Typhoon Phanfone pummeled the central Philippines on Christmas Day, bringing a wet and miserable holiday season to millions in the mainly Catholic nation.

Thousands were stranded at shuttered ports or evacuation centers at the height of the festive season on Wednesday, and residents cowered in rain-soaked homes as Phanfone leapt from one small island to another for the second day.

The typhoon toppled houses and trees and blacked out cities in the Philippines’ most storm-prone region, but no deaths were reported.

Though weaker, Phanfone was tracking a similar path as Super Typhoon Haiyan — the country’s deadliest cyclone on record which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing in 2013.

More than 10,000 people spent the night in schools, gyms and government buildings hastily converted into evacuation centers as the typhoon made landfall Tuesday, civil defense officials said.

“It was frightening. The glass windows shattered and we took cover by the stairs,” Ailyn Metran told AFP after she and her four-year-old child spent the night at the local state weather service office where her husband worked.

A metal window frame flew off and fell onto a car parked outside the building, she said.

With just two hours’ sleep, the family returned to their home in the central city of Tacloban early Wednesday to find their two dogs safe, but the floor was covered in mud and a felled tree rested atop a nearby house.

The weather office said the typhoon strengthened slightly overnight Tuesday and was gusting at 195 kilometers (121 miles) an hour, velocities that can knock down small trees and destroy houses made of light materials.

More islands along its projected path are expected to be hit with destructive winds and intense rainfall before blowing out into the South China Sea early Thursday, it added.

More than 25,000 people trying to get home for the traditional Christmas Eve midnight dinner with their families remained stranded at ports on Christmas Day with ferry services still shut down, the coast guard said.

Scores of flights to the region also remained cancelled, though the populous capital Manila, on the northern edge has so far been spared.

The Philippines is the first major landmass facing the Pacific cyclone belt.

As such, the archipelago gets hit by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, killing scores of people and wiping out harvests, homes and other infrastructure and keeping millions perennially poor.

A July 2019 study by the Manila-based Asian Development Bank said the most frequent storms lop one percent off the Philippine economic output, with the stronger ones cutting output by nearly three percent.

(Source: AFP)

President Donald Trump says that the United States will deal with North Korea “very successfully” after Pyongyang’s warning of a “Christmas gift.” 

North Korea has promised a possible “Christmas surprise” missile test if the US does not come to the negotiating table, noting it would not give in to Washington’s pressure since it already has “nothing to lose.”

Pyongyang said the US was dragging out denuclearization negotiations ahead of Trump’s re-election bid next year, noting it was “entirely up to the US what Christmas gift it will select to get.”

While US military commanders believe the North’s response could involve the testing of a long-range missile, Trump brushed off the warning, saying maybe the surprise is a “nice present.”

“We’ll find out what the surprise is and we’ll deal with it very successfully,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday. “We’ll see what happens.”

“Maybe it’s a present where he sends me a beautiful vase as opposed to a missile test,” Trump said. “I may get a nice present from him. You don’t know. You never know.”

Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said at a press conference Friday that the United States was ready “to fight tonight.”

General Mark Milley, who was next to Esper, also said, the US alliance with Japan and South Korea was “prepared to defend the interests of the United States, Japan and South Korea at a moment’s notice.”

Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went on to say that “Korea is one of those places in the world where we’ve always maintained high levels of readiness.”

Meanwhile, China called on the United States Tuesday to take immediate action with regard to the implementation of agreements reached with North Korea during last year’s summit in Singapore.

“China calls on US to take concrete steps asap to deliver what has been agreed in Singapore. We encourage DPRK & US to work out a feasible roadmap for establishing a permanent peace regime & realizing complete denuclearization on the Peninsula,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the People’s Daily in comments relayed on Twitter by the foreign ministry.

The negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang have been largely stalled since the collapse of a February summit in Hanoi between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Kim and Trump have already held two official meetings on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. However, their first meeting, the Singapore Summit held in June 2018, concluded with a broadly-worded agreement, and the second one, the Hanoi Summit, held in February, collapsed without an agreement.

The North has been under multiple rounds of harsh sanctions by the UN and the US over its nuclear and missile programs.

Last week, China and Russia proposed the UN Security Council lift some sanctions to break the current deadlock.

A US State Department official, however, responded by saying it was not the time to consider such an action when North Korea was “threatening to conduct an escalated provocation, refusing to meet to discuss denuclearization, and continuing to maintain and advance its prohibited weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.”

Despite the sanctions, Pyongyang has taken several unilateral steps to show its goodwill, including demolishing at least one nuclear test site and agreeing to allow international inspectors into a missile engine test facility.

Source: Presstv

France’s armed forces said Monday it had carried out a drone strike for the first time, during operations in Mali at the weekend in which it said 40 “terrorists” were killed.

On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron had announced that French forces had “neutralised” 33 jihadists in the central Malian region of Mopti, in an operation that had started the previous night.

In a statement, the French military command said the drone strike happened during a follow-up operation Saturday in which another seven jihadist fighters were killed.

As French commandos were searching the combat zone in Ouagadou forest, 150 kilometres (90 miles) from the town of Mopti, “they were attacked by a group of terrorists on motorbikes,” the statement said.

A Reaper drone and a French Mirage 2000 patrol opened fire to support the ground troops, it said.

“This is the first operational strike by an armed drone,” the statement said, confirming an earlier report published in the specialist blog Le Mamouth.

The strike came just two days after the French army announced it had finished testing the remotely-piloted drones for armed operations.

It has three drones, based near Niamey, the capital of Niger.

The operation at the weekend was in an area controlled by the Katiba Macina, a ruthless Islamist group founded by radical Mopti preacher Amadou Koufa.

Two Malian gendarmes who had been held hostage were freed, and French troops seized a number of armed vehicles, motorbikes and weaponry, “delivering a very heavy blow” to the jihadists, according to Monday’s statement.

France previously said it had killed 25 jihadists in two operations in the Sahel this month.

Last month, 13 French soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash as they hunted jihadists in the north of Mali — the biggest single-day loss for the French military in nearly four decades.

France has a 4,500-member force which has been fighting jihadists in the fragile, sprawling Sahel since 2013. Forty-one soldiers have died.

Source: AFP

Queen Elizabeth II described 2019 as “quite bumpy” in a Christmas Day message at the end of a chaotic year which saw Britain bitterly divided over its split from the European Union and her scandal-plagued son Prince Andrew withdraw from public life.

The 93-year-old monarch’s address — to be televised in full Wednesday but partially released in advance — came as her husband Philip was in hospital with an undisclosed illness.

The royal family was swept up in scandals that included a calamitous BBC interview in which the queen’s second son Andrew tried to distance himself from American paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew promised to “step back from public duties” after his denial of having sex with one of Epstein’s alleged victims was ridiculed in the UK media and reportedly criticised in Buckingham Palace.

The queen pointed to the life of Jesus as an example of how reconciliation can be achieved and “how small steps taken in faith and in hope can overcome long-held differences and deep-seated divisions.”

The remarks were interpreted by many as a reference to the Brexit debate that has torn Britain apart since it voted to leave the EU in a referendum in 2016.

“The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy, but small steps can make a world of difference.”

Royal commentators noted the queen’s use of the word “bumpy”, compared to her headline-grabbing description of 1992 as an “annus horribilis”, when the marriages of three of her children fell apart and her beloved Windsor Castle nearly went up in flames.

– ‘He’s alright’ –

The queen found herself dragged into the tortuous political drama of Brexit when she approved Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s request to suspend parliament in August. Critics claimed it was an attempt to silence opponents to his Brexit proposals.

In fact, the Supreme Court subsequently ruled that Johnson’s request had been unlawful and many people blamed him for making the queen look bad.

The queen was also rumoured to have been disappointed by her grandson Prince Harry and his American former actress wife Meghan Markle.

The young couple made waves by speaking out about their struggle with living in the public eye and then suing three British newspapers for prying into their private lives.

Their picture was notably absent from the collection of family photographs on the queen’s desk in her televised address.

It was a difficult year for Philip, too, beginning with a car accident in which two women were injured. The police found the 98-year-old responsible but brought no charges.

Buckingham Palace has released little information about Philip’s condition since his hospitalisation on Friday for “treatment in relation to a pre-existing condition”.

“He’s alright,” Philip’s son Charles told a reporter during a visit in northern England on Monday.

“Once you get to that age things don’t work as well.”

–‘Spirit of reconciliation’ –

The queen has remained one of Britain’s most popular figures despite the royal family’s travails.

A poll by YouGov in November showed 72 percent of respondents had a positive opinion of the monarch.

The queen’s Christmas Day message also reflected on the heroism of British forces during the D-Day landings in Normandy that turned the course of World War II in 1944.

Her trips abroad are becoming increasingly rare, but she made one in June to attend the 75th anniversary commemorations in France.

“For the 75th anniversary of that decisive battle, in a true spirit of reconciliation, those who had formerly been sworn enemies came together in friendly commemorations either side of the Channel, putting past differences behind them,” the queen said in her message.

“By being willing to put past differences behind us and move forward together, we honour the freedom and democracy once won for us at so great a cost.”

Source:  AFP