B for more than a week.

Its fuel tanks began to be filled overnight Sunday to Monday, with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems tweeting that they have been given a “go” for tanking.

But there was a brief delay of about an hour because of a high risk of lightning when the fueling operations were set to begin.

The process will continue for several hours, until the rocket is filled with more than three million liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

NASA said there is an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather for a liftoff on time at the beginning of a launch window lasting two hours.

For the first time a woman — Charlie Blackwell-Thompson — will give the final green light for liftoff.

Women now account for 30 percent of the staff in the control room; there was just one for the Apollo 11 mission, the first time astronauts landed on the moon in 1969.

Cameras will capture every moment of the 42-day trip, including a picture of the spacecraft with the Moon and Earth in the background.

The Orion capsule will orbit around the Moon, coming within 60 miles (100 kilometers) at its closest approach and then firing its engines to get to a distance 40,000 miles beyond, a record for a spacecraft rated to carry humans.

– Extreme temperatures –

Besides the weather, any kind of technical snafu could delay the liftoff at the last minute, NASA officials have said, stressing that this is a test flight.

If the rocket is unable to take off on Monday, September 2 and 5 have been penciled in as alternative flight dates.

One of the primary objectives of the mission is to test the capsule’s heat shield, which at 16 feet in diameter is the largest ever built.

On its return to the Earth’s atmosphere, the heat shield will have to withstand a speed of 25,000 miles per hour and a temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). That is half as hot as the Sun.

Dummies fitted with sensors will take the place of real crew members, recording acceleration, vibration and radiation levels.

The craft will deploy small satellites to study the lunar surface.

A complete failure would be devastating for a program that is costing $4.1 billion per launch and is already running years behind schedule.

– Life on the Moon –

Monday’s launch is “not a near-term sprint, but a long-term marathon to bring the solar system and beyond into our sphere,” said Bhavya Lal, NASA associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy.

The next mission, Artemis 2, will take astronauts into orbit around the Moon without landing on its surface. The crew of Artemis 3 is to land on the Moon in 2025 at the earliest.

And since humans have already visited the Moon, Artemis has its sights set on another lofty goal — an eventual crewed mission to Mars.

The Artemis program is to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon with an orbiting space station known as Gateway and a base on the surface.

Gateway would serve as a staging and refueling station for a voyage to Mars that would take a minimum of several months.

Honda, LG to invest $4.4 bn in US battery plant

29 Aug 2022 30 Aug 2022

Japanese auto giant Honda and South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution announced a joint venture Monday to invest $4.4 billion in a new US electric car battery plant.

The move comes after California last week ruled that all new cars sold in America’s most populous state must be zero-emission from 2035, with other US states expected to follow suit.

In a joint statement, the firms said they expected construction of the plant to begin next year, aiming for “mass production of advanced lithium-ion battery cells by the end of 2025”.

The tie-up was decided “based on the shared belief that expanding local electric vehicle production and ensuring the timely supply of batteries would put them in the best position to target the rapidly-growing North American EV market”, the companies added.

Last month, Japanese electronics giant and Tesla supplier Panasonic announced its own $4 billion investment to build a new battery factory in the United States for electric vehicles.

Panasonic CEO Kazuo Tadanobu said the new plant, the company’s second electric battery operation in the United States, was “critical to help meet demand”.

Earlier this year, Honda said it planned to invest nearly $40 billion in electric vehicle technology over the next decade as it works towards switching all sales away from traditional fuel cars.

It wants to launch 30 EV models by 2030, with an annual production volume of more than two million units, and aim to have electric and fuel cell vehicles account for 100 percent of all sales by 2040.

The success of Elon Musk’s Tesla, built solely on electric vehicles, and growing government pressure to move away from cars with combustion engines, are pushing traditional automakers to speed up the transition to electric.

Washington state’s governor has backed a move similar to California, while the European Union has taken steps to ban the sale of gas- or diesel-fuelled cars — and even hybrids — by 2035.

China wants at least half of all new cars to be electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen-powered by that time.

Asian, European markets tumble after Powell's rates warning

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

Markets sank Monday and the dollar rallied after Fed boss Jerome Powell warned of more interest rate hikes to fight inflation and poured cold water on the prospects of a cut in the new year.

The hefty selling tracked a painful day on Wall Street, where all three main indexes tanked between three and four percent as investors contemplated an extended period of monetary tightening.

In a much-anticipated speech to global finance chiefs Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Powell said his priority was bringing inflation down from four-decade highs, even at the expense of economic growth, adding that failure to act now would cause more pain later.

“Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance,” he told the symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The comments dealt a blow to markets, which had in recent weeks enjoyed a bounce from June lows as weak economic data and a slowdown in price rises fanned hopes the Fed would temper its interest rate hike drive.

Analysts said the chances of a third successive 75 basis-point increase next month had risen, with US Treasury yields — a gauge of future interest rates — surging.

“The game of assessing the Fed outlook has shifted from guessing how high the peak rate might be to also understanding how long it might stay there for,” Yanxi Tan, of Malayan Banking, said.

In Asian trade, investors ran for the hills as they contemplated an era of high borrowing costs with Charles Schwab & Co’s Liz Ann Sonders saying that once the Fed gets to “whatever the final hike is, they’re going to stay there for a while”.

“The market had trouble digesting that,” she told Bloomberg Television.

Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Seoul, Mumbai, Taipei, Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta and Wellington were all well down, though Shanghai eked out a small gain.

Paris and Frankfurt were sharply lower in the morning. London was closed for a holiday.

The dollar jumped against its major peers, closing in on the 140 yen mark not seen since 1998, while an energy crisis in Europe kept the euro depressed.

Still, oil prices extended gains as talk that surging interest rates could choke off the economic recovery was not enough to offset supply concerns.

The commodity has fallen in recent weeks on bets that demand will be hit by an expected drop in economic output, particularly from China as it continues to battle a Covid-19 outbreak with lockdowns.

But fresh unrest in Libya, warnings that an Iran nuclear deal was not imminent and a possible OPEC output cut kept prices elevated.

– Key figures at around 0810 GMT –

Tokyo – Nikkei 225: DOWN 2.7 percent at 27,878.96 (close)

Hong Kong – Hang Seng Index: DOWN 0.7 percent at 20,023.22 (close)

Shanghai – Composite: UP 0.1 percent at 3,240.73 (close)

Dollar/yen: UP at 138.72 yen from 137.38 yen Friday

Euro/dollar: DOWN at $0.9941 from $0.9964

Pound/dollar: DOWN at $1.1672 from $1.1743

Euro/pound: UP at 85.17 pence from 84.85 pence

West Texas Intermediate: UP 1.1 percent at $94.06 per barrel

Brent North Sea crude: UP 0.8 percent at $101.81

New York – Dow: DOWN 3.0 percent at 32,283.4 points (close)

London – FTSE 100: Closed for a holiday

Bolsonaro, Lula trade jabs in Brazil debate

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

Sparks flew Sunday as far-right President Jair Bolsonaro accused leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of massive corruption — and drew accusations of “destroying Brazil” in return — as they faced off in their first election debate.

The two front-runners, who waited until the last minute to confirm they would attend the first televised debate ahead of October’s elections, wasted no time in attacking each other.

Bolsonaro called Lula a “thief” in his opening salvo of the three-hour clash, pummeling the 76-year-old ex-president over the massive “Car Wash” corruption scandal centered on state-run oil giant Petrobras.

The investigation landed Lula in prison from 2018 to 2019 on controversial corruption charges — annulled by the Supreme Court last year.

“Your government was the most corrupt in Brazilian history,” said Bolsonaro, 67, rattling off figures from the scandal in a rapid-fire attack.

“It was a kleptocracy, a government based on robbery… What do you want to come back to power for? To do the same thing to Petrobras again?”

Lula fired back that Bolsonaro was spreading “untruths” — one of several exchanges in which they accused each other of lying. He in turn accused the incumbent of trashing his legacy of economic growth and anti-poverty initiatives.

“This country has been destroyed,” Lula said in his trademark gravelly voice, attacking Bolsonaro over increased poverty and hunger, soaring prices and a surge in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Dressing the part in dark suits and ties — striped blue for Bolsonaro, burgundy red for Lula — the front-runners had numerous fiery exchanges, but hewed to the rules and kept their demeanor relatively civilized.

With no audience in the studio, the tension surrounding the debate was especially palpable in the next room, where journalists and politicians followed the debate on a screen.

Pro-Lula lawmaker Andre Janones and Bolsonaro’s former environment minister Ricardo Salles got into a raucous shouting match and came close to hitting each other before they were pulled away.

