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Reuters

  • Infant sleep safety still misunderstood by many caregivers

    Researchers questioned caregivers of newborns at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City about sleep safety and found 53 percent of them disagreed with use of pacifiers – which are in fact linked to a lower risk of SIDS – and 62 percent believed in swaddling infants – which is tied to an increased SIDS risk.

    It’s possible that new parents may have a hard time discarding advice from their own parents or grandparents even though recommendations about sleep safety have changed considerably from one generation to the next, lead study author Dr. Sarah Varghese said by email.

    “There is a certain power surrounding ‘traditional’ knowledge,” said Varghese, now at Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “Both parents and health care professionals need to stay up-to-date on recommendations.”

    Nationwide, SIDS kills about four babies out of every 10,000 live births, down from about 130 in 10,000 in 1990, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Despite the dramatic decline in death from SIDS since 1992, when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced that babies should be placed on their backs to sleep, SIDS in recent years has remained the third leading cause of infant mortality, the authors report in the Journal of Perinatology.

    Almost four years ago, the AAP issued new infant sleep guidelines for prevention of SIDS and other sleep-related deaths; the guidelines encouraged breastfeeding, pacifier use, and firm crib mattresses, and cautioned against blankets and pillows and bed-sharing.

    The study by Varghese and colleagues, while small, suggests that at least some parents may not have absorbed these most recent recommendations.

    The researchers questioned 121 caregivers, including parents and grandparents, of newborns delivered in 2013, asking how strongly they agreed or disagreed with recommended infant sleep safety practice.

    Most participants strongly agreed on the importance of using a safety approved crib, avoiding exposure to smoke and getting routine childhood vaccinations.

    But most of them disagreed with guidance against swaddling and using home monitors, as well as recommended pacifier use.

    Some caregivers may avoid pacifiers because they have concerns about dental issues, while others may worry that it could interfere with breastfeeding, the study authors note. The AAP recommends starting pacifier use when babies are about three or four weeks old, after they are successfully breastfeeding.

    Swaddling with blankets or specially designed wraps can increase the risk of infant death, but some nurses still swaddle infants in the hospital and teach new parents how to do it themselves, the authors note. Some caregivers believe swaddling can soothe infants and make it easier for them to sleep.

    Only 61 percent of participants recalled being taught about sleep safety by a health care provider.

    The study was small, limited to English-speaking participants and included primarily white caregivers, which may limit how much the findings apply to a more diverse population, the researchers acknowledge.

    Even so, the findings highlight the challenge of conveying safe sleep practices to parents who may be overwhelmed by too much advice, said Dr. Michael Goodstein, a neonatologist at York Hospital WellSpan Health in York, Pennsylvania and a member of the AAP task force on SIDS.

    “Even if parents have been made aware of safe sleep information, there may be competing and conflicting information and advice available from multiple sources including books, magazines, family and friends, TV shows and the Internet, as well as many different health care providers,” Goodstein, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

  • "Heads as well as hearts": Croatia says it can take no more migrants

    The migrants, mostly from poor or war-torn countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, have streamed into Croatia since Wednesday, after Hungary blocked what had been the main route with a metal fence and riot police at its border with Serbia.

    “We cannot register and accommodate these people any longer,” Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic told a news conference in the capital Zagreb.

    “They will get food, water and medical help, and then they can move on. The European Union must know that Croatia will not become a migrant ‘hotspot’. We have hearts, but we also have heads.”

    The arrival of 13,000 in the space of 48 hours, many crossing fields and some dodging police, has proved too much for one of the EU’s less prosperous states in a crisis that has divided the 28-nation bloc and left it scrambling to respond.

    A record 473,887 refugees and migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, the International Organization for Migration said, most of them from countries at war such as Syria who are seeking a better, safer life.

    Hundreds of thousands have been trekking across the Balkan peninsula to reach the richer European countries north and west, especially Germany, which is preparing to accept 800,000 asylum seekers this year.

    But that has wrongfooted the European Union, which has come up with no common policy to deal with the biggest wave of migration to Western Europe since World War Two.

    Hungary acted on its own to shut the main route this week by closing its border with Serbia, leaving thousands of migrants scattered across the Balkans searching for alternative paths.

