PHILIPPINES
Flooding forces evacuations
Authorities yesterday moved thousands of residents of the capital, Manila, out of their low-lying communities as heavy monsoon rain, compounded by a tropical storm, flooded the city and nearby provinces. The national disaster agency said 14,023 people, most of them from a flood-prone Manila suburb, had moved into evacuation centers. In some parts of the capital region, flood waters, in places waist-deep, cut off roads to light vehicles. “Some houses were flooded up to the roof,” Humerlito Dolor, governor of Oriental Mindoro province south of the capital, told DZMM radio station.
CHINA
Flood death toll rises to 56
Rescuers yesterday used bulldozers and rubber boats to move residents out of flooded neighborhoods in central China after torrential rains killed at least 56 people. In Zhengzhou government crews armed with industrial pumps finished draining water from a major traffic tunnel, a news report said. Yesterday, skies were mostly clear but parts of Zhengzhou and other cities including Xinxiang, Hebi and Anyang still were under water.
SOUTH KOREA
Olympic images cause furor
A major broadcaster yesterday apologized for using offensive images and captions to describe participating countries during the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony on Friday night. Munhwa Broadcasting Corp used images of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster for Ukraine, a riot for Haiti and a promotional bitcoin poster for El Salvador when each nation entered the stadium. The broadcaster issued an apology following the opening ceremony, saying “inappropriate images and captions were used to introduce some countries.” “We apologize to those countries including Ukraine and our viewers,” it said. In the captions, the network described the Marshall Islands as “a former nuclear test site for the United States” and Haiti as a country “with an unstable political situation due to the assassination of its president.” The images and captions triggered outrage online. “They used whatever popped up first on Google,” one person said online.
THE NETHERLANDS
Teen stuns Bezos on flight
The Dutch teenager who became the world’s youngest space traveler this week surprised Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the flight by telling him he had never ordered anything on Amazon.com. Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student, accompanied Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and 82-year-old female aviator Wally Funk — the oldest person to go to space — on a 10-minute trip beyond Earth’s atmosphere. “I told Jeff, like, I’ve actually never bought something from Amazon, and he was like: ‘Oh, wow, it’s a long time ago I heard someone say that,’” Daemen said on Friday.
UNITED STATES
Condo collapse search over
Miami-Dade County Fire Rescue on Friday declared an end to its search for human remains in the rubble of a Florida condominium tower that collapsed on June 24, killing at least 97 people. Authorities said one victim was still believed to be unaccounted for. The Miami-Dade Police Department would continue to sift through what is left of the debris for additional remains and personal effects, officials said in a statement. The fire department’s round-the-clock operation at the beachfront site of the Champlain Towers South condo, in the Miami suburb of Surfside, was demobilized four weeks and a day after the 12-story structure gave way at about 1:30am.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
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