Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday officially opened the world’s longest sea-crossing bridge that connects mainland China with Hong Kong and Macau, during a ceremony in the city of Zhuhai.

The $20 billion mega-project includes with a 55 km road bridge that has been in the works for almost nine years, CNN reported.

It’s a key element of China’s plan for a Greater Bay Area covering 56,500 sq.km of southern China, and encompassing 11 cities, including Hong Kong and Macau, that are home to a combined 68 million people.

Proponents of the bridge have said that it will significantly cut journey times between the cities, enabling commuters and tourists to easily move around the region.

However, private car owners in Hong Kong will not be able to cross the bridge without a special permit.

Most drivers will have to park at the Hong Kong port, switching to a shuttle bus or special hire cars once they are through immigration.

Shuttle buses will cost between $8 to $10 for a single trip depending on the time of day.

Built to withstand a magnitude 8 earthquake, a super typhoon and strikes by super-sized cargo vessels, the bridge incorporates 400,000 tonnes of steel — 4.5 times the amount in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, CNN said.

It also includes a 6.7 km submerged tunnel to help it avoid the busy shipping paths over the Pearl River Delta.

The tunnel runs between two artificial islands, each measuring 100,000 sq.metres and situated in relatively shallow waters.

IANS

Authorities in Nigeria have deployed special police forces to northern Kaduna and declared a 24-hour curfew in the state’s capital following communal violence that killed dozens of people.

President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the deployment on Sunday, as the regional government imposed the measure in Kaduna city after violence broke out on its streets.

The clashes followed violence that broke out on Thursday between Muslim and Christian communities in the Kasuwan Magani area of southern Kaduna which left at least 55 people dead.

“The violence in Kaduna … is condemnable. The police have been authorised to do everything possible to restore calm. A Special Intervention Force has been deployed to the flashpoints,” Buhari said on Twitter.

“The federal government and its law enforcement agencies will work with the state government and community leaders to ensure the full restoration of peace and security,” Buhari said in another message.

Local people, who described unrest in both Christian and Muslim areas of the state capital, said troops were also seen on the city’s streets.

A spokesperson for Governor Nasir El-Rufai, in a statement on Facebook, appealed to the city’s residents to “do their best to uphold the peace”.

Ahmad Abdur-Rahman, the state police commissioner, told reporters on Friday that 22 people had been arrested in connection with the clashes.

Kaduna was plunged into communal violence after fighting erupted between Hausa Muslim and Adara Christian youths in Kasuwan Magani’s market following a dispute among wheelbarrow porters.

Two people were said to have been killed in the initial market fracas on Thursday.

The violence then dramatically escalated when Adara youths later attacked Hausa residents, burning homes and killing dozens.

“Most of the killings were done in the second attack which took the Hausa community off guard,” Muhammadu Bala, a Kasuwan Magani resident who lost his home, told AFP news agency over the weekend.

Kaduna state is where Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south and has seen previous bouts of communal violence.

In February, clashes left at least 10 people dead and hundreds of homes and businesses burned. Major bouts of sectarian rioting in 2000 and 2002 killed thousands.

Last year, troops and additional police officers were deployed to the state in response to an outbreak of violence.

Aljazeera

India on Monday described as “deeply regrettable” Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s remarks on Twitter in which he condemned “the new cycle of killings of innocent Kashmiris” in Jammu and Kahsmir.

“The remarks made by Pakistan’s Prime Minister in his tweet today (Monday) are deeply regrettable,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in response to queries from the media.

“Instead of making comments on India’s internal affairs, Pakistan leadership should look inwards and address its own issues,” Kumar said.

“Pakistan would serve the interest of the people of the region by taking credible action against all kind of support to terrorism and terror infrastructure from all territories under its control rather than supporting and glorifying terrorists and terror activities against India and its other neighbours.”

Kumar also said Pakistan’s “deceitful stand on dialogue, while supporting terror and violence, stands exposed to the whole world”.

Khan in a tweet earlier in the day said: “Strongly condemn the new cycle of killings of innocent Kashmiris… by Indian security forces. It is time India realise it must move to resolve the Kashmir dispute through dialogue in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions and the wishes of the Kashmiri people.”

His remarks came after seven civilians were killed in an explosion in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kulgam district on Sunday shortly after a gunfight that had left three militants dead.

Lima Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie, visiting Peru in her capacity as special envoy of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), has met with Venezuelan migrants at a shelter in Lima run by volunteers.

It was her first official activity on Monday as the filmmaker launched her three-day mission to evaluate the needs of the Venezuelan refugees “and observe Peru’s generous response,” the UN High Commissioner of Refugees said in a statement.

Jolie went to working-class San Juan de Lurigancho neighbourhood here to visit the Sin Fronteras (Without Borders) shelter, which opened more than a year ago to provide lodging and food for Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis in their homeland, Efe news reported.

