Desperate search for missing girls as death toll in Texas floods jumps to 82

Desperate search for missing girls as death toll in Texas floods jumps to 82
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First responders attend to a vehicle pulled from the water in the aftermath of deadly flooding in Kerrville, Texas, US, on July 6, 2025. (REUTERS)
Desperate search for missing girls as death toll in Texas floods jumps to 82
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First responders attend to a vehicle pulled from the water in the aftermath of deadly flooding in Kerrville, Texas, US, on July 6, 2025. (REUTERS)
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Updated 07 July 2025

Desperate search for missing girls as death toll in Texas floods jumps to 82

Desperate search for missing girls as death toll in Texas floods jumps to 82
  • Texas public safety chief fears the death toll could rise farther as forecasters warned of new deluges
  • Trump brushes off concerns his administration’s w ide-ranging cuts to weather forecasting had left local warning systems worse-off

HUNT, Texas: Rescuers in Texas raced against time Sunday to find dozens of missing people, including children, swept away by flash floods that killed at least 82 people, with forecasters warning of new deluges.
US President Donald Trump said he would “probably” visit the southern state on Friday.
The president brushed off concerns his administration’s wide-ranging cuts to weather forecasting and related federal agencies had left local warning systems worse-off.
Instead, Trump described the flash floods as a “100-year catastrophe” that “nobody expected.”
At least 40 adults and 28 children were killed in the worst-hit Kerr County in central Texas, Sheriff Larry Leitha said, while at least ten more people were killed by flooding in nearby areas.

“You will see the death toll rise today,” warned Texas public safety chief Freeman Martin at a press conference.
“Across the state, in all the areas affected by flooding, there are 41 known missing,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said.
As questions grew about why warnings did not come sooner or people were not evacuated earlier in the area popular with campers, Trump said the situation was a “Biden setup.”
“That was not our setup,” Trump told reporters on Sunday, adding that he would “not” hire back meteorologists when probed about staff and budget cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS).
Asked about whether he would change his plans to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he responded: “FEMA is something we can talk about later.”
Trump, who previously said disaster relief should be handled at the state-level, also signed a major disaster declaration that freed up resources for Texas.

In central Texas, some 17 helicopters joined the search for missing people, including ten girls and a counselor from a riverside Christian summer camp where about 750 people had been staying when disaster struck.
In a terrifying display of nature’s power, the rain-swollen waters of the Guadalupe River reached treetops and the roofs of cabins in Camp Mystic as girls slept overnight Friday, washing away some of them and leaving a scene of devastation.

Blankets, teddy bears and other belongings at the camp were caked in mud. Windows in the cabins were shattered, apparently by the force of the water.
The National Weather Service (NWS) warned Sunday that slow-moving thunderstorms threatened more flash floods over the saturated ground of central Texas.
Governor Abbott warned that heavy rainfall could “lead to potential flash flooding” in Kerrville and surrounding areas, as officials warned people against going near the swollen river and its creeks.
The flooding began at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend as months’ worth of rain fell in a matter of hours, much of it coming overnight as people slept.
The Guadalupe surged around 26 feet (eight meters) — more than a two-story building — in just 45 minutes.

Flash floods, which occur when the ground is unable to absorb torrential rainfall, are not unusual in this region of south and central Texas, known colloquially as “Flash Flood Alley.”




A drone view shows flooded houses, following torrential rains that unleashed flash floods along the Concho River in San Angelo, Texas, US, on July 4, 2025, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. (Patrick Keely via REUTERS )

Scientists say that in recent years human-driven climate change has made extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves more frequent and more intense.
Officials said while rescue operations were ongoing, they were also starting the process of debris removal.
“There’s debris all over the place that makes roads impassable, that makes reconstruction projects unachievable,” Abbott said.
People from elsewhere in Texas converged on Kerr County to help look for the missing.
Texans also started flying personal drones to help look but local officials urged them to stop, citing a danger for rescue aircraft.
One of the searches focused on four young women who were staying in a house that was washed away by the river. Adam Durda and his wife Amber, both 45, drove three hours to help.
“There was a group of 20-year-olds that were in a house that had gotten washed away,” Durda told AFP. “That’s who the family requested help for, but of course, we’re looking for anybody.”
Justin Morales, 36, was part of a search team that found three bodies, including that of a Camp Mystic girl caught up in a tree.
“We’re happy to give a family closure and hopefully we can keep looking and find some of the... you know, whoever,” he told AFP.
“Help give some of those families closure. That’s why we’re out here.”


