Nine and a half million Afghans will head to presidential polls Saturday. Thirty percent of them will be women. VOA’s Ayesha Tanzeem is in Afghanistan talking to them about their hopes, fears, and complaints.
Estonian police said Wednesday they found the body of the former head of Danske Bank in Estonia who was at the center of a 200 billion-euro ($220 billion) money laundering scandal and had disappeared two days ago.
Police said Aivar Rehe, 56, went missing Monday, fueling speculation it might be related to the 2007-2015 money laundering scheme that had engulfed the Danish bank.
The executive was found Wednesday after a search involving dogs, drones and volunteers near his home in the capital, Tallinn.
Police had said earlier that no third parties were suspected in Rehe’s disappearance and suggested the possibility of a suicide. According to Estonian media, Rehe’s body was found in his house’s back yard and everything at the scene pointed toward death by suicide.
Rehe, who was head of Danske Bank in Estonia from 2006 to 2015, said in an interview with the Estonian newspaper Postimees in March that he feels responsible but also believes Danske Bank’s anti-money laundering mechanisms at that time were adequate.
Rehe wasn’t considered a suspect in the case. Prosecutor Marek Vahing of the Estonian state prosecutors’ office in charge of investigating the case in Tallinn told the Estonian public broadcaster ERR on Tuesday that Rehe was last questioned about a year ago, and said his disappearance wouldn’t affect the ongoing probe.
In 2018, ten former employees at Danske Bank’s Estonia branch were briefly detained and are currently being investigated in connection with the massive money laundering scandal – one of the largest of its kind ever in which dirty money mainly from Russia and former Soviet republics was channeled through its client accounts.
The ten Estonian employees are mainly Danske Bank client managers suspected of knowingly assisting large-scale money laundering that involved Azerbaijan and Georgia, two former Soviet republics.
The scandal has had far-reaching consequences for the Estonian financial sector, which has become dominated by Nordic banks, and led to major criminal probes in Denmark, France and the United States along with Estonia.
A 23-year-old law student who accused a leader of India’s governing party of sexual assault was arrested Wednesday on charges of extortion, police said.
Naveen Arora, a police officer handling the case, said the woman is accused of demanding nearly $700,000 from the lawmaker, Chinmayanand, who uses one name, and “was arrested from her residence and will be produced before a court.”
In August, the student accused Chinmayanand, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader and president of the college where she studies, of sexual assault, harassment and intimidation. She first mentioned his alleged harassment in a video clip posted on social media last month.
His lawyer has denied the allegations.
Chinmayanand, who was was arrested on Sept. 20, has been shifted from a jail to a hospital in Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where he is being treated for cardiac problems.
The 72-year-old is a former minister from Uttar Pradesh and had previously faced charges in a rape case filed in 2011. Those charges were withdrawn in 2017.
The law student had said earlier that the case of extortion against her had been slapped to weaken her case against Chinmayanand.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, has a checkered history of its leaders being accused of sexual assault. In August, lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar was sacked from the party after being accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in 2017.
In January 2018, two BJP lawmakers attended protest rallies held by Hindu organizations defending the accused in the rape and murder of an 8-year-old inside a Hindu temple. It was only after a national uproar that the BJP made the two ministers resign.
A Zimbabwean doctor desperate to leave the country for medical treatment after his recent abduction has been blocked after police approached the High Court asserting he is “unfit to travel.”
The head of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association, Dr. Peter Magombeyi, was freed last week after disappearing for several days. His alleged abduction after leading a pay strike led to days of protests by health workers and expressions of concern by diplomats and rights groups, who said more than 50 government critics and activists in Zimbabwe have been abducted this year alone.
Police stopped Magombeyi from leaving for treatment in neighboring South Africa on Tuesday even after a judge ruled he could travel outside Zimbabwe as he is not under arrest. He has been recuperating in a local hospital, and lawyers have said preliminary medical assessments show possible physical harm and psychological trauma.
Magombeyi’s lawyers now say police are violating the court order, and they worry his condition will deteriorate as the drama plays out. The doctor must stay in Zimbabwe until the police application to the court is resolved.
Police dismissed accusations that they are preventing the doctor from traveling, saying they are providing him with protection “for his own personal safety.”
In the court application filed Tuesday night, police said Magombeyi should remain at the hospital until he is fit to travel, adding that they also want to sort out his security while in South Africa.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, a non-governmental group helping the doctor, described the police assertions as “shocking.”
The government has bristled at the accusations of abductions, with President Emmerson Mnangagwa and other officials over the weekend warning against so-called “false” abductions they assert are meant to make the government look bad. Mnangagwa is attending the United Nations annual gathering of world leaders this week.
Zimbabwe’s health sector, like its economy, is in crisis. Many services are unavailable due to collapsed infrastructure, lack of medicines or unavailability of doctors and nurses who say they can no longer afford transport to return to work.
Due to climate change, the world’s oceans are getting warmer, rising higher, losing oxygen and becoming more acidic at an ever-faster pace and melting even more ice and snow, a grim international science assessment concludes.
