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More than 100 feared dead in massive landslide in Papua New Guinea
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Melbourne, Australia — More than 100 people are believed to have been killed Friday in a landslide that buried a village in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
The landslide reportedly hit Kaokalam village in Enga province, about 370 miles northwest of the South Pacific island nation’s capital of Port Moresby, at roughly 3 a.m. local time, ABC reported.
Residents say current estimates of the death toll are above 100, although authorities haven’t confirmed that figure. Villagers said the number of people killed could be much higher.
Videos on social media show locals pulling bodies out that were buried under rocks and trees.
STR / AFP via Getty Images
The Papua New Guinea government and police didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Elizabeth Laruma, who runs a women’s business association in Porgera, a town in the same province near the Porgera Gold Mine, said village houses were flattened when the side of a mountain gave way.
“It has occurred when people were still asleep in the early hours, and the entire village has gone down,” Laruma told ABC. “From what I can presume, it’s about 100-plus people who are buried beneath the ground.”
The landslide blocked the road between Porgera and the village, she said, raising concerns about the town’s own supply of fuel and goods.
Village resident Ninga Role, who was away when the landslide struck, expects at least four of his relatives have died.
“There are some huge stones and plants, trees. The buildings collapsed,” Role said. “These things are making it hard to find the bodies fast.”
STR / AFP via Getty Images
Reuters reports that local media said the landslide affected operations at the Porgera gold mine, which is run by Barrick Gold through Barrick Niugini Ltd, a joint venture with China’s Zijin Mining. Barrick Gold didn’t immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside normal business hours.
Papua New Guinea is a diverse, developing nation of mostly subsistence farmers with 800 languages. There are few roads outside the larger cites.
With 10 million people, it is also the most populous South Pacific nation after Australia, which is home to some 27 million.
Located just south of the equator, the area gets frequent heavy rains, Agence France-Presse points out, adding that there’s been intense rainfall and flooding this year. At least 23 people were killed by a landslide in a nearby province in March.
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Moderate Masoud Pezeshkian wins Iran’s presidential runoff election
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Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran’s runoff presidential election Saturday, besting hard-liner Saeed Jalili by promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country’s mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests squeezing the Islamic Republic.
Pezeshkian promised no radical changes to Iran’s Shiite theocracy in his campaign and long has held Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the final arbiter of all matters of state in the country. But even Pezeshkian’s modest aims will be challenged by an Iranian government still largely held by hard-liners, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and Western fears over Tehran enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels.
A vote count offered by authorities put Pezeshkian as the winner with 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million in Friday’s election.
Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
Supporters of Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and longtime lawmaker, entered the streets of Tehran and other cities before dawn to celebrate as his lead grew over Jalili, a hard-line former nuclear negotiator.
But Pezeshkian’s win still sees Iran at a delicate moment, with tensions high in the Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Iran’s advancing nuclear program, and a looming U.S. election that could put any chance of a detente between Tehran and Washington at risk.
The first round of voting June 28 saw the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian officials have long pointed to turnout as a sign of support for the country’s Shiite theocracy, which has been under strain after years of sanctions crushing Iran’s economy, mass demonstrations and intense crackdowns on all dissent.
Government officials up to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei predicted a higher participation rate as voting got underway, with state television airing images of modest lines at some polling centers across the country.
However, online videos purported to show some polls empty while a survey of several dozen sites in the capital, Tehran, saw light traffic amid a heavy security presence on the streets.
The election came amid heightened regional tensions. In April, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israel over the war in Gaza, while militia groups that Tehran arms in the region — such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — are engaged in the fighting and have escalated their attacks.
Iran is also enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintains a stockpile large enough to build several nuclear weapons, should it choose to do so. And while Khamenei remains the final decision-maker on matters of state, whichever man ends up winning the presidency could bend the country’s foreign policy toward either confrontation or collaboration with the West.
The campaign also repeatedly touched on what would happen if former President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, won the November election. Iran has held indirect talks with President Joe Biden’s administration, though there’s been no clear movement back toward constraining Tehran’s nuclear program for the lifting of economic sanctions.
More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 were eligible to vote, with about 18 million of them between 18 and 30. Voting was to end at 6 p.m. but was extended until midnight to boost participation.
The late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a May helicopter crash, was seen as a protégé of Khamenei and a potential successor as supreme leader.
Still, many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions that Iran conducted in 1988, and for his role in the bloody crackdowns on dissent that followed protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by police over allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
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