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People watch as a plane air drops UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) food aid near the town of Katdalok, in Jonglei State of South Sudan, on July 30, 2018. Photo: Reuters

KATDALOK: The UN World Food Programme has been forced to carry out air drops of food aid across South Sudan as the rainy season makes about 70 percent of the country inaccessible, a regional head of logistics for WFP said on Monday.

In addition to the inaccessible terrain, aid groups also have to contend with being targeted by armed groups operating in South Sudan. Both rebels and government forces have been accused of targeting humanitarian workers and sometimes blocking access to relief and hijacking food and other aid.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in a war initially fought between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir against rebels under former vice president Riek Machar. The violence has spread throughout the country and has often been fought along ethnic lines.

The WFP said that at the beginning of this year, some 7.1 million people were projected to be facing severe food insecurity at the height of the lean season from May to July.

“We are already in the middle of the rainy season and approximately 70 percent of the country is not accessible, and as the result, we have to rely mainly on innovative ways of delivering the cargo,” Adham Effendi, head of logistics for WFP in South Sudan, told Reuters during a trip to Katdalok in Jonglei state, near the border with Ethiopia

“As you can see today in Katdalok, we have to feed approximately 5,000 people and we need to deliver 9 tonnes of cargo, which are approximately three planes loads, which we have to deliver between today and tomorrow,” he said.

Katdalok is in an area under government control.

“Many people are suffering in this county because no roads to connect us with other parts. For example, people go on foot two to three hours from their villages to reach the distribution centre here,” James Kalany Remkhor of the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission staff in Katdalok said.

“The area lacks health facilities. We only have one borehole, and the population are coming here to get clean water, which is very hard for our people.”

It was their first call since Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party emerged victorious from the July 25 vote that has been marred by claims of pre-election rigging and irregularities on the day.

Relations between the nuclear-armed rivals have frayed in the last couple of years, with direct talks stalled amid diplomatic rows and military firing across the Line of Control frontier that divides the disputed region of Kashmir.

Khan, widely seen as Pakistan’s prime minister-in-waiting, is now courting independent candidates and minor parties to form a coalition government in a nation that has fought three wars with India.

In the phone call, Modi “reiterated his vision of peace and development in the entire neighbourhood”, according to a statement by India‘s Ministry of External Affairs.

Khan declared in his victory speech that he wanted to resolve the long-standing territorial dispute over Kashmir, saying “if India comes and takes one step towards us, we will take two”.

Khan’s media team said he had told Modi it was vital both countries focus on pulling millions out of poverty.

The PTI said Khan had also told Modi that issues between the two nations must be resolved through talks. “Wars can breed tragedies instead of facilitating resolution of conflicts,” he said, according to a PTI statement.

“Prime Minister (Modi) expressed hope that democracy will take deeper roots in Pakistan,” theIndian ministry said in a brief statement.

European Union observers say there was uneven playing field during the election as major obstacles were put in the way of a rival party that was led by jailed former premier Nawaz Sharif. The United States has also expressed concern about what it calls electoral “flaws”.

Khan has offered to investigate all claims of irregularities, and promised to build a new Pakistan with an Islamic welfare state that would seek to elevate those mired in poverty.

Some analysts and commentators have said Pakistan’s democracy has been weakened by meddling by the armed forces. Both Khan and the military deny colluding with each other.

Majority-Muslim Pakistan has criticised India in recent years about what it calls New Delhi’s heavy-handed tactics in Kashmir, as well as violence suffered by the Muslim-minority groups inIndia at the hands of Hindu extremists.

It is a scene that would not look out of place in a futuristic sci-fi fantasy, but is instead playing out in Yaounde, the dusty capital of Cameroon with its potholed streets and frequent power outages.

In a country where one in four girls do not even learn to read, Xaviera, one of about 20 young Cameroonians studying at the NextGen centre in Yaounde, is picking up the basics of artificial intelligence.

“I love doing that because the physics that they teach us (at school) is all applied here,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “And it makes me a little bit smarter!”

The centre is the brainchild of Janet Fofang, a pioneering scientist and teacher who aims to train the future tech innovators of her country – with a particular focus on its girls.

It enables young Cameroonians to learn to write code, make robots and acquire advanced computer skills, and is one of a range of initiatives Fofang has set up, including a technological school for 800 pupils.

“We’ve seen technology prove to every one of us that it’s a good method to move away from poverty. And we all know that in these parts, women always remain at the poverty line,” she said.

