The death toll has risen to at least 18, with more than 70 missing, after floods and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Kaemi hit several areas of southern and central China, the government said yesterday.
Most of the casualties were in Jiangxi, where floods and landslides had killed 16 people and left 64 missing as of yesterday, according to the provincial flood control headquarters.
At least six people died and 38 were missing after a mountain torrent washed away a military barracks in a mountainous area of Jiangxi on Wednesday, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
PHOTO: AP
Three more bodies were recovered yesterday in Jiangxi's Shangyou County, the worst-hit area of the province, adding to the seven deaths reported there on Wednesday.
Floods and landslides destroyed at least 9,200 homes and affected about 329,000 people in the province, the agency said.
Five more people were missing after they were buried in a landslide in Chenzhou City, in the neighboring province of Hunan.
A teacher and a worker were also washed away by a flood in Hunan on Wednesday, the agency said.
An earlier report by the Ministry of Civil Affairs said two people died in Guangdong.
Officials evacuated more than 1 million people in Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hunan and the southeastern coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang before and during the storms brought by Kaemi, reports said.
The storms began in Fujian on Tuesday as Kaemi hit land after moving across Taiwan.
Fujian officials evacuated more than 640,000 people from the sea or vulnerable coastal and inland areas.
About 100,000 people were evacuated in Hunan, just one week after Tropical Storm Bilis killed at least 356 people, left 89 missing and forced the evacuation of 800,000 in the province.
More heavy rain is expected in Hunan for at least two days and the impact of the storm will be felt until tomorrow, the agency quoted Li Zuxian, head of the provincial meteorological observatory, as saying.
Li urged close monitoring of swollen reservoirs and rivers over the next few days.
The provincial government has assembled 10,000 soldiers and 66 boats for rescue operations.
In Fujian, hundreds of workers and soldiers rushed to shore up a 200m levee that collapsed in Zhaoan County on Wednesday.
More than 5,000 sandbags and 60 tree trunks were used to plug the gap in the levee, as 20,000 people in six villages remained under threat of flood, reports said.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS