Race to get aid to Asia flood survivors as toll nears 1,200
Governments and aid groups in Indonesia and Sri Lanka worked to rush aid Tuesday to hundreds of thousands stranded by deadly flooding that has killed around 1,200 people in four countries.Torrential monsoon season deluges paired with two separate tropical cyclones last week dumped heavy rain across all of Sri Lanka and parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia.Climate change is producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms.The floodwaters have now largely receded, but the devastation means hundreds of thousands of people are now living in shelters and struggling to secure clean water and food.In Indonesia’s Aceh, one of the worst-affected regions, residents told AFP that survivors who could afford to were stockpiling supplies.”Road access is mostly cut off in flood-affected areas,” 29-year-old Erna Mardhiah said as she joined a long queue at a petrol station in Banda Aceh.”People are worried about running out of fuel,” she added from the line she had been in for two hours.The pressure has caused skyrocketing prices.”Most things are already sky-high… chillies alone are up to 300,000 rupiah per kilo ($18), so that’s probably why people are panic-buying,” she said.On Monday, Indonesia’s government said it was sending 34,000 tons of rice and 6.8 million litres of cooking oil to the three worst-affected provinces, Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra.”There can be no delays,” Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman said.- Food shortage risk -Aid groups said they were working to ship supplies to affected areas, warning that local markets were running out of essential supplies and prices had tripled already.”Communities across Aceh are at severe risk of food shortages and hunger if supply lines are not reestablished in the next seven days,” charity group Islamic Relief said.A shipment of 12 tonnes of food from the group aboard an Indonesian navy vessel was due to arrive in Aceh on Tuesday.At least 631 people were killed in the floods across Sumatra, and 472 are still listed as missing. A million people have evacuated from their homes, according to the disaster agency.Survivors have described terrifying waves of water that arrived without warning.In East Aceh, Zamzami said the floodwaters had been “unstoppable, like a tsunami wave.””We can’t explain how big the water seemed, it was truly extraordinary,” said the 33-year-old, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.People in his village sheltered atop a local two-storey fish market to escape the deluge and were now trying to clean the mud and debris left behind while battling power and telecommunications outages.”It’s difficult for us (to get) clean water,” he told AFP on Monday.”There are children who are starting to get fevers, and there’s no medicine.”The weather system that inundated Indonesia also brought heavy rain to southern Thailand, where at least 176 people were killed.Across the border in Malaysia, two more people were killed.- Colombo floodwaters recede -A separate storm brought heavy rains across all of Sri Lanka, triggering flash floods and deadly landslides that killed at least 390 people.Another 352 remain missing, and some of the worst-hit areas in the country’s centre are still difficult to reach.President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with what he called the “most challenging natural disaster in our history”.Unlike his Indonesian counterpart, he has called for international aid.Sri Lanka’s air force, backed by counterparts from India and Pakistan, has been evacuating stranded residents and delivering food and other supplies.In the mountainous Welimada region, security forces on Monday recovered the bodies of 11 residents buried by mudslides, a local official said.In the capital Colombo meanwhile, floodwaters were slowly subsiding on Tuesday.The speed with which waters rose around the city surprised local residents used to seasonal flooding.”Every year we experience minor floods, but this is something else,” delivery driver Dinusha Sanjaya told AFP.”It is not just the amount of water, but how quickly everything went under.”Rains have eased across the country, but landslide alerts remain in force across most of the hardest-hit central region, officials said.burs-sah/mtp
Présidentielle au Honduras: les candidats de droite, dont celui soutenu par Trump, au coude-à-coude
Les candidats de droite à la présidence au Honduras sont au coude-à-coude lundi à l’issue du dépouillement préliminaire des procès-verbaux, dans un duel opposant l’homme d’affaires Nasry Asfura, adoubé par Donald Trump, et le présentateur de télévision Salvador Nasralla.Face à cette course particulièrement serrée, M. Trump a prêté l’intention aux autorités honduriennes de vouloir truquer le résultat, sans fournir la preuve de cette accusation.Les Honduriens ont sanctionné lors du scrutin de dimanche la gauche dirigée par la présidente Xiomara Castro, qui gouverne l’un des pays les plus pauvres d’Amérique latine, miné par la violence des gangs, le trafic de drogue et la corruption. Mme Castro est arrivée au pouvoir en 2021, plus d’une décennie après le coup d’État contre son époux, Manuel Zelaya, qui s’était rapproché du Venezuela et de Cuba.Nasry Asfura, ancien maire de Tegucigalpa âgé de 67 ans, devance Salvador Nasralla, animateur de télévision de 72 ans, de seulement 515 voix après le décompte numérique de 57% des procès-verbaux, a déclaré en milieu de journée sur le réseau social X la présidente du Conseil national électoral (CNE). Ce faible écart