US dockworkers’ union suspend strike until Jan. 15 to allow time to negotiate new contract
Updated 04 October 2024
AP
DETROIT: The union representing 45,000 striking US dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports has reached a deal to suspend a three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract.
The union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, is to resume working immediately. Both sides also reached agreement on wages, but no details were given, according to a joint statement from the ports and union Thursday night.
The union went on strike early Tuesday after its contract expired in a dispute over pay and the automation of tasks at the ports from Maine to Texas. The strike came at the peak of the holiday shopping season at 36 ports that handle about half the cargo from ships coming into and out of the United States.
The walkout raised the risk of shortages of goods on store shelves if it lasted more than a few weeks. But most retailers had stocked up or shipped items early in anticipation of the work stoppage.
The strike came at the peak of the holiday shopping season at 36 ports that handle about half of the cargo from ships coming into and out of the United States.
It raised the risk of shortages of goods on store shelves if it lasted more than a few weeks. But most retailers had stocked up or shipped items early in anticipation of the work stoppage.
Krathon, now downgraded to a tropical depression, hit land in the southwestern city of Kaohsiung
Nearly 100,000 households, almost all in Kaohsiung and Pingtung, still had no power on Friday
Updated 30 sec ago
Reuters
KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan: Southern Taiwan worked on Friday to clear up damage from flooding and high winds after Typhoon Krathon slammed into a major port city, while most of the rest of the island resumed work and financial markets re-opened. Krathon, now downgraded to a tropical depression, hit land in the southwestern city of Kaohsiung, inundating streets, blowing out the windows of some buildings and scattering debris amid record-breaking winds. While the rest of Taiwan resumed work, the governments in Kaohsiung and neighboring Pingtung county declared a fourth successive day off work as they scrambled to pump away floodwaters, remove fallen trees, and clear roads. “We hope as fast as possible to resume transport, water and electricity supplies, so work and life can get back to normal,” Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai told reporters. The city government said it was tackling more than 2,000 trees that had fallen on roads, but reported only two injuries. Workers used cranes to remove downed trees and traffic signs in Kaohsiung, a city and surrounds of 2.7 million people, with some roads blocked, forcing diversions of traffic and pedestrians. “Sandbags didn’t work. The wind pressed the water in anyway,” said Clark Huang, 49. “Fortunately it lasted only a couple of hours and then we started cleaning up.” Engineer Tsai Ming-an was cleaning up his home after floodwaters about 20 cm (7.8 inches) high washed through the entire ground floor. “I have never seen winds like that,” said the 51-year-old. “It was so bad.” Typhoons almost always hit Taiwan’s mountainous and sparsely populated east coast which faces the Pacific Ocean, but Krathon, unusually, struck its flat west coast. Nearly 100,000 households, almost all in Kaohsiung and Pingtung, still had no power on Friday, while 129,000 households in Kaohsiung lacked water supply. The fire department said the death toll remained at two, both men killed on the east coast before the typhoon made landfall, with one person missing and 667 injured. Taiwan re-opened its north-south high speed rail line, as well as most ordinary rail routes except for two branch lines, but disruptions to air transport continued, with cancelations of 15 international and 88 domestic flights. Workers at Kaohsiung port were clearing some freight containers blown off their stacks to make sure operations went unaffected, the transport ministry said. Kaohsiung airport suffered damage to two air bridges, while the airport on the outlying Orchid Island had landing aids washed away, though both remained open, the ministry added. The government also said it was investigating the cause of a Pingtung hospital fire that broke out as the typhoon was bearing down, killing nine people.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un threatens to use nukes if attacked
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in decades
Washington periodically deploys nuclear assets to the Korean peninsula
Updated 21 min 29 sec ago
AFP
SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would use nuclear weapons “without hesitation” if attacked by the South and ally the United States, state media reported Friday.
