India expelled a senior Canadian diplomat on Tuesday and accused Canada of interfering in its internal affairs, ramping up a confrontation between the two countries over accusations that the Indian government may have been involved in the killing of a Sikh activist.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later said that Canada wasn’t looking to escalate tensions, but asked India to take the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar seriously after India called accusations that the Indian government may have been involved absurd.
“India and the government of India needs to take this matter with the utmost seriousness,” Trudeau said. “We are doing that. We are not looking to provoke or escalate. We are simply laying out the facts as we understand them and we want to work with the government of India to lay everything clear and to ensure there are proper processes.”
Trudeau said Monday that his government was investigating allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Niijar.
Authorities have divided Libya’s flood-stricken city of Derna into four sections to create buffers in case of disease outbreaks, the prime minister of Libya’s eastern administration said Tuesday, a day after thousands of angry protesters demanded the city’s rapid reconstruction.
Last week, two dams collapsed during Mediterranean storm Daniel, sending a wall of water gushing through Derna. Government officials and aid agencies have given death tolls ranging from about 4,000 to 11,000, with thousands more missing.
“Now the affected areas are completely isolated, the armed forces and the government have begun creating a buffer out of fear of the spread of diseases or epidemics,” Prime Minister Ossama Hamad said in a telephone interview with Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV. No further details were given.
According to local media, the internet went down in the east of the country on Tuesday morning.
The United Nations had warned on Monday that a disease outbreak could create “a second devastating crisis.”
A long stretch of hot, dry weather has left the Mississippi River so low that barge companies are reducing their loads just as Midwest farmers are preparing to harvest crops and send tons of corn and soybeans downriver to the Gulf of Mexico.
The transport restrictions are a headache for barge companies, but even more worrisome for thousands of farmers who have watched drought scorch their fields for much of the summer. Now they will face higher prices to transport what remains of their crops.
Farmer Bruce Peterson, who grows corn and soybeans in southeastern Minnesota, chuckled wryly that the dry weather had withered his family’s crop so extensively they won’t need to worry so much about the high cost of transporting the goods downriver.
“We haven’t had rain here for several weeks so our crop size is shrinking,” Peterson said. “Unfortunately, that has taken care of part of the issue.”
About 60% of U.S. grain exports are taken by barge down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where the corn, soybeans and wheat is stored and ultimately transferred to other ships. It’s usually an inexpensive, efficient way to transport crops, as a typical group of 15 barges lashed together carries as much cargo as about 1,000 trucks.
Owen Larson can be reached at lars6521@stthomas.edu.