constitue, compte tenu de la marge d’erreur, une “égalité technique”, a indiqué Ana Paola Hall. Elle a demandé “de la patience” aux électeurs, sans préciser quand le dépouillement manuel prendra fin. Il pourrait durer plusieurs jours.”Les chiffres parleront d’eux-mêmes”, a affirmé M. Asfura, du Parti national (PN), depuis son quartier général de campagne. M. Nasralla, du Parti libéral (PL), se dit en tête avec cinq points d’avance, selon ses projections.”On dirait que le Honduras est en train d’essayer de changer le résultat de son élection présidentielle. S’ils le font, ils le paieront cher!”, a écrit lundi soir M. Trump sur son réseau Truth Social, accusant le CNE d’avoir “abruptement cessé de compter” les voix, sans étayer cette affirmation.Tant M. Nasralla que M. Asfura ont mené campagne sur la peur que le maintien de la gauche conduise le Honduras à devenir un autre Venezuela, pays dans une crise profonde. La candidate de la gauche au pouvoir, l’avocate Rixi Moncada, 60 ans, arrive loin derrière selon les résultats partiels.- Grâce pour un ancien président – La campagne a été marquée ces derniers jours par l’irruption de Donald Trump, qui a adopté une position interventionniste dans toute la région, n’hésitant pas à conditionner l’aide américaine à la bonne volonté des gouvernements et à ses affinités avec leurs dirigeants.S’agissant du Honduras, le président américain a assuré que “s’il (Asfura) ne remporte pas les élections, les Etats-Unis ne gaspilleront pas leur argent”.Il a assuré qu’il “ne pourrait pas travailler” avec Rixi Moncada “et les communistes”, et qu’il ne faisait “pas confiance” à Salvador Nasralla.”Tito (Nasry Asfura) et moi pouvons travailler ensemble pour lutter contre les +narco-communistes+ et apporter au peuple du Honduras l’aide dont il a besoin”, a affirmé M. Trump.Le dirigeant républicain a aussi annoncé qu’il gracierait l’ancien président hondurien Juan Orlando Hernandez, qui a gouverné de 2014 à 2022 sous la bannière du parti de Nasry Asfura et purge sur le sol américain une peine de 45 ans de prison pour avoir aidé à expédier des centaines de tonnes de cocaïne vers les Etats-Unis.Cette grâce annoncée va à contre-courant du déploiement militaire de Washington dans les Caraïbes, dans le cadre d’opérations antidrogue visant particulièrement le Venezuela.Mme Moncada a dénoncé l’ingérence des Etats-Unis dans le processus électoral.Nasry Asfura brigue la présidence pour la deuxième fois après avoir perdu en 2021 face à Mme Castro, et Salvador Nasralla pour la troisième fois. Au Honduras, pays parmi les plus instables d’Amérique latine, les politiciens n’ont pas bonne réputation. Lors de la campagne, les principales préoccupations des citoyens, comme la pauvreté qui touche les deux tiers des 11 millions d’habitants ou la violence, ont été à peine évoquées.”Ils ne font rien pour les pauvres, les riches deviennent chaque jour plus riches et les pauvres chaque jour plus pauvres, seuls des voleurs nous gouvernent”, a commenté lundi auprès de l’AFP Henry Hernandez, un gardien de voitures de 53 ans. Michelle Pineda, commerçante de 38 ans, espère que le gagnant de ce duel serré verra dans le pays “autre chose qu’un sac d’argent à piller”.
South Korean leader calls for penalties over e-commerce data leak
South Korea’s president ordered on Tuesday swift action to penalise those responsible for a major data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang affecting more than 33 million customers.It was “astonishing that the company failed to recognise the breach for five months”, President Lee Jae Myung said, adding that the “scale of the damage is massive”.Coupang is South Korea’s most popular online shopping platform, serving millions of customers with lightning-fast deliveries of products from groceries to gadgets.Seoul has said the leak took place through overseas servers from June 24 to November 8.But Coupang only became aware of it last month, according to police and local media, who said the company had issued a complaint in November against the alleged culprit — a former employee and a Chinese national.On Tuesday, Lee ordered the government to “strengthen fines and make punitive damages a reality”, calling for “substantive and effective countermeasures”.”The cause of the accident must be quickly identified and (those responsible) must be held strictly accountable,” he said.Police said Monday they were tracing computer IP addresses and looking into possible international collaboration as part of their investigation.They warned the leak could “threaten the daily lives and safety of every single citizen”.Coupang has told customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and some order histories had been exposed in the leak.But the company said their payment details and login credentials had not been affected.The case follows a major breach at South Korea’s largest mobile carrier SK Telecom, which was fined about 134 billion won ($91 million) in August after a cyberattack exposed data on nearly 27 million users.South Korea is among the world’s most wired countries, but has also been a target of hacking by arch-rival North Korea.Police announced last year that North Korean hackers were behind the theft of sensitive data from a South Korean court computer network — including individuals’ financial records — over a two-year period.And last month Yonhap News Agency reported that South Korean authorities suspected a North Korean hacking group may be behind the recent cyberattack on cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, which led to the unauthorised withdrawal of 44.5 billion won in digital assets.