    Croatia, offering one of the few overland routes to Germany that would bypass Hungary, found itself suddenly overwhelmed.

    Despite Hungary’s hardline stance, it did take in some migrants on Friday that Croatia expelled. Ferried to the border in buses, they were watched by police and soldiers as they were transferred onto other buses across the border in Hungary, where police said they would be registered.

    “TIME TO DEAL DIFFERENTLY”

    While Zagreb made welcoming statements earlier this week, Milanovic said he had called a session of Croatia’s National Security Council and that it was time to deal with the problem differently. The president has told the military to be ready if called on to help stop the flow of people.

    Croatia, the EU’s newest member state, has already closed almost all roads from the border. Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic said if the crisis continued “it is a matter of time” before the border was shut completely, though Milanovic, in his remarks, questioned whether even that would keep migrants out.

    Police have rounded up many migrants at the Tovarnik railway station on the Croatian side of the border with Serbia, where several thousand spent the night under open skies.

    “We are so exhausted,” said Hikmat, a bare-footed 32-year-old Syrian woman from Damascus, after a journey, like many others, by sea and then through the Balkans to the border between the two former Yugoslav republics.

    She said she had been travelling for two months with her son, and added: “Look at me. I just want to get anywhere where we will be safe.”

    Some kept travelling and reached tiny EU member Slovenia overnight. Many did so by evading the police and trekking through fields or travelling by train, exasperated by Europe’s confused response to the crisis.

    “I didn’t expect such a reaction from Europe… They first open the doors then they close them. They punish the people,” Syrian migrant Dara Jaffar said at the Tovarnik railway station.

    SLOVENIA SAYS NO CORRIDOR

    Worried by the situation, Slovenia stopped all rail traffic on the main line from Croatia and said there was “no basis on which we could form a corridor” for migrants to pass through en route to western Europe.

    Unlike Croatia, Slovenia is a member of Europe’s Schengen zone of border-free travel, an important goal for refugees to reach. With around 1,000 migrants expected to enter the country in the next 24 hours, Slovenia plans to abide by EU rules by receiving asylum requests but returning illegal migrants.

    After failing to agree on a plan to distribute 160,000 refugees across the EU — just a fraction of the numbers arriving this year — the bloc has called a summit for next Wednesday to work on a united response.

    Tempers are fraying among some migrants. In the Croatian town of Beli Manastir, just over the border from Hungary, angry groups of Afghan and Syrian migrants, waiting for trains to Zagreb, fought with rocks and sticks at a ticket office.

    Rocks, smashed bottles and broken sticks littered the ground. A handful of police in ordinary uniforms tried to restore control.

    Relations between EU states have also been damaged, with several suspending the Schengen rules to restore emergency border controls to slow the flow.

    Despite criticism by rights groups and some EU officials, Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, said his country was extending the fence along its southern border with Serbia to the Croatian section.

    Serbia warned its neighbours against shutting down the main arteries between them, saying it “will seek to protect our economic and every other interest before international courts.”

    Germany, which is planning to host by far the largest number of refugees, says other EU countries must do their part.

    Some other EU states, especially former Communist countries in the east, reject quotas to accept refugees. They accuse Berlin of exacerbating the problem and encouraging the overland surge by suspending EU rules to announce in August it would take in Syrian refugees wherever they enter the EU.

    German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel renewed a threat that countries that do not help in the migrant crisis will be deprived of EU funds.

    Interior ministers will try to overcome the differences a day before the EU’s leaders meet.

    “These occasions may be the last opportunity for a positive, united and coherent European response to this crisis. Time is running out,” Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said in Geneva.

  • Many Apple devices crashing on iOS 9 update

    Twitter and other social media were awash with disgruntled customers reporting two distinct faults, with one appearing to be linked specifically to older models of Apple iPhones and iPads.

    “It is beyond inconvenient to not be able to use your phone for a day,” said student Pip Cordi as staff in the Apple store in central Sydney looked at her phone on Friday. “I have a lot of apps that I use for school – things like language apps and dictionaries and that’s all really important for my studies.”

