US officials will meet Taliban representatives and “technocratic professionals” from key Afghan ministries during a visit to Doha this week, the State Department said on Wednesday, adding they will discuss economic issues, security and women’s rights.

Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West and Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights Rina Amiri will travel to Astana, Kazakhstan, and Doha, Qatar, from July 26 to July 31, the State Department said in a statement.

In Astana, they will meet with officials from Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to discuss Afghanistan, said the statement, which added the US officials will also meet civil society members focused on women’s rights.

The US officials will meet the Taliban delegation in Doha and discuss humanitarian support for Afghanistan, security issues, women’s rights, the Afghan economy’s stabilization, and efforts to counter narcotics production and trafficking, the State Department said.

The Taliban returned to power in 2021 when NATO and US forces withdrew after a 20-year conflict. The chaotic evacuation saw thousands of desperate Afghans trying to enter Kabul airport and men clinging to aircraft as they taxied down runways. A Daesh suicide bomber killed 13 US servicemembers and more than 150 Afghans outside an airport gate.

A State Department report last month criticized Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump for the pullout, which was negotiated by Trump and executed under Biden.

US-Taliban talks focus on economy, human rights, anti-drug trafficking

Updated 12 sec ago

REUTERS

July 31, 202320:49

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WASHINGTON/KABUL: US officials told Afghanistan’s Taliban that Washington was open to technical talks on economic stability and discussions on combating narcotics trafficking, the US State Department said on Monday following two days of talks in Qatar.
Taliban officials raised the lifting of travel and other restrictions on Taliban leaders and the return of Afghan central bank assets held abroad, the Kabul administration said.
No country has formally recognized the Taliban since the Islamist militant movement returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 when US-led foreign forces withdrew in chaos after a 20-year conflict.
The US side repeated concerns about “deteriorating” human rights and called anew on the Taliban to reverse bans on girls’ secondary education and womens’ employment and for the release of detained Americans, the State Department said in a statement.
It also sounded positive notes about improved financial data, including lower inflation, and reduced opium poppy cultivation under a 2022 ban. The US side “voiced openness to continue dialogue on counternarcotics,” said the statement. The US side also was ready “for a technical dialogue regarding economic stabilization issues soon.”
Most Taliban leaders require UN permission to travel abroad, and Afghanistan’s banking sector has been crippled by sanctions since the takeover by the Taliban administration, which calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA).
“IEA reiterated that it was crucial for confidence-building” that travel bans on Taliban leaders be lifted and central bank reserves unfrozen “so that Afghans can establish an economy unreliant on foreign aid,” foreign ministry spokesman Qahar Balkhi said in an English-language statement.
About $7 billion in Afghan central bank funds were frozen in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York after the Taliban took power. Half of the funds now are in a Swiss-based Afghan Fund.
A US-funded audit of the Afghan central bank failed to win Washington’s backing for a return of assets from the trust fund.

 Women will bear the brunt of extreme heat as more frequent heatwaves on a warming planet pose a growing threat to their work, earnings and lives, researchers have warned.
The impacts of rising heat are disproportionately dangerous and costly to women — be it at home or on the job — according to a report titled ‘The Scorching Divide’ by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).
The US-based non-profit’s research, which analyzed India, Nigeria and the United States, said that extreme heat could kill 204,000 women annually across the three countries in hot years.
“Extreme heat is quietly but profoundly brutalising women worldwide,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of Arsht-Rock. Heat creates a “double burden” for women, the report warned.
“Women are not only more susceptible to physically getting sick from heat, they’re also disproportionately expected to care for everyone else who’s sick from heat, whether that’s paid care or unpaid care,” McLeod told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Heatwaves are breaking records around the world and the continued release of planet-heating emissions — largely from the use of coal, oil and gas — will push global temperatures into uncharted territory in the coming years, scientists have said.
The debilitating heat will take its toll on women, forcing them to work longer hours — whether outdoors on a farm, for example, or doing unpaid domestic work like cooking and cleaning at home — for less money or no income at all, the report said.
“Women in poverty are being pushed further into poverty, and women climbing out of poverty are being pulled back in,” McLeod said.

LACK OF COOLING HITS WOMEN HARDEST
With the average number of heatwave days projected to at least double by 2050 in India, Nigeria and the United States, women from the poorest and marginalized communities will suffer the biggest blow to their productivity, the report found.
Much of these heat-related productivity losses — pegged at about $120 billion each year across the three countries — are in the context of unpaid household work and linked to lack of access to domestic cooling equipment, according to the research.
About 1.2 billion rural and urban poor globally are expected to be living without cooling solutions by 2030, with 323 million of them in India alone, according to Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), a UN-backed organization working on energy access.
These solutions range from domestic air-conditioning to cold chains for farm produce.
Women spend almost twice as much time than men working at home, taking care of children or older relatives and managing the house — and those who cannot afford air-conditioning experience a bigger hit to their productivity, the report found.
In nations such as Nigeria, where heat exacerbates symptoms of tropical diseases from malaria to yellow fever, mothers bear the “double burden” of looking after themselves and caring for sick family members, amounting to hours of unpaid work.
Doctors in Nigeria, who experience frequent power cuts, are calling for better-ventilated hospitals and say pregnant women should take breaks of at least three hours if working outdoors.
“Pregnant women are at greater risk of heat-related deaths as increasing temperature affects fetus growth and complicates the overall health of an expectant mother,” said Samuel Adebayo, a gynaecologist in Lagos.
Nigeria accounts for 20 percent of global maternal deaths — 58,000 women per year — said the Arsht-Rock report, citing World Health Organization (WHO) data, and heat adds yet another complication.
In Britain, where women from Black communities are nearly four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth, climate change will only exacerbate the challenges they face, according to Selvaseelan Selvarajah, a doctor in east London.
While the rich can afford air-conditioning units and electricity costs, the poor cannot, Selvarajah said.
“In poor housing, even if the council gave you air-conditioning, you’re paying hundreds of pounds a month for your electricity — you’re not going to want to turn it on,” he said.
INVISIBLE LABOUR PUTS BIGGER BURDEN ON WOMEN
Farm worker Savitri Devi, 40, soldiered through the harsh summer in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh this year, working in fields at temperatures as high as 44 degrees Celsius (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit) even as scores of people died during the heatwave in the state in June.
Women in India lose nearly a fifth of their paid working hours to heat, and extreme heat is pushing female wages below the poverty line in sectors including agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of total female employment, the report found.
“I obviously suffered working in the sun. I fell ill, and my wages were cut for every hour lost due to the heat. But what do I do? I have to work for money,” said Devi, who earns 250 rupees ($3.05) for eight hours of work per day.
Labour experts said rising heat has compounded the problem — particularly for the rural poor. As droughts dent crop harvests and fuel male migration from villages in search of alternative work, women are left behind to take care of farms and families.
Benoy Peter, executive director of the Center for Migration and Inclusive Development, a Kerala-based non-profit, said most agricultural work in rural India consists of invisible labor by women — who assume a bigger burden when men migrate to cities.
“So women do the farm work, take care of older people and children. But if they fall ill, there is no one to take them to a health facility,” he said.
McLeod of Arsht-Rock said people were starting to understand the effects of heat — from a financial and health perspective — and stressed the need to take urgent action on the issue.
“This crisis, given where our emissions are … it’s only getting worse,” she said. “No one has to die from heat. All of these deaths and illness are preventable. We just hope that people pay attention.”

Topics: TALIBAN AFGHANISTAN UNITED STATES

The $3.9 billion UN humanitarian appeal for Ukraine is only 30 percent funded, UN aid official says

Updated 59 min 42 sec ago

AP

August 01, 202304:53

5402

• Brown said a government-led assessment is under way with support from the UN, European Union and World Bank on needs following the dam collapse and should be ready “in a couple of weeks”

UNITED NATIONS: The $3.9 billion humanitarian appeal for war-torn Ukraine is less than 30 percent funded as the country starts preparing for a second winter with more residential buildings damaged and destroyed and thousands of people homeless following the collapse of the Kakhovka dam, the country’s UN humanitarian coordinator said Monday.
Denise Brown told a virtual news conference from Kyiv that 17 million Ukrainians need aid and the UN is targeting between 11 million and 12 million — but funding is becoming a serious issue.
A report last week from the UN humanitarian office said lack of funding “is hampering operations, adding to the challenges imposed by insecurity and other obstacles.”
By the end of June, it said, the UN and its humanitarian partners reached 7.3 million people but in some parts of Ukraine’s south, east and north, more than 25 percent of targeted people couldn’t be reached “due to a combination of funding shortages and other operational challenges.”
Brown stressed that winter starts early in Ukraine and a top priority is ensuring shelter for people who have lost their homes this year. Another priority is the growing need for psycho-social support for people who have struggled through 17 months of war, she said.
The rupture of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam and emptying of its reservoir on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine on June 7 added to the misery in a region that has suffered from artillery and missile attacks and has now seen thousands of people left homeless and swathes of agricultural land destroyed.
Each side has accused the other of destroying the dam, but the various Russian allegations — that it was hit by a missile or taken down by explosives — fail to account for a blast so strong that it registered on seismic monitors in the region.
Brown said a government-led assessment is under way with support from the UN, European Union and World Bank on needs following the dam collapse and should be ready “in a couple of weeks.” She said acute needs have been managed, but “longer-term needs are very large.”
What all this means, Brown said, is that “the needs of the population are increasing.”
“We know that donors are doing their best, but the needs are enormous,” she said. ”I’m hopeful that funding will come.”
Ukraine is far from alone in facing a serious funding shortfall.
On Friday, a top UN official said the United Nations has been forced to cut food, cash payments and assistance to millions of people in many countries because of “a crippling funding crisis” that has seen its donations plummet by about half as acute hunger is hitting record levels.
Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the UN World Food Program, told a news conference that at least 38 of the 86 countries where WFP operates have already seen cuts or plan to cut assistance soon — including in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and West Africa.