Month: May 2022

The Twin Otter aircraft took off from the western town of Pokhara at 9:55am (0410 GMT) but soon lost contact with air traffic control.

“A domestic flight bound for Jomsom from Pokhara has lost contact,” Sudarshan Bartaula, spokesman for Tara Air, told AFP.

He said there were 19 passengers on board and three crew members.

Phanindra Mani Pokharel, a spokesman at the Ministry of Home Affairs, said two helicopters have been deployed for a search operation. But he said visibility was low.

“The bad weather is likely to hamper the search operation. The visibility is so poor that nothing can be seen,” Pokharel said.

Jomsom is a popular trekking destination in the Himalayas about 20 minutes by plane from Pokhara, which lies west of Kathmandu.

The island nation is suffering its worst economic meltdown since independence, with shortages of fuel and other vital goods making life miserable for its 22 million people.

The state-run Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) refinery was shuttered in March in the wake of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange crunch, which left the government unable to finance crude imports.

The Russian crude delivery had been waiting offshore of the capital Colombo’s port for over a month as the country was unable to raise $75 million to pay for it, energy minister Kanchana Wijesekera said.

Colombo is also in talks with Moscow to arrange direct supplies of crude, coal, diesel and petrol despite US-led sanctions on Russian banks and a diplomatic outcry over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I have made an official request to the Russian ambassador for direct supplies of Russian oil,” Wijesekera told reporters in Colombo.

“Crude alone will not fulfil our requirement, we need other refined (petroleum) products as well.” Around 90,000 tonnes of Siberian light crude will be sent to Sri Lanka’s refinery after the shipment was acquired on credit from Dubai-based intermediary Coral Energy.

Wijesekera said Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) was already in arrears of $735 million to suppliers and no one came forward to even bid for its oil tenders.

He added that the Siberian grade was not an ideal match for the refinery, which is optimised for Iranian light crude, but no other supplier was willing to extend credit.

Sri Lanka will nonetheless call for fresh supply tenders in two weeks before the stock of Siberian light runs out, Wijesekera said.

The Sapugaskanda refinery on Colombo’s outskirts will resume work in about two days.

European Union leaders are meeting on Monday in an effort to negotiate a fresh round of sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict, including an oil embargo.

Russian oil is already subject to a US embargo and its barrels have traded at a steep discount from international benchmarks, which have risen substantially since the conflict began.

Officials in the oil producing region of Khuzestan, where Abadan is located, said the death toll had risen to 29 people, and another 37 were injured in Monday’s collapse of the 10-storey residential and commercial building. So far 13 people have been arrested for building violations, they said.

Authorities investigating the disaster have detained Abadan’s current and past mayors and several other municipal employees, amid accusations that safety warnings were ignored.

The government announced a day of national mourning on Sunday to honour the victims of the collapse, state media said.

Fars agency said that a protest in Abadan on Friday night turned violent when crowds forced their way into the ruins of the building, where rescue operations were continuing. Police fired tear gas and warning shots, it said.

Footage on social media showed people running for cover. Screams of “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot” and the sound of gunfire could be heard.

Unverified video from Khuzestan’s port city of Mahshahr showed protesters shouting: “They stole oil and gas, took our blood”.

Marches in solidarity with the Abadan protests have also been held in several nearby areas in Khuzestan as well as Shahin Shahr in central Iran and the southern city of Shiraz, according to other unverified postings on social media.

The missile was fired from the Admiral Gorshkov frigate stationed in the Barents Sea and “successfully hit” a target stationed 1,000 kilometres (625 miles) away in the White Sea in the Arctic, the defence ministry said.

The ministry added the test was undertaken as part of ongoing “testing of new weapons”.

The first official Zircon test, which President Vladimir Putin described as a “great event,” came in October 2020. Other tests followed, from the same frigate and from a submerged submarine.

The latest test of a hypersonic weapon comes as Russia looks to be making ground in its offensive launched in Ukraine in late February.

The weapon can reach speeds of between five and ten times the speed of sound and has a maximum range of around 1,000 kilometres.

In March, Moscow said it had used for the first time in combat its high-precision Kinzhal, or dagger, hypersonic missile.

Putin has described the missiles as a family of new “invincible” arms in Russia’s arsenal.

The new generation-weaponry, unveiled by Putin in 2018, are more difficult to track and intercept by missile defence systems than conventional weapons, owing to their speed but also as they are launched at lower altitude towards their target.

State TV said 100 drones were being kept in the heart of the Zagros mountains, including Ababil-5, which it said were fitted with Qaem-9 missiles, an Iranian-made version of air-to-surface US Hellfire.

“No doubt the drones of Islamic Republic of Iran’s armed forces are the region’s most powerful,” army commander Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi said.

“Our capability to upgr­ade drones is unstoppable,” he added.

The Iranian state TV correspondent said he had made the 45-minute helicopter flight on Thursday from Kermanshah in western Iran to a secret underground drone site. He was allowed to take blindfolds off only upon arrival at the base, he said.

TV footage showed rows of drones fitted with missiles in a tunnel, which it was said to be several hundred metres underground.

The TV report came a day after Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized two Greek tankers in the Gulf, in an apparent retaliation for the confiscation of Iranian oil by the United States from a tanker held off the Greek coast.

Due to European Union sanctions, Greek authorities last month impounded the Iranian-flagged Pegas, with 19 Russian crew members on board. The United States later confiscated the Iranian oil cargo held onboard and plans to send it to the US on another vessel.

The Pegas was later relea­sed, but the seizure inflamed tensions at a delicate time, with Iran and world powers seeking to revive a nuclear deal that Trump abandoned, re-imposing sanctions on Tehran.

