August 24, 2023

CAIRO (AP) — About 500 children have died from hunger in Sudan — including two dozen babies in a government-run orphanage in the capital of Khartoum — since fighting erupted in the East African country in April, a leading aid group said Tuesday. Save the Children also said that at least 31,000 children lack access to treatment for malnutrition and related illnesses since the charity was forced to close 57 of its nutrition centers in Sudan. Sudan was plunged into chaos after monthslong tensions between the military and a rival paramilitary force exploded into open fighting on April 15. The conflict has turned Khartoum and other urban areas into battlefields. Many residents live without water and electricity, and the country’s health care system has nearly collapsed. “Never did we think we would see children dying from hunger in such numbers, but this is now the reality in Sudan,” said Arif Noor, Save the Children’s director for Sudan. “We are seeing children dying from entirely preventable hunger.” The violence in Sudan is estimated to have killed at least 4,000 people, according to Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office. Activists and doctors on the ground, however, say the death toll is likely far higher. Mamadou Dian Balde, the U.N. East Africa regional refugee chief and coordinator for Sudan, told a U.N. press conference that 947,000 people have fled Sudan including South Sudanese, Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees who had sought shelter there — and 3.6 million Sudanese are displaced within the country. Speaking from Sudan’s White Nile state, Balde praised neighboring Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Central African Republic for opening their borders to those fleeing the fighting. But he expressed concern that recently “we started seeing and witnessing bureaucratic barriers as well as challenges into admission.” Balde urged all countries to keep their doors open. He also urged donors to give generously to the $566 million appeal for Sudanese refugees, which is only 35% funded. Save the Children said that between between May and July, at least 316 children, mostly under 5 years of age, died of malnutrition or associated illnesses in the southern While Nile province. More than 2,400 more children have admitted to hospitals in the past eight months with severe acute malnutrition — the deadliest form of malnutrition, it added. In the eastern Qadarif province, at least 132 children died from malnutrition in the government-run Children’s Hospital between April and July. And at least 50 children, including two dozen babies, died of starvation or related illnesses in an orphanage in Khartoum in the first six weeks of the conflict as the fighting prevented Save the Children staff from accessing the building to care for them, the charity said. Save the Children also warned that special food supplies for treating malnutrition were running critically low at 108 facilities it still operates across Sudan. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the U.N.-led agency responsible for famine classifications, said Sudan’s conflict and economic decline have driven about 20.3 million people — or more than 42% of the country’s population of over 46 million people — into high levels of acute food insecurity. Of them, about 6.3 million people live in areas that are a step away from an official famine classification, according to the agency. Meanwhile, clashes have raged this week around a military camp south of Khartoum as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have attempted to seize the crucial facility, the warring sides reported. Fierce battels were reported last week in Nyala, the provincial capital of South Darfur. The sprawling Darfur region saw some of the worst bouts of violence in the conflict with the fighting turning into ethnic clashes. Source:https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-rsf-children-hunger-a8e7f5130cbce5c860104fb579bd585e

Four people including a gunman were killed in a shooting at a bikers’ bar in California’s Orange County, the local sheriff’s office said on Wednesday. Six more people were in a hospital after the shooter opened fired at the Cook’s Corner bar in Trabuco Canyon, the Orange County Sheriff said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. CBS Los Angeles, which first reported the shooting at the historic bikers’ bar, initially reported five people were killed. It said a retired law enforcement officer opened fired at the bar and cited KCAL News reporting from sources that the shooter had been shot by deputies. The Sheriff’s office has not released any details about the shooter or how he was killed. The California governor’s office said it was monitoring the shooting. Source:https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/mass-shooting-at-a-bikers-bar-in-uss-california-police-4324464

