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