Kenyan authorities say the economic losses caused by COVID are driving more people to fish illegally. Poaching has tripled since last year and caused the daily catch to drop from an estimated 600 tons to 200 tons, according to Kenya’s Maritime Fisheries Research Institute. As a result, the Coast Guard has been deployed to protect lakes from poachers. Victoria Amunga reports from Naivasha.
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Scammers have long preyed upon the economically vulnerable. But in Indonesia, economic hardship and increased online activity during the COVID pandemic have led to a boom in predatory loan apps, as VOA’s Rendy Wicaksana reports.
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Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Thursday suspended flights to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, over what the state-run carrier alleged was “heavy-handed” interference by the neighboring country’s ruling Taliban.

The suspension came on the same day a Taliban Transport Ministry statement warned it will stop PIA flight operations between Islamabad and the Afghan capital unless the airline reduces ticket prices to the levels that existed before mid-August, when the Islamist group took control of the country.

The statement also ordered Afghan airlines Kam Air to reduce fares on the Kabul-Islamabad route to previous levels or face a halt to their flight operations.

“We have suspended our flights (between Islamabad and Kabul) indefinitely,” PIA spokesman Abdullah Khan told VOA on Thursday.

“The decision has been taken due to an inappropriate behavior by the local (Taliban) administration and inadequate conditions for flight operations,” Khan said.

He explained that PIA was flying charter flights out of Kabul on “purely humanitarian grounds,” and it was the only international airline linking the Afghan capital through Pakistan to the rest of the world.

“Information has been conveyed to PIA and Kam Air private company to reduce the fare on the Kabul-Islamabad route to the level prior to the victory of the Islamic Emirate. If the airlines do not agree to this proposal, their operations on the route will be stopped,” the Taliban said in the statement.

Both PIA and Kam Air operate chartered flights with high fares, citing high insurance costs as the reason for not resuming commercial operations.

PIA had been flying regular commercial flights between Islamabad and Kabul until the Taliban takeover of the country in August, and passengers were being charged up to $200 for a return ticket.

With most international airlines no longer flying to Afghanistan, PIA-chartered flights out of Kabul are charging $1,500 for a one-way ticket to Islamabad.

“The insurance cost of these flights is very high and the charter price cannot be reduced as per the insistence of (Taliban) authorities,” PIA’s Khan said.

PIA officials have complained that their staff in Kabul have faced last-minute changes in regulations and flight permissions and “highly

intimidating behavior” from Taliban commanders. They alleged the airline’s country representative had been held at gunpoint for hours at one point and was freed only after the Pakistan Embassy intervened.

Taliban officials have not yet commented on the allegations leveled by PIA officials.
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First-time claims for U.S. unemployment compensation dropped last week to their lowest point since the coronavirus pandemic swept into the United States more than a year and a half ago, the Labor Department reported Thursday. 

A total of 293,000 jobless workers filed for assistance, down 36,000 from the revised figure of the week before. It was the lowest claims figure since the 256,000 total in mid-March last year, the government said.

The new figure was an indication the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, remains on a general recovery from the worst economic effects of the 19-month coronavirus pandemic, even as President Joe Biden and Washington policy makers voice concerns about other economic warning signs.

Filings for unemployment compensation often have been seen as a current reading of the country’s economic health, but economists are wary of sharply rising consumer prices, consumer goods supply chain issues that have severely slowed the unloading of dozens of container ships off the U.S. Pacific coast, and meager job growth.

Even as the U.S. said last month that its world-leading economy grew by an annualized rate of 6.7% in the April-to-June period, in September it added only a disappointing 194,000 new jobs, down further from the August figure of 235,000. The jobless rate fell to 4.8%, but that was because thousands of workers dropped out of the labor force.

The two-month total of more jobs was down sharply from the more than 2 million combined figure added in June and July.

About 8.4 million workers remain unemployed in the United States. There are 10.4 million available jobs in the country, but the skills of the available workers often do not match what employers want, or the job openings are not where the unemployed live.

