World

TANAH DATAR, Indonesia — At least 34 people were killed and 16 more were missing in western Indonesia after flash floods and cold lava flow from one of the archipelago's most active volcanos damaged homes, roads and mosques, officials said Sunday.

Hours of heavy rain caused flooding in Agam and Tanah Datar districts in West Sumatra province on Saturday evening, threatening thousands of people after the downpours swept ash and large rocks down Mount Marapi.

"I heard the thunder and the sound similar to boiling water. It was the sound of big rocks falling," housewife Rina Devina told AFP, adding that three of her neighbours were killed.

"It was pitch black, so I used my cellphone as a flashlight. The road was muddy, so I chanted 'God, have mercy!' over and over again," she said of her evacuation to a local official's office.

West Sumatra disaster agency said 16 people died in Agam district and 18 in Tanah Datar, with 18 people injured overall.

"We are also still searching for 16 other people," agency spokesman Ilham Wahab told AFP.

He said the search effort involved local rescuers, police, soldiers and volunteers.

Abdul Malik, head of the search and rescue agency in provincial capital Pandang, told reporters three more people had died but they were yet to be confirmed by other authorities.

The flash floods and cold lava flow hit the two districts at around 10:30 pm (15:30 GMT) on Saturday, according to the Basarnas search and rescue agency.

Cold lava, also known as lahar, is volcanic material such as ash, sand and pebbles carried down a volcano's slopes by rain.

Abdul Muhari, spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency, or BNPB, said in a statement that 84 homes, 16 bridges and two mosques were damaged in Tanah Datar, as were 20 hectares of rice fields.

About 370,000 people live in the district, where several mosques and a public pool were also damaged, with large rocks and logs scattered on the ground, according to an AFP journalist at the scene.

In Lembah Anai, a popular tourist spot with a waterfall in Tanah Datar, a road connecting the cities of Padang and Bukittinggi was severely damaged and access for cars was cut off.

Aerial images seen by AFP of the district showed roads covered by mud, with roofs and a mosque’s minarets jutting out of the sea of brown mud.

Ilham said on Sunday that authorities were still receiving reports of missing people from relatives.

He said he could not give a figure for the number of people evacuated from the area because the search and rescue effort was still focused on the victims and the missing.

Two trucks had been swept away by the flooding and strong currents in a nearby river in Tanah Datar, the journalist said.

In Agam, which has a population of more than 500,000 people, dozens of homes and public facilities were damaged, the district’s disaster agency chief Budi Perwira Negara told reporters.

He said 90 people had been evacuated to a school being used as a shelter.

Nine bodies, including those of a three-year-old and an eight-year-old, were identified on Sunday, Malik said in an earlier statement.

Authorities sent a team of rescuers and rubber boats to look for the missing victims and to transport people to shelters.

The local government set up evacuation centres and emergency posts in several areas of Agam and Tanah Datar.

Indonesia is prone to landslides and floods during the rainy season.

At least 26 people were found dead in March after landslides and floods hit West Sumatra.

In 2022, about 24,000 people were evacuated and two children were killed in floods on Sumatra island, with environmental campaigners blaming deforestation caused by logging for worsening the disaster.

Trees act as natural defences against floods, slowing the rate at which water runs down hills and into rivers.

Marapi is the most active volcano on the archipelago’s Sumatra island.

It erupted in December and spewed an ash tower about 3,000 metres into the sky, taller than the volcano itself.

At least 24 climbers, most of them university students, died in the eruption.

KYIV, Ukraine — Hundreds of people were evacuated from areas near the Russian border in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, the regional governor said Saturday, a day after Moscow launched a surprise ground offensive.

Russian forces made small advances in the area it was pushed back from nearly two years ago, the latest in a series of gains as Ukrainian forces find themselves outgunned and outmanned.

"A total of 1,775 people have been evacuated," Kharkiv Governor Oleg Synegubov wrote on social media.

He reported Russian artillery and mortar attacks on 30 settlements over the past 24 hours.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a "fierce battle" was under way in Kharkiv.

"We must disrupt Russian offensive operations and return the initiative to Ukraine," Zelensky said on Saturday.

The Kharkiv region has been mostly under Ukrainian control since September 2022.

A senior Ukrainian military source said Russian forces had advanced 1 kilometre into Ukraine and were trying to "create a buffer zone" in the Kharkiv and neighbouring Sumy regions to prevent attacks on Russian territory.

Ukrainian forces have multiplied attacks inside Russia and Russian-held areas of Ukraine, particularly on energy infrastructure.

