MANILA: The death toll from a tropical storm that pummelled the central Philippines rose to 43 with hopes fading for dozens of others still missing after massive landslides, authorities said Tuesday.
Slow-moving Kai-Tak finally swept out to the South China Sea on Monday after inducing days of heavy rain that led to deadly floods and landslides as it sliced across the central islands last weekend.
The government’s disaster monitoring agency listed 43 dead in an updated tally and said 45 other people were still missing, many of them feared buried by mud avalanches that struck the small island of Biliran.
“The retrieval operations are still ongoing but we are not finding anyone alive. We only find dead bodies,” Sofronio Dacillo, a disaster monitoring officer, told AFP by telephone from Biliran.
“We still have not given up hope of finding someone alive but the chances are slim.”
Bulldozers continued to dig for survivors in houses buried by landslides on Biliran, located about 500 kilometers (310 miles) southeast of Manila. The island accounted for 30 of the 43 deaths, with 31 residents missing, authorities said.
The storm’s slow movement caused large volumes of rain to fall on the central Philippines, government weather forecaster Jun Galang told AFP.
“It stayed almost stationary so it dumped a lot of rain and caused a lot of landslides which caused many deaths,” Galang said.
About half of the more than 100,000 people who fled their homes remained inside evacuation centers this week, the government said.
As rescue efforts continued, Philippine authorities monitored another low-pressure area in the Pacific Ocean that the state weather service said could develop into a storm and strike the archipelago over the Christmas weekend.
The Philippines is battered by 20 major storms each year on average, many of them deadly.
Philippine storm toll rises to 43 as hopes fade for dozens missing
Philippine storm toll rises to 43 as hopes fade for dozens missing
Rubio says technical talks with Denmark, Greenland officials over Arctic security have begun
- US Secretary of State on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland
WASHINGTON: Technical talks between the US, Denmark and Greenland over hatching an Arctic security deal are now underway, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland agreed to create a working group aimed at addressing differences with the US during a Washington meeting earlier this month with Vice President JD Vance and Rubio.
The group was created after President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for the US to take over Greenland, a Danish territory, in the name of countering threats from Russia and China — calls that Greenland, Denmark and European allies forcefully rejected.
“It begins today and it will be a regular process,” Rubio said of the working group, as he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We’re going to try to do it in a way that isn’t like a media circus every time these conversations happen, because we think that creates more flexibility on both sides to arrive at a positive outcome.”
The Danish Foreign Ministry said Wednesday’s talks focused on “how we can address US concerns about security in the Arctic while respecting the red lines of the Kingdom.” Red lines refers to the sovereignty of Greenland.
Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally, has roiled US-European relations.
Trump this month announced he would slap new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries that opposed his takeover calls, only to abruptly drop his threats after a “framework” for a deal over access to the mineral-rich island was reached, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.
After stiff pushback from European allies to his Greenland rhetoric, Trump also announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that he would take off the table the possibility of using American military force to acquire Greenland.
The president backed off his tariff threats and softened his language after Wall Street suffered its biggest losses in months over concerns that Trump’s Greenland ambitions could spur a trade war and fundamentally rupture NATO, a 32-member transatlantic military alliance that’s been a linchpin of post-World War II security.
Rubio on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland.
“We’ve got a little bit of work to do, but I think we’re going to wind up in a good place, and I think you’ll hear the same from our colleagues in Europe very shortly,” Rubio said.
Rubio during Wednesday’s hearing also had a pointed exchange with Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, about Trump repeatedly referring to Greenland as Iceland while at Davos.
“Yeah, he meant to say Greenland, but I think we’re all familiar with presidents that have verbal stumbles,” Rubio said in responding to Kaine’s questions about Trump’s flub — taking a veiled dig at former President Joe Biden. “We’ve had presidents like that before. Some made a lot more than this one.”
