Latest news with #ODA
GMA Network
a day ago
- Business
- GMA Network
Nearly P1 trillion allotted for flood control projects from 2023-2025
The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) received around P980.25 billion budget for flood control projects from 2023 to 2025, according to data gathered by GMA Integrated News Research. This is equivalent to an average of P326.75 billion flood control budget for each year. In Joseph Morong's report on '24 Oras' on Tuesday, the DPWH said that it would submit next week to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the list of flood control projects to determine which were already finished and which are the 'ghost' projects However, state auditors in 2023 noted that the implementation of some foreign-assisted flood control projects were delayed. '...The DPWH disclosed that the Department was not able to efficiently implement 17 official development assistance (ODA) funded projects …as indicated by the reported year-end physical accomplishment with negative slippages ranging from 0.78% to 36.60%, increase in contact costs, and/or prolonged implementation period,' according to an audit report by the Commission on Audit. Among the delayed projects were the Pasig-Marikina River Channel Improvement Project, which seeks to deepen the Pasig River and Marikina River to mitigate overflowing. Also affected are the Metro Manila Flood Management Project, Cavite Industrial Area Flood Risk Management Project, and Cagayan de Oro Flood Risk Management Project. But the DPWH explained that the implementation of some projects was delayed due to budget constraints. 'We have been already cautioned by the lending institutions, actually, because napapansin daw nila that the appropriations we are putting into these projects are not adequate actually to sustain the momentum of the implementation,' said DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan. Furthermore, the DPWH stated that one of the challenges it is facing is the programs that did not undergo scrutiny for the government's National Expenditure Program. These affect the budget of existing projects causing their delays. 'Maraming dagdag, sabi ng President…To the detriment of the program of the President na hindi dumaan sa amin for vetting or preparation…Alam mo naman Congress has the power of the purse, dito na yung mga additional items,' said Bonoan. Under the national budget for 2025, Marcos vetoed the P16.72 billion budget for the DPWH's flood control projects. Marcos warned the Congress in his recent State of the Nation Address that he will vote against any budget allocations that are not part of the National Expenditure Program. —Vince Angelo Ferreras/LDF, GMA Integrated News
Time Out
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
This new Midtown skyscraper will let thrill-seeking New Yorkers free-fall 300 feet
If you're in New York City, you probably have a pretty strong (and likely complicated) relationship with adrenaline. But if you need an even bigger rush than trying to cross Eighth Avenue at rush hour, you're in luck, because the Manhattan skyline is about to get a whole lot wilder. In 2026, adrenaline junkies will get to experience the city from a heart-stopping new perspective: Plummeting 300 feet in transparent tubes. That's courtesy of the 52-story, 1,067-foot-tall skyscraper called The Torch, at 740 Eighth Avenue, which just resumed construction a year after halting. Forget fancy observation decks or high-end, high-rise restaurants. The Torch wants to offer both panoramic views and the kind of free fall that usually ends with you jerking awake. A combination of observation deck and theme park ride, the attraction will be housed inside a spire lit to resemble a literal torch, taking riders to the top before dropping them straight down at speeds approaching 60 mph. The experience will reportedly also include enveloping lighting and sound effects; in case you Need a side of immersive theater with your terror. But even those who don't want to look down as the streets of NYC hurtle ever closer can enjoy the top of The Torch. There will also be a more traditional observation deck and a glass-bottomed elevator that promises to take visitors up all 1,000 or so feet in under 60 seconds. The project was designed by studios ODA and SLCE, with the plans revealed in a Rizzoli book on ODA published in 2024. Developer Extell, responsible for One57 on the so-called Billionaire's Row, is also behind this one. The rest of The Torch will include 825 hotel rooms, retail spaces, and a rooftop restaurant. Construction on the project is already underway, with some estimates pegging the building's opening sometime in 2026. When it's complete, The Torch will dominate the Theatre District's skyline, offering up a level of drama that will rival anything that happens on a Broadway stage. Let's just hope the wind carries the screams over the river and into New Jersey.
