world
‘Because I fell, one of the shooters thought I’d died, and left’: Imran Khan
Imran Khan, former prime minister of Pakistan, has spoken in public for the first time since being shot while participating in a protest march in the eastern city of Wazirabad.
Khan said that if the two gunmen he observed had “synchronized” their attack, he wouldn’t have survived. He was seated in a wheelchair in a Lahore hospital.
Read: Imran Khan accuses Pak army of recreating 1971-like situation
BBC News quotes the PTI chief as saying: “Because I fell, one of the shooters thought I had died, and left.”
Khan was barred from running for public office by Pakistan’s election board last month in a case that the former all-star cricketer said was “politically motivated”.
One of the men suspected of shooting him confessed on camera and told police that he “intended to murder him” because the former cricketer was “misleading” the public. Uncertainty surrounds the circumstances of the confession.
Read More: Pakistan's ex-PM Imran Khan stable after shooting at anti-govt rally
Imran Khan accuses Pak army of recreating 1971-like situation
Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan Friday said what happened in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) is happening in his country now.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) chief drew comparisons to 1970, when the largest party, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman-led Awami League, was denied the right to form the government despite gaining the majority of seats in the general elections of December 7 – a watershed moment that later broke Pakistan.
"What happened in East Pakistan? The military took action against the party which won the elections," Imran said in his first public remarks in a video broadcast on PTI's YouTube channel after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt during a long march in Punjab's Wazirabad Thursday.
"The largest party won, but it was denied its rights; the same thing is happening here right now," the PTI chief added.
Sitting in a wheelchair at a hospital in Lahore, the 70-year-old former international cricket star said he would not have survived the shooting if the two shooters he saw had "synchronised" their attack.
One of Imran's supporters was killed and 13 others, including two lawmakers, were wounded in the attack.
Read more: Rallies demonstrate Imran Khan’s political force
Imran's protest march and rallies were peaceful until Thursday afternoon's attack, raising concerns about growing political instability in Pakistan, a country with a history of political violence and assassinations.
He maintains that his April ouster from Parliament was unlawful and a conspiracy by his political opponents orchestrated by the US, a charge denied by both Washington and his successor Shehbaz Sharif.
Imran wants the government to announce snap elections. He led the protest from Lahore beginning last Friday along with thousands of supporters, saying his protest will continue until his demands are accepted.
Pakistan says elections will take place as scheduled in 2023.
Read more: Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif condemns attack on Imran Khan
Updated Covid boosters rev up protection: Pfizer study
Pfizer’s updated COVID-19 booster significantly revved up adults’ virus-fighting antibodies, the company said Friday, releasing early findings from a rigorous study of the new shots.
Booster doses tweaked to target the most common omicron strain rolled out in early September, and the Food and Drug Administration said the latest data should spur more Americans to get one — especially before another expected wave of cases as people travel for Thanksgiving.
Pfizer said people 55 and older who got the omicron-targeting booster had four-fold higher antibody levels than those given an extra dose of the original vaccine.
With many Americans reluctant to roll up their sleeves again, perhaps the better question is how the new booster compares to going without another dose.
A hint: A month after receiving the new booster, antibody levels in people 55 and older had jumped 13 times higher than before the extra dose. Younger adults saw a 9.5-fold jump, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said. It had been about 11 months since the study participants’ last vaccination.
It’s too soon to know how much real-world protection the antibody boost translates into -- and how long it will last. The results are preliminary, the study is still underway and infection-fighting antibodies naturally wane over time.
Read: UN chief warns planet is heading toward `climate chaos'
Still, the FDA had cleared the updated boosters without first requiring testing in people, basing the decision on studies of a similarly tweaked vaccine — against an earlier omicron strain — rather than the exact recipe.
So the new data “reassures us that this was a good decision to move to this bivalent vaccine,” FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press. “Right now is the time for people to consider going out and get the updated” booster.