UN seeks breakthrough in Cyprus peace talks

UN seeks breakthrough in Cyprus peace talks
Updated 56 min 42 sec ago

UN seeks breakthrough in Cyprus peace talks

UN seeks breakthrough in Cyprus peace talks
  • Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta

Nicosia: The United Nations is pushing for a breakthrough when Cyprus’s rival leaders meet in New York next week for a renewed attempt to revive stalled peace talks, an UN envoy said Monday.
Maria Angela Holguin held separate meetings with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar, crossing the island’s UN-patrolled ceasefire line in a day of shuttle diplomacy.
“All this effort the UN is doing is for the prosperity of the island, so that the people have a better life,” Holguin, who was appointed the UN envoy to Cyprus earlier this year, told reporters after meeting Tatar.
“And we continue to work, the commitment of the UN is totally for that, so we hope the leaders can think about that, and we have results next week.”
The meetings are part of preparations for talks in New York on July 16-17, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due to meet both leaders.
They follow a meeting in Geneva in March, which marked the first meaningful progress in years.
At that gathering, both sides agreed on a set of confidence-building measures, including opening more crossing points across the divide, cooperating on solar energy, and removing land mines — steps Guterres described as reflecting a “new atmosphere” and renewed urgency.
“I hope we are going to have many advances on the measures they decided in March,” said Holguin.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognized only by Ankara.
The internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, controls the island’s majority Greek Cypriot south.
The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.


‘Bay of Bengal live’: Bangladeshi fishermen go viral showing life at sea

In this photo shared by Shahid Sardar on July 7, 2025, his colleague holds up a catch aboard a fishing vessel in Bay of Bengal
In this photo shared by Shahid Sardar on July 7, 2025, his colleague holds up a catch aboard a fishing vessel in Bay of Bengal
Updated 07 July 2025

‘Bay of Bengal live’: Bangladeshi fishermen go viral showing life at sea

In this photo shared by Shahid Sardar on July 7, 2025, his colleague holds up a catch aboard a fishing vessel in Bay of Bengal
  • Fishermen-turned-influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media
  • Content focuses on fishing techniques, daily life on the boats, and marine life

DHAKA: When Shahid Sardar started his Facebook page four years ago, he wanted to share his experience aboard a fishing boat. He did not expect the millions of views he would soon attract as he tapped into a content niche that is rapidly gaining popularity among Bangladeshis: life at sea.

Sardar, 35, lives with his wife and son in the coastal Chittagong district in south-eastern Bangladesh. He started to work as a fisherman in 2013, after leaving a job at a hospital canteen in the capital, Dhaka.

As the chief cook on a vessel with a 50-member crew, Sardar sails across the Bay of Bengal on month-long voyages in search of fish. When his videos documenting deep-sea fishing methods and daily life on the boat began gaining traction, he expanded his content to show various marine species found in Bangladeshi waters — many of which are not widely known.

“I think people generally enjoy fish, especially the kinds caught at sea, which are not usually found in local markets,” Sardar told Arab News.

“The beauty of the deep sea also draws people to my videos. For most viewers, these sights are rare and unfamiliar. They don’t have this experience themselves.”

Posting as BD Fisherman on Facebook, he has more than 360,000 followers. His other account, Fisherman Shahid, has another 240,000.

When two of his videos went viral in December 2023, Facebook approved monetization for his page.

“My first video that went viral showed a bulk of yellowfin tuna and some shrimp. The fish were just dropped on the deck ... it was the rainy season. People liked that video a lot. Within 24 hours, it got 3 million views,” he said.

“As I started receiving some money from the videos, I became more motivated to keep uploading and people started liking my videos more and more.”

He now earns an average of about $500 a month from his two pages. That is in addition to his salary of $120 per voyage, plus bonuses based on the catch — about 60 cents per tonne of fish sold in the market.

“In my locality, everyone knows me as Fisherman Shahid. Wherever I go, people come to me just to know how they can earn through making videos and posting them on social media platforms,” Sardar said. “Recently, the friends of my 7th-grader son also visited my home to learn about my video making.”

While for fellow fishers, Sardar’s content has been an inspiration to start their own pages, for some other followers, like Zaved Ahmed, a Bangladeshi migrant worker in , watching his videos is a reminder of his own roots.

“I was born in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal area of Bangladesh, and fishing was our family’s profession. Since 2023, I have been living in Jeddah, which is on the coast of the Red Sea. It seems that sea life is something in my blood. That’s why I love watching Sardar’s videos,” he said.

“Whenever I watch his videos, my mind travels to the sea with the fishing boat, as if I were experiencing it with my own eyes.”

But most of those who follow Sardar and other fishermen-influencers have never experienced life at sea.

Watching it on their mobile or laptop screens helps them connect with the sector that each year contributes about 3.5 percent to Bangladesh’s GDP and is the main source of animal protein in the Bangladeshi diet.

“I think most people generally love the sea, but they don’t have the opportunity to witness the mysteries of the deep sea,” said Karimul Maola, a follower of Sardar from Chittagong.

“Through Sardar’s videos, I’ve learned about many seafish that were previously unknown to me. Also, his videos have given me some idea about how a fishing vessel normally operates — something most people don’t know about.”

There is a similar sentiment among the followers of other Bangladeshi fishermen who have shot to social media fame.

On the page of Ehsanul Haque Shaon, a fisherman who has 172,000 followers on Facebook, one follower says watching his video was “like the Bay of Bengal live in front of my eyes!” while another says in amazement that watching the content made them realize that “life is very interesting.”

“How we survive on a boat in the Bay of Bengal,” a video on Fishiib, a YouTube channel focusing on showing the life of fishermen in the Bay of Bengal, has received more than 10 million views in six months.

“I am truly amazed by how these fishermen adapt to life at sea. They face constant challenges like harsh weather and limited resources, yet they find ways to survive and thrive,” one viewer said.

“Their resilience and ability to work together as a community is truly inspiring. It’s a glimpse into a way of life that most of us can only imagine.”


Russian forces claim first foothold in new Ukraine region

Russian forces claim first foothold in new Ukraine region
Updated 07 July 2025

Russian forces claim first foothold in new Ukraine region

Russian forces claim first foothold in new Ukraine region
  • The Russian defense ministry said its forces captured the village of Dachne in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial mining territory that has also come under mounting Russian air attacks

KYIV: Russia said Monday it captured its first village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region after grinding toward the border for months, dealing a physchological blow for Kyiv as its worries mount.
Moscow launched a fresh large-scale drone and missile barrage before the announcement, including on Ukraine’s army recruitment centers, as part of an escalating series of attacks that come as ceasefire talks led by the United States stall.
The Russian defense ministry said its forces captured the village of Dachne in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial mining territory that has also come under mounting Russian air attacks.
Russian forces appear to have made crossing the border a key strategic objective over recent months, and deeper advances into the region could pose logistics and economic problems for Kyiv.
Kyiv has so far denied any Russian foothold in Dnipropetrovsk.
Moscow first said last month its forces had crossed the border, more than three years since launching its invasion and pushing through the neighboring Donetsk region.
Earlier Monday, Ukraine’s army said its forces “repelled” attacks in Dnipropetrovsk, including “in the vicinity” of Dachne.
Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea — that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.


Russia used its main city of Dnipro as a testing ground for its “experimental” Oreshnik missile in late 2024, claiming to have struck an aeronautics production facility.
An AFP reporter in the eastern city of Kharkiv saw civilians with their belongings being evacuated from a residential building damaged during Russia’s overnight attacks, and others sheltering with pets in a basement.
At least four people were killed and dozens wounded across Ukraine, mostly in the Kharkiv region bordering Russia and in a late-morning attack on the industrial city of Zaphorizhzhia.
“Air defense remains the top priority for protecting lives,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media after the attacks, as fears mount over the continuing deliveries of US military aid.
Zelensky said Ukraine was “strongly counting on our partners to fully deliver on what we have agreed.”
The air force said Moscow had launched 101 drones across the country and four missiles. Seventy-five of the drones were downed, it added.
Attacks on Monday targeted two recruitment centers in separate cities wounding four people, the Ukrainian army said, in what appears to be a new trend following similar strikes over the weekend and last week.
“These strikes are part of a comprehensive enemy operation aimed at disrupting mobilization in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications, a government-funded body, wrote on social media.
It added that Russia had attacked recruitment centers last week in the cities of Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rig, and Poltava.
In Russia, the defense ministry said that it had shot down 91 Ukrainian drones overnight, including eight in the Moscow region, with the majority of the rest in regions bordering Ukraine.


A Vermont dairy farm was raided. The mixed messages from Washington since then have increased fears

A Vermont dairy farm was raided. The mixed messages from Washington since then have increased fears
Updated 07 July 2025

A Vermont dairy farm was raided. The mixed messages from Washington since then have increased fears

A Vermont dairy farm was raided. The mixed messages from Washington since then have increased fears
  • Brett Stokes, a lawyer representing the detained workers, said the raid sent shock waves through the entire Northeast agriculture industry

MONTPELIER: After six 12-hour shifts milking cows, José Molina-Aguilar’s lone day off was hardly relaxing.
On April 21, he and seven co-workers were arrested on a Vermont dairy farm in what advocates say was one of the state’s largest-ever immigration raids.
“I saw through the window of the house that immigration were already there, inside the farm, and that’s when they detained us,” he said in a recent interview. “I was in the process of asylum, and even with that, they didn’t respect the document that I was still holding in my hands.”
Four of the workers were swiftly deported to Mexico. Molina-Aguilar, released after a month in a Texas detention center with his asylum case still pending, is now working at a different farm and speaking out.
“We must fight as a community so that we can all have, and keep fighting for, the rights that we have in this country,” he said.
The owner of the targeted farm declined to comment. But Brett Stokes, a lawyer representing the detained workers, said the raid sent shock waves through the entire Northeast agriculture industry.
“These strong-arm tactics that we’re seeing and these increases in enforcement, whether legal or not, all play a role in stoking fear in the community,” said Stokes, director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
That fear remains given the mixed messages coming from the White House. President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to deport millions of immigrants working in the US illegally, last month paused arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels. But less than a week later, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said worksite enforcement would continue.
Such uncertainty is causing problems in big states like California, where farms produce more than three-quarters of the country’s fruit and more than a third of its vegetables. But it’s also affecting small states like Vermont, where dairy is as much a part of the state’s identity as its famous maple syrup.
Nearly two-thirds of all milk production in New England comes from Vermont, where more than half the state’s farmland is dedicated to dairy and dairy crops. There are roughly 113,000 cows and 7,500 goats spread across 480 farms, according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, which pegs the industry’s annual economic impact at $5.4 billion.
That impact has more than doubled in the last decade, with widespread help from immigrant labor. More than 90 percent of the farms surveyed for the agency’s recent report employed migrant workers.
Among them is Wuendy Bernardo, who has lived on a Vermont dairy farm for more than a decade and has an active application to stop her deportation on humanitarian grounds: Bernardo is the primary caregiver for her five children and her two orphaned younger sisters, according to a 2023 letter signed by dozens of state lawmakers.
Hundreds of Bernardo’s supporters showed up for her most recent check-in with immigration officials.
“It’s really difficult because every time I come here, I don’t know if I’ll be going back to my family or not,” she said after being told to return in a month.
Like Molina-Aguilar, Rossy Alfaro also worked 12-hour days with one day off per week on a Vermont farm. Now an advocate with Migrant Justice, she said the dairy industry would collapse without immigrant workers.
“It would all go down,” she said. “There are many people working long hours, without complaining, without being able to say, ‘I don’t want to work.’ They just do the job.”


Kenya police open fire on charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi

Kenya police open fire on charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi
Updated 07 July 2025

Kenya police open fire on charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi

Kenya police open fire on charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi
  • Protesters accuse the authorities of paying armed vandals to discredit their movement
  • The government compares the demonstrations to an ‘attempted coup’

NAIROBI: Kenyan police opened fire on a charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi on Monday, a Reuters reporter said, with one man subsequently seen lying motionless on the road with a visible bloodied wound.

Kenya marked its fight for democracy on Monday, with police blocking main roads in Nairobi ahead of potential protests, after last month’s demonstrations descended into violent clashes.

Saba Saba Day marks the uprising on July 7, 1990 when Kenyans demanded a return to multi-party democracy after years of autocratic rule by then-president Daniel arap Moi.

This year’s event comes as young Kenyans – frustrated over economic stagnation, corruption and repeated acts of police brutality – are once again engaging in protests that have degenerated into looting and violence, leaving dozens dead and thousands of businesses destroyed.

Protesters accuse the authorities of paying armed vandals to discredit their movement, while the government has compared the demos to an “attempted coup.”

On Monday, the streets of Nairobi were eerily quiet after police mounted roadblocks on the main roads, preventing most people from entering the center, with many businesses closed for the day.

Leading activist Hanifa Aden wrote on X: “the police getting rained on as they block every road while we stay at home warming our beds.”

“Total shutdown and forced holiday executed by the state,” she said.

On Sunday afternoon, a press conference by the Kenyan Human Rights Commission calling for an end to “enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings” was broken up when men, some armed with sticks, forced their way into the compound.

Social media and rising economic expectations have created anger at inequalities in a country where around 80 percent are trapped in informal, poorly paid jobs.

But the violent response of the police – at least 80 people have died in protests since June 2024 and dozens detained illegally – has scared many off the streets.

Politically, President William Ruto – elected in 2022 – still holds a strong position having forged an alliance with the main opposition leader Raila Odinga, leaving no clear challenger ahead of the next vote in 2027.

But each violent crackdown is fueling further unrest, said activist Nerima Wako.

“Every time people organize a protest, they kill more people, so it just continues to feed off itself,” she said.

It is as though the government is recycling tactics from the 1990s, said Gabrielle Lynch, an African politics expert at Britain’s University of Warwick.

“But we’re not in the nineties,” she said. “They don’t seem to have realized the world is different.”

“People don’t have the same inbuilt fear of the state.”