BEIJING: Torrential rains in China have killed at least 30 people and left dozens more missing, state media said on Thursday, as the country grinds through another summer of extreme weather.
Confirmation of the deaths came the same day that weather authorities said July was China’s hottest month since records began six decades ago.
China is the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that scientists say are driving climate change and making extreme weather more frequent and intense.
Heatwaves this summer have scorched parts of northern China, while heavy rain has triggered floods and landslides in central and southern areas.
This week’s downpours were triggered by Typhoon Gaemi, which moved on from the Philippines and Taiwan to make landfall in eastern China a week ago, with hilly, landlocked Hunan province hit particularly hard.
More than 11,000 people were evacuated from the city of Zixing after some areas endured record rainfall of 645 millimeters (25 inches) in just 24 hours, state news agency Xinhua said on Tuesday.
Many roads connecting townships in the Zixing area were temporarily cut off, which also affected the power supply and communications infrastructure.
State broadcaster CCTV said on Thursday the disruption was mostly over.
“Initial findings show that there have been 30 deaths and 35 are missing,” the report said, adding that search and rescue efforts were still ongoing.
Xinhua said on Tuesday four people had been killed and three people were missing in Zixing.
Three people were killed in Hunan’s Yongxing county, Xinhua also said Tuesday, while a landslide on Sunday killed 15 people elsewhere in the province.
Last month was “the hottest July since complete observations began in 1961, and the hottest single month in the history of observation,” the national weather office said Thursday.
It said the average July air temperature in China was 23.21 degrees Celsius (73.78 degrees Fahrenheit), exceeding the previous record of 23.17C (73.71F) in 2017.
The mean temperature in every province was also “higher than the average for previous years,” with the southwestern provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan logging their highest averages, the weather office said.
It forecast that the mercury would continue to climb in eastern regions this week, including Shanghai, where a red alert for extreme heat was in place on Thursday.
“Next week will be more of the same. It’s like being on an iron plate,” wrote one user of the Weibo social media platform in response to the megacity’s heat warning.
Another quipped: “It’s so hot. Did Shanghai do something to anger the gods?“
The nearby city of Hangzhou may hit 43C (109F) on Saturday, which would break its all-time record, the weather office said.
Middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River would likely see daily temperatures fall no lower than 30C (86F), it said.
The news came little more than a week after Earth experienced its warmest day in recorded history.
Preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service showed the daily global average temperature was 17.15C (62.9F) on July 22.
That was 0.06C hotter than the day before, which itself broke the all-time high temperature set a year earlier by a small margin.
China has pledged to bring emissions of carbon dioxide to a peak by 2030, and to net zero by 2060, but has resisted calls to be bolder.
It long depended on highly polluting coal power to fuel its massive economy but has emerged as a renewable energy leader in recent years.
Research showed last month that China is building almost twice as much wind and solar energy capacity than every other country combined.
30 dead, dozens missing after torrential rain in central China
https://arab.news/m9vyj
30 dead, dozens missing after torrential rain in central China
- Confirmation of the deaths came the same day that weather authorities said July was China’s hottest month since records began six decades ago
- Heatwaves this summer have scorched parts of northern China, while heavy rain has triggered floods and landslides in central and southern areas
Bus crash blaze kills 38 in Tanzania
The accident in Sabasaba, in the Kilimanjaro region, on Saturday evening occurred after one of the bus’s tires punctured, causing the driver to lose control.
“A total of 38 people died in the crash, including two women,” a presidency statement said, adding that 28 others were wounded.
“However, due to the extent of the burns, 36 bodies remain unidentified,” the presidency said.
Six of the injured were still in hospital for treatment, it added.
Deadly crashes are frequent on Tanzania’s roads.
In a 2018 report, the World Health Organization estimated that 13,000 to 19,000 people in Tanzania were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, far higher than the government’s official toll of 3,256.
EU must be more assertive with Israel: Ex-foreign policy chief
- Josep Borrell: Europe has been ‘relegated to the sidelines’ in mediating conflict
- Country ‘carrying out the largest ethnic-cleansing operation since end of Second World War’
LONDON: The EU must adopt a more assertive posture against Israel over its violations of international law in Gaza, Josep Borrell, the bloc’s former foreign policy chief, has said.
In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Borrell argued that the EU has a “duty” to intervene over the humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian enclave, The Guardian reported.
Rather than relying on the US to bring an end to the war, Europe must launch its own plan, he said.
The article was co-authored with Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek academic who has advised the EU.
“Europe can no longer afford to linger at the margin. The EU needs a concerted plan,” the two authors said.
“Not only is Europe’s own security at stake, but more important, European history imposes a duty on Europeans to intervene in response to Israel’s violations of international law.
“Europeans cannot stay the hapless fools in this tragic story, dishing out cash with their eyes closed.”
