AFP UK

The black soldier fly was introduced to Uganda by scientists who see it as the solution to farmers' woes

As fertiliser prices shot up following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ugandan villager Peter Wakisi fretted for the future of his small farm and his young family.

Little did he know that the answer to his prayers would arrive in the form of bugs — specifically the black soldier fly, an insect introduced to the East African nation by scientists who see it as the solution to farmers’ woes.

Wakisi, 36, is one of over 1,200 villagers enrolled in a programme to grow and sell the larvae of the black soldier fly, or BSF, a tiny creature whose powerful stomach enzymes turn food waste into fertiliser.

The food digested and excreted by the larvae is used to nourish plants.

The benefits are plain to see, father-of-four Wakisi said, pointing to a row of black plastic containers — home to the young larvae he buys and raises before selling back to the scientists for a threefold profit.

“The manure from the waste generated by the BSF, mixed with organic waste and pig droppings, is safe to the soil and much cheaper compared to inorganic fertilisers whose prices increased due to the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Wakisi said. 

“Organic fertilisers have reduced the expenses I used to incur on chemical fertilisers by almost 60 percent. My plants are healthier and yields are better now,” he told AFP in his village of Kawoomya Nyiize in central Uganda’s Kayunga district.

The programme, which is partly funded by the government of the Netherlands, is run by Kampala-based Dutch startup Marula Proteen Limited in partnership with Ugandan agricultural firm Enimiro. 

“A soil that doesn’t replenish its organic stock will eventually deplete and the plant yields will diminish significantly,” said Tommie Hooft, director at Marula Proteen.

The fertiliser produced by the black soldier flies “is full of healthy microbes that provide essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium” to plants, making it an excellent option for farmers, he said.

– The ‘ick’ factor –

But first, there’s the ‘ick’ factor to consider, at least in the eyes of some.

Scola Namataka, a 30-year-old single mother in Kayunga’s Nakirubi village, said she could never have imagined raising insects, especially ones known to feast on faeces.

“I said that can’t be possible, rearing these maggots,” she told AFP, reaching into a plastic container to grab a handful of wriggling larvae.

But with money falling short and the soil on her family’s farm becoming increasingly depleted of nutrients, Namataka was running out of options when she heard about the programme in March this year.

Since enrolling, her plants are thriving, she said, and she’s even managed to get used to the pungent scent of the larvae feeding factory in her backyard.

After the war in Ukraine highlighted the worrying dependence of many agricultural economies on Russian fertiliser, the plentiful supply of these insects is a boon to farmers, said Hooft.

Adult females lay hundreds of eggs during their days-long life cycle and the larvae’s voracious appetite means there’s little risk of running out of manure.

“Being so dependent on an imported product is detrimental to farmers’ profitability. Our organic fertiliser is locally produced, and always available,” Hooft said.

Apart from subsistence farmers, the company sells BSF fertiliser to bigger enterprises like Clarke Farms, a 1500-acre coffee estate around 300 kilometres (190 miles) west of Kampala.

The firm has also teamed up with the Kampala Capital City Authority to help with waste disposal, collecting between 8-10 tonnes of garbage daily from food markets and feeding it to larvae.

– ‘More sustainable’ –

The programme aims to solve several problems at once, said Ruchi Tripathi of VSO, one of the non-profits which has partnered with Marula Proteen.

“Feeding the soil through adding organic nutrients is much more sustainable and will build the resilience of the soils which (will) in turn feed the plants,” she told AFP.

“This helps improve food security, reduce dependence on expensive imported chemical fertilisers, and reduces demand for oil-based fertilisers, helping fight against climate change,” she added.

For Wakisi, these black bugs have transformed his family’s fortunes, enabling him to hire a tractor, feed his children and pay school fees for his four younger siblings.

Though the cost of fertiliser continues to soar in Uganda, he no longer worries about it.

“I have abandoned the use of chemical fertilisers,” he said.

The People's Liberation Army, paramilitary police and fire rescue services dispatched over 10,000 rescuers to the area

The death toll from a strong earthquake that struck southwest China rose to 82, state media reported Thursday, as rain and possible mudslides threatened the search for dozens of missing people. 

The magnitude 6.6 quake hit about 43 kilometres (26 miles) southeast of the city of Kangding in Sichuan province at a depth of 10 kilometres on Monday, according to the US Geological Survey, forcing thousands to be resettled into temporary camps.

State broadcaster CCTV said that 46 people died in Ganzi prefecture near the epicentre, while 36 deaths were reported in neighbouring Ya’an city. 

More than 270 were injured, while the number of missing remained at 35, CCTV reported.

The national weather service said moderate rain will continue in the affected earthquake area on Thursday and Friday, with some localised heavy showers. 

“Since the post-earthquake geological conditions are inherently fragile, and the impact of additional rainfall may lead to landslides and mudslides, the local area needs to beware of secondary disasters,” China’s meteorological administration said.

The People’s Liberation Army, paramilitary police, and fire rescue services dispatched more than 10,000 workers to the area, who continued search operations and landslide clean-up efforts in the remote countryside.

– Mountain torrents –

Rescuers braved flash floods and landslides caused by aftershocks to relocate villagers from destroyed homes, often having to haul them through mountainous terrain on ropes and stretchers.

“We also waded through the water to get to Xingfu village. The mountain torrents contain rocks… the stones you can’t see in the water pose the greatest threat to us,” a rescue team member named Tan Ke told CCTV.

“We quickly used ropes to build a human ladder… when we first started wading, the water reached our knees and thighs. By the time we got to a safe place, the flash flood had reached waist level.” 

Over 22,000 people have so far been resettled into 124 temporary sites across Ganzi and Ya’an, the state-owned People’s Daily newspaper reported. 

The paper said over 21,000 students and staff at a school in Shimian county — where Ya’an is located — were safely evacuated within one minute of the quake. 

Nearly 1,800 schools in the area had reopened by Wednesday, it added. 

Workers raced to fix hundreds of kilometres of power and optical cables, with communications in affected areas “basically restored” as of Thursday, the China Youth Daily reported. 

Local authorities have received over 100 million yuan ($14 million) in disaster relief donations so far, the report said. 

The quake also rocked buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu — where millions are confined to their homes under a strict Covid-19 lockdown — and in the nearby megacity of Chongqing, residents told AFP.

Human development index declines

A United Nations report published Thursday argues that an unprecedented array of crises, chiefly among them Covid-19, has set human progress back five years and fueled a global wave of uncertainty.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) announced that for the first time since it was created over 30 years ago, the Human Development Index — a measure of countries’ life expectancies, education levels, and standards of living — has declined for two years straight, in 2020 and 2021.

“It means we die earlier, we are less well educated, our incomes are going down,” UNDP chief Achim Steiner told AFP in an interview.

“Just under three parameters, you can get a sense of why so many people are beginning to feel desperate, frustrated, worried about the future,” he said.

The Human Development Index has steadily risen for decades, but began sliding in 2020 and continued its fall in 2021, erasing the gains of the preceding five years, the paper says.

Titled “Uncertain times, unsettled lives,” the report points to the Covid-19 pandemic as a major driver of the global reversion, but also says that a compounding number of crises — political, financial and climate-related — have not allowed time for populations to recover.

“We’ve had disasters before. We’ve had conflicts before. But the confluence of what we’re facing right now is a major setback to human development,” said Steiner.

The setback is truly global, impacting more than 90 percent of countries around the world, according to the study.

Switzerland, Norway and Iceland all retain their spots at the top of the list, while South Sudan, Chad and Niger sit at the bottom.

And while some countries had begun to recover from the pandemic, many others in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean had not yet turned the corner before a new crisis hit: the war in Ukraine.

– ‘Lost trust’ –

While the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on food and energy security has not yet been calculated into this year’s index, “without any doubt, the outlook for 2022 is grim,” Steiner said.

A large contributor to the Human Development Index’s recent decline is a global drop in life expectancy, down from 73 years in 2019 to 71.4 years in 2021.

The report’s lead author, Pedro Conceicao, described the decrease as an “unprecedented shock,” noting that some countries — the United States included — had drops of two years or more.

The report also describes how transformational forces, such as climate change, globalization and political polarization, present humanity with a complex level of uncertainty “never seen in human history,” leading to rising feelings of insecurity.

“People have lost trust in one another,” said Steiner.

“Never mind in institutions, our neighbor now becomes sometimes the greatest threat, whether literally speaking in the community, or globally by nations, that is paralyzing us.”

“We can’t continue with the playbook of the last century,” Steiner argued, preferring a focus on economic transformation rather than a reliance on growth as a panacea.

“Frankly speaking, the transformations we now need require us to introduce the metrics of the future: low carbon, less inequality, greater sustainability.”

The report strikes a positive note as well, saying that improvements could be made by focusing on three main areas: investments in renewable energy and preparation for future pandemics, insurance to absorb shocks, and innovations to strengthen the capacity to cope with future crises.

Steiner also called for a reversal in the recent downward trend of development assistance to the most vulnerable countries.

Continuing down that road would be a grave error, said Steiner, and “underestimates the impact it has on our ability to work together as nations.”

Record temperatures earlier this year hit India's wheat production

Blistering crop-withering temperatures that also risk the health of agricultural workers could threaten swathes of global food production by 2045 as the world warms, an industry analysis warned Thursday.

Climate change is already stoking heatwaves and other extreme weather events across the world, with hot spells from India to Europe this year expected to hit crop yields.

Temperature spikes are causing mounting concern for health, particularly for those working outside in sweltering conditions, which is especially dangerous when humidity levels are high. 

The latest assessment by risk company Verisk Maplecroft brings those two threats together to calculate that heat stress already poses an “extreme risk” to agriculture in 20 countries, including agricultural giant India.

But the coming decades are expected to expand the threat to 64 nations by 2045 — representing 71 percent of current global food production — including major economies China, India, Brazil and the United States. 

“With the rise in global temperatures and rise in global heat stress, we’re going to see crops in more temperate countries as well start being affected by this,” said Will Nichols, head of climate and resilience at Verisk Maplecroft. 

Rice is particularly at risk, the assessment said, with other crops like cocoa and even tomatoes also singled out as of concern.

– Growing risk –

Maplecroft’s new heat stress dataset, using global temperature data from the UK Met Office, feeds into its wider risk assessments of countries around the world. 

It is based on a worst-case emissions scenario leading to around 2 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2045. 

However, the authors stress that in projections to mid-century, even scenarios that assume higher levels of carbon-cutting action could still result in temperatures nearing 2C.

India — responsible for 12 percent of global food production in 2020 and heavily reliant on outdoor labour productivity — is already rated as at extreme risk, the only major agricultural nation in that category at current temperatures. 

“There’s a very real worry that people in rural areas, which are obviously highly dependent on agriculture, are going to be much more vulnerable to these kinds of heat events going forward,” Nichols told AFP. 

That could impact productivity and in turn exports — and have potentially “cascading” knock-on effects on issues such as the country’s credit rating and even political stability, he said.

By 2045, the list grows much longer.   

Nine of the top ten countries affected in 2045 are in Africa, with the world’s second largest cocoa producer Ghana, as well as Togo and Central African Republic receiving the worst possible risk score.

The top 20 at-risk countries in the coming decades include key Southeast Asian rice exporters Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, the authors said, noting that rice farmers in central Vietnam have already taken to working at night to avoid the high temperatures.

The assessment highlights that major economies like the US and China could also see extreme risk to agriculture in 2045, although in these large countries the impacts vary by region.  

Meanwhile, Europe accounts for seven of the 10 countries set to see the largest increase in risk by 2045. 

