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Super Typhoon Ragasa batters Hong Kong after wreaking havoc in Taiwan

admin - Latest News - September 24, 2025
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Super Typhoon Ragasa slammed into Hong Kong, brining torrential rain and strong winds after leaving at least 17 people dead in Taiwan and the Philippines. The super typhoon first made landfall in the Philippines as one of the world’s strongest storms this year.



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Sept. 23, 2025, 11:30 PM EDT / Updated Sept. 24, 2025, 4:38 AM EDTBy Jennifer Jett, Peter Guo and Jay GanglaniHONG KONG — Streets in southern China were deserted Wednesday as Typhoon Ragasa, one of the world’s strongest storms this year, slammed into the region after having carved a deadly path between the Philippines and Taiwan.At least 14 people were confirmed dead in Taiwan after floodwaters from a barrier lake surged into Guangfu township in eastern Hualien County, Taiwanese media reported early Wednesday, citing officials. At least three deaths were reported a day earlier in the Philippines, where the storm also displaced thousands of people in the north of the country.China’s National Meteorological Center said Wednesday afternoon that Ragasa had weakened from a super typhoon to a strong typhoon, but that it was still packing winds of up to 112 mph. After making landfall in southwestern Guangdong later Wednesday, it was expected to move into the Gulf of Tonkin between South China and Vietnam, the forecaster said. Authorities warned of heavy rain and strong winds across southern China.The storm earlier passed near the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, where fierce winds woke residents during the night, schools and flights were canceled and many businesses were closed. Residents had been stockpiling food and other supplies, while businesses taped their windows and lined sandbags along entryways. Callan Williamson, 36, who moved to Hong Kong five years ago and works as a brand manager at a consulting firm, said Ragasa was the first major typhoon he had experienced. “I have had water coming through the kitchen window,” he said. The Hong Kong Observatory issued storm warning signal No. 10, the highest in its weather alert system, at 2:40 a.m. local time (2:40 p.m. ET Tuesday), an hour after it issued its second-highest warning signal, No. 9. At 1:20 p.m. local time (1:20 a.m. ET), the signal was lowered to No. 8, the city’s third-highest.Maximum sustained winds as high as 120 mph were recorded on the island of Lantau, home to Hong Kong’s international airport.Macau, a major gambling hub, also issued a No. 10 warning signal early Wednesday, and casinos were closed.Firefighters preparing to remove an uprooted tree after Typhoon Ragasa hit Hong Kong on Tuesday.Tommy Wang / AFP via Getty ImagesRagasa, which means “scramble” in Tagalog, brought heavy showers and major storm surge to Hong Kong, and members of the public were advised to stay indoors and stay away from the shoreline and low-lying areas. The observatory said the storm surge caused a general rise of almost 5 feet in water levels across the city.By late morning, the storm was leaving Hong Kong, a densely populated international financial hub of 7.5 million, though hurricane-force winds persisted.The Hong Kong stock exchange was open after changing its policy last year to continue trading regardless of weather conditions.Hong Kong government officials said more than 800 people had sought refuge at dozens of temporary shelters. As of 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. ET), there were 82 reported injuries, 700 reports of fallen trees, one reported landslide and 16 reports of flooding.In one incident, huge waves crashed through the glass doors of the oceanfront Fullerton Hotel on the south side of Hong Kong Island, flooding the ground-floor lobby and sweeping people off their feet, according to videos posted on social media that were verified by NBC News. Calls to the hotel were not answered on Wednesday.Elsewhere, CCTV video showed a succession of waves bursting through the doors of a restaurant in the Tseung Kwan O neighborhood in the New Territories, sending furniture afloat. The observatory said that as of 4 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), the storm was centered about 130 miles west-southwest of Hong Kong. It was forecast to continue moving west at about 14 mph as it approached the west coast of China’s Guangdong province, where it was expected to make landfall.On Tuesday, mainland Chinese officials elevated the typhoon emergency response to Level III in Guangdong, the country’s most populous province at more than 125 million people, as well as in the island province of Hainan. More than 1 million people had been evacuated from Guangdong as of Tuesday afternoon, Chinese state media reported.More than 10 cities in Guangdong have suspended classes, business operations and public transport, including high-speed trains, and flights have been canceled at major regional airports including in the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen.Officials had said Ragasa could be even more destructive than Typhoon Hato in 2017 and Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in direct economic losses to the region.Hong Kong has experienced unusually severe rainfall this year, including four black rainstorms — the city’s highest tier of heavy rain — within eight days from late July to early August. On Aug. 5, the Hong Kong Observatory recorded more than 14.5 inches of rain, the highest daily rainfall in August since records began in 1884.Jennifer JettJennifer Jett is the Asia Digital Editor for NBC News, based in Hong Kong.Peter GuoPeter Guo is an associate producer based in Hong Kong.Jay GanglaniJay Ganglani is NBC News’s 2025-26 Asia Desk Fellow. Previously he was an NBC News Asia Desk intern and a Hong Kong-based freelance journalist who has contributed to news publications such as CNN, Fortune and the South China Morning Post.Jean Lee, Matteo Moschella and Larissa Gao contributed.
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleSept. 23, 2025, 10:45 PM EDTBy Abigail WilliamsThe United Nations has concluded its one-day investigation into the mysterious halting of President Donald Trump’s escalator Tuesday as he arrived at the U.N. General Assembly.The accidental culprit? A White House videographer who most likely tripped a safety mechanism.U.N. secretary general spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said in a note to reporters that a technician found it was the White House videographer who was unintentionally behind the now-international incident that was caught on video.“The escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator,” Dujarric said. “The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing. The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function described above.”But the escalator wasn’t the only thing that malfunctioned for Trump during his visit to the U.N.“I don’t mind making this speech without a teleprompter, because the teleprompter is not working,” Trump said soon after he took the podium to address all 193 delegations from around the globe.“There are two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” he said.A U.N. official told NBC News that the White House was responsible for operating Trump’s teleprompter.The Associated Press first reported the U.N.’s findings on the two incidents.Trump appeared good-natured about all of it.“The teleprompter was broken and the escalator came to a sudden hault as we were ridding up to the podium, but both of those events probably made the speech more interesting than it would have been other wise,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is always an honor to speak at the United Nations, even if, their equipment is somewhat faulty.”His press secretary, however, viewed things much differently.“If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately,” Karoline Leavitt wrote on X.Hours later, on Fox News, Leavitt suggested U.N. staffers may have sought to injure Trump and indicated the issue was far from resolved.”When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she told host Jesse Watters.”I know that we have people, including the United States Secret Service, who are looking into this to try to get to the bottom of it,” Leavitt added. “And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposely trying to trip up — literally trip up — the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it.”Abigail WilliamsAbigail Williams is a producer and reporter for NBC News covering the State Department.Tara Prindiville contributed.
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October 25, 2025
Oct. 25, 2025, 9:19 AM EDTBy Katherine DoyleKUALA LUMPUR— President Donald Trump arrives in Malaysia on Sunday for his first visit to Asia since returning to office, a three-nation tour through Malaysia, Japan and South Korea that is expected to culminate in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, as tensions between the world’s two biggest economies tick higher.“The first message is Trump the peacemaker. The second is Trump the moneymaker,” said Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And then, of course, with the meeting with China, I think what everybody’s expecting is that there’s probably not going to be a big trade deal, but there will be an effort to de-escalate or put a pause on the situation.”Trade is expected to dominate the week. Aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump said he would subsidize U.S. farmers if he did not reach a deal with China, and that he planned to discuss the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war with Xi, saying he’d like to see China “help us out.”The president also suggested he was angling for a meeting with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, even as the White House has said that no meeting is planned. “You know, they don’t have a lot of telephone service,” Trump said, before urging reporters to “put out the word.” In Kuala Lumpur, Trump is scheduled to meet with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim before attending a working dinner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders. Malaysia, this year’s ASEAN chair, has set “Inclusivity and Sustainability” as the summit theme. The White House said Trump will also join a signing ceremony for a peace agreement between Cambodia and Thailand, whose deadly border conflict he has claimed credit for helping to resolve. During his first term, Trump attended the annual ASEAN summit only once.Sandwiched between the summit in Kuala Lumpur and South Korea’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, Trump will pay an official visit to Japan, his fourth, for talks with the new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and an audience with Japanese Emperor Naruhito.Takaichi, a conservative protege of the late Shinzo Abe, has pledged to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP by March, two years ahead of schedule, a target likely to draw praise from Trump, who has pressed for allies to spend more. She has also raised the idea of revisiting the U.S.-Japan trade deal announced in July. Trump and Abe forged a close personal relationship during his first term, before Abe’s assassination in 2022. Trump will also meet with business executives and visit American troops while in Japan, a country that hosts more U.S. service members than any other in the world.In South Korea on Wednesday, Trump is slated to address business leaders at APEC, hold a bilateral meeting with the president, and attend a leaders’ dinner that evening.Topping the agenda at every stop is trade, with negotiators still ironing out the details of pacts with South Korea and Japan and taking steps towards agreements with China and Malaysia. U.S. and Chinese delegations are meeting in Malaysia over the weekend ahead of Trump’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur.“It’s not the U.S. president coming to Asia to meet the multilateral schedule; it’s the U.S. president coming to Asia and then bending the multilateral schedule around his schedule,” said Cha, noting Trump is skipping the U.S.–ASEAN leaders meeting, the East Asia Summit, and formal APEC sessions. Even so, Cha said regional leaders are eager to engage.“Everybody still wants to cut a deal with the U.S. president,” he said. “They all want tariff relief, and they will try to make a deal to achieve that.”Central to the trip is Trump’s anticipated meeting with Xi in South Korea on Thursday, though Beijing has not yet confirmed the session. Top officials from the U.S. and China are sitting down in Malaysia on Saturday to find a way forward after Trump threatened new tariffs of 100% on Chinese goods and other trade limits starting on November 1 in response to China’s expanded export controls on rare earth minerals and related technologies. Trump has said he plans to raise fentanyl, accusing China of failing to curb the flow of precursor chemicals, and a senior administration official said China’s purchases of Russian oil will also be on the table. Trump said he also expects to discuss Taiwan. “We have a lot to talk about with President Xi, and he has a lot to talk about with us,” Trump said Friday, adding he expects “a good meeting” even as he has intermittently threatened to call it off over trade frictions, including soybean purchases.Both leaders want the optics and tactical aspect of this meeting to go well, a person familiar with the meeting planning said. Analysts urged caution about what a leader-level encounter can deliver. “During Trump’s first term, high-level exchanges with China did not prevent him from later taking a harder line,” said Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy. “So the symbolic value of summit diplomacy should not be overstated.”Earlier this week, a senior administration official pushed back on speculation that Trump could reprise his 2019 encounter with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, when he made a surprise visit to the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas in an effort to revive nuclear talks that had collapsed. Trump said before leaving Washington on Friday that he “would like” to meet with Kim, but was unsure whether it would happen on this trip. Kim says he will negotiate only if the U.S. recognizes North Korea as a nuclear power, and has only further strengthened his weapons programs since Trump’s first term. “I think they are sort of a nuclear power,” Trump seemed to acknowledge as he began his journey to Asia on Friday, perhaps paving the way for a possible meeting. “They’ve got a lot of nuclear weapons. I’ll say that.”Katherine DoyleKatherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News. Carol E. Lee, Jennifer Jett, Peter Guo, Arata Yamamoto and Stella Kim contributed.
September 29, 2025
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November 4, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 4, 2025, 5:00 AM ESTBy Denise ChowA supermassive black hole violently gobbled up an enormous star, producing a cosmic outburst with the light of 10 trillion suns, according to a new study. The black hole flare, as the phenomenon is known, is thought to be the biggest and most distant ever recorded — it was detected from 10 billion light-years away.“This is really a one-in-a-million object,” said Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. Graham said a black hole flare is the most likely explanation based on the outburst’s intensity and duration, but follow-up studies will help the researchers confirm their findings.It’s not unusual for black holes to consume nearby stars, gas, dust and other forms of matter, but such a gargantuan flaring event is exceedingly rare, Graham said.“This massive flare is just so much more energetic than anything we’ve ever seen before,” he said, adding that at its peak, the outburst was 30 times more luminous than any previous black hole flare seen to date.Part of the intensity came from the sheer size of both cosmic objects involved. The ill-fated star that wandered too close to the black hole is estimated to be at least 30 times the mass of the sun. The enormous black hole and its surrounding disk of material, meanwhile, is estimated to be 500 million times as massive as the sun.The strong outburst has been going on for more than seven years, Graham said, and is likely still occurring. The flare was first detected in 2018 during an extensive sky survey using three ground-based telescopes. At the time, Graham said, it was registered as a “particularly bright object,” but during follow-up observations months later, scientists were not able to obtain much useful information. As such, the black hole flare was mostly forgotten until 2023, when Graham and his colleagues decided to revisit intriguing points of interest from their previous survey. This time around, the astronomers did a rough calculation of the distance to the particularly bright object they had seen, and the result shocked them. “Suddenly it was: ‘Oh, this is actually quite far away,’” Graham said. “And if it’s that far away and it’s this bright, how much energy is being put out? This is now something unusual and very interesting.”It’s not yet known how exactly the star met its demise, but Graham said a case of cosmic bumper cars may have jostled the star and knocked it off its regular orbit around the black hole, causing the close encounter.The findings help provide a fuller picture of how black holes behave and evolve.“Our idea of supermassive black holes and their environments has really changed over the last five to 10 years,” Graham said. “There was this classic image that most galaxies in the universe have a supermassive black hole in the middle and it just sits there and burbles along and that’s it. Now we know it’s a much more dynamic environment and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.”The flare has been steadily fading over time, he said, but it will likely continue to be observable with ground-based telescopes for a few years.Denise ChowDenise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.
November 16, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 16, 2025, 4:31 PM ESTBy Megan LebowitzWASHINGTON — The U.S. military carried out another strike on an alleged drug boat in the eastern Pacific on Saturday, killing three people, according to a Sunday post to X from the U.S. Southern Command.The latest strike is at least the 21st that the military has conducted on alleged drug boats during the second Trump administration, prompting concerns from some lawmakers.The U.S. Southern Command’s post said the strike was at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The post alleged that the boat was “operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization” and was “trafficking narcotics in the Eastern Pacific,” adding that the strike took place in international waters.“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” the post said.NBC News has not independently confirmed the military’s account of the strike. The administration has not provided evidence supporting its allegations about the vessel or the people on board.Video released by U.S. Southern Command appears to show the strike causing a large wave to spike up next to the boat, which is then engulfed in flames.The announcement came days after NBC News previously reported that the Trump administration carried out its 20th such attack, according to a Pentagon official. That strike took place in the Caribbean Sea. Previous attacks took place in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, and they have killed more than 75 people, according to officials.Sunday’s announcement came the same day the USS Gerald R. Ford, a major aircraft carrier, arrived in the Caribbean.The strikes have generated controversy in Congress, as Democrats and some Republicans paint the administration’s moves as heavy-handed overreach that circumvents lawmakers.But in October, the Senate rejected a resolution requiring Trump to obtain congressional approval for military strikes in the Caribbean. Earlier this month, the Senate voted down a similar resolution that would require the president obtain congressional approval for any military action against Venezuela.Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky sided with Democrats to push for a congressional authorization requirement.Paul previously said in an October interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that the strikes “go against all of our tradition.” He raised concerns over people being killed without the administration providing evidence of a crime, noting the possibility that some of those killed could be innocent.Megan LebowitzMegan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube and Frank Thorp V contributed.
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