PHILIPPINES, Sept 15: Super Typhoon Mangkhut — the biggest storm of the year — smashed through the Philippines on Saturday, and claimed its first death as a woman was swept out to sea off Taiwan.

Mangkhut tore through the northern part of Luzon island, where it made landfall in the pre-dawn darkness, ripping off roofs, felling trees and knocking out power.

The area is home to around 10 million people, many of whom live in flimsy wooden shelters.

As the powerful storm left the Southeast Asian archipelago and barrelled towards densely populated Hong Kong and southern China, search teams in the Philippines began surveying the provinces that suffered a direct hit.

“We believe there has been a lot of damage,” said Social Welfare Secretary Virginia Orogo as thousands of evacuees took refuge in emergency shelters.

Mangkhut was packing sustained winds of 170 kilometres (105 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 260 km per hour as it left the Philippines.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms lash the Philippines each year, killing hundreds of people and leaving millions in near-perpetual poverty.

Thousands of people fled their homes in high-risk areas ahead of the storm’s arrival because of major flooding and landslide risks.

In Taiwan, a woman was swept away by high waves caused by the typhoon, the government said.

– ‘We are terrified’ –

Residents had started lashing down their roofs and gathering supplies days before the arrival of the storm.

“Among all the typhoons this year, this one (Mangkhut) is the strongest,” Japan Meteorological Agency forecaster Hiroshi Ishihara told AFP on Friday.

“This is a violent typhoon. It has the strongest sustained wind (among the typhoons of this year).”

After blasting the Philippines, Mangkhut is predicted to hurtle towards China’s heavily populated southern coast this weekend.

“They (authorities) said this typhoon is twice as strong as the last typhoon, that’s why we are terrified,” Myrna Parallag, 53, told AFP after fleeing her home in the northern Philippines.

“We learned our lesson last time. The water reached our roof,” she said, referring to when her family rode out a typhoon at home in 2016.

The country’s deadliest on record is Super Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,350 people dead or missing across the central Philippines in November 2013.

Poor communities reliant on fishing are some of the most vulnerable to fierce typhoon winds and the storm surges that pound the coast.

“The rains will be strong and the winds are no joke… We may have a storm surge that could reach four storeys high,” Michael Conag, a spokesman for local civil defence authorities, told AFP.

As the storm heads for China’s southern coast, Cathay Pacific airline said it expects more than 400 flight cancellations over the next three days.

The Hong Kong government said Mangkhut will pose “a severe threat to the region” as many residents in the city and neighbouring Macau stocked up on food and supplies.

The president of neighbouring Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, pushed citizens to be ready.

“The typhoon is powerful and even it’s not expected to make a landfall in Taiwan, we should be well prepared and not… take it lightly,” she wrote on Facebook. AFP

Cebu Governor Hilario Davide III said 751 passengers and crewmen of the MV Thomas Aquinas have been rescued after the inter-island ferry was in a collision late Friday with the MV Sulpicio Express Siete then rapidly sank off the Cebu pier.

Stunned passengers were forced to jump in the dark into the water after the captain ordered the doomed ferry abandoned.

Coast guard, navy and fishing vessels, backed by helicopters, scoured the choppy seas off Talisay city in Cebu, about 570 kilometers (350 miles) south of Manila, Sunday but found no sign of any more survivors. Divers, however, retrieved the bodies of a man and a woman in the ferry, which sank in waters about 33 meters (100 feet) deep.

“We’re still on a rescue mission,” Davide told reporters. “We have not given up on them.”

A survivor, right foreground, of the ill-fated passenger ferry MV Thomas Aquinas, leaves the ticketi …
Relatives flocked to a ticketing office of ferry owner, 2GO Group Inc., and pasted pictures of their missing loved ones. Others, like Richard Ortiz, waited quietly and stared blankly at the vast sea from the Talisay pier, where coast guard and navy rescuers have encamped.

“I just want to see my parents,” said Ortiz, who clutched a picture of his father and mother. “This is so difficult.”

Amid initial confusion over the number of ferry passengers and the missing, Cebu coast guard chief Commodore William Melad said authorities reported that there were 870 people on board the ferry, including 754 passengers and 116 crewmen. The more than 30

MANILA, Philippines: One of the Philippines’ most active volcanoes spewed huge rocks and ash after daybreak Tuesday, killing at least five climbers and trapping more than a dozen others near the crater in its first eruption in three years, officials said.

