World

LISBON — A major UN conference on how to restore the faltering health of global oceans kicked off in Lisbon this week with a flurry of promises to expand marine protected areas, ban deep-sea mining, and combat illegal fishing.

UN chief Antonio Guterres set the tone on Monday for the five-day meet by warning that the world’s oceans are in deep crisis.

“Today we face what I would call an ocean emergency,” he told thousands of policymakers, experts and advocates, detailing how seas have been hammered by climate change and pollution.

“The ocean is not a rubbish dump. It is not a source on infinite plunder. It is a fragile system on which we all depend.”

Surangel Whipps, Jr., president of the Pacific island state of Palau, asked world leaders to join a moratorium on extracting rare Earth metals from the ocean floor.

“Deep sea mining compromises the integrity of our ocean habitat and should be discouraged to the greatest extent possible,” he said, flanked by Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

Indigenous leader Debbie Ngawera-Packer, a member of New Zealand’s parliament, told conference participants she had submitted a bill calling for such a moratorium in her country’s waters.

Companies seeking to mine so-called polymetallic nodules containing manganese, cobalt and nickel say they are a greener source of minerals needed to build electric vehicle batteries.

Scientists counter that seabed ecosystems at depth are fragile, and could take decades or longer to heal once disrupted.

“Mining, wherever it occurs, is well known to have environmental costs,” said former US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chief scientist Sylvia Earle.

‘No-take’ zones 

“On the land at least we can monitor, see and fix problems, and minimise the damage. Six thousand metres beneath the surface, who’s watching?”

A so-called high ambition coalition, meanwhile — backing a proposal to set aside 30 per cent of the planet’s land and ocean surface by 2030 as protected areas — grew to 100 nations, UK minister of state Zac Goldsmith announced in a side event.

Currently, less than 10 per cent of global oceans are protected.

The “30 X 30” plan could be the cornerstone of a treaty slated for completion at a UN biodiversity summit to be held in December in Montreal.

Nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in government, development bank and philanthropic funding to lock-in protection of marine and land ecosystems in Colombia, announced last week, could be the template for other countries.

“Working with scientists, we decided to get 30 per cent of our maritime area as protected, and we did it,” outgoing Colombian President Ivan Duque told AFP.

More than half of newly protected marine areas will be “no-take” zones off-limits to fishing, mining, drilling or other extractive activities, he said.

The United Sates, European Union nations, Mexico, Canada, Japan and India have joined the 30 x 30 drive, while China, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil have yet to do so.

Steps were also taken Monday to fight illegal fishing, another topic on the table at the long-delayed UN Ocean Conference, originally set for April 2020.

In Washington, US President Joe Biden issued a national security memorandum to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and related labour abuses.

Wreaking havoc 

The aim is to “make sure that the seafood products that are coming into the US market are caught in accordance with international rules and national rules”, a senior administration official told journalists.

A report by the International Trade Commission found that the United States imported $2.4 billion worth of seafood derived from IUU fishing in 2019.

“The ocean is the most underappreciated resource on our planet,” Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta told the conference, flanked by co-host Portuguese President Antonio Costa.

Oceans harbour 80 per cent of life on Earth and generate 50 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere.

They also absorb a quarter of CO2 pollution and 90 per cent of excess heat from global warming, keeping the planet livable for life on land.

But these services rendered come at a cost.

Sea water has turned acidic, threatening aquatic food chains and the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon. Global warming has spawned massive marine heatwaves that are killing off precious coral reefs and expanding dead zones bereft of oxygen.

“We have only begun to understand the extent to which climate change is going to wreak havoc on ocean health,” said Charlotte de Fontaubert, the World Bank’s global lead for the blue economy.

