UN releases $5 million for flood victims in Nigeria
The flooding has affected more than 1.2 million people in at least 31 out of Nigeria’s 36 states
Several Nigerian states hit by flooding have seen rises in the cases of cholera
Updated 03 October 2024
AFP
LAGOS: The United Nations Wednesday said it had released $5 million to help flood victims in Nigeria, where the rainy season has killed more than 300 people and caused widespread damage.
The money from its Central Emergency Relief Fund will help “scale up the flood response and address critical needs in three of the most flood affected states in Nigeria,” the UN said in a statement. They are Borno and Bauchi in the northeast, and Sokoto in the northwest.
The flooding has affected more than 1.2 million people in at least 31 out of Nigeria’s 36 states in the West African country, according to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).
Around 127,500 hectares of farmland has also been affected.
“Floods across Nigeria have created a crisis within a crisis,” said Mohamed Malick Fall, the UN coordinator in Nigeria.
“Millions of people were already facing critical levels of food insecurity before the floods because of economic hardships that have made it exceedingly difficult for the most vulnerable to feed themselves and their families.
“The floods have compounded people’s suffering.”
The latest emergency aid is in addition to the $6 million already released by the Nigerian Humanitarian Fund.
Several Nigerian states hit by flooding have seen rises in the cases of cholera.
Last month, severe flooding disaster killed at least 31 people and forced around 400,000 out of their homes in northeastern city of Maiduguri, the Borno state capital.
In 2022, more than 500 people died and 1.4 million were displaced in the country’s worst floods in a decade.
Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast
Man shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion
Updated 17 sec ago
Reuters
ATHENS: Greek police have arrested a 31-year old man for his role in an strong home-made bomb explosion which killed one man and seriously injured a woman in an apartment in Athens this week, police said on Saturday. The case, according to police officials, is linked to anti-establishment guerrilla groups. Anti-terrorism police suspect the blast occurred while the bomb was being made. The Greek man arrested had testified regarding the case on Friday night. According to police sources, he said he shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion. He is expected to appear before a prosecutor later on Saturday. Several left-wing and anarchist guerrilla groups, declaring war on all forms of governments, have emerged in Greece over the past two decades after the dismantling of its most lethal group, “November 17.” Small bomb and arson attacks against politicians, police, judges and businesses were frequent during the country’s 2009-18 debt crisis. They have abated in recent years but still occur.
Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend
Kamala Harris is bidding to become the country’s first woman president
Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states
Updated 1 min 47 sec ago
AFP
WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the most tense US presidential campaign of modern times with a flurry of swing-state rallies that will test their stamina — and ability to persuade the country’s last undecided voters. Harris, bidding to become the country’s first woman president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to drive home her message that Trump is a threat to US democracy. Trump — seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and then becoming the first presidential nominee to have been convicted of crimes — promises a radical right-wing makeover of the government and aggressive trade wars to promote his policy of “America first.” The 78-year-old, who rallied in Milwaukee, Wisconsin late Friday just miles from Harris’s event there, will all but cross paths with her again as Trump makes whistle-stops in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Their frenetic schedule will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris. Election Day is Tuesday but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 70 million ballots already cast — including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats seek to pull out all the stops to keep the state in their column. Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states likely to determine the result in the US electoral college system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival fighting hard to peel off even slivers of support from one another’s camps. Harris, currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing that by appealing to centrist voters and propelling her base to the polls with a robust ground game and get-out-the-vote effort. And by painting Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she is also encouraging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president. “He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance — and the man is out for unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin. Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of firing up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers. “Kamala’s closing message to America is that she hates you,” Trump fumed on Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he trashed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say it clearly is not — and warned that “a 1929-style economic depression” would ensue if Harris were elected. Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump earlier had conjured the image of former Republican representative turned Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot. “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said. Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic on Friday about how his experience campaigning over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.” “And now we want to take that thrill and turn it into ‘let’s do business,’ right?“ Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian-American vice president, meanwhile has sought to harness celebrity star power like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days. Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris onstage Thursday, amid a firestorm triggered by a Trump rally warm-up speaker branding the US territory a “floating island of garbage.” Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared with the candidate Friday night, asking the crowd in Milwaukee, “Are we ready to make history?“ With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to say whether he would accept its results if he loses — businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up shop fronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the days after the polls close. Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states such as Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many fear will be more unrest, following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol in the wake of the 2020 vote.
Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video
Russian embassy in the United States: ‘We view these allegations as baseless’
Updated 10 min 45 sec ago
AFP
MOSCOW: Moscow on Saturday denied it was behind fake videos about the US election after American intelligence said Russia was behind a fake video showing a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times.
Three US intelligence agencies on Friday said in a joint statement that “Russian influence actors” created the video as part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election.”
The statement also said Russian actors were behind another fake video.
“We have noticed the statement of the US intelligence services accusing our country of disseminating fabricated videos about electoral violations in the United States. We view these allegations as baseless,” the Russian embassy in the United States said in a statement on Telegram.
The 20-second clip features a man saying in a stilted, robotic delivery: “We are from Haiti. We came to America six months ago, and we already have our American citizenship — we’re voting Kamala Harris.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in the swing state, said Friday the video was an example of “targeted disinformation.”
Raffensperger said the “obviously fake” video was likely a production of “Russian troll farms.”
The embassy said that Russia had not received “any proof for these claims during its communications with US officials.”
“As President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed, we respect the will of the American people. All insinuations about ‘Russian machinations’ are malicious slander,” the embassy said in a statement also released by the Russian foreign ministry.
Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit
Updated 02 November 2024
AFP
LAHORE: Air pollution in Pakistan’s second biggest city Lahore soared on Saturday more than 80 times over the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization (WHO), with an official calling it record high.
The level of deadly PM2.5 pollutants — fine particulate matter in the air that causes the most damage to health — peaked at 1,067, before dropping to around 300 in the morning, with anything above 10 considered unhealthy by the WHO.
“We have never reached a level of 1,000,” Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore told AFP.
For days, Lahore has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.
“The air quality index will remain high for the next three to four days,” Anwar said.
On Wednesday, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hot spots” in the city.
Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.
Government offices and private companies will have half their staff work from home from Monday.
Construction work has been halted and street and food vendors, who often cook over open fires, must close at 8 pm.
Smog is particularly pronounced in winter, when cold, denser air traps emissions from poor-quality fuels used to power the city’s vehicles and factories at ground level.
Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain
Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred
Updated 02 November 2024
AFP
Tokyo: Nearly 200,000 people in western Japan were urged to evacuate on Saturday as authorities warned of landslides and floods while the remnants of a tropical storm trickle over the country.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said “warm, moist air... was causing heavy rainfall with thunderstorms in western Japan” partly due to Kong-rey, which was downgraded to an extratropical low-pressure system from a typhoon.
The city of Matsuyama “issued the top-level warning, urging 189,552 residents in its 10 districts to evacuate and immediately secure safety,” a city official told AFP.
While the evacuation was not mandatory, Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred.
Forecasters warned that landslides and floods could affect western Japan on Saturday and eastern Japan on Sunday.
Due to rain, shinkansen bullet trains were briefly suspended between Tokyo and southern Fukuoka region in the morning before resuming on a delayed schedule.
Kong-rey smashed into Taiwan on Thursday as one of the biggest storms to hit the island in decades. It claimed at least two lives and knocked out power to tens of thousands of households.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.