Even with the limited job growth, the size of the U.S. economy — nearly $23 trillion — now exceeds its pre-pandemic level as it recovers faster than many economists had predicted during the worst of the business closings more than a year ago.

Policy makers at the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank, have signaled that in November they could start reversing the bank’s pandemic stimulus programs and next year could begin to increase its benchmark interest rate.

How fast the U.S. economic growth continues is unclear. The delta variant of the coronavirus is posing a threat to the recovery even as the number of new cases has been declining in recent weeks, now down to under 100,000 a day from the 150,000 or so that were being recorded. The number of deaths each day also has been dropping somewhat below the 2,000 total of a few weeks ago.

But more than 65 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated — and many are refusing to get inoculated. Thousands of workers have gotten shots in the last three weeks, some under the threat from their employers that they would be fired from their jobs if they did not.

Biden has ordered workers at companies with 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or be tested weekly for the coronavirus. In addition, he is requiring 2.5 million national government workers and contractors who work for the government to get vaccinated if they haven’t already been inoculated, but it will be weeks before the mandates take full effect.

Some anti-vaccination advocates are filing suit to block Biden’s orders while a handful of conservative Republican state governors, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, remain adamantly opposed to vaccination mandates in their states. But some local school districts and businesses are ignoring their directives and imposing the mandates anyway. 

More than two-thirds of U.S. adults have now been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, and overall, 56.6% of the U.S. population of 332 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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France has threatened to retaliate against Britain in yet another post-Brexit dispute, this time over fishing rights in what the British call the English Channel and the French refer to as La Manche, the narrow arm of the Atlantic Ocean separating England’s southern coast from the northern shores of France.

French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said Wednesday retaliation could begin by the end of next week.

France is fuming at the British government’s refusal to allow more French boats to fish in its territorial waters near Britain’s Channel Isles. Britain has issued 325 fishing licenses but declined 125 applications from French fishermen who say they also have been trawling those waters in recent years. Under the terms of the trade deal struck last year by Britain with the European Union as it exited the bloc, they should be granted access too, the fishermen say.

An exasperated French government has threatened a dramatic escalation in the dispute and warned it is considering cutting or reducing electricity supplies to the Channel Islands and the British mainland, which gets 7% of its power from France.

The dispute over French trawlers accessing waters off Britain’s Channel Islands prompted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson earlier this year to dispatch Royal Navy vessels to patrol the area with France responding by sending patrol ships to protect French trawlers.

On Tuesday French Prime Minister Jean Castex said his government was ready to review all bilateral cooperation with Britain, and French President Emmanuel Macron has been pressing the EU to consider wider reprisals.

Speaking in France’s National Assembly Castex called on the EU to get tougher with Britain and said Brussels should “do more.” He added, “We will refer the matter to the arbitration panel of the agreement to lead the British to respect their word [and] we will question all the conditions for the more global implementation of the agreements concluded under the aegis of the European Union, but also, if necessary, the bilateral cooperation that we have with the United Kingdom,” he said.

But Brussels appears reluctant to get deeply involved in the fishing dispute, although officially it is backing Paris and has berated the British.

Dueling  

France’s Europe Minister Clément Beaune has outlined some possible reprisals, including slapping tariffs on British fish exports. “Britons need us to sell their products, including from fishing, they need us for their energy, for their financial services and for their research centres,” Beaune said last week. “All of this gives us pressure points. We have the means to modulate the degree of our cooperation, to reduce it, if Britain does not implement the agreement,” he added.

In the grander scheme of things, a dispute over 125 fishing licenses would seem a minor matter that should not derail relations between European neighbors, but the two governments have been dueling angrily for months and the clash over post-Brexit fishing is adding venom to an already poisonous relationship.