Shanghai aims to essentially end its lockdown from Wednesday after relaxing restrictions over the last week. More people have been allowed out of their homes, and more businesses permitted to reopen, though most residents remain largely confined to their housing compounds, with shops mainly limited to deliveries.

Shanghai officials urged continued vigilance, even though the vast majority of its 25 million residents live in areas that are in the lowest-risk “prevention” category. “Wear masks in public, no gathering and keep social distance,” Zhao Dandan, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, told a daily news conference.

Videos on social media showed revellers including many foreigners drinking and dancing in the street in a central area of the city before police interrupted and told them to go home.

Another video showed a group in the street singing an emotional 1985 pop anthem called “Tomorrow will be better”, accompanied by a keyboard player. Police can be seen arriving and allowing the song to finish before asking the people to go home, prompting online praise for the officers’ restraint.

The two-month lockdown of China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city has frustrated and infuriated residents, hundreds of thousands of whom have been quarantined in often crowded central facilities. Many of them struggled to access sufficient food or medical care during the lockdown’s early weeks.

In Beijing, new cases have trended lower for six days, with no fresh infections outside of quarantine areas reported on Friday. The outbreak that began on April 22 is “effectively under control”, a city government spokesman told a news conference.

Starting on Sunday, shopping malls, libraries, museums, theatres and gyms will be allowed to reopen, with limits on numbers of people, in the eight of Beijing’s 16 districts that have seen no community cases for seven consecutive days. Two of the districts will end work-from-home rules, while public transportation will largely resume in three districts including Chaoyang, the city’s largest. Still, restaurant dining remains banned city-wide.

While nationwide case numbers are improving, China’s strict adherence to its “zero-Covid” strategy has devastated the world’s second-largest economy and rattled global supply chains.

Investors have been worried about the lack of a roadmap for exiting what has been a signature policy of President Xi Jinping. The economic impact was evident in data on Friday showing April profits at industrial firms fell an annual 8.5pc, the biggest drop in two years.

China’s approach, which it says is needed to save lives and prevent the health system from being overwhelmed, has been challenged by the hard-to-contain Omicron variant.

In its updates on the annual Watch List, the ICG also urged the EU to pursue plans to hold the first official EU-Pakistan Security Dialogue.

“Repairing ties with Islamabad would help undo damage done by former prime minister Imran Khan’s conspiracy narrative,” recommends the ICG document, which was made available online on Friday night. EU should hold talks with the new government on the renewal of Pakistan’s status under the EU’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which provides substantial trade benefits to Islamabad and is set to expire at the end of 2022, including by moving forward with the European External Action Service’s GSP+ mission that was put on hold amid Pakistan’s political crisis.

The EU should respond positively to the Sharif government’s stated desire to reset the diplomatic ties that the former prime minister’s anti-Western agenda adversely affected.

But Biden, the dealmaker, has remained conspicuous in his absence from the war of words being waged over gun control that has followed the atrocity, preferring to let his party leaders in Congress do the talking for him.

“He can’t just be the ‘eulogis er-in-chief’. He also needs to put the full force of his office into the legislative process,” Peter Ambler, executive director for the gun safety group Giffords, told Politico.

“Otherwise it will seem like he has lost hope.” So far, the 79-year-old Democratic US president has appeared reluctant to drill down into the details of the firearms control debate, a decision that has more to do with pragmatic politics than any personal disinclination.

Gun control groups want US president to be more involved in efforts to frame federal laws to counter gun problem

Biden, a heart-on-sleeve politician and a twice-bereaved father who lost a baby daughter to a car accident and an adult son to cancer, takes his role as consoler-in-chief seriously.

He would like to believe that Americans can bridge their deep division at least to unite in mourning over the 19 children and two teachers who were shot dead by an 18-year-old gunman at their school in Uvalde, Texas, where he will visit Sunday with First Lady Jill Biden.

Political calculus

But if Biden’s focus for the moment is at the emotional end of the register — “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he cried on Tuesday — there is a sanguine political calculation behind the passion.

A former senator with a deference to the separation of powers, he wants Congress to pass a bill that would make psychiatric and criminal background checks for gun buyers more widespread, while banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.

“We have done our part… But, right now, we need the help of Congress. You know, the president has been very clear that it’s time to act, it’s time for Congress to act,” his spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday.

The White House believes Biden inserting himself into the middle of negotiations, at a time when he is very unpopular in the polls, would likely undermine a delicate legislative process.

In the evenly-divided Senate, the 50 Democrats, who support a broad range of actions, will need to win over Republicans to hit the 60-vote threshold required to get any bill signed into law. Biden has so far held back from openly criticizing the Republicans, who are mostly hostile to reform, with many campaigning for the November midterm elections on their support for access to firearms.

‘Bare minimum’

The administration also argues that a federal law would have a more profound impact than an executive order that would not be binding on all US states and can only regulate at the margins.

But several gun control groups say, without questioning the president’s beliefs, that he needs to be more involved.

Igor Volsky, executive director of the organization Guns Down America, tweeted that Biden could create an agency at the White House specifically dedicated to firearms, travel the country to meet affected communities, welcome activists to the Oval Office and personally lobby members of Congress.

“This is ‘literally the bare minimum’ for what a President who ran on gun violence prevention should be doing,” he tweeted.

Meanwhile, activists fear that the United States will fall back into the now-familiar pattern that plays out after every mass shooting: a wave of outrage that subsides before it can be translated into any significant reform.

The Uvalde school massacre may have shocked the nation but it was not enough to stop business as usual on Capitol Hill.

Congress went ahead anyway with its long-planned 10-day break, saying they would pick up the issue after the Memorial Day recess.