Rescue teams and helicopters were sent to Mayon volcano in the central Philippines to bring out the dead. At least seven were injured from a group of about 20 mountaineers who were caught by surprise by the sudden eruption, Albay provincial Gov. Joey Salceda said. Clouds have cleared over the volcano, which was quiet later in the morning.

The climbers who died were struck by huge rocks, guide Kenneth Jesalva told ABS-CBN TV network by cellphone from a camp near the crater. They included a German, an Austrian and a Filipino.

The injured included foreigners and Filipino guides. Some were in critical condition, said the chief of the national disaster agency, Eduardo del Rosario.

Jesalva said he was in the group that spent the night on the picturesque mountain, known for its almost-perfect cone, when the volcano rumbled back to life early in the morning and rocks “as big as a living room” came raining down on them. He rushed back to the base camp to call for help.

The head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, Renato Solidum, said Tuesday’s eruption was normal for the restive Mayon, about 340 kilometers (212 miles) southeast of Manila. It has erupted about 40 times during the last 400 years.

In 2010, thousands of residents moved to temporary shelters when the volcano ejected ash in an 8-kilometer (5-mile) zone surrounding the crater.

Solidum said that no alert was raised for the volcano following the latest eruption and no evacuation was being planned. Climbers are not allowed when an alert is up, and the recent calm may have encouraged this week’s trek.

MANILA, Philippines: A southern Philippine town plans to hold funeral rites for the world’slargest saltwater crocodile and then preserve its remains in a museum to keep tourists coming and prevent their community from slipping back into obscurity, the town’s mayor said Monday.

The 1-ton crocodile was declared dead Sunday a few hours after flipping over with a bloated stomach in a pond in an eco-tourism park in Bunawan town, which had started to draw tourists, revenue and development because of the immense reptile, Mayor Edwin Cox Elorde said.

“The whole town, in fact the whole province, is mourning,” Elorde said from Bunawan in Agusan del Sur province. “My phones kept ringing because people wanted to say how affected they are.”

Guinness World Records had proclaimed it the largest saltwater crocodile in captivity last year, measuring the giant at 6.17 meters (20.24 feet). The reptile took the top spot from an Australian crocodile that measured more than 5 meters (17 feet) and weighed nearly a ton.

The crocodile was named Lolong, after a government environmental officer who died from a heart attack after traveling to Bunawan to help capture the beast. The crocodile, estimated to be more than 50 years old, was blamed for a few brutal deaths of villagers before Bunawan folk came to love it.

The giant reptile has come to symbolize the rich bio-diversity of Agusan marsh, where it was captured. The vast complex of swamp forests, shallow lakes, lily-covered ponds and wetlands is home to wild ducks, herons, egrets and threatened species like the Philippine Hawk Eagle.

Wildlife experts were to perform an autopsy as early as Monday to determine the cause of its death, Elorde said.

Bunawan villagers planned to perform a tribal ritual, which involves butchering chicken and pigs as funeral offerings to thank forest spirits for the fame and other blessings the crocodile has brought, Elordie said. A group of Christians would separately offer prayers before the autopsy.

The rites would be held at the eco-tourism park, where the reptile had emerged as a star attraction, drawing foreign tourists, scientists and wildlife reporting outfits like the National Geographic to Bunawan, a far-flung town of 37,000 people about 515 miles (830 kilometers) southeast of Manila.

The crocodile’s capture in September 2011 sparked celebrations in Bunawan, but it also raised concerns that more giant crocodiles might lurk in a marshland and creek where villagers fish. The crocodile was captured with steel cable traps during a hunt prompted by the death of a child in 2009 and the later disappearance of a fisherman. Water buffalos have also been attacked by crocodiles in the area.

About 100 people led by Elorde pulled the crocodile from a creek using a rope and then hoisted it by crane onto a truck.

Philippine officials had planned to construct a road to the park to accommodate the growing number of tourists, Elorde said, adding that he planned to have the crocodile preserved and placed in a museum so Bunawan villagers and tourists could still marvel at it.

“I’d like them to see the crocodile that broke a world record and put our town on the map,” he said.

MANILA: Almost four decades after he was arrested and tortured and his sister disappeared into a maze of Philippine police cells and military houses, playwright Bonifacio Ilagan is finally seeing his suffering officially recognized.

A writer for an underground communist newspaper, Ilagan and thousands like him were rounded up by dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ security forces after he placed the Philippines under martial law in 1972. Detentions, beatings, harassment and killings of the regime’s opponents continued until Marcos was toppled in 1986.

Even though democracy was restored, it would take another 27 years for the Philippine Congress to vote on a bill awarding compensation and recognition to martial law victims. The bill was ratified Monday and will be sent to Pres. Benigno Aquino III for signing into law, said Sen. Francis Escudero, a key proponent.

“More than the monetary compensation, the bill represents the only formal, written document that martial law violated the human rights of Filipinos and that there were courageous people who fought the dictatorship,” said a statement from SELDA, an organization of former political prisoners that campaigned for the passage of the bill.
Ilagan’s story is more of a rule than exception among leftist activists of his generation.

“The torture started in the house. We were beaten up, punched and kicked,” he said, recalling a police raid on his residence in April 1974 and the beginning of his two-year detention ordeal. He said he vomited blood after being kicked in the thighs and had the soles of his foot burned by an iron.

“The one episode in my torture that I cannot forget was when they ordered me to remove my pants and underwear and they inserted a piece of stick into my penis. ‘Oh my God,’ I said, this is one torture I could not bear,'” the 61-year-old said in an interview. He said that interrogators wanted him to decode documents and identify people in pictures that were seized from suspected communist activists.

“Compared to others, mine was not the worst torture,” he said. “The others were electrocuted and injected with truth serum. … But the threats continued.”

Ilagan’s sister, Rizalina, disappeared in 1976 along with nine other activists, many of them students involved in anti-Marcos publications, he said. One of the women arrested by the same government unit that he suspected was involved in his sister’s abduction had escaped to recount her rape and torture. Ilagan said he has no doubt that his sister went through the same abuses.

His parents died still hoping his sister would turn up alive, but the family has found no closure, Ilagan said.
Lawmakers in two chambers of the Congress agreed last week on the text of the compensation bill.
Aquino is the son of an assassinated anti-Marcos activist and a mother who led the 1986 “people power” revolt that ousted Marcos and sent him into U.S. exile, where he died three years later without ever facing prosecution for human rights abuses.

Many of Marcos’ men reinvented themselves as powerful politicians or businessmen, and not one was successfully prosecuted for any of the crimes allegedly committed during the martial law years.
Two martial law figures, former Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and the deputy military chief of staff, Fidel Ramos, led a mutiny against Marcos as part of the 1986 revolt. Ramos later served as president from 1992 to 1998, and Enrile is currently the president of the Senate.

Despite cases filed by former political prisoners, “there have been no convictions of perpetrators,” Marie Hilao-Enriquez, chairwoman of SELDA, said Monday.

The Marcos family, meanwhile, returned from exile in 1990s and again wields influence. Former first lady Imelda Marcos is a lawmaker, son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcosis is a senator, and daughter Imee is a provincial governor.
“Governments after Marcos did not move or did not do anything to go after Marcos seriously, so we filed a case in Hawaii,” Hilao-Enriquez said.

In 1992, victims won a class action suit against the Marcos estate in Hawaii.

Under the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013, the 9,539 victims will be awarded compensation using $246 million that the Philippine government recovered from Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth. But all claims will have to evaluated by an independent commission and the amount each will receive will depend of the abuse suffered.

“Finally, over two decades after the fall of the dictatorship, we will have a law that puts the responsibility of human rights abuses square on the shoulder of Marcos and provides justice for all those who suffered under his reign,” said Rep. Walden Bello, a member of a congressional committee that drafted and approved the bill.

Sixteen Filipinos have been accounted for and four others are still missing since Algerian special forces stormed the plant on Saturday to end the siege, Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez told reporters.

He said the information came from Algerian authorities, which expressed their condolences to the Philippine government and the victims’ families.

The deaths of the six Filipinos were a direct result of the hostage-taking incident in the area and mostly by gunshot wounds and the effects of the explosions,” Hernandez said.
He said his office was notifying the families and arranging for the repatriation of the victims’ remains, while the government was focused on finding the missing four Filipinos. A team from the Philippine Embassy in neighboring Libya, which covers Algeria, was on the ground in that country.
Four Filipino survivors were treated in a hospital in Algiers, Hernandez said.

Most of the workers were employed by Japanese companies, he said.

A total of 1,780 Filipinos work in Algeria. They are part of 10 million overseas workers, or 10 percent of the population employed abroad.