At least 10 people died and dozens were injured as Typhoon Halong slammed into Japan over the weekend, reports said yesterday, with heavy rain still lashing the country’s north.
The storm moved over the East China Sea — which Tokyo calls the Sea of Japan — yesterday, after making landfall on the country’s largest and most populous island, Honshu, at the weekend, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
Halong’s outer bands continued to lash northern Japan with heavy rain as officials warned of landslides, floods and possible tornadoes in the area.
Photo: EPA
The agency downgraded the typhoon to a tropical storm at 9am yesterday as it headed toward Russia’s far eastern coast.
Along with heavy rain last week, Halong killed two people and injured 86 across the country, public broadcaster NHK reported, but the Nikkei Shimbun said as many as 10 deaths were linked to the storm.
Among the victims was an Iranian man whose body was found in Ibaraki, northeast of Tokyo, while two women died in the country’s west, the Nikkei said.
The National Police Agency confirmed that the storm and last week’s rain killed at least two people and left two others missing.
The Japanese Coast Guard yesterday resumed searching for a man who went missing, apparently while surfing during the storm off Wakayama.
In Osaka, Halong forced the cancelation of a major fireworks event on Saturday after the storm washed away 21 launching boats, about half of them carrying unused pyrotechnics, a spokesman for the show said.
The Osaka City Disaster Prevention Bureau said four workers also drifted away on the boats, but were later confirmed to be safe.
On Sunday, violent winds destroyed more than 460 buildings in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, injuring at least two, NHK said. Weather agency officials are investigating if those winds were generated by a tornado.
Airline services largely returned to normal yesterday, with only a handful of flights canceled after more than 700 were called off during the weekend.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS