World

Islamabad, Aug 31 (IANS) The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has painted a bleak picture of women affected by the unprecedented floods in Pakistan as it said that at least 650,000 pregnant women, of whom 73,000 are expected to deliver next month, in the flood-affected areas are in dire need of maternal health service.

The UN agency also warned that many women and girls were at an incre­a­­sed risk of gender-based violence (GBV) as almost one million hou­ses were dama­g­­ed in the catastrophic floods that spelled suff­ering for millions across Pakistan, Dawn reported.

"Up to 73,000 women expected to deliver next month will need skilled birth attendants, newborn care, and support," the UNFPA said.

It added that pregnancies and childbirth cannot wait for emergencies or natural disasters to be over as this is when a woman and baby are vulnerable and need the most care, Dawn reported.

"UNFPA is on the ground, working with partners, to ensure that pregnant women and new mothers continue re­­ceiving life-saving services even under the most challenging conditions," ac­­ting UNFPA Pakistan Repre­sen­tative Bakhtior Kadirov said.

According to the UN agency, over 1,000 health facilities were either partially or fully damaged in Sindh, whereas 198 health facilities were damaged in the affected districts in Balochistan.

The damage to roads and bridges also compromised girls' and women's access to health facilities, it added.

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Moscow, Aug 31 (IANS) World leaders were quick to pay rich tributes to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the man who ended the Cold War and the arms race, as a statesman who stood at the pivotal turning point in world history.

He died on Tuesday due to a long illness at a hospital on Moscow

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his "deep sympathies" over Gorbachev's death, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies.

Peskov said Putin, a former KGB agent who had an ambiguous relationship with Gorbachev, will send a telegram of condolences to the late leader's family and friends on Wednesday morning.

UN chief Antonio Guterres praised Gorbachev as "a one-of-a-kind statesman who changed the course of history" and "did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War".

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen hailed Gorbachev as a "trusted and respected leader" who "opened the way for a free Europe".

His "crucial role" in bringing down the Iron Curtain, which symbolised the division of the world into communist and capitalist blocs, and ending the Cold War left a legacy "we will not forget", she wrote on Twitter.

French President Emmanuel Macron described Gorbachev as a "man of peace" on Twitter early Wednesday, saying he "opened a path of liberty for Russians. His commitment to peace in Europe changed our shared history".

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he "always admired the courage and integrity" Gorbachev showed to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion.

"In a time of Putin's aggression in Ukraine, his tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all," he said in a Twitter post, referring to Moscow's ongoing offensive in its former Soviet neighbour.

US President Joe Biden praised the former Soviet leader as a "man of remarkable vision."

Gorbachev had worked to bring about democratic reforms in the Soviet Union after decades of brutal political repression, Biden said in a White House statement issued late on Tuesday.

"These were the acts of a rare leader, one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it. The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people," he said.

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Seoul, Aug 31 (IANS) South Korea will lift its current pre-travel Covid-19 test requirement for inbound travellers later this week, as the government believes the recent virus wave has passed its peak and the spread of omicron could slow down, an official said Wednesday.

The new rule that will take effect Saturday came after a state infectious disease advisory committee recommended the government lift the mandatory pre-travel polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for inbound travellers, reports Yonhap News Agency.

"All inbound travellers, whether our nationals or foreigners, arriving aboard a plane or ship will not need to hand in a negative PCR test starting midnight of September 3," Second Vice Health Minister Lee Ki-il said in a virus response meeting.

The new measure will be applied to all arrivals, regardless of their vaccination status or the country of departure.

Currently, inbound travellers are required to show a negative result within 48 hours of their PCR tests or within 24 hours of their rapid antigen tests to enter the country.

Critics and the travel industry have called for the requirements to be scrapped, citing low efficiency of the tests that often lack accuracy and cost burdens for individual travellers.

They also cited other countries that have removed the test mandate.

"The virus has been slowing in other countries and we have also confirmed a decline in nine weeks," Peck Kyong-ran, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), said.

"The decision is aligned with the global trend of discontinuing the negative PCR test submission, although we will quickly toughen the entry procedure in the event of another variant outbreak," Peck said.

Travellers still need to take a PCR test within the first 24 hours of their arrival in South Korea, a "minimum measure" put in place to prevent the inflow and spread of any variant from overseas.

Rapid antigen tests will not be accepted.

On Wednesday, South Korea reported 103,961 new Covid cases, including 458 cases from overseas, bringing the total caseload to 23,246,398, the KDCA said.

The country added 75 Covid-19 fatalities, putting the death toll at 26,764.

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Kiev, Aug 31 (IANS) Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) left Kiev on Wednesday for the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in the Russian-occupied region of southern Ukraine.

"We will be spending a few days there," IAEA chief and head of mission Rafael Grossi announced before leaving Kiev.

Grossi said he and 13 experts were there to stabilize the situation as much as they could, reports dpa news agency.

The IAEA chief hopes to hold talks with the power plant's Ukrainian staff during the visit.

Grossi stressed that his team had received all the necessary safe passage guarantees for the long journey to the war zone, some 450 km from Kiev.

"We are going into occupied territory and this requires the explicit guarantees, not only from the Russian side, but also from the Republic of Ukraine," he stressed before setting off in a convoy of 10 white SUVs with UN markings.

The IAEA team was received by President Volodymyr Zelensky upon their arrival in Kiev on Tuesday.

He called the arrival of the mission one of the most important security issues for Ukraine and the world today.

Zelensky called for the demilitarization of the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant, saying a zone should be created around the plant.

He also called for the transfer of the nuclear power plant back to Ukrainian state control as the only way to rule out all nuclear risks.

The Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant is the largest in Europe.

It has a net output of 9,500 megawatts and boasted over 10,000 employees before the war began.

The plant was occupied by Russian troops shortly after the invasion of Ukraine began at the end of February.

In recent weeks, the power plant has come under frequent fire, for which Kiev and Moscow blame each other, triggering international concern about a possible nuclear catastrophe.

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Paris, Aug 31 (IANS) France witnessed the second hottest summer since 1900, according to the country's meteorological service.

Meteorologists from Meteo-France said on Thursday that the months of June, July and August of this year, the national average temperature will probably be 2.3 degrees Celsius above the reference value, dpa news agency reported.

This was the second hottest summer in the country since 1900, after an even hotter summer in 2003.

According to Meteo-France, the country had suffered from three heatwaves in the past three months which it described as particularly intense and long.

Overall, these heatwaves would have lasted 33 days, a record.

Temperature records were also broken in various places in the country.

According to the data, there was significantly less rain in France this summer.

The national average was around 20 per cent below the average for the years 1991 to 2020.

Due to climate change, there are more hot days.

According to the weather service, France has been struggling with more and stronger heatwaves for the last few decades.

Drought will also be exacerbated by climate change as hot temperatures lead to evaporation.

The weather experts warned in their statement that a summer like this one could become normal in France after 2050 if high emissions continue.

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Paris, Aug 31 (IANS) France is looking into building a pipeline from the Iberian peninsula to the south of the country in a bid to open up new energy sources in the absence of natural gas from Russia.

"Spain and Germany are two close partners of France; if they make a proposal, we will examine it," dpa news agency quoted Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire as saying here on Tuesday.

So far, France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, has been cautious about reviving the Midcat natural gas pipeline, which was shut down in 2017 as it was unprofitable.

The Midcat pipeline is to run from Barcelona across the Pyrenees to a connecting point with the French grid in Barbairan in southern France.

In Spain, the pipeline is complete as far as Hostalric, 106 km south of the border; in France, around 120 km are missing.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, like the Spanish government, had already campaigned for the construction of the pipeline to open up new energy sources in view of the war in Ukraine and a possible end to Russian gas supplies.

Spain sees this as a project of European importance, which it says must also be financed by the EU.

The natural gas that is to flow north through the pipe could be obtained from different sources in Spain and Portugal, since both countries together have a total of seven LNG terminals.

There are also two pipelines to the gas supplier Algeria in North Africa.

Later, as part of the energy transition, so-called green hydrogen, which is generated with the help of wind or sun, could also be passed through.

So far there are only two smaller gas pipelines from Spain across the Pyrenees to the north with limited capacity.

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Berlin, Aug 31 (IANS) An administrative court in the German capital Berlin has declared the expulsion of a convicted Islamic State (IS) extremist to be legal.

