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Manchar Lake, in Sindh province, is dangerously full after record monsoons that inundated a third of Pakistan.

Its banks were deliberately breached to protect surrounding areas and more than 100,000 people have been displaced.

Officials are racing against time to rescue and evacuate thousands of villagers who are still stranded.

"We see the water is now starting to come down," provincial minister Jam Khan Shoro told the BBC. "If we didn't make the breaches, several towns with big populations would have been destroyed and many more people in danger."

Floods in Pakistan have affected some 33 million people and caused at least 1,343 deaths, Pakistan's National Disaster Management Agency said.

There is too much water. We are going to drown."

That was the warning from the villagers of Sehta Sehanj, where flooding caused by the overflow of Pakistan's largest lake has left many residents trapped by rising water levels and fearing for their lives.

Lake Manchar -- which has swelled to an area hundreds of square kilometers wide due to the combined effects of a heavy monsoon and melting glaciers -- breached its banks for what was at least the third time on Tuesday, leaving nearby villages under several feet of water.

He is one of a growing number of Ukrainians exploring the possibility of reparations for damage or violence that has occurred during the war as they attempt to rebuild their lives, according to the ICC.

The conflict, which six months in is locked in a stalemate, has caused thousands of deaths, made millions of people refugees and destroyed whole cities. Kyiv has said more than 140,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and economists have estimated the cost of damage to housing and infrastructure is more than $100 billion.

 

Pakistani authorities are in a desperate race against time to lower water levels at the lake in Sindh -- the country's second most populous province, home to nearly 48 million people -- fearing that a full-scale breach of its banks could inundate nearby cities.

 

 

Noor Mohammad Thebo said parts of his village have been cut off by the water from Lake Manchar.

 

In a bid to avert that scenario, they allowed the lake to overflow twice on Sunday in an attempt to divert some of the lake's waters into less densely populated areas. But this has led to flooding in smaller villages that has affected around 135,000 people, Sindh province's irrigation minister Jam Khan Shoro told CNN on Wednesday. Shoro said the move was necessary to avoid wider flooding in the district of Dadu, home to around 1.55 million people.

The lake also overflowed on Tuesday, in what officials said was a natural occurrence and not part of efforts to divert the water.

Shoro said officials had on Sunday had tried to warn people in towns near the lake that it would overflow and had urged people to leave the area.

Over the years multiple finance researchers. have found evidence that stock market returns have been consistently lower during the summer months. These culminated in a paper published a decade ago, and updated more recently, by finance professors Cherry Zhang and Ben Jacobsen at Massey University in New Zealand. They looked at the monthly returns of every stock market in the world for which they could find records: A total of 114 of them, including data from London starting in 1693.
“To answer the sceptics,” they wrote, “we use all historical data…on all stock market indices worldwide to verify the robustness of the so-called Halloween Indicator or Sell in May effect. The effect seems remarkably robust with returns on average 4% higher during November-April period than during May-October.”

In detail they report: “Summer risk premiums are not only not significantly positive, they are in most cases not even marginally positive. In 45 countries the excess returns during summer have been negative, and in 7 significantly so. Overall based on 37,167 observations we find that average stock market returns (including dividends) during May to October have been 1.1% (or 0.18% per month) lower than the short term interest rate and these negative excess returns tend to be significantly different from zero. Only in the winter months do we find evidence of a positive risk return relation. Average excess returns from November to April are 5.1% or (0.85% per month).”

Here in America, the sell-in-May rule is usually called the Halloween Effect: The general assumption is that you won’t get back into the stock market until the end of October. In Britain, where the adage supposedly began, it’s slightly different: The saying goes, “Sell in May and go away, and don’t come back till St Leger’s Day.” The St Leger’s Day in question is the day of the St Leger’s Cup, the last of the five big races of the British summer horse-racing calendar, and a social bookend for the summer season. This year the St Leger is being run this Saturday, Sept. 10.

The summer months, as the research shows, have tended to produce lower or even negative average returns. But as I mentioned earlier, they have also tended to be volatile: meaning, at best, that they have often produced some terrific buying opportunities. I ran the numbers on the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.55% going all the way back to 1900. The average price gain for the six months following May 1 was 2.8%–way below the 4% average price gain for any six months. Furthermore, in half of all years the Dow fell by at least 5% at some point during the summer: Someone who sold at the start of May had the chance to buy it back 5% cheaper over the summer. And in one year in three the market fell by at least 10%.

Clean Energy supplied fuel for the first bunkering with liquified natural gas (LNG) of Pasha Hawaii’s new container ship MV George III. (Photo: Business Wire)

 

Pasha Hawaii’s MV George III, a 774-foot container ship operating between Long Beach, CA, Honolulu, HI, and Oakland, CA, is the first of three LNG-powered ships that the domestic shipping company is putting into service. The three ships are expected to consume 105 million gallons of LNG fuel over the next five years.

"The air quality around the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles is some of the worst in the country because of in large part the very dirty marine fuels that have been traditionally used by container ships," said Andrew J. Littlefair, president and CEO, Clean Energy. "The move by Pasha to add ships that operate on clean-burning LNG is one the most forward-thinking and environmentally-progressive actions taken in the maritime industry. We congratulate Pasha on their first successful bunkering operation and look forward to many more as Pasha continues to add the other LNG-powered ships to their fleet."

LNG-powered ships achieve 99.9 percent reduction in diesel particulate matter and sulfur oxide emissions, 90 percent less nitrogen oxides and a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide compared to ships running on traditional fuels.

