Europe battles deadly heat
Arid ... ablaze
LISBON, Aug 8, (AFP): Europe’s scorching heatwave has killed nine people in a week in Spain, health authorities said Tuesday, as stifling temperatures kindled wildfires in the country and neighbouring Portugal where a ferocious blaze encircled a resort town.
Weeks of nonstop sunshine and near-record temperatures have caused droughts and seen tinder-dry forests consumed by wildfires from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle, in what many fear could be the region’s new normal in an era of climate change.
The devastating effects of the heatwave were visible from space, according to images of swathes of arid landscape taken by the German astronaut Alexander Gerst from the International Space Station.
“After several weeks of night flying, I was able to take the first day pictures of central Europe and Germany. The sight is shocking. Everything that should be green is parched and brown,” Gerst said on Twitter.
Spain and Portugal approached record temperatures at the weekend, with the mercury hitting 46.6 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit) at El Granado in Spain and 46.4 C in Alvega, Portugal, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
While the deadly hot spell is expected to ease in parts of western Europe in the coming days, firefighters in Spain and Portugal struggled to contain wildfires that have swept southern areas.
In the southern Portuguese holiday region, residents and tourists have been evacuated from around an Algarve resort town as fire crews struggled to extinguish wildfires that have raged for days leaving 30 people injured, one seriously.
by flight delays and cancellations and that it had booked 2,000 hotel rooms as a precaution in case people couldn’t be put on later aircraft.
German mathematician Peter Scholze, one of the four winners of the prestigious Fields prize, poses after a press conference in front of a building of the university in Bonn, western Germany on Aug 7. Scholze was given the Fields medal, dubbed the Nobel for mathematics on Aug 1, during a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. (AFP)
Hundreds of firefighters and soldiers used helicopters and planes, as well as several hundred vehicles, to douse the blaze around the mountain town of Monchique as strong winds fanned the flames, with meteorologists warning of “significant” gusts to come.
In the Valencia region of neighbouring Spain some 2,500 people were driven from their homes overnight to escape flames that have already swept across around 1,000 hectares, as fire crews struggled to bring the fires under control.
A spokesman for the regional health department in the southwestern region of Extremadura, near Portugal, said a 66-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman who died in recent days had both succumbed to heat stroke.
Consequence
This brings to nine the number of people to have died as a direct consequence of the heatwave.
While parts of Western Europe are forecast to have a reprieve in the coming days, the sweltering temperatures are expected to travel eastwards across the region.
“The same circulation pattern persists which brings hot air from North Africa over Europe, but this whole system is now moving slowly to the east so the western parts of the continent will get cooler air from the Atlantic,” said WMO spokeswoman Sylvie Castonguay.
“This will relieve the situation in most countries in southwestern Europe, while the hot weather conditions will spread further to Eastern Europe.”
In France, violent thunderstorms brought an end to the heatwave there but led to rail cancellations with trees toppled and powerlines down in some parts of the country.
It said also that some flights had to leave Frankfurt empty so that they would be at their destination airports at the right time to keep on schedule. (AP)
Russia warns of conflict:
An attempt by NATO to incorporate the former Soviet republic of Georgia could trigger a new, “horrible” conflict, Russia’s prime minister said Tuesday in a stern warning to the West marking 10 years since the Russia-Georgia war.
Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with the Kommersant daily broadcast by Russian state television that NATO’s plans to eventually offer membership to Georgia are “absolutely irresponsible” and a “threat to peace.”
Medvedev was Russia’s president during the August 2008 war, which erupted when Georgian troops tried unsuccessfully to regain control over the Moscow-backed breakaway province of South Ossetia and Russia sent troops that routed the Georgian military in five days of fighting.
The Russian army was poised to advance on the Georgian capital, but Medvedev rolled it back, accepting a truce mediated by the European Union.
After the war, Georgia entirely lost control of both South Ossetia and another separatist region, Abkhazia. Russia has strengthened its military presence in both regions and recognized them as independent states, but only a few countries have followed suit.
The European Union on Tuesday reiterated its “firm support to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia within its internationally recognized borders” and lamented the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. (AP)