The Nation Newspaper

Category: Foreign

  • Zimbabwe increases fuel prices second time in a week

    Zimbabwe hiked fuel prices on Monday for the second time in a week but most pumps remained dry, with no end in sight to shortages that are helping drive inflation rapidly higher.

    The Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority said in Harare a litre of petrol would now cost 7.45 Zimbabwe dollars, up 22 per cent from 6.10 dollars. Diesel now costs 7.19 a litre, a 23 per cent rise.

    On July 13, fuel prices were hiked by up to 16 per cent after finance minister Mthuli Ncube said fuel was considerably cheaper than in neighbouring countries.

    Ncube said he would like to see the price increase to the equivalent of $1 a litre.

    With inflation soaring, economic analysts say increases in fuel prices are adding to price pressures, especially as rolling electricity cuts are forcing businesses to use expensive diesel generators to power their operations.

    Read Also: ‘Why economy remains stagnant’

    Diesel and petrol prices have gone up by 456 per cent this year, in line with a slide in the value of the local RTGS currency, renamed the Zimbabwe dollar last month.

    The biggest fuel price hike in January, a 150 per cent increase, triggered violent protests by Zimbabweans. More than a dozen people were killed when the army clamped down on the unrest.

    The Zimbabwe dollar was trading on Monday at 8.88 against the greenback on the official interbank market, little change from last week. On the black market, $1 fetched 10.5 Zimbabwe dollars.

    NAN

  • Five killed in car crash in Indonesia’s West Java

    Five people were killed after a minivan and a pickup vehicle collided on a toll road in Indonesia’s West Java province, police said on Saturday.

    The accident occurred at 23:00 p.m. Jakarta time on Friday at Cikopo-Palimanan toll road, police chief of Majalengka District Mariyono said.

    “The driver of the pickup lost control of the car which crossed into the opposite lane and collided with the minivan.

    “It was predicted that the driver of the pickup vehicle was sleepy so his vehicle crossed into the opposite road lane,’’ Mariyono was quoted by Antara News Agency as saying in West Java province.

    He said the two vehicles caught fire after the collision and killed five people aboard.

    Mariyono added that all the victims had been identified.

    (Xinhua/NAN)

  • Three men lynched on suspicion of cattle theft

    Indian police on Friday said three men were lynched by a mob in the Saran district of Bihar over suspicion of cattle theft.

    Police said the men were spotted by villagers in Bihar with a pickup truck that allegedly had two stolen buffaloes.

    “Some 30 villagers gathered and many started beating the men with sticks till they collapsed. The victims were rushed to a hospital but they had died by then,” The district police chief, Har Rai said.

    Rai said villagers were angry because the men who belonged to a nearby hamlet had stolen cattle from their villagers in recent weeks as well.

    “We have arrested three villagers for taking the law in their hands,” Rai said, adding a case had also been filed against the alleged cattle thieves by the villagers.

    Read Also; Command parades suspected killers of corps members, policemen

    Police rejected the killings being a religiously motivated hate crime, saying two victims were from the majority Hindu community while one was from the Muslim community.

    Incidents of lynching and vigilante justice are regularly reported from India.

    Hardline Hindu groups have led campaigns targeting Muslims and low caste Dalits over suspicion of cattle slaughter and beef consumption.

    India’s Hindu majority regards the cow as holy and its slaughter is banned in several Indian states.

    India also saw a spate of mob lynchings in 2018 sparked by rumours that child abductors were on the prowl.

  • South Africa’s ex-president Zuma gets death threat

    Former South African President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday said he had received a death threat after his testimony the previous day to an inquiry on corruption.

    Zuma told the inquiry on Monday that he had been the victim of a plot to get rid of him and that he could trace that conspiracy to foreign intelligence services and the apartheid government in the 1990s.

    Appearing again on Tuesday, Zuma said his personal assistant received a phone call late on Monday from an unknown caller threatening to kill Zuma and his children.

    The country’s deputy chief justice, Raymond Zondo, who is overseeing the inquiry, said the threats were unacceptable.

    There was no immediate comment from the police.

    Zuma, ousted by the governing African National Congress (ANC) in February 2018 and replaced by President Cyril Ramaphosa, has consistently denied wrongdoing over his nine years in power.

    His appearance at the inquiry caps a dramatic fall from grace for a politician, who long dominated the country’s politics.

    Read Also: Zuma to make first appearance at South Africa corruption inquiry

    The inquiry is investigating allegations that Zuma allowed three Gupta brothers, friends of his, to plunder state resources and influence senior government appointments.

    Several former officials have told the inquiry that the Guptas were privy to information about senior government appointments.

