As civil war-torn Myanmar struggles to recover from a devastating earthquake, the United States is facing criticism that it has abandoned the country in its hour of need – and is ceding global leadership on disaster response to its rivals.

The 7.7-magnitude quake, which struck on March 28 and killed thousands, is the first major natural disaster since the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in lifesaving programs under its drive to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the main US humanitarian aid agency.

USAID used to administer most of America’s foreign aid – 61% of the $71 billion total budget in 2023. But since taking office in January, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of its employees, and cut 83% of USAID programs – including staff and programs working to help Myanmar. On Wednesday, they also announced that all foreign staff would be laid off.

Those cuts have been felt in the meager US response to the Myanmar quake, according to experts, exposing a void in international relief measures for major catastrophes.

“Not only did the United States only send a paltry amount of assistance, it sent only three workers, which then subsequently were fired while they were on the ground in Myanmar providing assistance.”

At least 3,550 people died and nearly 5,000 others were injured when the earthquake hit the impoverished Southeast Asian nation – which has already endured years of civil war since a military coup in 2021, leaving nearly 20 million people in need of aid.

The military government does not control all of the resource-rich country, as it battles a patchwork of powerful ethnic militias and pro-democracy groups.

“The needs are massive right now,” said Matthew Smith, CEO of human rights organization Fortify Rights, based in neighboring Thailand. “And unfortunately, the aid effort is not as robust as it could or should be.”

Two days after the quake, the US pledged $2 million in assistance to Myanmar – later increased to a total of $9 million – for emergency shelter, food, medical care and water, according to a post on X from State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce.

But Smith says that with minimal staffing on the ground, it is unclear how that money would be channeled.

“There’s nobody to administer that aid, there (are) no aid workers on the ground, there’s no deployment happening,” Smith said. “To so drastically cut it the way that they have was reckless and irresponsible.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the American response in Brussels last week. The US is “not the government of the world,” he said, adding that although Washington would continue to provide some humanitarian assistance, others should do more.

“There are a lot of other countries in the world and everyone should pitch in,” Rubio said. “I don’t think it’s fair to assume that the United States needs to continue to share the burden (of) 60-70% of humanitarian aid around the world.”

Comparisons have been made to the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023, when the US deployed hundreds of relief workers and pledged $185 million in assistance.

“In the past, the US government has certainly been one of the most effective response teams to mass-scale natural disasters,” Smith said.

‘Strategic mistake’

Multiple countries are filling the gap left by Washington’s limited earthquake response, including China, Russia and India – which have sent aid, rescue teams and mobile medical units to Myanmar.

Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs chief – who spent several days visiting the areas worst affected by the quake – said the world “can’t be reliant on US support alone.”

This year’s humanitarian appeal from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has only been 7% funded – which will hamper relief efforts around the world, he added.

“I’ve been in touch with China, with Russia, other countries that are moving aid in to try to ensure that we get as much global support as possible,” Fletcher said.

Beyond the humanitarian impact of the US retreat on assistance, ex-USAID official Bencosme said ceding this ground to adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow is a “strategic mistake” from a soft power perspective.

“Other actors will fill in that leadership void, which makes it difficult for the US to leverage international assistance or international help in the future,” Bencosme said.

Smith, of Fortify Rights, said some of the countries providing help to Myanmar are also facilitating the military’s attacks on rebel-held areas, which have continued since the disaster.

“It’s deeply troubling, ironic sadly, in some ways that the same countries that are providing the Myanmar military junta with weapons that the junta is using to kill civilians, those are the same countries now arriving into Myanmar to help with the aid effort,” he said.

Reduced to ashes

For the homeless residents of Mandalay’s Sein Pan district, in the epicenter of the earthquake zone, aid can’t come fast enough.

The informal settlement of wooden shacks was built on a landfill dump, and the tremors ignited a huge fire which spread rapidly, residents said.

“The fireball emerged from the ground immediately after the earthquake,” said resident Kyi Thein, as she stood on the charred remains of her home. “The fire spread out across the district and wiped out all 400 houses. Everybody ran away and now nothing remains.”

“I hope the government authorities will provide aid to us,” Kyi Thein said. “We are now depending on private donors for a living, but we need support.”

Another Sein Pan resident, who did not wish to share her name for security reasons, said the flames were so intense that they were unable to save any possessions.

“The entire neighborhood was reduced to ashes,” she said. “I’m relieved to have survived. I just want my home back.”

In the quake’s aftermath, junta leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing made a rare request for international aid. But the UN human rights office says the military has also been using its routine strategy of blocking and controlling access to aid and humanitarian workers.

Two weeks after the disaster struck, workers in the impacted areas are no longer looking for survivors – they have now switched to a recovery and aid operation.

But the challenges of doing so without the support they need are growing.

“We need to use proper machines to recover bodies under the collapsed buildings,” said 41-year-old Ei Mon Khine, an official from a social assistance association who was working on the scene. “When the rescuers do not arrive in time, the dead bodies become spoiled and deformed,” making it harder to recover the remains, she said.

People who have lost their homes are also dealing with temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), along with thunderstorms that rolled through last weekend.

“There was heavy wind and rain, and you have people living in tents outside on the street, so it made an already difficult situation even worse,” said Sara Netzer, Myanmar country director for the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), based in Yangon.

“We need to ensure that we are already thinking about how we can build some temporary shelter for people, and that will also help prevent this spread of disease as well.”

Many quake-hit communities in Mandalay and the neighboring Sagaing region were already hosting those displaced by the civil war, she added, showing the “resiliency” of Myanmar, but increasing the need for help before more heavy rains arrive.

“I think it’s illustrative of the kind of race against time that we have right now, before the monsoon season starts here in Myanmar,” Netzer said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said his nation is “not afraid,” in his first public comments on the escalating trade war with the United States that has tanked international markets and fueled fears of a global recession.

“There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation,” Xi told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing on Friday, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

“For over 70 years, China’s development has relied on self-reliance and hard work — never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression,” Xi added. “Regardless of how the external environment changes, China will remain confident, stay focused, and concentrate on managing its own affairs well.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Japan’s largest yakuza crime syndicate has pledged to end its longstanding war with a rival faction and refrain from causing “trouble,” authorities said, as the mafia-like groups contend with falling membership and increased police crackdowns.

The Yamaguchi-gumi, one of the world’s largest and wealthiest crime gangs, has been embroiled in a bloody feud with splinter groups since 2015, when more than a dozen factions broke away to form the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi.

Since then, intensifying violence between the two warring crime organizations has seen rival gangsters gunned down or stabbed in dozens of incidents, according to police.

The armed conflict, often erupting on public streets in cities across central and western Japan, has put pressure on authorities to toughen restrictions on the gangs.

“Yakuza” is a blanket term for Japan’s organized crime groups, which sit in a gray area in the country. Though they are not outlawed, the groups are regulated and monitored by authorities.

In 2020, police formally designated the Yamaguchi-gumi and its splinter group as gangs at war – giving officers the ability to increase surveillance, restrict their activities, including prohibiting the use of their offices and ability to raise funds.

“Their conflicts have become serious and unpredictable,” the National Police Agency said in 2021. In the past five years, police have also put several other gangs under close surveillance.

It is unclear whether the rival splinter group, Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, has responded to the ceasefire pledge. Police said they would be “closely monitoring the movements of both groups” as the declaration to end the turf war may be one-sided.

Membership to yakuza groups across Japan has been in decline over recent decades. In 2024, the number of members of organized crime syndicates stood at 18,800, hitting a record low and falling below 20,000 for the first time, according to police data.

Those official figures show the number of active members of the Yamaguchi-gumi gang have almost halved since 2014 – falling from 6,000 then to just 3,300 at the end of last year. The Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi had around 120 members last year.

As yakuza membership falls, however, Japanese authorities are contending with a new criminal phenomenon: the “tokuryu.”

These anonymous gangs are not affiliated with a yakuza family, operating individually or in ad hoc groups. About 10,000 members of tokuryu gangs were investigated last year, with police linking them to violent robberies in Tokyo, and fraud schemes involving romance scams and investments on social media.

A major Australian IVF clinic has apologized for giving the wrong embryo to a woman who then gave birth to another couple’s baby, blaming the mix-up on “human error.”

