Category: News

Martin Griffiths, under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told a news conference in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, that the severe drought ravaging the country is likely to push parts of the country into famine by the end of 2022.

“Famine is at the door, and today we are receiving a final warning. I have been shocked to my core these past few days by the level of pain and suffering we see so many Somalis enduring,” Griffiths said at the end of his five-day visit to Somalia.

The Somalia Food Security and Nutrition Analysis report released Monday shows concrete indications that famine will occur in two areas in the Bay region (Baidoa and Burhakaba districts) in south-central Somalia between October and December.

According to the report, with five consecutive seasons of poor rainfall, exhausted coping capacities of affected communities, depletion of livelihood assets, and other exacerbating factors, humanitarian assistance will be required to address high levels of needs beyond December 2022.

“I repeat: This is a final warning to all of us. The situation and trends resemble those seen in the 2010-2011, in that crisis. Except now they are worse,” Griffiths said.

He said the unprecedented failure of four consecutive rainy seasons, decades of conflict, mass displacement, and severe economic issues are pushing many people to the brink of famine.

“And these conditions are likely to last through to at least March 2023,” he said, pointing out that Baidoa is the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

“It is not the only place with needs, but it is one of them. In camps for the displaced people, we saw extreme hunger. In the hospital in Baidoa, we had the unenviable privilege of seeing children so malnourished that they could barely speak,” the UN relief chief said.

The UN said the Bay region was also the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis in 2017 when severe drought led to agropastoral and displaced populations facing a risk of famine, which was only averted due to timely, robust, and sustained humanitarian assistance.

Griffiths said 1.5 million children across Somalia will face acute malnutrition by October if the current course remains. “The drought, the worst in four decades, is forecast to continue. This is, in those often-used words, and no more true than here, a humanitarian catastrophe. We know that the needs will grow,” he said.

In the runoff, Truss, 47, beat former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak by winning approximately 57.4 percent of the Conservative Party members’ vote, Graham Brady, chair of the party’s backbench 1922 Committee, announced Monday.

The voting took place a month after Johnson was forced to step down following an avalanche of ministerial resignations over his scandal-plagued leadership.

The formal handover is scheduled for Tuesday after Truss and Johnson meet Queen Elizabeth II, who is staying at her Balmoral estate in Scotland.

Truss will be Britain’s third female prime minister after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. She faces the immediate tasks of tackling the worsening cost-of-living crisis and handling a Brexit arrangement about Northern Ireland to avoid antagonizing the EU.

“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply,” she said in her victory speech after the result was announced.

Though congratulating on Truss’s win, leader of the main opposition Labour Party Keir Starmer said in his tweets,” After 12 years of the Tories all we have to show for it is low wages, high prices, and a Tory cost of living crisis. Only Labour can deliver the fresh start our country needs.”

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Since the winter of 2021, Britain’s inflation has kept rising and successively hit new highs. Official data showed the Consumer Prices Index rose by 10.1 percent in July, far above the 2-percent target set by the Bank of England.

The central bank projected last month that higher energy prices would push Britain’s inflation to 13 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and inflation is likely to remain at very elevated levels throughout much of 2023.

The country’s energy regulator said in late August that the energy price cap will rise by 80 percent to 3,549 pounds (about 4,077 U.S. dollars) per year for an average household from October.

As millions of people in Britain face the prospect of escalating bills, Keith Baker, a research fellow in fuel poverty and energy policy at Glasgow Caledonian University, told Xinhua that the country could face its worst peacetime crisis since the General Strike of 1926. There has been a summer of disruption amid strikes by railway and airlines workers, and unions across sectors are threatening “waves of industrial action” in the coming weeks.

“We are now into really quite scary, unknown territory. We don’t know how much mortgage rates will go up, we don’t know how much food prices will go up, but we are seeing a trend that is certainly heading in that direction, and there’s no sign of it changing. In fact, there’s every sign it’s going to get worse,” said Baker.

Stuart Wilks-Heeg, a political expert at the University of Liverpool, told Xinhua that Truss as prime minister will probably face “the biggest set of policy challenges any prime minister has faced since at least the 1970s.”

Truss has campaigned to cut taxes, deregulation and prioritize economic growth, but experts doubt that these will be effective enough, given the severity of the situation. The Bank of England forecast last month that Britain will enter a five-quarter recession beginning in the final three months of 2022.

“She’s coming into a context which is almost unprecedented in modern British politics. It’s an extremely challenging situation. She hasn’t shown to me that she’s got the answers to the problems that we face,” Wilks-Heeg said.

Wilks-Heeg added that the leadership race took up too much time that could have been used to alleviate the situation.

“We’ve wasted a lot of time, so nothing has really happened over the summer to mitigate rising energy costs. The crisis will be looming even more urgently because we’re getting closer and closer to the winter. People’s fuel bills will already be going up, (while) inflation continues to rise,” he noted.

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A dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol — the rules governing post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland — has strained Britain’s relations with the EU, stoking worries of a trade war if Truss presses ahead with her controversial bill to rewrite the protocol.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a trade solution agreed by London and Brussels to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland following Brexit.

Under the protocol, Northern Ireland is part of British customs territory but is subject to the EU’s customs code, value-added tax (VAT) rules and single market rules for goods. However, a de facto Irish Sea border was thus created between the British mainland and Northern Ireland, meaning goods transported to and from Northern Ireland are subject to border controls.

