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Month: August 2024
Hopes of finding more survivors of Indian landslides wane
WAYANAD, India — Hopes of finding more than 180 missing people alive waned as rescue workers searched through mud and debris for a third day Thursday after landslides set off by torrential rains killed at least 194 people in southern India.
The rescue work was challenging in a forested, hilly area while more rain fell, said P.M Manoj, a spokesman for Kerala state’s top elected official. Nearly 40 bodies were found downstream after being swept some 30 kilometers down the Chaliyar River from the area in Wayanad district where the main landslides occurred. Body parts were also recovered.
Torrents of mud and water swept through tea estates and villages in hilly areas in the district early Tuesday. They flattened houses and destroyed bridges, and rescuers had to pull out people stuck under mud and debris. “This is one of the worst natural calamities Kerala state has ever witnessed,” Kerala’s top elected official, Pinarayi Vijayan, said.
Manoj said 187 people were unaccounted for as of Thursday. In addition to the dead and missing, 186 people were injured. Local media reported most of the victims were tea estate workers.
More than 5,500 people have been rescued, Vijayan said, with some 1,100 rescue personnel, helicopters and heavy equipment involved.
The army was constructing a temporary bridge after the main bridge in one of the worst-affected areas was swept away. Images from the site show rescue workers making their way through muck and floodwaters, while a land excavator was clearing the debris.
O.S. Jerry, a cardamom estate manager, said he regularly traveled through the district. “There was a lovely school over here,” he said, adding that many houses were now gone.
The Mundakkai and Chooralmala areas are destroyed with extreme devastation, Vijayan said.
Manoj said more than 8,300 people have been moved to 82 government-run relief camps. The government is ensuring food delivery and essential items to the relief camps.
Kerala, one of India’s most popular tourist destinations, is prone to heavy rains, flooding and landslides. The Indian Meteorological Department said Wayanad district had up to 28 centimeters of rain on Monday and Tuesday.
Heavy rains also wreaked havoc in other parts of India this week.
New Delhi, the Indian capital, shut schools Thursday after torrential downpours the previous day submerged roads, left residents stranded and killed at least two people, news agency Press Trust of India reported. More rains were expected this week.
In the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh, popular with tourists, three people were killed and around 40 were reported missing after heavy rains and two cloudbursts washed away homes, flooded roads and damaged infrastructure, authorities told PTI on Thursday. Four people were also killed Wednesday in the neighboring Uttarakhand state following heavy rains.
Meanwhile, at least 13 people, including three children, were killed in lightning strikes in eastern Bihar state on Thursday, a statement from the chief minister’s office said. Most of the victims had gone to plant paddy in the fields when lightning struck them.
India regularly has severe floods during the monsoon season, which runs between June and September and brings most of South Asia’s annual rainfall. The rains are crucial for rainfed crops planted during the season, but often cause extensive damage.
Scientists say monsoons are becoming more erratic because of climate change and global warming.
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Online misinformation fuels tensions over deadly Southport stabbing attack
LONDON — Within hours of a stabbing attack in northwest England that killed three young girls and wounded several more children, a false name of a supposed suspect was circulating on social media. Hours after that, violent protesters were clashing with police outside a nearby mosque.
Police say the name was fake, as were rumors that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. Detectives say the suspect charged Thursday with murder and attempted murder was born in the U.K., and British media including the BBC have reported that his parents are from Rwanda.
That information did little to slow the lightning spread of the false name or stop right-wing influencers pinning the blame on immigrants and Muslims.
“There’s a parallel universe where what was claimed by these rumors were the actual facts of the case,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank that looks at issues including integration and national identity. “And that will be a difficult thing to manage.”
Local lawmaker Patrick Hurley said the result was “hundreds of people descending on the town, descending on Southport from outside of the area, intent on causing trouble — either because they believe what they’ve written, or because they are bad faith actors who wrote it in the first place, in the hope of causing community division.”
One of the first outlets to report the false name, Ali Al-Shakati, was Channel 3 Now, an account on the X social media platform that purports to be a news channel. A Facebook page of the same name says it is managed by people in Pakistan and the U.S. A related website on Wednesday showed a mix of possibly AI-generated news and entertainment stories, as well as an apology for “the misleading information” in its article on the Southport stabbings.
By the time the apology was posted, the incorrect identification had been repeated widely on social media.
“Some of the key actors are probably just generating traffic, possibly for monetization,” said Katwala. The misinformation was then spread further by “people committed to the U.K. domestic far right,” he said.
Governments around the world, including Britain’s, are struggling with how to curb toxic material online. U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites.
Katwala said that social platforms such as Facebook and X worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Since Elon Musk, a self-styled free-speech champion, bought X, it has gutted teams that once fought misinformation on the platform and restored the accounts of banned conspiracy theories and extremists.
Rumors have swirled in the relative silence of police over the attack. Merseyside Police issued a statement saying the reported name for the suspect was incorrect, but have provided little information about him other than his age and birthplace of Cardiff, Wales.
Under U.K. law, suspects are not publicly named until they have been charged and those under 18 are usually not named at all. That has been seized on by some activists to suggest the police are withholding information about the attacker.
Tommy Robinson, founder of the far-right English Defense League, accused police of “gaslighting” the public. Nigel Farage, a veteran anti-immigration politician who was elected to Parliament in this month’s general election, posted a video on X speculating “whether the truth is being withheld from us” about the attack.
Brendan Cox, whose lawmaker wife Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right attacker in 2016, said Farage’s comments showed he was “nothing better than a Tommy Robinson in a suit.”
“It is beyond the pale to use a moment like this to spread your narrative and to spread your hatred, and we saw the results on Southport’s streets last night,” Cox told the BBC.
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China sanctions US lawmaker
Washington — China issued sanctions on U.S. Representative Jim McGovern, the sponsor of a bill advocating for a peaceful resolution of the China-Tibet dispute China views Tibet as an “inseparable part of China since ancient times,” despite supporters of the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Dalai Lama saying that Tibet has historically been independent.
Framed as a response to McGovern’s efforts to undermine Chinese territorial sovereignty, the sanctions freeze the representative’s Chinese assets, prohibit organizations or individuals in China from engaging with him, and ban him and his family from entering Chinese territory, according to a publication from Chinese state-media agency Xinhua.
McGovern has no assets or business dealings in China, according to The Associated Press.
McGovern’s Tibet-China Dispute Act, which passed through the House in mid-June, gives the State Department increased authority to counter Chinese disinformation about Tibet and promotes the resumption of talks between Chinese leaders and the Dalai Lama. No such talks have occurred since 2010.
President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law on July 12.
China stands accused of large-scale human rights abuses in Tibet, which the congressman hoped to alleviate with this legislation.
McGovern’s office did not respond to a VOA request for comment.
In a statement released on June 12 when the bill passed the House, McGovern said, “The People’s Republic of China has systematically denied Tibetans the right to self-determination and continues to deliberately erase Tibetan religion, culture, and language.”
“The ongoing oppression of the Tibetan people is a grave tragedy, and our bill provides further tools that empower both America and the international community to stand up for justice and peace,” he said.
Among the signees of the statement were House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, Senator Todd Young, McGovern and Senator Jeff Merkley.
In a response, Chinese state-sponsored media Xinhua said the Tibet-China Dispute Act “grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs,” violates international law and distorts historical facts to suppress China and encourage Tibetan separatist movements.
This is not the first time China has sanctioned a U.S. representative for their involvement in an issue that threatens Chinese territorial homogeneity. Over the last year, China has sanctioned both Representative McCaul and former Representative Mike Gallagher over their support for Taiwan.
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