Soldiers in northeastern India cleared a path yesterday to a hydroelectric project where 17 people were confirmed killed by landslides in a powerful Himalayan earthquake, bringing the overall toll in the disaster to 92.
The magnitude 6.9 quake on Sunday evening claimed lives in northeastern India, Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. Rescue efforts have been hampered by heavy rain and mudslides that blocked the roads leading to villages in the remote, mountainous region.
Several of those slides hit the area around the hydroelectric plant being built along the Teesta, a glacier-fed river in the Himalayas in Sikkim, India.
The deaths from the quake were spread across a wide swath of the Himalayan region, with officials reporting 60 dead in Sikkim, 12 in West Bengal, six in Bihar, six in Nepal, seven in Tibet and one in Bhutan. The toll was expected to rise as rescue workers gained access to remote villages.
Troops have been airlifting rescuers and dropping food and supplies to the cutoff areas, but word on casualties and damage has been slow to come by.
Nearly 60 tourists, stranded in the popular mountain resort of Lachung, clambered onto army helicopters yesterday and were ferried to the nearest town of Mangan.
“We’ve been waiting to be rescued,” Kiran Palany, a Mumbai businessman, said from Mangan. “It’s been a harrowing three days.”
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
‘DOWNSIZE’: The Trump administration has initiated sweeping cuts to US government-funded media outlets in a move critics said could undermine the US’ global influence US President Donald Trump’s administration on Saturday began making deep cuts to Voice of America (VOA) and other government-run, pro-democracy programming, with the organization’s director saying all VOA employees have been put on leave. On Friday night, shortly after the US Congress passed its latest funding bill, Trump directed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by law. That included the US Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. On Saturday morning, Kari Lake, a former Arizona gubernatorial and US
RSS