The judges confirmed a decision by the immigration authorities, a court spokesman said on Tuesday.

An Iraqi national who had been sentenced by the Berlin Court of Appeal in June 2021 to a youth sentence of several years for a war crime, aiding and abetting murder and membership of a terrorist organization had filed a complaint, reports dpa news agency.

He is due to be released from prison next year.

The judges have now decided that the man continues to pose a threat to Germany.

The judgement is not yet final.

From the point of view of the administrative court, the fact that the plaintiff has not recently shown any radical Islamist tendencies does not change the assessment of his remaining dangerousness.

In June, the Court of Appeal found that the plaintiff continued to commit serious violent crimes after entering Germany, intimidated witnesses and distributed video images of an execution.

The man had been on trial with his father for war crimes in their homeland for around two and a half years.

In the summer of 2021, the two were sentenced. A life sentence was imposed on the then 45-year-old. The then 22-year-old son received a youth sentence of five years and 10 months.

Although the verdict is not yet final, the man is still in custody.

According to court findings, the men joined the IS in their home town of Mosul in 2014 and took part in the public execution of a prisoner in October 2014.

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Washington, Aug 31 (IANS) The number of people infected with monkeypox in the US has crossed 18,000, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A total of 18,101 positive cases have been confirmed so far, dpa news agency quoted the CDC as saying in its latest update on Tuesday.

A total of 2,916 new confirmed cases were reported in the country in the last seven days.

Although the numbers are still on the rise nationally, the speed of the outbreak is apparently slowing down, the CDC says.

With 3,291 cases, California is the worst-affected state, followed by New York (3,197) and Florida (1,870).

Since the first case of the infectious viral disease was confirmed in the US on May 18, cases spread across more than 60 jurisdictions in the country.

The US has the world's highest number of monkeypox cases.

On August 4, the CDC declared monkeypox a public health emergency.

Later, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had announced the Emergency Use Authorization of the JYNNEOS vaccine to be administered intradermally in individuals 18 years of age and older.

The White House National Monkeypox Response team announced a series of actions to further accelerate the administration's response to the outbreak and mitigate the spread of the virus.

The LGBTQI+ community, especially men who have sex with men, is said to be most at risk of contracting the virus.

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Tel Aviv, Aug 31 (IANS) An Israeli court has sentenced a Palestinian employee of the World Vision aid organization to 12 years in prison.

Time already served should be deducted, the district court in Beersheva ruled on Tuesday.

Mohammed el-Halabi has been in prison for six years and was also sentenced to an additional 18 months of probation, reports dpa news agency.

The court found el-Halabi guilty in June because he had sent aid money to Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

He was also found guilty of other charges, including membership in a terrorist organization and illegal possession of weapons.

Israel arrested el-Halabi in June 2016. He was accused of diverting millions in aid to the Hamas organization.

In court, however, he pleaded not guilty to all counts.

According to media reports, his lawyer wants to appeal the verdict.

After the arrest, World Vision stopped working in the Gaza Strip and 120 employees were laid off.

In the previous 10 years, the Christian organisation said it had invested around 20 million euros in more than 50 projects along the coast.

Among other things, it provided food parcels, psychological assistance and support for pregnant women.

Germany and Australia stopped their payments to World Vision in Gaza in the face of the allegations. However, an external investigation commissioned by the aid organization did not reveal any irregularities.

The Islamist Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip by force in 2007.

It is classified as a terrorist organization by the US, the EU and Israel.

Some 2 million people live in precarious conditions in the blocked coastal area.

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Moscow, Aug 31 (IANS) The prosecution in the espionage trial of former Russian journalist Ivan Safronov has demanded a 24-year prison sentence, a court in Moscow said.

According to investigators, the 32-year-old shared confidential information about arms deals and operations of the Russian armed forces in Africa and the Middle East to foreign intelligence services, reports dpa news agency.

Safronov's lawyer rejected the accusations at the start of the trial and explained that the journalist had only used publicly accessible sources.

Safronov was arrested more than two years ago and has been in prison ever since.

He used to write about military and security issues for the newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti.

Before his arrest, he also worked for the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

According to a lawyers' association, a representative of the prosecution offered Safronov the prospect of 12 years in prison if the former journalist admitted his guilt.

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