Typhoon Yagi Kills 2 in China's Hainan as it Makes its Way to Vietnam

People ride scooters past falling trees after Super Typhoon Yagi hit Haikou, in southern China's Hainan province on September 7, 2024. (Photo by CNS / AFP)
People ride scooters past falling trees after Super Typhoon Yagi hit Haikou, in southern China's Hainan province on September 7, 2024. (Photo by CNS / AFP)
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Typhoon Yagi Kills 2 in China's Hainan as it Makes its Way to Vietnam

People ride scooters past falling trees after Super Typhoon Yagi hit Haikou, in southern China's Hainan province on September 7, 2024. (Photo by CNS / AFP)
People ride scooters past falling trees after Super Typhoon Yagi hit Haikou, in southern China's Hainan province on September 7, 2024. (Photo by CNS / AFP)

A powerful typhoon killed two people and left at least 92 injured in the southern Chinese island of Hainan, authorities said Saturday, with heavy rains and winds causing power outages in over 800,000 households.
The typhoon Yagi is currently en route to northern Vietnam over the Gulf of Tonkin Saturday, with Vietnamese authorities describing Yagi as “one of the most powerful typhoons in the region over the past decade.”
The typhoon on Friday afternoon struck Hainan's Wenchang city, with wind speeds of up to about 245 kph (152 mph) near its center.
China’s national meteorological authorities said Yagi was the strongest autumn typhoon to have landed in China.
Some 420,000 residents were relocated in Hainan prior to the typhoon's landfall in Hainan. Another half a million people in Guangdong province were evacuated before Yagi made a second landfall in the province's Xuwen County on Friday night.
Haikou's meteorological observatory downgraded its typhoon signal from red to orange on Saturday, as the typhoon moved further away from the city.
In Hong Kong, more than 270 people were forced to seek refuge at temporary government shelters on Friday, and more than 100 flights in the city were canceled due to the typhoon. Heavy rain and strong winds felled dozens of trees, and trading on the stock market, bank services and schools were halted, The Associated Press reported.
Yagi was still a storm when it blew out of the northwestern Philippines into the South China Sea on Wednesday, leaving at least 16 people dead and 17 others missing mostly in landslides and widespread flooding and affecting more than 2 million people across the archipelago.
More than 47,600 people were displaced from their homes in Philippine provinces and classes, work, inter-island ferry services and domestic flights were disrupted for days, including in the densely populated capital region, metropolitan Manila.



Hungary’s Orban Blames Immigration and EU for Deadly Attack in Germany

 Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban holds an international press conference in Budapest, Hungary, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban holds an international press conference in Budapest, Hungary, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
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Hungary’s Orban Blames Immigration and EU for Deadly Attack in Germany

 Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban holds an international press conference in Budapest, Hungary, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban holds an international press conference in Budapest, Hungary, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Saturday drew a direct link between immigration and an attack in Germany where a man drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers, killing at least five people and injuring 200 others.

During a rare appearance before independent media in Budapest, Orban expressed his sympathy to the families of the victims of what he called the “terrorist act” on Friday night in the city of Magdeburg. But the long-serving Hungarian leader, one of the European Union's most vocal critics, also implied that the 27-nation bloc's migration policies were to blame.

German authorities said the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, is under investigation. He has lived in Germany since 2006, practicing medicine and described himself as a former Muslim.

Orban claimed without evidence that such attacks only began to occur in Europe after 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees entered the EU after largely fleeing war and violence in the Middle East and Africa.

Europe has in fact seen numerous militant attacks going back decades including train bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004 and attacks on central London in 2005.

Still, the nationalist leader declared that “there is no doubt that there is a link” between migration and terrorism, and claimed that the EU leadership “wants Magdeburg to happen to Hungary too.”

Orban’s anti-immigrant government has taken a hard line on people entering Hungary since 2015, and has built fences protected by razor wire on Hungary's southern borders with Serbia and Croatia.

In June, the European Court of Justice ordered Hungary to pay a fine of 200 million euros ($216 million) for persistently breaking the bloc’s asylum rules, and an additional 1 million euros per day until it brings its policies into line with EU law.

Orban, a right-wing populist who is consistently at odds with the EU, has earlier vowed that Hungary would not change its migration and asylum policies regardless of any rulings from the EU's top court.

On Saturday, he promised that his government will fight back against what he called EU efforts to “impose” immigration policies on Hungary.