Politics
Erin’s explosive growth hammers Caribbean, raises flooding risks for US coast
Hurricane Erin’s massive footprint battered Caribbean islands with heavy gusts and downpours on Monday, as it threatened rip currents and flooding along the US East Coast later this week, even without a predicted landfall.
The Category 4 storm strengthened dramatically over the weekend in a historic burst of intensification, scientists said was fueled by human-caused climate change. It briefly peaked as a Category 5 hurricane before weakening slightly.
In its latest advisory, the US National Hurricane Center said the Atlantic season’s first hurricane was packing maximum sustained winds of 140 miles (220 kilometres) per hour while moving northwest at 10 mph.
Erin is “unusually large,” with hurricane force winds extending 80 miles and tropical storm winds extending 230 miles, the NHC said.
The storm’s outer bands were forecast to dump rain across Cuba and the Dominican Republic through Monday, as well as the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas — where a tropical storm warning is in place — into Tuesday.
These regions could receive localised totals of up to six inches (15 centimetres) of rain, according to the NHC.
The agency’s deputy director, Jamie Rhome, warned Americans not to assume the hurricane won’t impact them simply because its track keeps it offshore.
“Nothing could be further from the truth for portions of the Mid-Atlantic, especially the Outer Banks of North Carolina,” he said. On Wednesday and Thursday, waves of up to 20 feet (six meters), coastal flooding and storm surge “could overwash dunes and flood homes, flood roads and make some communities impassable,” he said.
Evacuations have been ordered for two North Carolina islands, Ocracoke and Hatteras.
From Tuesday, much of the East Coast will face a high risk of life-threatening surf and rip currents, which occur when channels of water surge away from the shore.
In Puerto Rico, a US territory of more than three million people, weekend flooding swamped homes and roads in the island’s east, and widespread power outages left residents in the dark, though nearly all service has since been restored.
Climate link
“Erin is one of the fastest, most intensifying storms in the modern record,” Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Climate Central, told AFP.
“We see that it has intensified over these warm surface temperatures — and this makes a lot of sense, because we know that hurricanes act like heat engines taking up energy from the ocean surface, converting that energy into winds.”
According to Climate Central, Erin travelled over waters whose extreme warmth was made up to 100 times more likely through climate change.
The Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, has now entered its historical peak.
Despite a relatively quiet start with just four named storms so far, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) continues to forecast an “above-normal” season.
A typical season produces 14 named storms, of which seven become hurricanes and three strengthen into major hurricanes.
This year, tropical activity is expected to be elevated by a combination of warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean, along with an active West African monsoon, NOAA said.
Scientists broadly agree that climate change is supercharging tropical cyclones: warmer oceans fuel stronger winds, a warmer atmosphere intensifies rainfall, and higher sea levels magnify storm surge.
Climate change may also be making hurricanes more frequent.
A man in India’s south brutally killed his estranged wife at a women’s hostel and took a selfie with her dead body, according to NDTV.
The victim, identified as Sripriya, employed at a private firm in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, had separated from her husband, Balamurugam, who was from Tirunelveli.
Police said the suspect arrived at the hostel on Sunday afternoon, concealing a sickle in his clothes, and was seeking to meet her.
They had an argument soon after the couple met, and the feud turned into a violent attack by Balamurugan, who drew the sickle and hacked the woman to death.
Furthermore, the police said he then took a selfie with her body and shared it on his WhatsApp status, accusing her of “betrayal”.
The incident spread panic and chaos in the hostel.
Following the brutal murder, the suspect did not escape from the spot but waited until the police arrived, and he was arrested at the crime scene. The murder weapon was recovered.
The initial investigation suggested that he suspected his wife of being in a relationship with another man.
- Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand witness large scale devastation.
- At least 176 people perish in Thailand and three in Malaysia.
- Indonesia’s death toll reaches 502 with 508 more still missing.
PALEMBAYAN: Rescue teams in western Indonesia were battling on Monday to clear roads cut off by cyclone-induced landslides and floods, as improved weather revealed more of the scale of a disaster that has killed close to 700 people in Southeast Asia.
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have seen large scale devastation after a rare tropical storm formed in the Malacca Strait, fuelling torrential rains and wind gusts for a week that hampered efforts to reach people stranded by mudslides and high floodwaters.
At least 176 have been killed in Thailand and three in Malaysia, while the death toll climbed to 502 in Indonesia on Monday with 508 missing, according to official figures.
Under sunshine and clear blue skies in the town of Palembayan in Indonesia’s West Sumatra, hundreds of people were clearing mud, trees and wreckage from roads as some residents tried to salvage valuable items like documents and motorcycles from their damaged homes.
Men in camouflage outfits sifted through piles of mangled poles, concrete and sheet metal roofing as pickup trucks packed with people drove around looking for missing family members and handing out water to people, some trudging through knee-deep mud.
Months of adverse, deadly weather
The government’s recovery efforts include restoring roads, bridges and telecommunication services.
More than 28,000 homes have been damaged in Indonesia and 1.4 million people affected, according to the disaster agency.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto visited the three affected provinces on Monday and praised residents for their spirit in the face of what he called a catastrophe.
“There are roads that are still cut off, but we’re doing everything we can to overcome difficulties,” he said in North Sumatra.
“We face this disaster with resilience and solidarity. Our nation is strong right now, able to overcome this.”
The devastation in the three countries follows months of adverse and deadly weather in Southeast Asia, including typhoons that have lashed the Philippines and Vietnam and caused frequent and prolonged flooding elsewhere.
Scientists have warned that extreme weather events will become more frequent as a result of global warming.
Marooned for days
In Thailand, the death toll rose slightly to 176 on Monday from flooding in eight southern provinces that affected about three million people and led to a major mobilisation of its military to evacuate critical patients from hospitals and reach people marooned for days by floodwaters.
In the hardest-hit province of Songkhla, where 138 people were killed, the government said 85% of water services had been restored and would be fully operational by Wednesday.
Much of Thailand’s recovery effort is focused on the worst-affected city Hat Yai, a southern trading hub which on November 21 received 335 mm (13 inches) of rain, its highest single-day tally in 300 years, followed by days of unrelenting downpours.
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has set a timeline of seven days for residents to return to their homes, a government spokesperson said on Monday.
In neighbouring Malaysia, 11,600 people were still in evacuation centres, according to the country’s disaster agency, which said it was still on alert for a second and third wave of flooding.
- Ex-Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina, sister Rehana also sentenced.
- Case relates to illegal allocation of a plot of land: local media.
- Prosecutors highlight political influence, collusion abuse of power.
DHAKA: A Bangladesh court sentenced British parliamentarian and former minister Tulip Siddiq to two years in jail in a corruption case involving the alleged illegal allocation of a plot of land, local media reported.
The verdict was delivered in absentia as Siddiq, her aunt and former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and Hasina’s sister Sheikh Rehana — all co-accused in the case — were not present in court.
Hasina was sentenced to five years in jail and Rehana to seven, the local media reports said.
Hasina, who fled to neighbouring India in August 2024 at the height of an uprising against her government, was sentenced to death last month over her government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators during the protests.
Last week, she was handed a combined 21-year prison sentence in other corruption cases.
Prosecutors said that the land was unlawfully allocated through political influence and collusion with senior officials, accusing the three powerful defendants of abusing their authority to secure the plot, measuring roughly 13,610 square feet, during Hasina’s tenure as prime minister.
Most of the 17 accused were absent when the judgement was pronounced.
Siddiq, who resigned in January as the UK’s minister responsible for financial services and anti-corruption efforts following scrutiny over her financial ties to Hasina, has previously dismissed the allegations as a “politically motivated smear”.
Britain does not currently have an extradition treaty with Bangladesh.
UK budget mildly deflationary; debt to climb past 106%: Fitch
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