Month: September 2022

They had gone down to move their cars but got caught by the incoming torrents.

Crew said they rescued two people, who reportedly survived by clinging to ceiling pipes for more than 12 hours.

Typhoon Hinnamnor, the strongest cyclonic storm this year so far, hit South Korea earlier this week.

Rescuers had to wade through metres of brown water to enter the almost completely submerged basement on Tuesday night.

According to news site Yonhap, all nine people were residents of an apartment building who had earlier on Tuesday morning been told by the management office to move their cars from the carpark.

The survivors – a man in his 30s and a woman in her 50s – were reported to be in stable condition.

President Yoon Suk-yeol expressed his grief over the drownings, calling it a “disaster”.

“I couldn’t sleep last night because of this tragedy,” he said.

He added that he’d designated the city a special disaster zone and he would travel to the region later on Wednesday.

Pohang, the city where the tragedy occurred, has suffered the worst damage across the country. In one area, a beachside hotel collapsed on its foundations during the storm. The resort operators told the BBC no guests had been injured.

At least 10 people have now died as a result of Typhoon Hinnamnor, which swept South Korea’s southern and eastern coasts on Monday and Tuesday, driving huge surf, gale-force winds and heavy rain.

Several other cities across the south – including Busan and Ulsan- are also dealing with wreckage caused by the storm, which ripped up roads, smashed building windows and flattened trees.

South Korea – like many countries in East Asia – has over the past few months endured extreme rains as well as record temperatures.

In early August, it recorded massive downpours which flooded cities, including the capital Seoul. Such floods killed at least eight people, including three who were living in basement apartments.

The deaths prompted Korea’s president to outlaw such units – known as banjiha, which were popularised in the Oscar-winning film Parasite.

Kwasi Kwarteng is made chancellor, James Cleverly becomes foreign secretary and Suella Braverman replaces Priti Patel as home secretary.

One of Ms Truss’s closest friends, Therese Coffey, is appointed as health secretary and deputy PM.

Her new cabinet will meet ahead of her first Prime Minister’s Questions later.

None of those who backed her defeated rival, Rishi Sunak, will remain in her full cabinet, with Dominic Raab, Grant Shapps, George Eustice and Steve Barclay all returning to the backbenches.

But Ms Truss’s press secretary said the changes would “unify” the Tory Party and pointed to senior roles for five of her leadership rivals: Suella Braverman, Tom Tugendhat as security minister, Kemi Badenoch as trade secretary, Penny Mordaunt as leader of the Commons, and Nadhim Zahawi as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

For the first time, none of the top four “great offices of state” – prime minister, chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – is held by a white man.

Meanwhile, the new PM made her first call to a fellow foreign leader, pledging the UK’s ongoing support to Ukraine in a call with president Volodymyr Zelensky.

No 10 said Ms Truss was also “delighted” to accept an invitation to visit Ukraine.

She later spoke to US President Joe Biden, where the pair discussed the importance of the UK reaching an agreement with the EU over post-Brexit trading rules in Northern Ireland.

There are a handful of striking things about the composition of Liz Truss’s cabinet.

There has been a near total purge of those who backed Rishi Sunak.

The only one who I can spot is Michael Ellis, the new attorney general for England and Wales.

And even he will attend cabinet rather than being a cabinet minister, subtle though that distinction is.

This dominance of Truss campaign supporters around the Truss top table is already prompting grumbling among some Tory MPs, although we do await appointments to the more junior ranks in government.

The prime minister’s desire for loyalty and building a government in her own image runs the risk of provoking rebellion down the track.

Read more from Chris here.

Ms Truss finished her first tranche of appointments late on Tuesday, with new the Chancellor, Mr Kwarteng, tweeting that getting the job was “the honour of a lifetime”.

He is expected to spend his first day meeting chief executives of various banks to brief them on his outlook.

Mr Kwarteng is also understood to be finalising plans for energy bill support which would see a typical household bill capped at around £2,500 a year.

But Labour have asked where the money is coming from to fund the bill.

“We really haven’t got the detail,” Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the BBC.

“She is going to freeze bills. Where is the money coming from?

“Is it actually gonna come from consumers – bill payers down the line – or is it going to come from the oil and gas companies who have made huge profits, more than they imagined, and can actually afford to fund it.”

Ms Truss has previously said she is not keen on a windfall tax on energy companies’ profits.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was one of the few senior minister to retain his job, where he has earned plaudits in his response to the conflict in Ukraine.

Nadine Dorries, who backed Ms Truss, said she had been asked by the new PM to stay on as culture secretary but had decided to quit front-line politics.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, an early supporter of Ms Truss, was appointed business, energy and industrial strategy secretary.

Mr Sunak, the former chancellor whose resignation helped trigger the downfall of Boris Johnson, had already made it clear he did not expect to be offered a new job.

But his supporters had urged Ms Truss to appoint an “inclusive” cabinet and not simply surround herself with loyalists.

Ms Truss was appointed the 56th prime minister of the UK by the Queen, in a ceremony at Balmoral on Tuesday.