“I think what it reinforces is that, even though a lot of us are sort of sitting in sort of Western countries, where we might think we’re a bit more insulated from some of these threats, actually we are not necessarily,” Nichols said.  

“Both in terms of the sort of physical risks that we’re facing, but also in terms of the kind of knock on effects down the supply chain.” 

A study found a "significant misalignment" between communication strategies and business plans of five oil majors

Energy majors are exaggerating their green credentials in public messaging while continuing to allocate the majority of new investment to oil and gas projects, according to an industry analysis released Thursday.

Campaigners say this “significant misalignment” between communication strategies and business plans could allow five of the biggest privately-owned energy firms to continue to delay the decarbonisation needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. 

Industry watchdog InfluenceMap analysed the content of more than 3,400 public communications from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies in 2021, from press releases, speeches and company and CEO social media accounts. 

They found that 60 percent of all messages contained at least one “green” claim — such as emissions reduction targets, transitioning the energy mix, or promoting fossil gas as part of a clean energy solution.

These public communications were found to contrast with the five’s planned capital expenditure for 2022, with just 12 percent of new investments earmarked for low-carbon activities. 

“You can see this real difference between a high use of green claims in public communications versus this ongoing strategy to kind of undermine and block climate policy,” report co-author and program manager Faye Holder told AFP.

She said the gap between what the majors advertised and what they were investing in was misleading the public as to their role in battling climate change.  

“Based on the public communications, and particularly social media, it would be fair enough if you walked away with the impression that these companies are acting to solve climate change, because that’s what you’re hearing from them,” she said.

– ‘Climate disinformation’ –

The analysis found that Shell had the largest disparity between its green talk and actual low-carbon investment. 

InfluenceMap said that 70 percent of Shell’s communications last year contained at least one green claim, compared with just 10 percent of planned investment in low-carbon activities this year.

A spokesman for Shell told AFP the major was already investing “billions of dollars in low-carbon energy”.

“To help alter the mix of energy Shell sells, we need to grow these new businesses rapidly. That means letting our customers know through advertising or social media what lower-carbon solutions we offer now or are developing.”

The analysis found that 62 percent of TotalEnergies’ communications mentioned green activities, while it planned to allocate 25 percent of 2022 capital expenditure on low-carbon projects. 

A TotalEnergies spokeswoman countered that 30 percent of the firm’s investments are devoted to “decarbonised energy”.

“Our public announcements policy reflects the transformation of TotalEnergies in a multi-energy company,” she told AFP. 

An ExxonMobil spokesman said it “continues to mitigate emissions from its operations and achieved its 2025 emission-reduction plans four years earlier than planned”.

BP and Chevron did not respond to requests for comment. 

The analysis found that overall the five corporations had spent $750 million on climate-related messaging last year alone. 

Report co-author Ed Collins said that represented good business for the majors, as it was significantly cheaper than decarbonising their business models and would encourage governments to continue subsidising their products.

“The costs seem huge, but the investment is tiny in comparison to the potential reward in terms of favourable policy conditions and subsidisation of building assets,” he said. 

Some of the firms analysed plan to increase oil and gas production by 2026, something the analysts said would see their emissions “significantly overshoot” the International Energy Agency’s recommended net-zero pathway. 

Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, a Greens member of the European Parliament, said Thursday’s analysis proved that the firms studied were engaged in “climate disinformation”.

“It shows the lengths oil and gas companies are willing to go to mislead citizens and protect their own interests.”

A skeleton discovered in a remote corner of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and proves amputation surgery was successfully carried out some 31,000 years ago, scientists say

A skeleton discovered in a remote corner of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and proves amputation surgery was successfully carried out about 31,000 years ago, scientists said Wednesday.

Previously, the earliest known amputation involved a 7,000-year-old skeleton found in France, and experts believed such operations only emerged in settled agricultural societies.

The finding also suggests that Stone Age hunter-gatherers living in what is now Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province had sophisticated medical knowledge of anatomy and wound treatment.

“It rewrites our understanding of the development of this medical knowledge,” said Tim Maloney, a research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, who led the work. 

