Bomb blast kills nine at Nigeria bus park in Borno
MAIDUGURI: At least nine people were killed in a blast at a bus park in northeastern Nigeria, blamed on a bomb planted by suspected militants who have stepped up attacks in Borno state, a local lawmaker and residents said.Borno has been the heartland of an Islamist insurgency for the past 16 years, which has killed thousands of Nigerians and driven tens of thousands from their homes.Villagers from Mairari village in Borno's Guzamala district were waiting for transport when a bomb detonated on Saturday, killing at least nine people, said Abdulkarim Lawan, the lawmaker for the area.Lawan, who is also speaker of Borno state assembly, said Mairari village was now largely deserted due to frequent attacks by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, who are also increasingly using improvised explosives.'Terrorists who have been monitoring their movements planted IEDs at the local bus stop, which exploded while they were waiting to board commercial vehicles back to their destinations,' he said.Borno state police spokesperson Nahum Kenneth Daso confirmed the incident but said he had no details.Bunu Bukar, a petty trader at the bus rank said on Monday the IED was tripped when passengers were boarding a mini bus, killing the nine instantly and injuring several others.Nigeria has witnessed a rise in insurgent attacks since January, with militants targeting civilians and military bases.
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Al Arabiya
14 hours ago
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India's Prime Minister Modi to visit Kashmir to unveil strategic railway
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to make his first visit to contested Kashmir since a conflict between India and Pakistan last month, inaugurating a strategic railway to the mountainous region, his office said Wednesday. The Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir is at the center of a bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan, divided between them since independence from British rule in 1947. Modi is set to visit on Friday to open the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-metre-long (4,314-foot-long) steel and concrete span that connects two mountains with an arch 359 meters above the river below. 'The project establishes all-weather, seamless rail connectivity between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of the country,' the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement. Modi is expected to flag off a special train. Last month, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day conflict, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10. More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire on both sides. The conflict was triggered by an April 22 attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi accused Pakistan of backing -- a charge Islamabad denies. Rebel groups in Indian-run Kashmir have waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan. The 272-kilometre (169-mile) Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway -- with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges -- has been constructed 'aiming to transform regional mobility and driving socio-economic integration', the statement added. Its dramatic centerpiece is the Chenab Bridge, which India calls the 'world's highest railway arch bridge.' While several road and pipeline bridges are higher, Guinness World Records confirmed that Chenab trumps the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe in China. Indian Railways calls the $24-million bridge 'arguably the biggest civil engineering challenge faced by any railway project in India in recent history.' The bridge will facilitate the movement of people and goods -- as well as troops -- that was previously possible only via treacherous mountain roads and air. The train line could slash travel time between the town of Katra and Srinagar, the region's key city, by half, taking around three hours. The bridge will also revolutionize logistics in Ladakh, the icy region in India bordering China. India and China, the world's two most populous nations, are intense rivals competing for strategic influence across South Asia. Their troops clashed in 2020, killing at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, and forces from both sides today face off across contested high-altitude borderlands. The railway begins in the garrison city of Udhampur, headquarters of the army's northern command, and runs north to Srinagar.
Arab News
15 hours ago
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India's Modi to visit Kashmir to unveil strategic railway
SRINAGAR, India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to make his first visit to contested Kashmir since a conflict between India and Pakistan last month, inaugurating a strategic railway to the mountainous region, his office said Wednesday. The Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir is at the center of a bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan, divided between them since independence from British rule in 1947. Modi is set to visit on Friday to open the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long (4,314-foot-long) steel and concrete span that connects two mountains with an arch 359 meters above the river below. 'The project establishes all-weather, seamless rail connectivity between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of the country,' the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement. Modi is expected to flag off a special train. Last month, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day conflict, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10. More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire on both sides. The conflict was triggered by an April 22 attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi accused Pakistan of backing – a charge Islamabad denies. Rebel groups in Indian-run Kashmir have waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan. The 272-kilometer (169-mile) Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway – with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges – has been constructed 'aiming to transform regional mobility and driving socio-economic integration,' the statement added. Its dramatic centerpiece is the Chenab Bridge, which India calls the 'world's highest railway arch bridge.' While several road and pipeline bridges are higher, Guinness World Records confirmed that Chenab trumps the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe in China. Indian Railways calls the $24-million bridge 'arguably the biggest civil engineering challenge faced by any railway project in India in recent history.' The bridge will facilitate the movement of people and goods – as well as troops – that was previously possible only via treacherous mountain roads and air. The train line could slash travel time between the town of Katra and Srinagar, the region's key city, by half, taking around three hours. The bridge will also revolutionize logistics in Ladakh, the icy region in India bordering China. India and China, the world's two most populous nations, are intense rivals competing for strategic influence across South Asia. Their troops clashed in 2020, killing at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers, and forces from both sides today face off across contested high-altitude borderlands. The railway begins in the garrison city of Udhampur, headquarters of the army's northern command, and runs north to Srinagar.
