In brief: Flood battle needs cash

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan remains desperately short of the money it needs to cope with the huge floods that have devastated the country in the past two weeks, the United Nations warned Tuesday as the scale of the disaster continued to grow.

A government relief fund established by Pakistan’s prime minister has collected just $1.4 million, a government spokesman said. The United States has provided another $76 million in cash, and other countries and international agencies have pledged about $280 million more, which will be distributed through the government, the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations. The World Bank is to make $900 million available.

Those amounts, however, are nowhere near the billions that are needed to deal with a calamity that’s swept through more than one-fifth of Pakistan’s land mass, wiped out crops in the agricultural heartland, affected more than 20 million people and has many people worrying that the government itself could collapse.

Jerusalem – A man reportedly threatened Tuesday night to kill himself and several hostages at the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv before security personnel overpowered and captured him.

Nadim Injaz, a resident of the West Bank town of Ramallah, allegedly threatened to burn down the embassy if he didn’t receive asylum abroad. He reportedly was injured during the incident.

Injaz staged a similar event in 2006, when he scaled the wall of the British Embassy in Tel Aviv and held off Israeli police with a plastic toy gun in a six-hour standoff. Israeli police said he’d been released from prison recently.

A statement from the Turkish Embassy charged that Injaz had climbed the first story of the mission in Tel Aviv and entered the building after smashing a window.

Seoul, South Korea – North Korea offered to hold a summit with South Korea in an apparent bid to secure economic aid, but Seoul rejected the idea citing increased tensions, a news report said today.

Seoul had told North Korea last year that it would give the North aid if Pyongyang agreed to a summit, but when the North recently asked if that offer stood it was told that circumstances had changed, according to the report in the mass-circulation Dong-a Ilbo newspaper, which cited unidentified South Korean government officials.

Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo denied there had been any past or current government-level dialogue between the Koreas over a summit.

There were reports in South Korean media earlier this year that the two Koreas held a series of secret meetings in 2009 to discuss a possible summit but were wide apart over conditions for such a meeting.