Tropical Storm Fay roared toward Cuba yesterday after lashing Haiti and the Dominican Republic with torrential rains and floods that killed at least four people.
Forecasters said Fay was expected to strengthen yesterday and could be hurricane strength when it passes over Cuba and zeros in on Florida, where officials declared a state of emergency on Saturday.
In Cuba, officials in the eastern province of Santiago advised farmers to move livestock to higher ground and were preparing to evacuate tourists from low-lying coastal areas, the newspaper Granma reported on its Web site.
PHOTO: EPA
The Cuban government said a hurricane watch was in effect for the island from the province of Matanzas east to Sancti Spiritus, and a tropical storm warning was in effect for Guantanamo Bay. Fay’s path was expected to take it near the southern coast of the island yesterday and over western Cuba last night or today.
The US National Hurricane Center in Miami said late on Saturday night that the storm was located about 280km southeast of Camaguey, Cuba. It was heading west at about 22kph, with maximum sustained winds of 75kph.
A man died on Saturday in Haiti while trying to cross a river in Leogane, south of Port-au-Prince, said Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste, head of Haiti’s civil protection agency.
Rice fields in the Artibonite Valley, Haiti’s most fertile region, were flooded, reports from Radio Ginen said. And Fay’s heavy winds destroyed banana crops in Arcahaie, north of the capital, although it is unclear how many acres were affected, Jean-Baptiste said.
Haiti has struggled to cope with a food crisis that sparked deadly riots in April.
In the Dominican Republic, a 34-year-old woman drowned when her family tried to cross a swollen river in a car, civil defense agency director Luis Luna Paulino said. The bodies of her missing 13-year-old niece and five-year-old nephew were found on Saturday afternoon, but her husband swam to safety.
A tropical storm warning has been issued for the Cayman Islands, and a tropical storm watch remains in effect for the Bahamas and Jamaica.
In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency. Fay “threatens the state of Florida with a major disaster,” he wrote in an executive order.
Residents and tourists in the Florida Keys prepared for the storm, which forecasters said could strengthen to a hurricane and begin battering the island chain today.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to