Tropical Storm Alex weakened slightly after it made landfall in Belize, but continued to produce gusting winds and heavy rain, the US National Hurricane Center said yesterday.
The storm was not an imminent threat to oil-siphoning efforts at BP’s blown-out Macondo well in the Gulf, the US Coast Guard said.
Forecasts projected that Alex would emerge in the southern Gulf of Mexico yesterday and make landfall again as a minimal hurricane later in the week between Brownsville, Texas, and Tuxpan de Rodriguez Cano, Mexico, sparing BP spill collection efforts.
Alex, the first named storm of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, had sustained winds of nearly 65km per hour and was located about 90km southwest of Chetumal, Mexico.
The storm was expected to slow down as it moved over Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula overnight, the Miami-based center said at 2am.
In Chetumal, the capital of the state of Quintana Roo across the border with Belize, streets emptied in anticipation of the heavy rains and strong winds expected yesterday.
On Saturday, Quintana Roo state authorities evacuated 200 people from fishing villages across the Chinchorro reef, near Belize and Xcalak, famous for its diving spots.
Some rain fell over Cancun, a major seaside resort that draws US and European visitors, but there was no threat to some 35,000 tourists in the area, civil protection authorities said.
Alex was moving west-northwest at 19kph but its speed was expected to decrease as it moved over land.
“Strengthening is forecast on Sunday night and Monday after Alex moves over the southern Gulf of Mexico,” the center said.
A tropical storm warning was in effect for the coast of Belize and the east coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula from Chetumal to Cancun. The hurricane center said the warning would likely be lifted late yesterday.
Tropical storm-force winds were still being felt off the east coast of Belize from near Belize City northeast to Ambergris Cay and Cayo Norte, Mexico, according to the center.
Alex was expected to bring 10 to 20cm of rain to the Yucatan Peninsula, southern Mexico, northern Guatemala, Honduras and Belize up to this morning. Isolated amounts of up to 38cm were possible over mountainous areas.
“These rains could cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides,” according to the center.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 and meteorologists predict this year will be very active. Hurricanes feed on warm water and the sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic are higher than usual this year.
In the Pacific, hurricanes Darby and Celia weakened to tropical storms as they continued to dissipate.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS