Typhoon Usagi veers from Hong Kong, hits China

  Last Updated On 22 September,2013 About 17 hours ago

The typhoon wreaked havoc on airport schedules in Hong Kong, nearby Macau and mainland China.

HONG KONG (AP) - The year's most powerful typhoon slammed into southern China on Sunday evening, forcing hundreds of flight cancellations, shutting down shipping and putting a nuclear power plant on alert after pummeling parts of the Philippines and Taiwan with heavy rains and fierce winds.
Typhoon Usagi veered away from Hong Kong at the last minute and made landfall northeast of the former British colony. Forecasters had warned earlier that it posed a "severe threat" to the southern Chinese city.
Usagi, Japanese for rabbit, was classified as a severe typhoon, packing sustained winds of 175 kilometers (109 miles) per hour, with gusts of up to 213 kph (132 mph).
The storm was downgraded from a super typhoon on Saturday, with its sustained winds falling below 241 kilometers (150 miles) per hour, as it passed through the Luzon Strait separating the Philippines and Taiwan, likely sparing residents in both places from the most destructive winds near its eye.
In the Philippines, Usagi left at least two people dead and two others missing, while in Taiwan nine people were hurt by falling trees on Kinmen island off China's coast.
The typhoon landed near the city of Shanwei in the Chinese province of Guangdong, about 140 kilometers (87 miles) northeast of Hong Kong, and was moving west-northwest at 22 kph (14 mph), the Hong Kong Observatory said. It was expected to skirt about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Hong Kong overnight.
Ferry services between Hong Kong and nearby Macau and outlying islands were suspended as the observatory raised the No. 8 storm warning signal, the third highest on a five-point scale. It reported winds as strong as 68 kph (42 mph) and warned that a storm surge and heavy rains could cause flooding in low-lying areas.
Police in Shanwei ordered more than 8,000 fishing boats to return to port and more than 1,200 residents were taken to temporary shelters, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
The typhoon wreaked havoc on airport schedules in Hong Kong, nearby Macau and mainland China, upsetting travel plans for many passengers who were returning home at the end of the three-day mid-autumn festival long weekend.
Hong Kong International Airport said 370 arriving and departing flights were canceled and another 64 delayed. Two of Hong Kong's biggest airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways and Dragonair, canceled flights to and from the city's airport starting at 6 p.m. Sunday, with plans to resume operations Monday if conditions permit.
Beijing-based Air China scrubbed 148 flights to and from Hong Kong, Macau and five nearby mainland cities. China Southern Airlines, based in Guangzhou, canceled all flights to and from Hong Kong and three mainland airports, Xinhua said.
Fujian province suspended shipping between mainland China and Taiwan, the news agency said.
Authorities in Guangdong initiated an emergency response plan for the province's nuclear power plants as Usagi approached, ordering four of six reactors at the Daya Bay nuclear power station northeast of Hong Kong to operate at a reduced load, Xinhua said. Outdoor work at two other nuclear power plants under construction in the province was suspended.
In Taiwan, more than 3,300 people were evacuated from flood-prone areas and mountainous regions. The storm also caused a landslide that buried a rail line on Taiwan's southeast coast, but rail services were restored by Sunday morning.
Another landslide late Saturday in the southeastern hot springs resort village of Chihpen sent mud and rocks crashing through the ground floor of a resort spa, forcing the evacuation of frightened guests. The Chihpen River breached its levies upriver, turning the village's main street into a rock-strewn stream, flooding homes and damaging vehicles.
In the Philippines, a 50-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman drowned when a passenger boat capsized in rough waters off northeastern Aurora province, the Office of Civil Defense said Saturday. Two other people were missing in the incident, while the remaining nine passengers and crew were rescued.
The typhoon set off landslides, flooded parts of six Philippine provinces and affected nearly 20,000 people, but disaster-response officials did not immediately report additional casualties.

