Talk About Tennis 2.0

That is not what he is talking about. The presidential terms in Colombia are 4 years, and Santos made re-election not an option. You do not get a second term, but there is a clause that would allow for such an extension via a referendum. That is what he is aiming for. So, in order to start such a process, he needs to start early enough.
I am not sure if the referendum is to force four more years, or to allow him to run again.
Anyway, these baboons here are discovering that he is a POS and his disapproval rating is around 67%. He has a lot of work to do.

Here in the States they want to bring back child labor because it's okay for kids 14 years old to work in bars (!). In England it's debtors prisons.

Secret Home Office policy to detain people with NHS debt at airport found unlawful
Policy was uncovered by defenders of two women repeatedly detained when trying to re-enter the UK
Diane Taylor
Fri 26 May 2023 19.57 BST

A secret Home Office policy to detain people with the right to live in the UK at air and seaports has been found to be unlawful in the high court.

The policy applied to those with unpaid NHS debts and was only uncovered through evidence gathered from charities and lawyers fighting the cases of two mothers who were repeatedly detained.

The women were held at ports when trying to re-enter the UK after trips abroad to visit family, because they had outstanding debts to the NHS for maternity care – debts which Home Office was aware of when granting them leave to remain in the UK.

While the women were only detained with their children for short periods they did not know when they would be released.

Border Force officials detained and investigated them because they were flagged on the Home Office system as having unpaid NHS debts.

In a judgment handed down today Mr Justice Chamberlain found that the two women and their young children were falsely imprisoned by the home secretary without justification. He also found that Suella Braverman had breached her duty to consider the equality impact of the policy on women, who are known to be disproportionately affected by NHS charging.

The Home Office was asked during the course of the case to confirm the policy existed and publish it, but refused to do so. It has now finally disclosed the policy and said it is being rewritten.

The women who brought the case are from Mali and Albania respectively. The woman from Mali is a survivor of FGM and ran up NHS debts due to several miscarriages and a stillbirth. Her debt is being challenged due to her being a victim of FGM. The Albanian woman is paying off her NHS debt.

Ruling in the women’s favour the judge found the Home Office’s unpublished policy to stop people at air and seaports was unlawful.

In his ruling he said: “If such a policy is not published, there is a danger that a practice will develop … which can only be discerned by piecing together the accounts given by a large number of individuals to their respective lawyers. The result may be that large numbers of people are unlawfully detained before the practice can be identified and the illegality exposed.

“By that time, however, it is likely that it had been applied to a very large number of people. It would have been much better for all concerned if the policy had been published and its illegality recognised earlier.”

Both women welcomed the judgment. The Albanian woman, who was detained at least eight times, said: “I was detained with my children every time we travelled home to see my family for the last eight years. It made us dread approaching immigration control as we just did not know how long they would hold us or even if they would let us through.

“I am really relieved that the judge agreed with us that the officers cannot use detention powers in this way. I welcome the Home Office’s decision to change its policy for people like me who have been living lawfully in the UK for years and who just want to be able to return home.”

Janet Farrell, of Bhatt Murphy Solicitors, who represented both the women, said: “The detention of our clients was humiliating and distressing. This judgment shows how vital it is that policies concerning the use of coercive powers such as detention are published so victims can hold the government to account in court in a meaningful way.”

A government spokesperson said: “The Home Office is carefully considering the implications of the judgment. Amended guidance will be updated and published shortly.”


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... d-unlawful

Haven't they already made that musical?

American ‘stolen’ as a baby finds family in Chile
Rafael Romo
By CNN's Rafael Romo
Updated 3:22 PM EDT, Sat May 27, 2023


Scott Lieberman, an American who lives in San Francisco, always knew that he was adopted from Chile. What he did not know was that he had been stolen as an infant.

“I lived 42 years of my life without knowing that I was stolen, not knowing what was happening down in Chile during the 70s and 80s and I just, I want people to know… There are families out there that can still be reunited,” Lieberman said.

During the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-90), many babies were funneled to adoption agencies. Some of the children came from rich families, taken or given up to protect reputations. Other babies from poorer backgrounds were simply stolen – as it appears was the case with Lieberman.

In the last decade, CNN has documented multiple cases of Chilean babies who were stolen at birth. Authorities in the country say priests, nuns, doctors, nurses and others conspired to carry out illegal adoptions, with the main motive being profit.

Chilean officials say the number of stolen babies could be in the thousands, but the country’s investigation into the controversial adoptions has languished over the years. Some who took part in the illegal adoptions have died. Many clinics or hospitals where the babies were allegedly stolen no longer exist.

When Lieberman found out about the scandal a few months ago, he began to wonder if the same thing had happened to him – and began to piece together the story of two families deceived, in Chile and in the United States.



Scott Lieberman as a child.
Courtesy of Scott Lieberman

Stolen children

Lieberman’s story starts in late 1979 in the town of Cañete, located in south central Chile’s Biobío region. His mother Rosa Ester Mardones, then 23 years old, had just found out she was pregnant. Since she was unmarried and in a difficult financial situation, she sought help, according to her daughter Jenny Escalona Mardones, who is two years older than Lieberman.

Escalona told CNN that Catholic nuns went to visit her mother and offered her a job in Santiago, the capital, where “she would do domestic work at a house belonging to a doctor.”

Once in Santiago, she was also helped by a social worker who, according to Escalona, seemed particularly interested in Mardones’ case. Over the course of her pregnancy, Escalona said, the social worker made her mother sign multiple documents that the young woman from the countryside didn’t fully understand.

The baby was born on August 21, 1980, at Santiago’s Clinica Providencia. He was healthy, but Rosa Ester Mardones barely got to see him after delivery. The social worker took custody and took the baby away, even before his mother had left the hospital, Escalona said.

When Mardones sought the social worker to inquire about the baby, she was threatened.

“Don’t come here looking for the baby anymore; because, if you do I will call the police, and they will arrest you,” Escalona said her mother was told.

“Your son is now in the Netherlands or Sweden. He’s in a different country. You’re a poor, single woman, and you’re not capable of raising another child. You signed your parental rights away, anyway.”

During the dictatorship, asking too many questions was risky. For a woman like Mardones, getting help from the police would’ve been unthinkable.

The baby was indeed in a different country, but not in Europe. An American couple had adopted him and done all the paperwork to legally take the baby home with them to the United States, where the infant, now named Scott Lieberman, would grow up.

‘I feel more complete’
In an interview with CNN, Lieberman, now 42 years old, said his adoptive parents never suspected they were adopting a baby boy who was stolen from his biological mother.

It was not until late last year when Lieberman, who works as a video editor, read a story about illegal adoptions in Chile, that he began to wonder if that had been his case too.

With the help of “Nos Buscamos” a Chilean nonprofit organization seeking to reunite children who were taken away from their biological parents, he found out he had a half-sister. With the help of MyHeritage, an online genealogy company, Lieberman and Escalona took DNA tests that confirmed they are related.

Lieberman showed CNN his Chilean birth certificate and birth record as well as his American adoption documents.

On April 11, Lieberman flew to Chile to meet his biological family. His mother had died of bone cancer in 2015, at the age of 58. She never knew her son was adopted by an American family and would return to his native Chile less than a decade later.

He instead met his half-sister at the Concepción Airport. She doesn’t speak English and his Spanish is basic, but there were no words needed. Despite being strangers a few weeks before, they were now hugging as if they had known each other their entire lives. No one, including those around them, had a dry eye.

Asked how he felt about returning to his native country, Lieberman said: “Very good. Almost all my family is here. It’s incredible. So much love!” Members of his extended family had also shown up and he later met with his biological father as well.

His sister, Escalona, said she felt “very happy,” yet lost for words.


Scott and his half-sister, Jenny Escalona, at their mother's grave in Chile.
Courtesy of Nos Buscamos
Lieberman believes he was fortunate, especially when he thinks about those mothers and children who haven’t found each other.

“She knew I existed. There are other mothers who were told their children were stillborn. They don’t know that their child could still be alive in another country,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman spent 12 days in Chile, visiting his biological mother’s tomb along with his sister.

“I didn’t feel that my life wasn’t complete before. I had a lot of love from my family growing up. I have a lot of love from my friends. But now, it’s weird, but I do feel more complete. loved in a way that I’ve never felt before,” Lieberman told CNN after returning to San Francisco from Chile.