On Saturday, Moscow-installed authorities in the Russian-occupied Lugansk region in eastern Ukraine said three people were killed by a Ukrainian strike with US-made missiles on an oil depot.

Governor Leonid Pasechnik said the strike "enveloped the oil depot in fire and damaged surrounding homes".

"The death toll has risen to three and eight more people are in hospital," he said on social media.

Officials in Kyiv had warned for weeks that Moscow might try to attack its northeastern border regions, pressing its advantage as Ukraine struggles with delays in Western aid and manpower shortages.

Ukraine’s military said it had deployed more troops and Zelensky said Ukrainian forces were using artillery and drones to thwart the Russian advance.

“Reserve units have been deployed to strengthen the defence in this area of the front,” it said.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War said on Friday that Russia had made “tactically significant gains”.

But the main aim of the operation was “drawing Ukrainian manpower and materiel from other critical sectors of the front in eastern Ukraine”, it said.

ISW said it did not appear to be “a large-scale sweeping offensive operation to envelop, encircle and seize Kharkiv” — Ukraine’s second biggest city.

Washington announced a new $400 million military aid package for Kyiv hours after the offensive began, and said it was confident Ukraine could repel any fresh Russian campaign.

LIBREVILLE — His father ruled Chad for three decades with an iron fist and Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno has now consolidated the family dynasty with his victory in the presidential election announced on Thursday.

Yet, the young general appeared timid, his gaze fleeting, when the army announced his father Idriss Deby Itno had been killed en route to the front line against rebels on April 20, 2021.

Deby Itno junior was not on any list of heirs to the throne drawn up by experts, who believed the veteran warlord and president seemed to worry little about anointing a successor.

Three years on, the 40-year-old is following in his father’s footsteps as the desert state’s new strongman, winning the May 6 presidential election in the first round with the opposition muzzled and his main rival dead.

But Deby Itno’s legitimacy within his family and Zaghawa ethnic group had been shaken following the killing of his cousin and main opponent late February.

Cousin killed 

“The man in black glasses,” as he is known in military circles, is said to be a discreet, quiet officer who looks after his men, though the public knew little about his past and personality in 2021.

Deby Itno immediately took charge of a transitional military council and appointed 14 of the most trusted generals to a junta to run Chad until “free and democratic” elections would be held within 18 months.

His extension of the transition by another two years sparked major protests in October 2022 that were brutally repressed by the police and the army.

Opposition figures have fled, been silenced or joined forces with him, while any attempts by civil society to form movements, protest or come out against the military rulers have been squashed.

The killing of his cousin Yaya Dillo Djerou eliminated the main opposition figure from the May 6 vote in which Deby Itno initially said he would not run.

The election became a formality that will further entrench the Deby dynasty’s domination.

But his cousin’s violent demise and the arrest of an uncle, Saleh Deby, has deepened fractures within his family and the Zaghawa ethnic minority that has long dominated Chadian politics.

To assert his authority, Deby Itno has removed several generals who had remained loyal to his father.

A poor orator and shy with crowds, Deby Itno has sometimes been at pains to present himself as a confident leader at home and abroad in line with his father’s martial persona.

He was quickly endorsed by the international community — led by France, which was just as quick to denounce coups elsewhere in the Sahel.

As the election approached, rumours had surfaced of an attempted coup by soldiers previously close to his father or allies of Dillo and Saleh Deby.

All-powerful guard 

Commander in chief of the all-powerful red-beret presidential guard, or DGSSIE security service for state institutions, Deby Itno carries the nickname Mahamat “Kaka” — grandmother in Chadian Arabic — after his father’s mother who raised him.

A career soldier, just like his father, he is on his paternal side from the Zaghawa ethnic group, which boasts numerous top officers in an army seen as one of the region’s strongest. Born to a mother from the Sharan Goran ethnic group, he also married a Goran, Dahabaye Oumar Souny, a journalist at the presidential press service.

She is the daughter of a senior official who was close to former president Hissene Habre, ousted by Idriss Deby in 1990.

Deby Itno was sent to a military school in Aix-en-Provence in southern France but stayed only a few months.

Back home in Chad, he returned to training at the military school in the capital N’Djamena and joined the presidential guard.

Rising through the ranks 

He rose quickly through the command structure from an armoured group to head of security at the presidential palace, before taking over the whole DGSSIE. Deby Itno was acclaimed for defeating the rebel forces of Timan Erdimi, a relative, at Am-Dam in 2009.

