AFP UK

'Girl with a Pearl Earring' is back on display in The Hague

Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was back on display at a museum in The Hague on Friday, a day after being targeted by climate activists.

Three men were arrested on Thursday after they glued themselves to the Dutch master’s famous 1665 painting at the city’s Mauritshuis museum during peak visiting hours.

“We are glad to say that at 3:30 pm (1330 GMT) the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ was put back in her rightful spot in the Mauritshuis by members of our staff,” the museum said.

“We are incredibly grateful that The Girl remained undamaged and is back in her familiar place so quickly,” museum director Martine Gosselink added.

Vermeer’s work — which has inspired a best-selling novel and a Hollywood movie — was examined in the museum’s conservation studio and found to be undamaged, the museum added.

The climate activists, three Belgians in their forties, were arrested shortly after the incident, which stunned visitors and forced museum staff to cordon off the area.

Social media images showed a man wearing a “Just Stop Oil” T-shirt gluing his head to the glass protecting the canvas, while another glued his hand to the wall and a third emptied out a tin of what appeared to be tomato soup.

The climate activists said they had not intended to damage the painting, which Gosselink described as very vulnerable.

Just Stop Oil, which wants urgent action to stop global warming making the planet unliveable, explained on its website that it had begun using shock tactics targeting iconic works of art to make people think about what they considered precious and how to protect it.

“It enables a conversation,” the coalition of anti-fossil fuel groups said.

“There’s an apocalyptic, climate-driven famine in Somalia, which hasn’t pushed me to say anything. But I’m venting my anger now over a work of art in a gallery. Does any of this add up? What do I really value here?”

The stunt at the Mauritshuis comes after activists threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London on October 14 and smeared mashed potato over a Claude Monet painting in Germany. Both canvasses were protected by glass and were undamaged.

jhe/gil

A storm in the Philippines unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight

Landslides and flooding in the southern Philippines killed at least 67 people on Friday, according to an official tally, with rescuers racing to save residents of a mountain village that was buried in mud.

The village of Kusiong accounted for many of the 50 deaths in the area around Datu Odin Sinsuat town, after heavy overnight rain unleashed floods mixed with mud, rocks and fallen trees that buried the community, the area’s civil defence office said in a statement.

Similar avalanches also struck villages in the nearby towns of Datu Blah Sinsuat and Upi, which accounted for 17 more deaths.

Eleven people remain missing and 31 were injured, according to official figures.

Flash floods from rains wrought by Tropical Storm Nalgae swamped nine mostly rural towns around Cotabato, a city of 300,000 people on Mindanao island that was also submerged in widespread flooding.

Many residents were caught by surprise as floodwaters rose rapidly before dawn, Naguib Sinarimbo, the spokesman and civil defence chief for the regional government, told AFP.

Teams in rubber boats had rescued residents from rooftops in some towns, Sinarimbo said.

In recent years, flash floods with mud and debris from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by typhoons in Philippine communities.

Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year and kill hundreds of people. Those that do, however, tend to be deadlier than those that hit the country’s main island of Luzon.

A long mountain range walls off most of Luzon from the Pacific, where most storms are spawned, helping to absorb the blow, the state weather service said.

Local filmmaker Remar Pablo told AFP he was shooting a beauty pageant in Upi when the floodwaters suddenly came in after midnight and forced audience members to flee.

A row of cars sat half-submerged on the street outside, video footage showed.

“We were stranded inside,” said Pablo, who eventually waded through the water to get home.

Rescuers carried a baby in a plastic tub as they navigated chest-deep water, a photo posted by the provincial police showed.

– ‘It was a shock’ –

Floodwaters have receded in several areas, but Cotabato remained almost entirely waterlogged.

Sinarimbo said there could be more flooding over the next few hours because of heavy rain over mountains surrounding the Cotabato river basin.

The army deployed its trucks to collect stranded residents in Cotabato and nearby towns, provincial civil defence chief Nasrullah Imam said.

“It was a shock to see municipalities which had never flooded getting hit this time,” Imam said, adding that some families were swept away when the waters hit their homes.

The heavy rainfall began late Thursday in the impoverished region, which is under Muslim self-rule after decades of separatist armed rebellion.

The state weather office in Manila said the downpours were partly caused by Nalgae, which it expects to strengthen at landfall overnight Friday.

Nalgae headed northwest over water with maximum winds of 85 kilometres (53 miles) an hour just off Samar island late Friday and is forecast to track the Bicol peninsula early Saturday.

More than 7,000 people were evacuated from flood- and landslide-prone communities in these areas, the civil defence office said in an updated tally.

The coast guard also suspended ferry services in much of the archipelago nation, where tens of thousands of people board boats each day.

Scientists have warned that storms, which also kill livestock and destroy farms, houses, roads and bridges, are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

strs-cgm/aha

The aye-aye has been filmed picking its nose with its extra-long middle finger

When scientists caught the aye-aye on video using its strangely thin, eight-centimetre-long middle finger to deeply pick its nose, it pointed towards a larger mystery: why exactly do some animals eat their own snot?

The footage resulted in research which names the aye-aye, a peculiar nocturnal lemur with big ears found only in Madagascar, as the 12th primate who picks their nose. 

It joins an illustrious group that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, macaques — and of course humans.

Anne-Claire Fabre, an assistant professor at Switzerland’s University of Bern and lead author of a study published in the journal Zoology this week, told AFP that the researchers stumbled on the discovery “by chance”.

She said they were “surprised” by the behaviour of a female aye-aye named Kali, who was being filmed at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina in 2015.

In the video, “the aye-aye inserts the entire length of its extra-long, skinny and highly mobile middle finger into the nasal passages and then licks the nasal mucus collected”, the peer-reviewed study said.

“This video brings the number of species known to pick their nose to twelve,” it said, adding that they all have “fine manipulative skills”.

The middle fingers of aye-ayes are not only long and thin, but also have a unique ball and socket joint they use to knock on wood to locate grubs.

After seeing the video, “the first thing I was wondered is where this finger is going”, said Fabre, who is also an associate scientist at London’s Natural History Museum.

So the researchers used a CT scan of an aye-aye’s skull to reconstruct the finger’s journey, finding it probably went down the throat.

“There is no other possibility. Otherwise it would have gone into the brain and then they die,” Fabre said.

The researchers compared the finger’s probing to a very deep Covid test.

– ‘Gross’ – 

But finding out exactly why aye-ayes — or other primates — pick their noses proved a more difficult task.

The scientists reviewed the existing literature and found that “most of it was jokes”, Fabre said.

They did find one study which suggested that nose-picking could spread bacteria in a harmful manner. 

Another said that eating snot could stop bacteria from sticking to teeth, so it might be good for oral health.

So why is there so little research on nose picking?

“I think it’s just something that people didn’t think about because it’s considered to be gross,” Fabre said. However she added that lots of research has been done about coprophagia — animals eating their own excrement — which could also be considered gross.

The aye-aye, the world’s largest nocturnal primate, is highly endangered — in part because it is seen as a bad omen in its native Madagascar, she said.

Surf instructor Felipe Guimaraes, 27, gives a lesson to a group of tourists at a beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — almost 3,000 kilometers away from the stricken Amazon rainforest, a problem far removed from many voters' daily lives

Felipe Guimaraes leaps on and off a surfboard on the sand as he shows tourists the basics of surfing. Here, on Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema beach, the stricken Amazon could not feel further away.

In Western capitals, the plight of the world’s largest rainforest is seen as a key issue in Brazil’s election, with much at stake for a world scrambling to curb the climate emergency.

However, fires and deforestation have taken a back seat in a dirty and divisive election campaign, and many Brazilians have bigger concerns beyond those happening in a vast area thousands of miles away.

“I dunno man, it’s so far away, but it’s obvious it is important and good to take care of” the Amazon, says bare-chested surf instructor Guimaraes, 27, adding there are more “visible issues” than the rainforest.

Many Brazilians list the economy, crime, education, and corruption as their top worries.

“The country has enormous social inequality, we are recovering from a pandemic. Today, some Brazilians are only worried about surviving one more day. Having a job, having food on the table, access to a doctor,” Daniel Costa Matos, 38, an IT analyst from the capital Brasilia, told AFP.

While he thinks the Amazon is “of extreme importance,” his biggest worry is corruption.

“The climate crisis, the problem of deforestation in the Amazon, is still far from the reality of many Brazilians,” said 36-year-old climate activist Giovanna Nader, who uses her podcast and Instagram account to sound the environmental alarm.

“We need to educate, educate, educate.”

– ‘Sometimes we feel alone’ –

For Brazil’s Indigenous community, the fight can often seem lonely, even after four years raising the alarm about violent, environmentally harmful policies they say have occurred under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

Most Brazilians never visit the rainforest. The capital of Amazonas, Manaus, is some 2,800 kilometers (1,739 miles) from Rio de Janeiro.

It is about the same distance between Paris and Moscow.

“What worries us a lot is that the vision of Brazilians on environmental protection … is very superficial,” says Dinamam Tuxa, executive coordinator of the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples (APIB).

“Sometimes we feel alone, that we are fighting such a powerful force that are the big corporations exploiting our territories, and that there is no engagement among the Brazilian population.”

– Personal attacks and disinformation –

Fires and deforestation are not new problems in the Amazon. However, the destruction has increased 75 percent under Bolsonaro compared to the previous decade. 

His rival, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who also grappled with the problem, only briefly touched on the rainforest on the campaign trail, mainly when drumming up votes in the Amazon itself.

However, it has been largely absent from an election campaign marked by disinformation and extreme polarization.

“It has become a political campaign of a lot of personal attacks between the two candidates. So, I think we are seeing more a focus on … fake news than the Amazon for example,” said Karla Koehler, a 35-year-old artist sunning herself on Ipanema beach.

“I think this is a very specific election… It is about political survival” and “maintaining basic democratic rights.”

Bolsonaro’s detractors see him as a threat to democracy and the country’s future, after a term marked by Covid carnage, attacks on the judiciary and media, and warnings he would not accept an election loss.

Lula, meanwhile, is still associated by many with a massive corruption scandal that saw him jailed for 18 months before the charges were annulled on procedural grounds, without exonerating him.

Latin America’s largest country has more than 33 million people living in hunger, according to the Brazilian Network for Research on Food Security. Some 11 million people cannot read or write, according to government statistics.

The country also has one of the highest crime rates in the world, with 47,503 murders in 2021, a figure that was nevertheless the lowest recorded in a decade, according to the Brazil Forum for Public Security.

“The challenge is getting people and their leaders to understand that the environmental agenda is directly linked to factors such as hunger, housing, crime, and the economic crisis,” said Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of environmental groups.

A storm in the Philippines unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight

Landslides and flooding killed at least 42 people as heavy rain from an approaching storm lashed the southern Philippines, a disaster official said Friday.

The storm unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight in nine mostly rural towns around Cotabato, a city of 300,000 people on Mindanao island.

Many residents were caught by surprise as floodwaters rose rapidly before dawn, Naguib Sinarimbo, the spokesman and civil defence chief for the regional government, told AFP.

Sinarimbo said 27 died in the town of Datu Odin Sinsuat, including 11 from a mountain village buried in mud, while 10 died in Datu Blah Sinsuat town and five were killed in Upi town.

Teams in rubber boats had rescued residents from rooftops in some towns, Sinarimbo said, adding that 16 people were missing in the region.

In recent years, flash floods with mud and debris from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by typhoons on Philippine communities.

Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year and kill hundreds of people. But those that do tend to be deadlier than those that hit Luzon, the main island.

A long mountain range walls off most of Luzon from the Pacific, where most storms are spawned, helping to absorb the blow, the state weather service said.

Local filmmaker Remar Pablo told AFP he was shooting a beauty pageant in Upi when the floodwaters suddenly came in after midnight and forced audience members to flee.

A row of cars sat half-submerged on the street outside, his clips showed.

“We were stranded inside,” said Pablo, who eventually waded through the water to get home.

Rescuers carried a baby in a plastic tub as they navigated chest-deep water, a photo posted by the provincial police showed.

– ‘It was a shock’ –

Floodwaters have receded in several areas, but Cotabato remained almost entirely waterlogged.

Sinarimbo said there could be more flooding over the next few hours because of heavy rain over mountains surrounding the Cotabato river basin.

“Our focus at this time is rescue as well as setting up community kitchens for the survivors,” he said.

The army deployed its trucks to collect stranded residents in Cotabato and nearby towns, provincial civil defence chief Nasrullah Imam said.

“It was a shock to see municipalities which had never flooded getting hit this time,” Imam said, adding that some families were swept away when the waters hit their homes.

The heavy rainfall began late Thursday in the impoverished region, which is under Muslim self-rule after decades of separatist armed rebellion.

The state weather office in Manila said the downpours were partly caused by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which it expects to strengthen at landfall overnight Friday.

Nalgae was heading northwest with maximum winds of 85 kilometres (53 miles) an hour and could hit Samar island late Friday or the Bicol peninsula on the southern tip of Luzon early Saturday.

Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from flood- and landslide-prone communities in these areas, the civil defence office said.

The coast guard also suspended ferry services in much of the archipelago nation where tens of thousands of people board boats each day.

Scientists have warned that storms, which also kill livestock and destroy farms, houses, roads and bridges, are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

strs-cgm/dva

The aye-aye has been filmed picking its nose with its extra-long middle finger

When scientists caught the aye-aye on video using its strangely thin, eight-centimetre-long middle finger to deeply pick its nose, it pointed towards a larger mystery: why exactly do some animals eat their own snot?

The footage resulted in research which names the aye-aye, a peculiar nocturnal lemur with big ears found only in Madagascar, as the 12th primate who picks their nose. 

It joins an illustrious group that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, macaques — and of course humans.

Anne-Claire Fabre, an assistant professor at Switzerland’s University of Bern and lead author of a study published in the journal Zoology this week, told AFP that the researchers stumbled on the discovery “by chance”.

She said they was “surprised” by the behaviour of a female aye-aye named Kali, who was being filmed at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina in 2015.

In the video, “the aye-aye inserts the entire length of its extra-long, skinny and highly mobile middle finger into the nasal passages and then licks the nasal mucus collected”, the peer-reviewed study said.

“This video brings the number of species known to pick their nose to twelve,” it said, adding that they all have “fine manipulative skills”.

The middle fingers of aye-ayes are not only long and thin, but also have a unique ball and socket joint they use to knock on wood to locate grubs.

After seeing the video, “the first thing I was wondered is where this finger is going”, said Fabre, who is also an associate scientist at London’s Natural History Museum.

So the researchers used a CT scan of an aye-aye’s skull to reconstruct the finger’s journey, finding it probably went down the throat.

“There is no other possibility. Otherwise it would have gone into the brain and then they die,” Fabre said.

The researchers compared the finger’s probing to a very deep Covid test.

– ‘Gross’ – 

But finding out exactly why aye-ayes — or other primates — pick their noses proved a more difficult task.

The scientists reviewed the existing literature and found that “most of it was jokes”, Fabre said.

They did find one study which suggested that nose-picking could spread bacteria in a harmful manner. 

Another said that eating snot could stop bacteria from sticking to teeth, so it might be good for oral health.

So why is there so little research on nose picking?

“I think it’s just something that people didn’t think about because it’s considered to be gross,” Fabre said. However she added that lots of research has been done about coprophagia — animals eating their own excrement — which could also be considered gross.

The aye-aye, the world’s largest nocturnal primate, is highly endangered — in part because it is seen as a bad omen in its native Madagascar, she said.

A storm in the Philippines unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight

Landslides and flooding killed at least 31 people as heavy rain from an approaching storm lashed the southern Philippines, a disaster official said Friday.

The storm unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight in nine mostly rural towns around Cotabato, a city of 300,000 people on Mindanao island.

Many residents were caught by surprise as floodwaters rose rapidly before dawn, Naguib Sinarimbo, the spokesman and civil defence chief for the regional government, told AFP.

Rescuers retrieved 16 bodies from Datu Odin Sinsuat, 10 from Datu Blah Sinsuat and five from Upi town, with at least seven other people missing, he told reporters.

A rescue team was also dispatched to a remote village after relatives reported that a community at the foot of a mountain was buried by mud, he said.

“Our fear is that there may be many casualties there, though we hope not,” Sinarimbo said, adding the rescuers have yet to brief him on the progress of the search.

Elsewhere, teams in rubber boats rescued residents from rooftops, Sinarimbo added.

In recent years, flash floods with mud and debris from largely deforested mountainsides have been among the deadliest hazards posed by typhoons on Philippine communities.

Mindanao is rarely hit by the 20 or so typhoons that strike the Philippines each year. But those that do tend to be deadlier than those that hit Luzon, the main island.

A long mountain range walls off most of Luzon from the Pacific, where most storms are spawned, helping to absorb the blow, the state weather service said.

Local filmmaker Remar Pablo told AFP he was shooting a beauty pageant in the town of Upi when the floodwaters suddenly came in after midnight and forced audience members to flee.

A row of cars sat half-submerged on the street outside, his clips showed.

“We were stranded inside,” said Pablo, who eventually waded through the water to get home.

Rescuers carried a baby in a plastic tub as they navigated chest-deep water, a photo posted by the provincial police showed.

– ‘It was a shock’ –

Floodwaters have receded in several areas, but Cotabato City remained almost entirely waterlogged.

Sinarimbo said there could be more flooding over the next few hours because of heavy rain over mountains surrounding the Cotabato river basin.

“Our focus at this time is rescue as well as setting up community kitchens for the survivors,” he said.

The army deployed its trucks to collect stranded residents in Cotabato and nearby towns, provincial civil defence chief Nasrullah Imam said.

“It was a shock to see municipalities which had never flooded getting hit this time,” Imam said, adding that some families were swept away when the waters hit their homes.

The heavy rainfall began late Thursday in the impoverished region, which is under Muslim self-rule after decades of separatist armed rebellion.

The state weather office in Manila said it was partly caused by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which it expects to strengthen at landfall.

Nalgae was heading northwest with maximum winds of 85 kilometres (53 miles) an hour and could hit Samar island late Friday or the Bicol peninsula on the southern tip of Luzon overnight.

Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from flood- and landslide-prone communities in these areas, the civil defence office said.

The coast guard also suspended ferry services in much of the archipelago nation where tens of thousands of people board boats each day.

Scientists have warned that storms, which kill people and livestock and destroy farms, houses, roads and bridges, are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

strs-cgm/dva

The researchers' tool measures the likelihood that unusually warm weather at a specific location on any given day is due to climate change

Whether they realised it or not, some 7.6 billion people — 96 percent of humanity — felt global warming’s impact on temperatures over the last 12 months, researchers have said.

But some regions felt it far more sharply and frequently than others, according to a report based on peer-reviewed methods from Climate Central, a climate science think tank.

People in tropical regions and on small islands surrounded by heat-absorbing oceans were disproportionately impacted by human-induced temperature increases to which they barely contributed.

Among the 1,021 cities analysed between September 2021 and October 2022, the capitals of Samoa and Palau in the South Pacific have been experiencing the most discernible climate fingerprints, the researchers said in the report, released on Thursday.

Spiking temperatures in these locations were commonly four to five times more likely to occur than in a hypothetical world in which global warming had never happened. 

Lagos, Mexico City and Singapore were among the most highly exposed major cities, with human-induced heat increasing health risks to millions.

Researchers at Climate Central, led by chief scientist Ben Strauss, looked for a way to bridge the gap between planetary-scale global warming — usually expressed as Earth’s average surface temperature compared to an earlier reference period — to people’s day-to-day experience.

“Diagnosing climate fingerprints lets people know that their experiences are symptoms of climate change,” Strauss told AFP. “It represents a signal and shows we must adapt.”

Using seven decades of high-resolution daily temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and two dozen climate models, Strauss and his team created a tool — the Climate Shift Index. 

The tool calculates the likelihood that unusually warm weather at a specific location on any given day is due to climate change.

In 26 cities, for example, at least 250 of the 365 days from October 2021 saw temperature increases that were at least three times more likely due to climate change.

– ‘Unfair and tragic’ –

Most of these cities were in east Africa, Mexico, Brazil, small island states, and the Malay Archipelago — a string of some 25,000 islands belonging to Indonesia and the Philippines. 

“The effect of warming is much more noticeable in the equatorial belt because there has been historically less temperature variability there,” Strauss told AFP. 

This is why even a relatively modest rise in local temperatures brought on by global warming registers so clearly on the index, he explained. 

“Island temperatures are strongly shaped by the temperature of the ocean around them,” said Strauss, who has also mapped the projected impacts of sea level rise on coastal areas worldwide. 

“To see that small island states have essentially already lost their historical climates — even as they face losing their land from rising seas — feels very unfair and tragic.”

The urgent need for money to help vulnerable tropical nations adapt to climate impacts will be squarely on the table when nearly 200 countries meet in 10 days for United Nations climate talks in Egypt. 

Rich nations have yet to honour a decade-old pledge to ramp up climate financing for developing nations to $100 billion per year, even though the UN’s climate advisory panel, the IPCC, estimates that annual adaptation costs could hit one trillion dollars by 2050 if warming continues apace.

The map-based climate shift index tool can be found here: https://csi.climatecentral.org/csi-contour-map/tavg/2022-10-27/

Chinese veterinary experts have been invited to Taiwan for a rare visit between the two sides after a male panda was moved into end of life care

Chinese veterinary experts have been invited to Taiwan, zoo officials said Friday, for a rare visit between the two sides after a male panda that symbolised an era of warmer ties was moved into end of life care.

Relations between China and Taiwan have been on ice since 2016 with Beijing severing official communications and government visits between the two sides scrapped.

But Taiwan has made an exception after Tuan Tuan, a male panda that was gifted to the island by Beijing in 2008, fell ill in recent weeks and looks to be entering his twilight days.

Taipei Zoo said the Chinese vets will stay for seven days and observe, rather than conduct, health checks.

“The main purpose is to visit Tuan Tuan and see his present condition,” Eve Wang, Animal Section Chief of Taipei City Zoo told reporters. 

“They expressed their desire to come in person to visit Tuan Tuan.  I also think it will be a very meaningful trip,” she added.

It is not clear when the vets will arrive but Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said Wednesday they were processing their visa applications.

Tuan Tuan and his breeding mate Yuan Yuan were given to Taiwan by Beijing at a time when relations between the two neighbours were more cordial.

In a nod to the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of one day taking Taiwan, their names combined mean “reunion” or “unity”.

The couple became huge stars in Taiwan and Yuan Yuan has since given birth to two female cubs.

