Japan Urges 200,000 People to Evacuate Due to Heavy Rain

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water. (AFP)
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water. (AFP)
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Japan Urges 200,000 People to Evacuate Due to Heavy Rain

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water. (AFP)
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water. (AFP)

Nearly 200,000 people in western Japan were urged to evacuate on Saturday as authorities warned of landslides and floods, while the remnants of a tropical storm trickle over the country.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said "warm, moist air... was causing heavy rainfall with thunderstorms in western Japan" partly due to Kong-rey, which was downgraded to an extratropical low-pressure system from a typhoon.

The city of Matsuyama "issued the top-level warning, urging 189,552 residents in its 10 districts to evacuate and immediately secure safety", a city official told AFP.

While the evacuation was not mandatory, Japan's highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred.

Forecasters warned that landslides and floods could affect western Japan on Saturday and eastern Japan on Sunday.

Due to rain, Shinkansen bullet trains were briefly suspended between Tokyo and southern Fukuoka region in the morning before resuming on a delayed schedule.

Kong-rey smashed into Taiwan on Thursday as one of the biggest storms to hit the island in decades.

It claimed at least three lives and injured 690 people, according to the National Fire Agency, which added a migrant worker death to the toll on Saturday.

The storm knocked out power to 957,061 households, 27,781 of which were still in the dark as of Saturday.

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.



'Amateurish' Thieves Steal 2 Warhol Prints, Damage 2 More in Botched Heist at Dutch Gallery

Screen prints depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, part of a series of sixteen prints of four queens titled Reigning Queens, 1985, by Andy Warhol at museum Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, early Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
Screen prints depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, part of a series of sixteen prints of four queens titled Reigning Queens, 1985, by Andy Warhol at museum Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, early Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
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'Amateurish' Thieves Steal 2 Warhol Prints, Damage 2 More in Botched Heist at Dutch Gallery

Screen prints depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, part of a series of sixteen prints of four queens titled Reigning Queens, 1985, by Andy Warhol at museum Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, early Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
Screen prints depicting Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, part of a series of sixteen prints of four queens titled Reigning Queens, 1985, by Andy Warhol at museum Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, early Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two more badly damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the gallery owner said Friday.
Mark Peet Visser said the thieves attempted to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” which features portraits of the then-queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa which is now called Eswatini.
In a telephone interview, Visser said the heist early Friday at MPV Gallery in the town of Oisterwijk was captured on security cameras, and called it “amateurish.”
“The bomb attack was so violent that my entire building was destroyed” and nearby stores were also damaged, The Associated Press quoted him as saying. "So they did that part of it well, too well actually. And then they ran to the car with the artworks and it turns out that they won't fit in the car. ... At that moment the works are ripped out of the frames and you also know that they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.”
Visser declined to put a value on the four signed and numbered works, which he had planned to offer for sale as a set at an art fair in Amsterdam later this month.
The thieves got away with portraits of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who is now known as the queen mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the thieves fled, Visser said.