Health experts say it’s shaping up to be a rough winter. Flu season is starting unusually early and harsh, children’s hospitals are packed with another respiratory illness named RSV, and COVID-19 cases again are expected to rise with holiday gatherings.
The original COVID-19 vaccines still offer strong protection against severe illness and death, especially among younger and healthier people who’ve gotten at least one booster — a reason for anyone who hasn’t gotten their first set of shots to do so. But effectiveness drops as new mutants emerge and more time passes since someone’s last shot.
Read: Record inflation puts the squeeze on Eurozone economies
The updated doses are combination shots, tailored to offer a boost of protection against both the original coronavirus strain and the dominant BA.5 strain. Pfizer’s shot is available for anyone 5 or older. Moderna’s version of the updated booster is for those 6 and older.
About 26.3 million Americans have gotten an updated booster since they rolled out in early September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some small studies have recently raised questions about how much advantage the updated boosters will offer rather than just getting another dose of the original vaccine.
Pfizer’s early findings compared several dozen younger and older adults given the bivalent booster with a group who received a fourth dose of the company’s original vaccine.
Is it too late to prevent climate change?
Global average temperatures have risen and weather extremes have already seen an uptick, so the short answer to whether it’s too late to stop climate change is: yes. But there’s still time to prevent cascading effects, as every degree of additional warming has exponentially disastrous impacts, experts say.
A 2021 report by the top body of climate scientists provided new analysis of the chance the world has to cap warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) or 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times in the coming decades, in line with global climate goals.
Although scientists estimated it’s still possible to stay within these limits, they said it would require immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It’s more likely that global temperature will reach or exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the report said.
Without major action to reduce emissions, the global average temperature is on track to rise by 2.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, scientists say.
And researchers warn that the situation will get very serious before then: Once the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is reached, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. When the 2 degrees Celsius mark is crossed, critical tolerance levels for agriculture and health will be reached.
Read more: UN, ADB to support Bangladesh's fight against climate change
But all hope is not lost, they urge.
At the time of the report’s release, Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London, said achieving the 1.5-degree goal “is still possible from a physical science point of view.”
“If we reduce emissions globally to net zero by 2040 there is still a two thirds chance to reach 1.5 degrees and if we globally achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the century, there is still a one third chance to achieve that,” she said.
If all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades but would eventually stabilize, climate scientists say. If humans don’t emit any additional planet-warming gasses, then natural processes would begin to slowly remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and global temperatures would gradually begin to decline.
Read more: Bangladesh a key player in fight against climate change, says British envoy
“There is a direct relation between delay and warming, and between warming and risk of what we would call extreme impacts,” said Ajay Gambhir, a senior research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, based at Imperial College London. “ Unfortunately, we’re already seeing all these extreme impacts — whether it’s extreme heat waves, increased risk of crop failures, forest fires or bleaching coral reefs— already happening.”
Blue check mark on Twitter: Vital verification or status symbol?
The story of Twitter’s blue checkmarks — a simple verification system that’s come to be viewed as an elite status symbol — began with some high-profile impersonations, just as the site began taking off in 2008 and ’09.
Celebrities who saw their likeness spoofed included Kanye West, now Ye, the basketball star Shaquille O’Neil and the actor Ewan McGregor, who was also impersonated on a wildly popular website called ... MySpace.
Then, in June 2009, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter, claiming that a fake account, using his name to make light of drunken driving and two Cardinals pitchers who died, damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.
LaRussa eventually dropped his lawsuit. But in June of that year, Twitter’s then-CEO Biz Stone introduced a verification system to sort out authentic accounts from impostors. The benefit would be to the holders of the accounts, but also to everyone else on Twitter. They could be sure, if they saw the blue check next to a name, that what they were reading was authentic.
Fast-forward to 2022. Twitter’s new owner and ruler, billionaire Elon Musk, wants to turn this verification system into a revenue source for the company he paid $44 billion to purchase. It’s a 180-degree turn from the stance he took earlier this year, before his buyout closed, when he said he wanted to “verify all humans” on Twitter.
After floating the idea of charging users $20 a month for the “blue check” and some extra features, he appeared to quickly scale it back in a Twitter exchange with author Stephen King, who posted “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” Musk replied.
Whatever the price, the idea of a paid verification system is raising some complex questions and concerns — beyond the customary cheers and jeers that have accompanied Musk’s every move since he took ownership of the social media company last week.
“Tapping into Twitter users to make more money may be the right strategy, but verification isn’t the right feature to charge for,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “Verification is intended to ensure the integrity of accounts and conversations on the platform, rather than a premium feature meant to elevate the experience. There is a growing appetite among some social users to pay for features that add value to their experiences.”
Read more: Musk tweets conspiracy theory about attack on Pelosi's husband, then deletes it
Instead of charging for authentication, though, Enberg said Musk should be looking at adding features to Twitter that get people to use it more and help them grow their follower base and find a way to make money from those.
“Turning users into customers isn’t an easy sell, and the value exchange has to be right in order for it to pay off,” she said.
Twitter already has a subscription plan, Twitter Blue, that for $5 a month lets users access extra features, such as the ability to undo a tweet and read ad-free articles. Musk’s plan, as it appears from his tweets, seems to be expanding it to charge more money for more features — including the verification badge — and spread it to more users.
“Of roughly 300,000 verified accounts on Twitter we would estimate only about 25% would go down this path ultimately and pay the $8 per month fee,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives said.
That would mean only $7.2 million a year in extra revenue for Twitter — not enough to move the dial for a company whose last reported quarterly revenue was $1.18 billion.
Ives expects Musk to first go after users who already have the check to charge them to keep it, then likely introduce other tiered pricing plans for other accounts.
“The problem is with many athletes and celebrities willing to lose their coveted blue check and refusing to pay the monthly fee it would be an ominous black eye moment for Musk on his first strategic move with Twitter,” he said.
While Musk’s exact plans are not clear, experts are raising concerns about the consequences of having a paid verification system that leaves anyone unwilling to pay vulnerable to impersonation — and anyone who does pay the ability to have their Twitter presence boosted by the platform’s algorithms.
Read more: Indian-origin tech executive ‘helping out’ Musk in revamping Twitter
While many verified users on Twitter are famous, there are also community activists, journalists at small newspapers and outlets inside and outside of the U.S. — and regular people who simply find themselves in the news. For this subset, $8 a month may not be worth it, no matter how many memes Musk posts about the cost of a cup of coffee.
The idea behind verification — which other social networks later copied — was to ensure that public figures, politicians and businesses were who they say they are. It began small at first, as things do when tech companies test out new features and functions.
“The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation,” Stone wrote in 2009. He suggested that those who can’t be immediately verified put their official website in their Twitter bio to show that they are who they say they are.
Employees brace for massive layoffs at Musk's Twitter
Employees braced for widespread layoffs at Twitter Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the social platform.
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.
Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm of the company. Already, the billionaire Tesla CEO has fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as Twitter’s owner.
Read more: Blue check mark on Twitter: Vital verification or status symbol?
He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other -- often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo -- and salute emojis in replies to each other.
As of Thursday, Musk and Twitter had given no public notice of the coming layoffs. That’s even though the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statute requires employers with at least 100 workers to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees, regardless of whether a company is publicly traded or privately held.
Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any such notifications from Twitter.
A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.
Read more: Musk fires Twitter's board of directors becomes board's sole member
The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers -- mainly TikTok -- are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.
Pakistan's ex-PM Imran Khan stable after shooting at anti-govt rally
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan is in a stable condition after being shot and wounded during a protest march, a senior leader from his party said Friday.
Khan's protest march and rallies were peaceful until Thursday afternoon's attack, raising concerns about growing political instability in Pakistan, a country with a history of political violence and assassinations.
One of Khan's supporters was killed and 13 others, including two lawmakers, were wounded in the attack.
