The English website of the Islamic magazine - Al-Mujtama. A leading source of global Islamic and Arabic news, views and information for more than 50 years.
February 10, 2025
Staff
Economic activity in US services sector up for 16th month in row
October 06, 2021Economic activity in the US' services sector grew in September for the 16th month in a row, according to the results of the services business survey released by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) on Tuesday.
The ISM non-manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI), which indicates the overall economic condition of the sector, increased 0.2 percentage points from the previous month to 61.9% in September.
The market expectation was for a 60% reading, while the index had been at 61.7% in August.
The ISM's business activity index was 62.3% last month, an increase of 2.2 percentage points from the August reading of 60.1.
Its services employment index, on the other hand, came at 53% in September, down 0.7 percentage points from 53.7 percent in August./aa
Zambia’s refugee numbers nearly double in past 5 years
October 06, 2021The Zambian Ministry of Home Affairs and Internal Security reported that the country's refugee numbers has more than doubled in the last five years.
Minister Jack Mwiimbu said numbers rose from 53, 972 in 2016 to 102,127 this year.
"This calls for greater burden and responsibility sharing, especially given the $12.3 million funding shortfall for Zambia experienced in 2021," Mwiimbu told a virtual 72nd UNHCR executive committee meeting, Tuesday.
He said his country has maintained a long standing tradition as a hospitable state and safe haven for asylum seekers and refugees by keeping its borders open in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Zambia stands with you and your staff as we strive to deliver protection and solutions despite the health crisis posed by the coronavirus pandemic," he added.
Zambia, which has a population of more than 18 million, rolled out the implementation of the comprehensive refugee response framework in 2017 and continues to be inclusive in
programs by placing national resources at the disposal of refugees, including land, social services and economic opportunities using the whole of government approach.
"However, the increase in the refugee population has exerted immense pressure on the country’s capacity to efficiently and effectively care and protect them," Mwiimbu said adding that there was also a greater need to raise the bar in the quality of services offered to refugees and host communities.
Mwiimbu called for international support to diversify sources of funding and find more creative ways to fulfil our responsibilities to displaced populations from countries such as Rwanda and Angola.
This, he said would be crucial for the country to provide alternative legal status and ensuring socio-economic inclusion for the more than 23,000 former refugees.
He added that to prevent statelessness, efforts are being made to ensure all refugees and former refugees have access to civil registration documents and are included in the new civil registration strategic plan./aa
Canada did not provide “adequate” help to the elderly and the disabled during soaring summer temperatures that killed hundreds, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Tuesday.
Temperatures in June reached a Canadian record of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the west coast province of British Columbia and authorities were not prepared for the disaster that killed at least 569 according to the government's own figures.
“People with disabilities and older people are at high risk of heat stress, but they were left to cope with dangerous heat on their own,” HRW disability rights researcher Emina Cerimovic said in a story as reported by the Aljazeera news website.
“The Canadian authorities need to listen to and provide much better support for people with disabilities and older people before disaster strikes again.”
The organization also condemned British Columbia's health services for delaying deployment of its emergency measures to deal with the intense "heat dome" until temperatures were starting to drop.
“One person said that her 88-year-old aunt who used a wheelchair died on June 28 as a result of the heat dome [heat trapped by a high pressure system] and had been unable to get through to 911 [emergency medical services],” the report reads.
A longer wildfire season due to climate change also contributed to poor air quality with negative health effects, the report states.
“Canada’s federal and provincial governments are required to take action to prevent foreseeable negative impacts on rights from climate change, including protecting those most at risk of negative health impacts, such as older people and people with disabilities,” the report says.
The rights organization also raked the Canadian government over the coals for continuing to subsidize fossil fuels that contribute to climate change.
British Columbia officials responded to the report by telling HRW that it is "developing an extreme heat and wildfire smoke response strategy in 2022-2025."
However, the rights group said "urgent measures" need to be adopted by the government.
The rights group interviewed 31 people who described their efforts to counteract the high temperatures./agencies
Trump out of Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people
October 06, 2021Former US President Donald Trump has dropped from the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people for the first time in 25 years, according to Forbes magazine.
Trump is worth an estimated $2.5 billion, leaving him $400 million short of the cutoff to make this year’s list.
"The real estate mogul is just as wealthy as he was a year ago, when he stood at No. 339 on the ranking, but he is down $600 million since the start of the pandemic," according to the magazine.
During the coronavirus pandemic, technology stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets have thrived but big-city properties that took a hit pushed Trump out of the exclusive club.
Real estate properties make up the bulk of Trump’s fortune, according to the magazine.
From 1997 to 2016, Trump had a spot in the top half of The Forbes 400./agencies
The head of the European Central Bank (ECB) said Tuesday that rising energy prices and supply chain disruptions will be transitory.
"We should not overreact" to those frictions as monetary policy cannot directly affect those phenomena, Christine Lagarde said at the 25th anniversary of Wirtschaftsinitiative – a business initiative that gathers entrepreneurial leaders. "But we will pay close attention to wage developments and inflation expectations to ensure that inflation expectations are anchored at 2%."
She acknowledged that it is hard to predict exactly how long disruptions will last.
Thanks to its fiscal and monetary policies, the EU is seeing a very fast economic recovery rather than a slow and painful one, she said. "We are going through the steepest bounce-back in growth in the euro area since 1975."
The ECB expects back at pre-pandemic levels before the end of this year, she added.
40% of EU funds to be spent on green transition, digitalization
Europe is on the road to recovery, she said, but the coronavirus pandemic has led to shifts in the global environment and within our economies.
Citing that the EU now has an ideal tool in place to support the transition toward sectors and activities of the future, she said, "around 40% of European funds will be spent on investing in the green transition and 20% on digitalization."
And these funds will only be disbursed in return for growth-enhancing reforms approved by the European Commission, she added.
Lagarde also praised EU's efforts in transitioning to a greener economy, saying, "In many areas, Europe is doing well."
She said European companies are among frontrunners and nine of the top 20 global players developing green-digital patents are European.
"The EU is the world’s largest green finance market, with around 60% of all senior unsecured green bonds issued here in 2020," she said.
This can be a stepping stone for achieving a fully-fledged capital markets union that could act as a catalyst for the overall structural transformation of Europe, she said./aa
A jury in the state of California ordered automaker Tesla to pay a Black former worker $137 million, finding that he was the victim of racist abuse and a hostile work environment at a company plant.
Owen Diaz said he suffered daily racist epithets, including the "N-word," while working at a San Francisco Bay area plant between 2015 and 2016 before he quit as a contracted elevator operator. He also said co-workers left swastikas, graffiti, and drawings around the plant and supervisors did not take steps to stop it.
Diaz told the New York Times that it was "four long years" in getting to the jury's decision on Monday and that it was "like a big weight has been pulled off my shoulders."
Diaz was awarded $6.9 million in damages for emotional distress and $130 million in punitive damages.
Tesla Vice President of People Valerie Capers Workman, who is Black, said in a statement that the company "strongly" believes the facts did not support the jury's decision.
She admitted janitors cleaned racist graffiti from bathrooms at the plant and the "N-word" was used but she said it was used primarily among Black workers.
And she said Tesla of today is not the company it was in 2015, when "we were not perfect."
"We're still not perfect," she wrote in a company blog post "But we've come a long way from 5 years ago," in rolling out new diversity programs and policies to ensure that kind of behavior would not be tolerated again.
In previous court filings, Black employees have alleged racial harassment at that plant, which employs about 10,000 workers.
Earlier this year, a former Black employee at the plant won $1 million in an arbitration ruling, which found that he also endured racist and discriminatory behavior when he worked at the plant, also between 2015 and 2016./agencies
14% of world's coral reefs wiped out over decade, study reveals
October 06, 2021An estimated 14% of the coral reefs across the globe have been wiped out in less than a decade, according to a study released by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) on Tuesday.
The report titled "Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020" documents the loss of the world's coral from 2009 to 2018 and is the largest analysis of global coral reef health as it draws on data spanning 40 years, in 73 countries, across 12,000 sites, and collected by over 300 scientists.
“Coral reefs across the world are under relentless stress from warming caused by climate change and other local pressures such as overfishing, unsustainable coastal development, and declining water quality,” it said. “An irrevocable loss of coral reefs would be catastrophic.”
According to the report, the reefs, despite covering merely 0.2% of the ocean floor, are "home to at least a quarter of all marine species, providing critical habitat and a fundamental source of protein, as well as life-saving medicines."
Hundreds of millions of human beings depend on the coral reefs for jobs, food, and protection from storms and erosions, it said.
Although the loss of coral reef might trigger significant outcomes, the report also pointed to a glimmer of hope as “it also found that many of the world’s coral reefs remain resilient and can recover if conditions allow, providing hope for the long-term health of coral reefs if immediate steps are taken to stabilize emissions to curb future warming.”