Those forces had launched a rebellion in the east and had reached the gates of the presidential palace a year earlier, before being pushed back with French assistance.

He finally moved out of the shadow of his brother Abdelkerim Idriss Deby, deputy director of the presidential office, when he was appointed deputy chief of the Chadian armed force deployed to Mali in 2013. That led Deby Itno to work closely with French troops in Operation Serval against extremists from 2013 to 2014.

Laqayi,Afghanistan, — More than 300 people were killed in flash floods that ripped through multiple Afghan provinces, the UN’s World Food Programme said Saturday, as authorities declared a state of emergency and rushed to rescue the injured.

Heavy rains on Friday sent roaring rivers of water and mud crashing through villages and across agricultural land in several provinces.

Survivors on Saturday picked through muddy, debris-littered streets and damaged buildings, an AFP journalist saw, as authorities and non-governmental groups deployed rescue workers and aid, warning that some areas had been cut off by the flooding.

Northern Baghlan province was one of the hardest hit, with more than 300 people killed there alone, and thousands of houses destroyed or damaged, according to WFP.

“On current information: in Baghlan province there are 311 fatalities, 2,011 houses destroyed and 2,800 houses damaged,” Rana Deraz, a communications officer for the United Nations agency in Afghanistan, told AFP.

There were disparities between the death tolls provided by the government and humanitarian agencies.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration said there were 218 deaths in Baghlan.

Abdul Mateen Qani, spokesman for the interior ministry, told AFP that 131 people had been killed in Baghlan, but that the government toll could rise.

“Many people are still missing,” he said.

Another 20 people were reported dead in northern Takhar province and two in neighbouring Badakhshan, he added.

Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, “Hundreds of our fellow citizens have succumbed to these calamitous floods”, in a statement posted to social media site X earlier on Saturday.

“Moreover, the deluge has wrought extensive devastation upon residential properties, resulting in significant financial losses,” he added.

Rains on Friday caused heavy damage in Baghlan, Takhar and Badakhshan, as well as western Ghor and Herat provinces, officials said, in a country wracked by poverty and heavily dependent on agriculture.

“My house and my whole life was swept away by the flood,” said Jan Mohammad Din Mohammad, a resident of Baghlan provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri.

His family had managed to flee to higher ground but when the weather cleared and they returned home, “there was nothing left, all my belongings and my house had been destroyed”, he said.

“I don’t know where to take my family... I don’t know what to do.”

State of emergency

Emergency personnel were rushing to rescue injured and stranded people, according to the defence ministry.

The ministry ordered multiple branches of the military “to provide any kind of assistance to the victims of this incident with all available resources”.

The air force said it had started evacuation operations as the weather cleared on Saturday, adding that more than 100 injured people had been transferred to hospital, without specifying from which provinces.

“By announcing the state of emergency in [affected] areas, the Ministry of National Defense has started distributing food, medicine and first aid to the impacted people,” it said. An AFP journalist saw a vehicle laden with food and water in Baghlan’s Baghlan-i-Markazi district, as well as others carrying the dead to be buried.

Since mid-April, flash flooding and other floods had left about 100 people dead in 10 of Afghanistan’s provinces, with no region entirely spared, according to authorities.

Farmland has been swamped in a country where 80 per cent of the more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.

Afghanistan — which had a relatively dry winter, making it more difficult for the soil to absorb rainfall — is highly vulnerable to climate change.

The nation, ravaged by four decades of war, is one of the poorest in the world and, according to scientists, one of the worst prepared to face the consequences of global warming.

The UN special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said on X the floods were “a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the #climatecrisis”.

“Both immediate aid and long term planning by the #Taliban & international actors are needed.”

Mohammed Khater, deputy head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs office in Afghanistan, said the high toll was due in part to people living near waterways, and that deaths were common during the seasonal rains.

“This is an everyday incident during this season, the rainy season,” Khater told AFP.

BUDAPEST — Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Hungary on Thursday seeking a “new journey” with Beijing’s closest European Union ally amid Beijing’s divisions with the West over the Ukraine war and global trade.

The state visit to Hungary is the last leg of Xi’s European tour, his first to the continent since 2019.

In recent years, the Central European country of 9.6 million people has attracted a flood of major Chinese projects, mostly related to the manufacture of electric vehicles and batteries.

Hungarian President Tamas Sulyok warmly received Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan with military honours in the courtyard of the presidential palace in Budapest on Thursday morning.