She returned to a rain-lashed Downing Street, where in a short speech, she vowed to grow the economy through tax cuts and reform; take action to deal with energy bills and put the health service on “a firm footing”.

Water levels in Manchar Lake, in the southeastern Sindh province, had risen to dangerously high levels after days of record monsoon rains.

The attempt to breach it displaced up to 100,000 people from their homes.

But on Monday, the province’s minister for irrigation told Reuters the water level of the lake had “not come down”.

Sindh province produces half of the country’s food supply, exacerbating fears that many will face serious food shortages in a country already struggling with an economic crisis.

Floods in Pakistan have affected some 33 million people and killed at least 1,314, including 458 children, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Agency said.

Estimates suggest the floods have caused at least $10bn (£8.5bn) of damage.

On Sunday, officials breached the lake after it had flooded two rural towns, in hopes that it would prevent it from further bursting its banks and inundating more densely-populated areas.

But the move risked affecting an estimated 400 villages – a total of 135,000 people – who would be left without homes. Officials told villagers to evacuate at the weekend.

On Monday however, officials said water levels at the lake had remained dangerously high.

Jam Khan Shoro, the provincial minister for irrigation told news agency Reuters water levels had not come down, but declined to say if there would be subsequent attempts to relieve the river of its bloated banks.

Pakistan is facing one of its worst climate-induced natural disasters in years, as record torrential rainfall and melting glaciers in the country’s northern mountains have caused devastating floods and submerged almost a third of its territory underwater.

Meanwhile, UN children’s agency Unicef said more children were at risk of dying from disease in Pakistan due to the shortage of clean water.

The disaster has also highlighted the stark disparity between countries that are the largest contributors towards climate change and countries that bear the brunt of its impact.

Pakistan produces less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions but its geography makes it extremely vulnerable to climate change.

The quake struck at 13:00 local time (05:00 GMT) on Monday in Sichuan province at a depth of 10km (6 miles).

The impact severed telecommunications lines and triggered mountain landslides that caused “serious damage”, local media reports say.

Some 21 million people in Sichuan’s capital Chengdu were last week ordered to stay at home because of Covid rules.

The epicentre of the quake was at Luding, a town in a remote mountain region located about 226km southwest of Chengdu, according to the China Earthquake Networks Centre.

State broadcaster CCTV said 17 people died in the city of Ya’an, while 29 deaths were reported in the neighbouring prefecture of Ganzi.

“Another 16 people were missing and 50 were injured,” CCTV said late on Monday.

Tremors shook buildings in Chengdu and the neighbouring mega-city of Chongqing, leaving roads blocked and cutting communication lines in areas home to more than 10,000 residents.

The shocks also forced some power stations to shut down in the areas of Garze and Ya’an, CCTV said.

More than 500 rescue personnel have been despatched to the epicentre, while workers laboured to clear roadblocks caused by landslides, according to state broadcaster CGTN.

Chengdu residents reported seeing people running out of their high-rise apartments in a panic after receiving earthquake alerts on their phones.

“There were many people who were so terrified they started crying,” Laura Luo, an international PR consultant, told news agency Reuters.

When the shaking began, “all the dogs started barking. It was really quite scary”.

“Some of my neighbours on the ground floor said they felt it very noticeably,” Chen, a resident of Chengdu, told AFP news agency.

“But because Chengdu is currently under epidemic management, people aren’t allowed to leave their residential compounds, so many of them rushed out into their courtyards.”

On Friday, Chengdu became the latest city to be locked down by Chinese authorities, in an attempt to stem the rise in Covid cases.

The latest disaster comes months after a 6.1-magnitude earthquake tore through Sichuan in June. Sichuan is a earthquake-prone area, as it lies along the eastern boundary of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.

The earthquake also called into memory an 8.0-magnitude quake which hit Wenchuan county in northwest Sichuan in 2008, which killed 70,000 and caused widespread destruction.

The plan, which had been suggested by the energy industry, is set to be announced on Thursday.

The “deficit reduction scheme” is expected to form the centre piece of the government’s attempt to tackle the high cost of energy for consumers.

Small business are also expected to be offered some relief.

Incoming Prime Minister Liz Truss used her victory speech on Monday to pledge to “deliver on the energy crisis” – with a price freeze widely expected.

Energy bills are rocketing and the cap on prices will go up on 1 October, meaning a typical British household is set to pay £3,549 a year on gas and electricity.

Energy bosses have insisted for some time that a government-backed superfund from which they could borrow to subsidise bills “is the only game in town”.

Under such a plan, the government would guarantee loans to energy companies that would be used to freeze or at least lower bills this winter and beyond. These loans would be repaid from bills over the next 10-20 years.

Scottish Power said freezing all bills at the current price cap of £1,971 for two years would cost nearly £100bn.

However, unlike households, businesses are not protected by an energy price cap. Many fixed-rate deals for business expire this October, exposing thousands of firms to the full horror of costs that could rise by four or five times or more. Thousands would go bust or cut their wage bills by firing staff.

Smaller firms are expected to be offered similar help to that of households, although the BBC understands the details of how businesses will be helped may not be ironed out in time to be included in Thursday’s energy announcement.

However, the leader of one business group said “it’s clear they have crossed a mental Rubicon – they know that businesses need help to avoid lasting damage to the economy”.

Including businesses would mean the bill for the government’s energy plan could easily exceed £100bn.

It is understood that bigger companies may be offered bespoke tax breaks to help them through the period of high prices.

Alex Veitch of the British Chambers of Commerce said: “It is encouraging that the government is seriously considering the support it can give to businesses during these very difficult times.

“But it remains to be seen whether these plans will go far enough in offering the help that many firms so desperately need.”

Craig Beaumont from the Federation of Small Businesses said: “This commitment looks very promising, and arguably the best reassurance that small businesses need that some form of help with bills will follow – not just for households.

“The scope and reach of the help is going to be absolutely crucial to save hundreds of thousands of small businesses this winter.”

Her plan, set to be announced on Thursday, is likely to include a freeze on energy bills – though precisely how it would work is still unclear.

Ms Truss will be formally appointed by the Queen at Balmoral Castle later, after a final speech by Boris Johnson.

The 47-year-old, the UK’s third woman PM, will then appoint her cabinet.

In her victory speech, Ms Truss promised a “bold” programme of tax cuts to grow the flagging economy and to prevent the UK tipping into recession.

She will officially take the reins of power on Tuesday, bringing Mr Johnson’s turbulent premiership to an end less than three years after the Conservatives’ resounding election victory in 2019.

Ms Truss’s most pressing decision as premier will be how best to shield households and businesses from the soaring international price of energy.

On Monday, Ms Truss told party activists at London’s Queen Elizabeth II conference centre she would “deliver on the energy crisis” by dealing with bills and boosting the UK’s domestic energy sources.

Under her plans, it is understood energy firms would be able to take out government-backed loans, which they would use to freeze or lower customers’ bills.

The loans would be repaid from bills over the next 10-20 years.

Scottish Power, which proposed government-backed loans, has estimated that freezing bills for two years could cost nearly £100bn.

Small business are also expected to be offered some energy bill relief, though the details may not be included in Thursday’s announcement.

There will be very little if any honeymoon period for Liz Truss, as the country clamours for answers to huge questions the caretaker government of Boris Johnson in recent months felt unempowered to take on.

As you can read from my colleagues, there is inflation, Ukraine, energy security, the NHS with winter approaching, the contrails of Brexit and… a general election that isn’t far away.

The Conservatives have consistently been some way behind Labour in the polls all year. And there has to be an election by January 2025 at the latest.

Politics is being reset, but it will continue to be competitive, noisy and unpredictable.

Read more from Chris

Ms Truss beat rival Rishi Sunak with 57% of the vote, a narrower win than expected.

Those predicted to join her top team include Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, former leadership rival Suella Braverman as home secretary and James Cleverly as foreign secretary.

Home Secretary Priti Patel and Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said they would step down as senior ministers once Ms Truss becomes prime minister.

Mr Johnson congratulated Ms Truss on her victory and said she had the right plan to “unite our party”.

Ms Truss paid tribute to her “friend” Mr Johnson in her victory speech, adding he would be “admired from Kyiv to Carlisle” for his record in office.

“Boris, you got Brexit done, you crushed Jeremy Corbyn, you rolled out the vaccine and you stood up to Vladimir Putin,” she said.

In a break with tradition, the outgoing and incoming prime ministers are expected to travel to Balmoral Castle in Scotland for the handover of power, rather than Buckingham Palace.

The Queen has been suffering from mobility issues and it is understood the change was made to prevent the need for any last-minute rearrangements.

Ms Truss has promised £30bn in tax cuts in an emergency Budget later this month, having blamed the tax burden for the UK’s sluggish growth.

Her proposed cuts include reversing the rise in National Insurance under Mr Johnson’s tenure, temporarily ditching green levies on energy bills, and scrapping a planned rise to corporation tax.

As well as the domestic agenda, her in-tray also includes continuing to support Ukraine after its invasion by Russia and repairing a fractious relationship with the EU over Northern Ireland.

Former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who attacked her economic plans during the campaign, told the BBC he would offer her his “full support”.

He said he will stand again to be an MP at the next general election, but is not expected to be in Ms Truss’s cabinet.

Labour has called on Ms Truss to expand the windfall tax on the profits of oil and gas companies to part-fund a six month freeze to domestic prices.

The party followed the Liberal Democrats earlier this summer in backing a freeze, along with the SNP.

Ms Truss, however, has ruled out further windfall taxes, saying during the campaign it “sends the wrong message to international investors”.

Speaking earlier, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer pledged to work with Ms Truss to deliver a freeze, saying there was cross-party agreement on the idea.

He criticised her approach on the economy, arguing she had talked more in her campaign about cutting taxes for businesses than the cost of living crisis.

“That shows that not only is she out of touch, but that she’s not on the side of working people,” he added.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey told BBC News Ms Truss “appears to have no plan whatsoever” to deal with rising prices, and the Tories were responsible for “lamentable” economic growth.

SNP leader and Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon called for the price freeze to include businesses, which are not normally covered by the UK’s energy price cap, and extra cash support.