Making things worse is an unending torrent of pollution, including a garbage truck’s worth of plastic every minute, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

LONDON — British lawmakers were set on Monday to take their first vote on a government bill to overhaul post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland, despite EU warnings it is illegal and could spark a trade war.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted the legislation was needed to remove "unnecessary barriers to trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

"All we're saying is that you can get rid of those, whilst not in any way endangering the EU single market," he told reporters at a G-7 summit in Germany, before British MPs began hours of debate on the bill.

In awkward timing, the MPs were to vote late Monday as Johnson socialises at the G-7 with top EU leaders, including European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Irish premier Micheal Martin rejected Johnson's attempts to play down the planned changes to the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, which was agreed as part of the UK's Brexit withdrawal from the European Union.

Martin said "any unilateral decision to breach international law is a major, serious development.

"There can be no getting out of that," he said in Dublin, also warning against another government bill to revamp human rights in the UK that could affect a 1998 peace deal for Northern Ireland.

'Legal and necessary' 

The UK government unveiled its plan to unilaterally change trading terms for the politically fraught British province earlier this month, prompting the EU to pledge legal action.

Brussels says overriding the deal it struck in 2019 with Johnson's government breaches international law, and has warned of trade reprisals, which Britain can ill-afford as prices surge on the back of the war in Ukraine.

MPs in the House of Commons began debating the controversial "Northern Ireland Protocol Bill" in mid-afternoon, and were to hold an initial vote on whether to proceed with it late in the evening.

Days of further scrutiny and subsequent votes then loom, and Johnson faces disquiet among some of his own Conservatives about the bill after he only narrowly survived a no-confidence vote this month.

Launching the debate, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said problems were “baked in” to the protocol and wholesale change was needed to entice pro-UK unionists back to a power-sharing government in Belfast.

“It is both legal and necessary,” she said, denying the UK was breaching international law and stressing the need to prioritise the peace process.

“We continue to raise the issues of concern with our European partners, but we simply cannot allow the situation to drift,” Truss added.

‘Unrealistic’

On Sunday, the bloc’s ambassador to Britain, Joao Vale de Almeida, said the legislation did break international, EU and UK law, and was “unrealistic”.

“We are committed to find the practical solutions on implementation, but we cannot start talking if the baseline is to say everything we have agreed before is to be put aside,” he added.

The protocol requires checks on goods arriving into Northern Ireland from England, Scotland and Wales, to track products that could be potentially headed to the bloc via the Republic of Ireland.

This creates a customs border down the Irish Sea, keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs orbit to avoid a politically sensitive hard border between the territory and EU member Ireland.

Unionist parties and the UK government argue the protocol is threatening the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of violence over British rule in Northern Ireland.

They want checks to be removed on goods, and animal and plant products, travelling from Great Britain through the creation of a “green channel” for goods intended to stay in Northern Ireland.

SPERA DISTRICT, Afghanistan — When Gul Nayeb Khan tried to claim a parcel of aid for earthquake victims being handed out in eastern Afghanistan at the weekend, he was turned away because he is Pakistani — one of thousands of migrants caught in limbo between the two countries.

“I wish I had been among the dead,” he told AFP, holding back tears as he bemoaned his fate in the aftermath of last week’s 5.9-magnitude quake that killed at least 1,000 people near the border with Pakistan.

Just two months earlier, Khan said, he lost 28 members of his family when Pakistan army helicopters fired rockets into his village — ostensibly targeting militants seeking shelter in Afghanistan.

Khan is one of thousands of Pakistanis who fled their homeland for Afghanistan around a decade ago after Islamabad cracked down on militants in the north of the country.

Islamabad says its home-grown version of the Taliban — Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — are carrying out attacks from Afghan soil across the porous border.

Khan, 30, said around 50 people were killed in the raid on Afghan-Dubai village in mid-April — an operation never acknowledged by Pakistan but described by Afghanistan’s Taliban as an attack on innocent civilians.

Islamabad has repeatedly called on the Afghan Taliban — with whom tensions have risen since their takeover in August — to take “tough action” against the militants.

Those injured in Khan’s family were just beginning to rebuild their homes when the earthquake struck.

