Britain finally learns who its next prime minister will be on Monday after two months of political uncertainty during which energy prices skyrocketed and tens of thousands of workers went on strike.
The governing Conservative Party plans to announce whether Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak won the most votes from party members to succeed Boris Johnson as party leader and thus prime minister.
After developing last week into the strongest tropical storm of the year, Typhoon Hinnamnor barreled toward South Korea on Monday, with officials raising the typhoon alert to the highest level ahead of expected landfall on Tuesday.
The powerhouse storm has already unleashed damaging wind and rain, prompting evacuation orders and disrupting transportation in the country’s south, including Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city.
Hinnamnor was packing maximum sustained winds of 127 mph and gusts of up to 155 mph, according to the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center. The Korea Meteorological Administration said strong winds and heavy rain are expected across the country through Tuesday.
No casualties have been reported so far but at least 11 facilities have been flooded, according to Seoul’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol held an emergency meeting over the weekend to discuss the typhoon response. “We are yet to fully recover from damage of the recent downpour and Typhoon Hinnamnor is making its way up, provoking big public concerns,” Yoon told the meeting on Sunday.
Last month, a record downpour over the country killed more than a dozen people and displaced thousands, many of them in the Seoul area. Recovery efforts are still underway in severely hit areas, where authorities called for extra precautionary measures ahead of the typhoon’s arrival.
As Hinnamnor neared, North Korea’s weather agency also issued bad weather warnings, with reports of heavy rain in the capital, Pyongyang, and other parts of the country on Sunday. The regime’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Monday urged damage prevention works to minimize the typhoon’s impact on the economy.
North Korea’s poor infrastructure and widespread poverty make its people particularly vulnerable to climate-induced disasters. The super typhoon could deal a blow to the ailing economy of the isolated country, which is grappling with international sanctions and stalled trade with China due to coronavirus curbs.
Typhoons regularly churn across the Pacific between June and November each year. But climate scientists have warned that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and damaging as a result of global warming. Typhoon Hinnamnor, which formed in the western Pacific earlier this month, has also affected Japan.
Whoever emerges victorious will inherit an economy heading into a potentially lengthy recession and will need to jump straight into tackling the cost-of-living crisis walloping the U.K.
Thanks to global gas price volatility triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the average U.K. household energy bill is jumping to more than 3,500 pounds ($4,000) a year — almost triple the level a year ago. Inflation is above 10% for the first time since the 1980s. The government is facing increasingly urgent calls to deliver financial support to help millions pay for essential heating and electricity to get through the winter.
The opposition Labour Party and other critics accuse the government of being “missing in action” during a summer of discontent that saw tens of thousands of rail staff, port and postal workers, lawyers and garbage collectors go on strike to demand better pay to keep up with spiralling costs.
Truss, widely regarded as the front-runner in the leadership race, has won the support of many Conservatives with her Thatcherite zeal to roll back state intervention and slash taxes. She has promised to act “immediately” to tackle soaring energy bills, but declined to give any details.
Sunak, who sought to paint himself as the more realistic economist, said he would temporarily cut the value-added tax on energy bills. But he insisted that he wouldn't “max out the country’s credit card” and said significant tax cuts should wait until inflation is under control.
Both finalists have declared their admiration for Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and her ring-wing, small-government economics.
“It’s all been very nonspecific and we’re really waiting for the next prime minister to hopefully hit the ground running and tell us what they’re going to do about what is in effect an emergency situation,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London.
Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at Nottingham University, says Truss’s politics has played well with the estimated 180,000 Conservative Party members who have a say in choosing the country's leader. But many have low expectations that she will deliver much financial relief to the country’s poorest.
“This is someone who believes in the market in a radical way, someone who believes that the objective of government is to get towards a much smaller state sooner rather than later. She takes that very seriously,” he said.
“So I think we’re going to have a very radical, right-wing, free market prime minister and one that actually is more of an ideologist than a pragmatist.”
While the economy is certain to dominate the first months of the new premier’s term, Johnson’s successor will also have to steer the U.K. on the international stage in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine, an increasingly assertive China and ongoing tensions with the European Union over the aftermath of Brexit – especially in Northern Ireland.
Pakistan authorities intentionally breached the country’s largest freshwater lake on Sunday, displacing 100,000 people from their homes but preventing more densely populated area close by from being hit by flood water.
Water levels in Manchar Lake – located in the country’s southeastern Sindh province – reached dangerously high levels on Sunday, prompting authorities to deliberately breach the lake, according to Jamal Mangan, Pakistan’s Irrigation Special Secretary.
Water released from the lake flowed into the nearby districts of Jaffarabad and Bubak, with the aim of sparing more populated cities and towns across Sindh, including Sehwan, Dadu and Bhan Syedabad, from the worst of the flooding, according to Mangan.
Record monsoon rains that have lashed Pakistan and melting glaciers in the country’s northern mountains have affected 33 million people – or 15% of its population – according to government officials and aid organizations.
A third of Pakistan was left underwater after experiencing the heaviest rains on record, according to satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA). Some areas – particularly the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan – have seen five times their normal levels of monsoonal rain.
The number of deaths since mid-June rose to 1,305 as of Sunday – with almost a third of the victims children – according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).
Three million children are now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance across Pakistan due to the increased risk of waterborne diseases, drowning and malnutrition, UNICEF warned in a statement Wednesday.
Several international aid agencies were beginning to arrive in flood-ravaged Pakistan on Monday, delivering much needed food, clean water and medicines to victims of what the United Nations has called a “monsoon on steroids.”
‘This will not be over in two months’
Dr. Deedar Hussain from Pakistan’s health department said he feared of an outbreak of waterborne diseases if the flood waters do not recede fast enough.
“Many patients have come to us. According to our register, we have received 16,000 patients (from over the district). Mostly patients are suffering from allergy because of (flood) water, and there are patients suffering from diarrhea and fever. Also there are patients suffering from malaria as we are conducting malaria parasite tests on them,” Hussain told Reuters on Saturday.
Aurélie Godet, a press officer with Médecins du Monde, told CNN on Thursday the flood waters had washed away everything.
“Survivors must start from scratch. They need urgently dignified shelters, affordable food, access to health and to basic commodities. But this will not be over in two months, they need a long-term aid,” Godet said.
Godet said that children have been coming to their clinics with severe injuries on their feet because they have no shoes. And she said some people can’t afford their regular medicine because of price increases that are also making food too expensive, even outside the flood zone.
“In the dryer areas, survivors are telling us that one difference now for them is the prices of the food, because the roads are inaccessible. It is four times the prices of the market. They cannot afford to eat,” she said.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on August 30 the floods were “the worst in the country’s history” and estimated the calamity had caused more than $10 billion in damages to infrastructure, homes and farms.
According to charity Action Against Hunger, 27 million people in the country did not have access to enough food prior the floods, and now the risk of widespread hunger is even more imminent.
