WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump will sign an executive order later this week that declares that a deal to divest TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese owner Bytedance, will meet requirements set out in a 2024 law, a White House official said on Monday.

The United States is confident that China has approved the deal and does not plan further talks with Beijing about its details, the official told reporters on a conference call, but added that additional paperwork is required from both sides to approve the deal.

Trump is trying to keep the short video app with 170 million US users from being banned after Congress passed a law that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if its US assets were not sold by the owner ByteDance.

Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok’s US assets from the global platform, line up American investors and ensure the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the 2024 law.

Last week’s progress toward a deal on TikTok marked a rare breakthrough in months-long talks between the world’s two biggest economies that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets.

MANILA: The Chinese city of Shenzhen began preparing to evacuate 400,000 people while residents of the northern Philippines sought shelter from gale-force winds Monday as Super Typhoon Ragasa continued on a collision course with southern China.

The typhoon made landfall on the Philippines’ Calayan Island, part of the sparsely populated Babuyan chain, at 3 pm (0700 GMT), according to the Philippine weather service.

As of 2 pm (0600 GMT), maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometres per hour were reported at the storm’s centre, with gusts reaching as high as 295 kph, the national weather service said.

“I woke up because of the strong wind. It was hitting the windows, and it sounded like a machine that was switched on,” said Tirso Tugagao, a resident of Aparri, a coastal town in northern Cagayan province.

Cagayan disaster chief Rueli Rapsing told AFP his team was prepared for “the worst”.

Just over 10,000 Filipinos were evacuated across the country, with schools and government offices closed Monday in the Manila region and across 29 other provinces.

A much larger operation will take place in China’s Shenzhen, where authorities said late Sunday they planned to move hundreds of thousands of people from coastal and low-lying regions.

Multiple other cities in Guangdong province announced classes and work would be cancelled, and public transportation suspended because of the typhoon.

Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific said it expected to cancel more than 500 flights as Ragasa threatened the financial hub.

A spokeswoman for the airline said passenger flights in and out of Hong Kong International Airport would be halted from 6 pm Tuesday, “resuming during daytime hours on Thursday”.

‘Extremely torrential’

In Taiwan, the state weather service predicted a chance of “extremely torrential rain” in the country’s east.

“Its storm radius is quite large, about 320 (kilometres). Although the typhoon’s centre is still some distance away, its wide, strong wind field and outer circulation are already affecting parts of Taiwan.”

James Wu, a local fire department officer, told AFP that evacuations were ongoing in mountainous areas near Pingtung.

“What worries us more is that the damage could be similar to what happened during Typhoon Koinu two years ago,” he added, describing a storm that saw utility poles collapse and sheet-metal roofs sent flying into the air.

Philippine government weather specialist John Grender Almario said Sunday that “severe flooding and landslides” could be expected in the northern areas of the main island Luzon.

The threat of flooding from Ragasa comes just a day after thousands of Filipinos took to the streets to protest a growing corruption scandal involving flood control projects that were shabbily constructed or never completed.

The Philippines is the first major landmass facing the Pacific cyclone belt, and the archipelago is hit by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, putting millions of people in disaster-prone areas in a state of constant poverty.

Scientists warn that storms are becoming more powerful as the world warms due to the effects of human-driven climate change.

• Dozens killed in Nepal’s worst protest violence in decades.
• Protests led by Gen Z over corruption and lack of jobs.
• Over 2,100 injured; key govt buildings, malls set on fire.
  

Nepal’s interim government, led by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, has set up a panel to investigate the violence during anti-corruption protests this month that killed 74 people and forced Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to quit, a minister said on Monday.

The demonstrations, which began as a Gen Z-led movement against widespread corruption and a lack of jobs, escalated into the Himalayan nation’s deadliest violence in decades.

More than 2,100 people were injured while protesters set fire to the main office complex that houses the prime minister’s office, the Supreme Court and the parliament building, as well as malls, luxury hotels and showrooms that the demonstrators said were owned by people close to corrupt politicians.

Rameshwore Khanal, who Sushila put in charge of the finance ministry, said the three-member panel headed by retired judge Gauri Bahadur Karki had been given three months to complete the probe.

“It will investigate […] the loss of life and property during the protests, excesses by both sides and people involved in the acts of arson and vandalism during the movement,” Khanal told Reuters.

In a social media post, former Prime Minister Oli also demanded an investigation into the violence and said his government did not order police to fire at the protesters. 

The protests were infiltrated by outsiders and police did not possess the type of weapons which were used to fire on the crowd, Oli said.

Karki is the former chairman of a special court that hears corruption cases in Nepal and has a reputation for honesty and integrity.