The skeleton was uncovered in 2020 in the imposing Liang Tebo cave known for its wall paintings dating back 40,000 years.

Surrounded by bats, terns and swiftlets, and interrupted by the occasional scorpion, scientists painstakingly removed sediment to reveal an astoundingly well-preserved skeleton.

It was missing just one notable feature: its left ankle and foot.

The base of the remaining leg bone had a surprising shape, with knobbly regrowth over an apparently clean break, strongly indicating that the ankle and foot were removed deliberately.

“It’s very neat and oblique, you can actually see the surface and shape of the incision through the bone,” Maloney told a press briefing.

Other explanations, like an animal attack, crushing injury, or fall, would have created bone fractures and healing different from those seen in the skeleton’s leg.

A tooth and surrounding sediment showed the skeleton is at least 31,000 years old and belongs to a person who died at around 20 years old.

Despite the incredible trauma of amputation, they appear to have survived six to nine years after the operation, based on the regrowth on the leg bone, and suffered no major post-operative infection.

That suggests “detailed knowledge of limb anatomy and muscular and vascular systems,” the research team wrote in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Intensive post-operative nursing and care would have been vital… the wound would have regularly been cleaned, dressed and disinfected.”

– ‘A hotspot of human evolution’ –

Humans have been operating on each other for centuries, pulling teeth and drilling skull holes in a process called trepanation.

But amputation is so complex that in the West it only became an operation people could reasonably hope to survive about a century ago.

The oldest previous example was a 7,000-year-old skeleton with a forearm found in France in 2010.

It appeared to confirm that humans only developed sophisticated surgery after settling in agricultural societies, freed from the daily grind of hunting food.

But the Borneo find demonstrates hunter-gatherers could also navigate the challenges of surgery, and did so at least 24,000 years earlier than once thought.

For all that the skeleton reveals, many questions remain: how was the amputation carried out and why? What was used for pain or to prevent infection? Was this operation rare or a more common practice?

The team speculates that a surgeon might have used a lithic blade, whittled from stone, and the community could have accessed rainforest plants with medicinal properties. 

The study “provides us with a view of the implementation of care and treatment in the distant past,” wrote Charlotte Ann Roberts, an archeologist at Durham University, who was not involved in the research.

It “challenges the perception that provision of care was not a consideration in prehistoric times,” she wrote in a review in Nature.

Further excavation is expected next year at Liang Tebo, with the hope of learning more about the people who lived there.

“This is really a hotspot of human evolution and archeology,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, an associate professor at Southern Cross University who helped date the skeleton.

“It’s certainly getting warmer and warmer, and the conditions are really aligned to have more amazing discoveries in the future.”

At least two people have died in the Fairview Fire to the southeast of Los Angeles, with firefighters battling ferocious heat as they try to halt the spread of the blaze

A ferocious heat wave scorching the western United States could finally begin to wane in the coming days, forecasters said Wednesday, but they warned of dangerous fire conditions as howling winds sweep through the bone-dry region.

California and neighboring states have endured a week of triple digit temperatures that have already brought deadly wildfires and the daily threat of power blackouts as the electricity grid struggles to cope with soaring demand.

But a predicted cooling as a cold front barrels in from Canada looks set to bring its own dangers, the National Weather Service said.

“This cold front will also aid in producing gusty winds throughout the northern Great Basin and northern High Plains today. Combined with low relative humidity, conditions are likely to support the potential for new wildfires to start and existing fires to spread uncontrollably,” the NWS warned.

The Storm Prediction Center “has issued an Extremely Critical fire weather area over north-central Montana, where winds could gust up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) per hour.”

A number of wildfires are already burning all over the western United States, including two deadly blazes that erupted over the long Labor Day weekend.

The Mill Fire in northern California killed two people, and destroyed over 100 buildings as it tore through 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of Siskiyou County.

To the southeast of Los Angeles, the Fairview Fire was continuing to grow and remained out of control, fire officials said Wednesday.

