Three people were missing in Vietnam as tropical storm Conson hit the country, officials said yesterday, after leaving 68 dead in the Philippines when it roared in as a typhoon.
A woman went missing in the north of Vietnam and two fishermen disappeared in waters off the impoverished central provinces, an official in Hanoi from the national committee to fight storms and flooding told reporters.
Conson swept onto the shores of Vietnam late on Saturday and was downgraded to a tropical depression, the official said.
“It continues to cause rainfall in parts of northern and central regions. We have not yet been able to calculate the amount of damage,” he said, but added the storm “has destroyed basic infrastructure, especially water works.”
Thousands of Vietnamese soldiers have been mobilized to help people living in areas affected by Conson and about 30,000 people were evacuated before the storm blew in.
Conson slammed into the Philippines on Tuesday last week, directly hitting the capital Manila as it cut westward into the South China Sea with a ferocity that caught weather forecasters by surprise.
Rescuers retrieved three more bodies from the sea yesterday, raising the death toll to 68 in the Philippines, but more bad weather was hampering search operations.
“Three more bodies were recovered from a sunken fishing vessel,” Benito Ramos, chief of the Office of Civil Defense in Manila, said on DZBB radio. “The death toll is now 68.”
He said rescuers, including volunteers and troops, continued to scour coastal areas in the country’s southeastern seaboard yesterday, where the majority of the 84 still missing were reported.
However, he said fresh rains brought on by a new weather disturbance east of the main island of Luzon were hampering search and rescue operations.
State weather forecasters said the rains were unlikely to develop into a full-blown storm.
The Philippines is in the so-called typhoon belt of the Pacific. Up to 20 typhoons sweep through the country each year, killing hundreds of people.
After slamming into the Philippines, Typhoon Conson, the first of the season, brushed past the southern Chinese island of Hainan and barreled its way into Vietnam on Saturday.
It killed at least two people, tore down trees and ripped up electricity pylons when it hit Hainan on Friday evening, local officials said. Authorities on the popular tourist island evacuated about 40,000 people from the most vulnerable areas before the storm headed inland.
Two men, a security guard and a motorcyclist, died after being struck by advertising hoardings unhinged by strong winds, an official from the local typhoon warning center said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema