Crowds in Mayotte vent frustration with cyclone response as Macron tours devastation

MIRERENI, Mayotte (AP) — Crowds in Mayotte vented their frustration at French President Emmanuel Macron, with some booing, as he toured destruction wrought by the strongest cyclone to hit the French territory in nearly a century.

Particularly tense scenes on Thursday underscored the discontent that many residents of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean feel toward their government, based about 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) away in Paris.

The people of Mayotte, the poorest department in France, have previously said they suffer from underinvestment and neglect by the government. Now, they are expressing disappointment with the response to Cyclone Chido, which hit Saturday.

The storm has devastated entire neighborhoods and caused an unknown number of deaths, as many people ignored warnings, thinking the storm wouldn’t be so extreme. Authorities have said hundreds or possibly thousands may be dead, but the official toll rose to 35 on Friday.

In the morning, Macron visited a neighborhood in Tsingoni on Mayotte’s main island, where people remain without access to drinking water or phone service nearly a week after the storm.

As he walked through the area, some shouted: “We want water, we want water.” Others, however, offered him a warmer welcome, posing for selfies with the French leader and showing him their children.

But the night before, Macron was met with boos from dozens of residents in Pamandzi on another nearby island.

As people expressed frustration at the slow pace of aid efforts, Macron grabbed a microphone and became angry.

Moving towards the crowd, he said: “I have nothing to do with the cyclone, you can blame me, it wasn’t me!”

Macron, who is known for his appetite for debate and for confronting people who are angry at him, vacillated between acknowledging the hardship and pushing back against criticism.

“You’ve been through something terrible, everyone’s struggling, regardless of skin color,” he said.

Visibly losing patience, Macron then shouted: “If it wasn’t France, you’d be 10,000 times more screwed!”

The French president added: “There’s no place in the Indian Ocean where people get so much help!” A woman could be heard saying “we disagree.”

In a reflection of further frustration, a woman working with local authorities in Mayotte’s capital told The Associated Press on Friday that many deaths recorded by officials on the ground have not yet been published in official tallies.

The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, said most of the people who died were migrants, living in the hills in flimsy houses. Mayotte is home to 320,000 residents and an estimated 100,000 additional migrants.

The woman was not able to give her own estimate.

The reported death toll has only slowly ticked up in the week since the cyclone hit and stood at 35 on Friday, even though authorities have said they know that is a dramatic undercount.

Many in Mayotte have expressed disbelief that the toll hasn’t been updated more quickly.

The Interior Ministry said Friday that in addition to the deaths, 67 people were seriously injured and more than 2,400 slightly injured.

“The number of deaths does not reflect the reality of the 100,000 people living in precarious housing,” the statement said. “The prefect has therefore ordered the deputy prefect to set up a mission to search for the dead.”

It said 70% of residents were “seriously affected.”

The government said it has created a way to count the dead by ordering a census of the population district by district, with the help of mayors and local associations.

In just one example of how the toll might grow, French Health Minister Geneviève Darrieussecq said Friday that about 17% of hospital staff and 40% of all regional health staff on the archipelago are still unaccounted for.

“That’s around 60 to 70 people,” she said on news broadcaster FranceInfo, stressing a large part of the population still has no access to phone service.

Meanwhile, French military and local authorities scrambled to repair busted water pipes across the islands and get water to villages who haven’t had any.

In the village of Mirereni, about 35 kilometers (20 miles) outside Mayotte’s capital, Civil Security officers were trying to remove a large, felled mango tree that busted a water pipe.

The pipe provides water to around 10,000 people in three nearby villages. But officials said repairing it might take longer than usual because of the heat, which impacts equipment.

Locals said they’re worried the lack of water would cause disease. Earlier this year, there was a cholera outbreak on the island, with at least 200 cases.

Mayotte is part an archipelago located between Africa’s east coast and Madagascar that had been a French colony. Its residents voted to remain part of France in a 1974 referendum while the rest of the islands became the independent nation of Comoros.

In recent decades, the French territory has seen massive migration from Comoros, one of the world’s poorest countries, most of whom entered and live illegally in Mayotte.

Macron said Friday fighting illegal immigration was key to state efforts to get Mayotte back on track.

“When you have schools where the population has multiplied by five in two years, when you have hospitals that are exploding under migration pressure, they feel they are being abandoned even if the state is doing a lot,” he said. “We won’t be able to solve Mayotte’s fundamental problems unless we solve the problem of illegal immigration.”

He has proposed rules that would apply to the territory in order to reduce the numbers of people coming in illegally.

On Thursday, he also announced a special law that would help rebuild Mayotte more quickly and would seek to destroy slums and replace tin shacks with more solid buildings.

Corbet reported from Paris.

I

Children play in a small shop in Majicavo Koropa, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Drone view of destroyed cars in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

People wait in line to get cash, in Mamoudzou, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Djoche Ahmed, 18, and his father Ahmed Attoumane, 47, repair their family house in Majicavo Koropa, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Drone view of destroyed dwellings in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Saindou Mohamadi, father of 6, sits on his bed at the Mayotte Central Hospital after being injured while attempting to reach his home in Mamoudzou, Mayotte, Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Drone view of destroyed dwellings in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Children play in Majicavo Koropa, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Drone view of destroyed dwellings in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Women wash clothes after a short rain filled their pots with water, at the Lycée des Lumières where they found shelter after losing their homes, in Mamoudzou, Mayotte, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024 . (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Containers, cars and debris litter the area near Longoni port, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Broken cars litter the road in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Containers and debris litter the area near Longoni port, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Fallen containers litter the Longoni port, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Construction crew clear debris from the area near Longoni port, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French military vehicles make their way to the central city of Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A man walks through shredded trees in the central city of Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant

A road snakes through a forest of shredded trees near Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers cut trees to open a road for heavy vehicles from Mayotte water authorities to repair water pipes in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers cut trees to open a road for heavy vehicles from Mayotte water authorities to repair water pipes in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers cut trees to open a road for heavy vehicles from Mayotte water authorities to repair water pipes in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers cut trees to open a road for heavy vehicles from Mayotte water authorities to repair water pipes in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A man walks by a destroyed car in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers reach the water station in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

Women wait for supplies to be delivered at a supermarket in Mamoudzou, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

A broken car lays in a field of shredded trees in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers make their way through shredded trees heading to Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

French civil security officers cut trees to open a road for heavy vehicles from Mayotte water authorities to repair water pipes in Mirereni, Mayotte, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.

The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.

Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”

He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”

He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.

His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.

Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.

In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.

He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.

“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”

CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.

Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.

“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”

That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.

Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.

After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.

On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.

TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”

Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.

In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.

But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.

TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.

“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”

He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”

Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”

For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.

“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.

Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.

Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.

Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.

He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.

During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.

“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”

He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.

“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”

Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.

Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.

Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.

He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.

Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”

Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.

He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.

“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”

As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.

Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.

FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)

FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)

FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)