Sticks and belts 

“My heart is suffering so much. We are facing all the misfortunes you can imagine,” he said.

In Afghan-Dubai — named at a time when the pine nut trade between the two places flourished in the coniferous mountain region — the distribution of aid is strictly supervised by armed Afghan Taliban.

It takes place on a small hill in the centre of the village, in a space the size of a basketball court.

The distribution area is cordoned off with rope, and anyone trying to cross without permission risks being beaten with sticks or belts by the Taliban.

Khan was denied aid because his name was not on a list compiled by the United Nations International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which is trying to encourage the Pakistanis to return home.

Hazrat Omar, 25, another exile from Pakistan, thought the village was being attacked again when the earthquake struck.

“It was midnight... we heard a loud noise... then the roof of our house collapsed,” he said.

“As this is a border area, we thought Pakistan was bombing our houses.”

‘Life is very hard’ 

Sharifullah Khan is another in the aid queue, luckily holding a ticket issued by the IOM that marks him as a legitimate recipient of aid.

He also fled Pakistan when the army launched operations against the TTP in Waziristan in the mid-2010s.

He settled on the other side of the border, which can be seen running along the mountain ridge, less than 2 kilometres away.

“Pakistan destroyed our homes [in Waziristan]... then Pakistan bombed us on Afghan soil,” he said.

“And now, after the earthquake, the aftershocks, the children can’t sleep at night.”

“Life here is very hard. We are enduring all sorts of difficulties. Nobody cares about us,” adds Omar.

Early Monday morning, with the sun barely rising, people were already approaching the distribution centre.

The Taliban were there too, waiting for any interlopers with their sticks and belts.

KYIV — Russian strikes hit a residential building in Kyiv on Sunday, the first attack on the capital in almost three weeks, sparking calls by Ukraine for more support from G-7 leaders meeting in Germany.

Four people, including a seven-year-old girl, were taken to hospital following the early morning strikes on a neighbourhood that includes a weapons factory, said city mayor Vitali Klitschko.

Moscow, meanwhile, said its forces had carried out strikes against three military centres in northern and western Ukraine, including one near the border with Poland.

The high-profile attacks, just over four months since Russia invaded its neighbour, come ahead of a week of Western diplomacy focused around the G-7 and NATO summits.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will address both gatherings, where allies including US President Joe Biden will take stock of their support for Kyiv and of sanctions imposed on Moscow.

Biden on Sunday condemned the attack on Kyiv as "more of their barbarism", referring to Russia.

The G-7 talks opened on Sunday with the announcement of a ban on imports of Russian gold, but Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called for more.

He posted on Twitter a photo of an injured child being carried on a stretcher, who he said was "sleeping peacefully in Kyiv until a Russian cruise missile blasted her home".

The "G-7 summit must respond with more sanctions on Russia and more heavy arms for Ukraine. Russia's sick imperialism must be defeated", he said.

The European Union this past week offered a strong show of support when it granted Ukraine candidate status, although the path to membership is long.

'Intimidate Ukrainians' 

Russian forces sought to encircle Kyiv in the first few weeks after the February 24 invasion, but Sunday's attack was the first strike on the capital since early June.

Klitschko said the attack was a Russian missile strike intended to "intimidate Ukrainians" ahead of the NATO summit.

It was the third time since the invasion that this northwest neighbourhood had been hit. A weapons factory nearby produces air-to-air and anti-tank rockets among others.

An AFP team said there was a fire on the top three floors of the building and its stairwell was completely destroyed.

Afterwards, residents gathered at the bottom of the building, many of them in tears. One woman was still wearing a bathrobe.

“I woke up at the first explosion, went to the balcony and saw missiles falling and heard a huge explosion — everything vibrated,” 38-year-old Yuri told AFP, declining to give his surname.

Edward Shkuta, who lives next door, said there had been four missiles since 6:30am.

A building “was directly hit on the top floors and I saw wounded people coming out”.