    On Monday Zuma denied that he had done anything unlawful with the Guptas or that he had discussed anything with them that he should not have.

    The Gupta brothers, who denied the allegations at the time, left the country around the time that Zuma was ousted.

  • Death toll in Nepal floods, landslides rises to 27

    Three people were killed in a village in eastern Nepal on Saturday, bringing the death toll from floods and landslides across the country to 27, officials said.

    Torrential monsoon rains have hit the country’s eastern and central regions over the past week, including the capital Kathmandu, triggering landslides and floods.

    Police spokesman Ramesh Thapa confirmed that the death toll had risen to 27, with 11 people injured and 15 others missing.

    Some 123 people have been rescued in several parts of the country in the last two days, the spokesman added.

    The Department of Hydrology and Meteorology on Saturday warned that water levels of several rivers in south-eastern Nepal had reached dangerous levels.

    READ ALSO: Death toll rises to 87 in South Africa floods

    The weather forecasting division has warned of continuous rains and strong winds in several parts of the country over the weekend.

    Several highway bridges have collapsed and roads were blocked by landslides and floods, leaving thousands of travellers stranded, local media reported on Saturday.

    Nepal is prone to natural disasters. In 2015, 9,000 people were killed when a powerful earthquake hit the Himalayan country.

    Every year, floods and landslides triggered by monsoon rains cause numerous deaths in Nepal, where the monsoon season lasts from June to September.

    (dpa/NAN)

  • My regrets as UK Prime Minister, by Theresa May

    Outgoing British Prime Minister, Theresa May, said she regrets allowing too much polarisation over Brexit and avoiding televised debates before a disastrous snap election in 2017, in an interview published on Friday.

    May resigned as leader of the ruling Conservatives in June after she conceded defeat in her two-year battle to persuade parliament to approve the deal she had agreed to with Brussels for Britain to leave the EU.

    “I did everything I could to get it over the line.

    “I was willing to sit down with (opposition Labour leader) Jeremy Corbyn, willing to sacrifice my premiership, give up my job!” May told the popular right-wing tabloid The Daily Mail.

    “I had assumed mistakenly that the tough bit of the negotiation was with the EU, that parliament would accept the vote of the British people (in the 2016 Brexit referendum) and just want to get it done.

    She said that people who’d spent their lives campaigning for Brexit would vote to get us out,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

    May agreed that she should have done more to halt “the polarisation between the language of soft and hard Brexit” that divided the Conservative and Labour parties, as well as British voters.

    She is expected to hand over the reins on July 24 to the victor in a run-off to succeed her as leader of the Conservatives and the country, after a vote by the party’s 160,000 members between strong favourite Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

    Johnson is backed by many of the “hard” Brexiteer Conservative lawmakers who strongly opposed May’s deal and played an important role in pushing May to resign.

    May said she also regrets her refusal to take part in televised debates before a disastrous snap election in June 2017.

    “I should have done the TV debates. I didn’t because I had seen them suck the life blood out of David Cameron’s campaign,’’she said, referring to her Conservative predecessor as prime minister, who resigned after losing the Brexit referendum.

    May called the 2017 snap election to ask voters to back her leadership and her Brexit plan, but she lost her majority in parliament, forcing her to rely on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to keep her in power.

    Read Also; Trump may place new tariffs on French wine

    She previously expressed regret that her focus on Brexit prevented her from promoting plans to improve social cohesion in Britain.

    On Friday, she announced a new Office for Tackling Injustices to monitor progress by all government agencies in tackling social injustices.

    “Deep-seated societal injustice requires a long-term focus and cannot be eliminated overnight,” May said in a statement.

    She said she is “proud” of her efforts as prime minister to “make the UK a more just society.”
    The new office “will go further, using the power of data… to shine a spotlight on key injustices and provide the catalyst for better policy solutions,” May added.

    NAN

  • Engineers develop artificial muscles

    An international team of engineers in U.S. and China have developed a powerful artificial muscles which can generate a power 40 times that of human muscles.

    A study published online on Friday in the journal Science, explained that the engineers developed the muscles using a polymer sheath around inexpensive yarns.

    It described the sheath-run artificial muscles in which the outside sheath absorbs energy and drives the actuation of the yarns inside.

    Previous artificial muscles were made by twisting yarns, such as carbon nanotubes (CNT), fishing line and nylon thread, to the point that they coil.

    Those twisted yarns can drastically contract when heated and return to initial conditions when cooled, according to the study.

    “In our previous twisted and coiled muscles, we applied thermal energy to the entire muscle, but only the outer twisted part of the fiber was doing any mechanical work.

    The central part was doing little, said the paper’s lead author Mu Jiuke at the University of Texas at Dallas.

