Day: July 10, 2022

JOHANNESBURG — Two bar shootings, one in a township close to Johannesburg and another in eastern South Africa, left 19 people dead, police said on Sunday.

In Soweto, 15 people were killed as they enjoyed a night out when assailants drew up in a minibus taxi and began randomly firing at bar patrons, police said.

In the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg, police reported four people were killed and eight wounded during a shootout in a bar after two men fired indiscriminately at customers.

Police sources said it was too early to say if the assaults were in some way connected but observed their similarity.

In Soweto, Johannesburg’s largest township to the southwest of South Africa’s economic capital, police were called to the scene shortly after midnight.

“When we arrived at the scene, 12 people were dead with gunshot wounds,” local police officer Nonhlanhla Kubheka told AFP.

She added 11 people were taken to hospital. Three died shortly after arrival.

There were no details regarding the assailants.

“Nobody has been arrested. Officers are still on site. They came and shot at people who were having fun,” said Kubheka, commander of the Orlando police station, the Soweto district where the shooting took place.

Hundreds of people were massed behind police cordons Sunday as police investigated, AFP journalists reported. Only a small poster showing beer prices at the bar could be seen from outside the establishment.

Police led away relatives who tried to approach the crime scene.

Previous unrest

In Pietermaritzburg, four people were killed and eight wounded in a shootout around 8:30 p.m. (1830 GMT) that left eight others injured, local police spokesman Nqobile Gwala said.

Two men drove up, entered the bar and “fired random shots at the patrons,” before fleeing, Lieutenant Colonel Gwala said. “A total of 12 people were shot. Two people were declared dead at the scene and the other two died in hospital. Another eight people are still in hospital after they sustained injuries.”

The dead were aged between 30 and 45.

The two incidents come a year after an outbreak of the worst violence the country has seen since the end of the apartheid era three decades ago brought democracy.

Last July saw large-scale rioting and looting, ransacking of shops, a wave of arson attacks, and attacks on infrastructure and industrial warehouses leading to more than 350 deaths and several thousand arrests with the country already in the throes of a major COVID-19 wave.

Most of the unrest occurred in Johannesburg and the eastern province of Kwazulu-Natal as South Africans protested the sentencing and incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma was sentenced after refusing to testify on corruption charges stemming from his 2009 to 2018 tenure.

Source : Voice of America

ZHURIVKA, UKRAINE — Oleksandr Chubuk’s warehouse should be empty, awaiting the new harvest, with his supply of winter wheat already shipped abroad. Instead, his storage bins in central Ukraine are piled high with grain he cannot ship out because of the war with Russia.

The green spikes of wheat are already ripening. Soon, the horizon will look like the Ukrainian flag, a sea of gold beneath a blue sky. Chubuk expects to reap 500 tons, but for the first time in his 30 years as a farmer, he’s uncertain about what to do with it.

“Hope is the only thing I have now,” he said.

The war has trapped about 22 million tons of grain inside Ukraine, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a growing crisis for the country known as the “breadbasket of Europe” for its exports of wheat, corn and sunflower oil.

Before Russia’s invasion, Ukraine could export 6 million to 7 million tons of grain per month, but in June it shipped only 2.2 million tons, according to the Ukrainian Grain Association. Normally, it sends about 30% of its grain to Europe, 30% to North Africa and 40% to Asia, said Mykola Horbachov, head of the association.

With Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, the fate of the upcoming harvest in Ukraine is in doubt. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the war is endangering food supplies for many developing nations and could worsen hunger for up to 181 million people.

Meanwhile, many farmers in Ukraine could go bankrupt. They are facing the most difficult situation since gaining independence in 1991, Horbachov said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said his country is working with the U.N., Ukraine, and Russia to find a solution, offering safe corridors in the Black Sea for wheat shipments.

For now, Ukraine is trying less-effective alternatives to export its grain, at least to Europe. Currently, 30% of exports go via three Danube River ports in southwestern Ukraine.

The country also is trying to ship grain via 12 border crossings with European countries, but trucks must wait in line for days, and Europe’s infrastructure cannot yet absorb such a volume of grain, Horbachov said.

