Still marooned after 2010 floods in Pakistan
AMAR GURIRO
Five years after Pakistan’s worst floods, thousands of displaced people continue to live makeshift lives in a slum on the outskirts of Karachi with the government doing little to help them.
It has been five years since the devastating floods of 2010 that drove Rubina Hisbani out of her village, five years of living like a refugee in a makeshift hut near Pakistan’s commercial capital Karachi.
But, Rubina is no closer to going back home. She lives every day without sanitation, drinking water and electricity, trapped in a permanent state of uncertainty and homelessness.
The 24-year-old mother is not the only one whose life was completely destroyed by the worst floods in Pakistan’s recorded history. About 1,000 families live in the vast scattered slum of Sindhabad, which runs parallel to the Super Highway, a critical artery and one of the country’s busiest roads that connects Karachi to the rest of the country.
MONACO: Juventus and Italian football are back among the elite of the elite in Europe.

The so-called 'Old Lady' of Turin, looking not old at all, ground out a 0-0 draw with Monaco on Wednesday to secure a 1-0 win on aggregate and become the first Italian team since Inter won the competition in 2010 to qualify for the Champions League semifinals.

With Real Madrid beating Atletico 1-0 in Wednesday's other quarterfinal, the semifinals now offer the mouthwatering prospect of four top teams that have all won European football's premier club competition multiple times. Barcelona and Bayern Munich round out the last four.

Juventus, a two-time champion, won't be the strongest team in Friday's semifinal draw. But the dogged, metronomic and assured defending Juventus deployed to blunt Monaco's youthful attack showed it will be a challenge to break down.

Arturo Vidal, whose first-leg penalty goal proved decisive in this quarterfinal, and the hoped-for return from a thigh injury of Paul Pogba give Juventus plenty of attacking intent from midfield.

Striker Carlos Tevez, a 2008 Champions League winner with Manchester United, also is a constant headache for opposing defenders, even when sick as he was against Monaco. Stopped in the quarterfinals in 2013, 2006 and 2005, Juventus will play in the semis for the first time since 2003, when it was a losing finalist on penalties to AC Milan.

“It's a very big year for Juventus and we have to savor it,” said coach Massimiliano Allegri.

“We are laying the foundations to become a very strong club.”

Juventus is also running away with its fourth consecutive Serie A title and can complete a domestic double in the Italian Cup final against Lazio on June 7.

Its advance to the Champions League semis is also a much-needed fillip for Italian club football, which has slipped behind Germany in European rankings and struggled to keep up with Europe's highest-earning teams. Against Monaco's speed and youth, the experience of Juventus' veterans quickly told. With 198 Champions League appearances between them, midfielder Andrea Pirlo and left-back Patrice Evra had 30 matches more at this level than the entire Monaco starting 11.

Pirlo, a Champions League winner with the Milan team that beat Juventus in 2003, came closest to breaking the stalemate in Monaco's Louis II stadium with an artful free-kick late in the second half that shaved paint off Danijel Subasic's posts.

For Monaco, Geoffrey Kondogbia threatened from midfield. The crowd howled for a first-half penalty when Vidal and defender Giorgio Chiellini sandwiched the tall, powerful 22-year-old as he charged with ball at feet into the Juventus box, bringing him down.

Referee William Collum waved play on. Should the much sought-after Pogba leave Juventus for another club, Kondogbia will have left a good impression as a possible replacement for his France teammate on the strength of his performance here.

Despite needing a goal to erase Juventus' slender first-leg advantage, Monaco coach Leonardo Jardim left the experience of former Manchester United striker Dimitar Berbatov on the bench until halftime, when he reshuffled his deck, taking off deep-lying midfielder Jeremy Toulalan, suffering lingering effects of a hamstring injury that forced him to miss the first leg. With Berbatov, the effect was immediate.

Monaco created more work for Juventus in a second half of sustained and more intense pressure. But last season's French league runner-up has struggled to score at home this season. Not for the first time, Monaco fans were left ruing the club's loan of goal-scorer Radamel Falcao to Manchester United. With 12 attempts on goal, but only one on target, Monaco never really sweated Juventus' evergreen 37-year-old 'keeper Gianluigi Buffon in his 85th Champions League appearance.

Laid low by tonsillitis earlier in the week, first-leg scorer Vidal didn't last the match, substituted after 77 minutes. Allegri said other players also got sick, including forwards Tevez and Alvaro Morata, who vomited on the bench after Fernando Llorente replaced him midway through the second half.

“We had to be courageous and tenacious,” said Allegri. And from here, the Old Lady's road will only get steeper.

 

3GENEVA: Sluggish economies and global conflicts are taking their toll on world commerce, the World Trade Organisation said on Tuesday, slashing its trade growth outlook for 2015.

“For trade growth it is important that you have certain elements present in the global economy (including) stability, predictability, and those things are not there right now,” WTO chief Roberto Azevedo told reporters in Geneva.

With economies around the world still struggling to fully recover from the 2008 financial crisis, and with conflicts flaring in places like Ukraine and the Middle East, global trade is expanding far more slowly than anticipated a year ago.

The Ebola outbreak in west Africa, unusually harsh winter weather in the United States and collapsing world oil prices are also taking their toll, as are strong exchange rate fluctuations, Azevedo said.

“All of these things have effects, sometimes destabilising effects,” Azevedo said.

On Tuesday, WTO said preliminary estimates showed global trade had expanded just 2.8 per cent last year and was expected to swell only 3.3pc this year.

A year ago, the WTO was singing a different tune.

Last April, it had forecast that trade would expand 4.6pc in 2014 and 5.8pc this year.

But it downgraded those predictions in September, to 3.1pc and 4pc respectively, before slashing them further on Tuesday.

“Trade growth has been disappointing in recent years due largely to prolonged sluggish growth in GDP following the financial crisis,” Azevedo said.

“Looking forward, we expect trade to continue its slow recovery, but with economic growth still fragile and continued geopolitical tensions, this trend could easily be undermined,” he warned.

Last year was the third consecutive year in which trade grew less than 3pc, WTO said in a statement.

In fact, trade growth averaged just 2.4pc between 2012 and 2014 -- the slowest rate on record for a three-year period when trade was expanding.

Trade growth is expected to pick up in 2016 with an expansion of 4pc, it said, warning though that going forward, trade growth looks set to remain well below the annual average of 5.1pc seen since 1990.

SLOW RECOVERY: “We are cautiously forecasting that trade will continue its slow recovery, “Azevedo told reporters. WTO acknowledged though that “risks to the trade forecasts are mostly on the downside.”

Trade is a key measure of the health of the global economy, which it both stimulates and reflects.

But Azevedo warned Tuesday that a systemic shift might be under way and that trade expansion would no longer far outstrip overall economic growth as it has largely done for decades.