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 Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida confirmed close cooperation in regional affairs with the new U.S. ambassador, including on North Korea and China and on global de-nuclearisation, a government spokesperson said on Friday. Chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the Japanese prime minister and the former chief of staff to U.S. President Barack Obama had also confirmed close cooperation in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. Asked about Japan's current strict border control restrictions rolled out following the Omicron variant's emergence, Matsuno said the government will take appropriate action based on domestic and overseas developments.

The government said the measure will be in place until the end of February. (Reuters)

A lack of flights and the search for a new U.S. reception center are among the hurdles facing the White House as it races to speed up the evacuation of at-risk Afghans from their homeland, according to a senior U.S. official and others familiar with the new plan.

Other obstacles include difficulties in obtaining passports and an affordable housing shortage in the United States, they said.

The plan's goal "is just to make this more enduring and less of an emergency operation," the senior U.S. official said in describing the revamp, requesting anonymity to discuss internal operations.

The Biden administration has been under pressure to speed up Operation Allies Welcome from lawmakers, veterans groups and others angry that tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and others at risk of Taliban retaliation were left behind when the last U.S. troops departed in August after 20 years of war.

Human rights organizations and the United Nations say the Taliban has stepped up detentions, abductions and killings. Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Sayed Khosti has rejected the accusation of reprisal killings, saying no evidence had been presented. read more

"People left behind are getting more and more desperate and we're going to start seeing more of the consequences of that, whether mass movement of refugees or meeting grim fates in Afghanistan," said a second senior U.S. official.

Advocacy groups say Washington should ensure the new plan will not suffer the types of setbacks that have hampered Afghan arrivals.

"We want to see enough resources applied to these issues so that even if one area fails or falters for a moment, there are options to make sure the pipeline isn't cut off," said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and president of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of advocacy groups.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday ordered that up to $1.2 billion be made available for the effort, the largest operation of its kind since the Vietnam era. About 80,000 Afghans have been resettled since August.

The new plan calls for shifting the processing of Afghan evacuees for admission to the United States from reception centers on U.S. military bases that are being closed to a base in the Qatari capital of Doha.

FLIGHTS ARE 'MAIN CHALLENGE'

But two U.S.-chartered Qatar Airways flights a week from Kabul to Qatar's al Udeid military base are needed, with the goal of adding more flights, the U.S. official said.

The flights are the "main challenge," said the official.

Differences between Qatar and the Taliban triggered a suspension of regular charters before Christmas.

"We're hoping we can get to regular order," the U.S. official said.

The Qatar Embassy and foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Qatar has told Washington it intends to close the reception center in September ahead of the World Cup, the U.S. official confirmed. The official said the U.S. was looking for alternatives, including reopening the air base center after the World Cup.

Once Afghan evacuees are processed for admission, they will be flown to the U.S. and placed with relatives or friends, provided housing by resettlement agencies or sent to a the planned reception center to help them resettle.

The Biden administration has housed tens of thousands of such evacuees on bases in the United States while their admission and resettlement arrangements were finalized.

The Pentagon has been closing those reception centers, with the last two expected to shutter this month, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said, after the roughly 6,500 people there have been processed.

One of those two centers will remain open until the administration finds a civilian site, but a location has not been selected yet, the senior U.S. official and a congressional source said.

The State Department plans to process Afghans for refugee status within 30 days beginning in March, two U.S. officials said. That is far faster than typical refugee processing, which can take years.

To be sure, that creates additional challenges that the second senior U.S. official said would be difficult to surmount.

Speeding up the operation, the second senior official said, will require an agreement with the Taliban to prioritize passports for evacuees or a deal with Qatar to allow travel without them, more U.S. officials in Doha to process evacuees, and a "higher tolerance of risk to speed up vetting."

Afghans entering the United States through the refugee resettlement program will be able to proceed directly to their destinations on U.N.-funded flights.

The department also will complete the processing in Doha of tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and have applied for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs), according to the official and two congressional aides.