Read more: Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif condemns attack on Imran Khan
“There is no doubt about it," said Fawad Chaudhry, a senior leader from Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party. “We are convinced that it was a well-planned assassination attempt on Pakistan's most popular leader Imran Khan, who is now in stable condition at the Shaukat Khanum hospital in Lahore after undergoing surgery there.”
He said the party leadership was meeting in Lahore later Friday. “We will announce today exactly when our march will resume from Wazirabad," Chaudhry told The Associated Press. He provided no further details, but Khan's party in a brief statement urged supporters to hold nationwide rallies to condemn the shooting.
Asad Umar, a senior figure from Khan’s party, blamed the shooting on Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, the country’s interior minister, and an army general without offering any evidence.
The government called the allegation baseless, saying it has ordered a high-level probe and that the attacker is being questioned.
Police are still questioning the alleged attacker, who is shown in a video saying he carried out the shooting and acted alone.
The attack took place as the former cricket star-turned-politician was traveling in a large protest convoy of trucks and cars toward Islamabad. Video footage show him and his team ducking for cover on top of a vehicle as gunfire rings out.
Read more: Ex-Pakistan PM Imran Khan wounded in firing at anti-govt rally
Khan, 70, is likely to be allowed to go home soon, according to Faisal Sultan, who is heading the team of doctors who treated Khan. He told reporters Thursday that Khan's surgery continued for two hours, and he had a bullet wound in his right leg.
He maintains that his April ouster from Parliament was unlawful and a conspiracy by his political opponents orchestrated by the United States, a charge denied by both Washington and Sharif.
Khan wants the government to announce snap elections. He led the protest from Lahore beginning last Friday along with thousands of supporters, saying his protest will continue until his demands are accepted. Pakistan says elections will take place as scheduled in 2023.
His supporters rallied overnight in different parts of the country after the shooting.
4 Palestinians killed in flare-up as Israel counts votes
Israeli forces killed at least four Palestinians in separate incidents on Thursday, including one who had stabbed a police officer in east Jerusalem and three others in Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank.
Early Friday, Israeli aircraft struck several targets in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire Thursday evening from the Palestinian enclave. The rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes were the first cross-border violence since a cease-fire ended a round of fighting between Israel and the Islamic Jihad militant group there in August.
The violence flared as Israel completed the counting of votes in national elections held this week, with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies capturing a comfortable majority of seats in Israel's parliament.
In the West Bank, Israeli troops operating in the Jenin refugee camp, a militant stronghold, killed at least two Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said one of those killed was a local commander. Residents said he was killed while at the butcher, where he was buying meat ahead of his wedding this weekend.
Read more: ‘Free Palestine’: Protesters in major US cities decry airstrikes over Gaza
The army said Farouk Salameh was wanted in a number of shooting attacks on Israeli security forces, including the killing of a police officer last May. It said that a firefight ensued, Salameh fled and then drew a gun at soldiers who shot and killed him.
Late Thursday, Gaza militants fired a rocket into southern Israel, setting off air-raid sirens in the area. The army said the rocket was intercepted, and that three other launch attempts failed and exploded inside Gaza. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but in the past, Islamic Jihad has fired rockets in response to the killings of its members.
In response, the Israeli military said it targeted an underground site used by Gaza's Hamas rulers as a rocket-making facility. The airstrikes “will significantly impede” Hamas' rocket capabilities, it said. It also blamed the militant group for attacks emanating from Gaza. There were no reports of casualties.
Earlier Thursday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said a Palestinian man was killed by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank. Israeli police said it happened during a raid in the territory and alleged the man threw a firebomb at the forces.
In a separate incident Thursday, a Palestinian stabbed a police officer in Jerusalem’s Old City, police said, and officers opened fire on the attacker, killing him. The officer was lightly wounded.
The violence came as a political shift is underway in Israel after national elections, with Netanyahu set to return to power in a coalition government made up of far-right allies, including the extremist lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in response to the incidents said Israel would soon take a tougher approach to attackers.