“It’s impossible to build such infrastructure in one year,” he told The Associated Press.

Russia’s invasion also caused transportation costs to soar. The price to deliver this year’s harvested barley to the closest Romanian port, Constanta, is now $160 to $180 per ton, up from $40 to $45. And yet a farmer selling barley to a trader gets less than $100 per ton.

The losses are piling up, along with the harvest.

“Most of the farmers are running the risk of becoming bankrupt very soon. But they don’t have any other option but to sell their grain cheaper than its cost,” Horbachov said.

On top of such challenges, not all farmers can sell their grain.

Before the invasion, Chubuk could sell a ton of wheat from his Kyiv region farm for $270. Now he can’t find a buyer even at $135 per ton.

“The whole system backs up,” including storage options, said James Heneghan, senior vice president at Gro Intelligence, a global climate and agriculture data analytics company. The system was meant to keep Ukraine’s exports flowing, not store them.

Without money coming in for grain, future harvests are challenging. “Farmers need to purchase fertilizers, seeds, diesel, pay the salary,” Horbachov said. “Ukrainian farmers can’t print money.”

The country hasn’t yet run out of storage as the harvest begins.

Ukraine has about 65 million to 67 million tons of commercial grain storage capacity, according to Horbachov, although 20% of that is in Russian-occupied territories. Farmers themselves can store 20 million to 25 million tons, but some of that is also in occupied areas.

By the end of September, when the harvest of corn and sunflower seeds begins, Ukraine will face a shortage of storage capacity.

The FAO recently announced a $17 million project to help address the storage deficit. Heneghan of Gro Intelligence noted that one temporary solution could be providing farmers with silo bags for storage.

In eastern and southern regions near the front line, farmers continue to work their fields despite the threat to their lives.

“It can be finished in a moment by bombing, or as we see now, the fields are on fire,” said Yurii Vakulenko in the Dnipropetrovsk region, black smoke is visible in the distance.

His workers risk their lives for little return, with storage facilities now refusing to take their grain, Vakulenko said.

Ukraine had a record-breaking grain harvest last year, collecting 107 million tons. Even more had been expected this year.

Now, in the best-case scenario, farmers will harvest only 70 million tons of grain this year, Horbachov estimated.

“Without opening the (Black Sea) ports, I don’t see any solution for Ukrainian farmers to survive,” he said. “And if they don’t survive, we won’t be able to feed African countries.

Source : Voice of America

MADRID — Spaniards stayed in the shade in parks, headed for the beach or sipped iced drinks to tackle stifling temperatures as high as 43C (110F), as the country experiences its second heatwave this year.

Warm summer sunshine combined with a hot air front from North Africa have sent temperatures soaring, state metereological forecasters AEMET said on Sunday, and the heatwave could last until July 14.

The highest recorded temperature on Sunday was 43C (110F) by the Guadalquivir river near Seville in southern Spain and in Badajoz, towards the west of the country, forecasters said.

For Rasha, 45, a Syrian health executive who lives in Abu Dhabi, the heatwave was an unwelcome surprise on holiday.

“It’s not as enjoyable as we would like it to be on a holiday but it is what it is. But compared to the desert it is not that bad,” she told Reuters.

Lazaro Cun, 37, a builder from Guatemala, stayed in the shade in Madrid’s Casa de Campo Park to escape the heat.

“It is hot but at least with a breeze you feel better,” he said.

AEMET spokesman Ruben del Campo told Reuters that temperatures could touch 44C in Corboda or Extremadura in southern Spain.

“They could also reach 42C in parts of [central Spain] like Castille and Leon and Galicia [in central and western Spain] on Tuesday and Wednesday.”

Del Campo advised people to avoid excessive physical activity, to take care of elderly people with conditions which meant they were sensitive to high temperatures, and to drink plenty of water.

He said there was also a high risk of forest fires during the heatwave.

In June, Spaniards weathered the earliest heatwave since 1981, according to AEMET, with temperatures surpassing 40F in parts of central and southern Spain.

Source : Voice of America