Nearly one in three girls in Cameroon are married by 18, according to a 2016 study by United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, and this often means they drop out of full-time education early.

In 2016, 95 percent of all children out of school were girls, and UN data for 2010 – the most up to date available – showed women and girls made up 60 percent of Cameroon’s illiterate population.

Studies suggest educating girls has a broader societal benefit that goes well beyond the individual child.

If all girls had a secondary education, child deaths would be cut in half, saving almost 3 million lives across the globe, according to research by the UN cultural agency UNESCO.

Fofang says teaching girls about technology can help break the cycle of “poverty from generation to generation”, but says social attitudes, as well as a lack of opportunities, are still holding them back.

“An overly ambitious girl in Cameroon is not a good one – if you’re too ambitious, society judges you,” she said.

GLASS CEILING

One woman who has not allowed society to hold her back is chemical engineer Persis Mbangsi, one of a tiny minority of Cameroonian women who have broken through the glass ceiling.

She is the only woman among 500 male engineers at the aluminium plant in Cameroon where she works.

Together with other female engineers, Mbangsi established a social media initiative entitled Hidden No More Cameroon to showcase the achievements of women in technology.

It was inspired by the Hollywood film “Hidden Figures”, which tells the story of three African-American female mathematicians in the 1960s who defy the odds by going to work for NASA.

“We have a cultural background that says that a woman sits in the kitchen,” said Mbangsi. “But imagine in a community one person saying … ‘oh, I’ve seen her, she’s a petroleum engineer’.”

Cameroon, a lower-middle income country wedged between Central and West Africa, has natural resources including oil and gas, timber and minerals, yet 40 percent of its 23.7 million people live below the poverty line.

The country needs to increase productivity and unleash the potential of its private sector, the World Bank said in April.

‘IT WORKED!’

After she qualified as an electrical engineer, Fofang worked in one of Yaounde’s poorest schools, where most teachers lacked even basic computer skills.

In 2009 she established her own school, the Tassah Academy, financing it herself with the help of her mother and sister. The school specialises in technology and 60 percent of its students are girls.

Five years later, seeking to take technology to schoolgirls around the country, she launched a scheme to encourage other schools to set up clubs to get girls interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

In August, Xaviera and her team will travel to Mexico to take part in an international competition to devise robots that provide reliable energy power systems – a topic close to their hearts given the frequent power outages in Cameroon.

“It’s really frustrating sometimes. Just as we’re talking there can be … a blackout,” said Xaviera, who wants to keep working on the issue.

In the meantime, robotics is helping her assert herself against the boys in the team and at school, who she says often think they know best.

Xaviera recalled a recent case where she came up with the solution to a problem – forcing them to concede she was right.

“And I was so happy!” she laughed. “My solution, it worked!”

Indonesian and foreign climbers are seen after walking down from Rinjani Mountain at Sembalun village in Lombok Timur, Indonesia, July 29, 2018. Picture taken July 29, 2018. Photo: Antara Foto/Ahmad Subaidi/via Reuters

JAKARTA:  Efforts were underway on Monday to rescue several hundred trekkers stranded on Mount Rinjani on Indonesia‘s Lombok Island, a day after a powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the popular tourist destination, a disaster agency official said.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the disaster mitigation agency spokesman, said on Twitter late on Sunday that out of 820 people on the slopes of the volcano when the quake struck, 246 had been successfully evacuated.

He said 617 of those trekking at the time were foreigners.

Two trails were impassable following the earthquake, he said.

News portal Detik said two helicopters had been deployed to take the trekkers off the mountain and distribute food.

Agung Pramuja, an official of the West Nusa Tenggara Disaster Mitigation Agency, said the death toll from Sunday’s earthquake stood at 16.

“The latest information from the team in the field is that today all the families stuck on Mount Rinjani will be evacuated via the Sembalun trail,” said Asdiyanto, an official at the North Lombok Disaster Mitigation Agency.

“This is being handled by the management team from Mount Rinjani National Park,” said Asdiyanto who, like many Indonesians, uses one name.

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake is considered strong and is capable of causing severe damage.

The Lombok quake struck at 6:47 a.m. (2247 GMT on Saturday) and was only 4.35 miles deep (7 km), a shallow depth that would have amplified its effect.

It was centred 50 km (31 miles) northeast of the city of Mataram, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, but it was also felt strongly to the west on the neighbouring island of Bali, Indonesia’s top tourist destination.

Earthquakes are common in Indonesia, which is located on the seismically active “Ring of Fire” on the rim of the Pacific Ocean.

Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or Pakistan Movement for Justice, emerged as the largest single party in Wednesday’s vote, defeating the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N) party of jailed former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

During the campaign, Sharif said the military had influenced the judiciary to deny him a second term. The military denied this. It has ruled Pakistan for about half the time since the country’s formation in 1947.

“We demand constitution of a judicial commission to probe incidents that took place on July 25,” senior party leader Khawaja Asif told reporters in Lahore. “We will issue a white paper on the election rigging and other incidents.”

“PML-N will not accept these elections as legitimate and we are ready to … start movement along with other parties,” Mushahid Ullah Khan, a senior leader, told reporters.

PTI did better than expected to win 16.86 million votes and beat PML-N, which got nearly 13 million votes. PTI opened coalition talks with at least one smaller party and independent politicians on Saturday.

European Union observers were critical of the political climate in the run-up to the vote, saying that some parties had been disadvantaged. The United States voiced similar concerns.

“Pakistan witnessed the most disputed elections in the country’s history,” Ahsan Iqbal, a senior leader of PML-N and former interior minister, told reporters.

Sharif was taken to hospital in Islamabad on Sunday with a possible heart problem, said a government official and Sharif’s party.

Sharif and his daughter Maryam were arrested on July 13, minutes after they returned from Britain seeking to revitalise their flagging PML-N party ahead of a July 25 election.

An anti-corruption court sentenced him on July 6 to 10 years while his daughter and political heir was sentenced to seven years over the purchase of luxury flats in London in the 1990s.

They were moved to Adiala jail in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.

“After initially refusing to be shifted to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences … Sharif agrees to be treated outside prison after consulting with his personal doctor,” said a PML-N tweet on Sunday night.

“Doctors at Adiala jail have observed changes in the ECG (electrocardiogram) of Nawaz Sharif,” Punjab Chief Minister Hasan Askari Rizvi told Reuters. An ECG checks the heart’s electrical activity.

“We cannot take any risk about Sharif’s health,” Rizvi said.

YANGON: Some 50,000 people in Myanmar evacuated their homes after days of heavy monsoon rains left villages inundated and swept away bridges, while authorities scrambled to deliver aid to the affected regions, authorities and media said on Sunday.

President Win Myint visited the Bago region in central Myanmar to meet displaced residents on Saturday and urged local officials to step up the provision of temporary shelters and aid. An estimated 100,000 people may be affected by the floods.

Parts of Myanmar flood annually at the peak of the monsoon season, causing frequent landslides and widespread damage to farmland and infrastructure in the Southeast Asian nation.

The country saw the worst monsoon flooding in a decade in 2015 when around 100 people reportedly died and over 330,000 were displaced.

The national disaster management committee on Sunday warned residents living near rivers and in low-lying areas to “immediately leave their homes as the water level…has exceeded the danger level,” according to state media on Sunday.

Torrential downpours washed away a section of a 60 metre (200 feet) concrete bridge in the northern Shan state, while rice paddies and roads in the central Kayin state suffered extensive damage, state media reported.

The western state of Rakhine also saw heavy rainfall submerge some roads. Aerial images shared on social media showed muddy brown water covering vast tracts of land.

The Red Cross said on Twitter it was distributing hygiene, kitchen, and shelter gear, posting photos of its volunteers getting people in flood-hit areas to safety in small boats.

The United Nations said in a statement it was following developments with “great concern”.

“The UN in Myanmar is mobilising its partners, resources and capacity and is offering to provide support to the ongoing assistance delivered to the victims of the floods by the government of Myanmar,” said Knut Ostby, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator.

Suban is one of hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims categorised as “doubtful voters”, who will not find their names in a National Register of Citizens (NRC) the northeastern border state of Assam will release on Monday.

“If the government has decided to brand us foreigners what can we do?” said the 60-year-old. “NRC is trying to finish us off. Our people have died here, but we will not leave this place.”

Suban was seated with his wife at their house a few hundred metres from a vast paddy field where, in 1983, scores of people were chased down and killed by machete-armed mobs intent on hounding out Muslim immigrants. He survived by running as hard as he could and hiding behind a bush for days.

Work on the citizens’ register has accelerated under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

With an eye on the 2019 national election, the BJP’s Hindu-first campaign has become more strident, critics say, playing to its core base with divisive programmes such as the citizenship test in Assam, already a tinderbox of ethnic and religious tensions.

Elsewhere in the country’s northern heartland, lynchings of Muslim cattle traders have risen under Modi in the country where many Hindus consider cows sacred, further deepening social divides.