“The time has come to restore security to the streets,” he tweeted. “The time has come for a terrorist who goes out to carry out an attack to be taken out!”
Read more: Israel-Palestine conflict: China calls for UN council action, slams US Israel-Palestine conflict: China calls for UN council action, slams US
The violence was the latest in a wave of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in the West Bank and east Jerusalem that has killed more than 130 Palestinians this year, making 2022 the deadliest since the U.N. started tracking fatalities in 2005.
The violence intensified in the spring, after a wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis killed 19 people, prompting Israel to launch a months-long operation in the West Bank it says is meant to dismantle militant networks. The raids have been met in recent weeks by a rise in attacks against Israelis, killing at least three.
Israel says most of those killed have been militants. But youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in the fighting have also been killed.
Also on Thursday, Israel said it was removing checkpoints in and out of the city of Nablus. Israel had imposed the restrictions weeks ago, clamping down on the city in response to a new militant group known as the Lions' Den. The military has conducted repeated operations in the city in recent weeks, killing or arresting the group's top commanders.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and has since maintained a military occupation over the territory and settled more than 500,000 people there. The Palestinians want the territory, along with the West Bank and east Jerusalem, for their hoped-for independent state.
Christian monastery possibly pre-dating Islam found in UAE
An ancient Christian monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam spread across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, officials announced Thursday.
The monastery on Siniyah Island, part of the sand-dune sheikhdom of Umm al-Quwain, sheds new light on the history of early Christianity along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It marks the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years — long before its desert expanses gave birth to a thriving oil industry that led to a unified nation home to the high-rise towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
The two monasteries became lost to history in the sands of time as scholars believe Christians slowly converted to Islam as that faith grew more prevalent in the region.
Read more: What’s the status of women in Qatar, host of 2022 FIFA World Cup?
Today, Christians remain a minority across the wider Middle East, though Pope Francis arrived in nearby Bahrain on Thursday to promote interfaith dialogue with Muslim leaders.
For Timothy Power, an associate professor of archaeology at the United Arab Emirates University who helped investigate the newly discovered monastery, the UAE today is a “melting pot of nations.”
“The fact that something similar was happening here a 1,000 years ago is really remarkable and this is a story that deserves to be told,” he said.
Read more: Archaeologists unearth 2,700-year-old rock carvings
The monastery sits on Siniyah Island, which shields the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain, an emirate some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Dubai along the coast of the Persian Gulf. The island, whose name means “flashing lights” likely due to the effect of the white-hot sun overhead, has a series of sandbars coming off of it like crooked fingers. On one, to the island's northeast, archaeologists discovered the monastery.
Carbon dating of samples found in the monastery's foundation date between 534 and 656. Islam's Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 and died in 632 after conquering Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Viewed from above, the monastery on Siniyah Island's floor plan suggests early Christian worshippers prayed within a single-aisle church at the monastery. Rooms within appear to hold a baptismal font, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. A nave also likely held an altar and an installation for communion wine.
Next to the monastery sits a second building with four rooms, likely around a courtyard — possibly the home of an abbot or even a bishop in the early church.
On Thursday, the site saw a visit from Noura bint Mohammed al-Kaabi, the country's culture and youth minister, as well as Sheikh Majid bin Saud Al Mualla, the chairman of the Umm al-Quwain's Tourism and Archaeology Department and a son of the emirate's ruler.
The island remains part of the ruling family's holdings, protecting the land for years to allow the historical sites to be found as much of the UAE has rapidly developed.
The UAE's Culture Ministry has sponsored the dig in part, which continues at the site. Just hundreds of meters (yards) away from the church, a collection of buildings that archaeologists believe belongs to a pre-Islamic village sit.
Elsewhere on the island, piles of tossed-aside clams from pearl hunting make for massive, industrial-sized hills. Nearby also sits a village that the British blew up in 1820 before the region became part of what was known as the Trucial States, the precursor of the UAE. That village's destructions brought about the creation of the modern-day settlement of Umm al-Quwain on the mainland.
Historians say early churches and monasteries spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and all the way to India. Archaeologist have found other similar churches and monasteries in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In the early 1990s, archaeologists discovered the first Christian monastery in the UAE, on Sir Bani Yas Island, today a nature preserve and site of luxury hotels off the coast of Abu Dhabi, near the Saudi border. It similarly dates back to the same period as the new find in Umm al-Quwain.
However, evidence of early life along the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain dates as far back as the Neolithic period — suggesting continuous human inhabitance in the area for at least 10,000 years, Power said.
Today, the area near the marshland is more known for the low-cost liquor store at the emirate’s Barracuda Beach Resort. In recent months, authorities have demolished a hulking, Soviet-era cargo plane linked to a Russian gunrunner known as the “Merchant of Death” as it builds a bridge to Siniyah Island for a $675 million real estate development.
Power said that development spurred the archaeological work that discovered the monastery. That site and others will be fenced off and protected, he said, though it remains unclear what other secrets of the past remain hidden just under a thin layer of sand on the island.
“It’s a really fascinating discovery because in some ways it’s hidden history — it’s not something that’s widely known,” Power said.
UN chief warns planet is heading toward `climate chaos'
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Thursday that the planet is heading toward irreversible “climate chaos” and urged global leaders at the upcoming climate summit in Egypt to put the world back on track to cut emissions, keep promises on climate financing and help developing countries speed their transition to renewable energy.
The U.N. chief said the 27th annual Conference of the 198 Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — better known as COP27 — “must be the place to rebuild trust and re-establish the ambition needed to avoid driving our planet over the climate cliff.”
He said the most important outcome of COP27, which begins Nov. 6 in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, is to have “a clear political will to reduce emissions faster.”
That requires a historical pact between richer developed countries and emerging economies, Guterres said. “And if that pact doesn’t take place, we will be doomed.”
In the pact, the secretary-general said, wealthier countries must provide financial and technical assistance – along with support from multilateral development banks and technology companies – to help emerging economies speed their renewable energy transition.
Guterres said that in the last few weeks, reports have painted “a clear and bleak picture” of global-warming greenhouse gas emissions still growing at record levels instead of going down 45% by 2030 as scientists say must happen.
The landmark Paris agreement adopted in 2015 to address climate change called for global temperatures to rise a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times, and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Guterres said greenhouse gas emissions are now on course to rise by 10%, and temperatures are on course to rise by as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius under present policies by the end of the century.
Read more: Climate Change: Int’l community must act with fund and solutions to help most vulnerable nations
“And that means our planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and forever bake in catastrophic temperature rise,” the secretary-general warned.
He said the 1.5 degree goal “is in intensive care” and “in high danger,” but it’s still possible to meet it. “And my objective in Egypt is to make sure that we gather enough political will to make this possibility really moving forward,” the U.N. chief said.
“COP27 must be the place to close the ambition gap, the credibility gap and the solidarity gap,” Guterres said. “It must put us back on track to cutting emissions, boosting climate resilience and adaptation, keeping the promise on climate finance and addressing loss and damage from climate change.”
Rich countries, especially the United States, have emitted far more than their share of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, data shows. Poor nations like Pakistan, where recent floods left a third of the country under water, have been hurt far more than their share of global carbon emissions.
Loss and damage has been talked about for years, but richer nations have often balked at negotiating details about paying for past climate disasters, like Pakistan’s flooding this summer.
“Loss and damage have been the always-postponed issue,” Guterres said. “There is no more time to postpone it. We must recognize loss and damage and we must create an institutional framework to deal with it.”
Read more: UN, ADB to support Bangladesh's fight against climate change
The secretary-general said Thursday that “getting concrete results on loss and damage is the litmus test of the commitment of the governments to close all of these gaps.”
“COP27 must lay the foundations for much faster, bolder climate action now and in this crucial decade, when the global climate fight will be won or lost,” Guterres said.