But that’s nothing compared to what Wednesday’s special United Nations-affiliated oceans and ice report says is coming if global warming doesn’t slow down: three feet of sea rise by the end of the century, many fewer fish, weakening ocean currents, even less snow and ice, stronger and wetter hurricanes and nastier El Nino weather systems.
“The oceans and the icy parts of the world are in big trouble and that means we’re all in big trouble too,” said one of the report’s lead authors, Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. “The changes are accelerating.”
These changes will not just hurt the 71% of the world covered by the oceans or the 10% covered in ice and snow, but it will harm people, plants, animals, food, societies, infrastructure and the global economy, according to the special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat from carbon pollution in the air, as well as much of the carbon dioxide itself. The seas warm more slowly than the air but trap the heat longer with bigger side effects — and the report links these waters with Earth’s snow and ice, called the cryosphere, because their futures are interconnected.
“The world’s oceans and cryosphere have been taking the heat for climate change for decades. The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and a deputy assistant administrator for research at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The report found:
—Seas are now rising at one-seventh of an inch (3.66 millimeters) a year, which is 2.5 times faster than the rate from 1900 to 1990.
—The world’s oceans have already lost 1% to 3% of the oxygen in their upper levels since 1970 and will lose more as warming continues.
—From 2006 to 2015, the ice melting from Greenland, Antarctica and the world’s mountain glaciers has accelerated and is now losing 720 billion tons (653 billion metric tons) of ice a year.
—Arctic June snow cover has shrunk more than half since 1967, down nearly 1 million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers).
—Arctic sea ice in September, the annual minimum, is down almost 13% per decade since 1979. This year’s low, reported Monday, tied for the second-lowest on record. If carbon pollution continues unabated, by the end of the century there will be a 10% to 35% chance each year that sea ice will disappear in the Arctic in September.
—Marine animals are likely to decrease 15%, and catches by fisheries in general are expected to decline 21% to 24% by the end of century because of climate change.
And for the first time, the international team of scientists is projecting that “some island nations are likely to become uninhabitable due to climate-related ocean and cryosphere change.”
“Climate change is already irreversible,” French climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a report lead author, said in a Wednesday news conference in Monaco. “Due to the heat uptake in the ocean, we can’t go back. ”
But many of the worst-case projections in the report can still be avoided depending on how the world handles the emissions of heat-trapping gases, the report’s authors said.
The IPCC increased its projected end-of-century sea level rise in the worst-case scenario by nearly four inches (10 centimeters) from its 2013 projections because of the increased recent melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
The new report projects that, under the business-as-usual scenario for carbon emissions, seas by the end of the century will rise between two feet (61 centimeters) and 43 inches (110 centimeters) with a most likely amount of 33 inches (84 centimeters). This is slightly less than the traditional 1 meter (39 inches) that scientists often use.
“Sea level continues to rise at an increasing rate,” the report said. “Extreme sea level events that are historically rare (once per century in the recent past) are projected to occur frequently (at least once per year) at many locations by 2050.”
And sea level will rise two to three times as much over the centuries to come if warming continues, so the world is looking at a “future that certainly looks completely different than what we currently have,” said report co-author Hans-Otto Portner, a German climate scientist.
The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC requires nations meeting this week in Monaco to unanimously approve the report, and because of that the group’s reports tend to show less sea level rise and smaller harms than other scientific studies, outside experts said.
“Like many of the past reports, this one is conservative in the projections, especially in how much ice can be lost in Greenland and Antarctica,” said NASA oceanographer Josh Willis, who studies Greenland ice melt and wasn’t part of the report. “We’re not done revising our sea level rise projections and we won’t be for a while.”
Willis said people should be prepared for a rise in sea levels to be twice these IPCC projections.
The oceans have become slightly more acidic, but that will accelerate with warming. In the worst case scenario, the world is looking at a “95% increase in total acidity of the oceans,” said study co-author Nathan Bindoff of the University of Tasmania.
Even if warming is limited to just another couple of tenths of a degree, the world’s warm water coral reefs will go extinct in some places and be dramatically different in others, the report said.
“We are already seeing the demise of the warm water coral reefs,” Portner said. “That is one of the strongest warning signals that we have available.”
The report gives projections based on different scenarios for emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. One is a world that dramatically decreases carbon pollution — and the worst case is where little has been done. We are closer to the worst-case situation, scientists said.
Outside scientists praised the work but were disturbed by it.
“It is alarming to read such a thorough cataloging of all of the serious changes in the planet that we’re driving,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the report. “What’s particularly disturbing as a scientist is that virtually all of these changes were predicted years or decades ago.”
The report’s authors emphasized that it doesn’t doom Earth to this gloomy outlook.
“We indicate we have a choice. Whether we go into a grim future depends on the decisions that are being made,” Portner said. “We have a better future ahead of us once we make the right choice.”
“These far-reaching consequences can only be brought under control by acute emissions reductions,” Portner said.