The BJP has denied the lynchings have any connection with it being in power. Modi has at least twice publicly spoken out against cow vigilantes.

MASS GRAVE

Several other survivors of the “Nellie Massacre”, which killed around 2,000 people from more than a dozen villages, gave accounts of burying bodies in a mass grave now partly under water.

They said they hoped the release of the NCR list on Monday would not spark further violence. Security has been tightened across Assam.

The citizenship test is the culmination of years of often violent agitations by Assamese demanding the removal of outsiders they accuse of taking jobs and cornering resources in the state of 33 million, known for its tea estates and oil fields.

“The NRC is extremely important to make the Assamese people feel protected,” said Santanu Bharali, the legal adviser to the BJP chief minister of Assam.

“It’s a moral victory. The ethnic Assamese always maintained the presence of foreigners and this will prove that.”

But the opposition Congress party and rights activists say the government is misusing the register to target even legal Indian Muslim citizens who have traditionally voted for non-BJP parties. The BJP and NRC authorities have repeatedly denied the allegations.

“COMMUNAL POLITICS”

To be recognised as Indian citizens, all residents of Assam had to produce documents proving that they or their families lived in the country before March 24, 1971.

Suban said both he and his father were born in Assam, and showed Reuters a soiled yellow document that showed his father’s name in the list of voters in Assam for 1965, before the cut-off date. The local border police declined to discuss individual cases, but said not all documents furnished by suspected illegal immigrants were valid.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled to India from Bangladesh during its New Delhi-backed war of independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s. Most of them settled in Assam, which has a near-270 km (165-mile) border with Bangladesh.

The migrants included many Hindus, but Modi has issued orders stating that no Hindu or members of other minorities from Pakistan or Bangladesh would be considered an illegal immigrant even if they entered the country without valid documents before 2014.

“BJP’s only aim is to do communal politics, including through the NRC,” Congress lawmaker Ripun Bora said.

The BJP said the NRC was monitored by the country’s top court and there was no question of discriminating on the basis of religion.

Following an outcry from rights groups over possible harassment of Muslims in Assam, Interior Minister Rajnath Singh said that the NRC exercise was being carried out in an impartial and transparent manner.

Singh also reiterated that people finding their names missing from the list could raise objections and appeals, and said that they would not be thrown into detention centres.

Rivals say that as Modi’s government faces disillusionment for failing to deliver on jobs and prosperity, it will step up religious mobilisation across the country.

FEAR IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

The first draft of the NRC, released on December 31, confirmed the citizenship of 19 million people, leading to jubilation for some and heartbreak among others.

The NRC office, however, told the Supreme Court this month that 150,000 people from the first list, a third of them married women, would be dropped from the next one, mainly because they provided false information or gave inadmissible documents.

Political activists in Assam say most of those are Bengali-speaking Muslims. NRC chief Prateek Hajela, whose office has processed 66 million documents and spent nearly $180 million in the whole NRC process, declined comment on the religion of people who would be removed from the register.

“We are doing an exercise that is unprecedented and if there are course corrections which are required to be done, we will need to do that,” said Hajela, who is guarded round-the-clock by a team of police.

Hajela said that most of Assam’s 126,000 so-called doubtful voters, and an estimated 150,000 of their descendants, would be excluded from the NRC in accordance with a court order.

One of them is Nellie farmer Suban’s son Nabi Hussain, 28, who said he has voted in two Indian elections but now fears arrests.

“We are scared,” said Hussain, his wife looking on from their mud-coated bamboo house, their nine-month-old daughter in her arms. “Terrible things happened to our family once, we don’t want a repeat.”

Cambodia’s Prime Minister and President of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) Hun Sen and his wife Bun Rany show their stained fingers at a polling station during a general election in Takhmao, Kandal province, Cambodia, on July 29, 2018. Photo: Reuters

PHNOM PENH: Voters headed to the polls in Cambodia on Sunday in an election Prime Minister Hun Sen is expected to easily win, extending his 30-plus years in power, after the main opposition party was dissolved and the government cracked down on critics.

Hun Sen’s opponents have called for an election boycott, saying that without any real opposition to the government, the poll will be a sham.

Nineteen political parties are running against Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) but none are strongly critical of the prime minister or the government.

Ros Vireak, 34, emerged from a polling booth in Phnom Penh’s city centre, where 12 parliamentary seats are up for grabs, with his finger stained in ink to show that he had voted.