Relations between the two Koreas are at one of their lowest points in decades, with Seoul this week staging a military parade where it showcased its bunker-busting “monster” missile and President Yoon Suk Yeol warned Kim that using nukes would mean the end of his regime.
Pyongyang has also been bombarding the South with balloons carrying bags of trash, and a fresh flurry was seen floating over Seoul early Friday by AFP reporters. Seoul’s military confirmed it had detected the balloon launches overnight.
If an enemy’s forces were “encroaching upon the sovereignty” of the North, Pyongyang would “use without hesitation all the offensive forces it has possessed, including nuclear weapons,” Kim said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
Images in state media showed Kim, clad in his customary leather jacket, speaking at a training event for special operations forces.
There, he slammed Yoon for his “end of regime” comments and “clamoring” about his country’s alliance with the United States.
Seoul, which does not have nuclear weapons of its own, is covered by the US nuclear umbrella, and Washington has stationed tens of thousands of troops in the country since the Korean war ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.
Kim said it was Seoul and Washington who were “destroying regional security and peace,” KCNA reported, while branding South Korea’s leader “an abnormal man.”
On Tuesday, fighter jets flew over downtown Seoul and tanks rolled through the streets, as South Korea displayed for the first time its largest ballistic missile, the Hyunmoo-5, which is capable of destroying underground bunkers.
An American B-1B heavy bomber also staged a flyover of the ceremony early Tuesday, flanked by F-15K jets.
Washington periodically deploys nuclear assets to the Korean peninsula, underscoring its protection of the South from Pyongyang’s growing threats.
At the event marking South Korea’s Armed Forces Day, Yoon said that if the North “attempts to use nuclear weapons, it will face the resolute and overwhelming response of our military and the US and Republic of Korea alliance.”
“That day will be the end of the North Korean regime,” he added.
North Korea is expected to scrap a landmark inter-Korean agreement signed in 1991 at a parliamentary meeting next week, Seoul’s unification ministry said Wednesday, as part of Kim’s drive to officially define the South as an enemy state.
Earlier this year, Kim called to remove unification-related clauses from the constitution, while abolishing agencies dedicated to improving ties with the South.
Last month, the North also disclosed images of a uranium enrichment facility for the first time, showing leader Kim touring the site as he called for more centrifuges to boost the country’s nuclear arsenal.
South Korea’s spy agency later said the unprecedented disclosure was “directed at the US” and that North Korea was believed capable of producing a double-digit number of nuclear weapons.
Last week, a lawmaker told reporters that the National Intelligence Service had warned the North might carry out another nuclear test — its seventh — after the US elections in November.
As search for Helene’s victims drags into second week, sheriff says rescuers ‘will not rest’
Exhausted rescue crews and volunteers continue to work long days — navigating past washed out roads
With at least 215 dead, lack of phone service and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the unaccounted for
Updated 28 min 44 sec ago
AP
PENSACOLA: The search for victims of Hurricane Helene dragged into its second week on Friday, as exhausted rescue crews and volunteers continued to work long days — navigating past washed out roads, downed power lines and mudslides — to reach the isolated and the missing.
“We know these are hard times, but please know we’re coming,” Sheriff Quentin Miller of Buncombe County, North Carolina, said at a Thursday evening press briefing. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming to pick up our people.”
With at least 215 killed, Helene is already the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US since Katrina in 2005, and dozens or possibly hundreds of people are still unaccounted for. Roughly half the victims were in North Carolina, while dozens more were killed in South Carolina and Georgia.
In Buncombe County alone, 72 people had been confirmed dead as of Thursday evening, Miller said. Buncombe includes the tourist hub of Asheville, the region’s most populous city. Still, the sheriff holds out hope that many of the missing are alive.
His message to them?
“Your safety and well-being are our highest priority. And we will not rest until you are secure and that you are being cared for.”
Rescuers face difficult terrain
Now more than a week since the storm roared onto Florida’s Gulf Coast, lack of phone service and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the missing. That means search crews must trudge through the mountains to learn whether residents are safe.