BATTAGRAM/SHANGLA: It was a routine morning for students who were en route to school on a chairlift. But as fate would have it, they soon found themselves suspended in mid-air, thousands of feet above the ground after two of the three wires holding the chairlift snapped. “As a result of the sudden jerk which came with a big bang, we piled on each other in the lopsided trolley, which was swaying due to strong gusts of wind,” the survivors told Dawn a day after they were rescued in a 14-hour-long operation. The passengers — including six students — held on to the rickety trolley’s hooks and supporting pipes — their lives dangling by a solitary steel wire. As if the gusts were not enough to terrify them, the wind pressure on the trolley scared them to death. “All hope was lost; with every passing moment,” one of the survivors told Dawn. However, they got their hopes up again after an army chopper started hovering over the chairlift in an attempt to rescue them. Before the aerial operation was called off at night, 13-year-old Irfan was the only one rescued by a helicopter. Irfan said he did not see any other option but death before he was rescued. As he was being pulled out of the gondola, his parents and the rest of the family gathered at the site anxiously awaited his return. Survivors, families recall how panic eventually gave way to relief; cable car owner, operator arrested Another student, Niaz Mohammad, said army officials threw down a rope after rescuing Irfan. “I tied the rope around myself, but when I was pulled up, the rope got stuck with another rope on top of the cable car and they had to abort the attempt,” he said. “After several attempts, when the helicopter flew back, I thought it was impossible to rescue us,” Attaullah, 16, told Dawn. Gulfraz, 20, who was earlier mistakenly identified as a teacher, said that at nightfall, their hopes also faded. “When the helicopters left and darkness fell in front of our eyes, we started losing hope; if we could not be rescued in daylight then night was surely going to make things worse,” the survivor told Dawn. Heroic operation Enter Sahib Khan and his Koka and Engineering Company. They were called in to rescue the stranded passengers after the aerial operation did not get the job done. The two private rescuers and their team from Bisham Seror, along with zipline operators from Naran, rescued the passengers in a daring operation, widely hailed by locals. Sahib Khan told Dawn at his residence that he was asking the local authorities to spearhead the efforts to save the students, but his requests were ignored at first. Mr Khan claimed that the army had succeeded in rescuing one student, but after that it became impossible for them to overcome the situation, due to poor visibility. After nightfall, he and his team were allowed to initiate the operation with ground support provided by the army, Rescue 1122, police and locals. He claimed that locals and the administration started to back him after he rescued the first person. Soon, other rescues followed, and eventually everyone was safely by midnight. Niaz Mohammad was rescued at about 11pm. His teary-eyed family and mother hugged him and thanked God for the rescue. His father, Umer Zaib, said they had lost all hope of their son’s safe recovery, but rescue efforts thankfully bore fruit, ending their hours-long ordeal. Voice of reason As these teenagers were facing death, Sher Nawaz, who was on his way to Abbottabad, became a voice of reason. He said the chairlift was already ferrying students when he reached there and he got on board on the third trip. “After the rope snapped, the students got scared and were screaming… I calmed them down and told them to be patient and have some hope… whatever fate has held in store for them will come to them,” he said as he related the scenes inside the trolley to Dawn. “Some of the children were so frustrated, they were considering jumping down, but the elder passengers gave us confidence,” 15-year-old Rizwan Ullah told AFP. Gulfaraz said they were prepared to die after the ropes snapped. “I don’t have words to explain what we faced inside the hanging cable car,” he said. On the ground, the families’ terror was palpable. 13-year-old Irfan’s father said that shortly after his son left for school, he received word about the accident. “I reached there with a heavy heart, unaware of my son’s presence in the cable car… soon someone told me that my son is also stranded.” “My wife and other kids rushed to the scene and their eyes remained glue to the cable car till the rescue operation came to an end in the night,” he said. “Death is less painful than looking at your teenage son dangling thousands of feet above the ground, in a broken trolley,” Umraiz told Dawn. Two arrested Meanwhile, Allai police arrested cable car owner Malik Gulzarin and operator Ejaz after a loding a case over the incident. The FIR said that a substandard rope had been used, with no alternatives available, which endangered the lives of the passengers. The report also mentioned that the chairlift operators had been instructed beforehand to provide a fitness certificate for the cable to a nearby police station, but they neglected to do so. Separately, AC Allai Muhammad Jawad told Dawn that he formed an inspection committee to inspect such chairlifts. SOURCE:https://www.dawn.com/news/1771862/hanging-by-a-thread-and-living-to-tell-the-tale