Diplomats on both sides describe Anglo-French relations as “dreadful” and acknowledge they have never been as bad in their professional lifetimes. They say for a comparison you would have to go back to the 1960s. That was when French President Gen. Charles de Gaulle kept slamming the door on British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s efforts to get France’s backing for Britain to join the then-European Community. Macmillan was reduced to tears of frustration after one meeting with De Gaulle.

But at least the two statesmen met face-to-face. The British say they have been trying to arrange sit-down talks for months between Johnson and Macron. Their French counterparts say they doubt a sit-down between the two leaders would accomplish anything.

Other historians cite as a comparison the 1890s when Britain and France were locked in rivalry in a scramble for African colonies. That competition eventually ended when the two signed in 1904 the Entente Cordiale, a set of agreements that marked a significant improvement in Anglo-French relations.

But there are few prospects of a new Entente Cordiale. Some former British diplomats agree there is little point in a Johnson-Macron face-to-face. “The bilateral rows are more numerous and more public than at any time since the major rift over Iraq in 2003. Some level of trust has to be rebuilt before a summit would be worthwhile,” tweeted Peter Rickets, a retired senior diplomat and former chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Post-Brexit friction

Since formally departing the EU more than year ago — and in the years of ill-tempered negotiations between Brussels and London leading up to Brexit — hardly a week has gone by without the British and French sniping at each other, a squabbling that has been amplified by Britain’s notoriously Francophobe tabloid press and France’s equally patriotic media.

In his New Year address in January, Macron assured Britain that France would remain a “friend and ally” despite Brexit, but he slammed the British decision to leave the bloc as one born from “lies and false promises.”

This year alone the two countries have clashed cross-Channel migration with London accusing French authorities of not doing enough to stop migrants and asylum-seekers — more than 10,000 this year so far — crossing La Manche in dinghies and small boats. The French have accused Britain of not having paid money it promised to help French authorities police their coastline to prevent migrants from trying to cross the Channel.

The countries have clashed also over supplies of the COVID vaccine made by AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish company, with the French left fuming at the Johnson government’s frequent readiness to compare the speed of the vaccine rollout earlier in the year in Britain with the much slower inoculation programs in France and the rest of Europe.

British ministers this week accused France of having stolen – earlier this year – five million coronavirus vaccine doses manufactured in Holland but destined for Britain. They say Macron worked with EU chiefs to divert the large batch of Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs to France. British government officials told Britain’s The Sun newspaper that the diversion was “outrageous” and could have cost lives, if Britain had not managed to secure Pfizer vaccines.

And the two governments have bickered over Australia’s decision last month to abandon a $66 billion deal to buy 12 French diesel-electric submarines and to purchase instead at least eight much more sophisticated nuclear-powered attack boats from Britain and America.

France’s defense minister cancelled scheduled talks with her British counterpart as the submarine row reverberated and amid accusations from Paris that Britain had been “opportunistic” and underhanded. Johnson responded blithely by saying in Franglais, “I just think it’s time for some of our dearest friends around the world to prenez un grip [get a grip] about all this and donnez-moi un break [give me a break].”

With next year’s French presidential election looming and the British prime minister under mounting economic pressure, both Macron and Johnson have domestic political reasons to prolong the duel, fear some political commentators. “French President Emmanuel Macron faces a tough and unpredictable election in six months’ time, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is looking for distractions and scapegoats as reality starts to contradict his cheerful bluster about a plucky, triumphant, stand-alone Brexit Britain,” John Lichfield, a former foreign editor of Britain’s Independent newspaper, noted in a commentary for the Politico.eu news site.

“Both countries are obsessed with each other, for different reasons, and often with silly outcomes,” tweeted Jonathan Eyal, an associate director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London defense think tank.

Ten EU member states including Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium have joined the French in signing a joint statement that calls on Britain to abide by the terms of the Brexit trade agreement and to ensure “continuity” for French fishing fleets. But the joint statement also called for a negotiated solution and avoided any mention of retaliation.