Climate change biggest threat
"A clear message from the study is that climate change is the biggest threat to the world’s reefs, and we must all do our part by urgently curbing global greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating local pressures," said Paul Hardisty, the CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
“There are clearly unsettling trends toward coral loss, and we can expect these to continue as warming persists,” he added. “Despite this, some reefs have shown a remarkable ability to bounce back, which offers hope for the future recovery of degraded reefs.”
Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) that provided support to the report, said that the amount of coral lost worldwide since 2009 equaled more than all the living coral in Australia.
“We are running out of time. We can reverse losses, but we have to act now,” he added.
It was further noted in the report that reef algae – which grows during periods of stress – has increased by more than 20% over the past 10 years.
Almost invariably, sharp declines in coral cover corresponded with rapid increases in sea surface temperatures, indicating their vulnerability to spikes, which is a phenomenon that is likely to happen more frequently as the planet continues to warm, the report underlined./agencies
France: Thousands hold strikes, protests against pension reform
October 06, 2021Nationwide strikes and demonstrations were held Tuesday in France to protest Paris’ social policies.
Activists and thousands of demonstrators, responding to a demand by trade unions, gathered in the Place de la Republique in the center of Paris and marched near the Paris Opera.
Challenging the government’s controversial pension reform plans, demonstrators demanded improved working conditions in the public and private sectors and a rise in salaries for retirees, employees and civil servants.
About 25,000 people took part in protests in Paris where police took intense security measures, while, demonstrations were held at more than 200 areas across the country.
According to the Education Ministry, more than 4% of teachers went on strike Tuesday.
There were partial disruptions to public transportation services in the nationwide demonstrations.
Paris suspended work on pension reform in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
French President Emanuel Macron said in September that work on the reform would start again at an appropriate time.
Demonstrations were staged with the participation of hundreds of thousands of people on different days across the country, especially in Paris in December 2019 and January 2020 with police use of force against journalists and activists during protests causing controversy./aa
'We are unable to walk forward properly': IMF chief
October 06, 2021The global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic remains "hobbled" by the virus and the world is "unable to walk forward properly," the head of the IMF said on Tuesday.
Assessing global economic outlook and policy priorities at an event hosted by Bocconi University in Italy ahead of the fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank, Kristalina Georgieva said the risks and obstacles to a balanced global recovery were now even more pronounced.
"The most immediate obstacle is the ‘Great Vaccination Divide’ -- too many countries with too little access to vaccines, leaving too many people unprotected from COVID," she said.
Countries, she added, remain deeply divided in their ability to respond, to support the recovery, and to invest for the future.
With the global economy projected to grow by 6% in 2021 as of July, she noted that they expected growth to be slightly more moderate this year.
"Economic output in advanced economies is projected to return to pre-pandemic trends by 2022. But, most emerging and developing countries will take many more years to recover," Georgieva said, warning that this delayed recovery would make it even more difficult to avoid long-term economic scarring.
Inflation prospects uncertain
The IMF chief also said headline inflation rates had risen rapidly in a number of countries. "While we do expect price pressures to subside in most countries in 2022, in some emerging and developing economies, price pressures are expected to persist."
Together with rises in energy prices, this is putting further pressure on poorer families, she noted.
"More generally, inflation prospects remain highly uncertain," noted Georgieva, adding that a more sustained increase in inflation expectations could cause a rapid rise in interest rates and a sharp tightening of financial conditions.
This would pose a particular challenge for emerging and developing economies with high debt levels, she concluded./agencies
US trade deficit rises 4.2% to $73.3B in August
October 06, 2021The US trade deficit increased to $73.3 billion in August, according to figures released Tuesday by the Commerce Department.
It represents a rise of $2.9 billion, or around 4.2%, from the revised figure of approximately $70.3 billion in July, the agency’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said in a statement.
While exports in August rose $1 billion, or 0.5%, to approximately $213.7 billion from the previous month, imports increased much faster -- $4 billion, or 1.4%, to around $287 billion.
"The August increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $1.6 billion to $89.4 billion and a decrease in the services surplus of $1.4 billion to $16.2 billion," it said.
In August, the trade deficit with China increased the most by $3.1 billion to $28.1 billion, as exports decreased $1.8 billion to $11.2 billion and imports increased $1.3 billion to $39.3 billion.
The trade deficit with the EU came at $19.3 billion, followed by Mexico with $6.6 billion.
But trade surplus showed the largest rise in August with South and Central America -- a $5.7 billion increase./agencies
