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Я жив – глава наемников Вагнера Пригожин вновь появляется и опровергает сообщения о своем «уничтожении»

Domestic flights were cancelled and almost 4,000 people were evacuated as Typhoon Haikui barrelled into southeastern Taiwan on Sunday bringing torrential rain and strong winds.

Haikui made landfall in the mountainous and sparsely populated far southeast of Taiwan mid-Sunday afternoon, the first typhoon to directly hit Taiwan in four years. Counties and cities in the region cancelled classes and declared a day off for workers.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen told a meeting of disaster management officials that people should avoid going out and not go up mountains, to the coast, fishing or engage in water sports, according to a statement from her office.

The fire department said two people were slightly injured when a tree fell on a truck in the eastern county of Hualien. There were few other reports of damage. In the capital Taipei there were only sporadic rain showers.

Haikui is a much weaker storm than Typhoon Saola which hit Hong Kong and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Saturday.

Taiwan’s government said that 3,729 people had been evacuated, mainly in the south and east.

Taiwanese airlines cancelled all domestic flights on Sunday, while ferry services to surrounding islands were also suspended.

There was less disruption to international flights, with only 41 cancelled for Sunday, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said.

The military has mobilised soldiers and equipment to help with flood relief and evacuation efforts.

After passing across southern Taiwan, Haikui is forecast to enter the Taiwan Strait and head towards China.

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India switched off its moon rover, the first craft to reach the lunar south poll, after it completed its two-week assignment conducting experiments, the country’s space agency said.

The Pragyan rover from the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was “set into Sleep mode” but with batteries charged and receiver on, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, late on Saturday.

“Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!” ISRO said. “Else, it will forever stay there as India’s lunar ambassador.”

By landing on the moon, India joined the United States, China and the former Soviet Union. It went beyond them in reaching the rugged south pole, shortly after Russia’s Luna-25 crashed on a similar attempt.

Chandrayaan-3’s soft, textbook touchdown after a failed attempt in 2019 sparked widespread jubilation in the world’s most populous country. The media hailed the landing as India’s greatest scientific feat.

Pragyan travelled over 100 m (330 feet), confirming the presence of sulphur, iron, oxygen and other elements on the moon, ISRO said.

Now India is hoping for the success of a probe launched on Saturday to study the sun, observing solar winds that can cause disturbance on earth commonly seen as auroras.

“The satellite is healthy” and in earth orbit, ISRO said on Sunday, as it prepares for its 1.5 million-km (930,000-mile) journey.

Border Patrol agents ordered the young Senegalese men to wait in the scant shade of desert scrub brush while they loaded a more vulnerable group of migrants — a family with three young children from India — into a white van for the short trip in triple-degree heat to a canopied field intake center.

The migrants were among hundreds who have been trudging this summer in the scorching sun and through open storm gates in the border wall to U.S. soil, following a remote corridor in the sprawling Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that’s among the most desolate and dangerous areas in the Arizona borderlands. Temperatures hit 47.7 degrees Celsius just as smugglers abruptly began steering migrants from Africa and Asia here to request asylum.

Suddenly, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which oversees the area, in July became the busiest sector along the U.S-Mexico border for the first time since 2008. It’s seen migrants from faraway countries like Pakistan, China and Mauritania, where social media is drawing young people to the new route to the border that begins in Nicaragua. There are large numbers from Ecuador, Bangladesh and Egypt, as well as more traditional border crossers from Mexico and Central America.

“Right now we are encountering people from all over the world,” said Border Patrol Deputy Chief Justin De La Torre, of the Tucson Sector. “It has been a real emergency here, a real trying situation.”

The patrol is calling on other agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration, for help in getting migrants “out of the elements and into our processing centers as quickly as possible,” De La Torre said.

During a recent visit, Associated Press journalists saw close to 100 migrants arrive in just four hours at the border wall near Lukeville, Arizona, inside Organ Pipe, as temperatures hit 43.3 degrees Celsius. The next morning, several hundred more migrants lined up along the wall to turn themselves in.

“Welcome to America, that’s good person,” a young Senegalese man said in his limited English, beaming as he crunched across the desert floor after Tom Wingo, a humanitarian aid volunteer, gave him some water and snacks. “I am very, very happy for you.”

The storm gates in the towering steel wall have been open since mid-June because of rains during the monsoon season. Rushing water from heavy downpours can damage closed gates, the wall, a rocky border road, and flora and fauna. But migrants get in even when the gates are closed, sometimes by breaking locks or slipping through gaps in the wall.

Agents from the Border Patrol’s small Ajo Station a half hour’s drive north of the border encountered several large groups the first weekend of August, including one of 533 people from 17 countries in the area that includes the national monument, an expanse of rugged desert scattered with cactus, creosote and whip-like ocotillo. The Tucson Sector registered 39,215 arrests in July, up 60% from June. Officials attribute the sudden influx to false advertising by smugglers who tell migrants it’s easier to cross here and get released into the United States.

Migrants are taken first to the intake center, where agents collect people’s names, countries of origin and other information before they are moved to the Ajo Station some 48 kilometers up a two-lane state highway. 

Arrests for illegally crossing anywhere along the nearly 3,200-kilometer U.S.-Mexico border soared 33% from June to July, according to U.S. government figures, reversing a plunge after new asylum restrictions were introduced in May. President Joe Biden’s administration notes illegal crossings were still down 27% that month from July 2022 and credits the carrot-and-stick approach that expands legal pathways while punishing migrants who enter illegally.

De La Torre said most migrants in the area request asylum, something far from guaranteed with the recent restrictions.

The Ajo Station’s area of responsibility is currently the busiest inside the Tucson Sector, De La Torre said. It includes the border areas of Organ Pipe and the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, isolated areas with rough roads and scarce water and shade. They include the Devil’s Highway region, where 14 border crossers in a group of 26 died in 2001 after smugglers abandoned them.

CBP rescues by air and land along the border are soaring this year, with 28,537 counted during the 10-month period ending July 31. That compares with 22,075 for the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2022, the agency said. There were 2,776 migrant rescues in July.

The rescues continued in August, including one especially busy day when a Black Hawk helicopter hoisted a 15-year-old Guatemalan boy from a remote southern Arizona mountain to safety. A short time later, the chopper rescued a Guatemalan man who called 911 from the vast Tohono O’odham Nation just east of Organ Pipe.

Some activists recently protested outside the Ajo Station, saying migrants kept in an outdoor enclosure there didn’t have enough shade. Patrol officials say that only adult men waiting to be transported to bigger facilities for processing are kept outside for a few hours, and under a large canopy with fans. Women, children and vulnerable people stay inside. The average wait time the facility is 15 hours.

The influx has also presented challenges for humanitarian groups.

Wingo, a retired schoolteacher working with Samaritanos Sin Fronteras, or Samaritans Without Borders, travels to the border several times a week to fill bright blue plastic barrels at six water stations. He and other volunteers distribute hats, bandanas, snacks and ice-cold bottled water to migrants they encounter.

“A lot of these people go out into the desert not knowing the trouble they are getting themselves into,” said Wingo.

During a recent border visit, Wingo handed bottled water to people from India waiting for help by the wall after a woman they were traveling twisted her ankle. He gave water and granola bars to a Guatemalan couple with three young children who were traveling with a Peruvian man.

Wingo said he pays especially close attention to those who may be more susceptible to the torrid heat, such as pregnant and nursing women and the elderly. He recently encountered an 89-year-old diabetic woman from India about to go into shock. When he called Border Patrol agents on that especially busy day, he said, they asked him to bring the woman himself to their intake center for medical care. The woman is recovering in a Phoenix hospital.

Many others don’t survive.

The remains of 43 suspected border crossers were found in southern Arizona in July, about half of them recently dead, according to the non-profit organization Human Borders, which works with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office to track and map the numbers.

They included two found in Organ Pipe: Hilda Veliz Maas de Mijangos, 36, from Guatemala City, dead about a day; and Ignacio Munoz Loza, 22, of the Mexican state of Jalisco, dead for about a week. Both succumbed to heat exposure.

Serhiy Kolyada on what’s causing all the loud bangs in Russian occupied Crimea.

A report released by the EU says a number of social media platforms “failed to implement” new rules designed to combat Kremlin disinformation.

Australia said on Sunday it would send additional police to the Solomon Islands to boost security for the Pacific Games in November, keeping them there until June to assist with a general election.

The extended Australian police presence comes after the Solomon Islands upgraded ties with China, signing a policing agreement in July. Australia, New Zealand and the United States are concerned Chinese police could dislodge a long-standing security arrangement Canberra has with the Pacific Islands nation.

The Solomon Islands said on Friday it had invited Australia to extend the police presence, originally due to end in December.

Australia was the Pacific Islands nation’s “primary security partner,” a spokesperson for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in a statement on Sunday. The Australian police will work alongside officers from Fiji, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

“At the request of the Solomon Islands Government, Australia has extended its contribution to the Solomons International Assistance Force until June 2024 to assist with security for the national general elections,” the statement said.

The Australian police contingent arrived in December 2021 to quell anti-government riots, while Chinese police trainers arrived this year to prepare for the games.

More than 5,000 athletes from two dozen nations are expected to attend the games, for which China has donated and constructed stadiums and other venues.

China stepped up its funding for infrastructure after Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019. The Solomon Islands last year signed a security pact with China, raising concern in Canberra and Washington about Beijing’s naval ambitions.

President Joe Biden traveled to Florida on Saturday to survey the destruction from Hurricane Idalia and comfort victims of the storm, but he did not meet with Governor Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential rival, who opted not to come.

Biden, who praised DeSantis during the visit, said he was not disappointed by the Republican governor’s absence and said DeSantis had helped plan the trip.

DeSantis’ spokesperson said on Friday the governor had no plans to meet Biden, saying “the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts.”

Biden, a Democrat, took an aerial tour and received a briefing from local officials and first responders in Live Oak, a town hit hard by the storm. He saw houses with fallen trees on them, and said no one “intelligent” could doubt that climate change was happening.

But politics hung over his trip. The president, who has spoken to DeSantis multiple times this week, had said on Friday they would meet in person. The governor’s decision caught the White House off guard.

Asked if he was disappointed DeSantis did not come, Biden said no.

“No, I’m not disappointed. He may have had other reasons. … But he did help us plan this,” Biden told reporters while standing in front of a damaged house. “He sat with FEMA and decided where we should go, where would be the least disruption,” the president said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Biden said he was pleased that Senator Rick Scott, a Republican former governor of Florida, had come despite their disagreements on many issues.

Scott, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, who was the 45th U.S. president, wore a hat that said “Navy” on the front and “45” on the back. Scott later said he wore the hat as a reference to his term as Florida’s 45th governor.

DeSantis, 44, spent the day about 50 miles (80 km) south, touring small communities along Florida’s Gulf Coast, according to his official schedule.

The governor is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to oust Biden from the White House, but trails Trump in opinion polls. Biden, 80, is running for re-election.

Biden and DeSantis have spoken regularly this week about the hurricane, which pummeled Florida’s Big Bend region with Category 3 winds of nearly 125 mph (200 kph). On Wednesday, the president said politics had not crept into their conversations.

It could have been politically perilous for DeSantis to be photographed with Biden overlooking storm damage now as the nominating race intensifies. Though he trails far behind Trump, DeSantis leads the other Republican candidates in the race.

When Biden visited Florida after Hurricane Ian last year, a photo of DeSantis standing awkwardly to the side as the president talked animatedly with a local couple went viral, highlighting the difference between the two politicians’ styles of public interaction.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is also running for the 2024 Republican nomination, drew criticism for his praise of then-President Barack Obama in 2012 when the Democrat visited his state following superstorm Sandy.

During his visit to Live Oak, Biden received praise from Republican Senator Scott for declaring an official disaster early on.

The president, for his part, complemented Scott and DeSantis. “The governor was on top of it,” Biden said.

The White House said Biden, who was traveling with his wife, Jill, informed DeSantis about the visit during a conversation on Thursday, and the governor did not raise concerns.

Their failure to meet will not have any impact on recovery efforts, FEMA head Deanne Criswell said.

She told reporters that search and rescue operations had wrapped up and that officials were now focused on restoring power to affected regions. Less than 1% of Floridians were without power as of Saturday, she said, though that figure was significantly higher in some areas directly affected by the hurricane.

DeSantis has been a sharp critic of Biden, and the two have clashed over COVID-19 vaccines, abortion and LGBT rights. But when they met last year during Biden’s visit to Florida to Florida to assess the devastation from Hurricane Ian, the president said they had worked together “hand in glove.”

Biden visited Hawaii just last week after deadly wildfires there. He expressed confidence on Friday that Congress would approve his administration’s request for a further $4 billion to address natural disasters.

“I’m confident because I can’t imagine Congress saying ‘We’re not going to help,’” he told reporters.

After concluding the Florida trip, he traveled to his home state of Delaware, where he planned to spend the weekend.

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