Monash IVF, which operates more than 100 clinics across Australia, said in a statement staff were “devastated” by the mistake, believed to be the first of its kind in Australia.

It’s not clear whether either of the couples suspected a mix-up before the clinic discovered the error in February.

“On behalf of Monash IVF, I want to say how truly sorry I am for what has happened,” said CEO Michael Knaap in the statement.

“We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time,” he added.

Monash IVF has not named the couples involved, nor has it responded to questions about when the baby was born, or who has custody of the child, out of respect for the couples’ privacy.

The error occurred at Monash IVF’s Brisbane clinic, in the state of Queensland, where the law recognizes the birth mother and her partner as the child’s legal parents.

Alex Polyakov, a clinical associate professor at the University of Melbourne and a fertility consultant at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, said it was the first incident of its kind in four decades of IVF in Australia.

“Australia’s regulatory framework for assisted reproductive technology is internationally recognized for its stringency and thoroughness,” he said in written comments.

“The probability of such an event occurring is so low that it defies statistical quantification.”

How did it happen?

The mistake was discovered in February after the birth parents requested to transfer their remaining embryos to another IVF provider.

After an extra embryo was found in their storage compartment, an internal inquiry discovered they’d received the wrong embryo.

It’s not clear how the error was made but according to the Monash IVF statement, another patient’s embryo was “incorrectly thawed and transferred to the birth parents.”

Knaap, the company’s CEO, said he was confident it was “an isolated incident.”

“We are reinforcing all our safeguards across our clinics – we also commissioned an independent investigation and are committed to implementing its recommendations in full,” he added.

The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) said in a statement that it was “aware of the serious incident” and its immediate thoughts were with the families affected.

It said such incidents are rare and require “the highest standards of transparency.”

Similar errors have been made in the United States, including a recent case where a White woman discovered she’d been given the wrong embryo after giving birth to a Black infant.

This is not the first time Monash IVF has been accused of wrongdoing.

Last year, the company agreed to pay 56 million Australian dollars ($35 million) to settle a class action suit brought by 700 former patients.

The patients alleged the company didn’t disclose the risk of false positives in genetic testing on embryos, which led them to discard potentially viable embryos.

Taiwan prosecutors on Friday for the first time charged a Chinese ship captain with intentionally damaging undersea cables off the island in February, after a rise in sea cable malfunctions alarmed Taiwan officials amid tensions with China.

Prosecutors say the man was captain of the Chinese-crewed Hong Tai 58, registered in Togo, which Taiwanese authorities detained after suspecting the ship had dropped anchor near an undersea cable off southwestern Taiwan, damaging it.

The prosecutors’ office in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan said they had charged the ship’s Chinese captain, whom they identified only by his family name, Wang, with being responsible for damaging the cable.

Wang has said he is innocent, but refused to provide details of the ship’s owner and “had a bad attitude”, the prosecutors said in a statement.

Seven other Chinese nationals detained at the same time will not be charged and will be transported to China, prosecutors said, adding that the case was the island’s first prosecution over damaging sea cables.

Reuters was not able to determine the ship’s ownership or immediately locate a lawyer representing the captain.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China has previously accused Taiwan of “manipulating” possible Chinese involvement in the case, saying it was casting aspersions before the facts were clear.

Taiwan has reported five cases of sea cable malfunctions this year, compared with three each in 2024 and 2023, according to its digital ministry.

Taiwan’s coast guard has in recent months stepped up efforts to protect its sea cables, including monitoring a “blacklist” of close to 100 China-linked ships registered to a country other than that of its owner near Taiwan, officials familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Taiwan said in January it suspected a China-linked ship of damaging an undersea cable off its northern coast; the ship owner denied the accusations.

Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, has repeatedly complained about “grey zone” Chinese activities around the island, designed to pressure it without direct confrontation, such as balloon overflights and sand dredging.

Taipei was alarmed after another Chinese-linked ship was suspected of damaging a different cable this year, prompting the navy and other agencies to step up efforts to protect the undersea communication links, which are vital to the island’s connections to the rest of the world.

Taiwan, whose government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, has pointed to similarities between what it has experienced and damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.