MANILA, Jan 17:GThousands of people fled rising floods and an approaching storm in a fresh round of evacuations in the Philippines, officials said today as the death toll from a week of foul weather rose to 37.
Nearly 13,000 people left their villages along the flooded banks of the Agusan river on the southern island of Mindanao in the past 24 hours, the civil defence office in the region said in an updated report.
“The rains come to this region around this time, but this year has been terrible,” John Uayan, an operations official for the Government agency said.
The state weather office said a weather system off the Philippines’ east coast has turned into a tropical storm and would hit Mindanao’s coast on Saturday, increasing the danger to residents of the already flooded Agusan basin.
The storm looks set to spare the nearby region where Super Typhoon Haiyan left nearly 8,000 people dead or missing and made more than four million people homeless in November — a rare piece of good news for the disaster-weary Asian nation.
But many in Mindanao were bracing for a fresh wave of appalling weather.
“We expect intense rain over the (Agusan) region starting tonight,” forecaster Alczar Aurelio told a news conference.
“The public is being warned about the possibility of landslides and flash floods,” Reynaldo Balido, spokesman for the Government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
The coastguard expects stormy local waters and has barred ferries from setting sail, Balido told the news conference.
More than 218,000 people are now temporarily housed in schools and other Government buildings across the eastern third of Mindanao after a week of bad weather, civil defence officials said today.
Some of them have been there since shortly after heavy rains began pounding the region on January 10, they added.
Floods and landslides unleashed by heavy rains killed 18 people in the Agusan basin, including a woman who drowned on Thursday and three gold prospectors whose bodies were pulled from a landslide.
Nineteen other people were killed earlier in the week along Mindanao’s east coast, including areas still recovering from Typhoon Bopha that left 1,900 people dead or missing in December 2012, they added.
Two ferries and a cargo vessel ran aground off the central islands of Cebu and Bohol on Wednesday and Thursday, but no casualties were reported and nearly 400 passengers and crew are being transferred to other vessels, the coast guard said. (AGENCIES)

WASHINGTON, Jan 17: The US and Pakistan have vowed to cooperate on a full range of bilateral issues, including counter-terrorism, economy and regional issues, amidst differences over several matters including CIA drone strikes.
Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met new Pakistani Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani and “underscored” that both the sides “look forward to deepening these discussions” during the upcoming Strategic Dialogue Ministerial.
The meeting comes after the bilateral ties have seen “new vigour and momentum” following the visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Washington in October last year.
Burns welcomed Jilani in his new role as Ambassador and noted that “we look forward to continuing our productive working relationship”, a State Department statement said.
As Foreign Secretary from 2012 to 2013, Jilani worked closely with the United States during a critical time in their bilateral relationship.
“Conveying the greetings of the Government and people of Pakistan to Deputy Secretary Burns, Ambassador Jilani exchanged views on the state of play in the bilateral relations which has seen new vigor and momentum after the visit of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Washington in October last year,” the Pakistan Embassy here said in a statement.
The former foreign secretary, Jilani arrived in Washington in the last week of December and presented copies of his credentials to Natalie Jones, the Acting Chief of Protocol at the State Department on January 2.
Jilani was appointed as Pakistan’s Ambassador to Washington in October shortly before the US visit of Sharif. (AGENCIES)

TOKYO, Jan 17: Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida called today for summit talks with China and South Korea after more than a year of fractious arguments that have prevented any top-level meetings.
Beijing and Seoul have both refused to meet with conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, citing what they say is his lack of remorse for World War II wrongs and his intention to remilitarise Japan.
“Individual problems that we have with China and South Korea are the kind of issues that are difficult to solve in the short term,” Kishida said.
“But I wonder if it’s right to take the attitude that we should not have talks because we have issues.
“Exactly because there are problems, political leaders should hold talks and make efforts to solve them, shouldn’t they?” he said.
Abe, China’s President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye all came to power around a year ago, but entrenched positions and growing nationalism in the three countries has prevented them from getting together.
Seoul and Beijing were angered by Abe’s visit last month to a shrine in Tokyo that counts 14 senior war criminals among the 2.5 million souls it commemorates.
China and South Korea see the shrine as a symbol of Japan’s wartime aggression in Asia.
Abe defended the visit as a pledge against war and said it was not aimed at hurting feelings in China and South Korea.
Two separate territorial disputes that Beijing and Seoul say have their roots in Japan’s early imperial ambitions have also roiled relations.
The diplomatic scrap between Tokyo and Beijing has increasingly spilled out onto the world stage, with dozens of Chinese diplomats penning op-ed pieces in newspapers around the world seeking to swing global public opinion behind them.
China’s envoy to the African Union this week launched an attack on Abe in a press conference, warning of the impending “resurrection of Japanese militarism” and branding the premier a “troublemaker”.
Tokyo launched its latest rebuttal today, with the publication in the Washington Post of an opinion piece by Kenichiro Sasae, its ambassador to the US, in which he said Beijing’s “anachronistic propaganda” was out of step with the world.
“China’s leaders clearly misread global attitudes,” he wrote. “It is not Japan that most of Asia and the international community worry about; it is China.
“China has quadrupled its military expenditures, which are hardly transparent, in the past decade. During the same period, Japan has decreased its expenditures by 6 per cent,” he wrote.
The row over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea continues to draw significant attention in foreign policy circles, with some observers warning of the danger of an armed clash and others drawing comparisons with Sarajevo in 1914, when a localised act of violence flung an entire continent into war. (AGENCIES)

HONG KONG, Jan 17: Hong Kong police have shut down brothels operating in converted public toilets in a shopping mall, making dozens of arrests in raids on the operation run by triad crime gangs, reports said today.
Prostitutes from mainland China were found in tiny “one-woman” brothels created from the toilets in a mostly vacant shopping mall in the outlying Yuen Long district, the South China Morning Post reported.
The cramped 14 square metre blocks on the second floor of the building doubled up as the prostitutes’ working and living space.
“I think it is the first time police have discovered public toilets turned into brothels,” Chief Inspector Law Kwok-hoi said according to the daily.
There were a total of seven brothels, some converted from empty shops or office space, and operators dealt only with regular customers, who had to give a secret code before being allowed in, the newspaper said.
“An initial investigation showed up to 100 customers visited the seven brothels each day,” Law said, adding that each were charged USD 32 for sex services.
Police said in a statement that they had arrested 51 women and 35 men aged between 17 and 72 in the two day operation starting Tuesday, which included raids on more than 20 other locations.
Police seized a knife, metal pipes and a small amount of a drug suspected to be ketamine in the raids.
A quarter of those arrested in the raids which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday were suspected to have connections to triad gangs.
They were arrested for breach of conditions of stay, extortion, and possession of illegal drugs, among other charges.
The South China Morning Post report, citing police sources, said the brothels had been running for 10 months and that the raids were part of a nine-month operation into Yuen Long faction of the 14K triad society.
Prostitution is legal in Hong Kong, but soliciting and living off the earnings of prostitutes are criminal offences.
Hundreds of sex workers ply their trade in one-room brothels, saunas and bars throughout the city of seven million. Some operate independently but many, especially those from mainland China, are controlled by the city’s notorious triads. (AGENCIES)