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KHARTOUM: A network of Russian and Sudanese military leaders are colluding to plunder the African nation’s gold reserves and production, enabling Moscow to fund its ongoing war in Ukraine amidst increasingly severe Western sanctions, a CNN report published recently has claimed.
According to CNN’s sources, Russia allegedly operated 16 flights out of Sudan, Africa’s third largest producer of the precious metal, over the past 18 months.
CNN claimed a whistleblower from inside the Sudanese Central Bank showed reporters a photo of a spreadsheet revealing that 32.7 tons was unaccounted for in 2021. Using current prices, this amounts to $1.9 billion worth of missing gold, at $60 million a ton.
But the report stated that this could be an underestimate, and that $13.4 billion, or 90 percent of the country’s production, is lost through illegal means every year. CNN could not verify these figures in the report.
The CNN report claims that the scheme is the result of an agreement with Sudan’s increasingly unpopular military leadership in exchange for Russia’s military support to suppress the country’s pro-democracy movement.
Former and current US officials quoted by CNN claim that Russia actively supported Sudan’s 2021 military coup, which deposed a transitional civilian government.
This was a crushing blow to Sudan’s pro-democracy movement, which had toppled President Omar Al-Bashir two years before.
The CNN report claims that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and key ally of President Vladimir Putin, is at the heart of this pact between Moscow and Khartoum’s military junta.
The broadcaster claims it has invoices showing that Prigozhin’s main vehicle in Sudan is a US-sanctioned company called Meroe Gold, which extracts gold while also providing weapons and training to the country’s army and paramilitary groups.
The report, which CNN compiled in collaboration with the London-based Dossier Center, claims that at least one high-level Wagner Group operative, Alexander Sergeyevich Kuznetsov, has overseen operations in Sudan’s key gold mining industry in recent years.
The Dossier Center was started by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, now living in exile in London. Wagner is a paramilitary group linked to alleged torture, mass killings and looting in several war-torn countries including Syria and the Central African Republic. Prigozhin denies links to Wagner.
In 2021, the European Union sanctioned Kuznetsov for Wagner Group activities that it claimed endangered Libya’s peace, stability, and security.
CNN has sought comment on the story from Russia’s foreign and defense ministries, and the parent organization of Prigozhin’s group of companies, but there has been no response.
“We are monitoring this issue closely, including the reported activities of Meroe Gold, the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group, and other sanctioned actors in Sudan, the region, and throughout the gold trade,” a US State Department spokesperson was quoted as saying, in response to the CNN investigation.
“We support the Sudanese people in their pursuit of a democratic and prosperous Sudan that respects human rights,” the spokesperson added. “We will continue to make clear our concerns to Sudanese military officials about the malign impact of Wagner, Meroe Gold, and other actors.”
HELSINKI: Finland’s much-delayed Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor, Europe’s largest, began regular output early on Sunday, its operator said, boosting energy security in a region to which Russia has cut gas and power supplies.
Nuclear power remains controversial in Europe, primarily due to safety concerns, and news of OL3’s start-up comes as Germany on Saturday switched off its last three remaining reactors, while Sweden, France, Britain and others plan new developments.
OL3’s operator Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), which is owned by Finnish utility Fortum and a consortium of energy and industrial companies, has said the unit is expected to meet around 14 percent of Finland’s electricity demand, reducing the need for imports from Sweden and Norway.
The new reactor is expected to produce for at least 60 years, TVO said in a statement on Sunday after completing the transition from testing to regular output.
“The production of Olkiluoto 3 stabilizes the price of electricity and plays an important role in the Finnish green transition,” TVO Chief Executive Jarmo Tanhua said in the statement.
Construction of the 1.6 gigawatt (GW) reactor, Finland’s first new nuclear plant in more than four decades and Europe’s first in 16 years, began in 2005. The plant was originally due to open four years later, but was plagued by technical issues.
OL3 first supplied test production to Finland’s national power grid in March last year and was expected at the time to begin regular output four months later, but instead suffered a string of breakdowns and outages that took months to fix.
Russia’s power exports to Finland ended last May when Russian utility Inter RAO said it had not been paid for the energy it sold, a consequence of the widening gulf between Moscow and Europe over the war in Ukraine.
Russian state export monopoly Gazprom shortly after ended shipments of natural gas to the Nordic nation.
ATHENS: Five migrants and a Greek motorist were killed in a car crash on a highway near the border between Greece and Turkiye on Saturday, police said.