Borrell’s successor, Kaja Kallas, said last week that it was “very clear” Israel had breached its human rights commitments during its war on Gaza.
However, the “concrete question” remains the choice of action EU member states can agree on in response, she added.
Last month, 17 EU member states, in protest against Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, triggered a review of the bloc’s association agreement with Israel, which covers trade and other cooperation.
Borrell last month accused Tel Aviv of “carrying out the largest ethnic-cleansing operation since the end of the Second World War.”
Europe’s inconsistent response to the humanitarian crisis can be partly explained by the reluctance of some countries — including Germany, Hungary and Austria — to take action against Israel for historical reasons, Borrell and Nicolaidis wrote.
Yet there are ways for other EU member states to take action without requiring a continent-wide consensus, they said, highlighting the EU’s financial leverage and the utility of European programs for Israel, including the Erasmus student exchange scheme.
EU member states could also invoke Article 20 of the EU’s treaty to “allow for at least nine member states to come together to utilize certain foreign policy tools not related to defense,” they wrote.
“Because such an action has never been taken before, those states would have to explore what (it) … would concretely allow them to do,” the Foreign Affairs article said.
The EU has been rendered ineffective in applying pressure due to disunity, the two authors said, arguing that the bloc should act as a powerful mediator in the Middle East.
“Some EU leaders cautiously backed the International Criminal Court’s investigations, while others, such as Austria and Germany, have declined to implement its arrest warrants against Israeli officials,” they wrote.
“And because EU member states, beginning with Germany and Hungary, could not agree on whether to revisit the union’s trade policy with Israel, the EU continues to be Israel’s largest trading partner.
“As a result, the EU, as a bloc, has been largely relegated to the sidelines, divided internally and overshadowed in ceasefire diplomacy by the US and regional actors such as Egypt and Qatar. Shouldn’t the EU also have acted as a mediator?”
Ukraine on track to withdraw from Ottawa anti-personnel mines treaty, lawmaker says
KYIV: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a decree on the country’s withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention, which bans the production and use of anti-personnel mines, a senior Ukrainian lawmaker said on Sunday.
Ukraine ratified the convention in 2005 and a parliamentary decision is needed to withdraw from the treaty.
The document is not yet available on the website of the president’s office.
“This is a step that the reality of war has long demanded. Russia is not a party to this Convention and is massively using mines against our military and civilians,” Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Ukraine parliament’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, said on his Facebook page.
“We cannot remain tied down in an environment where the enemy has no restrictions,” he added, saying that the legislative decision must definitively restore Ukraine’s right to effectively defend its territory.
Russia has intensified its offensive operations in Ukraine in recent months, using significant superiority in manpower.
Kostenko did not say when the issue would be debated in parliament.
Air India plane crash probe looking at all angles: minister
- All but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner were killed when it crashed in the western city of Ahmedabad on June 12
- Authorities have identified 19 others who died on the ground, but a police source said after the crash that the toll was 38
NEW DELHI: An Indian aviation minister on Sunday said investigators were probing “all angles” behind an Air India crash when asked by media about possible sabotage.
All but one of the 242 people on board the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner were killed when it crashed in the western city of Ahmedabad on June 12.
Authorities have identified 19 others who died on the ground, but a police source told AFP after the crash that the toll was 38.
India’s minister of state for civil aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, said the investigation was looking at “all angles” when asked specifically about possible “sabotage,” in an interview with Indian news channel NDTV.
“It has never happened before that both engines have shut off together,” Mohol said earlier in the interview, in reference to theories by some experts of possible dual-engine failure.
The minister added that until the investigation report is published, it would be premature to comment on the cause.
The team appointed to investigate the crash started extracting data from the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders this week, in an attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the disaster.
Air India has said that the plane was “well-maintained” and that the pilots were accomplished flyers.
Germany seeks Israeli partnership on cyberdefense, plans ‘cyber dome’
BERLIN: Germany is aiming to establish a joint German-Israeli cyber research center and deepen collaboration between the two countries’ intelligence and security agencies, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Sunday.
Germany is among Israel’s closest allies in Europe, and Berlin has increasingly looked to draw upon Israel’s defense expertise as it boosts its military capabilities and contributions to NATO in the face of perceived growing threats from Russia and China.
“Military defense alone is not sufficient for this turning point in security. A significant upgrade in civil defense is also essential to strengthen our overall defensive capabilities,” Dobrindt said during a visit to Israel, as reported by Germany’s Bild newspaper.
Dobrindt, who was appointed by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last month, arrived in Israel on Saturday.
According to the Bild report, Dobrindt outlined a five-point plan aimed at establishing what he called a “Cyber Dome” for Germany, as part of its cyberdefense strategy.
Earlier on Sunday, Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Soeder called for the acquisition of 2,000 interceptor missiles to equip Germany with an “Iron Dome” system similar to Israel’s short-range missile defense technology.