The Diplomat
7 days ago
- Business
- The Diplomat
US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics
The dismantling of USAID is the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China's Belt and Road Initiative. The GSEZ Mineral Port in Gabon, one of the projects supported by public-private partnership via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. As President Donald Trump takes a chainsaw to U.S. foreign aid programs, it would be easy to attribute such extreme measures to MAGA isolationism or DOGE zealotry. While anti-globalist and anti-government ideologies certainly played a role, the shift away from traditional foreign aid is not limited to the U.S. and does not represent a full-scale abandonment of development finance. Indeed, Trump's moves represent the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The retreat from traditional foreign assistance cuts across the Western world. By 2026, estimates hold that foreign aid budgets will have fallen by over one-quarter in Canada and Germany and by close to 40 percent in Britain, compared with 2023 levels. Overall, G-7 countries, which account for 75 percent of foreign assistance, spent 28 percent less in 2025 than in 2024. Yet even as Trump's Big Beautiful Bill cut foreign aid, it also provided new funding – a $3 billion revolving fund – for the International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC), which was created by the 2017 BUILD Act. The IDFC is up for renewal this year, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee has already voted in support of authorizing its operations for another seven years with a lending cap of $120 billion, double the initial level. The IDFC was intended as an answer to China's BRI, which represented an alternative to traditional Western approaches to aid. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – a club of Western donor countries – defines Official Development Assistance (ODA) as concessional finance directed toward developmental projects in low- and middle-income countries. The DAC encourages transparency and discourages the tying of aid to purchases of goods and services from the donor country. Most DAC countries emphasize 'soft' aid, focused on health, education, and humanitarian assistance. ODA typically draws upon budgeted funds that must be renewed annually. Very little of Chinese development finance meets these criteria. Instead, China's development finance is commercial in orientation. Most loans are initiated by policy banks – the China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank – that raise funds by issuing bonds to investors. Loans carry near-market interest rates and must be repaid in full. Much of Chinese development finance has been channeled through the BRI, which focuses on infrastructure construction. Loans through these policy banks and others have amounted to well over a trillion dollars over the past decade. Western countries have followed China's lead both in commercializing development finance and in driving more resources toward infrastructure development. The latter move has transpired under the guise of various initiatives: the BUILD Act (U.S.), Build Back Better World (U.S.), the Global Gateway initiative (European Union), the Blue Dot Network (U.S., Australia, Japan), the Quality Infrastructure Investment Initiative (Japan), and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (G-7). The competitive ambitions of the West have been limited by a paucity of available public funds, which makes it difficult to match the scale of China's BRI. This problem gave rise to efforts to leverage public money to mobilize private capital for development purposes through blended finance initiatives. At the multilateral level, a group of multilateral development banks issued a planning document titled 'From Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance' in 2015. This paper outlined a vision for mobilizing private financial resources toward Global South infrastructure and other developmental needs. This was followed by the World Bank's 'Maximizing Finance for Development' initiative and the United Nation's 'Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance.' These projects and those discussed below constituted what Daniela Gabor characterized as a 'Wall Street Consensus.' Many types of infrastructure take the form of public (or semi-public) goods. Public goods, by their nature, are underproduced relative to their social utility because producers cannot exclude consumers from benefiting once the goods are produced. The Wall Street Consensus aims to make infrastructure projects 'bankable' or attractive to private investors by shifting the risk of unprofitability to the state. If successful, private money is pooled with public funding through blended financing models such as syndicated bond issues. In this 'development as derisking' model, private capital is 'escorted' into the process of financing infrastructure through the creation of new asset classes freed of investor risk. In 2018, the G-20 declared support for a Roadmap to Infrastructure as an Asset Class. Two types of risks must be minimized for private investors: regulatory risk and financial risk. Reducing regulatory risk includes lower environmental and safety standards, guaranteed grid access, legal protections against nationalization, and liability limits. Financial risk is managed through guaranteed toll revenues, preferential credit, loan guarantees, tax relief, or subsidies. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) or DAC donors help build state capacity in project identification and development, provide expertise in securitizing infrastructure assets for the market, and offer partial financing or loan guarantees. The necessity for subsidies and other forms of state support arises from the fact that more than half of infrastructure projects in emerging economies do not promise sufficient cash flow to attract private investors. Even projects with dedicated revenue streams often carry demand risks, meaning they turn unprofitable if demand for the service declines. Governments may be compelled to include contract provisions that promise to cover revenue shortfalls with public funds when demand falls below certain thresholds. Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, and Nicholas Jepson noted that what Gabor referred to as the 'derisking state' becomes both more dependent upon global finance and increasingly interventionist in shaping market outcomes. This contrasts with the Washington Consensus, which counseled state neutrality vis-à-vis the market, but also differs from the East Asian development model, where state intervention sought to shape the behavior of national capital rather than global capital. By relieving private investors of risk, states aim to amplify the capital that can be mobilized toward critical development needs beyond national savings or the resources of MDBs and bilateral donors. The trade-off is the acceptance of risk by the developing state, a danger highlighted when the COVID-19 pandemic and rising interest rates threatened the solvency of many highly indebted countries. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation fits this model. The BUILD Act described its purpose as to 'provide countries a robust alternative to state-directed investments by authoritarian governments and United States strategic competitors.' With a financing authority of $60 billion, the IDFC seeks to 'crowd-in' private capital with a flexible toolkit that includes nonconcessional loans, loan guarantees, export credits, political risk insurance, equity investments, and technical assistance. Largely due to IDFC activity, nonconcessional development finance flows jumped from 4 percent of overall U.S. aid spending in 2020 to 36 percent in 2021. Among the major projects funded by the IDFC are investments related to the Lobito Corridor in Southern Africa, which aims to create transportation links allowing Western firms to access critical minerals that are presently monopolized by China. Ironically, this growing Western emphasis on nonconcessional, commercialized development finance with an emphasis on infrastructure development comes at a time when China has scaled back the BRI (largely due to growing evidence that many recipient countries have exceeded their borrowing capacities) and begun allocating more resources to 'soft' aid through the Global Development Initiative. An obvious drawback of the blended finance model is that it diverts attention and resources from traditional concessional aid and the investment in health, education, and disaster assistance that remain essential. But even on its own terms, the effectiveness of the Wall Street Consensus remains in doubt. A 2020 report by the Center for Global Development concluded that the overall flow of blended finance had been disappointing and that the great bulk of MDB-mobilized private financing was directed to middle-income rather than low-income countries. A 2019 study by ODI Global reached similar conclusions. In low-income countries, on average, each $1 in public development financing mobilized only $0.37 in private finance. Blended finance was constrained by the low risk tolerance of both public and private actors in the face of environments hampered by poor governance and few profitable investment opportunities. Since most blended finance flowed to middle-income countries and to 'hard' sectors, such as transport and energy, as opposed to social sectors, the report suggested that the increased priority given such investments came at the expense of programs that more directly targeted poverty in low-income countries. Indeed, the proposed doubling in the funding cap for the IDFC cannot substitute for the human costs that follow from the cuts to U.S. Official Development Assistance, which one study suggests will lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years. Traditional aid may have drawbacks, whether evaluated as a tool of U.S. foreign policy or in terms of development effectiveness, but abandoning it in favor of the privatization of development finance is neither wise nor humane.
UPI
18-07-2025
- Politics
- UPI
Unification Church scandal expands with raids at more than 10 locations
Han Hak-ja attends a Blessing Ceremony in Gapyeong, South Korea, in 2020. At the center of growing focus today is Jung Wonju, Executive Secretary to Hak-ja Han. Though Han remains the official spiritual leader, Jung is widely regarded as the church's de facto second-in-command and is believed to have overseen high-level political outreach and internal consolidation of power. File Photo by Keizo Mori/UPI | License Photo July 18 (UPI) -- South Korean prosecutors on Thursday executed coordinated raids on more than 10 locations connected to the Unification Church, including its Seoul headquarters in Cheongpa-dong, the Cheonjeonggung Palace in Cheongpyeong, a foundation office in Mapo, and the private residence of former church executive Yoon Young-ho. The large-scale operation marks a significant escalation in a widening political influence scandal involving the church and top government figures. During the raid at Cheonjeonggung, Lee Cheong-woo -- the church's director of central administration and its third-ranking official -- allegedly mobilized approximately 600 young members to physically obstruct investigators. According to JTBC, Lee issued verbal threats and threatened to ram his vehicle into media reporters in an attempt to intimidate and disrupt coverage of the raid. JTBC also reported that investigators discovered large bundles of cash and high-end luxury items inside a hidden safe, possibly intended for use in lobbying operations. Prosecutors allege that the Unification Church sought to secure political favors in exchange for luxury goods and financial support, including lobbying for public development assistance (ODA) projects along Cambodia's Mekong River and South Korea's bid to host the United Nations' Fifth Secretariat Office. The church has denied all allegations, characterizing the investigation as a case of "individual misconduct" by Young-ho Yoon. However, the hierarchical nature of the Unification Church makes it unlikely that Yoon acted alone. Many observers expect the seized materials to provide more definitive evidence implicating higher-ranking officials. At the center of growing scrutiny is Jung Wonju, Executive Secretary to Chairwoman Hak-ja Han and Vice President of Cheon Mu Won, the Unification Church's highest administrative body. Though Han remains the official spiritual leader, Jung is widely regarded as the church's de facto second-in-command and is believed to have overseen high-level political outreach and internal consolidation of power. Jung began her rise within the organization as Han's personal hairdresser but gradually leveraged her close relationship with the chairwoman to sideline rival figures and accumulate influence behind the scenes. In recent years, she is believed to have effectively replaced senior leadership, quietly assuming control over key decision-making processes. She left South Korea for the United States in early June -- more than a month before the July 18 raids -- reportedly citing her husband's illness. Despite being subject to a de facto travel restriction, she has not returned since. Her prolonged absence is widely viewed as compelling circumstantial evidence of her central role in the alleged scheme. Further intensifying public scrutiny, Jung's family ties have raised concerns over media influence and nepotism. Her husband's younger brother, Tom McDevitt, currently serves as chairman of The Washington Times, a U.S.-based newspaper with long-standing ties to the Unification Church. Additionally, Jung's younger brother, Hee-taek Jung, is CEO of Segye Ilbo, a major South Korean daily also affiliated with the church. Critics argue that these familial connections have enabled Jung to exert behind-the-scenes influence over both domestic and international media. Just a day before the raids, The Washington Times published a glowing profile of Chairwoman Hak-ja Han, prompting allegations that the outlet -- though publicly operating as an independent journalistic institution -- was being privately leveraged to defend and legitimize church leadership amid mounting legal pressure. As the investigation widens, calls are mounting for Jung Wonju to return to South Korea and face legal proceedings. Many within the broader religious community argue that assuming responsibility is not only a legal duty but a spiritual obligation. The special prosecutor's office has indicated that additional indictments and arrests are likely as evidence is reviewed. International cooperation may also be sought if Jung continues to remain overseas.