The car, carrying 10 migrants, was traveling at a high speed on the wrong side to avoid a police checkpoint and slammed into a four-wheel drive, the 46-year-old driver of which was also killed, the police said.
The other five migrants — whose nationalities were not immediately clear — and the driver of their vehicle were taken to hospital after sustaining injuries, the police added.
Thousands of migrants have in recent years transited into Greece from Turkiye in the hope of making it to western Europe.
With the stepping up of patrols in the Aegean Sea making it harder for migrants to reach Greek islands more are taking their chances by crossing the River Evros, a natural mainland border, and having traffickers take them from there by road.
Recently there have been an increasing number of accidents similar to that of Saturday.
NGOs have meanwhile been accusing Greece of illegal pushbacks — which Athens denies — of asylum seekers who make it across the river.
In an effort to reduce the flow of migrants, conservative Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis two weeks ago called on the EU to “seriously consider” providing financial aid to help extend an anti-migrant steel fence along the border with Turkiye.
Athens has decided to extend by 35km a five-meter high steel fence which runs along the river.
The fence is currently 38 km long, and Athens aims to carry out the extension within a year, adding a total of 100 km by 2026.
BERLIN: Germany switched off its last three nuclear reactors on Saturday, exiting atomic power even as it seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and manage an energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.
While many Western countries are upping their investments in atomic energy to reduce their emissions, Germany brought an early end to its nuclear age.
It’s “the end of an era,” the RWE energy firm said in a statement shortly after midnight confirming the three reactors had been disconnected from the electricity grid.
Europe’s largest economy has been looking to leave behind nuclear power since 2002, but the phase-out was accelerated by former chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011 after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
The exit decision was popular in a country with a powerful anti-nuclear movement, stoked by lingering fears of a Cold War conflict and atomic disasters such as Chernobyl in Ukraine.
“The risks of nuclear power are ultimately unmanageable,” said Environment Minister Steffi Lemke, who this week made a pilgrimage to the ill-fated Japanese plant ahead of a G7 meeting in the country.
Anti-nuclear demonstrators took to the streets in several German cities to mark the closures.
Greenpeace, at the heart of the anti-nuclear movement, organized a celebratory party at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
“We are putting an end to a dangerous, unsustainable and costly technology,” said Green MP Juergen Trittin.
In front of the Brandenburg Gate, activists symbolically slayed a model dinosaur.
Initially planned for the end of 2022, Germany’s nuclear exit was delayed as Russian gas supplies dwindled.
Germany, the largest emitter in the European Union, also powered up some of its mothballed coal-fueled plants to cover the potential gap left by gas.
The challenging energy situation had increased calls domestically for the exit from nuclear to be delayed.
Germany had to “expand the supply of energy and not restrict it any further” in light of potential shortages and high prices, the president of the German chamber of commerce Peter Adrian told the Rheinische Post daily.
Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition CDU party, said the abandonment of nuclear power was the result of an “almost fanatical bias.”
Meanwhile the conservative daily FAZ headlined its Saturday edition “Thanks, nuclear energy,” as it listed benefits it said nuclear had brought the country over the years.
Outside observers have been similarly irked by Germany’s insistence on exiting nuclear while ramping up its coal usage, with climate activist Greta Thunberg in October slamming the move as “a mistake.”
As expected, the Isar 2 reactor in the southeast of the country, the Neckarwestheim facility in the southwest and Emsland in the northwest were disconnected from the electricity network before midnight.
Earlier, Guido Knott, CEO of PreussenElektra, which operates Isar 2, said it would be “a very moving moment” to power down the reactor.
The three final plants provided just six percent of Germany’s energy last year, compared with 30.8 percent from all nuclear plants in 1997.
“Sooner or later” the reactors will start being dismantled, Economy Minister Robert Habeck told the Funke group ahead of the scheduled decommissioning, brushing aside the idea of an extension.
The government has the energy situation “under control,” Habeck assured, having filled gas stores and built new infrastructure for the import of liquefied natural gas to bridge the gap left by Russian supplies.
Instead, the minister is focused on getting Germany to produce 80 percent of its energy from renewables by 2030.
To this end, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the installation of “four to five wind turbines a day” over the next few years — a tall order given that just 551 were installed last year.
But the current rate of progress on renewables could well be too slow for Germany to meet its climate protection goals.
Despite planning to exit nuclear, Germany has not “pushed ahead enough with the expansion of renewables in the last 10 years,” Simon Mueller from the Agora Energiewende think tank told AFP.
