KATMANDU: Shelter, fuel, food, medicine, power, news, workers — Nepal’s earthquake-hit capital was short on everything Monday as its people searched for lost loved ones, sorted through rubble for their belongings and struggled to provide for their families’ needs. In much of the countryside, it was worse, though how much worse was only beginning to become apparent.
The death toll soared past 3,700, even without a full accounting from vulnerable mountain villages that rescue workers were still struggling to reach two days after the disaster.
Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha district, where Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 quake was centered, said he was in desperate need of help.
“There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I’ve had reports of villages where 70 percent of the houses have been destroyed,” he said.
Aid group World Vision said its staff members were able to reach Gorkha, but gathering information from the villages remained a challenge. Even when roads are clear, the group said, some remote areas can be three days’ walk from Gorkha’s main disaster center.
Some roads and trails have been blocked by landslides, the group said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “In those villages that have been reached, the immediate needs are great including the need for search and rescue, food items, blankets and tarps, and medical treatment.”
Timalsina said 223 people had been confirmed dead in Gorkha district but he presumed “the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured.” He said his district had not received enough help from the central government, but Jagdish Pokhrel, the clearly exhausted army spokesman, said nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army was involved in rescue operations.
“We have 90 percent of the army out there working on search and rescue,” he said. “We are focusing our efforts on that, on saving lives.”
Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake spread horror from Katmandu to small villages and to the slopes of Mount Everest, triggering an avalanche that buried part of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts.
Aid is coming from more than a dozen countries and many charities, but Lila Mani Poudyal, the government’s chief secretary and the rescue coordinator, said Nepal needed more.
He said the recovery was also being slowed because many workers — water tanker drivers, electricity company employees and laborers needed to clear debris — “are all gone to their families and staying with them, refusing to work.”
“We are appealing for tents, dry goods, blankets, mattresses, and 80 different medicines that the health department is seeking that we desperately need now,” Poudyal told reporters. “We don’t have the helicopters that we need or the expertise to rescue the people trapped.”
As people are pulled from the wreckage, he noted, even more help is needed.
“Now we especially need orthopedic (doctors), nerve specialists, anaesthetists, surgeons and paramedics,” he said. “We are appealing to foreign governments to send these specialized and smart teams.”
More than 6,300 people were injured in the quake, he said, estimating that tens of thousands of people had been left homeless. “We have been under severe stress and pressure, and have not been able to reach the people who need help on time,” he said.
Nepal police said in a statement that the country’s death toll had risen to 3,617 people. That does not include the 18 people killed in the avalanche, which were counted by the mountaineering association. Another 61 people were killed in neighboring India, and China reported 20 people dead in Tibet.
Well over 1,000 of the victims were in Katmandu, the capital, where an eerie calm prevailed Monday.
Tens of thousands of families slept outdoors for a second night, fearful of aftershocks that have not ceased. Camped in parks, open squares and a golf course, they cuddled children or pets against chilly Himalayan nighttime temperatures.
They woke to the sound of dogs yelping and jackhammers. As the dawn light crawled across toppled building sites, volunteers and rescue workers carefully shifted broken concrete slabs and crumbled bricks mixed together with humble household items: pots and pans; a purple notebook decorated with butterflies; a framed poster of a bodybuilder; so many shoes.
“It’s overwhelming. It’s too much to think about,” said 55-year-old Bijay Nakarmi, mourning his parents, whose bodies recovered from the rubble of what once was a three-story building.
He could tell how they died from their injuries. His mother was electrocuted by a live wire on the roof top. His father was cut down by falling beams on the staircase.
He had last seen them a few days earlier — on Nepal’s Mothers’ Day — for a cheerful family meal.
“I have their bodies by the river. They are resting until relatives can come to the funeral,” Nakarmi said as workers continued searching for another five people buried underneath the wreckage.
Katmandu district chief administrator Ek Narayan Aryal said tents and water were being handed out Monday at 10 locations in Katmandu, but that aftershocks were leaving everyone jittery. The largest, on Sunday, was magnitude 6.7.
“There have been nearly 100 earthquakes and aftershocks, which is making rescue work difficult. Even the rescuers are scared and running because of them,” he said.
“We don’t feel safe at all. There have been so many aftershocks. It doesn’t stop,” said Rajendra Dhungana, 34, who spent Sunday with his niece’s family for her cremation at the Pashuputi Nath Temple.
Acrid, white smoke rose above the Hindu temple, Nepal’s most revered. “I’ve watched hundreds of bodies burn,” Dhungana said.
The capital city is largely a collection of small, poorly constructed brick apartment buildings. The earthquake destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods, but many were surprised by how few modern structures collapsed in the quake.
On Monday morning, some pharmacies and shops for basic provisions opened while bakeries began offering fresh bread. Huge lines of people desperate to secure fuel lined up outside gasoline pumps, though prices were the same as they were before the earthquake struck.
With power lines down, spotty phone connections and almost no Internet connectivity, residents were particularly anxious to buy morning newspapers.
Pierre-Anne Dube, a 31-year-old from Canada, has been sleeping on the sidewalk outside a hotel. She said she’s gone from the best experience of her life, a trek to Everest base camp, to the worst, enduring the earthquake and its aftermath.
“We can’t reach the embassy. We want to leave. We are scared. There is no food. We haven’t eaten a meal since the earthquake and we don’t have any news about what’s going on,” she said.
The earthquake was the worst to hit the South Asian nation in more than 80 years. It and was strong enough to be felt all across parts of India, Bangladesh, China’s region of Tibet and Pakistan. Nepal’s worst recorded earthquake in 1934 measured 8.0 and all but destroyed the cities of Katmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan.
The quake has put a huge strain on the resources of this impoverished country best known for Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The economy of Nepal, a nation of 27.8 million people, relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.
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Associated Press writers Muneeza Naqvi and Tim Sullivan in New Delhi contributed to this report.
Quake-aid need acute in Nepal; toll still soaring
Quake-aid need acute in Nepal; toll still soaring
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How Democrats in America’s most Jewish city embraced a critic of Israel for New York mayor
- Mamdani’s success reflects the ideological realignment of many American Jews since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel that led to Israel’s invasion of Gaza
NEW YORK: In choosing Zohran Mamdani as their candidate for mayor, Democrats in America’s most Jewish city have nominated an outspoken critic of Israel, alarming some in New York’s Jewish community and signaling a sea change in the priorities of one of the party’s most loyal voting groups.
The 33-year-old democratic socialist’s surprisingly strong performance against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo makes clear that taking a stance against Israel is no longer disqualifying in a Democratic primary. The state Assembly member has declined to support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, refused to denounce the term “global intifada” and supports an organized effort to put economic pressure on Israel through boycotts and other tactics.
Yet he excelled in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and with the support of many Jewish voters.
Mamdani’s success reflects the ideological realignment of many American Jews since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel that led to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Many Democratic voters, including Jews, have grown dismayed by Israel’s conduct in the war and are deeply critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That is especially true among younger, more progressive voters, many of whom have rejected the once-broadly accepted notion that anti-Israel sentiment is inherently antisemitic.
For others, Mamdani’s showing has spurred new fears about safety and the waning influence of Jewish voters in a city where anti-Jewish hate crime has surged. Last year, Jews were the target of more than half of the hate crimes in the city.
“Definitely people are concerned,” said Rabbi Shimon Hecht, of Congregation B’nai Jacob in Brooklyn, who said he has heard from congregants in recent days who hope Mamdani will be beaten in the November general election, where he will face Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and possibly Cuomo, if he stays in the race.
“I think like every upsetting election, it’s a wake-up call for people,” Hecht said. “I strongly believe that he will not be elected as our next mayor, but it’s going to take a lot of uniting among the Jewish people and others who are concerned about these issues. We have to unify.”
Veteran New York Democratic political strategist Hank Sheinkopf put it more bluntly, predicting a hasty exodus of religious Jews from the city and a decline in long-standing Jewish influence that would be replicated elsewhere.
“It’s the end of Jewish New York as we know it,” he said, adding: “New York is a petri dish for national Democratic politics. And what happened here is what will likely happen in cities across the country.”
Israel was a key campaign issue
Mamdani’s top Democratic rival, the former governor, had called antisemitism and support for Israel “the most important issue” of the campaign.
Mamdani’s backers repeatedly accused Cuomo of trying to weaponize the issue. Many drew parallels to the way Republican President Donald Trump has cast any criticism of Israel’s actions as antisemitic, claiming Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and their own religion.
For some Mamdani supporters, the election results signaled a rejection by voters of one of Cuomo’s arguments: that an upstart socialist with pro-Palestinian views posed a threat to New York’s Jewish community.
Many were focused on issues such as affordability in a notoriously expensive city, or flat-out opposed to Cuomo, who was forced to resign in disgrace amid sexual harassment allegations.
Aiyana Leong Knauer, a 35-year-old Brooklyn bartender who is Jewish and backed Mamdani, said the vote represented “New Yorkers, many of them Jewish, saying we care more about having an affordable city than sowing division.”
“Many of us take really deep offense to our history being weaponized against us,” she said. “Jewish people all over the world have well-founded fears for their safety, but Jews in New York are safe overall.”
Others agreed with Mamdani’s views on Israel.
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, an anti-Zionist, progressive group that worked on Mamdani’s behalf, said Mamdani “was actually pretty popular among a lot of Jewish voters.”
“That is not in spite of his support for Palestinian rights. That is because of his support for Palestinian rights,” she said. “There has been a massive rupture within the Jewish community and more and more Jews of all generations, but especially younger generations,” she said, now refuse to be tied to what they see as a rogue government committing atrocities against civilians.
Polls show support for Israel has declined since the war began. Overall, a slight majority of Americans now express a “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable opinion of Israel, according to a March Pew Research Center poll, compared with 42 percent in 2022. Democrats’ views are particularly negative, with nearly 70 percent holding an unfavorable opinion versus less than 40 percent of Republicans.
Beyond the mayoral race
Mamdani’s wasn’t the only race where Israel was on voters’ minds.
In Brooklyn, City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, who represents Park Slope and surrounding areas, drew criticism for her Palestinian advocacy. Some said she had failed to respond forcefully to antisemitic incidents in the district.
Yet Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council, easily beat her top challenger, Maya Kornberg, who is Jewish, despite an influx of money from wealthy, pro-Israel groups and donors.
That outcome dismayed Ramon Maislen, a developer who launched Brooklyn BridgeBuilders to oppose Hanif’s reelection and said antisemitism did not seem to resonate with voters.
“We were very disappointed with our neighbors’ response,” he said.
While campaigning against Hanif, he said he was routinely screamed at by residents and accused of supporting genocide.
“I think that those of us in the Jewish community that are attuned to that are cognizant that there’s been some kind of cultural sea change that’s occurring,” he said. “What we’re seeing is a legitimatization of hatred that isn’t happening in any other liberal or progressive space.”
Mamdani’s record and rhetoric
Mamdani has repeatedly pledged to fight antisemitism, including during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” where he was grilled on his stance. He was joined on the show by city comptroller and fellow candidate Brad Lander, the city’s highest-ranking Jewish official, who had cross-endorsed him. He has also said he would increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800 percent.
But many of his comments have angered Jewish groups and officials, most notably his refusal to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used as a slogan in recent protests. Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians. In a podcast interview, Mamdani said the phrase captured a “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”
Given another opportunity to condemn the phrase, Mamdani on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it was not his role to police speech and he pledged to be a mayor who “protects Jewish New Yorkers and lives up to that commitment through the work that I do.”
Mamdani also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to pressure governments, schools and other institutions to boycott Israeli products, divest from companies that support the country, and impose sanctions. The Anti-Defamation League calls it antisemitic and part of a broader campaign to “delegitimize and isolate the State of Israel.”
Mamdani has also said that, as mayor, he would arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli leader tried to enter the city.
The ADL in a statement Thursday warned candidates and their supporters not to use “language playing into dangerous antisemitic canards that time and time again have been used to incite hatred and violence against Jews.”
In his victory speech, Mamdani alluded to the criticism he’d received and said he would not abandon his beliefs. But he also said he would “reach further to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”
Trump blasts ‘communist’ winner of NY Democratic primary
- Trump’s White House has repeatedly threatened to curb funding for Democratic-led US cities if they oppose his policies, including cutting off money to so-called sanctuary cities which limit their cooperation with immigration authorities
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump branded the winner of New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary a “pure communist” in remarks that aired Sunday, an epithet the progressive candidate dismissed as political theatrics.
Zohran Mamdani’s shock win last week against a scandal-scarred political heavyweight resonated as a thunderclap within the party, and drew the ire of Trump and his collaborators, who accused Mamdani of being a radical extremist.