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Two dead, many feared hurt in India rail accident: official

NEW DELHI: At least two people were killed and many feared injured when a Bangalore-bound train derailed in southern India on Wednesday morning, a railways official told AFP.
V.J. Accamma, a spokesman for Southern Railways, confirmed the death of at least two people in the accident, which occurred just after dawn in the small village of Chitteri in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
“At least two persons have been killed, we are still trying to verify the numbers of injured,” Accamma told AFP.
“Rescue workers have been sent to help people after the train derailed around 5:50 this morning,” he added.
The train was on its way from the town of Muzaffarpur in eastern India to the suburb of Yeshwantpur in the southern technology hub of Bangalore, he said.
India’s colonial-era train system has a notoriously bad accident record.
The country’s worst rail accident occurred in 1981 when a train plunged into a river in the eastern state of Bihar, killing an estimated 800 people.
Derailments, collisions and other accidents are also common.

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North Korea: Foreigners should evacuate South Korea

North Korea has warned foreigners in South Korea to take evacuation measures in case of war.

This comes amid growing concern that the North may be about to launch a missile test.
Pyongyang has been making bellicose threats against South Korea, Japan and US bases in the region.
Japan has deployed defensive anti-missile batteries at three locations in Tokyo, to protect the capital's 30 million residents.
US-made Patriot anti-missile systems have been deployed at the defence ministry and at two other military bases.
"The government is making utmost efforts to protect our people's lives and ensure their safety," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.
"As North Korea keeps making provocative comments, Japan, co-operating with relevant countries, will do what we have to do," he added.

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US boosts missile defence, N. Korea warns of nuclear strike

SEOUL: The United States has scrambled to reinforce its Pacific missile defences, preparing to send ground-based interceptors to Guam, as North Korea said Thursday it had authorised plans for nuclear strikes on US targets.

US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said Pyongyang’s increasingly bellicose threats combined with its military capabilities represented a “real and clear danger” to the United States and to its allies South Korea and Japan.
“They have nuclear capacity now, they have missile delivery capacity now,”Hagel said Wednesday. “We take those threats seriously; we have to take those threats seriously.”
The Pentagon said it would send ground-based THAAD missile-interceptor batteries to protect military bases on Guam, a US territory some 3,380 kilometres (2,100 miles) southeast of North Korea and home to 6,000 American military personnel, submarines and bombers.
They would complement two Aegis anti-missile destroyers already dispatched to the region.
Shortly after the THAAD announcement, the North Korean military said it had received final approval for military action against the United States, possibly involving nuclear weapons.
“The moment of explosion is approaching fast,” the Korean People’s Army general staff said, responding to what it called the provocative US use of nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers in ongoing war games with South Korea.
The US aggression would be “smashed by… cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means,” it said in a statement.
While few of the North’s threats have been matched with action, reports Thursday said it appears to have moved a medium-range missile capable of hitting targets in South Korea and Japan to its east coast.
“We are closely monitoring whether the North moved it with a view to actual launch or just as a show of force against the US,” Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korean official as saying.
A provocative missile test-fired into the sea over Japan is one scenario that analysts have said the North could opt for as a relatively low-risk way of exiting the crisis with a face-saving show of force.
Yun Duk-Min, a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul, said the latest nuclear threat was similar to one issued a month ago, but with the added weight of “approval” — presumably by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
“The problem is whether Kim, who is still young and inexperienced, knows how to handle this escalation,” Yun said. “Where does it end? That’s the worrying question.”
North Korea blocked access to its Kaesong joint industrial zone with South Korea Thursday for the second day running, and threatened to pull out its 53,000 workers in a furious reaction to the South’s airing of a “military” contingency plan to protect its own workers there.
Pyongyang informed Seoul on Wednesday it was stopping the daily movement of South Koreans to the Kaesong complex, the last real surviving point of contact between the two countries.
“The full closure of the complex is set to become a reality,” a spokesman for the North’s Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK) said.
The North has said that the more than 800 South Koreans currently in Kaesong — 10 kilometres (six miles) inside the North Korean border — can leave whenever they want but many have chosen to stay to keep the factories running.
North Korea threatened a “pre-emptive” nuclear strike against the United States in early March, and last week its supreme army command ordered strategic rocket units to combat status.
Most experts think it is not yet capable of mounting a nuclear device on a ballistic missile capable of striking US bases or territory.
Tensions have soared on the Korean peninsula since December, when the North test-launched a long-range rocket. In February, it upped the ante once again by conducting its third nuclear test.
Subsequent UN sanctions and joint South Korea-US military drills triggered weeks of near-daily threats from Pyongyang, ranging from artillery strikes to nuclear armageddon.
The escalating crisis has triggered global concern, with China and Russia issuing repeated calls for restraint and UN Chief Ban Ki-moon warning that the situation had “gone too far” and risked spiralling out of control.
This week, the North warned it would reopen its mothballed Yongbyon reactor — its source of weapons-grade plutonium. It was closed in July 2007 under a six-nation aid-for-disarmament accord.
The US-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University said Wednesday that a satellite photograph seen on March 27 appeared to show construction work around the reactor was already under way.

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SEOUL: North Korea said on Tuesday that it intended to restart a mothballed nuclear reactor to feed its nuclear arms programme and hinted it may begin openly enriching weapons-grade uranium.
The announcement was the latest provocation at a time of soaring military tensions and followed a US decision to place a destroyer off the South Korean coast to defend against a possible missile strike from the North.
A government nuclear energy spokesman said the move would involve “readjusting and restarting” all facilities at the North’s Yongbyon nuclear complex, including a uranium enrichment plant and a five megawatt reactor.
This was being done with a view to “bolstering the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity” as well as solving “acute” electricity shortages, the spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA agency.
The North shut down the Yongbyon reactor in July 2007 under a six-nation aid-for-disarmament accord. The following summer it destroyed the cooling tower.
The reactor was the sole source of plutonium for the North’s nuclear weapons programme. The country’s remaining plutonium stockpile is believed to be enough for four to eight bombs.
North Korea revealed it was enriching uranium in Yongbyon in 2010 when it allowed foreign experts to visit the centrifuge facility there.
It insisted at the time that it was solely low-level enrichment for energy purposes.
The mention of “readjustment” by the energy spokesman will fuel concerns that it will be transformed, if indeed it has not been already, into a facility for producing weapons-grade uranium.
Many observers believe the North has been producing highly-enriched uranium in secret facilities for years, and that the third nuclear test conducted by the North in February may have been of a uranium bomb.
Its previous tests in 2006 and 2009 were both of plutonium devices.
The Korean peninsula has been caught in a cycle of escalating tensions since the February atomic test, which followed a long-range rocket launch in December last year.
Subsequent UN sanctions and annual South Korea-US military exercises have been used by Pyongyang to justify a wave of increasingly dire threats against Seoul and Washington, including warnings of missile strikes and nuclear war.
On Monday, the United States said its destroyer, USS Fitzgerald, had moved to South Korea’s southwestern coast after taking part in annual military exercises, instead of returning to its home port in Japan.
The deployment was “a prudent move” given the current tensions, a US defence official said, adding that it would offer “greater missile defence options should that become necessary”.
Earlier on Monday, the US military announced it had deployed F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to South Korea as part of the ongoing annual “Foal Eagle”joint military exercise.
North Korea has already threatened to strike the US mainland and US bases in the Pacific in response to the participation of nuclear-capable US B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers in the drill.
But the tough talk has yet to be matched by action on the ground, according to US intelligence.
“Despite the harsh rhetoric we’re hearing from Pyongyang, we are not seeing changes to the North Korean military posture, such as large-scale mobilisations and positioning of forces,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Tuesday’s nuclear announcement will, however, be serious cause for concern.
It followed a meeting of the ruling party’s top leadership on Sunday, at which North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jong-Un, stressed the importance of upgrading the country’s nuclear arsenal.
“Modernisation of the atomic energy industry is a key to… developing the technology to produce miniaturised, lighter nuclear weapons to a whole new level,” Kim said.
The next day, the annual session of the North’s parliament adopted a law enshrining North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapons state.
A basic uranium bomb is no more potent than a basic plutonium one, but the uranium enrichment path holds various advantages for the North, which has substantial deposits of uranium ore.
It also poses a significant proliferation risk.
Highly enriched uranium is the easiest fissile material with which to make a crude bomb, and the technical know-how and machinery for enriching uranium is more readily transferred and sold.

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