To build enough onshore wind capacity, according to Mueller, Germany now has to “pull out all the stops.”
KHAPLU: After offering afternoon prayers, Fatima carries wood from the roof of her house in northern Pakistan to her kitchen and lights a fire under a large, black stove as she prepares to make a local bread called khurba that is a Ramadan staple in the region.
In Khaplu Valley in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region where Fatima, 66, lives, no pre-fast sahoor meal is complete without khurba — known for keeping one full for long hours through the day — and a local version of salty tea called payoo chaye.
“The importance of khurba is that if anyone eats khurba during sahoor, he can’t feel hungry for long a time because this is not easily digestible,” Ghulam Hassan Hassanu, a local historian and writer, told Arab News, adding that one could even do hard labor while fasting if he or she had consumed the bread.
To make khurba, flour is first sifted into a pot and then baking soda, salt and water is added. The dough is kneaded into round balls and rested on a heated griddle so that it loses its moisture.
In Khaplu Valley in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, no pre-fast sahoor meal is complete without khurba — known for keeping one full for long hours through the day — and a local version of salty tea called payoo chaye.
It is then cooked over a fire.
“We always eat khurba but this is a very special dish for us during Ramadan,” Fatima told Arab News at her home. “Once it is ready, we crumble the khurba (into pieces) and then we mix butter or apricot oil into the pot, and we eat the mixture during sehri,” she said, adding that the dish was “very healthy.”
Mazahir Hussain, a Khaplu-based hotelier, said that the bread was widely consumed during Ramadan and mostly prepared at home and unavailable in markets.
“Khurba is made in homes, not in hotels,” he said. “Women make this food in their homes in the traditional way.”
Hassanu the historian said that while the best quality khurba was made in Khaplu Valley, the famous bread was also prepared in the Kharmang, Shigar, Skardu and Rondu districts of the Gilgit-Baltistan region.
“In addition, it is also made in the Kargil and Ladakh valleys (of India),” he said. “And khurba is made in every place where the Balti people reside,” he added, referring to a local term for the ethnic Balti people from Gilgit-Baltistan.
Among the five popular types of bread, Hassanu said the first was rgia-rat, followed by thal-khur, biami-khurba, rxab-khur and mar-khur.
During the holy month, the rgia-rat, thal-khur and biami-khurba have been considered an important staple of diets, the historian added.
“Rgia-rat khurba is eaten on the same day while biami-khurba can be kept and eaten for 15 days as it is cooked in the oil-mixed heated sand,” he said.
“Due to the lack of moisture, it can be eaten for 15 to 16 days.”
JAKARTA: The world’s largest passenger plane will connect Bali with Dubai from June, boosting optimism for the Indonesian island’s tourism sector as it seeks to welcome 4.5 million foreign visitors this year.
Operated by Emirates, the four-engine behemoth Airbus A380 aircraft will start flying to Bali’s Denpasar airport from June 1, marking a milestone in Indonesia’s aviation, as it will be the first scheduled service of the over 600-seat plane to the archipelago.
One of the world’s most popular vacation destinations, Bali has been getting back on track after its tourism-dependent economy was battered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since Indonesia scrapped quarantine requirements for foreign visitors in March last year, the island welcomed more than 2.3 million international travelers in 2022 — a number still far from the record 6.2 million foreign tourists in 2019, right before the pandemic.
With the strong rebound of global tourism, officials in Bali have set their sights on welcoming 4.5 million foreign visitors in 2023. More than 650,000 have already visited in the first two months of the year.
“The additional access that comes with this new service (from Emirates) will definitely help Bali attract more visitors,” Tjok Bagus Pemayun, chief of Bali Tourism Agency, told Arab News.
“With this big plane come big opportunities to attract the Middle East market.”
More than 5,000 tourists from the Middle East — including from Saudi Arabia and the UAE — have visited Bali in the first two months of the year, local government data shows. And demand for holiday trips to the tropical island is growing.
Emirates itself announced the new A380 service citing growing customer interest.
“The increase in demand for flights between Indonesia and Dubai following COVID-19 recovery this past year especially to Bali, along with the Indonesian public’s sustained excitement toward the A380, are great indicators that this service will be well received in Indonesia,” Emirates Senior Vice President for Far East commercial operations, Orhan Abbas, told Arab News.
“Indonesia remains one of our strategic markets as one of Southeast Asia’s most popular tourist destinations.”