    Another iPhone user, Zorry Coates, said she had spent three hours in the Apple store and had been left with the option of either returning her phone to factory settings – losing any non-backed-up data – or waiting until Apple technicians announced an update.

    “They said they were aware of the problem and their engineers were working on it 24/7, but they couldn’t tell me when – or how – I would get a solution,” Zorry said.

    “I’m very annoyed because it’s wasted half my day. They pride themselves on being a company that’s flawless.”

    Apple’s headquarters in San Francisco did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday. An Apple spokesman in Sydney said the company had no comment.

    Despite any troubles, significant numbers of iOS users had upgraded; more than 16 percent, according to Mixpanel, a San Francisco, California-based analytics company, as of 4 p.m. PDT (2300 GMT) Thursday.

    ERROR MESSAGE

    Charlie Brown, a technology expert at Sydney-based Cybershack, said any number of dissatisfied customers was significant in the social media era, particularly following the troubled rollout of iOS 8. Apple released several further updates to iOS8, but some of the bugs were never fully fixed.

    “The risk to Apple in terms of having dissatisfied customers is that as their customer base grows, so will the number of those dissatisfied customers,” said Brown.

    One group of users reported that iOS 9 upgrade would fail after several minutes, requiring them to start the process over. Many posted screen shots of the error message they received: “Software Update Failed”.

    That problem was likely caused by servers that were overloaded when too many people tried to download the upgrade simultaneously, tech analysts said.

    “It’s like the Black Friday thing,” said Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research, referring to the major U.S. shopping sale day after Thanksgiving. “Some websites get creamed on the traffic on Black Friday.”

    Other users, many of them with older devices, reported their devices seizing up on a “swipe to upgrade” page. The latest upgrade had been deemed by Apple as “friendly” to the older devices after the iOS 8 problems.

    “Apple were saying the downloading mechanism doesn’t take as much space to download,” said Sydney-based Graham McKay, an IT support specialist.

    McKay and Brown said they always advised clients to wait several days before downloading any new upgrades from Apple, Google Inc or Microsoft Corp to make sure any glitches had been found and ironed out.

    Metering the upgrade, or allowing users to upgrade in waves rather than all at once, would have been a smarter approach, O’Donnell said.

    “It’s a lot about setting expectations,” he said.

    Apple did this week delay the release of watch OS 2, its updated operating system for the Apple Watch after it discovered a bug in development.

  • Croatia overwhelmed by flood of migrants, EU calls summit

    The European Union’s newest member state said it may try to stop taking in migrants, just as the 28-nation bloc announced it leaders would hold an emergency summit on Sept. 23 to try to resolve the migration crisis, which has deeply divided it.

    More than 7,300 people entered Croatia from Serbia in the 24 hours after Wednesday’s clashes between Hungarian riot police and stone-throwing refugees at its Balkan neighbor’s frontier.

    At the eastern border town of Tovarnik, Croatian riot police struggled to keep crowds of men, women and children back from rail tracks after long queues formed in baking heat for buses bound for reception centers elsewhere in Croatia.

    Police were also deployed in a suburb of the capital Zagreb, taking up positions around a hotel housing hundreds of migrants, some of them on balconies shouting “Freedom! Freedom!”. Others threw rolls of toilet paper from the balconies and windows.

    “Croatia will not be able to receive more people,” Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told reporters in Tovarnik.

    “When we said corridors are prepared (for migrants), we meant a corridor from Tovarnik to Zagreb,” he added, suggesting Croatia would not simply let migrants head north to Slovenia, which is part of the EU’s Schengen zone of border-free travel.

    The flood of migrants into Croatia has accelerated since Hungary sealed its southern, external EU frontier with Serbia on Tuesday, to keep out the asylum seekers and refugees, many of whom hope eventually to reach wealthy Germany.

    “I just want to go,” Syrian Kamal Al’hak said in Tovarnik, among people sitting or lying by the tracks trying to shade themselves from the sun. “I may return to Syria, but only in a few years. It’s too dangerous there now.”

    DEEP DIVISIONS

    The EU is split over how to cope with the influx of people mostly fleeing war and poverty in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    European Council President Donald Tusk summoned EU leaders to an extraordinary summit next Wednesday to discuss migration and a proposed scheme to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers across the bloc.