The National
15-07-2025
- Business
- The National
UK draining aid budget with asylum seeker hotel policy
Some £1.8 billion of the projected £8.9 billion budget for overseas assistance could be spent on supporting refugees and asylum seekers in Britain in 2027-28, a report by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) says. THE UK's shrinking aid budget is being drained by the Government's prolonged use of asylum hotels — diverting life-saving global development funds while failing to provide refugees with humane and timely support, a watchdog has warned. Despite the June spending review suggesting a reduction in such costs over the next three years, the asylum seeker system is still on course to absorb a 'significant portion' of total aid funding, leaving as little as 0.24% of gross national income for global development, according to the watchdog. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced plans to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this Parliament after the National Audit Office said accommodation costs could hit £15.3 billion over a 10-year period. READ MORE: Heckling of Nigel Farage will only help reinforce Reform UK's mantra But progress in bringing down aid spending on so-called in-donor refugee costs remains 'slow', the ICAI said. International OECD rules allow governments to use their aid budgets to cover some of the costs of helping people claiming asylum in the first year of entering a country, such as housing and food. According to ICAI calculations, asylum costs are expected to take up £2.2 billion of total UK official development assistance (ODA) funding for 2026-27, £1.8 billion the following year and £1.5 billion by 2028-29. The UK Government slashed Britain's aid budget earlier this year from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in order to pay for increased defence spending. Total ODA spending is now expected to fall from £10 billion in 2026-27 to £8.9 billion the following year before increasing slightly to £9.4 billion in 2028-29. This means a fifth of the total aid spend in 2027-28 is expected to go towards asylum costs, before dipping to around a sixth in 2028-29. ICAI commissioner Harold Freeman, who led the new report, acknowledged the Government had already taken some steps to address 'flaws in the system' but said further changes would be likely to be needed. READ MORE: Russell Findlay under fire for £150k taxpayer cash given to ex-spin doctor's firms He said: 'The UK's development programme is at a turning point, with budget reductions coming against a backdrop of increasing global conflicts, climate threats and rising humanitarian needs. 'At the same time, UK asylum costs are likely to continue to absorb a significant proportion of our aid funding. 'The Government has already taken steps to address some of the flaws in the system for managing aid identified by past ICAI work. 'But further changes will likely be needed to maximise the impact and value for money of the remaining development budget.' The UK Government has been contacted for comment. Last year, the watchdog raised 'value for money' concerns after some 28% – or £4.3 billion – of all UK aid in 2023 was spent on hosting refugees and asylum seekers in Britain under the previous Conservative government. The amount of ODA spending on in-house refugee costs has risen dramatically since 2020, in part due to visa schemes for Afghan and Ukrainian people but largely linked to lengthy stays in so-called asylum hotels, the ICAI said. In response to its latest report, the Tories said the 'eye-watering cost' of housing asylum seekers was 'utterly indefensible, particularly when so many people are struggling to get by'. Shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam said: 'This broken system rewards delay and indecision, while the British taxpayer foots the bill. 'Those who have no right to stay here should not be languishing in hotels; they should be detained and deported within days – not years. 'We need a migration system that is firm, fair, and fast. 'Over the past 12 months, Keir Starmer has systematically dismantled every deterrent, while his joke of a migrant deal agreed with France last week will do nothing to stem the flow of migrants risking their lives to cross the Channel.' The One campaign, which aims to reduce poverty in Africa, said the report confirmed that UK aid had been 'stretched to breaking point'. Executive director Adrian Lovett said: 'While it's right that refugees are housed in safe accommodation, paying for this from the diminished international aid budget means there will be even less support for the world's most vulnerable people at a time of growing global need.' Lovett added: 'The UK is at its best when it delivers a strong and growing aid budget, but also uses its political and diplomatic muscle to help create the conditions for sustainable solutions. 'We look to ministers to be creative and ambitious on both fronts in the months and years ahead.'
