MANDALAY: Myanmar declared a week of national mourning on Monday over the country’s devastating earthquake, as the death toll passed 2,000 and hopes faded of finding more survivors in the rubble of ruined buildings.
National flags will fly at half-mast until April 6 “in sympathy for the loss of life and damages” from Friday’s massive quake, the ruling junta said in a statement.
The junta also announced a minute’s silence on Tuesday, to begin at 12:51:02 p.m. (0621 GMT) — the precise time the 7.7-magnitude quake struck.
People should stop where they are to pay tribute to the victims, the junta said, while media should halt broadcasting and show mourning symbols, and prayers will be offered at temples and pagodas.
The announcement came as the tempo and urgency of rescue efforts wound down in Mandalay, one of the worst-affected cities and the country’s second-largest, with more than 1.7 million inhabitants.
“The situation is so dire that it’s hard to express what is happening,” said Aung Myint Hussein, chief administrator of Mandalay’s Sajja North mosque.
People prepared to camp out in the streets across Mandalay for a fourth successive night, either unable to return to ruined homes or nervous about the repeated aftershocks that rattled the city over the weekend.
Some have tents but many, including young children, have been bedding down on blankets in the middle of roads, trying to keep as far from buildings as possible for fear of falling masonry.
The junta said Monday that 2,056 have now been confirmed, with more than 3,900 people injured and 270 still missing, but the toll is expected to rise significantly.
Three Chinese nationals are among the dead, China’s state media said, along with two French people, according to the foreign ministry in Paris.
At least 19 deaths have been confirmed hundreds of kilometers away in Thailand’s capital Bangkok, where the force of the quake caused a 30-story tower block under construction to collapse.
Mandalay’s 1,000-bed general hospital has been evacuated, with hundreds of patients being treated outside.
Patients lay on gurneys in the hospital car park, many with only a thin tarpaulin rigged up to shield them from the fierce tropical sun.
Relatives did their best to comfort them, holding hands or waving bamboo fans over them.
“We’re trying to do what we can here. We are trying our best,” said one medic, who asked to remain anonymous.
The sticky heat has exhausted rescue workers and accelerated body decomposition, which could complicate identification.
But traffic began returning to the streets of Mandalay on Monday, and restaurants and street vendors resumed work.
Hundreds of Muslims gathered outside a destroyed mosque in the city for the first prayer of Eid Al-Fitr, the holiday that follows the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan.
The challenges facing the Southeast Asian country of more than 50 million people were immense even before the earthquake.
Myanmar has been ravaged by four years of civil war sparked by a military coup in 2021, with its economy shattered and health care and infrastructure badly damaged.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the quake a top-level emergency as it urgently sought $8 million to save lives, while the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has launched an appeal for more than $100 million.
International aid and rescue teams have been arriving after junta chief Min Aung Hlaing made an exceptionally rare appeal for foreign assistance.
In the past, isolated Myanmar’s ruling generals have shunned foreign assistance, even after major natural disasters.
Junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun thanked key allies China and Russia for their help, as well as India, and said the authorities were doing their best.
“We are trying and giving treatment to injured people and searching for missing ones,” he told journalists.
But reports have emerged of the military carrying out air strikes on armed groups opposed to its rule, even as Myanmar grapples with the quake’s aftermath.
One ethnic minority armed group told AFP on Sunday that seven of its fighters were killed in an aerial attack soon after the quake, and there were reports of more air strikes on Monday.
Myanmar’s raging civil war, pitting the military against a complex array of anti-coup fighters and ethnic minority armed groups, has displaced around 3.5 million people.
In Bangkok, diggers continued to clear the vast pile of rubble at the site of the collapsed building.
Officials say they have not given up hope of finding more survivors in the wreckage, where 12 deaths have been confirmed and at least 75 people are still unaccounted for.

PARIS: A French court on Monday sentenced far-right leader Marine Le Pen to a five-year ban on running for office with immediate effect, throwing into doubt her bid to stand for president in 2027.

She was also given a four-year prison term but will not go to jail, with two years of the term suspended and the other two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet, the court ruled.

Including 56-year-old Le Pen, nine figures from her National Rally (RN) party were convicted over a scheme where they took advantage of European Parliament expenses to employ assistants who were actually working for the party.

Twelve assistants were also convicted of concealing a crime, with the court estimating the scheme was worth €2.9 million ($3.1 million).

All the RN officials including Le Pen were banned from running for office, with the judge specifying that the sanction should come into force with immediate effect even if an appeal is lodged.

“The court took into consideration, in addition to the risk of reoffending, the major disturbance of public order if a person already convicted... was a candidate in the presidential election,” said presiding judge Benedicte de Perthuis.

Three-time presidential candidate Le Pen, who scented her best-ever chance of winning the French presidency in 2027 when President Emmanuel Macron cannot stand again, has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

She left the courtroom after her conviction and this sanction were announced, but before the judge announced the prison sentence, an AFP correspondent said.

She is due to give a primetime TV interview to broadcaster TF1 on Monday evening.

Le Pen had said in a piece for the La Tribune Dimanche newspaper published on Sunday that the verdict gives the “judges the right of life or death over our movement.”

With her RN emerging as the single largest party in parliament after the 2024 legislative elections, Le Pen believed she has the momentum to finally take the Elysee in 2027 on the back of public concern over immigration and the cost of living.

Polls predicted that she would easily top the first round of voting and make the second round two-candidate run-off.

The reaction from Moscow to the verdict was swift. “More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine“), wrote Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of her main allies in the EU, on X in support.

Waiting in the wings is her protege and RN party leader Jordan Bardella, just 29, who is not under investigation in the case.

Bardella, reacting to the verdict, said French democracy was being “executed” with the “unjust” verdict.

In a documentary broadcast by BFMTV late on Sunday, Le Pen for the first time explicitly gave her blessing to Bardella becoming president.

“Of course he has the capacity to become president of the republic,” she said.

But there are doubts even within the party over the so-called “Plan B” and whether he has the experience for a presidential campaign.

Le Pen took over as head of the then-National Front (FN) in 2011 but rapidly took steps toward making the party an electoral force and shaking off the controversial legacy of its co-founder and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died earlier this year and who was often accused of making racist and anti-Semitic comments.

She renamed it the National Rally and embarked on a policy known as “dediabolization” (de-demonization) with the stated aim of making it acceptable to a wider range of voters.

Prosecutors accused the party of easing pressure on its own finances by using all of the 21,000-euro monthly allowance to which MEPs were entitled to pay “fictitious” parliamentary assistants, who actually worked for the party in France.

“It was established that all these people were actually working for the party, that their MEP had not assigned them any tasks,” said the judge.

Given her current popularity, even some opponents have expressed discomfort over the prospect of Le Pen not making it to the starting line of an election.

“There are a very significant number of our fellow French citizens who identify with Marine Le Pen’s words and her struggle, and personally I would be very upset, to put it mildly, if she were unable to run to represent them,” France’s former EU commissioner Thierry Breton told French television at the weekend.