‘Fully occupied’ 

In recent months, the fighting in Ukraine has focused on the eastern Donbas region, which has been partially under the control of pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.

The Russians made a strategic breakthrough on Saturday when they took the industrial hub of Severodonetsk, the scene of weeks of fierce battles that have left it largely destroyed.

Severodonetsk’s mayor said it had been “fully occupied” by Russian troops after Ukrainian forces retreated to better defend the neighbouring city of Lysychansk.

Pro-Moscow separatists on Saturday said Russian troops and their allies had entered Lysychansk, which faces Severodonetsk on high ground across the Donets River.

Its capture would give Russia control of the entire Lugansk region in the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland.

At talks on the sidelines of the G-7, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron said they saw an “opportunity to turn the tide” in Ukraine, a Downing Street spokesman said.

But Johnson also cautioned Macron — who has maintained a dialogue with Putin, unlike the British leader — that “any attempt to settle the conflict now will only cause enduring instability”.

Pull in Belarus 

In Saint Petersburg on Saturday, Putin said Russia would deliver Iskander-M missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to Belarus in the coming months, as he received Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

He also offered to upgrade Belarus’ warplanes to make them capable of carrying nuclear weapons, in comments broadcast on Russian television.

Putin has referred to nuclear weapons several times since the invasion, in what the West has seen as a warning to the West not to intervene.

Ukraine said it had come under “massive bombardment” Saturday morning from neighbouring Belarus which, although a Russian ally, is not officially involved in the conflict.

As in the southern port of Mariupol before it, the battle for Severodonetsk has devastated the city.

On Saturday, Severodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Striuk said civilians had begun to evacuate the Azot chemical plant, where several hundred people had been hiding from shelling.

“These people have spent almost three months of their lives in basements, shelters,” he said. “That’s tough emotionally and physically.”

They would now need medical and psychological support, he added.

In Russian-occupied Mariupol, meanwhile, residents face the prospect of a desperately cold winter, according to Mayoral Adviser Petro Andryushenko, who said local committees were being instructed to collect data on the need for firewood and coal.

“This is a direct signal and an acknowledgement of the obvious fact — there will be no heating in winter,” he said.

The city’s Moscow-backed leadership could not even provide heat if they wanted to, given the “huge damage” to the pipeline that supplied the city with natural gas, Andryushenko added.

EAST LONDON, South Africa — At least 21 teenagers, the youngest possibly just 13, died at the weekend after a night out at a township tavern in South Africa, in a tragedy whose cause remains unclear.

Many are thought to have been students celebrating the end of their high-school exams on Saturday night, provincial officials said.

There were no visible wounds on the bodies. Officials have ruled out a stampede as a possible cause and said autopsies would determine if the deaths could be linked to poisoning.

Crowds of people, including parents whose children were missing, gathered on Sunday outside the tavern where the tragedy happened in the city of East London, while mortuary vehicles collected the bodies, an AFP correspondent saw.

Senior government officials rushed to the southern city. They included national Police Minister Bheki Cele, who broke down in tears after emerging from a morgue where the bodies were being stored.

"It's a terrible scene," he told reporters. "They are pretty young. When you are told they are 13 years, 14 years and you go there and you see them. It breaks [you]."

The provincial government of Eastern Cape said eight girls and 13 boys had died. Seventeen were found dead inside the tavern. The rest died in hospital.

Drinking is permitted for over-18s in township taverns, commonly known as shebeens, which are often situated cheek by jowl with family homes or, in some case, inside the homes themselves.

But safety regulations and drinking-age laws are not always enforced.

"We have a child that was there, who passed away on the scene," said the parents of a 17-year-old boy.

"This child, we were not thinking was going to die this way. This was a humble child, respectful," said grieving mother Ntombizonke Mgangala, standing next to her husband outside the morgue.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is attending the G-7 summit in Germany, sent his condolences.

