The New York Times
진보 성향
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As Ebola Spreads in East Africa, Will China Step Up?
China is well positioned to help stop the deadly virus, and could move into a gap left by U.S. retreat.
"SPREADS" · 총 65건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 86,740건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,282건(4.9%)·중립 80,326건(92.6%)·부정 2,132건(2.5%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 14.8(중도 균형)입니다.
China is well positioned to help stop the deadly virus, and could move into a gap left by U.S. retreat.
Kakamega High School also ordered parents and guardians to collect their sons from the institution on Saturday morning.
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The market for London flats is crumbling and its impact is beginning to ripple out.. Losses are for flats not just bought recently years, but even many years ago.
A new deadly virus is spreading near a prominent SoCal city.
At least three vaccines are being funded, research being fast-tracked as the outbreak spreads faster than the response.
The Delhi Gymkhana Club was born in 1913, raised for British officers and the colonial set, and was later inherited by bureaucrats, politicians, and the comfortably connected. None of that pedigree could save it, however, from the law. Last week India told it to vacate the land by June 5. The government read a single clause from the club’s own lease, named a public purpose, and issued the notice. The land returns to the state as do the buildings on it. The club says it will fight the decision in court, and it may. But the order is out and the clock has started. In Pakistan, the Lahore Gymkhana was born in the same year, is grander than Delhi’s and also sits on land worth a king’s ransom. But no notice to vacate has been issued. These are the facts from the government documents that explain why. India has ordered the Delhi Gymkhana Club to vacate its premises by June 5 — Credits: BBC 38 paisas a kanal The Lahore Gymkhana sits on state land ringed by The Mall, Jail Road, and Zafar Ali Road. There is no pricier address in the province. Its 1913 lease stretches back to the Raj, and has been repeatedly extended in 1921, 1960, and, in haste in 1996, five years before its expiry. This time it was extended for 50 years to cover the years 2000 to 2050. The gymkhana estate sprawls over 112 acres and the club holds three kanal and 16 marlas more than the record of rights allows — a tiny trespass that nobody thought to note until now. But that is not all. Inside Lawrence Gardens (Bagh-e-Jinnah), the Gymkhana keeps an exclusive cricket ground on three-and-a-half acres of the Agriculture Department. This was never part of the lease, there is no grant for it and no rent is paid. No paper explains how a public garden was fenced off for a private game. For the main estate, the club pays Rs5000 a year in rent. Not per kanal. In total. That comes to Rs417 a month, or under fifty paisas per kanal, for some of the most valuable earth in Pakistan. How little is Rs5000? Consider it against the government’s upper commercial rate. Total land 1,091 kanals 21,820 marla Market value 1,091 × Rs200 million/kanal Rs218.2 billion Fair annual rent 21,820 marla × Rs200,000/marla Rs4.364 billion The land is worth Rs218 billion so fair rent would be about Rs4.36 billion a year. Under the government’s 2023 policy, clubs can pay a tenth of market rent, but this would still come to Rs400 million a year. The club pays Rs5000. For years, the land’s real value sat behind a nominal colonial rent. It became visible when market figures were placed on the record. The admissions of guilt The club filed its defence with the Assembly admitting the buildings came after the lease, which said the government had to approve construction. Over the decades the club built its clubhouse, golf clubhouse, pool, two guest blocks, health club, administration block, mosque and a café in 2012. The Board of Revenue searched for permissions but none were on record. The club has not even paid its token Rs5,000 rent. The Additional Deputy Commissioner’s office sent a notice, dated 26 August 2020, saying that rent had not bee paid since 2011. Then the money. The club swears no public funds reach it but then lists them in the next breath: Rs2 million from President Zia in 1985, Rs2 million from PM Nawaz Sharif the same year, Rs50 million from CM Pervaiz Elahi in 2006, Rs10 million from CM Shehbaz Sharif in 2014. Four heads of government, four gifts from the public purse, to a private club. And who is the club for? Its rulebook answers. Every civil servant of Grade 18 and above may join for a token fee, and so may every commissioned officer of the armed forces. The other way to become a member is to inherit membership. The capture is not an accident of history. It is written into the founding charter. The roll of ordinary members, meanwhile, the club guards as confidential as if it were a list belonging to a Freemason Lodge. The instinct to maintain secrecy runs deep. When citizens used the Right to Information law to ask for the lease and the donor records, the club refused, and carried its refusal to the Lahore High Court, pleading, without blushing, that as a public limited company it was no “public body” and owed the public nothing. In January 2023, the court dismissed the plea. The land belongs to the state, the judge held. Handing over land worth billions of rupees almost free was an enormous benefit and rent of Rs5,000 a year “cannot be even termed as any rate whatsoever.” The same shrug was then offered to the Assembly when it asked who the club’s members were. Lahore Gymkhana — Credits: Express Tribune Institutionalising the giveaway The Gymkhana is no aberration. It is the template: in May 2023 the state made the template law. That month, a caretaker government in Punjab, an unelected stopgap whose only charge was to hold an election, approved a sweeping new policy. It had no mandate to make long-term land decisions but it made one anyway. On May 10 2023, the Colonies Department opened the door to hand prime state land to gymkhana clubs across the province, and fixed their rent at a tenth of market value. The discount was sewn into the rules. The Board of Revenue reports the harvest. The figure that matters is what the clubs actually pay, after the 90 per cent is shaved away: Rs20,000 an acre a year at Dera Ghazi Khan, Mandi Bahauddin, and Chiniot; Rs50,000 at Vehari, Sahiwal, and Dera Ghazi Khan; Rs60,000 at Kamalpur Syedaan in Attock; Rs100,000 at Saddar Gymkhana, Gujranwala; Rs120,000 at Jhang; Rs140,000 at Jhelum and Gujranwala City. An acre of prime city land, for the price of a secondhand motorcycle, every year. And the final irony: this generous policy, the Board says, does not reach the Lahore Gymkhana, because its lease is older. Elite enclaves on public land The Gymkhana is not the only refuge for the officer class in Lahore. Inside the GOR, that broad expanse of prime central land set aside for officialdom, stands the Punjab Civil Officers Mess on Tollington Road. At GOR’s gate stands the colonial Punjab Club. A short walk off, the Lahore Polo Club keeps its grounds and stables inside the Race Course, public parkland surrendered to horses and a handful of players. An exclusive school for the male heirs of the elite, Aitchison College (Chief’s College), spreads over 200 acres. None of these entities bought their land. It is public land, held in trust, enjoyed by the few. Islamabad tells the same story more starkly. The Islamabad Club, sprawled across 352 acres of CDA land, pays about three rupees an acre a month as its gates remain closed to ordinary citizens. The Gun and Country Club rose up on land meant for the Pakistan Sports Board; the Supreme Court declared it illegal in 2018 and ordered the land to be taken back, yet years later auditors could not trace some 38 acres, and the club sat on roughly 37 with no deed, no lease, no licence at all. The court said it aloud: there was no land in Islamabad for a public hospital [for the poor], but there was land aplenty for clubs for the rich. And the hunger has not eased. In Multan, the district administration moves to slice 15 acres off the Central Cotton Research Institute, founded in 1970, the cradle of more than forty cotton varieties, including the region’s first virus-free strain, to feed another gymkhana, while the country’s cotton reserves sit at a record low and we spend hard currency importing the very crop the institute exists to improve. The Pakistan Business Forum has written to the chief minister to stop it. The clubs took the parks. Now they reach into the seed bank. There has been an attempt to quantify this. In 2021, the UNDP put a number on the privileges captured by Pakistan’s elite. Cheap land and capital, tax breaks and soft inputs came to about $17.4 billion a year, which is nearly 6pc of the whole economy. The Gymkhana is merely a place where one may stand and watch the transfer happen: a 112 acres, for Rs5000. When the same hands value, grant, and enjoy the land This mechanism endures not through sloth but through strategy, as the actors make clear. The land belongs to the state. The men who grant it are senior civil servants in the Colonies Department, the Board of Revenue, the office of the Deputy Commissioner. The men who set the value of the land, and thus decide the rent, are with the same revenue service. And the men who enjoy the clubs are, by rule, civil servants of Grade 18 and above and senior officers of the armed forces. The same hands own the land, price the land, rent it, and carry the membership cards. When one cadre handles every aspect of a deal, its low price is no blunder. It is the purpose. No one at that table has any interest in making public land fetch a public price, for all of them gain from the opposite. The officer who would raise the rent, enforce the breach, or cancel the lease must act against his service, his colleagues, and likely his own leisure. That is what makes Sohaib Butt’s report so rare, and so telling. It took a man willing to go against the grain of his service to do the simplest thing: write down what the land is worth. This is the truth worth stating plainly. In Pakistan, real power does not change hands at the ballot box. Governments arrive and