Ominous warnings carved on usually submerged boulders along the River Rhine in Germany are peaking out of the water, as a result of the drought currently affecting large parts of Europe.
The reappearance of the so-called ‘hunger stones’ is seen as a warning and reminder of the hardships people faced during former droughts. The stones are also used to indicate bad harvests, interrupted river navigation and consequent famine.
Many such stones can be found along the river banks, with people’s names engraved next to the date of the drought.
Weeks of baking temperatures and scant rainfall have drained water levels in Germany’s largest river, Germany’s commercial artery, causing delays to shipping and pushing freight costs up.
Water levels at the Kaub reference point for the river near Koblenz were at 34 centimetres on Wednesday, close to the record lows during the last comparable drought in 2018.
A satellite image released on Wednesday of the drought-hit Rhine River illustrated the result of weeks of baking temperatures and scant rainfall in Germany.
In the image, taken on Saturday near the city of Dusseldorf, several parched areas and kilometres of exposed riverbank were noticeable around a bend in the commercial artery.
A comparison image taken around the same period in 2021 showed verdant vegetation and higher water levels in the corresponding areas.
Rhine shipping authorities said they expect the situation to improve in the coming days as rain is forecast for the region and water levels could rise “by 50 centimetres or more” by the end of the next week.
Ukraine has urged leaders of South and Southeast Asian countries not to be afraid of Russia and to stop being neutral on the war.
The plea came courtesy of Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba at a virtual press conference attended by reporters in the two regions.
A host of countries in South and Southeast Asia have maintained a neutral stance on the war and steered clear of saying anything that would upset Russia since the conflict began.
But Kuleba asked how could any nation remain neutral when “war crimes have been committed” and when one country “invades the sovereignty” of another.
He insisted the war in Ukraine is not a local conflict as many have tried to suggest.
The foreign minister said plainly that if Russia succeeded in Ukraine, it would set an example for other countries to follow a similar pattern of invasion and this would pose a “great threat to world order”.
He therefore pleaded for support in term of weapons and other aid so Ukraine could defend itself.
In replying to a question about when the war would end, Kuleba said it could end only with the total withdrawal of Russian troops.
At the same time, Ukraine is open to a diplomatic solution with Russia, he added.
An adopted puppy which breached security and darted on to the pitch during a clash between two Chilean Premier League football teams has finally been reunited with its owner.
Matias Gayozo had almost lost all hope of finding his missing Beagle called Toby when he received a call from animal group Huellitas de Collao, which said Toby had been found 20 kilometres away.
During the 20th minute of Sunday’s league clash between Fernandez Vial and Universidad de Concepcion, several football players tried to stop Toby from causing havoc, but they failed.
The little canine made its way to the 12-yard line, stopping to defecate on the goal line. Universidad goalkeeper Manuel García decided to take his gloves off and clean up the mess.
The dog was successfully caught after several minutes of mayhem.
On Monday, Huellitas de Collao gave Toby’s owner the good news that the dog was discovered 20km away from the stadium in Concepcion.
Gayozo told Chilean publication Sabes that the puppy just loves to run, as tens of thousands witnessed on television when the little creature invaded the pitch.
“We were very happy to get him back to Villa Montahue. He is already at home, warm, without going through all the cold that we imagine he would find himself in on the streets,” Gayozo added gleefully.
On August 16, the RCEP and Asean International Arbitration Summit themed “Sharing Opportunities, Creating Prosperity-Innovation and Development of International Arbitration in the light of RCEP” was successfully held in Nanning.
The Forum focuses on the hot issues of international arbitration, and it allows the participants to exchange and discuss the international arbitration experiences and results to promote the high-quality implementation of RCEP and to deepen the economic and trade relations between China and Asean as well as other RCEP member states, facilitating regional connectivity and economic integration.
The Unveiling Ceremony for the Nameplate of the Asean Trial Center of China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC) was held during the Forum, marking the official inauguration of the Center in Nanning.