Videos posted on social media showed Jolie chatting with the migrants.

Peru has received 4,56,000 Venezuelans in the past 18 months, second only to Colombia.

(IANS)

Pakistan has reopened the friendship gate at the Afghan border in Chaman, resuming trade activities, Nato supplies and transit trade between the two countries, the media reported on Monday.

Pakistan had closed the border at Chaman and Torkham on Friday in connection with parliamentary elections in Afghanistan that had suspended trade activities in the border town Chaman and Spin Boldak, reports Dawn news.

Hundreds of trucks carrying Nato supplies and transit trade goods crossed into Afghanistan after reopening of the border on Sunday.

Pakistan had closed the border soon after the Kandahar Police chief, the governor and intelligence chief of Kandahar and a cameraman were killed in the firing in the Governor House.

IANS

The UN’s drug strategy of the past 10 years has been a failure, according to a report by the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), which has called for a major rethinking of global policy on illegal narcotics.

The report released on Sunday claimed that UN efforts to eliminate the illegal drug market by 2019 through a “war on drugs” approach has had scant effect on global supply while having negative effects on health, human rights, security and development, CNN reported.

According to the report, drug-related deaths have increased by 145 per cent over the last decade, with more than 71,000 overdose deaths in the US in 2017 alone.

At least 3,940 people were executed for drug offenses around the world over the last 10 years, while drug crackdowns in the Philippines resulted in around 27,000 extrajudicial killings.

The IDPC, a network of 177 national and international NGOs concerned with drug policy and drug abuse, is urging the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs to consider a different approach to narcotics strategy for the next 10 years in the run-up to a March 2019 summit in Vienna, Austria.

“This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs,” said Ann Fordham, the Executive Director of IDPC, in a statement.

“The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising.”

The UN was not immediately available for comment on the report, reports CNN.

In 2017, Mexico, for example, recorded its most murderous year on record due to soaring levels of drug-related violence.

As previously reported by CNN, the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography revealed that there were 31,174 homicides over the course of the year — an increase of 27 per cent over 2016.

IANS

The lawyer of a prominent Sri Lankan student who was accused of plotting to assassinate Australian politicians said he will sue police after prosecutors dropped terrorism charges on Friday.

Mohamed Kamer Nizamdeen, 25, was arrested in August and accused of writing in a notebook plans to kill then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then-Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

Police also alleged the PhD student possessed plans to carry out a “lone wolf” attack on several public places, including the Sydney Opera House, and he appeared to have links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Nizamdeen, a respected business student at the University of New South Wales, spent four weeks in jail after being charged with making documents to facilitate terrorist acts.

He was kept in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison along with convicted murderers.

Prosecutors withdrew the charges in Sydney’s Central Local Court on Friday. He had been released on bail in September after police admitted an expert concluded it could not be proved the plot was in his handwriting.

‘Unforgivable circumstances’
Nizamdeen’s lawyer, Moustafa Keir, told reporters outside court his client would apply for legal costs and sue the police.

“What authorities have done to this young man is absolutely unforgivable,” Kheir said.

“We will be seeking justice for him in the NSW Supreme Court. It’s a terrible experience, as a young man who has done everything right in life, he has gone through supermax jail in unforgivable circumstances.”

After Nizamdeen’s arrest, family members and hundreds of supporters in Sri Lanka held protests urging a swift and fair investigation.

Nizamdeen comes from a prominent Sri Lankan family. His uncle Faiszer Musthapha, the country’s sports minister, insisted his nephew was innocent.

Aljazeera

The seven-storey Roa Roa Hotel, with its clean lines and bright blue decor, was one of the few high-rises in the small Indonesian city of Palu, on Sulawesi Island, offering a dash of style to visitors on a budget.

Just under half the hotel’s 50 rooms were booked on the last Friday of September, many of them by athletes competing in a gliding championship that was taking place nearby. As evening fell, some guests headed out for dinner. Others chose to stay behind and relax.

Then the ground began to rumble. Staff and guests rushed to escape as the magnitude 7.5 quake cracked the hotel’s concrete columns, reducing the building to a pile of twisted steel and rubble.

The Roa Roa, which was completed in 2014, wasn’t the only major building that failed in the quake and the tsunami that followed. The Mercure hotel overlooking the city’s distinctively shaped bay, the Ramayana shopping centre, hospitals, schools and the airport’s control tower were all badly damaged in the disaster, which left more than 2,100 people dead and hundreds missing.

Indonesia is one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, experiencing seismic activity on an almost daily basis and an earthquake of magnitude 5 about once a week on average. Just two months before the Sulawesi disaster, two earthquakes rocked the island of Lombok, killing 500.

‘Wake-up call’
“I see that these earthquakes are our wake-up call,” Raditya Jati, director of disaster risk reduction at Indonesia’s National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), told Al Jazeera.