The Republican’s aggressive criticism of the self-described democratic socialist is sure to ramp up over the coming months as Trump’s party seeks to push Democrats away from the political center and frame them as too radical to win major US elections.
“He’s pure communist” and a “radical leftist... lunatic,” Trump fumed on Fox News talk show “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
“I think it’s very bad for New York,” added Trump, who grew up in the city and built his sprawling real estate business there.
“If he does get in, I’m going to be president and he is going to have to do the right thing (or) they’re not getting any money” from the federal government.
Trump’s White House has repeatedly threatened to curb funding for Democratic-led US cities if they oppose his policies, including cutting off money to so-called sanctuary cities which limit their cooperation with immigration authorities.
Mamdani also took to the talk shows Sunday, asserting he would “absolutely” maintain New York’s status as a sanctuary city so that “New Yorkers can get out of the shadows and into the full life of the city that they belong to.”
Asked directly on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he is a communist, Mamdani — a 33-year-old immigrant aiming to become New York’s first Muslim mayor — responded “No, I am not.
“And I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for,” Mamdani said.
“I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”
The Ugandan-born state assemblyman had trailed former governor Andrew Cuomo in polls but surged on a message of lower rents, free daycare and buses, and other populist ideas in the notoriously expensive metropolis.
Although registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one in New York, victory for Mamdani in November is not assured.
Current Mayor Eric Adams is a Democrat but is campaigning for re-election as an independent, while Cuomo may also run unaffiliated.
US Senate pushes ahead on Trump tax cuts as nonpartisan analysis raises price tag
- The Senate only narrowly advanced the tax-cut, immigration, border and military spending bill in a procedural vote late on Saturday, voting 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill
WASHINGTON: The US Senate version of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill will add $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt, about $800 billion more than the version passed last month by the House of Representatives, a nonpartisan forecaster said on Sunday.
The Congressional Budget Office issued its estimate of the bill’s hit to the $36.2 trillion federal debt as Senate Republicans sought to push the bill forward in a marathon weekend session.
Republicans, who have long voiced concern about growing US deficits and debt, have rejected the CBO’s longstanding methodology to calculate the cost of legislation. But Democrats hope the latest, eye-widening figure could stoke enough anxiety among fiscally-minded conservatives to get them to buck their party, which controls both chambers of Congress.
The Senate only narrowly advanced the tax-cut, immigration, border and military spending bill in a procedural vote late on Saturday, voting 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill.
Trump on social media hailed Saturday’s vote as a “great victory” for his “great, big, beautiful bill.”
In an illustration of the depths of the divide within the Republican Party over the bill, Senator Thom Tillis said he would not seek re-election next year, after Trump threatened to back a primary challenger in retribution for Tillis’ Saturday night vote against the bill.
Tillis’ North Carolina seat is one of the few Republican Senate seats seen as vulnerable in next year’s midterm elections. He was one of just two Republicans to vote no on Saturday.
Trump wants the bill passed before the July 4 Independence Day holiday. While that deadline is one of choice, lawmakers will face a far more serious deadline later this summer when they must raise the nation’s self-imposed debt ceiling or risk a devastating default on $36.2 trillion in debt.
“We are going to make sure hardworking people can keep more of their money,” Senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
HITS TO BENEFITS
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said this legislation would come to haunt Republicans if it gets approved, predicting 16 million Americans would lose their health insurance.
“Many of my Republican friends know ... they’re walking the plank on this and we’ll see if those who’ve expressed quiet consternation will actually have the courage of their convictions,” Warner told CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
The legislation has been the sole focus of a marathon weekend congressional session marked by political drama, division and lengthy delays as Democrats seek to slow the legislation’s path to passage.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer called for the entire text of the bill to be read on the Senate floor, a process that began before midnight Saturday and ran well into Sunday afternoon. Following that lawmakers will begin up to 20 hours of debate on the legislation. That will be followed by an amendment session, known as a “vote-a-rama,” before the Senate votes on passage. Lawmakers said they hoped to complete work on the bill on Monday.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the other Republican “no” vote, opposed the legislation because it would raise the federal borrowing limit by an additional $5 trillion.
“Did Rand Paul Vote ‘NO’ again tonight? What’s wrong with this guy???” Trump said on social media.
The megabill would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s main legislative achievement during his first term as president, cut other taxes and boost spending on the military and border security.
Representative Michael McCaul, however, warned that fellow Republicans who do not back Trump on the bill could face payback from voters.
“They know that their jobs are at risk. Not just from the president, but from the voting — the American people. Our base back home will not reelect us to office if we vote no on this,” McCaul also told CBS News.
Senate Republicans, who reject the CBO’s estimates on the cost of the legislation, are set on using an alternative calculation method that does not factor in costs from extending the 2017 tax cuts. Outside tax experts, like Andrew Lautz from the nonpartisan think tank Bipartisan Policy Center, call it a “magic trick.”
Using this calculation method, the Senate Republicans’ budget bill appears to cost substantially less and seems to save $500 billion, according to the BPC analysis.
If the Senate passes the bill, it will then return to the House of Representatives for final passage before Trump can sign it into law. The House passed its version of the bill last month.
Cold baths, climate shelters as Southern Europe heat wave intensifies
- Peaks of 43 degrees Celsius were expected in areas of southern Spain and Portugal, while nearly all of France is sweltering in heat expected to last for several days
ROME: Authorities across Southern Europe urged people to seek shelter Sunday and protect the most vulnerable as punishing temperatures from Spain to Portugal, Italy and France climbed higher in the summer’s first major heat wave.
Ambulances stood on standby near tourist hotspots and regions issued fire warnings as experts warned that such heat waves, intensified by climate change, would become more frequent.
Peaks of 43 degrees Celsius were expected in areas of southern Spain and Portugal, while nearly all of France is sweltering in heat expected to last for several days.
In Italy, 21 cities were on high alert for extreme heat, including Milan, Naples, Venice, Florence and Rome.
“We were supposed to be visiting the Colosseum, but my mum nearly fainted,” said British tourist Anna Becker, who had traveled to Rome from a “muggy, miserable” Verona.
Hospital emergency departments across Italy have reported an uptick in heatstroke cases, according to Mario Guarino, vice president of the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine.
“We’ve seen around a 10 percent increase, mainly in cities that not only have very high temperatures but also a higher humidity rate. It is mainly elderly people, cancer patients or homeless people, presenting with dehydration, heat stroke, fatigue,” he told AFP.
Hospitals like the Ospedale dei Colli in Naples have set up dedicated heatstroke pathways to speed access to vital treatments like cold water immersion, Guarino said.
In Venice, authorities offered free guided tours for people over 75s in air-conditioned museums and public buildings.
Facing possible prison, former Brazilian president Bolsonaro seeks to rally faithful
- Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro faces decades in prison if convicted of plotting to cling to power despite losing the 2022 election
SAO PAULO: Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro called for his supporters to rally Sunday in his defense, as he faces decades in prison if convicted of plotting to cling to power despite losing the 2022 election.
“Brazil needs all of us. It’s for freedom, for justice,” the far-right former president (2019-2022) said on X, urging his supporters to march along Sao Paulo’s Paulista Avenue, a key thoroughfare of Latin America’s largest metropolis.
“This is a call for us to show strength... this massive presence will give us courage,” he declared Saturday night on the AuriVerde Brasil YouTube channel.
The demonstration — which already had drawn crowds of Bolsonaro supporters by mid-morning Sunday — follows a hectic several weeks for the embattled ex-leader.
During a key phase in his Supreme Court trial earlier this month, he denied involvement in an alleged coup plot to wrest back power after leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva narrowly beat Bolsonaro at the ballot box in October 2022.
Brazil’s police have also called for Bolsonaro to be separately charged with illegal espionage while president, along with his son.
Bolsonaro, 70, has rejected any wrongdoing, claiming the various cases against him amount to politically motivated judicial hounding, aimed at preventing him from making a comeback in the 2026 elections.
The former army captain dreams of emulating Donald Trump’s return to the White House, despite being banned from holding public office until 2030 over his attacks on Brazil’s electronic voting system.
Bolsonaro had already called for several protests throughout his legal saga, but attendance appears to have declined in recent months.
According to estimates by the University of Sao Paulo, some 45,000 people participated in the most recent march on Paulista Avenue in April, almost four times fewer than in February.
Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas said he would attend the march and urged others to join.
“We need to talk about freedom... we are going to promote peace.”
De Freitas, a former Bolsonaro minister, is a top candidate to represent the conservatives in the 2026 presidential election.