    The bloc’s interior ministers failed on Monday to agree on a mandatory quota system designed to spread the burden of this year’s huge influx of migrants and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the EU’s most powerful member state, had called for an emergency summit.

    EU commissioner for migration Dimitris Avromopoulos rebuked Hungary over its actions, telling a joint news conference with Hungary’s foreign and interior ministers that most of those arriving in Europe were Syrians “in need of our help”.

    “There is no wall you would not climb, no sea you would not cross if you are fleeing violence and terror,” he said, describing barriers of the kind Hungary has erected as temporary solutions that only diverted migrants, increasing tensions.

    Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto hit back, saying that siding with rioting migrants, who pelted Hungarian police with rocks on Wednesday in clashes that injured 20 police, was encouraging violence.

    “It is bizarre and shocking how some members of international political life and the international press interpreted yesterday’s events,” he said. “All these people will be responsible if these events are repeated today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”

    In Brussels, Johannes Hahn, the EU’s commissioner in charge of enlargement, urged member states to stay calm and fight the crisis together.

    “The Western Balkans must not become a parking lot for refugees. That would be a grave geostrategic mistake. Cool heads on all sides are all needed now, not harsh rhetoric,” he said.

    MORE MIGRANTS COMING

    Undeterred by the problems faces by migrants at the gates of Europe, more have been arriving at the Greek port of Piraeus from Lesbos island, a route taken by many refugees.

    Others are still waiting outside Europe, despite the hazardous Journey which has cost some refugees their lives.

    “It would be very dangerous, but if you make it, the reward is great, the whole world will open up for you,” Yousef Hariri, a refugee from Deraa in Syria, said at a refugee camp in Jordan.

    German police said the number of refugees arriving in Germany more than doubled on Wednesday to 7,266.

    The head of Germany’s Office for Migration and Refugees quit for personal reasons after being criticized for slow processing of applications from a record number of asylum seekers.

    Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who has blamed Berlin for stoking the wave of migrants entering his country after Merkel rolled out the welcome mat for Syrian refugees, said Muslims would end up outnumbering Christians in Europe if the policy continued.

    “I am speaking about culture and the everyday principles of life, such as sexual habits, freedom of expression, equality between men and woman and all those kind of values which I call Christianity,” Orban said in an interview published in several European newspapers including The Times.

    The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, in turn hit back by denouncing “callous, xenophobic and anti-Muslim views that appear to lie at the heart of current Hungarian government policy”.

    The European Parliament endorsed on Thursday the Commission proposal for the relocation of 120,000 migrants from Italy, Greece and Hungary, opposed by four central European states including Hungary itself.

    Two German ministers have spoken of cutting European funds to central European member states that refuse to take their allotted share of refugees.

    The future of border-free travel in the Schengen zone of 26 continental European states has been cast in doubt by the uncoordinated national actions to revive frontier checks.

    “Europe was created to knock down walls, not to build them,” Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said after talks with Luxembourg’s premier.

  • Chileans pick through debris after powerful quake; eight killed

    Violent aftershocks continued shaking the South American country on Thursday morning and locals said they feared another big quake, although the government lifted its tsunami warning.

    “Everything is a mess. It was a disaster, a total loss. Bottles and glasses shattered and the pipes in the bathroom and kitchen burst,” said restaurant owner Melisa Pinones in the city of Illapel, near the epicenter of Wednesday’s quake.

    In the coastal town of Los Vilos, residents tried to salvage belongings from dozens of beachfront homes that were destroyed or severely damaged when the strong waves swept in.

    The government had ordered evacuations from coastal areas after the powerful quake hit, seeking to avoid a repeat of a quake disaster in 2010 when authorities were slow to warn of a tsunami and hundreds were killed.

    The latest quake and the heavy waves that followed caused flooding in coastal towns and knocked out power in the worst hit areas of central Chile, although most buildings held up well. The quake was felt as far away as Buenos Aires in Argentina.

    The port of Coquimbo suffered major damage, Interior Minister Jorge Burgos told reporters. Chile’s navy said the city was hit by waves of up to 4.5 meters (15 feet).

    President Michelle Bachelet said her government “learned a series of lessons” from previous disasters and that she would travel to the worst affected areas. It was the strongest quake in the world this year and the biggest to hit Chile since 2010.

