An energy crisis in the Philippines triggered by a severe drought deepened yesterday as the nation’s capital endured another round of rolling blackouts.
It was the third week this year that Manila has faced power outages, while the southern Philippines has faced blackouts daily for more than a month.
“We have a supply deficiency. That’s why we resorted to [power cuts] for an hour, to be able to balance the system and ensure there will be power for the other areas,” Manila Electric spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga said.
The outages, typically lasting an hour, began in several northern Manila districts in mid-morning, then rolled over to other areas of the capital.
They also affected four nearby provinces, Manila Electric said.
Power transmission firm National Grid Corp said the capacity for the main island of Luzon, which includes Manila, was short by 440 megawatts of the expected demand for the day.
Two plants south of Manila “were put on emergency shutdown,” causing a loss of 360 megawatts of capacity, while a “technical problem” shut down another 250-megawatt plant in the area before dawn yesterday, it said.
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
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