TACLOBAN: At least three people were killed and tens of thousands were driven from their homes by floods as Tropical Storm Kai-Tak pounded the eastern Philippines on Saturday, cutting off power and triggering landslides, officials said.
Kai-Tak, packing gusts of up to 110 km/per hour, hit the country’s third-largest island Samar in the afternoon and tore through a region devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan four years ago, the state weather service said.
Local officials reported three deaths on neighboring Leyte island — a two-year-old boy who drowned in the town of Mahaplag, a woman buried by a landslide and another person who fell into a flooded manhole in Ormoc city.
Samar and Leyte, with a combined population of about 4.5 million, had borne the brunt of Haiyan in 2013, which left more than 7,350 people dead or missing.
Bus driver Felix Villaseran, his wife and four children hunkered down in their two-story house in the Leyte city of Tacloban along with 11 relatives whose homes were flooded from incessant rain.
“We have yet to shake off our phobia. I hope we don’t have a repeat of that,” Villaseran, who lost 39 cousins in the Haiyan onslaught, told AFP.
“My missus stockpiled on groceries before the storm hit, but since we also have to feed these three other families we’re now running low on food,” he added.
Military trucks drove through rising floodwaters on Samar and Leyte to rescue trapped residents, with more than 77,000 people now in evacuation centers, local officials said.
Strong winds toppled trees and power pylons, knocking out power throughout the region while floods, small landslides and rock falls blocked roads and buried some homes, local officials and witnesses said.
Farmland in the mainly rural region was also under water, while seven people were injured by landslides and flying objects, the regional civil defense office said in a report.
A spokeswoman for the national government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council told AFP it was trying to confirm reports of two other deaths from landslides and floods on the islands of Biliran and Dinagat.
“It was like a flashback again for residents of Tacloban city,” its Vice Mayor Sambo Yaokasin told Manila TV ABS-CBN, referring to the Haiyan disaster.
The station broadcast images of flooded streets and corrugated iron roofing sheets flying off homes.
“Nearly half the villages here are flooded,” Marcelo Picardal, vice governor of Eastern Samar province told ABS-CBN in an interview.
Three other people were missing in Ormoc after being swept away by floods on Saturday, city Mayor Richard Gomez told CNN Philippines TV in an interview.
“We need a lot of water and a lot of blankets,” Gomez added, citing widespread flooding that may have contaminated the tap water system of the city of 200,000 people.
The state weather service said more heavy rain was expected in the eastern Philippines in the coming hours with Kai-Tak forecast to slice across the rest of the central Philippines over the weekend.
Ferry services on the storm’s path were suspended due to rough seas, the civil defense office in the area said.
About 20 typhoons or weaker storms either make landfall in the Philippines or reach its waters each year, bringing annual misery and death and consigning millions of survivors to perennial poverty.
3 dead, 77,000 flee as storm pounds Philippines
3 dead, 77,000 flee as storm pounds Philippines
Pakistan rejects Afghanistan’s ‘concocted’ allegations of training Daesh militants
- Defense Minister Khawaja Asif says accusations “attempt to shift the blame” of militancy on Pakistan
- Urges Afghanistan to dismantle “terrorist infrastructure,” prevent use of Afghan soil for militant attacks
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif this week rejected “concocted” allegations by Afghanistan’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, who accused Islamabad of arming and training Daesh militants.
In a statement this week, Stanikzai claimed Daesh has centers in Pakistan where Pakistan Army soldiers arm and train militants, and then send them to Afghanistan for subversive activities.
His allegations come amid tense relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with both countries trading blame over surging militant attacks in their countries.
“Pakistan categorically rejects baseless, concocted, and contrived allegations by Acting Afghanistan DFM Stanikzai, which are an attempt to shift the blame,” Asif wrote on social media platform X on Saturday.
The Pakistani defense minister said that as per the UN Monitoring Team’s report, over two dozen militant groups such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Al-Qaeda, Daesh, East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) are operating in Afghanistan.
“The interim Afghan authorities are well advised to fulfill the assurances given to the international community by dismantling terrorist infrastructure and taking visible and verifiable actions to prevent Afghan soil from being used against other countries,” Asif added.
Ties between the two neighbors have been strained because of a surge in militant attacks in Pakistan’s western regions that border Afghanistan since 2022, after the breakdown of a fragile truce between the Pakistani government and the outlawed TTP.
Pakistan has frequently accused neighboring Afghanistan of sheltering and supporting militant groups that launch cross-border attacks. Afghan officials deny involvement, insisting Pakistan’s security issues are an internal matter of Islamabad.
The two countries also conducted cross-border strikes in each other’s territory last month in the latest escalation of hostilities along the border.
KSrelief continues humanitarian outreach in Syria, Yemen
RYADH: The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief) continues with its humanitarian activities in Syria and Yemen with the distribution of food supplies, health kits and prosthetic services.
In the town of Beit Yashout, Jabla District of Syria’s Latakia Governorate, 499 families each received boxes containing a bag of flour as well as personal care kits on Saturday, state news agency SPA reported.
In Jindires of Aleppo Governorate, KSrelief distributed 1,476 food boxes and 1,476 health kits while in Talbiseh of Homs Governorate the aid agency on Thursday handed out to 86 families food parcels, each containing a 10-kilogram bag of flour, along with winter kits and personal care kits on Thursday.
This initiative is part of the Kingdom’s continuous humanitarian efforts, through KSrelief, to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people during various crises and hardships, SPA reported.
Meanwhile in Yemen, the Project for Operating Artificial Limbs and Rehabilitation Center in Taiz provided medical services to 434 beneficiaries who lost their limbs in December last year.
The center, being supported by KSrelief, delivered 1,613 services including the delivery, measurement and maintenance of prosthetic limbs, as well as physical therapy and specialized consultations.
Scramble to shelter animals from Los Angeles wildfires
BURBANK, USA: When wildfires roared to life around Los Angeles, Janell Gruss had to leave immediately. But as the manager of a stable with 25 horses and other animals, she knew it was going to be complicated.
While some people just got in their cars and drove out of the danger zone, Gruss had to wrangle more than two dozen frightened horses, as embers swirled in 100-mile (160-kilometer) -an-hour winds.
“The last horse we had to get out of the barn... it was pretty bad,” Gruss told AFP at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, where hundreds of animals have been brought this week.
“It was very smoky. It was dark. I couldn’t see where I was,” she recalled. “Both the horse and I were tripping over things, branches, whatever was on the ground.”
Gruss said coralling the animals was so challenging, she feared at one point she might not make it out alive.
“I thought I might have been one of those casualties,” she said, as tears rolled down her face.
“You hear about the person that goes in to get the last horse and doesn’t come out.”
More than 150,000 people have been forced from their homes by the huge blazes tearing through the city in a tragedy that has killed at least 16 people and changed the face of Los Angeles forever.
With so many people ordered to get out of the way of the advancing wildfires and needing to take their animals with them, capacity is strained.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Jennie Nevin, director of communications for the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.
“The first night was very busy and chaotic. Lots of people coming from all over.”
Care for Animals
Dozens of people milled around the barns Saturday at the equestrian center, where donkeys, pigs and ponies have also found shelter.
Tarah Paige, a professional stuntwoman, had brought her three-year-old daughter to visit their pony Truffles and her miniature cow Cuddles — a TV star in her own right who has appeared on several programs.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” said Paige, for whom the equestrian center has been an oasis in the midst of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Nevin says there has been an outpouring of support and people offering their services to help care for the menagerie.
“It really takes a village,” she said. “It takes the community.”
Across the Los Angeles sprawl there are activists, veterinarians and volunteers working to rescue and care for animals made homeless in the tragedy, including some that were injured.
The Pasadena Humane Society received about 400 animals from Altadena, where the flames have already consumed more than 14,000 acres (5,600 hectares).
One of their patients is a five-day-old puppy that was found in the ruins of a building, its ears burned.
Annie Harvilicz, founder of the Animal Wellness Center, says she has hardly slept a wink all week.
As the fire spread through the upmarket Pacific Palisades, Harvilicz posted on Facebook that she was happy to take in animals.
The post “exploded,” she said, and dogs, cats and even a rabbit began arriving.
With flames still raging out of control, the calls for help have not stopped.
But, she thinks, even when the firefighters have quelled the blaze, the slow-motion tragedy will roll on.
“There’s gonna be more pets found, more pets injured, with smoke inhalation and burns that we’re gonna start to discover as some of the fire recedes,” she said.
“This is just the beginning.”
Israel’s Netanyahu sends Mossad director to Gaza ceasefire talks in Qatar
- His presence means high-level Israeli officials who would need to sign off on any agreement are now involved
- Just one brief ceasefire has been achieved in 15 months of Israel's war on Gaza which has killed over 44,000
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved sending the director of the Mossad foreign intelligence agency to ceasefire negotiations in Qatar in a sign of progress in talks on the war in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s office announced the decision Saturday. It was not immediately clear when David Barnea would travel to Qatar’s capital, Doha, site of the latest round of indirect talks between Israel and the Hamas militant group. His presence means high-level Israeli officials who would need to sign off on any agreement are now involved.
Just one brief ceasefire has been achieved in 15 months of war, and that occurred in the earliest weeks of fighting. The talks mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have repeatedly stalled since then.
Netanyahu has insisted on destroying Hamas’ ability to fight in Gaza. Hamas has insisted on a full Israeli troop withdrawal from the largely devastated territory. On Thursday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said over 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war.
Pakistan commends OIC for empowering females during ongoing summit on girls’ education
- Pakistan’s deputy PM meets OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha in Islamabad
- At least 150 dignitaries from 44 Muslim and other friendly states are attending summit
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar met the chief of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) this week to laud the inter-governmental organization’s efforts in empowering women, the foreign office said, as Islamabad hosts a two-day conference on girls’ education in Muslim communities.
Dar met OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha, who is in Islamabad to take part in the International Conference on “Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities: Challenges and Opportunities.”
The global summit, which aims to find ways to advance girls’ education across the Muslim world, is being attended by over 150 dignitaries from 44 Muslim and other friendly states, according to Pakistan’s foreign office.
“Welcoming the OIC delegation to Pakistan, the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister commended the OIC’s dedication and commitment to women empowerment and its unwavering focus on girls’ education in the Islamic countries,” the foreign office said on Saturday.
During the meeting, the two sides discussed Israel’s war in Gaza and the situation in the Middle East, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, Islamophobia, discrimination, violence against Muslims worldwide and the role of OIC in that regard.
“The DPM/FM commended the appointment of OIC’s Special Envoy on Islamophobia to help coordinate the work of the Organization and its Member States for addressing discrimination against Muslims all over the world,” the statement added.
The two-day conference resumes today, Sunday, and will see an “Islamabad Declaration” announced at the end of the conference that would outline decisive steps to transform girls’ education in Islamic countries.