Escalona now believes the nuns who went to visit her mother when she became pregnant, as well as the doctor in whose house she worked, conspired with the social worker to steal her half-brother from her mother.

Escalona said her mother never told her anything about her brother. She believes a combination of shame, pain and sadness prevented her mother from letting her know the truth.

“Never, ever, did my mother talk about the fact that she had had a child and that he had been stolen. It was the painful truth that she kept to herself for many years. I even think that her pain took her away,” Escalona said.

What Escalona knows is from a close relative who helped her mother. That relative was with her mother during the pregnancy and knew details about the baby’s birth and how he was taken away from her mother, Escalona said.

The truth has helped Escalona understand things about her mother that once seemed puzzling, including her mother’s decision to live near Santiago’s airport during the last years of her life.

“She liked going to the airport and she would ask us to go with her. She would just sit down and watch people, especially those who were arriving,” Escalona said.

She now believes her mother hoped her son would come back.

Her mother moved back to Cañete just before she died, but would often say: “I can no longer hear the airplanes.”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/27/americas ... index.html

Photos of the Week via the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/news/galler ... est-photos

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... 0-pictures

India train disaster: signal fault identified as cause, says minister
Train was diverted on to wrong tracks, says railways minister as efforts to clear wreckage continue

Hannah Ellis-Petersen South Asia correspondent
Sun 4 Jun 2023 15.15 BST

India’s railways minister has said the country’s deadliest train crash in more than two decades was caused by an error in electronic signals that sent a train on to the wrong tracks.

Ashwini Vaishnaw said the full investigation into Friday’s crash in the eastern state of Odisha, which killed at least 275 people and injured more than 1,000, was still under way but “the root cause has been identified”.

According to preliminary findings, a green signal was given to the Coromandel Express train to move forward, at which point the train switched tracks from the main line to the loop line where a stationary freight train, laden with heavy iron ore, was parked.

The impact of the collision, which took place as the Coromandel Express was travelling at 80mph, was momentous. The crash caused the engine and the first four or five coaches to jump the tracks, topple and hit the last two coaches of the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express heading in the opposite direction, causing several carriages of that train to also derail.

Vaishnaw would not confirm if the human error or interference had played a role in the signalling malfunction. “Who has done it and what is the reason will come out of an investigation,” he added. The railways ministry has also sought a criminal investigation into the incident by the Central Bureau of Investigation, a government agency.

Two officials of the Railway Board also confirmed that the train had been given a green signal to proceed down the loop track and had not been over the speed limit at the time of the collision.

Jaya Varma Sinha, a member of the Railway Board, said failure of the track management system was the main focus of investigations. The computer-controlled “interlocking system”, which is in use across the whole railway network, coordinates and controls the signals to oncoming trains.

It is supposed to automatically direct a train to an empty track at the point where two tracks meet, but it appears this did not happen on Friday. Sinha said she had spoken to the driver, who survived the crash, and confirmed he had not jumped a signal.

“It is supposed to be tamper-proof, error-proof. It is called a failsafe system, even if it fails the signal will turn red and the train will be stopped,” said Sinha. “However, as it is being suspected, there was some kind of a problem in the system.”

More than 1,000 rescuers have been working since Friday to locate survivors in the aftermath of the collision. On Sunday, as the operation was completed and all the remaining bodies were pulled from the wreckage, the process began of clearing the mangled carriages and relaying the tracks so service could resume along one of India’s busiest rail routes.

“All bodies have been removed. Our target is to finish the restoration work by Wednesday morning so that trains can start running on this track,” said Vaishnaw as he visited the collision site on Sunday.

The death toll, earlier estimated at 288, was revised down on Sunday after it was found that some bodies had been counted twice, according to a statement by a senior Odisha state official.

Five more bodies were brought to a school being used as a mortuary near the scene of the accident early on Sunday, where health workers struggled to deal with the scale of the decomposing bodies in the hot temperatures. Almost 100 ambulances were deployed to bring the bodies, many of which were mutilated beyond recognition, to hospitals and cold storage facilities in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, until they were claimed by relatives.

Friday’s incident was the worst since 1995, when two trains collided near Delhi, killing 358 people. The accident has thrown a spotlight on the safety of the Indian railways at a time when the prime minister, Narendra Modi, has spent billions on a sleek modernisation of the British colonial-era railway network, which carries about 13 million passengers daily.

Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, which have brought down fatalities to zero in the past two years, several hundred accidents occur every year on India’s railways, the largest train network under one management in the world, the majority of them due to derailment.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... assing-300

grim.

NY Times is reporting that Boris Johnson has resigned from Parliament.

dryrunguy wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 9:27 pm NY Times is reporting that Boris Johnson has resigned from Parliament.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ate-report

To which all I can say is:
BORIS JOHNSON WAS STILL IN PARLIAMENT?

ponchi101 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 9:39 pm To which all I can say is:
BORIS JOHNSON WAS STILL IN PARLIAMENT?

He stepped down as Prime Minister, but he was still an elected member of Parliament until an election, or resignation.

Canada’s Ability to Prevent Forest Fires Lags Behind the Need
Provincial firefighting agencies are stretched thin, there is no national agency and it’s hard to get approval for controlled burns — factors that have exacerbated recent outbreaks.


The headquarters of Quebec’s forest firefighting agency, in Roberval, where all operations for the northern part of the province are managed.Credit...Renaud Philippe for The New York Times

By Vjosa Isai and Ian Austen
Reporting from Toronto

June 9, 2023, 6:58 p.m. ET
Canada’s capacity to prevent wildfires has been shrinking for decades because of budget cuts, a loss of some of the country’s forest service staff, and onerous rules for fire prevention, turning some of its forests into a tinderbox.

As residents braced for what could be the worst wildfire season on record, and one that is far from over, the air slowly cleared over the Northeastern United States on Friday, but hundreds of wildfires continued to burn across Canada.

Thanks to some rain and cloud cover near wildfire areas, with scattered rains expected in parts of southern Ontario on Sunday, Steven Flisfeder, a warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, predicted that the weekend could bring better air quality in Toronto, the country’s largest city.

“That’s going to help flush out the contaminants from the air a little bit,” he said.

More than 1,100 firefighters from around the world have been dispatched across Canada to help combat the country’s raging fire season, officials said, including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Wildfire emergency response management is handled by each of the 10 provinces and three territories in Canada, but hundreds of blazes across the country have stretched local resources thin, and renewed calls for a national firefighting service.

At a time when many Canadians are asking if the country has enough wildfire fighting resources, several experts say the government should be focused on doing all it can to prevent wildfires, a focus from which it has strayed since budget cuts imposed in the 1990s that hampered the nation’s forest service.

“We need to do more to get ahead of the problem,” said Mike Flannigan, who studies wildfires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, a community in the heart of that province’s wildfire country. “And progress on that has been slow, primarily because we are kind of stuck in this paradigm that fire suppression is the solution.”

People who study Canada’s response say it’s been weakened by a variety of forces, including local and national budget cuts for forests, cumbersome safeguards for fire prevention and a steep reduction in the number of forest service employees.

British Columbia spent 801 million Canadian dollars (about $601 million) on fighting forest fires during the unusually hot year 2021 wildfire season, which saw fire wipe out the town of Lytton. But the province’s current wildfire prevention budget is just 32 million dollars a year.

Similar disparities exist in other provinces, which tend to invest in small, community-based programs that protect villages and towns rather than mitigating the risk of fire throughout forests, increasing the threat of out-of-control wildfires.

The small programs are helpful, involving measures like clearing forest floors on the periphery of towns and creating fire breaks between settlements and forests. But to reduce runaway wildfires, broader measures are necessary, experts said.

One of the fire prevention methods that Canada should expand, experts said, is prescribed burns, a practice that involves setting a specific area on fire under controlled conditions to incinerate trees, dead branches, brush and other materials that could otherwise be fuel for wildfires.

It also stimulates ecological restoration, clearing the canopy cover to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor and promote new growth, as well as opening the cones of some tree species to free seeds.

“It’s a great technique, but we haven’t used it that much in Canada,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. “With climate change, we’re clearly seeing different fire behavior.”

Some communities of Indigenous people — whom wildfires disproportionately affect because they often live in fire-prone areas — have hewed to the practice of controlled burning.

Two years ago, while a record-breaking heat wave exacerbated wildfires across British Columbia, some of the flames roared close to the Westbank First Nation, an Indigenous community in the Okanagan Valley. But years of thinning the forest and managing their land using cultural burning practices prevented the fire from causing any major damage to the community.

Across Canada, there are a handful of controlled burns each year, according to partial figures compiled by the National Forestry Database. Foresters seeking to perform them must go through a lengthy process to get approval from a province.

The burns are generally unpopular in places like public parks, and even more so when they go wrong. In 1995, more than 1,000 people were evacuated after a prescribed burn got out of control and threatened the town of Dubreuilville, Ontario.

In some fire seasons, the duration of the approval process exceeds the narrow window when weather conditions are favorable for controlled burns.

The rules minimize the risk of an out-of-control prescribed burn, but they increase the risk of an out-of-control wildfire.

“Essentially, you’ve handcuffed folks — foresters and silviculturists — from being able to get off successful prescribed burns because we made the rules so onerous and so restrictive” causing more wildfire fuel to be left on the forest floor, said Sarah Bros, a forester and co-owner at Merin Forest Management based in North Bay, Ontario, who has done prescribed burning. “Harvesting doesn’t do what Mother Nature does.”

Budget cuts in the late 1990s, called for by the prime minister at the time, Paul Martin — known as a “deficit slayer” — left few government agencies untouched, shrinking the Canadian Forest Service’s staff size from 2,200 to the 700 people it now employs.

“There was an incredible brain drain,” said Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University in Ontario and author of the book “Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire.”

“People were mortified, and continue to be mortified, by the fact that we have this situation that’s unfolding, this new fire paradigm, and the forest service’s just getting chump change to address it,” he said.

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Montreal. Remy Tumin contributed reporting from New York.

Vjosa Isai reports for The Times from Toronto. @lavjosa

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto and currently lives in Ottawa. He has reported for The Times about Canada for more than a decade. @ianrausten

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/worl ... acity.html

Paris explosion: More than 20 injured after blast










Twenty-nine people have been injured, four of them seriously, after a large explosion in central Paris.

The blast took place in a building that housed a design school and the Catholic education system headquarters in Rue Saint-Jacques, in the fifth arrondissement of the French capital.

Emergency workers are searching through the wreckage of the building, with at least two thought to be missing.

According to witnesses, there was a strong smell of gas before the blast.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said after arriving at the scene that initial checks of camera footage suggested the explosion occurred within the building, which was next to the Val de Grâce church, Le Parisien newspaper reported.

However, the authorities have said the cause of the blast has not yet been determined.

The building was initially engulfed by fire, but the blaze was later brought under control, said Paris police chief Laurent Nunez.

The area has been cordoned off and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been to the scene, while Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has warned people to avoid the area.

The area where the explosion took place runs south from the Latin Quarter in Paris's Left Bank area that is popular with tourists and known for its student population.

A student at Ecole des Mines on Boulevard Saint-Michel told Le Parisien: "I was in front of the Val de Grâce, I heard a huge boom and I saw a ball of fire 20 or 30m high. And the building collapsed with a huge noise. I smelled gas, but took several minutes to come to my senses."

Another witness, Antoine Brouchot, told the BBC he was at home when he heard a "big explosion".

"I stuck my head out of the window and looked towards Cochin [hospital], then I saw a big cloud of smoke and as I got closer, there was a building that had collapsed and for the moment, there is a fire."


https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65979245

In missing submersible and migrant disaster, a tale of two Pakistans
Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor


Raja Sakundar displays a picture of his nephew, who was missing after a boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of Greece. (Nasir Mehmood/AP)

The two maritime tragedies that gripped attention in recent days could barely be more different.

Last Wednesday, a fishing trawler carrying more than 700 migrants primarily from Egypt, Syria and Pakistan went down off the coast of Greece, in one of the worst such disasters in more than a decade. Though the death toll is officially at 81, Greek authorities have only counted 104 survivors. Their testimony suggests all the women and children aboard perished. By some estimates, more than 300 Pakistani nationals on the boat died, with one account alleging many were forced to stay below deck in the hold as the ship capsized and sank.