Along the Cane River in western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pensacola Volunteer Fire Department had to cut their way through trees at the top of a valley on Thursday, nearly a week after a wall of water swept through.
Pensacola, which sits a few miles from Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River, lost an untold number of people, said Mark Harrison, chief medical officer for the department.
“We’re starting to do recovery,” he said. “We’ve got the most critical people out.”
Near the Tennessee state line, crews were finally starting to reach side roads after clearing the main roads, but that brought a new set of challenges. The smaller roads wind through switchbacks and cross small bridges that can be tricky to navigate even in the best weather.
“Everything is fine and then they come around a bend and the road is gone and it’s one big gully or the bridge is gone,” said Charlie Wallin, a Watauga County commissioner. “We can only get so far.”
Every day there are new requests to check on someone who hasn’t been heard from yet, Wallin said. When the search will end is hard to tell.
“You hope you’re getting closer, but it’s still hard to know,” he said.
Power slowly coming back
Electricity is being slowly restored, and the number of homes and businesses without power dipped below 1 million on Thursday for the first time since last weekend, according to poweroutage.us. Most of the outages are in the Carolinas and Georgia, where Helene struck after coming into Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
President Joe Biden flew over the devastation in North and South Carolina on Wednesday. The administration announced a federal commitment to foot the bill for debris removal and emergency protective measures for six months in North Carolina and three months in Georgia. The money will address the impacts of landslides and flooding and cover costs of first responders, search and rescue teams, shelters and mass feeding.
Taliban’s battle with Daesh opens door to foreign cooperation
The Taliban government has been plagued by attacks by the Islamic State Khorasan
Tackling the threat is a rare point of accord between Western nations and the Taliban government
Updated 40 min 58 sec ago
AFP
ISLAMABAD, Paksitan: Afghanistan’s Daesh group is staging a growing number of bloody international attacks, presenting a rare but complicated opportunity for foreign cooperation with the Taliban government to counter the jihadists.
Since winning their own insurgency in defiance of the international community three years ago, the Taliban government has been plagued by attacks by the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K).
While a crackdown has seen domestic attacks diminished, IS-K remains active and has pivoted abroad — killing more than 140 at a Moscow concert hall in March and more than 90 in an Iran bombing in January.
Tackling the threat is a rare point of accord between Western nations and the Taliban government, whose austere vision of Islamic law stifling women’s rights has largely choked off diplomatic relations.
“Western intelligence officials have told me that cooperation with the Taliban against IS-K is ongoing, including the sharing of targeting information that allows the Taliban to take lethal action against terrorists,” Graeme Smith of the International Crisis Group told AFP.
“There’s a gap between the public rhetoric of Western states complaining about the Taliban’s draconian rule and the same countries’ eagerness for the Taliban to enforce the law.”
Afghan men bury victims of a Daesh suicide bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kandahar province, killing 41 people. (AFP)
IS-K was founded in 2015, an offshoot of the Middle Eastern Sunni extremist group with ambitions of establishing a global Islamic “caliphate.”
The regional faction came to global prominence by bombing America’s chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport in August 2021 — killing some 170 Afghans alongside 13 US troops.
Since ousting US-led forces three years ago, the Taliban government has declared security its highest priority and pledged militants planning foreign attacks will be rooted out.
But while the Taliban seized a vast stockpile of military gear when they took over, analysts doubt they can eradicate the group because of technological shortfallings in their intelligence gathering.
“The Taliban has limitations on what it can do,” said Aaron Y. Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Between March 2023 and March 2024, IS-K planned 21 international attacks in nine countries, he said, compared to just eight plots the previous year.
A 2023 UN Security Council report said that “the Taliban have quietly reached out requesting intelligence and logistical support” to fight IS-K, “offering itself as a counter-terrorism partner.”
Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP that some “countries being affected by this group are being cooperated with in some areas and we also occasionally share information with them.”
An IS-K gun attack in May saw six people, including three Spanish tourists, killed in Afghanistan. Last month, the group claimed two more domestic attacks, killing a total of 20 people.
But their deadliest strikes were in Iran and then Moscow, where four gunmen besieged the Crocus City Hall.
The gunmen were Tajik — evidence of a surge in IS-K recruitment among Central Asian countries that border Afghanistan — raising the threat to Russia in particular, analysts say.
Moscow has since said it will remove the Taliban government from its list of outlawed groups.
“The Taliban certainly are our allies in the fight against terrorism,” Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Dmitry Zhirnov, said in July. “They are working to eradicate terrorist cells.”
Tricia Bacon, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Russia is the “prime candidate” for international cooperation.
“There’s the possibility that the Russians could share things that the Taliban could use to understand IS-K or take action against IS-K,” such as intelligence, she said.
US Central Command chief General Michael Kurilla warned this year that IS-K “retains the capability and will to attack US and Western interests abroad in as little as six months and with little to no warning.”
In August, a UN counter-terrorism official told the Security Council that IS-K poses the greatest external terror threat to Europe — where plots are regularly uncovered.
The international threat “does create some potential for increased counterterrorism cooperation with the Taliban,” said Clemson University assistant professor Amira Jadoon, author of a book on IS-K.
“But the situation is far from straightforward,” she told AFP.
But the case is complicated by the Taliban’s reported ties to Al-Qaeda — which carried out the 9/11 attacks — as well as the Pakistani Taliban, which targets Islamabad.
That means aiding the Taliban government against IS-K may risk stoking threats from other groups. IS-K is also known to recruit from the ranks of disaffected Taliban.
Such concerns “severely limit the scope of potential cooperation,” said Jadoon.
“Cooperation would likely be limited, indirect, and focused strictly on the IS-K threat, balancing the need to address this emerging danger against the significant ethical and strategic concerns of working with the Taliban regime.”
More than 100 feared dead in Nigeria boat accident
The boat was packed with 300 passengers on their way to a festival in north-central Niger state when the accident happened
Boat accidents are common on Nigeria's poorly regulated waterways, particularly during the rainy season when rivers and lakes swell
Updated 04 October 2024
AFP
KANO, Nigeria: Over 100 people are feared dead after a boat carrying mostly women and children capsized in Nigeria, rescue workers said as they pulled more bodies from the River Niger on Thursday.
Around 300 passengers were on their way to celebrate the Muslim festival Mawlid in north-central Niger State when the accident took place on Tuesday, the state's emergency agency said.
Thirty-six dead bodies have now been found and 150 survivors rescued, spokesman Ibrahim Audu Husseini told AFP.
"We have recovered 20 more bodies today. This brings to 36 the number of bodies recovered from the river."
There was "no possibility" of finding others alive, he said. "There is no way one can survive three days underwater. The work now is to recover all the missing bodies."
The agency did not specify the cause of the sinking in Gbajibo community, near Mokwa, but said it took place after dark at around 8:30 pm (1930 GMT).
Boat accidents are common on Nigeria's poorly regulated waterways, particularly during the rainy season when rivers and lakes swell.
Nigeria's waterways authority has tried in the past to prohibit night-time travel on rivers and says overloading vessels is a crime, but crews often break regulations.
Last month, an overloaded boat sank while carrying more than 50 farmers across the Gummi River in Zamfara State. Over 40 are believed to have died.
In June 2023, over 100 people died when a riverboat carrying around 250 passengers capsized in north-central Kwara state, one of the country's deadliest waterway accidents in years.
In a statement late on Thursday, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu expressed sympathy for the victims and called for an investigation into recent boat accidents.
"President Tinubu commiserates with the families of the victims and prays for the repose of the souls of the dead," the presidency said.
The president urged officials to make sure boat operators violating the ban on travelling at night were brought to justice.
Tinubu also thanked emergency workers and praised local divers helping in the search.
