Door-to-door voters’ verification begins today

NADRA had provided the Election Commission with voters’ lists of over 800 million people and a door-to-door campaign to verify the identity of the draft electoral rolls.

Over 200,000 verifying officials would conduct the verification exercise across the country. The electoral rolls have already been distributed in 130 districts. The country has been divided in into 140000 census blocks.

After the verification process the voters’ lists will be handed over to NADRA and the final lists will be issued in March. A voter would be allowed to cost his vote at either his permanent or temporary address but NADRA’s unique identification system would make it impossible for individuals to cast dual votes.

Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has also decided to introduce water marked ballot papers aiming to eliminate fraudulent voting and the Printing Corporation of Pakistan had been asked to print water marked ballot papers.

Visa lottery dashes hopes of thousands

The U.S. State Department mistakenly told more than 22,000 people that they had won a special U.S. visa lottery and the drawing would have to be redone.

Because of a computer programming error, 90 percent of the winners were selected from the first two days of applications rather than from the entire 30-day registration period. The problem had been fixed and the results of the new drawing from among the same 19.6 million people who applied were expected to be available around July 15. The news dashes the hopes of those who believed they were eligible for the next step in obtaining one of the coveted “green card” lottery visas.

The lottery gives the winners the opportunity to immigrate without having a family member or an employer sponsor them.

‘One million’ on anti-AIDS drugs in South Africa

DRIEFONTEIN: A million people are now receiving anti-AIDS drugs in South Africa, a country with the world’s heaviest HIV infections, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said on Wednesday.

“More than 200 000 new patients have been initiated on ARV’s since April this year, bringing a total number to one million,” Motlanthe told a public gathering to mark World AIDS Day in the eastern province of Mpumalanga.

Motlanthe said more public health institutions were now providing treatment, with more nurses trained to administer ARV (anti-retroviral) drugs.

“It is important to emphasize that even as we continue to make headway with our treatment programme, prevention remains the mainstay of our response to the dual epidemic of HIV and TB,” he said.

South Africa has 5.6 million people who are HIV-positive out of a 50-million population, according to UN

New AIDS cases fall by one fifth in a decade: UN

GENEVA: The number of new cases of HIV/AIDS has dropped by about one-fifth over the past decade but millions of people are still missing out on major progress in prevention and treatment, the UN said on Tuesday.

In 2009, 2.6 million people contracted the HIV virus that causes AIDS, a decline of 19 percent over the 3.1 million recorded in 2001, said UNAIDS, the UN agency spearheading the international campaign against the disease.

About half of the 60 million people who caught HIV/AIDS since the start of the pandemic 30 years ago have died, added the agency.

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe urged caution over the growing impact of prevention measures and medical treatment highlighted in the 2010 global report on the AIDS epidemic.

“We have halted and begun to reverse the epidemic. Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV and fewer people are

Up to six more months of Pakistan flood water: EU official

ISLAMABAD: A senior EU aid official warned Friday that flood waters could linger up to another six months in Pakistan, where he said the magnitude of the crisis meant people were still going without aid.

“There is nearly water everywhere,” Peter Zangl, the director general of the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO), told a news conference in Islamabad after a five-day visit to Pakistan.

Unprecedented monsoon rains triggered catastrophic flooding across Pakistan in July and August, ravaging an area roughly the size of England and affecting 21 million people in the poverty-stricken country’s worst natural disaster.

Parts of Sindh province remain under water in southern Pakistan, where people are still camping on roadsides after the floods washed away their homes and swallowed up rice and wheat fields.

“The only

Thailand floods leave 57 dead

Heavy downpours that caused rivers to burst around Thailand have killed 57 people in nearly two weeks of flooding that officials are calling the worst in several decades, authorities said Wednesday.
The fatalities have occurred in central, eastern and northeastern provinces and have affected more than 3 million people in 36 of Thailand’s 76 provinces, government medical and disaster agencies said. The floods have eased in a third of those provinces.
More than 4 million sandbags were used to erect walls this week in Bangkok along stretches of the Chao Praya River, which has swelled with runoffs from upper provinces that officials feared could inundate the capital.
So far, flooding in Bangkok has been minimal but riverside residents were warned to be on alert through Friday, after which current high-tide levels were expected to subside.
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva warned that new risks loomed next month.
We have to keep an eye on the situation closely, Abhisit said Wednesday, adding that tidal levels were expected to rise again early next month. The worrying period will return in the beginning of next month. The supervision must continue.
Last week, Abhisit said the flooding was the country’s worst in 40 or 50 years.

‘Seven million still lack shelter after Pakistan floods’

ISLAMABAD: At least seven million people are still without shelter in Pakistan nearly three months after catastrophic floods devastated huge parts of the country, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Torrential monsoon rains began falling in northwestern Pakistan in July, causing floods that moved steadily south, wiping out villages and farmland and affecting an area roughly the size of England.

“At least seven million people are currently without shelter in the flood-affected areas,” UN spokeswoman Stacey Winston told a news conference in Islamabad.

She said that the floods destroyed and damaged over 1.9 million homes.

The United Nations has issued a record two-billion-dollar appeal for funds to cope with the disaster, which UN agencies say affected 21 million people. Only around 35 percent of the appeal has already been funded.

Winston

Pakistan floods cost $9.7 bln in damage -ADB/WBank

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s floods caused an estimated $9.7 billion in damage to infrastructure, farms and homes, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and World Bank said on Thursday.

An assessment conducted by the two banks said agriculture, which is the mainstay of the economy, and livestock were the worst affected by the disaster, which seriously damaged an already fragile economy.

The floods, which began in late July, made more than 10 million people homeless and affected 20 million.

“The floods that swept across Pakistan since July caused an estimated $9.7 billion in damage to infrastructure, farms, homes, as well as other direct and indirect losses,” the ADB and World Bank said in a statement.

Pakistan’s cash-strapped government, which needs to secure as much aid as possible for reconstruction, has said the floods caused $43 billion in

Holbrooke says US helping Pakistan on humanitarian grounds

The US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke denied any link between his efforts for Pakistan and the US fight to stamp out Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists in northwestern tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan.
We are not helping in the flood zones as part of the war against the Taliban. We are doing it because it’s the right thing to do for 20 million people, Holbrooke said. It’s not strategic, it’s not political, it’s humanitarian.
Holbrooke who was visiting Europe urged the latter to help boost aid to the victims of devastating floods there that have left millions homeless.
The situation in Pakistan is extraordinary. An area larger than Italy was put under water, over 20 million people were affected, Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Paris.
The amount of money to reconstruct what has been destroyed in Pakistan is going to be in the tens of billions of dollars, he said. People are desperate to go back to their land and homes but there are no homes to go back to.

China pledges another $200m in flood aid

BEIJING: China is to give another $200 million in emergency flood aid to Pakistan, Premier Wen Jiabao announced during a visit to New York for a UN anti-poverty summit.

The announcement comes a month after Beijing faced sharp criticism of its relief pledges from Washington’s pointman on Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, who called on Islamabad’s close ally to “step up to the plate” and do more to help.

“I wish to take this opportunity to announce that China will, on top of the pledged assistance, provide another $200 million of assistance to Pakistan,” Wen said. China had previously offered about $47 million in aid to Pakistan following the devastating floods, which UN agencies say affected 21 million people and left 12 million in need of emergency food aid.

Torrential rain began falling in northern Pakistan in July and the floods have since moved slowly south,

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