Day: September 18, 2022

Typhoon Nanmadol made landfall in southwestern Japan on Sunday night, as authorities urged millions of people to take shelter from the powerful storm’s high winds and torrential rain.

The storm officially made landfall around 7 pm local time (1000 GMT) as its eyewall arrived near Kagoshima city, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

Nanmadol had wind gusts of up to 234 kilometers per hour and had already dumped up to 500 mm of rain in less than 24 hours on parts of southwestern Kyushu region.

At least 20,000 people were spending the night in shelters in Kyushu’s Kagoshima and Miyazaki prefectures, where the JMA has issued a rare “special warning” — an alert that is issued only when it forecasts conditions seen once in several decades.

National broadcaster NHK, which collates information from local authorities, said more than seven million people had been told to move to shelters or take refuge in sturdy buildings to ride out the storm.

The evacuation warnings are not mandatory, and authorities have at times struggled to convince people to move to shelters before extreme weather.

They sought to drive home their concerns about the weather system throughout the weekend.

“Please stay away from dangerous places, and please evacuate if you feel even the slightest hint of danger,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida tweeted after convening a government meeting on the storm.

“It will be dangerous to evacuate at night. Please move to safety while it’s still light outside.”

The JMA has warned the region could face “unprecedented” danger from high winds, storm surges and torrential rain and called the storm “very dangerous.”

“Areas affected by the storm are seeing the sort of rain that has never been experienced before,” Hiro Kato, the head of the Weather Monitoring and Warning Centre, told reporters Sunday.

“Especially in areas under landslide warnings, it is extremely probable that some kinds of landslides are already happening.”

He urged “maximum caution even in areas where disasters do not usually happen.”

By Sunday evening, utility companies said nearly 200,000 homes across the region were without power.

Trains, flights and ferry runs were cancelled until the passage of the storm, and even some convenience stores generally open all hours and considered a lifeline in disasters — were shutting their doors.

‘Highest caution possible’

“The southern part of the Kyushu region may see the sort of violent wind, high waves and high tides that have never been experienced before,” the JMA said Sunday, urging residents to exercise “the highest caution possible.”

On the ground, an official in Kagoshima’s Izumi city said conditions were deteriorating rapidly by Sunday afternoon.

“The wind has become extremely strong. Rain is falling hard too,” he told AFP. “It’s a total white-out outside. Visibility is almost zero.”

In Kyushu’s Minamata city, fishing boats tied up for safety bobbed on the waves, as spray from the sea and bands of rain sluiced the boardwalk.

The storm, which has weakened slightly as it approached land, is expected to turn northeast and sweep up across Japan’s main island through early Wednesday.

Japan is currently in typhoon season and faces around 20 such storms a year, routinely seeing heavy rains that cause landslides or flash floods.

In 2019, Typhoon Hagibis smashed into Japan as it hosted the Rugby World Cup, claiming the lives of more than 100 people.

A year earlier, Typhoon Jebi shut down Kansai Airport in Osaka, killing 14 people.

And in 2018, floods and landslides killed more than 200 people in western Japan during the country’s annual rainy season.

Scientists say climate change is increasing the severity of storms and causing extreme weather such as heat waves, droughts and flash floods to become more frequent and intense.

Source: Voice of America

As world leaders gather in New York at the annual U.N. General Assembly, rising superpower China is also focusing on another United Nations body that is meeting across the Atlantic Ocean in Geneva.

Chinese diplomats are speaking out and lobbying others at an ongoing session of the Human Rights Council to thwart a possible call for further scrutiny of what it calls its anti-extremism campaign in Xinjiang, following a United Nations report on abuses against Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic groups in the western China border region.

The concurrent meetings illustrate China’s divided approach to the United Nations and its growing global influence. Beijing looks to the U.N., where it can count on support from countries it has befriended and in many cases assisted financially, as a counterweight to U.S.-led blocs such as the Group of Seven, which have grown increasingly hostile toward China.

“China sees the U.N. as an important forum that it can use to further its strategic interests and goals, and to reform the global order,” said Helena Legarda from the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.

While holding up the United Nations as a model of multilateralism, China rejects criticism or decisions that the ruling Communist Party sees as counter to its interests. Its diplomats struck back at the report published last month by the U.N. human rights office raising concerns about possible “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang — vowing to suspend cooperation with the office and blasting what it described as a Western plot to undermine China’s rise.

China had pushed hard to block the report on Xinjiang, delaying its release for more than a year. In the end, the information did come out — but just minutes before embattled U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet left office.