Shocking as it is, this disaster in the Mediterranean is all too familiar to a global public largely numb to the plight of those making the perilous crossing. The migrants fell victim to a familiar chain of misfortunes: They were exploited by people-smuggling networks that stretched from their countries of origin to the coast of Libya. With the threat of violence, they were forced onto an overcrowded, unseaworthy, ill-equipped boat. The ship that took them to their deaths was stranded for days on its intended journey to Italy without help, despite apparent distress calls made by the migrants. And they endured this all in a desperate attempt to find asylum on a continent whose governments have failed to come up with a collective plan on migration and where many locals would rather push them back into the sea.

Far away in the North Atlantic, a cinematic ordeal is playing out that has news media and the global public riveted. Somewhere near the famous wreck of the Titanic, a deep-sea submersible is missing. At the time of writing, the search for the 21-foot craft, known as the Titan, was entering its fourth day after it lost contact with Canadian research vessel Polar Prince on Sunday morning. The U.S. Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Air Force had scrambled to locate the submersible over a vast 10,000-square mile search zone in the ocean, which reaches 13,000 feet deep in some areas. U.S. officials feared that the five passengers aboard, if still alive, had not much more than a day of oxygen left.

The Titan was carrying out a dive organized by OceanGate Expeditions, a private research and tourism company that has conducted trips to the Titanic wreck site. Its passengers reportedly pay $250,000 a head to go on the journey. Though the names of those on board had not been released by authorities, reporting confirmed that British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush were inside the Titan. So too were Shahzada Dawood, heir to one of Pakistan’s biggest private fortunes, and his teenage son Suleman.

“[They] had embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean,” the Dawood family said in a statement. “As of now, contact has been lost with their submersible craft and there is limited information available.”

On social media, some Pakistanis pointed to the grim spectacle of compatriots from opposite ends of a great socioeconomic divide disappearing in the watery depths at the same time. Pakistan is in the middle of a devastating economic crisis, with the rate of inflation at a 50-year high, food shortages, energy blackouts and mounting unemployment. The conditions have compelled numerous people, especially among the poor, to seek a better life abroad.

“The desperate situation has led to the mushrooming growth of people smugglers in Pakistan,” wrote Zahid Shahab Ahmed, a senior research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization in Australia. “In exchange for large sums of money, they offer people transportation, fake documentation and other resources for a swift departure from the country.”

“It is bad enough that the spectacular failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract by providing economic security to its citizens drives desperate individuals — even the educated ones — to leave the country,” noted a Monday editorial in Dawn, a Pakistani daily, further lamenting that “an inept, uncaring government has made little effort to crack down on a vast network of human smugglers who fleece desperate individuals and put them on a path strewn with hazards.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif declared Monday a national day of mourning, while authorities in various parts of the country arrested people suspected of links to human-trafficking networks. “Our thoughts and prayers are with you, and we pray that the departed souls find eternal peace,” the chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, Muhammad Sadiq Sanjrani, said, vowing to take on the people smugglers.

That may be cold comfort to many Pakistanis, who live in what by some measures is South Asia’s most unequal society, one long dominated by influential, quasi-feudal potentates. Sharif himself is a scion of a political dynasty that also has huge business interests.

The Dawoods belong to the same world. Shahzada Dawood is vice chairman of Engro Corp., a major conglomerate that is a subsidiary of family-owned Dawood Hercules, fronted by his father, Hussain Dawood. It’s a multibillion-dollar operation that sprawls over various sectors of Pakistan’s economy, including textiles, fertilizers, foods and energy. As a result, Engro has been the beneficiary of hefty government subsidies. Both Dawood and Sharif were identified in the 2016 Panama Papers leak among the dozens of Pakistani tycoons and politicos to possess secret offshore bank accounts.

Dawood frequented the World Economic Forum, touted his vision for a “sustainable future” and business models that help uplift “low-income communities.” The Dawoods are also engaged in philanthropic work in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Britain, where Shahzada Dawood and his immediate family are based as dual British-Pakistani citizens.

The hundreds of Pakistanis lost in the Mediterranean were chasing just a glimmer of that life. Speaking to the Associated Press, Zohaib Shamraiz, a Pakistani man living in Barcelona, described his last conversation with his uncle, Nadeem Muhamm, who was still missing. Shamraiz’s uncle had left behind three young children in Pakistan to make a better life for his impoverished family.

“I spoke to him five minutes before he got on the boat,” Shamraiz told the AP. “I told him not to go. I was afraid. He said he had no choice.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... -pakistan/