The LNG that powers the Pasha Hawaii container ships is supplied by the Clean Energy plant in Boron, CA, the only one of its kind in the state. Because of the increase in demand for LNG by Pasha and others, Clean Energy is in the process of expanding its Boron LNG plant by adding a third production train, which will increase capacity by 50 percent when completed.

Days after a high school football player in Washington state was reported missing under suspicious circumstances, he was found safe and accused of murder in the killing of his mother’s former partner, court documents filed Tuesday show.

The 16-year-old was charged with first-degree murder and other crimes in the killing of a man, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in Pierce County Superior Court.

 

His friend, a minor, was also charged with murder in the killing, according to the documents. It is unclear whether they have entered a plea.

NBC News does not usually identify minors who have been charged with a crime.

The teenager was reported missing to authorities in nearby Thurston County on Aug. 31, the affidavit says. The sheriff’s office there said he left his home at 4 p.m. for football practice, but never arrived.

His damaged truck was found on the side of a road roughly 13 miles south, with blood on the steering wheel and driver's side door, according to the affidavit. His cell phone was found smashed on the pavement.

The Thurston County Sheriff's Office described his disappearance as "suspicious," and asked the public for help finding him.

Authorities dispatched bloodhounds and investigators to search a state park where he was reportedly last seen, and officials told reporters that they would "explore every tip and avenue" to bring the teen home safely.

On Sept. 1, 36 hours after the teenager was reported missing, he was found, according to the affidavit. He was 3 miles from his truck and wearing only a pair of shorts.

He initially told investigators that he had no idea where he had been, though he later claimed that people were going to hurt him if he revealed what had happened, the affidavit says.

On the same day the teenager was found, Pierce County sheriff's deputies responding to a call for a welfare check found the decaying body of a man at his home. A medical examiner later concluded that he appeared to have been shot in the head and stabbed multiple times, according to the affidavit.

- A landslide triggered by heavy rain in a remote part of southwestern Uganda has killed at least 15 people, according to the Uganda Red Cross.

The group reported Wednesday that most of the victims are “mothers and children,” calling the landslide in the hilly district of Kasese a disaster.

Kasese, which lies near the border with Congo, is prone to deadly mudslides during rainy seasons.

Ugandan police and other authorities didn’t immediately comment.

 

But for many Ukrainians like Zhyvotovskyi, currently the chances of obtaining compensation from Russia or international tribunals or domestic programs are small, three reparations specialists told Reuters. And, even if the victims do receive reparations, they might only get a modest sum many years from now, they added.

International criminal tribunals can be a route for reparations but the ICC deals with individual perpetrators who can be held liable for damages, rather than states. And, the ICC determines reparations only at the end of what are typically lengthy court cases and they can have a more symbolic value that is unlikely to cover actual costs, some of the specialists said.

Putin told an annual economic forum in the far-eastern port city of Vladivostok that the main goal behind sending troops into Ukraine was protecting civilians in the east of that country after eight years of fighting.

“It wasn’t us who started the military action — we are trying to put an end to it,” Putin said, reaffirming his argument that he sent troops to protect Moscow-backed regions in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“All our action has been aimed at helping people living in the Donbas. It’s our duty, and we will fulfill it until the end,” he said.

Putin asserted that Russia had strengthened its sovereignty in the face of Western sanctions, which he said bordered on an aggression.

“Russia has resisted the economic, financial and technological aggression of the West,” Putin said. “I’m sure that we haven’t lost anything and we won’t lose anything. The most important gain is the strengthening of our sovereignty. It’s an inevitable result of what’s going on.”

Reparations can also be organized at the national level and Ukraine has pledged to set up a reparations structure with international partners but it’s unclear who would be eligible or how it would be funded. Kyiv has said it hopes Russian assets in other countries could be confiscated and used as compensation, an idea Moscow has rejected as illegal.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said any attempt to use frozen Russian state assets to rebuild Ukraine would constitute “outright theft.” Moscow has rejected allegations by Ukraine and Western nations of war crimes and has denied targeting civilians in what the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" to demilitarise its neighbour.

Zhyvotovskyi’s lawyer, Yuriy Bilous, said he is hopeful his client will get some financial help to rebuild his house and that a successful war crimes prosecution would provide some psychological relief in terms of seeing justice done.

 

"We are trying our best to provide relief to the people but the scale of the disaster is so high and the number of people affected is also so high," he said. "It's nearly impossible for our government to provide everyone with shelter, food, and medicine. It's difficult."

Shoro added that the army and navy were being enlisted to help the relief efforts and authorities were communicating with elected officials in the villages.

Murad Ali Shah, the chief minister of Sindh, said Wednesday he did not want the lake to overflow but if authorities had not diverted the water, cities up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the lake -- such as Sehwan, Dadu and Mehar -- would have been put in danger.

While those areas have been spared, at least for now, villages nearby are bearing the brunt.

"(Our) village is submerged. There is no way to go (to it)," said Noor Mohammad Thebo, who spoke to CNN on a roadside as rapidly flowing water swirled around his ankles.

Thebo said 10 to 15 families had been cut off by the rising waters in his village near the lake and that water up to 1.5 meters (five feet) deep now covered its main access road -- making any rescue efforts a dangerous affair.

"There are no rescue teams that could help (the trapped families) and there is no way for (the families) to come out," Thebo said.