depart; the bureaucracy and elites abide. And on the matter of state land for clubs, those who never leave office and those who enjoy the clubs are one and the same. That is why such a file scarcely moves. And it is why it matters so greatly who, in the end, forced it into the open. Nestled within the Bagh-e-Jinnah, is one of the most picturesque cricket arenas of the world — Credits: Dawn archives Two-tiered justice The state can, of course, move on land with great speed if it wants. Take Islamabad, the capital that prides itself on order. For three months its bulldozers have flattened katchi abadis or the informal colonies where the city’s gardeners and nannies, washerwomen and labourers have lived for a generation. Around 25,000 people were driven out of Mulism Colony in Bari Imam alone. Settlements a quarter-century old, Rimsha Colony in H-9 and the largely Christian Allama Iqbal Colony in G-7, were marked for the same fate, along with the ancient villages of Saidpur and Nurpur Shahan.The state’s housing policy counts 60 such settlements in the city, home to between 300,000 and half a million souls; the CDA recognises barely 10 as lawful and brands the rest squatters. And here is the part that should silence the room: a Supreme Court order from 2015 was passed after the merciless clearance of the I-11 settlement left 25,000 people homeless. It stayed the summary evictions altogether. The bulldozers came regardless. The same legal system that cannot dislodge an unpaid colonial lease in 18 months had no trouble dislodging the poor in open defiance of its highest court. Punjab is no kinder about informality. It is just quieter about it. For three decades, it has promised to regularise its katchi abadis, and for three decades that promise has mostly stayed on paper. There is a law to sanction the work done and an agency to get it done but the number of settlements grows faster than the lists of “regularised” ones. Surveys are started and abandoned. Notifications are issued and forgotten. The poor who put up their housing on the edges of Lahore and Faisalabad and Rawalpindi live out their years in limbo, always one bureaucrat’s signature away from eviction. Three decades is a lifetime. A child born in one of these colonies has grown, married, and had children, and the family still cannot say for certain that the ground beneath their feet is legally theirs. Meanwhile, the new law enforcer is punishing and swift. The Punjab government created the Punjab Enforcement and Regulatory Authority (PERA), to clear what it deemed to be encroachments. It is aided by deputy and assistant commissioners and a uniformed force with black Vigos. Through 2025 PERA hired thousands of staff and opened stations across Lahore and beyond, as its drives targeted the small folk. Traders protested its methods: a shop photographed in the evening, sealed the next morning, fined Rs10,000 to Rs25,000, kept shut until the owner paid. Thella wallahs, vendors, kiosks punished for setting up on a footpath. But 112 acres of the city’s finest land, held on a dead lease, built over without leave, exempted by a rule the board invented, is “legitimate possession,” defended for generations. The bulldozer works swiftly for the weak but stalls for the strong. What Rs218 billion could buy instead of membership It is worth listing what Rs218 billion would buy in a place that cannot pay for medicine. In 2025-26, Punjab set aside Rs630.5 billion for its health sector, and proudly announced that for the first time this included Rs79.5 billion for free medicine. And yet Dawn reported that Rawalpindi’s three public hospitals (Holy Family, Benazir Bhutto, and the Teaching Hospital) were given a fraction of Rs4.5 billion they asked for. Their vendors are refusing to deliver stocks until the bills are cleared. The Lahore Gymkhana land, on the other hand, is worth Rs218 billion, or three times the free medicine funding. A single elite golf-and-dining estate, that pays Rs5000 in rent, is worth more than the tab for medicines in a province of 120 million people. The Assembly did its job It took an elected Assembly more than one attempt to set this right. The matter was brought up at the last session but did not move ahead for “mysterious” reasons. The House pressed further. A member moved an adjournment motion and the Speaker called it out: this was elite capture of state land. The Speaker formed a committee and for the first time in history, opened its hearings to the public and TV cameras. The House’s members killed it at the first sitting by placing on the record, all of them, that they sought no membership of the club, only the public interest. In a few weeks they ferreted out from their government two documents that settled everything. The first was the valuation, ADC(R) report (shown above), which turned Rs5,000 into a scandal by comparison. The second document ended the argument. The Law and Parliamentary Affairs Department gave a clean opinion on what the state may do: Clause 6 of the 1996 lease lets the government end the lease at any time, on six months’ notice. Clause 8 says that when it ends, the club is owed nothing for any building it raised. The Board of Revenue added that the state is bound to resume the land when public purpose requires it, or when the lease is broken. India reclaimed its gymkhana land by reading one clause of a lease. Punjab’s lawyers have now confirmed the province holds the same power to take back the Rs218 billion estate, with every building on it, on six months’ notice, and pay nothing. Credit for this denouement goes to the House of elected representatives. What they cannot do alone is sign the order. That pen rests with the executive, which is the same bureaucracy that would rather keep the file shut. Inside Lahore Gymkhana Cricket Museum, the first of its kind in Pakistan — Credits: Dawn archives Options The remedy is not exotic. The simplest one is to cancel the lease. The second option is to take back the land for public use, which is what Delhi did. We don’t need to look far to find precedent. When the Royal Palm Club in Lahore defaulted on its lease of Railways land, the state took the land back and pulled down structures. Indeed, members on both benches have said if it can be done to a club on railway land in Lahore, it can be done to a club on nazul (state) land in Lahore. The most durable option is a legal statute to dedicate the gymkhana estate to a fixed public use. And one use should unite the benches. The estate is a manicured, thirsty green in one of the most poisoned cities on earth. Take it back. Grow a native forest on it the fast and thick Miyawaki way and plan a park. Such greenery traps the dust, cools the air, and pushes back against the smog that sends people to our hospitals each winter. A golf course serves a hundred men. A forest would serve millions. We say the law protects everyone alike but we must admit it does not. The thella wallah is presumed to be illegal and is not given time to prove otherwise. The Lahore Gymkhana Club is presumed to be lawful no matter what the file says. Delhi has shown us the way. There was never a question of what the law allowed if elite land had to be taken back. The Assembly has proven this twice and put proof on record. What remains is the will to choose a public forest or park over a private fairway, the many over the few, the medicine over the membership. The House has spoken. The executive has not. For now, the silence belongs to the people holding the pen, and everyone can see why they would rather not sign.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday dramatically scaled back the number of suspected Ebola cases in central Africa to 116, down from more than 900 previously, with 330 cases now confirmed. As of May 31, the WHO said 116 suspected cases of the deadly virus had been registered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — down from 906 late last week. Some 321 cases have now been confirmed in the DRC, including 48 deaths, while nine confirmed cases have been registered in neighbouring Uganda, including one fatality. While some suspected cases have been confirmed, many more “have been cleared out” from the data after having been shown to have other diseases with similar early symptoms or an unlinked fever, said WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier. He stressed that “anybody who gets picked up by surveillance or presents themselves in a health facility with any symptoms that could be Ebola-like” is counted as a suspected case in the outbreak, pending testing. The outbreak was declared on May 15 in conflict-hit Ituri province in northeastern DRC, a central African country which is home to more than 100 million people and is one of the poorest in the world. But the virus, which spreads through close contact and bodily fluids and can cause a fatal haemorrhagic fever, is believed to have been spreading under the radar for weeks before that. One reason is that people infected with Bundibugyo, the strain of Ebola behind the outbreak, initially show symptoms similar to flu, malaria or typhoid, which can delay detection. Lindmeier told reporters that once those suspected of having Ebola were tested, they were “ruled out, in many cases”. For example, he said there had been “a couple of cases with malaria or meningitis cases or others”. “So they then of course drop off the suspected cases list and don’t appear in that statistic any more,” he said. “If you’re confirmed, you’ve been added then to the confirmed cases,” he said. It was therefore normal that the registered number of confirmed cases would continue to climb, while the suspected cases would fluctuate, he said. WHO’s previous figures had also listed 223 deaths suspected of being due to the Ebola virus but its new figures no longer include that category. Asked about that, Lindmeier suggested the number had been very uncertain, since it included “people who died a while ago” and whose remains, in many cases, could not be exhumed to be tested. Six people confirmed to have had Ebola in the outbreak have meanwhile been registered as having recovered, according to the WHO. No vaccine or approved treatment is available against the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, and efforts to contain its spread rely mainly on preventative measures.
