THABEIKKYIN, Myanmar: Myanmar rescuers struggled Monday to help villagers hit by an earthquake that aid agencies said killed at least 13, injured dozens and caused a bridge and mine to collapse.
A series of powerful aftershocks rattled nerves after yesterday’s 6.8-magnitude quake, which sent terrified people running from homes and hotels in the country’s second-biggest city of Mandalay and surrounding villages. Authorities said they were providing help to victims, including those without shelter after more than one hundred homes were damaged, but that communication problems made it difficult to assess the scale of the destruction.
An AFP team in the town of Thabeikkyin saw significant damage in the area, which is near the epicenter of the earthquake and has been cut off from mobile phone contact.
Patients at the local hospital were being treated in tents outside amid fears buildings could be vulnerable to further tremors.
“We decided not to keep the people inside the hospital building as the quakes have been coming continuously,” said a local official, asking not to be named. He said three people from the area had died in the quake, including two children who drowned after the riverbank they were working on collapsed. It was unclear whether the deaths were included in official tallies.
Villagers in other settlements north of Mandalay told AFP earlier they had yet to see rescue teams following the quake.
“I have never felt such a big earthquake in my life. Everybody is terrified,” said Win Tint, the head of Khu Lel village near Sint Ku township.
Some 40 buildings in the village were damaged and residents had been forced into temporary shelters set up in the fields. “The situation is quite bad. No rescue team has arrived here so far,” he said.
Following the initial jolt, which was felt as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok, the US Geological Survey recorded two further strong quakes of 5.8 and 5.6-magnitude.
A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report Sunday said government departments had indicated “significant damage to houses, infrastructure and public buildings, including primary and secondary schools in various locations”.
At least 100 homes were said to be damaged between Thabeikkyin and nearby Shwebo township, it said, adding the government’s Relief and Resettlement Department had provided tents.
The UN’s chief in Yangon, Ashok Nigam, said aid stocks were stretched, given the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Rakhine state in western Myanmar, where communal unrest has forced more than 110,000 people to flee their homes.
“We do have a very intense emergency going on in Rakhine and the stocks are low,” he told AFP.
Myanmar rescuers struggle to reach quake victims
Myanmar rescuers struggle to reach quake victims
UK faces choice next week between health and other spending, IFS think tank warns
- The non-partisan IFS said this spending review could prove to be “one of the most significant domestic policy events” for the current Labour government
LONDON: British finance minister Rachel Reeves’ key decision in next week’s multi-year spending review will be how much to spend on health care versus other public services, the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said on Sunday.
Reeves is due to set out day-to-day spending limits for other government departments on June 11 which will run through to the end of March 2029 — almost until the end of the Labour government’s expected term in office.
Britain has held periodic government spending reviews since 1998, but this is the first since 2015 to cover multiple years, other than one in 2021 focused on the COVID pandemic.
The non-partisan IFS said this spending review could prove to be “one of the most significant domestic policy events” for the current Labour government.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement in February that defense spending would reach 2.5 percent of national income by 2027 had already used the room for further growth in public investment created in Reeves’ October budget, it said.
“Simultaneously prioritising additional investments in public services, net zero and growth-friendly areas ... will be impossible,” said Bee Boileau, a research economist at the IFS.
Non-investment public spending is intended to rise by 1.2 percent a year on top of inflation between 2026-27 and 2028-29, according to budget plans which Reeves set out in October — half the pace of spending growth in the current and previous financial year.
The IFS sees no scope for this to be topped up, as Reeves’ budget rules leave almost no room for extra borrowing and tax rises are now limited to her annual budget statement.
This forces Reeves and Starmer to choose between the demands of the public health care system — plagued by long waiting times and a slump in productivity since the COVID-19 pandemic — and other stretched areas.
In past spending reviews, annual health care spending has typically risen 2 percentage points faster than total spending.
If that happened this time — equivalent to an annual increase of 3.4 percent — spending in other departments would have to fall by 1 percent a year in real terms, the IFS forecast.
Raising health care spending at roughly the same pace as other areas — a 1.2 percent rise — would only just keep pace with an aging population and not allow any reversal of recent years’ deterioration in service quality, the IFS said.
Spending cuts could be achieved by scaling back services provided by the state, reducing public-sector employment or real-terms cuts in public-sector pay, it added.
But it warned the government needed to be specific about how it planned to make cuts, or risk financial markets losing confidence in its ability to keep borrowing under control.
The review does not cover spending on pensions or other benefits, which the government is tackling separately.
Britain plans at least six new weapons factories in defense review
- The 1.5 billion-pound ($2.0 billion) investment will be included in the Strategic Defense Review, a 10-year plan for military equipment and services
MANCHESTER, England: Britain will build at least six new factories producing weapons and explosives as part of a major review of its defense capabilities, the government said on Saturday.
The 1.5 billion-pound ($2.0 billion) investment will be included in the Strategic Defense Review, a 10-year plan for military equipment and services. The SDR is expected to be published on Monday.
The Ministry of Defense added that it planned to procure up to 7,000 long-range weapons built in Britain. Together, the measures announced on Saturday will create around 1,800 jobs, the MoD said.
“The hard-fought lessons from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine show a military is only as strong as the industry that stands behind them,” Defense Secretary John Healey said in a statement.
“We are strengthening the UK’s industrial base to better deter our adversaries and make the UK secure at home and strong abroad.”
The extra investment will mean Britain will spend around 6 billion pounds on munitions in the current parliament, the MoD said.
Earlier on Saturday, the MoD said it would spend an extra 1.5 billion pounds to tackle the poor state of housing for the country’s armed forces.
Paris Holocaust memorial, synagogues hit with paint
- “I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” Retailleau said
- No arrests have been made
PARIS: France’s Holocaust memorial, two synagogues and a restaurant in central Paris were vandalized with green paint overnight, according to police sources on Saturday, prompting condemnation from government and city officials.
“I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X.
No arrests have been made.
Retailleau last week called for “visible and dissuasive” security measures at Jewish-linked sites amid concerns over possible anti-Semitic acts.
In a separate message seen by AFP, the interior minister on Friday had again ordered heightened surveillance ahead of the upcoming Jewish Shavuot holiday.
The French Jewish community, one of the largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials since the Gaza war erupted on October 7, 2023.
“Anti-Semitic acts account for more than 60 percent of anti-religious acts, and the Jewish community is particularly vulnerable,” Retailleau said in the message seen by AFP.
Paris authorities would be lodging a complaint over the paint incident, said the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
“I condemn these acts of intimidation in the strongest possible terms. Anti-Semitism has no place in our city or in our Republic,” she said.
In May 2024, red hand graffiti was painted beneath the wall at the memorial in central Paris honoring individuals who saved Jews from persecution during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation of France.
US judge prevents Trump from invalidating 5,000 Venezuelans’ legal documents
- The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued
- TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster
NEW YORK: A federal judge prevented the Trump administration from invalidating work permits and other documents granting lawful status to about 5,000 Venezuelans, a subset of the nearly 350,000 whose temporary legal protections the US Supreme Court last week allowed to be terminated.
US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco in a Friday night ruling concluded that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likely exceeded her authority when she in February invalidated those documents while more broadly ending the temporary protected status granted to the Venezuelans.
The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued that prevented the administration as part of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda from terminating deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program.
But the high court stated specifically it was not preventing any Venezuelans from still challenging Noem’s related decision to invalidate documents they were issued pursuant to that program that allowed them to work and live in the United States.
Such documents were issued after the US Department of Homeland Security in the final days of Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure extended the TPS program for the Venezuelans by 18 months to October 2026, an action Noem then moved to reverse.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
Lawyers for several Venezuelans and the advocacy group National TPS Alliance asked Chen to recognize the continuing validity of those documents, saying without them thousands of migrants could lose their jobs or be deported.
Chen in siding with them said nothing in the statute that authorized the Temporary Protected Status program allowed Noem to invalidate the documents.
Chen, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, noted the administration estimated only about 5,000 of the 350,000 Venezuelans held such documents. “This smaller number cuts against any contention that the continued presence of these TPS holders who were granted TPS-related documents by the Secretary would be a toll on the national or local economies or a threat to national security,” Chen wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Chen ruled hours after the US Supreme Court in a different case allowed Trump’s administration to end the temporary immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants under a different Biden-era program.
India’s military chief admits jets downed in recent clashes with Pakistan
- Islamabad previously claimed to have shot down 6 Indian jets in early May
- Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart, says expert
NEW DELHI: India’s military chief Gen. Anil Chauhan has confirmed for the first time that the Indian Air Force lost jets in clashes with Pakistan in May.
Earlier this month, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said his country shot down six Indian jets, an assertion that Delhi had refrained from commenting on.
Chauhan, chief of defense staff of the Indian Armed Forces, is the first Indian official to make the most direct admission over the fate of the country’s fighter jets during the conflict that erupted on May 7.
“What is important is that, not the jet being downed, but why they were being downed,” Chauhan told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Saturday, while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
“The good part is that we are able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it and then implement it again after two days and fly all our jets again, targeting at long range.”
Pakistan’s claims of shooting down six Indian combat aircraft were “absolutely incorrect,” Chauhan said, without specifying how many jets India lost.
India and Pakistan recently saw their worst clashes in half a century, during which both sides traded air, drone and missile strikes, as well as artillery and small arms fire along their shared border.
It was triggered by a gruesome attack on tourists near the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir on April 22, in which 26 people — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — were killed.
Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor for National Security Studies at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, said that the Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart.
“Initially, Indians were surprised. Maybe they underestimated the capacity of the Pakistani Air Force,” Karnad told Arab News on Saturday.
“I think what was surprising was that India did not use the airborne early warning (and) control system, the NETRA, which Pakistan has used very well,” he said. “I’m not sure how much the Indian Air Force expected this kind of tactical innovation. So, this is something that the Indian Air Force realized very quickly.”
According to Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, a retired officer of the Indian Air Force, Pakistan benefited from its Chinese-made weapons during the early May conflict.
“This brings us to the lessons which underscore that India was not fighting Pakistan on one front but two countries: Pakistan and China,” Kak told Arab News.
“Every single superior technology, capability, operationally and tactically, or in strategic terms, are made available to Pakistan. That must concern us: What kind of force structure we must have and what kind of capabilities we must build against the combo.”