The working pattern and mechanism of the Trial Center are:
1. If the agreed arbitration clauses set Nanning, Guangxi, as the place of arbitration, CIETAC may hear the case at the Asean Trial Center;
2. If there is no specified place of arbitration in the arbitration clauses, the CIETAC may, upon consultation and agreement of both parties, choose to hear the case at the AseanTrial Center;
3. Depending on the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, if one of the parties is from an Asean country, CIETAC may hear the case in the Asean Trial Center to resolve the dispute upon consultation and agreement of both parties;
4. The Asean Trial Center will provide court facilities for the international arbitration institutions cooperating with CIETAC to hear a case if needed.
Established by CIETAC, the Asean Trial Center is an Asean -oriented institution that provides arbitration services. It will help Guangxi build a regional arbitration hub for RCEP member states, especially the Asean countries, aiming to create a rule-based and internationalized business environment.
It also seeks to provide an expeditious arbitration environment for Chinese and Asean parties’ disputes to encourage the use of arbitration among foreign traders and investors, offering legal measures for China-Asean economic and trade development.
China’s central bank has leveraged its policy toolkit, cutting the interest rates of its medium-term lending facility (MLF) loans and reverse repos by 10 basis points for the second time this year, to further consolidate economic growth.
Specifically, the People’s Bank of China lowered the rate of 400 billion yuan (about 59 billion U.S. dollars) worth of one-year MLF to financial institutions to 2.75 per cent from the 2.85-per cent rate it opted for on the previous occasion.
It also injected 2 billion yuan of funds into the market via seven-day reverse repos at an interest rate of 2 per cent, down from 2.1 per cent.
The MLF tool was introduced in 2014 to help commercial and policy banks maintain liquidity by allowing them to borrow from the central bank using securities as collateral.
A reverse repo is a process in which the central bank purchases securities from commercial banks through bidding, with an agreement to sell them back in the future.
Analysts saw the move as the central bank’s quick response to changes in economic and financial situations, which will further lower financing costs for the real economy, expand domestic demand, and consolidate the momentum of economic recovery.
The central bank’s data showed that the M2, a broad measure of money supply that covers cash in circulation and all deposits, increased 12 per cent year on year to 257.81 trillion yuan at the end of last month.
Newly added social financing, a measurement of funds that individuals and non-financial firms receive from the financial system, came in at 756.1 billion yuan last month, down 319.1 billion yuan from the same period last year.
The July data suggested that while the money supply was sufficient, the financing demand from the real economy was still weak, said Zhou Maohua, an analyst with the China Everbright Bank.
Zhong Zhengsheng, chief economist with Pingan Securities, said lowering policy interest rates is the most direct way to drive down financing costs.
Zhong said more convenient financing for companies that contribute to the new drivers of the economy, as well as decreased financing costs, will be conducive to structural optimization and high-quality development of China’s economy.
Chinese leadership emphasized at a high-profile meeting in late July that the monetary policy should help maintain a proper and adequate liquidity supply, increase credit support for enterprises, and make good use of new loans from policy banks, as well as their funding for infrastructure projects.
The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said Friday that more efforts will be made to provide more credit to the real economy, including infrastructure and manufacturing, to improve services for new urban residents and bolster support for education, healthcare and elderly care.
A senior UN official arrived in Myanmar on a rare visit on Tuesday that comes amid domestic political turmoil and fraying ties between Myanmar and its Southeast Asian neighbours.
Noeleen Heyzer, the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy to Myanmar, is visiting after “extensive consultations with actors from across the political spectrum, civil society as well as communities affected by the ongoing conflict,” the United Nations said in a statement dated Monday.
Referring to a U.N. Security Council call for an immediate cessation of all forms of violence and unimpeded humanitarian access, the United Nations said Heyzer would “focus on addressing the deteriorating situation and immediate concerns.” It gave no more details of her visit.
Myanmar has been in chaos since the military overthrew an elected government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi early last year and launched a bloody crackdown on protests that followed.
The junta has not allowed an envoy from the ASEAN regional bloc to meet her.
A Myanmar court on Monday sentenced Suu Kyi to six years in prison after finding her guilty in four corruption cases.
The 77-year-old veteran leader of Myanmar’s opposition to military rule has been charged with at least 18 offences ranging from graft to election violations, carrying a combined maximum jail term of nearly 190 years.
Suu Kyi has called the accusations absurd and denies all charges against her. She is being held in solitary confinement and had already been jailed for 11 years in other cases.
Mexico will ask both a German and a US company to help rescue 10 miners who have been trapped in a coal mine for nearly two weeks, officials said on Tuesday, as families urged quicker action to save the trapped men.
The Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond when asked which two companies it contacted.
The miners became confined underground at the Pinabete mine in the northern border state of Coahuila on August 3 when a tunnel wall collapsed, triggering flooding throughout the mine.
Water surged more than halfway up the 60-meter (197-foot) mine shafts, and officials have struggled to extract enough water and debris such as piping and wooden planks to be able to safely send rescue teams into the mine.
Laura Velazquez, head of Mexico’s civil protection agency, said Mexican officials, including the Foreign Ministry, would speak with the companies on Tuesday.
Engineers meanwhile are pumping water out of Pinabete while working on sealing off the nearby Conchas Norte mine – where water that has accumulated for more than 25 years is now rushing into Pinabete due to the underground tunnel collapse.
Relatives of the trapped miners said their frustration has mounted with each delay and blamed the government for not acting faster.
Darkness and debris impede rescue efforts at the flooded Mexico mine.
A team of biomedical engineers in Australia have developed a smart textile which incorporates artificial ‘muscles’, in the hopes that it will revolutionise the future of soft robotics and wearable exoskeletons.
The team demonstrated the shape-morphing flexibility of the material to Reuters, with models of a butterfly and flower made from the textile, performing complex motions in their lab.
Team leader Thanh Nho Do is thinking bigger and believes that he and his team could even use the material to create a human smart suit.
“Like the Iron Man suit or Spiderman suit,” said Do, who is also Director of the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics Lab. “It’s very flexible and has a very high conformability to the bodies.”
The programmable smart textiles were created by weaving or knitting fabric together with artificial muscle fibres. The resultant material has the ability to shape-shift and can lift objects up to 192 times their weight, according to the team in their academic paper published in June. The ‘muscle fibres’ were constructed from long silicon tubes filled with fluid, and then manipulated hydraulically using a syringe, as detailed in the academic paper.
Do say that the material has a wide range of potential applications.
“We can use our technology to make a soft wearable device for human augmentation or we can support disabled people to walk again,” he said.
One potential use is in compression garments. The team showcased prototypes pulsing over a finger and forearm, which could provide massage therapy to relieve pain or improve blood circulation.
Another potential use is through the creation of shape-shifting robots to assist search-and-rescue teams in accessing hard-to-reach locations, said the bioengineers.
The team illustrated this by curling the material around a much larger screw, lifting it out of a narrow tube with ease.
The soft material presents an improvement upon many existing technologies in this field, which are often rigid or heavy and limit usability in changing environments like a bushfire or collapsed building, according to the team’s research.
The team is also working on creating a non-invasive device that can wrap around the heart and assist it to pump blood around the body, to help people with cardiovascular problems, thanks to funding from the National Heart Foundation of Australia.
“The way our artificial (muscle) works is similar to the human’s biological motions… we can control the muscle have elongation or expansion or contraction on demand,” explained Do.
However, the team currently has to manually control the hydraulic pressure through syringe outlets connected to the material. They envision that in around two years the material can be controlled wirelessly and it will be ready for commercialisation.
Apec officials are meeting now against a backdrop of economic and geopolitical challenges to collaborate and focus on building a more resilient and inclusive future for the region.
The third Apec technical meeting cluster is now underway in Chiang Mai, a city around 700 kilometres north of Bangkok, involving close to 2,000 policymakers, officials and private-sector representatives from 21 economies.
The meeting cluster will culminate in a two-day plenary session of senior officials on 30–31 August, chaired by Thani Thongphakdi, Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs of Thailand and 2022 Chair of the Apec Senior Officials. This will be the last meeting of the year before Apec Senior Officials prepare for Leaders’ Week on 14–19 November.
The International Monetary Fund projects the world economy to decelerate to 3.4 per cent before slowing further to a 2.9 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) rate in 2023. The same scenario is expected in APEC, where a recent report projected the region’s economy to grow slower than expected at 2.5 per cent this year and 3.4 per cent next year.
“It is a particularly challenging time to be a policymaker. We need to keep our focus on building a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable future because this is the key to future-proofing the region from crises,” said Rebecca Sta Maria, Executive Director of the Apec Secretariat.