Northern Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party has demanded the removal or replacement of the protocol as a precondition for it to sit in the assembly and form a devolved government.

The EU warned Truss last week that they will not participate in talks with Britain over reforms to the Northern Ireland Protocol unless she takes the bill off the table. However, she is reportedly planning to override the protocol even before the bill passes through British parliament by activating Article 16, the agreement’s emergency mechanism, when she becomes prime minister.

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These daunting challenges, if not properly tackled, could torpedo Truss’s premiership, some experts cautioned.

“More broadly, the country is in a very difficult situation. It’s not just the energy crisis. Almost every public service is struggling. There are strikes in all kinds of industries. The potential for this to overwhelm Liz Truss is very clear,” Wilks-Heeg said.

Wilks-Heeg added that Johnson might attempt to make a comeback should Truss’s leadership go wrong.

“He (Johnson) could well be successful in that, given the lack of obvious other contenders and given his obvious continuing popularity within the party,” he said.

However, Professor Iain Begg from the London School of Economics and Political Science believed the likelihood of Truss being ousted before the next general election in 2024 is low.

“I’ve seen suggestions that she might face a very rapid leadership challenge. I rather doubt it. I don’t think the Conservative Party wants to go through another convulsion, knowing how close they are to a general election. So she’s probably safe until the general election,” Begg said.

The main opposition Labour Party widened its lead in opinion polls over the Conservative Party as a summer of infighting caused damage to the Tories.

Begg added that Truss might be tempted to call an earlier general election if she gets a poll bounce after taking over.

“But it’s a perilous thing to do, as Theresa May found to her cost in 2017. She started off with a huge polling majority, and then she squandered it by ill-advised policies, but also by a lackluster campaign,” he said.

Speaking at a press briefing after a videoconference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Macron said France is ready to deliver more gas to Germany while the latter will offer more electricity to France, if the current energy crisis persists in winter.

“We are going to finalize the gas connections in order to be able to deliver gas to Germany…It (Germany) will be ready to produce more electricity to bring to us in extreme situations,” Macron said.

The French president said that he was in favor of solidarity measures at the European level to deal with the current energy crisis.

“We are in favor of common gas purchasing practices that will make it possible to buy cheaper,” he explained.

However, he said there was “no need” for a gas pipeline linking France and Spain.

Concerning the high energy prices in Europe, Macron proposed to set up control mechanisms for speculative operations at the European level.

Days ahead of a European Union (EU) energy ministers’ meeting, Macron said that he supports a price cap on gas purchased from Russia at the EU level.

Macron assured his countrymen that France is not in a situation for energy rationing, but called on people to limit heating to 19 degrees Celsius to save energy.

“If we collectively know how to behave more soberly and save energy everywhere, then there will be no rationing or cuts,” he stressed.

On Friday, Macron chaired a Defense Council meeting on the energy crisis. French Minister for Energy Transition Agnes Pannier-Runacher said after the meeting that France’s gas reserves were 92 percent full in preparation for possible shortages this winter.

According to the minister, 32 of the country’s fleet of 56 nuclear reactors are currently offline for routine maintenance, but French multinational electric utility company EDF has committed to restarting all of them for this winter.

As of 8:30 p.m. Monday, 16 people were missing and over 50 injured, said Wang Feng, deputy director of the Sichuan provincial emergency management department.

Among the dead, 29 were from Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture which administers Luding County, and the other 17 were from Ya’an City. Over 50,000 people in Ganzi and Ya’an have been evacuated to safety.

The 6.8-magnitude earthquake jolted Luding County at 12:52 p.m. Monday (Beijing Time), according to the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).

Sichuan has activated the highest level of emergency response for the earthquake.

As of 6 p.m. Monday, the province had deployed over 6,500 rescuers, four helicopters and two unmanned aerial vehicles to the frontline.

“There were many aftershocks, and some roads were blocked. We had to climb over the debris to get to the town square of Moxi,” said a rescuer from the provincial forest fire brigade.

On the way to Moxi Town, Xinhua reporters saw houses and infrastructure that had been damaged to varying degrees, and some roads partially collapsed.

The town’s electricity and communications had been cut, and emergency power-generation equipment was supplying electricity for residents taking shelter on the square.

Liu Fang, a local official, said that after the earthquake, she and other colleagues immediately evacuated the residents to the square about several hundred meters away.

According to the medics on the scene, after the earthquake, medical staff from the health centers in Moxi and neighboring villages and townships responded immediately. As of 8 p.m., more than 50 slightly injured people had received treatment at a medical site on the square.

A local special police rescue team had received calls saying a man in his 40s was trapped under a collapsed house, and they immediately rushed to the rescue.

However, excavators and other rescue machines could not reach the scene due to the narrow passage. The team thus dug the debris with their bare hands, and successfully rescued the man, who was sent to hospital.

So far, the special police rescue team has rescued more than 30 trapped people.

The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Emergency Management earmarked 50 million yuan (about 7.25 million U.S. dollars) to support rescue and relief work. The provincial government also allocated 50 million yuan to Ganzi.

Relief supplies, including some 3,000 tents and 10,000 folding beds, were allocated to Luding County, where the epicenter was located.