    Also, it takes a relatively long time to transmit the energy into the inner part of yarns, thus slowing down the muscle’s response speed,” Mu told Xinhua.

    Read Also: Benefits of artificial intelligence and robotics

    Mu said with the sheath, the input energy can be converted into the mechanical energy of the muscle more quickly and efficiently.

    In the experiment, the researchers twisted the yarns while the sheath was still wet since the sheath will crack after it has dried.

    Researchers from Donghua University in Shanghai also demonstrated a consumer application of sheath-run artificial muscles.

    They knitted them into a textile that increases porosity when exposed to moisture in order to bring more comfort to cloth wearers.

    (Xinhua/NAN)

  • Ex-president summoned for interrogation

    Former Kyrgyz President, Almazbek Atambayev, was on Tuesday summoned for interrogation by the Ministry of the Interior, local media reports.

    The 62-year-old former president was deprived of legal immunity after a parliament vote on June 27.

    A special commission formed by the parliament suggested earlier that Atambayev was involved in six crimes during his presidency.

    Read Also; Oil tanker seizure: Iran warns UK

    Atambayev called the accusations against him “absurd,’’ saying that he was clean and ready to answer all the accusations.

    He served as president of Kyrgyzstan from December 2011 to November 2017.

  • Oil tanker seizure: Iran warns UK

    Britain’s seizure of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar last week will not be “unanswered”, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, said on Tuesday, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

    “Capture of the Iranian oil tanker based on fabricated excuses … will not be unanswered and when necessary Tehran will give appropriate answer,” Bagheri said.

    British Royal Marines boarded the ship, Grace 1, off the coast of Gibraltar on Thursday and seized it over accusations it was breaking sanctions by taking oil to Syria.

    Read Also; Land acquisition: We followed due process, says LASG

    Iran has demanded the immediate release of the oil tanker, while an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander threatened on Friday to seize a British ship in retaliation.

    According to the British Ministry of Defense, the Iranian vessel was seized at the request of their U.S. partners. Shortly after its seizure, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton applauded the British Royal Marines for this move.

    On Friday, an Iranian general warned the country could seize a British ship in retaliation.

    “If Britain does not release the Iranian oil tanker, it is the authorities’ duty to seize a British oil tanker,” Mohsen Rezai, a Major General in the Revolutionary Guards Corps and head of the country’s influential Expediency Council, which advises the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

    “Islamic Iran in its 40-year history has never initiated hostilities in any battles but has also never hesitated in responding to bullies,” Maj Gen Rezai added.

     

    NAN

  • US border detention conditions appalling – UN rights Chief

    United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, has described as appalling conditions in which migrants and refugees are being held in the US

    In a statement on Monday, Bachelet emphasised that children should never be held in immigration detention, or separated from their families.

    “As a pediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of State, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities.

    “This is without access to adequate healthcare or food, and with poor sanitation conditions,” she said.

    Citing several UN human rights bodies, she stated that detaining migrant children might constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment “that is prohibited under international law.”

    The human rights chief noted that immigration detention was never in the best interests of a child.

    She said: “Even for short periods under good conditions, it can have a serious impact on their health and development.

    “Consider the damage being done every day by allowing this alarming situation to continue.’’

    Read Also: UN rights chief slams Papua New Guinea government

    Bachelet referenced the “disturbing report” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, on the conditions in migrant centres along the southern border.

    In the report, the department outlined “dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention of children and adults” at border facilities in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

    It came with photographs illustrating the overcrowding of migrants in small, fenced areas.

    However, the administration of President Donald Trump dismissed the report as exaggerative of the conditions at the facilities.

    “The Fake News Media, in particular the failing @nytimes, is writing phony and exaggerated accounts of the Border Detention Centers,” Trump said in a tweet on Sunday.

    Bachelet urged the authorities to find non-custodial alternatives for migrant and refugee children and adults.

    “Any deprivation of liberty of adult migrants and refugees should be a measure of last resort.

    “If migrants or refugees are detained, it should be for the shortest period, with due process safeguards and under conditions that fully meet all relevant international human rights standards.

    “States do have the sovereign prerogative to decide on the conditions of entry and stay of foreign nationals.

    “But clearly, border management measures must comply with the State’s human rights obligations and should not be based on narrow policies aimed only at detecting, detaining and expeditiously deporting irregular migrants.”

    The human rights chief elaborated that in most of these cases, the migrants and refugees embarked on perilous journeys with their children in search of protection and dignity and away from violence and hunger.

    “When they finally believe they have arrived in safety, they may find themselves separated from their loved ones and locked in undignified conditions, this should never happen anywhere,’’ Bachelet said. (NAN)