Bangladesh’s new leadership seeks continued cooperation with Saudi Arabia

GOLD COAST, Australia: Violent winds toppled power lines Friday as a tropical cyclone inched toward Australia’s eastern coast, swelling rivers, sparking evacuation orders and leaving 80,000 homes without electricity.
Tropical Cyclone Alfred was 125 kilometers east of Brisbane by Friday afternoon, crawling toward the densely populated coastline at “walking speed,” government forecasts said.
Some four million people were in the firing line along a 400-kilometer (250-mile) stretch of coastline straddling the state border of Queensland and New South Wales.
It is a region rarely troubled by typhoons — it has been more than 50 years since a tropical cyclone made landfall in that stretch of coast.
No deaths have been reported, but police said one man was missing after his four-wheel drive vehicle was swept from a bridge into fast-running river water south of the cyclone.
“The male driver was able to exit the vehicle and secure himself to a tree branch,” New South Wales police said in a statement.
But later, “the man was swept from the tree and seen to go beneath the water where he has not been sighted since.”
Heavy rains associated with the cyclone had already prompted flood warnings in the area.
Around 80,000 homes were left in the dark across the two states as winds uprooted trees and brought down power lines, officials and utility companies said, as repair crews raced to restore electricity.
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said the storm already “packed a punch,” warning conditions would get worse as it approached land on Saturday morning.
AFP images showed a white yacht blown into the rocks after snapping its moorings at Point Danger on the Gold Coast.
Two people made “a lucky escape” after a large gum tree crashed through the roof of a house in rural Currumbin Valley, the Queensland Ambulance Service said.
Emergency response officials said they had issued evacuation orders for some 10,000 people in the flood-prone northern rivers region of New South Wales.
There was particular concern for the town of Lismore, which was engulfed by record 14-meter (45-feet) floodwaters after heavy rains in 2022.
Many residents have spent the past three days fortifying their homes with sandbags, tying down loose furniture and stocking up on food and water.
“A lot of people are feeling a bit anxious, for sure, because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Paul Farrow from Coolangatta, a coastal suburb better known for its sun-splashed beaches.
“Yeah, we could all lose our houses. Who knows,” the 62-year-old told AFP.
“The pubs might be shut for a week or two. Who knows.”
Farrow said he had stashed a “couple of peaches,” a “couple of cartons of beer,” and “a bag of grapes” to get him through.
“So I’ll be right,” he said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the region should “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
“When nature does its worst, Australians are at our best. We rally. We lift each other up. We look out for our neighbors,” he told reporters.
Tropical Cyclone Alfred would likely cross the coast on Saturday, the Bureau of Meteorology said, although its path has proven increasingly difficult to track.
It was forecast to make landfall somewhere north of Brisbane.
Drenching rains, “destructive” wind gusts, and “abnormally high tides” would pummel the coast as it crept nearer, the bureau said.
More than 900 schools across Queensland state and neighboring parts of northern New South Wales were closed on Friday, education department officials said.
While cyclones are common in the warm tropical waters lapping Australia’s northern flank, it is rarer for them to form in cooler waters further south.
Alfred would be the first to make landfall in that part of Australia since 1974, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
Researchers have repeatedly warned that climate change amplifies the risk of natural disasters such as bushfires, floods and cyclones.

BISWAMBHARPUR: Young Bangladeshi mother Mafia Akhter’s decision to give birth at home and without a doctor left her grieving over her firstborn’s lifeless body and vowing never to repeat the ordeal.
“My first baby died,” the 25-year-old told AFP. “I told myself that if I didn’t go to the clinic it could happen again, and that I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
She gave birth again last month at a medical center in a village hemmed in by rice paddy and rivers, far from the nearest hospital and without the oversight of an obstetrician.
But this time her child survived — something she credits to Nargis Akhter, one of the thousands of Bangladeshi women working as “skilled birth attendants” to help mothers through delivery.
“Giving birth is the most important and critical moment for a woman,” Nargis — no relation to her patient — told AFP.
“I am lucky and proud to be able to be with them at that moment.”
Nargis was speaking to AFP after her routine post-natal consultation with Mafia, who was cradling her young daughter during her return to the spartan village health center where she gave birth.
Skilled birth attendants have been a fixture of Bangladesh’s maternal health policy for two decades and are an important pillar of the South Asian nation’s underfunded health system.
More than 30 percent of Bangladeshi women nationally give birth without the assistance of a doctor, nurse or midwife, according to government data from 2022 Demographic and Health Survey.
Birth attendants like Nargis, 25, are given several months training and put to work plugging this gap by serving in a jack-of-all-trades role akin to a cross between a nurse and a doula.
The use of skilled birth attendants has coincided with dramatic improvements to maternal health outcomes in Bangladesh.
Over the past 20 years, the mortality rate for pregnant women has fallen by 72 percent, to 123 deaths per 100,000 births and babies by 69 percent to 20 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Many women do not have access to quality care, so I feel useful by helping them,” said Nargis, who in her five years as a birth attendant has overseen more than 400 deliveries.
“Almost no women die in childbirth here anymore,” she added.
“For me, that’s the most important thing.”


Besides helping with deliveries, birth attendants will screen pregnant women weeks ahead of their due date to refer high-risk pregnancies to hospitals further afield.
For women in Biswambharpur, the remote district that Mafia and Nargis call home, complicated cases will wind up in a district hospital struggling with inadequate resources.
“We never leave a patient without care, but they sometimes have to wait a long time for treatment,” said Abdullahel Maruf, the hospital’s chief doctor.
“Plus, we can’t change the geography. In an emergency, it takes time to get to us.”
Biswambharpur is lashed by monsoon rains for months each year that make travel difficult, and a lack of paved roads mean that many of its villages are inaccesible by the district’s only ambulance, even during the drier months.
Maruf’s hospital sees up to 500 patients each day and still has around eight women die in labor each year — fatalities he says are avoidable, given that his emergency department lacks an obstetrician and backup surgeon.
“We could easily reduce this figure if we had all the required staff,” he said.
Maruf said that mortality rates had nonetheless improved by an awareness campaign encouraging women to give birth at local health clinics rather than at home.
“This is our greatest victory,” he said.
Bangladesh spends only 0.8 percent of its GDP on public health, a figure that Maya Vandenent of the UN children’s agency said risked stalling the country’s improvements to maternal health.
“Huge progress has been made,” she told AFP. “But the movement is slowing down.”
Sayedur Rahman, a physician overseeing Bangladesh’s health ministry, freely concedes that more health funding is far from the top of the agenda of the government he serves.
The country is still reeling from the dramatic ouster of autocratic ex-premier Sheikh Hasina last August during a student-led national uprising.
Rahman is part of an interim administration tasked with steering democratic reforms ahead of fresh elections, and he laments that these priorities will leave others in the health sector unaddressed.
“We need resources to create a national ambulance network, recruit more anesthesiologists, open operating rooms,” Rahman told AFP.
“Our financial constraints will directly impact maternal and neonatal mortality rates.”