TAIPEI, Taiwan: Taiwan evacuated more than 3,000 people from vulnerable areas and closed schools and offices on Tuesday ahead of the arrival of tropical storm Fung-wong, which killed at least 18 people and displaced more than 1.4 million in the Philippines after making landfall there Sunday.
Fung-wong was classified as a typhoon but is losing intensity while approaching Taiwan and is expected to make landfall Wednesday afternoon or evening near the southwestern port city of Kaohsiung.
On Tuesday morning, the storm had maximum sustained winds of up to 108 kph (67 mph) and gusts of 137 kph (85 mph) and is expected to sweep across the island and exit from its northeastern side Wednesday evening or early Thursday, Taiwan’s weather agency said.
More than 3,300 people from four counties and cities have been evacuated near the eastern township of Guangfu, where flooding from a typhoon in September caused a barrier lake to overflow, killing 18 people.
Schools and offices were closed on Tuesday in Hualien and Yilan counties, while weather authorities issued a land warning covering south and southwestern areas including Kaohsiung, Pingtung County, Tainan and Taitung.
China activated an emergency typhoon response for its southeastern Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Hainan provinces.
Fung-wong slammed into the northeastern Philippine coast from the Pacific on Sunday as a super typhoon with maximum sustained winds of 185 kph (115 mph) and gusts of up to 230 kph (143 mph). The 1,800-kilometer (1,100-mile)-wide storm killed at least 18 people in flash floods and landslides in several northern provinces.
More than a million people remained displaced Tuesday, including about 803,000 sheltering in 11,000 evacuation centers across the northern Luzon region, Office of Civil Defense deputy director Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV said.
Among the dead were three children whose houses were buried in two separate landslides in the mountainous province of Nueva Vizcaya that injured four others, while a landslide in nearby Kalinga province killed two villagers and two others were missing, officials said.
“It’s not mass casualty in one place,” Alejandro said Tuesday, noting several people were killed in separate landslides.
The Philippines and Taiwan are battered by numerous typhoons and storms each year.
Taiwan evacuates thousands ahead of tropical storm Fung-wong after deaths in the Philippines
https://arab.news/pzbj9
Taiwan evacuates thousands ahead of tropical storm Fung-wong after deaths in the Philippines
- On Tuesday morning, the storm had maximum sustained winds of up to 108 kph
- More than 3,300 people from four counties and cities have been evacuated near the eastern township of Guangfu
Aid workers stand trial in Greece on migrant smuggling charges
- All 24 defendants are affiliated with rescue group ERCI, which operated on Greece's Lesbos island from 2016 to 2018
- EU countries are tightening rules on migration as right-wing parties gain ground across the bloc amid a migration crisis
ATHENS: Two dozen aid workers went on trial in Greece on Thursday on charges including migrant smuggling, in a case that rights groups have dismissed as a baseless attempt to outlaw aid for refugees heading to Europe.
The trial on the island of Lesbos comes as EU countries, including Greece — which saw more than one million people reaching its shores during Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015-2016 — are tightening rules on migration as right-wing parties gain ground across the bloc.
The 24 defendants, affiliated with the Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), a nonprofit search-and-rescue group that operated on Lesbos from 2016 to 2018, face multi-year prison sentences. The felony charges include involvement in a criminal group facilitating the illegal entry of migrants and money laundering linked to the group’s funding.
Among them is Sarah Mardini, one of two Syrian sisters who saved refugees in 2015 by pulling their sinking dinghy to shore and whose story inspired the popular 2022 Netflix movie The Swimmers, and Sean Binder, a German national who began volunteering for ERCI in 2017. They were arrested in 2018 and spent over 100 days in pre-trial detention before being released pending trial. “The trial’s result will define if humanitarian aid will be judicially protected from absurd charges or whether it will be left to the maelstrom of arbitrary narratives by prosecuting authorities,” defense lawyer Zacharias Kesses told Reuters. Greece has toughened its stance on migrants. Since 2019, the center-right government has reinforced border controls with fences and sea patrols and in July it temporarily suspended processing asylum applications for migrants arriving from North Africa.
Anyone caught helping migrants to shore today may face charges including facilitating illegal entry into Greece or helping a criminal enterprise under a 2021 law passed as part of Europe’s efforts to counter mass migration from the Middle East and Asia. In 2023, a Greek court dropped espionage charges against the defendants.
Rights groups have criticized the case as baseless and lacking in evidence. “The case depends on deeply-flawed logic,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement. “Saving lives at sea is mischaracterized as migrant smuggling, so the search-and-rescue group is a criminal organization, and therefore, the group’s legitimate fundraising is money laundering.”
