Author: Himalaya Post

Chandigarh (Punjab) [India] – Cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu will attend the swearing-in ceremony of Pakistan Prime Minister-designate Imran Khan on August 18. The decision came shortly after Khan extended a personal invite over a telephone conversation to the Punjab Cabinet Minister to attend his swearing-in ceremony. According to Punjab’s Information and Public Relations Department, Khan also thanked Sidhu for praising him in a press conference on August 2. Meanwhile, the Punjab Minister informed the Union Home Ministry and the office of the Chief Minister of Punjab regarding his intention to attend the swearing-in ceremony. He further revealed that he was in talks with former Indian skipper Kapil Dev, who has also been invited to the event. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Friday confirmed that the Prime Minister-in-waiting will take oath at the President House in Islamabad on August 18, instead of August...

SHANGHAI – A key objective of President Donald Trump’s trade war is to pressure Beijing to “buy American”, but when it comes to millions of dollars of US meat imports, China may simply take its business elsewhere. Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs on US pork and beef are making them prohibitively expensive and Chinese importers are simply turning to other sources, a trend expected in other sectors as well. “When the US prices go so expensive after the duties… we will source from other origins,” said Zhang Lihui, Shanghai manager for global meat company PMI Foods. “Like for beef, we will buy more from Australia, we will buy more from South America, and maybe a little bit more from Canada.” PMI Foods has already ceased importing cuts of US pork meat into China after Beijing’s tariffs — imposed last month in response to Trump’s initial duties on Chinese goods — drove prices up. – Shifting patterns – Shifting trade patterns caused by the tariff battle will “definitely” benefit other countries at the US’s expense, Zhang said. “The Chinese market will certainly look for replacements,” she said. The outcome of the trade battle, spread across a range of sectors, remains hard to predict. But analysts warn that US exporters will lose significant China business. The US exported around $140 million worth of pork, beef and related by-products to China in June, before...

AKTAU, Kazakhstan – The leaders of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan are meeting in the Kazakh port city of Aktau on Sunday to sign a landmark deal on the Caspian Sea. Here are five facts about the inland sea whose legal status has been the subject of fraught negotiations for over two decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse. – Vast inland sea – The Caspian is the largest inland body of water in the world. With around 70,000 cubic kilometres (16,800 cubic miles) of water, it is bigger by volume than both the North and Baltic seas. The region’s countries have long disputed whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake, which carries legal consequences. No rivers flow out of it and it is surrounded by land which means it is technically closer to being a lake. The new draft agreement calls it a sea while Russia said the provisions give it a special legal status. – Energy-rich – One of the reasons the Caspian has been contested so fiercely by the five littoral states is its abundance of hydrocarbon reserves. According to the US Energy Information Administration’s latest estimate in 2012 there were 48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet (8.3 trillion cubic metres) of natural gas in proved and probable reserves in the Caspian Sea’s basins and its surrounding area. The Caspian’s...

JAKARTA –  A 12-year-old boy is the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed eight people in mountainous eastern Indonesia, authorities said Sunday. The Swiss-made Pilatus aircraft lost contact with air traffic control Saturday during what was supposed to be a flight of around 40 minutes in remote Papua province. The wreckage of the plane was found in a heavily forested area on a mountain side in the Oksibil subdistrict on Sunday morning. “Eight passengers were found dead and one was found alive,” Papua military spokesman Lieutenant colonel Dax Sianturi said. “At the moment the cause of the crash has not been confirmed,” he told AFP, adding an investigation would be carried out by the national transportation safety committee. The plane, which was owned by private charter company Dimonim Air, was carrying seven passengers and two crew. Before the accident, villagers in nearby Okatem reported hearing a loud roar followed by an explosion. Search and rescue teams walked two hours to reach the crash site and were still recovering the bodies late morning. Indonesia relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands but has a poor aviation safety record and has suffered several fatal crashes in recent years. Papua is a particularly difficult area to reach. Five people died after a small plane crashed near Wamena in Papua province in July last year. In August...

BEIJING –  China’s coal imports in July hit a record high in four and a half years as demand for coal-fired electricity increased during the summer, official data showed. China imported 29 million tonnes of coal in July, up 49 percent year on year, the highest monthly volume since January 2014, according to data from the General Administration of Customs. The value of imports surged 63 percent year on year to 17.9 billion yuan (about 2.6 billion U.S. dollars) in July, the data showed. China is promoting the use of clean energy to reduce its dependence on coal, but the latter still accounted for 60.4 percent of the country’s energy consumption in 2017. The share narrowed by 1.6 percentage points from the previous year. Increased imports and port inventories kept a lid on coal prices. The Bohai-Rim Steam-Coal Price Index, the country’s benchmark power coal price, stood at 567 yuan per tonne for the week between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7, the same as the previous week. ...