News forecast for the week
FURTHER reports on the various African leaders highlighted in the Pandora Papers, as well as the Indo-Pacific tensions, will likely dominate headlines in the coming week.
Last week, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) leaked one of the biggest offshore data leaks in history, dubbed the Pandora Papers.
A number of African leaders, among them Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, former Congolese military leader Denis Sassou-Nguesso and Zimbabwean presidential adviser Martin Rushwaya, were exposed for secretly owning offshore companies.
The financial data leak of some 11.9 million files was gathered from companies hired by their wealthy clients to create offshore structures.
While in many countries it is not illegal to have shell companies or to possess offshore assets, the ICIJ said more data would be released as it was sifted by more than 650 investigative journalists from selected media partners.
In Asia, North and South Korea restored their cross-border communication hotline last week following tensions caused by a series of missile tests. It is not the first time the hotline has been patched up and it remains to be seen whether communications can last for more than two weeks this time around.
Also, Chinese and US senior officials met last Friday over a range of issues which include healthy competition as well as China’s military tests.
In the US, officials were criticised last month for their treatment of Haitian migrants at the Mexican border after thousands of Haitians embarked on a perilous journey to the US after their country was hit by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in August.
To deport the migrants, the US government relied on a policy called Title 42 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gives the government power to block non-essential travel at the border in the event of an emergency involving communicable disease, the New Yorker reported. More than 7000 people had been deported, the New Yorker wrote.
In the coming days it remains to be seen whether some of the migrants will attempt to return to the US. | African