Some gas stations latest to run out of fuel
A B.C. Interior fuel shortage first reported in Kamloops and then Kelowna is spreading to Vernon.
Hand-written signs were taped up on the gas pumps at the Middleton Way 7-Eleven Petro-Can station on Thursday.
The signs read: "Out of gas, sorry for any inconvenience."
This follows stations in Kelowna running out of fuel earlier this week.
Signs posted at some stations pointed to ethanol delivery problems from the Kamloops bulk fuel terminal, which is operated by Suncor.
The issue was expected to be rectified within a few days.
Problems first started showing up around the middle of the month, when some Kamloops stations were dry.
This followed a Suncor refinery shutdown in Edmonton for maintenance.
This also impacted stations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and.
Pakistan blackouts choke economy as China power plants go unpaid
ISLAMABAD -- Electricity outages are disrupting life and business in Pakistan as the cash-strapped government struggles to compensate Chinese power suppliers, complicating efforts to resuscitate the ailing economy.
Waheed Ahmed, a taxi driver in Rawalpindi, complained that the power goes out for 8 hours a day, making an ongoing heat wave unbearable. Mumtaz Baloch, a government employee living in a rural area of the southwestern province of Balochistan, said the situation there is even worse, with just six hours of electricity per day.
"We are used to living without government-supplied electricity as our forefathers did in ancient times," he said.
The power crunch has echoes of the crisis in another South Asian country, Sri Lanka, which has also suffered hourslong blackouts, contributing to social unrest. Pakistan's government has attempted to ease the shortages by shifting back to a five-day workweek -- reversing a change to a six-day week that was intended to increase productivity. It is also considering shutting down commercial markets at 8 p.m. to conserve energy.
Meanwhile, households that can afford it buy uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, devices that store electricity to use during outages. Prices have soared, however, with a UPS and accompanying battery costing around $300 -- beyond the range of most working-class families.
Sri Lanka has less than a day’s worth of fuel left, the energy minister says, with public transport grinding to a halt as the country’s economic crisis deepens.
Power and energy minister Kanchana Wijesekera on Sunday said petrol reserves were about 4,000 tonnes, just below one day’s worth of consumption, as queues snaked through the main city of Colombo for kilometres.
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA - Cash-strapped Sri Lanka on Sunday extended school closures for one week because there isn't enough fuel for teachers and parents to get children to classrooms, and the energy minister appealed to the country's expatriates to send money home through banks to finance new oil purchases.
A huge foreign debt has left the Indian Ocean island with n
