Archives for April 2023

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s year-on-year inflation hit 35.37 percent in March — the highest in nearly five decades — as the government scrambled to meet International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions to unlock a desperately needed bailout.

Month-on-month inflation was 3.72 percent, according to government data released Saturday, while the average inflation rate for the past year was 27.26 percent.

Years of financial mismanagement and political instability have pushed Pakistan’s economy to the brink of collapse, exacerbated by a global energy crisis and devastating floods that submerged a third of the country in 2022.

The country needs billions of dollars of financing to service existing debt, while foreign exchange reserves have dwindled and the rupee is in freefall.

Poor Pakistanis are feeling the brunt of the economic turmoil, and at least 20 people have been killed since the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in crowd crushes at food distribution centres.

“The way inflation is rising, I believe a famine-like situation has been simmering,” said Shahida Wizarat, a Karachi-based analyst.

At least 12 people were killed Friday in a crowd crush in Pakistan’s southern city of Karachi at a factory distributing Ramadan alms.

The South Asian nation — home to more than 220 million — is deep in debt and must enact tough tax reforms and push up utility prices if it hopes to unlock another tranche of a $6.5 billion IMF bailout and avoid defaulting.

Inflation is expected to stay at “elevated” levels, the finance ministry said, “owing to market frictions caused by relative demand and supply gap of essential items, exchange rate depreciation and recent upward adjustment of administered prices of petrol and diesel.”

JALALABAD, Afghanistan: A women-run radio station in Afghanistan’s northeast has been shut down for playing music during the holy month of Ramadan, a Taliban official said Saturday.

Sadai Banowan, which means women’s voice in Dari, is Afghanistan’s only women-run station and started 10 years ago. It has eight staff, six of them female.

Moezuddin Ahmadi, the director for Information and Culture in Badakhshan province, said the station violated the “laws and regulations of the Islamic Emirate” several times by broadcasting songs and music during Ramadan and was shuttered because of the breach.

“If this radio station accepts the policy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and gives a guarantee that it will not repeat such a thing again, we will allow it to operate again,” said Ahmadi.

Station head Najia Sorosh denied there was any violation, saying there was no need for the closure and called it a conspiracy. The Taliban “told us that you have broadcast music. We have not broadcast any kind of music,” she said.

Sorosh said at 11:40 a.m. on Thursday representatives from the Ministry of Information and Culture and the Vice and Virtue Directorate arrived at the station and shut it down. She said station staff have contacted Vice and Virtue but officials there said they do not have any additional information about the closing.

Many journalists lost their jobs after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Media outlets closed over lack of funds or because staff left the country, according to the Afghan Independent Journalists Association.

The Taliban have barred women from most forms of employment and education beyond the sixth grade, including university. There is no official ban on music. During their previous rule in the late 1990s, the Taliban barred most television, radio and newspapers in the country.

TORONTO: Police in Canada have said they recovered the bodies of two more migrants who drowned in the St Lawrence River while attempting to enter the US from Canada illegally, taking the death toll to eight, including members of an Indian family.

The bodies were found on Friday in a marsh on the riverbank near Akwesasne, a community that straddles Quebec, Ontario and New York state.

One other person is still missing.

Police say the deceased, believed to be two families of Indian and Romanian descent, were trying to cross into the United States from Canada. Among them were two children under the age of three, both Canadian citizens.

“Unfortunately, these situations happen. It’s not something new,” Akwesasne Mohawk Police chief Shawn Dulude said of people trying to cross.

“We’ve seen it happen in the past, and hopefully as we move forward, it’s something we can one day eliminate,” the officer was quoted as saying by the Montreal Gazette newspaper.

Akwesasne police are working with Immigration Canada to assist with identifying the victims and notifying the next of kin.

They are also increasing surveillance on the river, it said.

Authorities located the first body in the marsh around 5 p.m. on Thursday during an aerial search conducted at the request of the Canadian Coast Guard.

Throughout the day on Friday, search crews could be seen wading through a marshy area near the local marina with the help of a light airboat. A helicopter also scanned the river. The last two bodies, of a second infant and another woman, were retrieved from the water during the day.

Police recovered two more bodies from the river on Friday, after discovering six bodies and an overturned boat during a missing person search Thursday afternoon, CBC News reported.

They are believed to have been an Indian family and a Romanian family who were attempting to cross into the US, police said, adding, that an Akwesasne resident remains missing.

According to police, there has seen an uptick in human smuggling into the U.S.

Ryan Brissette, a public affairs officer with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, says the agency had seen a “massive uptick in encounters and apprehensions” at the border.

The agency saw more than eight times as many people try to cross from Canada into the U.S. in 2022 compared to previous years, he said.

Many of them — more than 64,000 — came through Quebec or Ontario into New York.

“Comparing this area in the past, this is a significant number,” Brissette said.

“There’s a lot of different reasons as to why this is happening, why folks are coming all of a sudden through the northern border. I think a lot of them think it’s easier, an easy opportunity and they just don’t know the danger that it poses, especially in the winter months,” the officer said.

Akwesasne police say there have been 48 incidents of people trying to cross illegally into Canada or into the United States through the Mohawk territory since January, and most of them have been of Indian or Romanian descent.

In January 2022, the bodies of four Indians, including a baby, were found frozen in Manitoba near the Canada-US border.

In April 2022, six Indian nationals were rescued from a sinking boat in the St.Regis River, which runs through Akwesasne Mohawk Territory.

In April 2022, six Indian nationals were rescued from a sinking boat in the St Regis River, which runs through Akwesasne Mohawk Territory.