– Bolsonaro rants, Lula underwhelms –

In all, six of the 12 presidential candidates on the ballot were on the neon-blue-lit stage in TV network Band’s Sao Paulo studios.

But all eyes in the deeply polarized Latin American country of 213 million people were on front-runner Lula, the popular but tarnished ex-metal worker who led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, and his nemesis, Bolsonaro — the leader nicknamed the “Tropical Trump” — who is vying for a come-from-behind win.

Neither appeared to score a knockout punch, and both drew criticism over their performances.

Bolsonaro sparked outrage with a trademark rant in which he attacked journalist Vera Magalhaes, one of the moderators, for saying he had spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

“Vera, you think about me in your sleep, you must have a crush on me or something,” the incumbent reacted irately.

“You can’t take part in a debate like this and spread lies and accusations about me. You’re an embarrassment to Brazilian journalism.”

The president, who has been struggling to win over women voters, drew accusations of misogyny on social networks after the episode.

Lula delivered an underwhelming performance, looking less fiery as the three-hour debate wore on.

“Lula looked very timid and made mistakes on certain points, falling into some traps,” said political analyst Andre Cesar of consulting firm Hold.

He gave Bolsonaro the edge in the debate for hitting on his favorite themes, “nation, family and freedom.”

“Bolsonaro was looser, letting out his phrases, laughing,” Cesar said. “In that sense, Bolsonaro won.”

But he added that the incumbent’s attack on the moderator “showed that this is who Bolsonaro is — and that might hurt him anyway.”

Lula leads Bolsonaro by 47 percent to 32 percent, according to the latest poll from the Datafolha institute.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of valid votes in the first round on October 2, the election will go to a run-off on October 30.

From bus routes to gutters, tech-savvy youth map Mali's capital

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

Under a blazing sun in Mali’s capital, Amadou Menta leant over to measure a gutter then jotted down the results on a mapping app on his smartphone.

“We’re collecting data,” said the 27-year-old geography student, helping to chart the roadside drains of central Bamako with two friends.

Until recently Mali’s capital was largely uncharted on the web.

With street names or fixed public transport routes often missing in the city of some two million, people tend to ask for directions to find their way.

But the lack of maps is a major obstacle to developing its infrastructure — whether to prevent traffic jams, collect wastewater and rubbish, or prevent flooding.

Tech-savvy young Malians are striving to change this, cataloguing the city’s features in the hope it will improve the lives of its residents.

Armed with smartphones, dozens of volunteers have been collecting data for the local branch of OpenStreetMap, a free, online geographic database — which is then used by sites including Google Maps.

Menta and fellow mappers have been charting the channels collecting waste and rainwater in Daoudabougou, a central district often hit by floods.

The gutter project is receiving financial support from the World Bank, and has been welcomed by the authorities.

But it’s just one of the avenues the group is exploring — and there is plenty more work to do.

Founder Nathalie Sidibe said there was previously “no freely available data in Mali”.

“We saw mapping as a concrete way to contribute to developing the area,” she said.

“We need to change habits here — and to do that, we need to encourage people to use digital tools.”

– Data to ‘get ahead’ –

Mobile data access is still poor in Mali.

Countrywide, only one in 10 women is connected to mobile broadband, compared to one in five men, a World Bank report found last year.

But the OpenStreetMap Mali team has been busy.

So far, its volunteers have drawn up a map of Bamako’s public minibus routes, household waste collection points, and basic social services.

Adama Konate, deputy mayor in charge of sanitation, said the group’s efforts had helped Bamako.

“We only had basic knowledge before this project,” Konate said.

“Now we know that this place needs drainage, and that place needs a rubbish dump.”

Mahamadou Wadidie, director of the Regional Development Agency in Bamako, said the youth mapping project had made his job much easier.

On the agency’s website, he showed off a regularly updated map of all the health centres and schools in Bamako drawn up from OpenStreetMap data.

“Instead of taking two months to find out about these things, mayors can now get this information from their computer,” he said.

“Digitisation is allowing us to get ahead, to lose less time.”

Mali — an impoverished country with severe governance challenges that has been battling a decade-long jihadist insurgency — does not have many resources to devote to digitising data, he said.

But Menta and his young colleagues, he said, have shown it is possible to launch ambitious mapping projects “without spending a lot of money”.

