KATMANDU: Survivors of a strong earthquake that shook Nepal’s northwest in the middle of the night described sudden shaking followed by houses collapsing and burying entire families, as the death toll rose to 157 on Saturday.
Most of those killed were crushed by debris when their houses — usually made by stacking rocks and logs — crumbled under the force of the tremblor midnight Friday, local media reported.
While rescuers were scrambling to rush aid, operations were hampered by the fact that many of the mountainous villages could only be reached by foot. Roads were also blocked by landslides triggered by the earthquake. Soldiers could be seen trying to clear the blocked roads.
The government is trying to get as much aid to the affected areas, Deputy Prime Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha said on Saturday. Tents, food and medicine were flown in as thousands became homeless overnight.
“I was fast asleep when all of a sudden it started shaking violently. I tried to run but the whole house collapsed. I tried escaping but half my body got buried in the debris,” said Bimal Kumar Karki, one of the first people to be brought to the regional hospital.
“I screamed, but every one of my neighbors was in the same situation and screaming for help. It took nearly a half-hour to an hour before rescuers found me,” he said.
Another injured man recovering in the hospital also described getting buried while he was asleep.
“I was asleep at night and around 10 or 11 at night it started shaking and the house caved. So many houses have collapsed and so many people have been buried,” said Tika Ram Rana, who had his head wrapped in a white bandage.
Besides aid, rescuers were focused on finding survivors.
Local television aired footage of troops recovering bodies while others helped dig out and carry the injured.
The US Geological Survey said the earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.6 and occurred at a depth of 11 miles (18 kilometers) . Nepal’s National Earthquake Monitoring & Research Center said its epicenter was at Jajarkot, which is about 400 kilometers (250 miles) northeast of the capital, Katmandu.
In Jajarkot district, a mostly agricultural area, at least 105 people were confirmed dead while 52 were killed in the neighboring Rukum district, officials said. Another 184 were injured.
Security officials worked with villagers through the night to pull the dead and injured from fallen houses. The death toll was expected to rise as communications were still cut off in many places, authorities said.
At the regional hospital in the city of Nepalgunj, more than 100 beds were made available and teams of doctors stood by to help the injured.
Apart from rescue helicopters, small government and army planes able to land in the short mountain strips were also used to ferry the wounded to Nepalgunj.
Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal flew in on a helicopter with a team of doctors. Dahal had led an armed communist revolt in 1996-2006 that began in the districts that were hit by the quake.
The quake, which hit when many people were already asleep in their homes, was also felt in India’s capital, New Delhi, more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) away.
Earthquakes are common in mountainous Nepal. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015 killed some 9,000 people and damaged about 1 million structures.
Neighboring India offered to help in the rescue efforts.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared on social media that he was deeply saddened by the loss of lives and damage due to the earthquake in Nepal. “India stands in solidarity with the people of Nepal and is ready to extend all possible assistance,” he said.
Nepal rushes aid and rescue operations after strong quake shakes its northwest, killing at least 157
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Nepal rushes aid and rescue operations after strong quake shakes its northwest, killing at least 157
- The 5.6-magnitude quake hit the far west of the Himalayan country late Friday and was measured at just 18 kilometers deep
- Videos and photos posted on social media showed locals digging through rubble in the dark to pull survivors from the wreckage
Women spearhead maternal health revolution in Bangladesh
- Young Bangladeshi mother Mafia Akhter’s decision to give birth at home and without a doctor left her grieving over her firstborn’s lifeless body and vowing never to repeat the ordeal
“My first baby died,” the 25-year-old told AFP. “I told myself that if I didn’t go to the clinic it could happen again, and that I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
She gave birth again last month at a medical center in a village hemmed in by rice paddy and rivers, far from the nearest hospital and without the oversight of an obstetrician.
But this time her child survived — something she credits to Nargis Akhter, one of the thousands of Bangladeshi women working as “skilled birth attendants” to help mothers through delivery.
“Giving birth is the most important and critical moment for a woman,” Nargis — no relation to her patient — told AFP.
“I am lucky and proud to be able to be with them at that moment.”
Nargis was speaking to AFP after her routine post-natal consultation with Mafia, who was cradling her young daughter during her return to the spartan village health center where she gave birth.
Skilled birth attendants have been a fixture of Bangladesh’s maternal health policy for two decades and are an important pillar of the South Asian nation’s underfunded health system.
