Powerful Typhoon Vongfong yesterday hit Japan, injuring at least 20 people as it pounded the southern Okinawan islands with ferocious winds and driving rain.
The monster storm was about 110km southeast of Naha City in Japan’s southernmost area of Okinawa at 8am GMT yesterday, according to the nation’s meteorological agency.
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center has downgraded the storm from a super typhoon, but officials said it remained “large and very strong” and warned of gusts, high waves, torrential rain and landslides.
Packing gusts of up to 234kph, the typhoon was moving north very slowly, at 15kph.
Vongfong is expected to reach near Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu by early tomorrow after brushing off Okinawa, and could make landfall, the meteorological agency said.
Okinawa has already been experiencing gusts and heavy rain, which caused a blackout in 33,000 households.
At least 20 people have been injured in the prefecture, including a man who lost a finger after it was caught in a door slammed shut by strong winds, a municipal official said.
Public broadcaster NHK said several more had been injured, including a nine-year-old girl who also caught a finger in the door.
Satellite images of Vongfong showed a perfectly formed eye in the middle of a gigantic swirling disc of cloud.
The typhoon came just a week after another strong tropical storm whipped through the country, leaving 11 people dead or missing in the nation prone to natural disasters.
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake yesterday shook northern Japan two weeks after a volcano in the central part of the archipelago erupted without warning, killing at least 55 hikers.
In August, rainfall in western Japan’s Hiroshima triggered landslides, killing more than 70 people.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of