Typhoon Kalmaegi churned across Vietnam yesterday, killing five more people after its devastating passage through the Philippines where the death toll rose to 188.
Kalmaegi unleashed record rainfall and flooding in the central Philippines this week — sweeping away cars, trucks and shipping containers before lashing Vietnam.
“The roof of my house was just blown away,” said Nguyen Van Tam, a 42-year-old fisherman in Vietnam’s Gia Lai Province where the storm made landfall late on Thursday.
Photo: AFP
“We were all safe, [but] the typhoon was really terrible, so many trees fallen,” he said, adding that his boat had survived intact.
Vietnamese authorities were still assessing the damage yesterday, but the environment ministry reported five dead, and 57 houses collapsed in Gia Lai and neighboring Dak Lak.
Nearly 3,000 more had their roofs blown off or were damaged, it said, while 11 boats or ships sank.
Vo Thi Danh, 43, watched from higher ground as Kalmaegi ripped through Nhon Hai fishing village in Gia Lai, splitting boats into kindling and sweeping away the small seaside house where she lived with her family.
“The waves were so high, swallowing the whole house,” she said in tears as she surveyed the rubble. “The house totally collapsed, nothing left.”
It was one of seven homes clustered together in the fishing village that were reduced to chunks of concrete and twisted metal.
In the streets along Gia Lai’s Quy Nhon beach, journalists saw rescue workers and soldiers working with residents to clear uprooted trees, remove debris and collect sheet-metal roofs blown away in the night.
The state power company said 1.6 million clients lost electricity as the typhoon smashed the central coast, but service to one-third had been restored by yesterday morning.
The storm was next forecast to hit Thailand, which yesterday issued a warning for heavy rain and flooding starting in the northeast and spreading to the rest of the country.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
RSS