The US has spent more on Afghanistan’s reconstruction than was spent on all Western Europe after World War II

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“All the money that has come to this country has gone to the people in power. The poor people didn’t get anything,” said Hajji Akram, a day laborer in Kabul’s Old City who struggles to feed his family on around $4 a day. “The foreigners are not making things better. They should go.”

It’s not just Afghans who feel this way. The United States’ own inspector general for Afghanistan’s reconstruction offered a blistering critique in a speech in Ohio.

John Sopko pointed out that the U.S. has spent $132 billion on Afghanistan’s reconstruction–more than was spent on Western Europe after World War II.

Another $750 billion has been spent on U.S. military operations, and Washington has pledged $4 billion a year for Afghanistan’s security forces.

The result? “Even after 17 years of U.S. and coalition effort and financial largesse, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest, least educated, and most corrupt countries in the world,” Sopko said. “It is also one of the most violent.”

“After the Taliban we were expecting something good, but instead, day by day, it is getting worse,” said Hamidullah Nasrat who sells imported fabrics in Kabul’s main bazaar. “How is it that a superpower like the United States cannot stop the Taliban? It is a question every Afghan is asking.”

[AP]

650 illegal immigrants detained crossing Arizona border over two days

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U.S. Border Patrol agents in Arizona have been busy, detaining more than 650 illegal immigrants in just two days this week. They say apprehensions in the Yuma Sector are up more than 150 percent compared to the last fiscal year at this time.

Agents in the Yuma Sector said they detained 654 people – most reportedly being family units or unaccompanied minors from Guatemala – on Monday and Tuesday. Officials said the groups of illegal immigrants are not believed to be associated with the large caravan of mostly Central American migrants that have prompted the military deployment.

“Yuma is seeing a huge spike and it’s a concern because they don’t have the facilities to process the cases,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, adding a majority of the people detained are released to local charities or even at bus stations because federal facilities are overwhelmed.

[Fox News]

First wave of the Migrant Caravan reaches US border in Tijuana

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Hundreds of migrants in the caravan traveling from Central America have begun arriving in the northern Mexico border city of Tijuana, setting up a potential confrontation with the American authorities that has been brewing for weeks.

About 800 migrants associated with the caravan have made it to Tijuana so far, according to local officials and advocates, with another 1,500 – 2,000 migrants expected to arrive by the end of Thursday, with many hundreds more showing up throughout the rest of the week. That influx could possibly overwhelm the city’s resources, they said.

Tijuana, long a migratory gateway to the United States, supports a constellation of migrant shelters. Prior to these first arrivals, migrants’ advocates said the shelters were already half full. César Anibal Palencia Chávez, Tijuana’s director of migrant services, said there were already some 2,800 migrants not related to the caravan waiting their turn to apply for asylum at the United States border, plus another 130 Mexican deportees, staying in Tijuana shelters.

After coming under fire from critics who accuse him of stoking fears about the migrant caravan as a threat to get Republicans to the polls for the midterm elections, President Trump has not tweeted about the caravan since the elections on November 6.

Olvin Joel Lobo Reyes, 21, who said he left Honduras because of poverty, hoped that the American authorities would relent and let them in. If that didn’t happen, he had a Plan B: to stay in Mexico and look for work. And even a Plan C: to sneak across the American border with the aid of a smuggler.

“Thanks to God, we made it,” he said. “All will be defined here.”

[New York Times]

Human Rights Watch denounces Angola’s expulsion of 400,000 Congolese

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Global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Angola to halt mass deportations after more than 400 000 migrants mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo fled or were expelled from Angola in just weeks.

Without producing any evidence, the government of President Joao Lourenco claimed that migrants organized and controlled diamond smuggling.

The migrants have accused Angolan security forces of physical and sexual abuse that feed a climate of fear and intimidation. HRW pointed to UN reports that Angolan security forces and allied youth militias from the ethnic Tshokwe group, shot dead at least six Congolese last month during an operation in Lunda North province bordering DRC. (Angola and DRC share a 2,500km land border, the longest in Africa.)

The government has vehemently denied that its security forces committed abuses.

[AFP]

UNICEF convenes key players in sanitation markets in West Africa

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Open defecation is a life-threatening practice, as contact with human waste can lead to diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, polio and diarrhea. Every day, 700 children under five die from diarrhea-related diseases.

One of the key approaches in the UNICEF global strategy for water, sanitation and hygiene is to build sustainable markets for goods and services where supply meets demand. In an effort to support the abandonment of open defecation, and 60 million to gain access to at least basic sanitation services by 2021, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is convening industry, financial institutions, governments and development partners in Abuja, Nigeria to discuss shaping healthy sanitation markets in the West and Central Africa Region.

In Nigeria alone, 46.5 million people practice open defecation, making it the second highest ranked country in the world. Following the rise in demand for toilets, “new accelerators are needed to support local markets to deliver sustainable sanitation solutions at scale,” said Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa.

UNICEF, with a long history of influencing markets and driving product innovation that has increased children’s access to essential commodities, will host a series of regional sanitation industry consultations, the event in Abuja convening product manufacturers, service providers, government officials, financial institutions and development partners to share information, discuss market challenges, communicate perspectives and identify strategic steps to strengthen local markets in West and Central Africa and specifically in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

Similar consultations in other regions such as Eastern & Southern Africa, Southern Asia and Eastern Asia and the Pacific are also in the pipeline.

[UNICEF]

‘Water from air’ quenches thirst in arid region

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In many arid regions of Africa, water can be hard to find, particularly in the dry season.

But a center run by the Samburu Girls Foundation in northern Kenya – which rescues girls facing early marriage and female genital mutilation – has a new high-tech source of it. Since June, the center has used panels that catch water vapor in the air and condense it to supply their drinking water.

Officials at the school say the girls no longer have to travel for water.  “The girls can now have more time to study since there is enough fresh water to go round and there is no need to walk long distances to search for water,” said Lotan Salapei, the foundation’s head of partnerships. Girls formerly trekked up to five kilometers a day in search of clean water during particularly dry periods, sometimes bringing them into contact with members of their former community, Salapei said.

The center, given 40 of the water vapor-condensing panels by the company that builds them, U.S.-based technology company Zero Mass Water, now creates about 400 litres of clean water each day, enough to provide all the drinking water the center needs. The panels provided cost about $1,500 each, foundation officials said.

George Sirro a solar engineer with a Nairobi-based solar equipment company said such devices can be a huge help not only to people but in slowing deforestation that is driving climate change and worsening drought in Kenya. Often people with inadequate water cut trees to boil the water they do find to make it safe, he said, driving deforestation.

[Reuters]

$15M in cash from Qatar bring relief for Gaza

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After months of negotiations, Qatar has delivered $15 million to Gaza, with the intention of paying salaries for Gaza’s civil servants and easing the humanitarian situation. The money, sent by cash in three large suitcases, was brought into Gaza through Israel last Thursday by Qatar’s envoy to Gaza, Mohamed Al Emadi.

Images from Gaza over the weekend showed Palestinians civil servants lining up to receive the cash, with some people fanning $100 bills in their hands. Hamas ordered post offices to remain open on Friday and Saturday — the normal weekend in Gaza — to handle the cash disbursements, a Hamas spokesman told CNN.

The cash transfer comes just a few weeks after Qatar began sending urgently needed fuel into Gaza to power the coastal enclave’s power plant. The fuel supply increased the electricity in Gaza from about four hours a day to eight hours in an effort to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there.

Negotiations for the financial package to Gaza began months earlier, following the Palestinian Authority’s decision to cut salaries of employees in Gaza last year, an Israeli government source with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The sanctions against Gaza were an attempt to put economic pressure on Hamas to relinquish control of the coastal enclave to the Palestinian Authority.

[CNN]

Canadian-led movement aims to seize assets from dictators to remedy refugee crisis

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A Canadian-led international movement seized with staunching the flow of refugees wants to use an untapped source of cash to address the global crisis: the billions languishing in the frozen bank accounts of dictators and despots.

The proposal will be one of the main recommendations of the World Refugee Council, a self-appointed body of two dozen global political figures, academics and civil-society representatives led by former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy. “We’ve put forward a proposition that where there are frozen assets they should be unfrozen through a proper legal process and reallocated to help the victims of the crime and corruption and instability that the bad guys create,” said Axworthy. “It’s a morality play. The bad guys have to pay to help their victims.”

The World Bank estimates the pool of cash to be worth $10 billion to $20 billion per year, Axworthy said in an interview.

The council was established last year by a Canadian think-tank, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, to find new ways to deal with the 21st century’s record-setting migration crisis — the 68.5 million displaced people driven from their homes by war, famine and disaster. The United Nations will turn its attention to solving the problem at a special session later this fall, and the council plans to offer its input, using the weight of the last Canadian foreign minister to chair a Security Council meeting. Axworthy says there are fundamental structural flaws in how the world’s institutions are set up to cope with the unprecedented forced migration of people, and a big one is how the bills are paid. The system is based on charity — the benevolent donations of people, countries and businesses — and is not sustainable, Axworthy said.

Axworthy said the courts in several countries can be used to seize funds that have been frozen there. Canada, the United States and Britain have all passed legislation allowing them to impose sanctions on individual human-rights abusers. These “Magnitsky laws” are named after a Russian tax accountant who died in prison after exposing a massive fraud by state officials there.

Irwin Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister and human-rights lawyer who has championed Magnitsky-style legislation, said in a separate interview that these laws can allow to go beyond freezing funds, because once the assets are seized, there’s no point to returning them to their corrupt owners. “What you want to do is have the proceeds put for the public good,” said Cotler, the founder of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

[Read full CBC article]

New report shows the ozone hole is healing

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A three decades old international treaty to phase out chemicals that deplete the ozone layer protecting our planet from harmful solar radiation is paying off. According to the 2018 Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion released by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, the ozone layer is recovering.

This includes the “hole” over Antarctica where the ozone layer is exceptionally thin, which has been gradually shrinking since the early 2000s and is projected to heal by the 2060s. This year, the hole spanned about 9 million square miles, an area slightly smaller than the entire North American continent.

“Generally, it’s good news,” says Paul Newman, co-chair of the new assessment and chief scientist of earth sciences at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Ozone-depleting gases are decreasing and have continued to fall since the mid-1990s. “The projections into the future are pretty positive as long as parties continue to comply with the Montreal Protocol.”

That’s not to say there aren’t any flies in the ointment, Newman says. Certain ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbon-11 (CFC-11) are decreasing from the atmosphere more slowly than projected. Two independent networks have confirmed an uptick of emissions over eastern Asia since 2012, though their exact origins are still being investigated. That’s troubling because compounds including CFC-11 are banned under the Montreal Protocol and persist in the atmosphere for decades. If someone is releasing them today, they’ll continue to do damage for generations to come.

[Read full Popular Science article]

India suffering “the worst water crisis in its history”

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India is suffering “the worst water crisis in its history,” according to a report by a government policy think tank NITI Aayog. Worsening water shortages – for farmers, households, and industry – threaten the lives and incomes of hundreds of millions of Indians, and the economic growth of the country, the report said.

An estimated 163 million people out of India’s population of 1.3 billion – or more than one in 10 – lack access to clean water close to their home, according to a 2018 report by WaterAid, an international water charity.

The port city of Chennai needs 800 million liters of water a day to meet demand for water, according to official data. At the moment, the government can provide only 675 million liters, according to the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board. Like many Indian cities, Chennai and its suburbs plug that gap by buying water, encouraging residents to dig backyard borewells, or using private wells. Chennai depends on more than 4,000 private water tankers for its everyday water needs.  Each tanker may make up to five trips a day, ferrying water from the outskirts of the city to apartments, hotels, malls, and offices.

“There are neighborhoods that depend on tankers throughout the year with no access to government water pipelines,” said Shekhar Raghavan, director of the charity Rain Centre, which encourages rainwater harvesting and water conservation in urban areas. That, he said, has “given rise to the water mafia, which has total control over who will get how much water in the city.” Tankers identify good groundwater sources in agricultural areas in neighboring districts, pay a small fee to access the water and then sell if for 50 times that cost, Mr. Raghavan said. And what Raghavan called “indiscriminate” – and in many cases unauthorized – extraction of groundwater is creating growing problems as supplies run short.

Raghavan, of the Rain Centre, which has spent two decades looking for alternative and sustainable water for Chennai, said getting water to those who need it will require better rainwater harvesting and storage, and renovation of wells – not just more delivery tankers. “A common sense approach [is] required to avoid day zero,” he said.

Chennai’s highest court has ruled that overuse of rural groundwater is threatening food production and the country’s food security. “The water crisis is worsening and even we are worried about depleting ground water,” admitted Shakespeare Arulanandam, founder of the greater Tamil Nadu packaged drinking water manufacturers association, whose members filed the high court suit. “In the future we can only pray more fervently and hope for good rains to ensure there is enough water to go around. It will be up to the Gods,” he said.

[Thomson Reuters Foundation]