“I don’t see any problem with this election. As a citizen, I fulfilled my obligation to vote,” Ros Vireak said. He declined to say who he voted for.

Voting is not mandatory, but authorities have warned that anyone who boycotts the vote will be seen as a “traitor”.

Critics say the election marks the decimation of democracy in the Southeast Asian country following months of intimidation by the ruling party Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the dissolution last year of the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) by the Supreme Court.

Many CNRP leaders have fled abroad and are living in self-imposed exile and its leader, Kem Sokha, was jailed in September on treason charges.

Just two days before the election, authorities shut the websites of some independent media.

The government insists the vote will be free and fair, but a low voter turnout could undermine its claims to legitimacy.

“No matter how hard you try, the Cambodian People’s Party will still win by a landslide,” CPP spokesman Sok Eysan told reporters in a message aimed at critics.

Exiled former opposition leader Sam Rainsy urged Cambodians in a message on Facebook on Saturday to not be intimidated by Hun Sen.

“Don’t be intimidated by the dictator who wants to force you to go to vote,” Sam Rainsy said in the video, which was viewed more than 415,000 times.

Police were deployed around the city to maintain security at polling stations. There was no sign of unrest.

Canada’s ambassador to Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, Donica Pottie, said on Twitter that Cambodia had entered a “new period of single-party rule”.

“Early am, Election Day in Cambodia. I feel today marks end of the promise of the peace agreement 25+ yrs ago and new period of single-party rule,” she wrote.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, said many voters are grudgingly going to the polls.

“Fear and the need to survive are driving turn-out as much as anything any of the parties had to say during the campaign period,” Robertson told Reuters in an e-mail.

Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who eventually defected from Pol Pot’s murderous regime, is the world’s longest serving prime minister.

The opposition CNRP, appealing to younger voters and those seeking change, narrowly lost the last general election in 2013.

Some 8 million people are registered to vote and election commission officials expect a 60 percent turnout, well below the 70 percent rate of the 2013 general election.

The National Election Committee will announce preliminary results on Sunday night. Official results are expected in mid-August.

An Indonesia paramedic gives treatment to injured people outside of a hospital after an earthquake hit Sembalun Selong village in Lombok Timur, Indonesia, on July 29, 2018. Photo: Antara Foto/Zakir/via Reuters

JAKARTA: A powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the popular tourist destination of Lombok in Indonesia on Sunday, killing three people and damaging many buildings, the country’s disaster mitigation agency said.

The quake hit Lombok island early in the morning when many people were still sleeping. Twelve people were injured and many fled into open fields away from collapsed buildings.

“We jumped out of our beds to avoid anything falling on our heads,” said Jean-Paul Volckaert who was woken by the quake while sleeping in the Puncak Hotel near Senggigi on Lombok.

“I’ve been walking around but so far there is no damage. We were very surprised as the water in the pools was swaying like a wild sea. There were waves in the pools but only for 20 to 30 seconds,” he told Reuters via telephone.

“The people in the villages may have damages. It’s still early morning here.”

The quake was centered 50 km (31 miles) northeast of the city of Mataram on the northern part of Lombok island, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the disaster mitigation agency spokesman, posted on Twitter pictures of houses with collapsed roofs and walls.

“People are gathering on the streets and empty fields to avoid collapsing buildings,” he said.

“The main focus now is evacuation and rescue. Some of the injured are still being treated at clinics.”

Around 43 quakes were recorded after the initial 6.4 magnitude tremor, with the largest aftershock recorded at 5.7 magnitude, said the disaster mitigation agency.

The major quake was felt on the neighboring island of Bali, Indonesia‘s top tourist destination.

The quake may have also impacted Mount Rinjani national park, a popular trekking destination.

“Rinjani mountain climbing is closed temporarily because there are indication of landslide around the mountain,” Nugroho, said in a statement.

Local news Metro TV reported that people were still sleeping when the first quake hit and they quickly fled their houses in panic. Most of the people were still waiting outside their houses in fear of aftershocks, Metro TV said.

The earthquake struck at 6:47 a.m. on Sunday (2247 GMT on Saturday) and was only 4.35 miles deep (7 km), a shallow depth that would have amplified its effect. The second struck less than a hour later

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake is considered strong and is capable of causing severe damage.

The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC), the European quake agency, put the magnitude at 6.5.

The earthquake was on land and did not trigger any waves or tsunami.

Lombok is the next island east of Bali.

Quakes are common in Indonesia, which is located on the seismically active “Ring of Fire” that surrounds the shores of the Pacific Ocean.