By JIM GOMEZ

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Thousands of people were evacuated from northern Philippine villages and schools and offices were closed Monday in the archipelago and neighboring Taiwan as one of this year’s strongest typhoons threatened to cause flooding and landslides on its way to southeastern China.

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Super Typhoon Ragasa had sustained winds of 134 mph with gusts of up to 183 mph when it slammed into Panuitan island off Cagayan province on mid-afternoon Monday, Philippine forecasters said.

Tropical cyclones with sustained winds of 115 mph or higher are categorized in the Philippines as a super typhoon, a designation adopted years ago to underscore the urgency tied to such extreme weather disturbances.

Ragasa was heading west and forecast to remain in the South China Sea at least into Wednesday while passing south of Taiwan and Hong Kong before landfall on the Chinese mainland.

The Philippines’ weather agency warned of coastal inundation, saying “there is a high risk of life-threatening storm surge with peak heights exceeding nearly 10 feet within the next 24 hours over the low-lying or exposed coastal localities” of the northern provinces of Cagayan, Batanes, Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.

Power was knocked out on Calayan island and in the entire northern mountain province of Apayao, west of Cagayan, disaster-response officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or further damage from Ragasa, which is locally called Nando.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. suspended government work and all classes Monday in the capital and 29 provinces in the main northern Luzon region.

More than 8,200 people were evacuated to safety in Cagayan while 1,220 fled to emergency shelters in Apayao, which is prone to flash floods and landslides. Domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces lashed by the typhoon while fishing boats and inter-island ferries were prohibited from leaving ports due to rough seas.

Ragasa, the 14th weather disturbance to batter the Philippines this year, comes while authorities and both chambers of Congress investigate a corruption scandal involving alleged kickbacks that resulted in substandard or non-existent flood control projects.

Taiwan’s southern Taitung and Pingtung counties ordered closures in some coastal and mountainous areas as well as on the outlying Orchid and Green islands. Ragasa also forced the cancellation of afternoon flights to outlying islands and suspended various ferry services, the Central News Agency reported.

In Fujian province, on China’s southeast coast, 50 ferry routes were suspended. Officials in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese tech hub, planned to relocate about 400,000 people, including residents living in low-lying and flood-prone areas. Shenzhen’s airport said it will halt flights, starting Tuesday night.

China’s National Meteorological Center forecast the typhoon would make landfall in the coastal area between Shenzhen city and Xuwen county in Guangdong province on Wednesday.

China’s ruling Communist Party chief in Guangdong, Huang Kunming, urged departments across the region to minimize harm and “fully enter emergency state and war-ready state.”

Ragasa is expected to sweep south of Hong Kong and Macao. While Hong Kong’s airport is expected to remain open, the city’s airport authority said flights would be significantly reduced after 6 p.m. Tuesday and most flight operations would be affected on Wednesday.

Hong Kong’s flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways said passenger flights scheduled to depart and arrive in the city after 6 p.m. Tuesday will be suspended, with more than 500 flight cancellations expected.

Other Hong Kong-based airlines announced their flights would be disrupted, including budget airline HK Express, which reported a cancellation of over 100 flights between Tuesday and Thursday.

All schools in Hong Kong and Macao will be closed for the next two days. More than the usual number of sandbags have been provided to flood-prone areas in Hong Kong, while Macao police urged people living in low-lying areas to prepare for possible evacuation.

Ragasa is expected to bring torrential rains and heavy winds to China’s mainland coastal areas, starting Tuesday. Multiple cities such as Jiangmen, Yangjiang, Zhongshan and Zhuhai in southern Guangdong province ordered the suspension of schools, offices, factories and means of transportation.

The typhoon could make landfall in Guangdong more than once, China’s weather agency said.

Authorities urged residents to stockpile emergency supplies, reinforce doors and windows, and evacuate underground areas.

Associated Press writers Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

By DEREK GATOPOULOS

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — With a pristine white exterior, the Greece tax authority’s new headquarters looks out of place on a clogged industrial artery outside Athens. A former shopping mall and ice rink, the building has been overhauled into an ultramodern digital center that has led the rescue of the nation’s ailing finance and tax sector.

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It is teeming with inspectors who chase down tax cheats with the help of drones, big data and live surveillance feeds from as far as Greece’s island ports and remote farming villages.

Analysts at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue monitor millions of transactions in real time and order stings on businesses flagged by algorithms for a high potential of illegal activity. The high tech was on full display during a recent visit as The Associated Press was granted rare access to the authority’s headquarters.

Greece’s tax system — once a byword for inefficiency — has been rewired by technology.

Now, the country that spent nearly a decade as Europe’s financial outcast, drowning in debt, has become one of its best budget performers, with bonds restored to investment grade by all major ratings agencies.

“We worked systematically over the years, with dedication,” Giorgos Pitsilis, governor of the revenue authority, told the AP. “We started from a situation of no data to a situation with big data.”

From crisis to credit upgrades

Greece was one of just six EU member states that recorded a budget surplus in 2024, after running deficits for decades. Momentum carried into this year, with government revenues shooting past targets through August.

Moody’s upgraded Greece’s bonds to investment grade in March, praising its large-scale push to digitize the tax system. Jason Graffam, senior vice president at ratings agency Morningstar DBRS, noted that Greece’s long-term borrowing costs now sit slightly above Spain’s — and below Italy’s and France’s.

“The Greece of today is indeed very different from a decade ago,” Graffam said. “There has clearly been durable change to the country’s economic model and its fiscal regime.”

During the crisis years, international creditors imposed punishing austerity measures in exchange for three massive bailout packages. Greece’s population felt the pain deeply — wages were slashed, companies shut down and the economy bled jobs.

Sustained pressure from lenders forced successive governments to modernize one of Europe’s weakest tax systems.

Out went paper files and fax machines. In came cashless, paperless systems powered by algorithms that scour card payments, tax filings, payroll data, customs declarations and bank records – and flag anomalies for inspectors to pursue.

‘Saturday Night Fever’

Repurposed smartphones carried by inspectors in the field stream video and audio back to headquarters. There are panic buttons to use when someone feels threatened.

Back at headquarters, screens map ongoing site inspections and drone surveillance feeds from multiple sites: from restaurants and ports to hidden grain silos and fruit delivery trucks — even live readings from ships’ fuel tanks.

Tax and customs officials described how the data translates into raids. They spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of the confidentiality of their work and citing reasons of personal safety.

During a recent nightclub sweep dubbed “Saturday Night Fever,” they matched individual table orders against receipts to uncover undeclared sales, mostly of alcoholic drinks.

“We knew the tables were full, but the receipts didn’t match,” one official said, adding that after inspectors showed up, the nightclub’s reported revenues doubled within days.

Fraud can be detected by cross-referencing mobile phone activity with reported sales as recorded by cash registers and card-payment terminals that by law must be connected to the tax authority.

“If we detect signals from 20 phones inside a store, but see almost no receipts, that’s a cue to dispatch a team immediately,” another inspector explained.

High cost-of-living persists

The reforms have salvaged Greece’s reputation abroad. At home, the windfall has funded 1.6 billion euros in tax cuts recently announced by the center-right government.

Still, opposition parties argue that more efficient tax collection does not offset policies that worsen inequality: The national sales tax rate was hiked during the crisis to 24% — higher than most EU countries.

It hasn’t been reduced since, while other austerity-era cuts remain in place and poverty is stubbornly high.

The powerful Greek Communist Party described recent budget figures as a “blood-stained surplus” that is eating further into the spending power of wage earners.

But the revenue is a sorely needed boost for the government, which is facing public anger over a corruption scandal and the cost-of-living crisis.

Tax compliance may also — slowly and grudgingly – build trust in public institutions, revenue agency officials say.

“It’s a powerful argument … being tax responsible is beneficial,” said Pitsilis, who has been governor since the tax agency became an independent authority in 2017. “We earn more, and that gives space for tax reform.”

Change is visible on the streets too. At a stall north of Athens, Makis Panaretos sells watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers and oranges. About 70% of his sales are now electronic — all transactions are instantly referred to the tax authority.

“Customers use their cards, phones and watches to pay,” he said. “I don’t mind it, even though it slows things down when there’s a line.”

By November, all businesses will be required to accept IRIS, a Greek instant payment system similar to Venmo in the United States, eliminating bank and payment provider fees currently incurred by vendors like Panaretos.

Deeper AI integration

Greece’s progress is an example how a crisis can accelerate reforms, observers say.

“Greece has shown how digitalization and institutional independence can translate into real fiscal gains,” said Alexandros Kentikelenis, a political economy professor at Bocconi University in Milan.

Further integration of artificial intelligence into the tax authority’s systems through 2026 is likely to accelerate this process, according to tax officials.

“The push to modernize tax administration continues, which supports our expectation that tax revenue growth will remain robust over the medium term,” Moody’s wrote in its report accompanying its ratings upgrade in March.

Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis, a Harvard- and MIT-trained technocrat, says the shift is irreversible. A supporter of the digital euro, he has tied tax reform to broader plans to digitize the economy.

“Countries change when they change course,” he said at a news conference this month. “And that change means we won’t be left behind or ever return to the past.”

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Moldovan authorities said they carried out 250 raids and detained dozens on Monday as part of an investigation into an alleged Russia-backed plan to incite “mass riots” and destabilize the country around a critical parliamentary election.

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The raids targeted more than 100 people and took place in multiple localities across the country, police said. Seventy-four people were detained for up to 72 hours, said Victor Furtuna, Moldova’s chief prosecutor from the Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases.

Moldovans will vote to choose a new 101-seat legislature on Sunday, in an election many view as a choice between Moldova’s continued path toward European Union membership or closer ties with Russia.

Moldova’s police said that the unrest plot was “coordinated from the Russian Federation, through criminal elements.”

Furtuna said that most of the suspects “systematically traveled” to Serbia, where they received training and that they were aged between 19 and 45 years old.

The head of Moldova’s police, Viorel Cernauteanu, said that some of the suspects didn’t know the real purpose of their trips, which were presented as pilgrimages, and only later became involved in “training for disorder and destabilization.”

He added that the investigation was “not aimed at political entities, despite interpretations. Rather, it was aimed at documenting the criminal intent and organization of these individuals who traveled to Serbia for training.”

Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu said in a statement after the raids on Monday that the Kremlin is spending “hundreds of millions of euros” to try to sway the election.

“People are intoxicated daily with lies,” she said. “Hundreds of individuals are paid to provoke disorder, violence, and spread fear. … I appeal to all citizens: we must not allow our country to be handed over to foreign interests.”

She added that the Kremlin “has accomplices here in Moldova,” describing them as people “willing to sell out their country for money.”

Moldovan authorities have long accused Russia of conducting a hybrid war — meddling in elections, disinformation campaigns, illicitly funding pro-Russian parties — to try to derail the country’s path toward European Union membership.

Moscow has repeatedly denied meddling in Moldova.

In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moldova applied to join the EU and was granted candidate status that year. Brussels agreed to open accession negotiations last year. Moldova’s westward shift further irked Moscow and tensions between the two nations skyrocketed.

Ta’Shawn Burks often walked to see friends and family, finding joy in those quiet, simple moments, his mother told the court Monday.

Ta’Shawn Burks, right, of St. Paul, and his mother, Tamera Burks, at his graduation from Northeast Metro 916 in 2008. (Courtesy of Tamera Burks)

Burks was doing just that on July 11, 2023, in St. Paul’s Summit-University, when, “in an instant, everything changed,” Tamera Burks, his mother, said.

As the 31-year-old was crossing Concordia Avenue at Dale Street around 9:45 p.m., Abdirahman Ali Hassan saw a yellow light, gunned his sedan and plowed into him at 77 mph. Burks, of St. Paul, died at the scene.

“Since that day, our family has been left shattered,” his mother said at Hassan’s sentencing.

Judge DeAnne Hilgers gave Hassan, 21, of St. Paul, a 364-day term in the workhouse, a sentence that’s more than double what had been agreed upon as part of an April plea agreement.

After his plea to criminal vehicular homicide, Hassan missed a date for his presentence investigation. On Aug. 14, he was cited for careless driving and speeding for allegedly going 102 mph on Interstate 35W near Lyndale Avenue in south Minneapolis.

“I do not believe you understand the ramifications of your actions, and I don’t believe you’ve come to grips with them,” Hilgers told him. “You will not receive the benefit of the plea agreement because you have twice violated that agreement.”

He’ll get credit for three days already served in custody.

Court records show Hassan was convicted of speeding a month before the fatal crash. New Brighton police clocked him driving 90 mph in a 60 mph zone on the entrance ramp to Interstate 694 from Silver Lake Road.

Hassan was ‘covered in glass and blood splatter’

St. Paul police officers were called to the St. Paul intersection on a report of a hit-and-run involving a pedestrian. They found Burks motionless on Concordia Avenue, approximately 100 feet east of Dale Street.

Witnesses told officers that a white car drove through the intersection heading east on Concordia Avenue at a high rate of speed.

One witness said they were stopped at a red light heading south on Dale Street and that Burks was walking north against the traffic light, according to the criminal complaint. Burks was halfway across Concordia Avenue when the witness heard a vehicle’s engine rev up and then saw a white sedan hit Burks, who went airborne. The driver did not stop.

Abdirahman Ali Hassan (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

While officers were securing the scene they learned the driver had stopped less than a mile away at Carroll Avenue and Arundel Street. Officers located a white Hyundai Sonata with heavy front-end damage and a damaged windshield. The driver, identified as Hassan, was in a “state of shock and had a blank stare on his face,” the complaint says, adding that he was “covered in glass and blood splatter.”

Hassan’s mother identified her son to police “since he was unable to talk at that time” and said he had called her crying and in shock and that she met him there, the complaint says. Hassan was transported to a hospital, and later declined to speak to police about the crash.

A blood draw showed that Hassan did not have alcohol or drugs in his system.

Investigators obtained a search warrant and removed the Sonata’s electronic data recorder for crash analysis. It showed Hassan’s speed continually increased after he got off I-94 and that he “unsuccessfully tried to make a green light at the intersection” and hit Burks. The complaint does not clearly state who had the right of way at the time of the crash.

The data showed the car’s speed was 62.8 mph five seconds before the crash and 77.7 mph at the time of impact. The speed limit on Concordia Avenue is 25 mph.

‘Make some serious changes’

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Judge Hilgers gave Hassan the longest workhouse sentence she could without sending him to prison. She stayed a four-year prison term for five years of probation.

Hilgers pointed out to Hassan that he cannot have any traffic violations while on probation.

“And to make that clear, a speeding ticket could put you in prison,” she said. “So take this opportunity to make some serious changes, changes that can honor who you can be, and that will honor who Ta’Shawn was and who he could have been.”