Diamond magnate's appeal of Swiss bribery verdict opens

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

French-Israeli diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz will be back in court in Switzerland on Monday to appeal against a corruption verdict linked to mining rights in Guinea.

The 66-year-old businessman was convicted in January 2021 of setting up a complex financial web to pay bribes to ensure his company could obtain permits in an area estimated to contain the world’s biggest untapped deposits of iron ore.

He was sentenced by a Geneva court to five years in prison and also ordered to pay 50 million Swiss francs ($52 million) in compensation.

Steinmetz, who maintained his innocence throughout that trial, has changed his legal team for the appeal.

“We expect that the tribunal recognises that Beny Steinmetz did not bribe anyone,” his new lawyer Daniel Kinzer told AFP in an email.

“I am confident the appeals court can be convinced,” he said, adding a deeper look at the case revealed “a totally different picture than the one painted by the first verdict”.

Far from being corrupt, Beny Steinmetz Group Resources (BSGR) had legitimately obtained the mining rights in question, and had striven in difficult and complex circumstances to set up an operation that would have benefited Guinea’s national interests, his team said.

– ‘Pact of corruption’ –

Swiss prosecutors however accuse Steinmetz and two partners of bribing a wife of the then Guinean president Lansana Conte and others in order to win mining rights in the southeastern Simandou region.

The prosecutors said Steinmetz obtained the rights shortly before Conte died in 2008 after about $10 million was paid in bribes over a number of years.

Conte’s military dictatorship ordered global mining giant Rio Tinto to relinquish two concessions to BSGR for around $170 million in 2008.

Just 18 months later, BSGR sold 51 percent of its stake in the concession to Brazilian mining giant Vale for $2.5 billion.

But in 2013, Guinea’s first democratically-elected president Alpha Conde launched a review of permits allotted under Conte and later stripped the VBG consortium formed by BSGR and Vale of its permit.

To secure the initial deal, prosecutors claimed Steinmetz and representatives in Guinea entered a “pact of corruption” with Conte and his fourth wife Mamadie Toure.

Toure, who has admitted to having received payments, has protected status in the United States as a state witness.

– ‘No crystal ball’ –

She and several other key witnesses in the case failed to appear in the first trial, and Kinzer said he had “no crystal ball as to what they will do for the appeals trial”.

Steinmetz, who lived in Geneva during the years when the bribes were allegedly paid, continues to insist the bribery allegations are “totally false”, according to a document released by his team.

It stresses that Rio Tinto had lost the rights to half of its concessions in Simandou for failing to develop them, and BSGR later legitimately bid for and obtained exploration rights.

“The mining rights were withdrawn from a competitor because it was hoarding them and then awarded to BSGR on the basis of a solid and convincing business case with no need to bribe a public official,” Kinzer said.

Steinmetz, who was granted a legal free-passage guarantee in order to participate in the first trial, left Switzerland without serving his sentence.

He is back in Geneva to argue his case after receiving another free-passage.

The appeal hearings are due to last through September 7. The verdict will come at a later date.

IAEA chief leading team to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

29 Aug 2022 29 Aug 2022

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said Monday he was on his way to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been the target of strikes in recent weeks.

“The day has come, IAEA’s Support and Assistance Mission to Zaporizhzhya is now on its way,” Grossi tweeted, saying the team from the UN atomic watchdog would arrive at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant “later this week”.

In a photograph accompanying his tweet, the IAEA chief posed with a team of 13 people wearing caps and sleeveless jackets bearing the nuclear watchdog’s logo.

Grossi has for months been asking to be able to visit the site, warning of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which has six of Ukraine’s reactors, has been occupied by Russian troops since shortly after Moscow launched its invasion on February 24, and has remained on the frontlines ever since.

Moscow and Kyiv have traded blame for shelling around the complex, near the city of Energodar.

Its Ukraine operator Energoatom warned on Saturday of the risk of radioactive leaks and fire after new strikes.

The United Nations has called for an end to all military activity in the area surrounding the complex.

Ukraine initially feared an IAEA visit would legitimise the Russian occupation of the site before finally supporting the idea of a mission.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday urged the watchdog to send a team as soon as possible.

Between Thursday and Friday, the plant was cut off from Ukraine’s national power grid for the first time in its four-decade history due to “actions of the invaders”, Energoatom said.

It came back online Friday afternoon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed that a team of independent inspectors could travel to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant via Ukraine, the French presidency said on August 20 after a call with Emmanuel Macron.