The Chinese leader arrived in the Hungarian capital on Wednesday night after wrapping up his visit to Serbia, and later attended a state dinner with Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Budapest was decked out with Chinese flags and placed under tight security, while Tibetan flags were hidden from sight.

In an op-ed published in Hungary’s pro-government Magyar Nemzet daily ahead of his arrival, Xi praised a “long-standing friendship” he described “as mellow and rich as Tokaji wine”, referring to the renowned Hungarian vineyards region.

“We have gone through hardships together and defied power politics together amid volatile international situations.

“Our bilateral relationship is at its best in history and has embarked on a golden voyage... On the new journey of the new era, China looks forward to working closely with our Hungarian friends,” he wrote.

Deepening ties 

Frequently at loggerheads with Brussels, Orban has been pursuing an eastwards foreign policy since his return to power in 2010, seeking closer economic ties with Russia, China and other Asian countries.

The nationalist premier remained committed to his strategy even as tensions between Western nations and Beijing increased over human rights violations, the COVIDpandemic, trade and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Xi’s three-day visit to Hungary marks 75 years of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

Since Hungary began to promote itself as a global hub for EV manufacturing in 2022, several new Chinese businesses have sprung up all over the country.

According to the Hungarian government, the two countries are expected to sign at least 16 different agreements promoting their cooperation in rail and road infrastructure, nuclear energy and the automotive industry.

Xi will meet Orban for talks later on Thursday before delivering a statement to the press.

The Chinese leader is due to leave Hungary on Friday afternoon.

Message to Europe 

Earlier this week, the Chinese leader kicked off his trip in France, a visit that was cordial but also highlighted tensions between Beijing and the EU over the war in Ukraine and global trade.

While French President Emmanuel Macron pressed a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade, Hungary will provide “a friendlier destination for Xi”, said political scientist Ja Ian Chong of the University of Singapore.

In Hungary, a country with close ties to both Moscow and Beijing, Xi will be able to “avoid tough conversations and awkward questions”, he added.

Both countries have called for a peaceful settlement of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Hungary provides a diplomatic win for Xi, showing his warm ties with an EU member state that will still roll out the red carpet for Chinese investment,” said Xiaoxue Martin, a researcher at the Clingendael China Centre.

“Xi’s message to the rest of Europe: this is how China would like to be treated in Europe,” she added.

On the streets of Budapest, Hungarians were divided over the visit.

“Money does not smell, as they say, so other countries would welcome the kind of investment that is going to happen here, even in Western Europe I assume,” said 52-year-old security manager Laszlo Toth.

But Tibor Hendre, head of the Tibet Support Association, said he was worried that Hungary was “getting into... a debt trap, from which we cannot really escape”.

Software engineer Dezso Bereknyei, 46, said that “financial benefits” appeared to be driving the cooperation, and were “coming before environmental protection”.

LONDON — UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron will on Thursday urge NATO partners to soon start spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence, during a major speech in which he will call for a more muscular approach to Western foreign policy.

Cameron — a former UK prime minister — will say that countries need to take more assertive action to protect their interests from emerging threats, including from Russia and Iran.

“We are in a battle of wills. We all must prove our adversaries wrong — Britain, and our allies and partners around the world,” Cameron will say, according to excerpts released by the foreign ministry.

Cameron will use the keynote address at the National Cyber Security Centre in London to call for NATO countries to boost defence spending above a 2 per cent target agreed 10 years ago.

He will call on countries in the 32-member Western defence alliance to “out-compete, out-cooperate and out-innovate” adversaries.

“The upcoming NATO summit must see all allies on track to deliver their pledge made in Wales in 2014 to spend 2 per cent on defence.

“And we then need to move quickly to establish 2.5 per cent as the new benchmark for all NATO Allies,” Cameron is due to say.

Last month, UK leader Rishi Sunak announced during a visit to Poland that London would gradually boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030.

He singlled out “an axis of authoritarian states”, including Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

Cameron will argue that the UK needs to invest in old alliances, including the G7 of the world’s richest nations and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network with the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

But he will add that Britain also needs to forge new partnerships, like the AUKUS alliance with the US and Australia, post-Brexit.

“We need to adopt a harder edge for a tougher world. If Putin’s illegal invasion teaches us anything, it must be that doing too little, too late, only spurs an aggressor on,” he will say.

“We need to be tougher and more assertive,” Cameron is expected to add.

Cameron, who resigned as prime minister in 2016 after Britons voted to leave the European Union, was plucked from the political wilderness by Sunak to be foreign secretary last November.