The goal is to process and fly to the United States 1,000 refugees and 1,000 SIV recipients a month, the official said. (Reuters)

The United Nations has about $135 million in the bank in Afghanistan but is unable to use it because the Taliban-run central bank cannot convert it to the afghani currency, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

Abdallah al Dardari, head of the U.N. Development Programme in Afghanistan, said the United Nations had taken the U.S. dollars into the country and deposited it with the Afghanistan International Bank "with a clear promise from the central bank that fresh cash will be automatically converted to afghanis."

"This did not happen," he told the ACAMS Global Sanctions Space Summit, adding that UNDP itself has "$30 million stuck at AIB that I cannot convert to afghanis and without afghanis as you can imagine, we cannot implement all our programs."

The Taliban, who seized power in August, banned the use of foreign currency in a country where U.S. dollars were common.

The Islamist group has long been under international sanctions, which the United Nations and aid groups say are now hindering humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, where more than half the country's 39 million people suffer extreme hunger and the economy, education and social services face collapse.

Billions of dollars in Afghan central bank reserves and foreign development aid have been frozen to prevent it from falling into Taliban hands. International banks are wary of breaching sanctions, leaving the United Nations and aid groups struggling to get enough money into the country.

Liquidity is also a problem. Al Dardari told Reuters in November that while there was about $4 billion worth of afghanis in the economy, only about $500 million worth was in circulation.

The United Nations and the World Bank are discussing a possible swap facility, aid groups and U.N. officials have said.

Al Dardari said on Thursday that this would allow cash for humanitarian operations to be paid into a mechanism abroad and then afghanis could be collected "from major traders and mobile companies from inside Afghanistan."

He also said lessons could be learned from a program in Myanmar, where electronic payment systems bypassed the central bank. Myanmar's military have been hit with a raft of sanctions by the United States and others since a coup a year ago. (Reuters)

Pacific island nations that are some of the last places in the world to be hit by the coronavirus pandemic are recording a growing number of COVID-19 cases, prompting a rush to provide vaccines, medical teams and food aid.

Concern about the detection of the coronavirus in tsunami-hit Tonga, where one new case was recorded on Friday, has been heightened by thousands of infections sweeping neighbouring Pacific islands.

In the Solomon Islands, where riots, not connected to the pandemic, saw buildings in the capital, Honiara, burn in November, an outbreak of the Delta strain with 2,357 cases has overwhelmed the health system, aid agencies say.

Australia has sent four defence flights to the Solomon Islands over the past two weeks with a medical team, vaccines, and emergency food for hospital patients and tens of thousands of households.

Katie Greenwood, head of delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross Pacific, said cases had taken off rapidly in the Solomon Islands, where just 11% of the population was fully vaccinated.

"People are scared and its affecting everyone," she said.

"Fragile health systems get overwhelmed very quickly."

The Solomon Islands government has reported 21 deaths from COVID, and imposed restrictions on movements.

Solomon Islands National University professor Transform Aqorau said Honiara has been shut off, causing a scarcity of fresh food, and he had been eating from one plant in his garden.

"They have blocked Honiara in, vendors from outside can't come in," he told Reuters by phone.

He credited essential workers for keeping the power and water running, despite increasing numbers of staff testing positive and needing to isolate.

The rush for vaccination had also caused crowding with "a high level of lack of obedience to social distancing", he said.

Vaccination sites closed from Wednesday to prevent the spread of the virus to health workers and the public, the health ministry said in a statement, adding it would "re-strategise" distribution.

An Australian medical team has also been sent to Kiribati, which has 913 cases after allowing a flight with returning nationals to land in January, its first outbreak since lifting border restrictions.

Palau, where 99% of the population of 18,000 is vaccinated, recorded 2,115 COVID-19 cases in a month.

Tonga recorded its first community transition of COVID-19 on Tuesday, after two workers at a cargo wharf were infected. There are now five cases.

An influx of tsunami aid brought by foreign navy ships has been delivered without contact with Tongan people, and pallets are quarantined for 72 hours.

Greenwood said Pacific islands had worked hard for two years to keep COVID out but new strains were more virulent and harder to detect. "There may be a small chink in the armour that allows COVID to get in," she said. (Reuters)