A month after torrential monsoon rains triggered Pakistan’s worst natural disaster on record, flood waters are starting to recede, but leaving countless survivors at risk of death from hunger and disease.
The disaster has killed at least 1,643 people, forced more than 6 million from their homes, inflicted billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure and the vital agriculture sector and stirred anger against the government that has struggled to cope.
Despite generally lower water levels, officials said they were still battling to save the delta town of Thatta, 70km east of Karachi, in the southern province of Sindh.
Water has broken the banks of the Indus near Thatta and also topped a feeder canal running off the river.
“Thatta will be inundated if this water does not flow into the sea. The situation is very critical,” Sindh relief commissioner Riaz Ahmed Soomro said. “We are trying to fill in breaches and strengthen embankments to save Thatta.”
Soomro said about 95 percent of the delta town’s 300,000 residents had already fled.
“Only male members of the families have stayed back to save their property. Children, women and old people, all of them have left Thatta,” Soomro said.
The floods began late last month after torrential monsoon downpours over the upper Indus basin in northwest Pakistan.
Weather officials said water levels were receding on most rivers and they expected no rain in the coming few days.
“We believe that it will take another 10 to 12 days for rivers in Sindh to come to normal flow. Therefore, we still need to be watchful,” said Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, the government’s top weather official.
The death toll was expected to rise significantly as the bodies of the many missing people are found.
The UN said aid workers were increasingly worried about disease and hunger — especially among children — in areas where even before the disaster acute malnutrition was high.
UN officials say an estimated 72,000 children, affected by severe malnutrition in flood-affected areas, are at high risk of dying.
Even before the floods, Pakistan’s economy was fragile. Growth, forecast at 4.5 percent this fiscal year, is now predicted at anything between zero and 3 percent.
The floods have damaged at least 3.2 million hectares — about 14 percent of Pakistan’s cultivated land — the UN food agency said.
The total cost in crop damages is believed to be about 245 billion rupees (US$2.86 billion.)
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS