Vietnam used army helicopters yesterday to evacuate thousands stranded by Tropical Storm Kammuri, which has killed at least 113 people, as forecasters warned of more bad weather ahead.
Disaster relief workers continued searching for 45 people still missing since heavy rains pounded the mountainous north for three days starting last Friday, swelling rivers and triggering deadly mudslides and flash floods.
Troops were rushing water, food and medicines to villagers, many from ethnic minorities, who have remained isolated by floods and blocked roads and rail lines in the mostly poor region near the Chinese border.
Some 2,700 troops and helicopters have been mobilized to evacuate more than 5,000 residents to safer areas in the worst-hit Lao Cai and Yen Bai provinces, the national flood and storm control committee said.
Meteorologists warned that more rain storms would hit within one or two days.
In Lao Cai — where 49 people have died in the worst storms to hit in decades — hopes of finding the 37 still missing were now fading, said Thao A Tua, a provincial emergency services official.
“In several areas, mud and rocks from the mountains have buried entire villages,” he said. “The search effort has been difficult because we don’t have equipment and the digging has to be done manually. We are trying our best, but we really think they have all died. Their bodies might be buried below the rubble, and they could even have been swept away, down the Red River.”
Across the north, more than 670 houses have been destroyed, the central government said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver