PHILIPPINES
Eruptions force evacuations
A series of eruptions at the nation’s most active volcano has prompted the evacuation of nearly 3,000 people from a danger zone on its foothills, officials said on Wednesday. Authorities raised the five-stage alert around Mayon Volcano in the northeastern province of Albay to Level 3 on Tuesday after detecting intermittent rockfalls from its peak crater along with pyroclastic flows — an avalanche of super-hot rock fragments, ash and gas. “This is already an eruption, a quiet one, with lava accumulating up the peak and swelling the dome, which cracked in some parts and resulted in rockfalls, some as big as cars,” said Teresito Bacolcol, the country’s chief volcanologist. It was too early to tell if Mayon’s restiveness would worsen, and lead to a major and violent eruption given the absence of other key signs of unrest, such as a spike in volcanic earthquakes and high levels of sulfur dioxide emissions, Bacolcol said. Troops, police and disaster-mitigation personnel helped evacuate more than 2,800 people from 729 households inside a 6km radius from the volcano’s crater that officials have long designated as a permanent danger zone, demarcated by concrete warning signs, Albay provincial officials said. Another 600 people living outside the permanent danger zone evacuated voluntarily to government-run emergency shelters to be safely away from the volcano, said Claudio Yucot, regional director of the Office of Civil Defense.
Photo: AP
SOUTH KOREA
Penguin diplomacy deployed
President Lee Jae-myung on Wednesday portrayed himself and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a pair of affectionate penguins in a social media post urging Kim to meet with him. Lee wrote on X that he hoped for the day that “the abnormal state of turmoil and hostility on the Korean Peninsula will be overcome.” The Korean-language post said: “Go meet, Po Jae-myung and Po Jong-un,” a reference to Pororo the Little Penguin, a popular children’s animation featuring penguin characters. One of the South’s most successful animated series, the program’s creators outsourced some work in its initial production phase to North Korean studios in the early 2000s.
UNITED STATES
Trump exits UNFCCC
President Donald Trump is withdrawing the nation from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as part of a sweeping exit from collective global action, the White House said on Wednesday. Sixty-six global organizations and treaties — about half of them affiliated with the UN — were listed in a White House memorandum as “contrary to the interests of the United States,” including the UNFCCC, the parent treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements.
UNITED STATES
Somalian aid halted
Department of State officials on Wednesday rebuked Somalia’s leaders over reports of food aid theft, and paused “all ongoing US assistance programs” to its government, the department wrote on X. Noting its “zero-tolerance policy” for waste or theft, the Undersecretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs and Religious Freedom wrote that it had received reports Somalian officials “destroyed a US-funded World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse and illegally seized 76 metric tons of donor-funded food aid for vulnerable Somalis.” Any future aid would be dependent on the Somalian Federal Government taking accountability and remediating the matter, it said.