Like the United States, China feels a certain freedom to ignore U.N. institutions when it wants: The Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the Human Rights Council in 2018, accusing it of anti-Israel bias. The Biden administration jumped back in this year and has made a priority of defending Israel in the 47-member-state body.

Also like the United States, China leverages its influence to get its way — effectively stymieing an investigation by the U.N.’s World Health Organization into whether China was the birthplace of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ken Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Chinese President Xi Jinping is trying to redefine what human rights are, in part by casting economic development as a key criterion. China, Roth said, “more than any government in the past, is trying to undermine the U.N. human rights system” — by pressuring U.N. officials, retaliating against witnesses and trying to bribe governments.

“One of their top priorities right now — maybe after Taiwan — is to avoid condemnation by the Human Rights Council,” Roth said. The self-governing island of Taiwan is claimed by China as its sovereign territory, an issue that the Beijing government is vociferous about internationally.

Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Renmin University in China, said advocating for the U.N.’s role in maintaining the international order doesn’t mean that China agrees with every U.N. body, citing the COVID-19 origins study and the recent Xinjiang report.

“When the U.N high commissioner for human rights issues such a report, in the eyes of China, it is the same as all organizations in the world, no matter official or private, that defames China,” Shi said.

But China doesn’t want its pique toward the rights office, which falls under U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, to spill over to its deepening relationship with other parts of the world body that deal with refugees, climate, the internet, satellites, world hunger, atomic weapons, energy and much more.

China wields power as one of the five veto-holding members of the Security Council, helping it build relationships with the United States and others who needed China’s support for past resolutions on Iran and North Korea.

That influence has diminished somewhat with the overall deterioration of U.S.-China ties, Shi said. Subsequently, both China and Russia vetoed a U.S.-backed resolution in May to impose new sanctions on North Korea.

Under Xi, who came to power 10 years ago, China has expanded its U.N. involvement from primarily international development early on to political, peace and security issues, Legarda said.

China has stepped into a diplomatic void created by a lack of U.S. leadership, said Daniel Warner, a Geneva-based political analyst. Former President Donald Trump shunned many international institutions, Warner said, and successor Joe Biden has been preoccupied with domestic issues.

China holds the top jobs at three of the U.N.’s 18 specialized agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Industrial Development Organization and the International Telecommunications Union, where the United States has put up a candidate to succeed outgoing chief Houlin Zhao. A Chinese official headed the International Civil Aviation Organization until last year.

For China, it’s a matter of prestige as well as influence, Warner said.

“The United States and the Western countries were very much involved in the initial United Nations,” he said. “China doesn’t want to have that kind of leadership. They’re not talking about liberal values, but they want to make sure that their interests are defended in the U.N. system.”

Chinese diplomats spearheaded a joint statement — which it said was backed by 30 countries including Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — that blasted “disinformation” behind the U.N. report on Xinjiang and the “erroneous conclusions” drawn in it. And China’s ambassador in Geneva said Beijing could no longer cooperate with the human rights office — without specifying how.

Sarah Brooks, a China expert at the International Society for Human Rights advocacy group in Geneva, said China could hold up its funding for the office — which lately has come in at $800,000 a year, far less than Western countries that give tens of millions.

Still, Brooks said it would be a “huge blow” if funding from China were to stop, in part because many countries appreciate and support the causes that Beijing helps pay for.

“The optics of it are really damaging,” she said. “You have a country that says, ‘Hi, I want to be responsible, but I’m so thin-skinned … I’m still going to lash out at the organization that drafted it.’”

Source: Voice of America

PHNOM PENH– Cambodia’s anti-drug police arrested two local men, for allegedly possessing and trafficking in illicit drugs, confiscating 7.8 kg of narcotics, the National Police reported, yesterday.

The two suspects were apprehended during a raid on three locations in Phnom Penh’s Boeung Keng Kang and Meanchey districts, early Friday, after an investigation for months.

“A total of 7.8 kg of drugs, including 7.51 kg of ecstasy (MDMA) and 0.29 kg of ketamine, were seized from the suspects during the crackdown,” the National Police said, on its website.

The country has no death sentence for drug trafficking. Under its law, those found guilty of trafficking more than 80 grams of illicit drugs could be jailed for life.

According to the Anti-Drug Police Department (ADP), Cambodia nabbed 10,545 drug suspects, including 154 foreigners, during the Jan-Aug period this year, seizing a total of 6.11 tons of narcotics.

Source: Nam News Network