Privately, EU officials say they are determined to ensure the Anglo-French fishing dispute does not escalate and are playing down the prospect of the bloc as a whole agreeing to retaliatory action. Their priority is on resolving a bigger dispute between the EU and Britain over Northern Ireland.
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Finance ministers from the Group of 20 economies Wednesday pledged to keep economic stimulus policies in place to ensure a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid ongoing risks, “We will continue to sustain the recovery, avoiding any premature withdrawal of support measures,” according to the official communique released after the G-20 meeting.

While the global recovery has been solid, the statement notes that it has been “highly divergent” among countries.

“We reaffirm our resolve to use all available tools for as long as required to address the adverse consequences of COVID-19, in particular on those most impacted,” the statement continued.

At the same time, officials are closely watching rising prices, the statement said.

The meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors is being held at a time when suppliers are struggling to meet renewed demand and bottlenecks are causing shortages of key materials and pushing prices higher.

Oil prices, notably, have spiked above $80 a barrel for the first time in years.

The World Bank estimates 8.5% of global container shipping is stalled in or around ports, twice as much as in January.

Italy’s central bank chief Ignazio Visco agreed with the International Monetary Fund and others who have said the inflation pressures are mostly the result of transitory factors like the surge in demand.

But he acknowledged that “these may take months before fading away.”

G-20 central bankers are studying the issue to see if there are “more structural factors at work” in the bigger-than-expected inflation spike, and “whether there is some component which starts being transitory but that could become permanent,” Visco told reporters.

Central bankers are walking a fine line between supporting the recovery with easy financial conditions while warding off a permanent increase in inflation.

“Supply chain issues are being felt globally — and finance leaders from around the globe must collaborate to address our shared challenges,” said U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, who chaired the meeting of the world’s richest nations.

The G-20 communique said central banks “will act as needed” to address price stability “while looking through inflation pressures where they are transitory.”

But World Bank President David Malpass warned that some of the price spikes “will not be transitory.”

“It will take time and cooperation of policymakers across the world to sort them out.”

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said the lag in vaccination rates to contain the pandemic in developing nations is contributing to the supply constraints, and “as long as it widens, this risk of interruptions in global supply chains is going to be higher.” 

 
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President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a plan to clear the backlog of container ships off the coast of Southern California by launching 24-hour operations at the port of Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports.
Camera: Roy Kim
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A report marking the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction finds many deaths and economic losses from natural disasters could be averted by investing in preventive risk reduction measures. 

Climate-related disasters have nearly doubled over the past 20 years, with developing countries bearing the brunt of the damage. Though extreme weather events and other emergencies are growing, the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction says little money is being allocated to help countries prevent or reduce risks. 

The report finds $133 billion of official development assistance was allocated for disaster-related aid between 2010 and 2019, but only $5.5 billion was invested in measures to reduce the risks and lessen the impact of disasters. 

For every $100 spent on disaster-related development aid, only 50 cents goes toward protecting development from the impact of disasters, according to the report. 

Ricardo Mena, director of the Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, said even that low-level funding should be better targeted to address the needs of poorer, more vulnerable countries. 

“One would think that countries that are more prone to disasters and that experience higher mortality rates would be the ones where DRR, disaster risk reduction, financing would be allocated the most. But that is unfortunately not the case,” he said. “Insufficient investment is being provided to prevent future disasters in areas where high mortality is likely.” 

Mena said failure to invest in DRR is like buying a nice car that has no brakes.

“Investing in DRR, we know it makes sense and, in terms of cost-benefit, it is tremendously positive,” he said. “So, yes, we are saying it is better to attack the underlying factors of risk, then having to spend more money at a time when disasters actually happen.” 

Academic studies find every dollar invested in disaster risk reduction prevention can result in savings of $3 to $15 in disaster losses. 

Mena is calling for an increase in funding to help poor countries adapt to climate change and implement national strategies for disaster risk reduction. 

 
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