Posted 7-18-08

NewsRoom Shorts

NewsRoom Agency
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Gas in Remote Alaskan Village Tops $8.50 a Gallon

The price of gasoline in a remote Alaskan village has topped $8.50 a gallon, making it the most expensive in the nation.

Gas in Lime Village, Alaska, an isolated Denaina Athabascan Indian community, hit $8.55 a gallon Friday, reports said.

The high prices are severely curtailing movement in Alaska's interior.

Despite being a major oil producing state, Alaska has on average the highest gasoline prices in the nation.

Somalis At Dire Crossroads, Says UN

Some 2.6 million people in Somalia, or 35 percent of the population, are in need of food aid and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) expects this figure to rise to 3.5 million by December.

The FFP says millions in need of urgent aid as the effects of drought and successive poor harvests have been severely exacerbated by insecurity in the strife-torn nation which has not had a functioning government since 1991.

Somalia's problems have also been compounded by attacks on aid workers and threats to ships delivering food aid as well as price rises in basic commodities and the weakness of the Somali shilling.

Peter Goossens, WFP's Country Director for Somalia, says the country is at a "dire crossroads".

Mr. Goossens told a press conference in London that if sufficient food and other humanitarian assistance cannot be scaled up in the coming months, parts of the country could well be in the grips of disaster similar to the
1992-1993 famine, when hundreds of thousands of people perished.

He warned that deteriorating security was hindering land and sea deliveries of food.

As some 90 percent of the food aid distributed to Somalis arrives by sea, the WFP has appealed to countries to provide naval escorts to protect WFP food ships against piracy. France, Denmark and the Netherlands had done so over the last eight months but the agency has received no commitments for further escorts beyond June.

The humanitarian aid operation is also being hindered by a spate of killings or kidnappings of staff from UN agencies and non-governmental organizations.

The WFP says it has to double the amount of people it feeds by more than one million per month, to 2.4 million by December, while CARE International and the International Committee of the Red Cross are to assist the remaining 1.1 million.