“This is the right moment for us [to have] structural mitigation and non-structural mitigation. There’s got to be an effort to manage risk.”

It’s not only earthquakes that put Indonesians at risk. The archipelago is vulnerable to a range of other natural disasters including landslides, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, which make it even more complicated to build structures that can survive the impact.

Palu also saw widespread soil liquefaction with entire communities disappearing into the resulting mud.

“[Sulawesi] was a complex disaster,” said Elizabeth Hausler, founder and CEO of Build Change, which works in developing countries, including Indonesia, to help local communities build homes that can better withstand natural disasters.

“We should be able to design a control tower to withstand that, but this is complex science, complex research, and complex engineering. The US, Japan and maybe a few other countries are state of the art on this, but it has not spread throughout the world.”

Over the past 30 years, Indonesia has reported an average of 289 significant natural disasters each year with an average annual death toll of about 8,000 people, according to the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. While falling masonry and collapsed buildings are the main cause of injury and death in an earthquake, it is only recently that Indonesia began to tighten its construction regulations.

Seismic resistance
The first building codes were issued in 1998 and it was only in 2002 that a national building law was passed (it had been a draft since 1964). A national standard on seismic design was established in 2012, along with a revised manual on improving seismic resistance in larger buildings. Indonesia’s earthquake risk map, meanwhile, was updated last year, identifying the areas of the archipelago most at risk of seismic activity.

“An appropriately designed earthquake-resistant building should perform satisfactorily during an earthquake,” said Wael Hassan, an associate professor in structural and earthquake engineering at the University of Alaska.

Like other developing nations in earthquake-prone regions, Hassan said that, in Indonesia, there is a large gap between design practices, construction itself and the enforcement of building regulations. “A good seismic design with poor construction and quality control won’t help resist the earthquake.”

An earthquake prediction map prepared by Indonesia’s BNPB [National Agency for Disaster Management]
Architects admit there is pressure to reduce costs, and changes are made as a result. But they insist there is no compromising safety.

“In my experience, the client asks for the cheapest possible,” said Brahmastyo Puji Pamadyo, who is head of the professional registration department at the Institute of Architects Indonesia in Jakarta.

“But every time we discuss this with the client, the architect, the structural expert and others, safety standards are something that are non-negotiable. So if they want to reduce the budget, what could be bargained over is something like the facade or interior materials – but not like, ‘let’s reduce one column’.”

Earthquake-resistant buildings need to be engineered for horizontal forces (tremors) as well as the vertical forces of a conventional building, to have strong connections between their concrete columns and horizontal beams and to incorporate numerous other features to reduce the risk of outright collapse during an earthquake.

“They might be repairable and they might not be repairable, but they won’t kill people and that’s the most important thing,” said Hassan.

Searching for solutions
The World Bank currently estimates the cost of the disaster in Sulawesi at $500m, including damage totalling $185m for commercial and industrial buildings and $165m for infrastructure.

“The high impact on commercial-industrial buildings could affect operations and recovery in the retail and tourism, education and health sectors,” the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance, known as the AHA Centre, wrote in its most recent update on the situation.

Losses could well be higher because World Bank estimate does not include the costs of equipment, social impact, or effects on business.

“We don’t look for someone to blame,” said Jati. “We’re looking for a solution for the future. If we have adopted this map and we’re aware that there’s the risk of an earthquake, there’s got to be monitoring on how to control it. We’re not talking only about the government, but also the developer, private sector, or anyone who is developing within high-risk area.”

Many Indonesians will not resort to professional architects or engineers when building their own homes, instead doing it themselves using bricks, concrete and tiles.

“They think that using [a] steel core is something luxurious,” IAI’s Pamadyo said. “In many houses, they’re just using bricks. They think that strong material is a strong structure when actually [a strong] structure is a system.”

Build Change has been working in Indonesia since 2005 and provides training in bricklaying and other crucial construction skills, as well as simple manuals to help villagers build safer homes.

Rescue workers and a soldier remove a victim of the September 28 earthquake from the Balaroa neighbourhood of Palu
Hausler said construction standards have improved greatly in recent years, especially in Sumatra where a number of serious quakes have underlined the need for safer homes.

“We have seen things change,” she said. “We see an improvement and people building back better… We also see people going back to building in timber, maybe with a masonry skirt wall. It’s actually much better in an earthquake.”

‘Nervous’
In Sulawesi, nearly 68,500 homes were destroyed in the disaster, but houses are actually subject to less stringent regulations on earthquake resistance than buildings that are considered of greater importance to the community – an airport, hospital or other building where large numbers of people gather – or central to disaster response.

With a badly damaged runway and no functional control tower, Palu’s skies were closed at a time when emergency teams were desperate to get into the city and residents eager to get out.