“The intensified uncertainty brought about by recent events brings along the risk of distrust in globalization, multilateral institutions and in each other,” she said.
“While there’s no denying that disagreements have spilled into multilateral forums and are of significance, they should not keep Apec member economies from banding together to prevent something as existentially damning, as climate change, which will not be fixed, or even managed, by a world divided into distinct blocs.”
Ahead of the technical meeting cluster and Apec Economic Leaders’ Week in November, Sta Maria reiterated that organizations like Apec will play a big part in building back the world’s economy by strengthening policy coordination and regional cooperation when adopting economic resiliency policies as well as ensuring transparency and predictability of trade.
Several ministerial meetings and high-level meetings will also take place alongside the technical meeting cluster:
The Apec Tourism Ministerial Meeting will be held in Bangkok on 19 August and will be chaired by Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn, Thailand’s Minister of Tourism and Sports. Reflecting on the severe impact of the pandemic on the travel and tourism industry, the meeting will focus on rebuilding and rethinking tourism for the future, making it more inclusive and sustainable and paying more attention to the domestic well-being of tourism destinations.
The Apec Meeting of Ministers Responsible for Forestry will take place in Chiang Mai on 24 August. It will focus on tackling forest-related issues such as combatting illegal logging and associated trade, promoting trade in illegally harvested forest products, strengthening forestry cooperation in the region as well as advancing work on sustainable forest management, conservation and restoration.
The Apec High-Level Meeting on Health and the Economy will be held in Bangkok on 25–26 August. It will focus on bolstering economies’ pandemic preparedness and response to future health threats holistically—through investments in global health security—while fostering the application of new technology and continuing the sharing of experiences and best practices.
The Food Security Ministerial Meeting will be held virtually on 26 August and chaired by Chalermchai Sri-on, Thailand’s Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives. Countering a food crisis and ensuring the region’s food security is also high on the agenda for Apec. Last year, ministers agreed on a 10-year food security roadmap. This year, Thailand will lead discussions to implement the roadmap and build resiliency against the risk of international food trade disruption.
“In today’s challenging environment,” Sta Maria continued, “there is the role for multilateral institutions like Apec to help us confront these challenges in a coordinated, integrated and cohesive manner, and ensure that our work ultimately work brings benefits to people in the region.”
“We will continue to emphasize effective partnerships and cooperation across our region, including between the public and private sectors, specifically, the Apec Business Advisory Council, and other regional fora and key stakeholders, including the youth of our region,” she concluded.
The Taliban marked a year in power on Monday with celebrations by the group’s fighters and leaders as Afghanistan struggles with rising poverty, drought, malnutrition and fading hope among women that they will have a decisive role in the country’s future.
Some people fired celebratory gunshots in the air in Kabul and Taliban fighters gathered, waving the group’s black and white flag to mark a year since they marched into the capital after a stunning series of battlefield victories.
A few hundred people, including supporters, soldiers, and officials gathered at the square in front of the U.S. Embassy to mark the day.
In a ceremony attended by Taliban government ministers, acting foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said their rule had brought security where the United States had failed and said the group wanted positive relationships with the world.
The country is physically safer than it was when the hardline Islamist movement was fighting against U.S.-led foreign forces and their Afghan allies, although a local offshoot of the Islamic State has carried out several attacks.
Yet that relative security cannot mask the scale of the challenge the Taliban face in setting Afghanistan on a path of economic growth and stability. There are huge pressures on the economy, caused in large part by the country’s isolation as foreign governments refuse to recognise its rulers.
Development aid upon which the country relied so heavily has been cut as the international community demands that the Taliban respect the rights of Afghans, particularly girls and women whose access to work and education has been curtailed.
The Taliban is demanding that $9 billion in central bank reserves held overseas to be returned, but talks with the United States face hurdles, including the U.S. demands that a Taliban leader subject to sanctions step down from his position as second in command at the bank.
The Taliban refuse to cede to these demands, saying that they respect all Afghans’ rights within the framework of their interpretation of Islamic law.
And until there is a major shift in either side’s position, there is no immediate fix in sight for spiralling prices, rising joblessness and hunger that would get worse as winter sets in.
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