The Philippine health secretary said yesterday that firecracker injuries dropped considerably during New Year celebrations, thanks to a scare campaign that included bloody images of revelry gone wrong.
The number of Filipinos injured by firecrackers and celebratory gunfire from Dec. 21 to Jan. 1 dropped by nearly half to 439 compared with the previous year, and there were no immediate reports of deaths, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said yesterday.
It was the lowest number of injures in eight years, he said.
"Filipinos chose to be safer this year," Duque said at a news conference, which he traditionally holds on Jan. 1 to announce the gory details of firecracker blast injuries and deaths.
"The effective strategy was showing the public the incontrovertible horror of losing their limbs and possibly their lives," he said.
Last week, Duque showed the media a father and son who lost their arms to a powerful firecracker blast in 2006 in Manila. He also showed a long surgical saw, pliers and a syringe with a 12.7cm needle -- the tools used to amputate the limbs of firecracker blast victims.
Local TV networks repeatedly showed gory scenes from last year's New Year's eve celebrations, including blood-splattered victims yelling in pain in hospital emergency rooms as doctors attended to their wounds.
Organized fireworks displays in public parks and near shopping centers and the hard economic times also helped discourage many Filipinos from setting off firecrackers in their neighborhoods, officials said.
Despite the government campaign, Manila and other cities resembled war zones late on Monday as the New Year approached. Powerful firecracker blasts could be heard booming everywhere, and neighborhoods and commercial districts were shrouded in dark-gray smoke. Ambulance sirens later wailed as the wounded were brought to hospitals.
However, the explosions were over in less than an hour -- markedly shorter than in years past -- and a drizzle later helped clear the smoke from Manila.
Duque said about 30 percent of those injured by firecrackers were children under 10 years old.
He said he would ask Congress to permanently ban firecrackers in neighborhoods, but acknowledged that it would be difficult to stop the ingrained tradition, partly because thousands of poor Filipinos depend on the legal and underground firecracker industry for a living.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS