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PORT-AU-PRINCE/KINGSTON/HAVANA: Hurricane Melissa’s confirmed death toll climbed to 44 on Thursday, according to official reports, after wreaking destruction across much of the northern Caribbean and picking up speed as it headed toward Bermuda.
Jamaica’s information minister told Reuters at least 19 deaths had been confirmed, but authorities were continuing search and rescue efforts. The storm left hundreds of thousands without power, ripped roofs of buildings and scattered fields with rubble.
Jamaica’s military has called on reserve personnel to report for duty to help with relief and rescue operations.
Melissa made landfall in southwestern Jamaica on Tuesday as a powerful Category 5 hurricane, the Caribbean nation’s strongest-ever storm to directly hit its shores, and the first major hurricane to do so since 1988.
Windspeeds were well above the minimum level for the strongest hurricane classification. Forecasters at AccuWeather said it tied in second place for strongest-ever Atlantic hurricane on record in terms of windspeed when in struck land.
The forecaster estimated $48 billion to $52 billion in damage and economic loss across the western Caribbean.
Authorities in Haiti, which was not directly hit but nevertheless suffered days of torrential rains from the slow-moving storm, reported at least 25 deaths, mostly in the southern town of Petit-Goave when a river burst its banks.
A river also caved in and carried off part of a national highway, local newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported. The road, which had been weakened by last year’s Hurricane Beryl, connected to the nearby city of Jacmel.
Melissa also hit eastern Cuba, where some 735,000 evacuated, but as of Thursday, no deaths were reported there, despite extensive damage to homes and crops.
At 8 p.m. , Melissa was a Category 1 storm 409 km  south-west of the North Atlantic British island territory, where hurricane conditions were expected by nightfall even as Melissa’s eye skirts north-west.
Melissa was packing maximum sustained winds of 105 mph .
Residents in Bermuda however remained calm as the storm was expected to give the island a relatively wide berth. Authorities said they would close its causeway Thursday night and shut schools and ferries on Friday “out of an abundance of caution.”
In the Bahamas, which Melissa cut through Wednesday night, authorities lifted storm warnings but did not give the “all clear.” An official said authorities expected to decide by Saturday whether it was safe for the hundreds of people who evacuated off affected islands to return to their homes.
The front page of Thursday’s Jamaica Observer newspaper read: “DEVASTATION.”
Densely populated Kingston was spared the worst damage. Its main airport was set to reopen on Thursday, as was the capital’s port. Relief flights and aid had begun to flow into Jamaica’s airports, authorities said.
But across the country, more than 130 roads remained blocked by trees, debris and electric lines, authorities said, forcing the military to clear roadways on foot into isolated areas, with ambulances following close behind.
Satellite imagery showed swaths of trees and homes devastated in the hardest-hit areas of Jamaica, sparse remaining greenery defoliated and most structures destroyed.
In a neighborhood of the island’s Montego Bay, 77-year-old Alfred Hines waded barefoot through thick mud and debris as he described his narrow escape from the rising floodwaters.
“At one stage, I see the water at my waist and  about 10 minutes time, I see it around my neck here and I make my escape,” he told Reuters on Wednesday.
“I just want to forget it and things come back to normal.”
In western parts of the island, people crowded by supermarkets and gas stations to fill up on supplies.
“Montego Bay hasn’t got any petrol. Most of the petrol stations are down,” British tourist Chevelle Fitzgerald told Reuters, adding it took her at least six hours to cross the 174 km  to Jamaica’s capital.
“The highway was closed. You had some blockage on the road and trees falling down,” she said.
Over 70 percent of electrical customers in Jamaica remained without power as of Thursday morning, said Energy Minister Daryl Vaz, with power lines felled across the island’s roadways.
Many schools remained without power or water, officials in the capital Kingston said.
Scientists say hurricanes are intensifying faster with greater frequency as a result of warming ocean waters caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Many Caribbean leaders have called on wealthy, heavy-polluting nations to provide reparations in the form of aid or debt relief.
Despite the UN setting up a fund for developing nations to quickly access reliable financing for more extreme weather events in 2023, donations have not met targets.
US forecaster AccuWeather said Melissa was the third most-intense hurricane observed in the Caribbean, as well as its slowest-moving, compounding damages for affected areas.
US search and rescue teams were headed for Jamaica on Thursday to assist in recovery efforts, Jamaican authorities said. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was prepared to offer “immediate humanitarian aid” to the people of Cuba, a long-time US foe.
Authorities in Cuba — which Melissa struck in the night as a Category 3 storm — said they were “awaiting clarification on how and in what way they are willing to assist.”
At least 241 Cuban communities remained isolated and without communications on Wednesday following the storm’s passage across Santiago province, according to preliminary media reports, affecting as many as 140,000 residents.
Residents of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, began returning to repair their homes. Authorities had evacuated 735,000 people to shelters outside the hurricane’s cone and relocated tourists in northern cays to inland hotels.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump set the refugee admissions ceiling at 7,500 for fiscal year 2026, the lowest cap on record, a White House document published on Thursday said, part of a broader effort to reshape refugee policies in the US and worldwide.
Trump said in an annual refugee determination dated September 30 that admissions would be focused largely on South Africans from the country’s white Afrikaner ethnic minority.
Trump has claimed Afrikaners face persecution based on their race in the Black-majority country, allegations the South African government has denied. Trump paused all US refugee admissions when he took office in January, saying they could only be restarted if they were established to be in the best interests of the US Weeks later, he launched an effort to bring in Afrikaners, sparking criticism from refugee supporters. Only 138 South Africans had entered the US by early September, Reuters reported at the time.
In the determination published on Thursday, Trump said his administration would consider bringing in “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.” An internal document drafted by US government officials in April suggested the administration could also prioritize bringing in Europeans as refugees if they were targeted for expressing certain views, such as opposition to mass migration or support for populist political parties. Europeans and other groups were not named in Trump’s public refugee plan.
US law requires the executive branch to consult with members of Congress before setting refugee levels, but Democratic lawmakers said on September 30 that the meeting never took place. In a statement on Thursday, US Representative Jamie Raskin, US Senator Dick Durbin and other Democratic lawmakers said Trump’s low refugee cap was both wrongheaded and lacked legal force.
“This bizarre presidential determination is not only morally indefensible, it is illegal and invalid,” the lawmakers said.
A senior Trump administration official blamed the government shutdown that began on October 1 for delayed consultation and said no refugees would be admitted until it occurred.
During the United Nations General Assembly in September, top Trump administration officials urged other nations to join a global campaign to roll back asylum protections, a major shift that would seek to reshape the post-World War Two migration framework.
This month, Reuters and other outlets reported Trump’s plans for the 7,500-person refugee ceiling, which contrasts sharply with the 100,000 refugees who entered under former President Joe Biden in fiscal 2024.
Gideon Maltz, CEO of Tent Partnership for Refugees, said in a statement that refugees help address labor shortages and that the program “has been extraordinarily good for America.”
“Dismantling it today is not putting America first,” he said in a statement.
In a related move, the White House said it would move oversight of the refugee support programs from the State Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.