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a day ago
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From Nigeria to Pakistan, TB testing ‘in a coma' after US aid cuts
LAGOS/JOHANNESBURG/MANILA: At a tense meeting in Nigeria's capital Abuja, health workers poured over drug registers and testing records to gauge whether US aid cuts would unravel years of painstaking work against tuberculosis in one of Africa's hardest hit countries. For several days in May, they brainstormed ways to limit the fallout from a halt to US funding for the TB Local Network (TB LON), which delivers screening, diagnosis and treatment. 'To tackle the spread of TB, you must identify cases and that is in a coma because of the aid cuts,' said Ibrahim Umoru, coordinator of the African TB Coalition civil society network, who was at the Abuja meeting. 'This means more cases will be missed and disaster is looming.' This desperate struggle to save endangered programs is being replicated from the Philippines to South Africa as experts warn that US aid cuts risk reviving a deadly infectious disease that kills around one million people every year. President Donald Trump's gutting of the US Agency for International Development has put TB testing and tracing on hold in Pakistan and Nigeria, stalled vital research in South Africa and left TB survivors lacking support in India. The World Health Organization says 'the drastic and abrupt cuts in global health funding' threaten to reverse the gains made by global efforts to fight the disease — namely 79 million lives saved since 2000 — with rising drug resistance and conflicts exacerbating the risks. In Nigeria, TB LON is in the firing line. The project was set up in 2020, during Trump's first term, and received $45 million worth of funding from USAID. The US development agency said at the time it was committed to a 'TB free Nigeria.' Five years later and with the same president back in charge but now with a more radical 'America first' agenda, USAID support for TB LON's community testing work was terminated in February, according to a TB LON official. The official did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the project. 'HARD WORK IN JEOPARDY' TB kills 268 Nigerians every day and cases have historically been under-reported increasing the risk of transmission. If one case is missed, that person can transmit TB to 15 people over a year, according to the World Health Organization. The Thomson Reuters Foundation spoke to half a dozen health workers who collect TB test samples for TB LON but had stopped doing so in January due to the US aid freeze. Between 2020-2024, TB LON screened around 20 million people in southwestern states in Nigeria, and more than 100,000 patients were treated as a result. 'All that hard work is in jeopardy if we don't act quickly,' Umoru said, adding that non-profits working with TB LON had laid off more than 1,000 contract workers who used to do TB screening. Nigeria's health ministry did not respond to request for comment on the effect of the USAID cuts on TB programs. In March, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu declared TB a national emergency and donated 1 billion naira ($630,680) to efforts to eradicate the disease by 2030. In South Africa, medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said TB and HIV programs had been disrupted across the country, making patient tracking and testing more difficult, according to a statement sent to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. South Africa had a TB incidence rate of 427 per 100,000 people in 2023, government data showed, down 57 percent from 2015. TB-related deaths in South Africa dropped 16 percent over that period, the data showed. Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi said in May that the government would launch an End TB campaign to screen and test 5 million people, and was also seeking new donor funding. 'Under no circumstances will we allow this massive work performed over a period of more than a decade and half to collapse and go up in smoke,' he said at the time, referring to efforts to tackle TB and HIV. BLOW TO CRITICAL RESEARCH South Africa is also a hub for research into both TB and HIV and the health experts say funding cuts risk derailing this vital work. The Treatment Action Group (TAG), a community-based research and policy think tank, says around 39 clinical research sites and at least 20 TB trials and 24 HIV trials are at risk. 'Every major TB treatment and vaccine advance in the past two decades has relied on research carried out in South Africa,' said TAG TB project co-director Lindsay McKenna in a March statement. People struggling with poor nutrition and those living with HIV — the latter affects 8 million people in South Africa — were also more at risk of contracting TB as aid cuts made them more vulnerable by derailing nutrition programs, community outreach and testing, said Cathy Hewison, head of MSF's TB working group. 'It's the number one killer of people with HIV,' she said. In the Philippines, US cuts have disrupted TB testing in four USAID-funded projects, and affected the supply of drugs, Stop TB Partnership, a UN-funded agency said. 'The country has a nationwide problem with recurrent drug shortages, which is leading to a direct impact on efforts to eliminate TB,' said Ghazali Babiker, head of mission for MSF Philippines. In Pakistan, which sees 510,000 TB infections each year, MSF said US cuts had disrupted TB screening in communities and other services in the hard-hit southeastern province of Sindh. 'We are worried that the US funding cuts that have impacted the community-based services will have a disproportionate effect on children, leading to more children with TB and more avoidable deaths,' said Ei Hnin Hnin Phyu, medical coordinator with MSF in Pakistan. 'We cannot afford to let funding decisions cost children's lives.'
