(BBC News with David Austin.)
(The humanitarian catastrophe in Pakistan, where a fifth of) the country is flooded, has led to renewed calls for help from the government in Islamabad.
The Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the BBC the disaster was too great for Pakistan to handle alone, and an international failure to get immediate aid to those in need could leave millions to starve.
He also warned of the activities of charities linked to militant groups who were trying to
exploit
the situation.
“When people are suffering, they do not
differentiate from
where help is coming. If a person is hungry, if a person is thirsty, and you provide water, he will not ask you whether you are a moderate or an extremist. He will grab that water from you and save himself and his children who are starving. So we have to be aware of this challenge.”
The United Nations has warned that up to 3.5 million children are at risk from
waterborne
diseases. It says a
boost
in funding is urgently needed to get safe drinking water to 6 million children.
With American forces just weeks away from ending their combat operations in Iraq, there’s been another blow to the
protracted
negotiations to try to form a stable coalition government. Five months after Iraqis went to the polls, the alliance that won the most seats, the al-Iraqiya bloc, has suspended its talks with the second-placed Shiite-led bloc of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This was in response to Mr al-Maliki describing al-Iraqiya as a “Sunni group” rather than cross-sectarian. A member of the al-Iraqiya bloc, Adnan al-Danbus, said the prime minister’s remarks were not