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.
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
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