He voiced concern "about the reported circumstances under which such young people were gathered at a venue which, on the face of it, should be off-limits to persons under the age of 18".

The authorities are now considering whether to revise liquor licencing regulations. South Africa is among the countries in Africa where most alcohol is consumed.

"It's absolutely unbelievable ;.. losing 20 young lives just like that," provincial prime minister Oscar Mabuyane said, visibly shocked.

He was speaking to reporters before the toll was updated to at least 21.

He condemned the "unlimited consumption of liquor".

"You can't just trade in the middle of society like this and think that young people are not going to experiment," he said from outside the tavern, in a residential area called Scenery Park.

Empty bottles of alcohol, wigs and even a pastel purple "Happy Birthday" sash were found strewn on the dusty street outside the double-storey Enyobeni Tavern, according to Unathi Binqose, a safety government official who arrived at the scene at dawn.

'No obvious signs of injury' 

Ruling out a stampede as the cause of death, Binqose told AFP: "There are no visible open wounds."

"Forensic [investigators] will take samples and test to see if there was any poisoning of any sort," he said, adding the bar was overcrowded.

Local newspaper DispatchLive reported on its website: "Bodies are lying strewn across tables, chairs and on the floor, with no obvious signs of injury."

Parents and officials said they understood many of the dead were students celebrating "pens down" parties held after the end of high school exams.

Local television showed police officers trying to calm down a crowd of parents and onlookers gathered outside the club in the city, which is located on the Indian Ocean coast, nearly 1,000 kilometres  south of Johannesburg.

WASHINGTON — FBI agents seized all 25 works at a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit in Florida amid questions about their authenticity, the museum which was showing them said on Saturday.

The Orlando Museum of Art said it had complied with a request for access to works at the show called "Heroes and Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat" and that the paintings are now in the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"It is important to note that we still have not been led to believe the Museum has been or is the subject of any investigation," museum spokeswoman Emilia Bourmas-Fry said in an email sent to AFP.

The exhibit had been due to close June 30. The museum said it would keep cooperating. The FBI did not immediately reply to AFP's request for comment.

The paintings were done on scavenged pieces of cardboard and were largely unseen until this exhibit began in February, The New York Times reported in a story on Friday's confiscation of the works.

The Times said that it had learned last month that one of the works was painted on the back of a shipping box that bore instructions to "Align top of FedEx Shipping Label here."

But the instructions were in a typeface that was not used until 1994, six years after the artist died, the paper said, quoting a designer who worked for Federal Express.

The FBI seized the paintings with a warrant based on a 41-page affidavit that said the agency's probe had unearthed "false information related to the alleged prior ownership of the paintings", the Times said.

The probe also revealed "attempts to sell the paintings using false provenance, and bank records show possible solicitation of investment in artwork that is not authentic".

The owners of the works as well as the director of the museum, Aaron De Groft, say Basquiat made these paintings in 1982 and sold them to a now deceased television screenwriter named Thad Mumford for $5,000, the Times said. They said Mumford put them in a storage unit and apparently forgot about them for 30 years.

But in the affidavit related to the search warrant, FBI special agent Elizabeth Rivas states that she interviewed Mumford in 2014 and learned that "Mumford never purchased Basquiat artwork and was unaware of any Basquiat artwork being in his storage locker", the Times said.

If authentic the paintings would be worth around $100 million, it added, quoting art experts.

KANTÁRA, Cyprus — In the end, it was Mother Nature that extinguished a wildfire that scorched thousands of acres and forced the evacuation of villages in the north of divided Cyprus, officials said on Saturday.

Aircraft from both sides of Cyprus, as well as British military and Israeli personnel, had responded to calls for help to fight the fire which began on Tuesday in the Kantara area of the Kyrenia Mountain range.

"The fire... has been extinguished to a large extent with the effect of the rain that fell last night," said Unal Ustel, prime minister of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognised only by Ankara.

"We have survived a great disaster."

There have been no reports of casualties but Turkish Cypriot authorities said more than 6,500 acres had been burned.

Helicopters were still dropping water onto the burning ridge lines on Friday, before intense rains fell overnight.

Forestry department head Cemil Karzaoglu said the fire was completely under control and mopping up operations were continuing where smoke was still visible.

Ustel expressed gratitude to “the British Base Areas, Israel and the Greek Cypriot administration for their support in extinguishing the fire from the air”.

The United Nations peacekeeping force said it coordinated the firefighting response.

According to Cypriot media reports earlier, at least four villages were evacuated.

Emergency services from Israel and Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas on the eastern Mediterranean island often help fight Cyprus’s frequent wildfires.

In July last year, blazes that broke out in the Larnaca and Limassol districts claimed the lives of four Egyptian farmworkers.

GAYAN DISTRICT, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's Taliban rulers pledged on Saturday they would not interfere with international efforts to distribute aid to tens of thousands of people affected by this week's deadly earthquake.

Even before Wednesday's quake the country was in the grip of a humanitarian crisis, with aid flows and financial assistance severely curtailed since the Taliban's return to power.

The 5.9-magnitude quake struck hardest in the rugged east along the border with Pakistan, as people slept, killing over 1,000 and leaving thousands more homeless.

Aid organisations have complained in the past that Taliban authorities have tried to divert aid to areas and people that supported their hardline insurgency — or even seized goods to distribute themselves and claim the credit.

But Khan Mohammad Ahmad, a senior official in hard-hit Paktika province, said international organisations helping relief efforts would not be interfered with.

"Whether it is WFP, UNICEF or any other organisation... the international community or the United Nations... they will do the distribution by themselves," said Khan.

"The responsible people from the Islamic Emirate are here... our members will be always with them [to help]," he added, referring to the Taliban's new name for Afghanistan.

Huge challenge 

The disaster poses a huge logistical challenge for the government, which has isolated itself from much of the world by introducing hardline rule that subjugates women and girls.

But the international community has been quick to respond to the latest disaster to befall the country and aid is starting to flow — although not always where it is needed most.

"What don't we need? We need everything," Said Wali told AFP in Gayan district, close to the epicentre of the quake, around 200 kilometres southeast of Kabul.

"We are alive, but there is no one listening to us and we have not received any aid so far."

Many of the buildings in Wali’s village — like most in the Afghan countryside, made out of mud bricks — had been flattened in the quake.

“Our beds and all our stuff are buried under our home. Our homes are destroyed... there is nothing left,” he said.

“Currently we need money so that we can buy our necessities — clothes, mattresses, equipment. We also need flour and rice.”

The country’s health minister, who toured Gayan district on Saturday, said people were deeply traumatised by the quake and reluctant to return to their homes

“The whole community is badly affected, mentally and psychologically,” Qalandar Ebad told AFP.

“I think now the situation is critical... society is totally damaged here.”

But Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s top official in Afghanistan, praised Afghans for their resilience and courage after touring the area on Saturday.

“What signs of resolve in face of this adversity — I would say endless adversity,” he told AFP.

“Endless difficulties, endless tragedy, and yet these people are so gracious, so strong. And they are willing to overcome, and they are coming together as a community and as a society.”

Delivering aid has been made more difficult because the quake struck areas already suffering the effects of heavy rain, causing rockfalls and mudslides that wiped out hamlets perched precariously on mountain slopes.

Communications have also been hit with mobile phone towers and power lines toppled.

Officials say nearly 10,000 houses were destroyed, an alarming number in an area where the average household size is more than 20 people.

Even before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan’s emergency response teams were stretched to deal with the natural disasters that frequently strike the country.

But with only a handful of airworthy planes and helicopters left since they returned to power, their response to the latest catastrophe is further limited.

Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, especially in the Hindu Kush mountain range, near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

Afghanistan’s deadliest recent earthquake killed 5,000 in 1998 in the north-eastern provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.