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary group chief who led a failed munity against Moscow, is presumed dead after being named among passengers on a private jet that crashed into a field near Moscow with no survivors. The 62-year-old warlord, who challenged Vladimir Putin’s authority in a 23 June uprising, was listed on the manifest, or passenger list, of an Embraer Legacy business jet that spiralled out of the sky in the Tver region, about 96km (60 miles) north of the capital, according to civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia. Dmitry Utkin, the co-founder of Wagner and a former Russian military intelligence special forces officer, was also on board, it said. The other passengers onboard were Sergey Propustin, Evgeniy Makaryan, Alexander Totmin, Valeriy Chekalov and Nikolay Matuseev, according to Rosaviatsia. The regulator also said pilot Aleksei Levshin, co-pilot Rustam Karimov and flight attendant Kristina Raspopova were onboard. Flightradar24 online tracker showed that the Embraer Legacy 600 (plane number RA-02795) carrying Prigozhin had dropped off the radar at 1811 local time (1511 GMT). Seven passengers and three crew were said to be aboard the aircraft, which was flying from Moscow to St Petersburg. The bodies of all 10 people travelling on board the crashed plane have been recovered from the site, and the search operation has been completed, says the Interfax news agency, quoting emergency services. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but video circulated on the Baza Telegram channel, which is closely associated with Russian security services, showing a plane spiralling into a nosedive. Flight tracking data gave no indication of a distress call or inflight emergency, and the aircraft was still climbing when it disappeared from the radar. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly claimed a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane, without citing evidence. British security forces believe Russia’s FSB intelligence agency shot down the jet on the orders of Vladimir Putin, The Telegraph reports. Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with Russia’s beleaguered military, and his aborted uprising, would give Mr Putin’s state apparatus plenty of motive for revenge. The mutiny, which ended when a deal was stuck between Prigozhin and the Kremlin, marked the most significant threat to Putin’s authority during his decades in power. As news of the crash broke, the president was attending a concert commemorating the 1943 Battle of Kursk and hailing the troops of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Mikhail Podolyak, a chief adviser to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, said Prigozhin’s reported demise showed “it is obvious that Putin does not forgive anyone for his own bestial terror”. Prigozhin’s deal to end the uprising was a “death warrant”, he added. The UK Foreign Office said it was “monitoring” the situation closely, while US president Joe Biden said he was not surprised by the reports, adding that “not much happens” in Russia that Putin is not behind. A Telegram channel linked to Wagner said Prigozhin is dead. The Grey Zone account said he was “killed as a result of actions by traitors of Russia”. In an image posted by another pro-Wagner social media account showing burning wreckage, a partial tail number matching the jet could be seen. Prigozhin has reportedly used the plane before, including shortly after the aborted armed uprising. A second private jet linked to Prigozhin, which also appeared to be heading to St Petersburg, turned back to Moscow and landed, flight tracking data showed. Once a low-profile businessman, Prigozhin profited from Mr Putin’s patronage, earning the nickname “Putin’s chef”. He amassed a fortune from state contracts and later went on to establish a paramilitary army that became an important extension of Russian power abroad. Moscow would repeatedly deny any official link to the Wagner group, founded in 2014. Fighters for the private military company were deployed in support of Moscow’s allies in countries including Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic. The United States has sanctioned it and accused it of atrocities, which Prigozhin had denied. Prigozhin had acknowledged that he founded and financed the Internet Research Agency, a company Washington says is a “troll farm” which meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. In November 2022 he admitted that he had interfered in US elections and would do so again. He soared in prominence after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where his fighters – including thousands of convicts he recruited from prison – were at the vanguard of the Russian assault on the eastern city of Bakhmut. That battle became the longest and bloodiest battle of the war, and gave Prigozhin a boost in power among Kremlin circles and among the Russian military elite. It would also have made him plenty of enemies. Prigozhin used social media to trumpet Wagner’s successes and wage a months-long feud with the military establishment, accusing it of incompetence and openly questioning decisions made on the Ukrainian frontline. In June, Prigozhin led the mutiny in which Wagner fighters took control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shot down a number of military helicopters, killing their pilots, as they advanced towards Moscow. In a television address as Prigozhin’s forces marched twowrads Moscow, Mr Putin called it an act of treachery that would meet with a harsh response. The deal ended the march would be made hours later. As part of that deal, Prigozhin and some of his fighters would leave for Belarus and a criminal case against him for armed mutiny would be dropped. But confusion has surrounded the implementation of the deal and the future of Prigozhin. The Kremlin said he attended a meeting with Mr Putin five days after the mutiny ended. Then, on 5 July, Russian state TV said an investigation against him was still being pursued, and broadcast footage showing cash, passports, weapons and other items it said were seized during a raid on one of his properties. In late July, Prigozhin was photographed in St Petersburg during a Russia-Africa summit in the city. Prigozhin appears to have been able to move relatively freely, a surprise given the anger Mr Putin showed while the mutiny was taking