    “We’re going to have go on the ground to see that the damages are and see where help is needed,” Bachelet said.

    Chile is the world’s top copper producer and operations were suspended at two big copper mines as a precaution, sending prices on the London Metal Exchange CMCU3 to two-month highs in early Asian trading on concern over disruptions to supplies. Prices later dipped again after reports that were was no damage to mines.

    State copper miner Codelco said it was keeping operations at its Andina mine suspended, but it had restarted operations at its Ventanas smelter.

    Both Codelco and Antofagasta, which halted operations at its Los Pelambres copper mine, said they were carrying out inspections but they did not have any reports so far of damage. Los Pelambres is the closest major mine to the quake epicenter.

    Chile earthquake forces evacuation of 1 millionAn 8.3-magnitude earthquake and over 50 aftershocks forced the evacuation of 1 million people in Chile Wednesday. Eight people are known to have died. Small tsunamis flooded some coastal city streets and scattered debris. #TerremetoChile #ChileQuake Posted by reported.ly on Thursday, September 17, 2015
    Chile's state oil company ENAP said its two refineries were running at a minimal rate after staff were evacuated. Tsunami advisories were issued for parts of South America, Hawaii, California and French Polynesia, although waves were generally expected to be small. As far away as New Zealand's remote Chatham Islands, some residents left their homes after reporting repeated ebbing and flowing of the tide, along with ocean noises associated with tide surge around midnight local time. There were no immediate reports of damage or injury. AFTERSHOCKS FELT Dozens of strong aftershocks continued to rattle central Chile, a largely agricultural region south of the mining belt, on Thursday. In Illapel, a 26-year-old woman was killed by a wall that collapsed when the quake hit. Another person died from a heart attack in Santiago, according to media reports. Quake-prone Chile has strict building regulations so newer buildings are able to withstand even strong quakes. Many homes in Illapel and surrounding areas are simple, adobe houses and are more prone to damage. The brunt of the damage was borne by coastal areas such as Coquimbo where houses and fishing boats were smashed by waves. "We're going through a really grave situation with the tsunami. We have residential neighborhoods that have flooded. The ocean has reached the downtown area," said Coquimbo's mayor Cristian Galleguillos. Chile is due to celebrate its national holiday on Friday, but roads were cut off and public transport canceled between Santiago and the north, local media reported. The quake is the latest natural disaster to roil mining in Chile, which accounts for a third of global copper output. Northern Chile was hit by severe floods earlier this year, while a volcanic eruption caused problems for residents in the south. Chile runs along a highly seismic and volcanic zone where tectonic plates meet and often experiences earthquakes. In 2014, an 8.2-magnitude quake struck near the northern city of Iquique. In 2010, an 8.8 -magnitude earthquake in central-southern Chile triggered a massive tsunami, and more than 500 people were killed. In the hours after that quake, President Bachelet and her government misjudged the extent of damage and declined offers of international aid. That delayed the flow of assistance to disaster areas, leaving many survivors feeling they had been abandoned by the government. Bachelet's government was also slow to prevent looting following the quake. Its failings hit her high approval ratings at the end of her presidential term, although she remained popular and was elected again in 2013.

  • Blasts in central Baghdad leave 23 dead, 68 wounded

    Two suicide blasts claimed by Islamic State killed at least 19 people in the commercial district of Bab al-Shargi, a demonstration that the Sunni insurgent group can still launch attacks in the heart of the capital despite government efforts to thwart them.

    A third explosion in the nearby Bab al-Muadham district killed four people, the sources said. A hospital source said the bombs had wounded a total of 68 people.

    Baghdad is trying to dislodge Islamic State from large swathes of the country’s north and west, but advances have been slow, particularly in the western province of Anbar, where Baghdad has been focusing its attention for months.

    As part of a reform campaign aimed at combating corruption and improving people’s daily lives, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has directed security commanders to ease civilian access to the Green Zone, just across the Tigris River from the site of Thursday’s attacks.

    He also ordered the elimination of no-go zones set up by militias and political parties in response to more than a decade of bombings, but removal of the gray concrete blast walls and barriers that line many of Baghdad’s thoroughfares has been slow.

  • Stocks steady, dollar slips as Fed decision looms

    A poll by Reuters released on Wednesday showed the majority of economists now expect no hike later on Thursday, although it remains a close call. The futures market implied traders assigned a 1-in-4 chance of such a move.

    “Investors are in wait-and-see mode,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York.

    Mixed U.S. data on jobless claims, housing starts and regional manufacturing did little to change traders’ view on the timing of the Fed’s “lift-off.”

    U.S. two-year Treasuries yield US2YT=RR held below a near 4-1/2 year high. Oil prices were marginally lower, while gold gave back a bit of Wednesday’s gains.

    Traders had expected the Fed to raise rates for most of this year, but those expectations faded following a bout of global market turmoil this summer on worries about China.

    As the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s policy-setting group, releases its policy statement at 2 p.m, it will put forth its quarterly Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), also referred to as “dot plots,” that present individual forecasts of policymakers.

    At 2:30 p.m, Fed Chair Janet Yellen will hold a news conference where she will likely face a barrage of questions on the central bank’s policy stance and economic outlook.

    The dot plots and Yellen’s responses will likely stir wild swings across markets, analysts said.

    In early U.S. trading, the Dow Jones industrial average .DJI fell 10.79 points, or 0.06 percent, to 16,729.16, the S&P 500 .SPX declined 0.2 points, or 0.01 percent, to 1,995.11 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC shed 8.01 points, or 0.16 percent, to 4,897.24.

    The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index .FTEU3 was little changed at 1,428.27.

    Tokyo’s Nikkei index .N225 ended up 1.4 percent.

    The MSCI world equity index .MIWD00000PUS, which tracks shares in 45 nations, rose 0.2 percent to 399.64.

    The dollar index .DXY, which tracks the greenback versus a basket of six currencies, fell 0.28 percent, to 95.151.

    Brent crude LCOc1 was last down 26 cents, or down 0.52 percent, at $49.49 a barrel. U.S. crude CLc1 was last down 23 cents, or 0.49 percent, at $46.93 per barrel.

    Spot gold prices XAU= fell 0.12 percent to $1,117.81 an ounce.

  • Indian activists outraged as Saudi diplomat accused of raping Nepali maids flees

    Citing the diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention, India’s foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup confirmed in a statement late on Wednesday that Majed Hassan Ashoor, the first secretary at the Saudi embassy, had left India.

    “We realize that the laws and conventions are such that there is little India could have done to prevent him from leaving,” said Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association.

    “The focus and pressure has to be on the Saudis to take it up and ensure the victims get justice. You can’t have allegations of a rape racket in your bedroom and think you can get away with it without any investigation.”

    The international community, including the United Nations and influential countries like the United States, should put pressure on the Saudis to pursue the matter, added Krishnan.

    Indian police last week rescued the two women, aged 30 and 50, from Ashoor’s luxury apartment after a tip-off from an anti-human trafficking group and the Nepali embassy.

    The women told police they were gang raped, assaulted, tortured and starved while held captive for over three months. The women said they were raped by eight men on one occasion. Medical examinations showed evidence of rape and sodomy.

    The women came from remote rural parts of Nepal and were sent to Saudi Arabia as domestic servants by human traffickers before returning to New Delhi with their employer.

  • Key Pakistani-Afghan trade deals stall on India, souring ties

    Afghan President Ashraf Ghani struck the trade deals with Pakistan soon after taking office last year as part of a broader rapprochement that included plans to share intelligence on Taliban insurgents active in both countries.

    That cooperation was aimed at tackling the Islamist militant movement, which has separate Afghan and Pakistani branches whose violent campaigns kill thousands of people each year and hamper much-needed development.

    The trade deals were supposed to be a step towards warmer relations and boosting Afghanistan-Pakistan trade from $1.6 billion now to $5 billion by 2017.

    But officials told Reuters that the agreements, which include reducing tariffs and granting each other preferential trade status, have stalled.

    “There has been no progress or further meetings for months since those agreements were signed,” said Musafer Qoqandi, the Afghan Commerce Ministry’s spokesman.

    The key bone of contention was whether Pakistan would allow trade from old rival India to cross its territory.

    The setback first emerged in April, but neither side was willing to discuss it amid attempts to salvage the agreements and maintain the appearance of unity.

    But political relations deteriorated after a spate of Taliban attacks in Afghanistan last month, including several large blasts in Kabul, and the impasse over trade spilled into the open, further complicating efforts to save the deals.

    Some Afghans blame Pakistan for supporting the Taliban, charges that Pakistan denies.

    As diplomats from the two countries swap blame, some are wondering how they can control militancy together if they cannot make progress on trade.

    “If Pakistan and Afghanistan aren’t able to agree on relatively simple trade initiatives that benefit both countries, how can they be expected to make progress in security co-operation?” asked Vaqar Ahmed, deputy executive director at Islamabad’s Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).

    DISAGREEMENTS OVER INDIA

    Muzamel Shinware, Afghanistan’s deputy commerce minister, told Reuters that it was “illogical and unfair” not to include Indian trade crossing Pakistan into Afghanistan.

    Under the terms of the agreements, Pakistan was to have been allowed to ship its goods to markets in Central Asia and beyond via Afghan territory.

    But the row over Indian goods has jeopardised the deals, with India and Pakistan locked in a decades-old standoff.

    “If you put India on the table, then the whole thing stops,” said a Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    Pakistani Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan confirmed that progress was stalled and blamed Afghanistan for failing to deliver promised lower levies on Pakistani transit trade and to begin negotiations on a preferential trade agreement.

    Afghanistan, in turn, blamed Pakistan.

    A senior Afghan official, who asked not to be named, said that the progress on trade made since Ghani’s visit to Pakistan in November “could, frankly, have been made in two weeks if we were serious”.

    In November, Pakistan promised faster clearance of Afghan cargo, greater access for Afghan traders to Pakistan’s railway system and to set up ‘parallel track’ Afghan customs at Karachi.

    Dastgir Khan says most of those steps have been implemented, although some officials privately concede that progress in recent months has stalled as relations chilled.

    Part of the problem is that the Pakistani military retains the final say in bilateral ties, experts say.

    The military has ruled Pakistan for around half its history and heavily influences security and foreign policy.

    “(The Pakistani commerce ministry’s) hands are too tied,” said an Islamabad-based consultant who has worked closely with the ministry. “(They) need to take clearance on each and every petty issue on Pak-Afghan trade.”

    One country benefitting from the chill between Pakistan and Afghanistan is neighbouring Iran.

    Afghan transit trade with Iran has increased steadily since 2007. In 2011, it supplanted Pakistan as Afghanistan’s largest transit trade partner in terms of containers shipped, according to SDPI.

    “Perhaps Pakistan thinks that it is twisting Afghanistan’s arm by stopping these trade initiatives,” said Ahmed of SDPI.

    “But very soon, Iran could make Pakistan irrelevant.”

  • Keith Richards says Rolling Stones to record new album next year

    In a live radio interview on Tuesday night to promote the upcoming release of his own solo album, “Crosseyed Heart,” the 71-year-old rock icon said he and his bandmates – Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood – were ready to return to the studio.

    “I was in London last week, and the boys and I got together, and yeah, there are now definitely plans to record,” Richards said during the iHeartRadio broadcast. The studio session would follow the Stones’ planned South American tour early next year.

    The resulting album would mark the longest interval – at least 11 years – between new studio sets by the Stones, whose last album of freshly recorded material was the 2005 release “A Bigger Bang.”

    Richards, who was touring North America with the band until mid-July, is due to release “Crosseyed Heart,” his first solo album in more than 20 years, on Friday.

    The Rolling Stones

    The set, a mixture of rock, reggae and country music, features Richards playing electric and acoustic guitars, bass and piano, as well as singing. It also includes collaborations with vocalist Norah Jones, keyboardist Ian Neville and guitarist Waddy Wachtel.

    Richards wrote most of the songs on the album with drummer and co-producer Steve Jordan.

    Asked in a separate interview posted Wednesday by the rock music and pop culture website The Quietus whether the Stones ever came close to calling it quits as a group, Richards said, “Never … They just hibernate. There’s never been any sort of talk of splitting.”