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In Pakistan, owning a house is more than just shelter; it is a symbol of financial stability and social status. However, this goal is slipping out of reach for many as soaring property prices and real wage decline have made homeownership increasingly unaffordable. Before getting into the extent of this problem, we first need to understand the country’s demographics and how the problem is only expected to amplify. By 2100, Pakistan is projected to be the third largest country in the world with more than 500 million inhabitants. Based on the average household size of 6.3 per 2023 census, the country potentially faces an annual demand of 977,497 houses. While that foretells a massive planning and resource challenge, the distribution is even more telling. According to the 2023 census, urban areas, which house 39 per cent of the population, expanded at 3.65pc annually, almost twice the growth rate of 1.90pc in rural areas, driven by the double whammy of high births as well as internal migration. Both this pace and the gap have widened from 2017, when the rate of change for urban areas was 3pc compared to 2pc rural. The ramifications for housing are significant: the top 20 districts by density contain 83m people, yet occupy merely 5pc of the landmass, according to a new policy brief, “Urbanisation, Housing Supply, and the Credit Gap in Pakistan”, published by the Karachi School of Business Leadership’s InsightLab. What this means is that in the absence of proper metropolitan infrastructure, demand is naturally channelled towards more central locations where the supply doesn’t adjust accordingly, thus putting pressure on prices. While demand-side incentives are great at developing depth in the mortgage markets, home ownership is a supply problem as low-cost options are almost negligible in core urban centres Islamabad’s urban housing market best reflects the classic case of rising inaccessibility, where the average per-square-foot price is Rs31,000, whereas Karachi and Lahore stand at Rs27,000 and Rs21,000, respectively, as per Zameen.com. Since Covid-19, Pakistan’s urban housing market has generated staggering returns, with average per-square-foot prices rising by 103pc in Karachi, 115pc in Islamabad, and 90.9pc in Lahore. It’s no surprise then that renting is far more common in Karachi and Islamabad, with 36pc of households renting in both cities compared to 20pc in Lahore. As urbanisation would accelerate even further in search of better economic opportunities and living standards, a growing share of the population will be unable to purchase properties in highly inflated urban centres. Eventually leading to increasing demand for rental housing, which would in turn put upward pressure on rents and gradually narrow the gap between rental and property prices. While the demographic challenge is already hard to arrest, the housing problem is only exacerbated by a lack of credit access as Pakistan’s mortgage markets remain underdeveloped. High appetite from the government has systematically diverted liquidity towards the treasury and crowded out private sector credit, which stands at just 9.2pc of GDP. Within that constrained pool, personal finance comprises only 11pc or Rs1.4 trillion, of which Rs507.2bn trickled down to mortgages as of December 2025. However, this figure substantially overstates the market’s depth, for it clubs house loans to both consumers and bank employees. In fact, the latter accounts for over 56pc of the scheduled banking outstanding housing advances. In terms of volumes, the market is even more skewed as only 34,926 consumers had an outstanding housing loan from a scheduled bank as of December, out of almost 90m deposit accounts. Contrast this with slightly over 200,000 bank employees claiming 91,396 mortgages. These challenges stem partly from the economy’s boom-and-bust cycles, in which borrowing costs fluctuate sharply, discouraging financial institutions from underwriting long-term loans while making markups prohibitively high and volatile for end customers. Moreover, the lack of formal income and credit history, coupled with weak foreclosure laws, made the segment quite unviable. The data attests to this: mortgage non-performing loans stood at Rs14.8bn as of March, which represents 32.8pc of all consumer sector bad debts despite making up only 23.2pc of the segment’s loan portfolio — translating into an infection ratio of 6.4 versus 4.2, respectively. Multiple attempts have been made to address this problem. When the ‘Mera Pakistan Mera Ghar’ (MPMG) scheme was launched in 2020, it was designed as a broad, multi-tiered housing finance program to support both low- and middle-income buyers. It offered four tiers with loan sizes ranging from Rs2m to Rs10m and unit size limits extending up to 10 Marla (2,000 sq. ft) for Tier 3. Except for Tier 1, there was no price cap on housing units and customer pricing was differentiated by tier, which started at 3pc for Tier 1 and went up to 7–9pc for higher tiers, while banks were allowed varied spreads on top of Kibor [Karachi Interbank Offered Rate]. This structure gave borrowers not only some predictability on pricing but also flexibility across income segments, including access to upper-tier customers. By June 2022, the scheme had been suspended amid economic and political uncertainty. But almost three and a half years later, it made a comeback under a new branding, albeit with some key changes. First, the end customer rates are cheaper and fixed at 5pc for the first 10 years. Second, the markup subsidy is to be provisioned in the federal budget instead of a refinancing facility by the central bank, due to the International Monetary Fund conditionalities. Though these amendments may make the scheme more attractive to borrowers while still maintaining monetary prudence, the more important question is: how did the previous intervention fare? According to available numbers, MPMG received applications worth Rs514bn, of which Rs235bn was approved, and only Rs99bn were disbursed. It was complemented by ‘Naya Pakistan Housing Program’, a supply-side intervention wherein the government assured to provide 5m houses. While the targets were quite ambitious, the reality fell well short, with only 21,980 low-cost units completed, about 52,000 under construction and 95,084 in the planning phase. That’s where the biggest learning lies; while demand-side incentives are great at developing depth in the mortgage markets, home ownership in Pakistan is largely a supply problem as low-cost options are almost negligible in core urban centres. Moreover, the lack of mass transit and infrastructure deters residents from moving to the more affordable options in the peripheries. Unless those are addressed, cheap loans will only go so far. Mutaher Khan is co-founder of Data Darbar and Head of InsightLab at KSBL. Hasan Umair and Shahzaib Abbasi are analysts at InsightLab. Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, June 1st, 2026
Country: occupied Palestinian territory Source: UN Children's Fund Please refer to the attached file. WHEN WATER IS A DAILY STRUGGLE, DISEASE SPREADS FASTER Ahead of summer months: update on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in the Gaza Strip • For 1.1 million children in Gaza, water remains a daily uncertainty. UNICEF and partners continue to sustain emergency WASH services through a combination of trucked water, desalination, wells and limited network supply. Drinking water distributions are reaching up to 1.5 million people, depending on access and operational conditions.1 Despite efforts, most families remain water insecure (82 per cent), and up to 70 per cent are unable to collect the minimum of 6 litres per person per day for drinking and cooking.2 • A critical water-trucking route remains inaccessible: Humanitarian actors have suspended all water-trucking operations at the Al Mansoura filling point since the incident on 17 April, in which two UNICEF-contracted truck drivers were killed. UNICEF and partners are now trucking water from desalination plants at a significant additional cost of about USD 40,000 per day to cover the 2 million litres per day previously collected from Al Mansoura. The filling station is critical for daily access to drinking water of 285,000 people. • Core water systems remain under severe strain due to restrictions on energy, chemicals, spare parts: Seawater desalination output was 20,000 m³/day in March but has since decreased to 16,000 m³/day due to shortages of chemicals and spare parts. Shortages of engine oil, lubricating oil, and other essential consumables also disrupt water production and related services.3 • Solid waste, sanitation and environmental health pressures are alarming: Children and families face deteriorating hygiene conditions, as growing quantities of waste accumulate in and around displacement sites, shelters, and overcrowded communities while disposal sites remain inaccessible. 1 Under normal conditions, waste would be transferred to managed disposal sites, but in the current context disposal capacity is extremely limited, temporary sites are full or nearly full, and access to landfill options remains constrained. Environmental health risks are severe, with rodents and pest infestations threatening further spread of disease.