More than 30 percent of Bangladeshi women nationally give birth without the assistance of a doctor, nurse or midwife, according to government data from 2022 Demographic and Health Survey.
Birth attendants like Nargis, 25, are given several months training and put to work plugging this gap by serving in a jack-of-all-trades role akin to a cross between a nurse and a doula.
The use of skilled birth attendants has coincided with dramatic improvements to maternal health outcomes in Bangladesh.
Over the past 20 years, the mortality rate for pregnant women has fallen by 72 percent, to 123 deaths per 100,000 births and babies by 69 percent to 20 deaths per 100,000 births, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Many women do not have access to quality care, so I feel useful by helping them,” said Nargis, who in her five years as a birth attendant has overseen more than 400 deliveries.
“Almost no women die in childbirth here anymore,” she added.
“For me, that’s the most important thing.”
Besides helping with deliveries, birth attendants will screen pregnant women weeks ahead of their due date to refer high-risk pregnancies to hospitals further afield.
For women in Biswambharpur, the remote district that Mafia and Nargis call home, complicated cases will wind up in a district hospital struggling with inadequate resources.
“We never leave a patient without care, but they sometimes have to wait a long time for treatment,” said Abdullahel Maruf, the hospital’s chief doctor.
“Plus, we can’t change the geography. In an emergency, it takes time to get to us.”
Biswambharpur is lashed by monsoon rains for months each year that make travel difficult, and a lack of paved roads mean that many of its villages are inaccesible by the district’s only ambulance, even during the drier months.
Maruf’s hospital sees up to 500 patients each day and still has around eight women die in labor each year — fatalities he says are avoidable, given that his emergency department lacks an obstetrician and backup surgeon.
“We could easily reduce this figure if we had all the required staff,” he said.
Maruf said that mortality rates had nonetheless improved by an awareness campaign encouraging women to give birth at local health clinics rather than at home.
“This is our greatest victory,” he said.
Bangladesh spends only 0.8 percent of its GDP on public health, a figure that Maya Vandenent of the UN children’s agency said risked stalling the country’s improvements to maternal health.
“Huge progress has been made,” she told AFP. “But the movement is slowing down.”
Sayedur Rahman, a physician overseeing Bangladesh’s health ministry, freely concedes that more health funding is far from the top of the agenda of the government he serves.
The country is still reeling from the dramatic ouster of autocratic ex-premier Sheikh Hasina last August during a student-led national uprising.
Rahman is part of an interim administration tasked with steering democratic reforms ahead of fresh elections, and he laments that these priorities will leave others in the health sector unaddressed.
“We need resources to create a national ambulance network, recruit more anesthesiologists, open operating rooms,” Rahman told AFP.
“Our financial constraints will directly impact maternal and neonatal mortality rates.”
One dead, seven missing in Indonesia floods and landslides
- One child was found dead, and seven people in three separate districts were still missing
JAKARTA: Floods and landslides on Indonesia’s main island of Java killed one and left seven more missing after heavy rains inundated more than a dozen towns, an official said Friday.
Torrential rains this week hit capital Jakarta and its surrounding cities, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate and authorities to use weather modification technology.
But the bad weather carried on in neighboring West Java province Thursday, hitting most parts of its Sukabumi district, damaging houses and flooding hundreds of public facilities including schools and hospitals.
One child was found dead, and seven people in three separate districts were still missing, according to the local disaster agency.
“The disaster was caused by extreme weather and torrential rain with high intensity that lasted for a long time,” agency spokesman Andrie Setiawan told AFP.
At least 18 towns in the district were affected by flooding and landslides, he said, adding more than 200 people had to evacuate to higher ground.
Indonesia is prone to landslides during the rainy season, typically between November and April.
Climate change has also increased the intensity of storms, leading to heavier rains, flash floods and stronger gusts.
In January, at least 25 people died after floods and landslides hit a town in Central Java.
Around 70 people died in May last year after heavy rains caused flash floods in West Sumatra, pushing a mixture of ash, sand and pebbles from the eruption of Mount Marapi into residential areas.
American Jews who fled Syria ask White House to lift sanctions so they can rebuild in Damascus
- They say the sanctions are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding Syria’s decimated Jewish community
- Members of the Hamra family, who fled Damascus in the 1990s, returned to Syria last month for the first time
WASHINGTON: American Jews who fled their Syrian homeland decades ago went to the White House this week to appeal to the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Syria that they say are blocking them from restoring some of the world’s oldest synagogues and rebuilding the country’s decimated Jewish community.
For Henry Hamra, who fled Damascus as a teenager with his family in the 1990s, the 30 years since have been shadowed by worry for what they left behind.
“I was just on the lookout the whole time. The old synagogues, the old cemetery, what’s going on, who’s taking care of it?’ said Hamra, whose family has settled in New York.
His family fled the Syrian capital to escape the repressive government of Hafez Assad. With the toppling of his son, Bashar Assad, in December and the end of Assad family rule, Hamra, his 77-year-old father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, and a small group of other Jews and non-Jews returned to Syria last month for the first time.
They briefed State Department officials for the region last week and officials at the White House on Wednesday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
They were accompanied by Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of a group called the Syrian American Task Force, who was influential in the past in moving US officials to sanction the Assad government over its institutionalized torture and killings.
With Assad gone and the country trying to move out of poverty, Moustafa has been urging US policymakers to lift sweeping sanctions that block most investment and business dealings in Syria.
“If you want a stable and safe Syria ... even if it’s as simple as rebuilding the oldest synagogue in the world, the only person that’s able to make that a reality today is, frankly, Donald Trump,” Moustafa said.
Syria’s Jewish community is one of the world’s oldest, dating its history back to the prophet Elijah’s time in Damascus nearly 3,000 years ago. It once had been one of the world’s largest, and was still estimated at 100,000 at the start of the 20th century.
Increased restrictions, surveillance and tensions after the creation of Israel and under the authoritarian Assad family sent tens of thousands fleeing in the 1990s. Today, only seven Jews are known to remain in Damascus, most of them elderly.
What began as a largely peaceful uprising against the Assad family in 2011 grew into a vicious civil war, with a half-million dying as Russia and Iranian-backed militias fought to keep the Assads in power, and the Daesh group imposing its rule on a wide swath of the country.
A US-led military coalition routed the Islamic State by 2019. Successive US administrations piled sanctions on Syria over the Assad government’s torture, imprisonment and killing of perceived opponents.
Bashar Assad was ousted in December by a coalition of rebel groups led by an Islamist insurgent, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who today leads what he says is a transition government. He and his supporters have taken pains to safeguard members of Syria’s many minority religious groups and pledged peaceful coexistence as they ask a skeptical international community to lift the crippling sanctions.
Although incidents of revenge and collective punishment have been far less widespread than expected, many in Syria’s minority communities — including Kurds, Christians, Druze and members of Assad’s Alawite sect — are concerned and not convinced by promises of inclusive government.
After the decades away, Yusuf Hamra’s former Christian neighbors in the old city of Damascus recognized him on his trip back last month and stopped to embrace him, and share gossip on old acquaintances. The Hamras prayed in the long-neglected Al-Franj synagogue, where he used to serve as a rabbi.
His son, Henry Hamra, said he was shocked to see tiny children begging in the streets — a result, he said, of the sanctions.
Visiting the site of what had been Syria’s oldest synagogue of all, in the Jobar area of Damascus, Hamra found it in ruins from the war, with an ordnance shell still among the rubble.
Hamra had become acquainted with Moustafa, then a US-based opposition activist, when he reached out to him during the war to see if he could do anything to rescue precious artifacts inside the Jobar synagogue as fighting raged around it.
A member of Moustafa’s group suffered a shrapnel wound trying, and a member of a Jobar neighborhood council was killed. Both men were Muslim. Despite their effort, fighting later destroyed most of the structure.
Hamra said Jews abroad want to be allowed to help restore their synagogues, their family homes and their schools in the capital’s old city. Someday, he says, Syria’s Jewish community could be like Morocco’s, thriving in a Muslim country again.
“My main goal is not to see my Jewish quarter, and my school, and my synagogue and everything fall apart,” Hamra said.
Judge orders Trump administration to speed payment of USAID and State Dept. debts
- Thursday’s decision thaws the administration’s six-week funding freeze on all foreign assistance
- Ali issued his order a day after a divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to freeze funding that flowed through USAID
WASHINGTON: A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to speed up its payment on some of nearly $2 billion in debts to partners of the US Agency for International Development and the State Department, giving it a Monday deadline to repay the nonprofit groups and businesses in a lawsuit over the administration’s abrupt shutdown of foreign assistance funding.
US District Judge Amir Ali described the partial payment as a “concrete” first step he wanted to see from the administration, which is fighting multiple lawsuits seeking to roll back the administration’s dismantling of USAID and a six-week freeze on USAID funding, which has forced US-funded organizations to halt aid and development work around the world and lay off workers.
Ali’s line of questioning in a four-hour hearing Thursday suggested skepticism of the Trump administration’s argument that presidents have wide authority to override congressional decisions on spending when it comes to foreign policy.
It would be an “earth-shaking, country-shaking proposition to say that appropriations are optional,” Ali said.
“The question I have for you is, where are you getting this from in the constitutional document?” he asked a government lawyer, Indraneel Sur.
Thursday’s order is in an ongoing case with more decisions coming on the administration’s termination of more than 90 percent of USAID contracts worldwide this month.
Ali’s ruling came a day after a divided Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to freeze funding that flowed through USAID. The high court instructed Ali to clarify what the government must do to comply with his earlier order requiring the quick release of funds for work that had already been done.
The funding freeze stemmed from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20. The administration appealed after Ali issued a temporary restraining order and set a deadline to release payment for work already done.
The administration said it has replaced a blanket spending freeze with individualized determinations, which led to the cancelation of 5,800 USAID contracts — more than 90 percent of the agency’s contracts for projects — and 4,100 State Department grants totaling nearly $60 billion in aid.
“The funding freeze, it’s not continuing. It’s over,” Sur told the judge Thursday.
With thousands of the form-letter contract terminations going out within days earlier this month, nonprofits and businesses charge that no actual individual contract reviews were possible, and that the contract cancelations only made permanent most of the across-the-board program shutdowns from the funding freeze.
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Global Health Council and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking back payment for their share of the nearly $2 billion they and other USAID partners were already owed at the time of the Jan. 20 funding freeze.
Lawyers for the organizations told the court Thursday they also wanted to see all of the contract terminations reversed, and future terminations follow regulations.
The Trump administration said it recently resumed payment for USAID debts after the funding freeze. But it told the court that its processing of payments was being slowed because it had pulled most USAID workers off their jobs, through forced leaves and firing, as part of the agency shutdown.
Ali noted Thursday that USAID had said it routinely made thousands of payments before the agency shutdown, and that it said it had recently called 100 staffers off leave to process payments.
The administration could continue bringing idled workers off leave to make Monday’s deadline, he said.
SpaceX’s latest Starship test flight ends with another explosion
Nearly two months after an explosion sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos, SpaceX launched another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday, but lost contact minutes into the test flight as the spacecraft came tumbling down and broke apart.
This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.
Starship reached nearly 90 miles (150 kilometers) in altitude before trouble struck and before four mock satellites could be deployed. It was not immediately clear where it came down, but images of flaming debris were captured from Florida, including near Cape Canaveral, and posted online.
The space-skimming flight was supposed to last an hour.
“Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we have some practice at this now,” SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot said from the launch site.
SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly" during the ascent engine firing. "Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” the company said in a statement posted online.
Starship didn't make it quite as high or as far as last time.
NASA has booked Starship to land its astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX’s Elon Musk is aiming for Mars with Starship, the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
Like last time, Starship had mock satellites to release once the craft reached space on this eighth test flight as a practice for future missions. They resembled SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, thousands of which currently orbit Earth, and were meant to fall back down following their brief taste of space.
Starship’s flaps, computers and fuel system were redesigned in preparation for the next big step: returning the spacecraft to the launch site just like the booster.
During the last demo, SpaceX captured the booster at the launch pad, but the spacecraft blew up several minutes later over the Atlantic. No injuries or major damage were reported.
According to an investigation that remains ongoing, leaking fuel triggered a series of fires that shut down the spacecraft’s engines. The on-board self-destruct system kicked in as planned.
SpaceX said it made several improvements to the spacecraft following the accident, and the Federal Aviation Administration recently cleared Starship once more for launch.
Starships soar out of the southernmost tip of Texas near the Mexican border. SpaceX is building another Starship complex at Cape Canaveral, home to the company’s smaller Falcon rockets that ferry astronauts and satellites to orbit.
