Your Tuesday Briefing: Political Turmoil in Pakistan

Good morning. We’re covering political turmoil in Pakistan and schools reopening in the Philippines.

Political tensions swell in Pakistan

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was charged under the country’s antiterrorism act on Sunday. He is trying to stage a political comeback after he was ousted from power in April following a no-confidence vote.

The charges followed a rally in Islamabad, the capital, where Khan condemned the recent arrest of one of his top aides and vowed to file legal cases against police officers and a judge involved in the case. Police said the comments amounted to an illegal attempt at intimidation.

The charges represent a drastic escalation of the power struggle between Pakistan’s current government and its former leader and could set off a fresh round of public unrest and violent street protests.

Analysis: Khan’s rallies have drawn tens of thousands, and his party has scored recent victories in the most populous province, Punjab, and the economic hub, Karachi. But experts say he and his supporters face a mounting crackdown aimed at curtailing their electoral successes.

Details: Pakistan’s media regulatory authority imposed a ban on the live broadcast of Khan’s speeches on news television channels. Several journalists and talk show hosts, who are sympathetic to Khan, say they have been threatened by the state authorities.

“We could no longer afford to delay the education of young Filipinos,” said Vice President Sara Duterte, who is also the education secretary.

The lost time will be hard to make up: Even before the pandemic, the Philippines had among the world’s largest education gaps, with more than 90 percent of students unable to read and comprehend simple texts by age 10, according to the World Bank.

Covid-19 may have only worsened divides. Even though the country offered online instruction during the pandemic, many students lacked access to computers or the internet.

Pandemic: As other countries sent students back to classrooms, government officials and parents hesitated. They feared that schoolchildren could bring the virus to homes crowded with multiple generations of family members, potentially overtaxing a creaky health care system.

Details: Schools in the Philippines have long suffered from teacher shortages, and only some schools are currently in-person five days a week. The country plans to fully reopen all of its roughly 47,000 schools by November.

Drought roils China’s economy

China’s central bank announced that it would cut its five-year interest rate yesterday, an effort to bring a little relief to the country’s huge construction and real estate sector.

The rate cut comes as record-high temperatures and a severe drought have crippled hydropower and prompted the shutdown of many factories in west-central China, an industrial base.

Sichuan Province, for instance, normally generates more than three-quarters of its electricity from huge dams. The summer rainy season usually brings so much water that Sichuan sends much of its hydropower to cities and provinces as far away as Shanghai.

But an almost complete failure of summer rains this year has meant that many dams now cannot generate enough electricity even for Sichuan’s own needs, forcing factories there to close for up to a week at a time and triggering rolling blackouts in some commercial and residential districts.

Fallout: Sichuan’s three main rivers feed the Yangtze River, so hydropower cutbacks have also started to affect downstream areas, like the city of Chongqing and adjacent Hubei Province.

Details: The central bank cut the rate by 0.15 percentage points yesterday, to 4.3 percent, and said that it was reducing a one-year interest rate by 0.05 percentage points, to 3.65 percent.

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