‘I need to be home’: stranded Heathrow passengers separated from loved ones

GENEVA: The UN said Monday it and partners were seeking nearly $1 billion to provide life-saving aid this year for some 1.5 million Rohingya refugees and their hosts in Bangladesh.
The United Nations said that it and more than 100 partners were launching a 2025-26 Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya crisis, amid “dwindling financial resources and competing global crises.”
The appeal, it said in a statement, “seeks $934.5 million in its first year to reach some 1.48 million people including Rohingya refugees and host communities.”
Around a million members of the persecuted and mostly Muslim minority live in squalid relief camps in Bangladesh, most of whom arrived after fleeing the 2017 military crackdown in neighboring Myanmar.
“In its eighth year, the Rohingya humanitarian crisis remains largely out of the international spotlight, but needs remain urgent,” Monday’s statement said.
It stressed that “any funding shortfalls in critical areas, including reductions to food assistance, cooking fuel or basic shelter, will have dire consequences for this highly vulnerable population.”
It could, it added, “force many to resort to desperate measures, such as embarking on dangerous boat journeys to seek safety.”
The UN said that more than half of the refugee population in the camps are women and girls, “who face a higher risk of gender-based violence and exploitation.”
And it highlighted that a third of the refugees are aged between 10 and 24, warning that “without access to formal education, adequate skills building and self- reliance opportunities, their futures remain on hold.”
“Until the situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State is peaceful and conducive to returning safely and voluntarily, the international community must continue to fund life-saving assistance to refugees in the camps.”

LONDON: Britain’s Heathrow defended its decision to shut down operations at Europe’s busiest airport last Friday as the blame game intensified over an 18-hour closure which cost airlines tens of millions of pounds and stranded thousands of passengers.
As questions mounted over how such a critical part of Britain’s infrastructure could fail and whether all Heathrow’s four terminals needed to shut, both National Grid and Heathrow agreed that the failure of the transformer was an unprecedented event.
But the airport was forced to defend its closure after the boss of National Grid told the Financial Times that the electricity transmission network remained capable of providing power to the airport throughout the crisis.
Heathrow said the fire at a nearby substation late on Thursday interrupted its operations, forcing it to shut while it reconfigured systems and switched to power from an alternative substation.
“Hundreds of critical systems across the airport were required to be safely powered down and then safely and systematically rebooted,” a Heathrow spokesperson said.
“Given Heathrow’s size and operational complexity, safely restarting operations after a disruption of this magnitude was a significant challenge.”
John Pettigrew, the CEO of National Grid, said there were two other substations able to provide power to Heathrow, showing that the grid was resilient.
“Two substations were always available for the distribution network companies and Heathrow to take power,” he told the FT.
While airlines such as British Airways, the worse affected, add up the bill for the closure, the government and Heathrow have both commissioned reviews into what happened.
“It’s really important that we do learn the lessons from this, and that’s why I think those two reviews...are going to be really critical,” Transport Minister Heidi Alexander told Sky News on Monday.
Asked on LBC Radio about whether she had confidence in Heathrow’s CEO Thomas Woldbye, Alexander said she wanted to see the results of the reviews.