“He (Tuan Tuan) was small and so cute when he first got here,” said Heng Ling-lin, who brought her children to Taipei Zoo to sign get-well notes.

“He was like everybody’s baby,” she told AFP. 

“It breaks my heart now to see him like this.”

– ‘Panda diplomacy’ –

China only loans pandas to foreign zoos which must usually return any offspring within a few years of their birth to join the country’s breeding programme.

But Taiwan was granted an exception as part of a brief charm offensive China launched in the late 2000s and was fully gifted both Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan and any offspring they had.

Vets first noticed Tuan Tuan, 18, was ill in August when he began suffering seizures and appeared increasingly unsteady and lethargic.

Subsequent scans showed he had a brain-lesion and he was placed on anti-seizure medication.

Earlier this week Taipei Zoo said they suspected Tuan Tuan had a brain tumour and he was moved into palliative care.

Beijing has long deployed “panda diplomacy” and the gift of Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan was a move seen to endorse the presidency of then Beijing-friendly leader Ma Ying-jeou.

China views Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to one day bring the self-ruled democratic island back into the fold, by force if necessary.

Relations took a dive in 2016 when President Tsai Ing-wen was elected.

Beijing loathes Tsai because she views Taiwan as an already sovereign nation and not part of “one China”.

Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has since ramped up economic, military and diplomatic pressure on Taiwan.

Landslides and flooding kill 13 people and leave seven missing in the southern Philippines

Landslides and flooding killed 31 people as heavy rain from an approaching storm lashed the southern Philippines, a disaster official said Friday.

The storm unleashed flash floods carrying uprooted trees, rocks and mud overnight in mainly rural communities around Cotabato, a city of 300,000 people on Mindanao island.

Many residents were caught by surprise by the rapidly rising floodwaters, Naguib Sinarimbo, the spokesman and civil defence chief for the regional government, told AFP.

“The water started entering the houses before dawn,” Sinarimbo said, confirming that the death toll in the storm-hit areas had risen to 31 from the earlier tally of 13.

Rescuers retrieved 16 bodies from Datu Odin Sinsuat, 10 from Datu Blah Sinsuat and five from Upi town, he told reporters.

Teams in rubber boats had to rescue some residents from rooftops, Sinarimbo added.

Local filmmaker Remar Pablo told AFP he was shooting a beauty pageant in the town of Upi when the floodwaters suddenly came in after midnight and forced audience members to flee for safety.

A row of cars sat half-submerged on the street outside, his clips showed.

“We were stranded inside,” said Pablo, who eventually waded into the water to get home.

Rescuers carried a baby in a plastic tub as they waded through chest-deep water, a photo posted by the provincial police showed.

– ‘It was a shock’ –

Floodwaters have receded in several areas, but Cotabato City remained almost entirely waterlogged.

Sinarimbo said there could be more flooding on Friday because of heavy rain.

“Our focus at this time is rescue as well as setting up community kitchens for the survivors,” he said.

The army deployed its trucks to collect stranded residents in Cotabato and eight nearby towns, provincial civil defence chief Nasrullah Imam said.

“It was a shock to see municipalities which had never flooded getting hit this time,” Imam said, adding that some families were swept away when the waters hit their homes.

The heavy rainfall began late Thursday in the impoverished region, which is under Muslim self-rule after decades of separatist armed rebellion.

The state weather office in Manila said it was partly caused by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which it expects to strengthen at landfall.

Nalgae was now heading toward the northern or central sections of the Philippines, with the state weather service saying it was not ruling out a landfall on Samar island later Friday, much earlier than earlier forecast.

Nearly 5,000 people were evacuated from flood- and landslide-prone communities in these areas, the civil defence office said.

The coast guard also suspended ferry services in much of the archipelago nation where tens of thousands of people board boats each day.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms strike the Philippines each year, killing people and livestock and destroying farms, houses, roads and bridges, although the south is rarely hit.

Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.