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Headline News 13/01/2021
Headlines:
Trump’s Political Career Hangs in the Balance
Pakistan Power Blackout
Zionist Human Rights Group Describes ‘Israel’ as an Apartheid state
Details:
Trump’s Political Career Hangs in the Balance
Donald Trump warned that efforts by Democrats to impeach him for a second time were “causing tremendous anger” in the US and said he bore no responsibility for a violent attack on the US Capitol by his supporters last week. In his first unscripted remarks since the rampage in the nation’s capital, Mr Trump described the move to impeach him as a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics”. Democrats in the House of Representatives formally charged Trump with one count of “incitement of insurrection” and have asked Vice President, Mike Pence, to invoke the 25th amendment of the US Constitution, which includes a clause that allows removal of a standing US President under extreme circumstances. If Trump is convicted and impeached, the Senate could decide to punish him by barring him from seeking office again, which will end his rather short, but eventful political career.
Pakistan Power Blackout
Most of Pakistan, including the capital and many of its major cities, lost power early Sunday 3rd January 2021 in one of the biggest blackouts to affect this country of more than 200 million people. The power failure affected the capital, Islamabad, along with major cities such as Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta. On Sunday, power was slowly being restored in cities across the country, including Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city after Karachi, the southern port city, which was also affected in the outage. The energy minister, Omar Ayub Khan, said at a news conference that the blackout had initially been set off by an engineering fault at the Guddu Thermal Power Plant in Sindh Province, which then pushed much of the country’s power grid into an automatic shutdown.In January 2019, problems at the Guddu led to a major power failure across areas of Sindh and Baluchistan Provinces. In May 2018, a widespread breakdown in the National Transmission and Despatch Company’s northern system caused people to lose power in Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistan’s power sector has long struggled with outdated infrastructure and a lack of up keep. But the blackout took place with negotiations continuing with the IPPs, which proposes to change the capacity payment structure via changes in currency indexation. The PTI governemnt is aiming to pay the IPPs Rs450 billion in cash and in kind in three tranches throughout the year, which will be used to pay their debts off.
Zionist Human Rights Group Describes ‘Israel’ as an Apartheid state
A leading ‘Israeli’ human rights group has begun describing both ‘Israel’ and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and their supporters vehemently reject. In a report released Tuesday, 12 January, B’Tselem said that, although Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within ‘Israel’ itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. “One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy-plus-occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.” That a highly respected Israeli organization is adopting a term long considered taboo even by many critics of ‘Israel’ shows that the reality is becoming more and more difficult to hide.