Collapsed hospitals and damaged clinics made it hard to treat the badly injured – more than 4,600 people in Palu and surrounding districts. Some 45 health facilities were destroyed or damaged in and around Palu, according to the AHA Centre.

Working in the hard-hit area of Sigi, which was also affected by soil liquefaction, MERCY Malaysia found patients fearful of stepping inside the district health facility.

MERCY Malaysia field hospital near a damaged clinic in earthquake-hit central Sulawesi [MERCY Malaysia]
“Like all other buildings that are still standing there are cracks on the walls,” said Dr Shalimar Abdullah, a specialist with MERCY Malaysia’s relief team, which helped set up a field hospital outside.

“Even visitors like us were nervous entering the building, what more the patients who have to spend hours waiting in line.”

Indonesian schools, while usually single-storey, tend to have large windows and an unreinforced gable roof that is vulnerable to collapse in an earthquake. More than 2,700 were damaged in the Sulawesi disaster. Experts say revisions to school design standards are necessary to reinforce the masonry around the windows – making them sturdier – and helping strengthen the entire structure.

The Roa Roa’s architects declined to speak to Al Jazeera. But as rescue teams continued to search the rubble for survivors earlier this month, the hotel’s owner, Denny Liem, appeared on local television.

“The hotel was designed to withstand an earthquake as high as 8 on the Richter scale,” he told the reporter as dust billowed in the air.

Aljazeera

Bhutan’s voters have handed an overwhelming victory to a new party headed by a surgeon in only the third democratic election held by the Himalayan kingdom, according to provisional results.

The country of 800,000 people, wedged between giant neighbours China and India and known for its Gross National Happiness index, has now chosen a different party to rule at each election since the end of absolute monarchy in 2008.

The centre-left Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa (DNT), which was only formed in 2013, won 30 of the 47 national assembly seats in Thursday’s vote, according to the provisional results released by Bhutan’s election commision. Official results are to be announced Friday.

Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) secured the other 17 seats in the runoff contest limited to the two parties who led a first round of voting in September, the AFP news agency reported.

The last ruling party was excluded from the contest.

DNT leader Lotay Tshering, a 50-year-old urology surgeon who trained in Bangladesh and Australia, vowed to work for “nation-building” in the country, which is battling high foreign debt, mainly owed to India, as well as youth employment, rural poverty and criminal gangs.

Both parties had vowed to boost the economy with Tshering’s party using the slogan “Narrowing The Gap”.

The DPT, which won Bhutan’s first election in 2008 but did not get a seat in the 2013 vote, had wanted to accelerate the building of hydropower plants which dominate the economy, with electricity mainly exported to India.

The DNT has been more wary about increasing Bhutan’s debt to pay for more power plants.

Aljazeera

The top security leadership of Afghanistan’s Kandahar has been assassinated in a brazen gun attack claimed by the Taliban, leaving a power vacuum in the crucial province ahead of Saturday’s elections.

General Abdul Raziq, one of Afghanistan’s most powerful security officials, was killed along with Kandahar’s intelligence chief, Abdul Mohmin, when a bodyguard opened fire after a meeting in the southern province, officials said.

Deputy provincial governor Agha Lala Dastageri said Kandahar Governor Zalmai Wesa also died of his wounds after being taken to a local hospital, although security officials in the capital maintained Wesa was wounded but survived.

Citing US military officials, TOLOnews reported that Wesa survived the attack after undergoing surgery, adding that he is in stable condition.

General Scott Miller, the top US commander in Afghanistan who had been at the meeting with Raziq only moments earlier, was also uninjured in the attack.

In their claim of responsibility, the Taliban said they had targeted both Miller and Raziq, who had a fearsome reputation as a ruthless opponent of the armed group.

The killing of Raziq is a major blow to the Afghan government ahead of parliamentary elections on October 20, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt.

Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Kabul, said two US official were also wounded in the attack.

“There was a meeting between the US top commander in Afghanistan Scot Miller and top government representatives in Kandahar. After that meeting, there was gunfire inside the governor’s compound.

“In that gunfire, the intelligence chief, and the top police commander were killed. Two Americans were injured,” Ahelbarra reported.

Taliban claim
The Taliban have managed to infiltrate the most secure government meetings on multiple occasions this year, striking at the heart of its command.

“The brutal police chief of Kandahar has been killed along several other officials,” a Taliban statement said.

Raziq was criticised by human rights groups but highly respected by US officers who saw him as one of Afghanistan’s most effective leaders, largely responsible for keeping Kandahar province under control.

Afghan election candidate killed in Taliban attack
A flamboyant commander, he had survived several attempts on his life over many years and narrowly escaped an attack last year in which five diplomats from the United Arab Emirates were killed in Kandahar.

NATO spokesperson Colonel Knut Peters said Miller, who took command of US and forces and the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan last month, was uninjured but he confirmed that two Americans were wounded in the crossfire.