Two people are known to have perished as they tried to flee the blaze, which exploded from a standing start during soaring temperatures on Monday. It has now consumed 7,000 acres.

Local fire chief Josh Janssen said efforts to dowse the inferno would expand after a difficult day that saw flames “outpace our efforts.”

The blaze continues to spread with “all sides of the fire still threatening several communities.”

More than 10,000 people have been told to evacuate, but the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said not everyone had heeded the warnings — despite the deployment of dozens of deputies going door-to-door.

“You would think more people would take it seriously because it’s so fast-moving, and that’s why we try and do such a large evacuation area because the shift in winds, the weather is unpredictable, and fire moves fast,” department spokeswoman Brandi Swan told the Los Angeles Times.

– Weather whiplash –

More than two decades of drought has left the US West tinder dry and vulnerable to fast-moving fires that burn hotter and are more destructive.

Scientists say human-caused global warming is interfering with the natural weather cycle, amping up the hots and making the storms wetter and more unpredictable.

The kind of weather whiplash climatologists say is becoming more frequent could be on display later in the week, with forecasters predicting the heat wave in the southwest could give way to torrential rain.

While Wednesday and Thursday were expected to continue to be very hot, with the mercury topping 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) in several places, a hurricane looming off the Pacific coast of Mexico looked set to bring up to six inches (15 centimeters) of rain to some parts of Arizona and California.

“This amount of rainfall is likely to produce scattered instances of flash flooding, particularly near recent burn scars,” the NWS said.

The soaring temperatures have put enormous pressure on California’s creaking power grid, with record demand for electricity to cool homes.

Rolling blackouts were narrowly avoided on Tuesday after the California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, issued an emergency call to cell phone users for households to turn up their air conditioner thermostats and switch off unnecessary lights.

California ISO called again Wednesday for economising.

“The emergency alert has been declared to help the grid secure more supplies and urge market participants to lower demand on the system. The state and much of the West is enduring an historically long and record-breaking heat wave, straining the grid from high electricity use,” the body said.

California has abundant solar installations, including on homes, which typically provide for around a third of the state’s power requirements during daylight.

But when the sun goes down, that supply falls quickly, leaving traditional generation to plug the gap. The problem is particularly acute in the early evening when temperatures are still high, but solar starts dropping out of the power mix.

At least two people have died in the Fairview Fire to the southeast of Los Angeles, with firefighters battling ferocious heat as they try to halt the spread of the blaze

A ferocious heat wave scorching the western United States could finally begin to wane in the coming days, forecasters said Wednesday, but they warned of dangerous fire conditions as howling winds sweep through the bone-dry region.

California and neighboring states have endured a week of triple digit temperatures that have already brought deadly wildfires and the daily threat of power blackouts as the electricity grid struggles to cope with soaring demand.

But a predicted cooling as a cold front barrels in from Canada looks set to bring its own dangers, the National Weather Service said.

“This cold front will also aid in producing gusty winds throughout the northern Great Basin and northern High Plains today. Combined with low relative humidity, conditions are likely to support the potential for new wildfires to start and existing fires to spread uncontrollably,” the NWS warned.

The Storm Prediction Center “has issued an Extremely Critical fire weather area over north-central Montana, where winds could gust up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) per hour.”

A number of wildfires are already burning all over the western United States, including two deadly blazes that erupted over the long Labor Day weekend.

The Mill Fire in northern California killed two people, and destroyed over 100 buildings as it tore through 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of Siskiyou County.

To the southeast of Los Angeles, the Fairview Fire was continuing to grow, and remained out of control, fire officials said Wednesday.

Two people are known to have perished in the blaze, which exploded from a standing start during soaring temperatures on Monday, and has now consumed 5,000 acres.

More than 10,000 people have been told to evacuate, but the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said not everyone had heeded the warnings — despite the deployment of dozens of deputies going door-to-door.

“You would think more people would take it seriously because it’s so fast-moving, and that’s why we try and do such a large evacuation area because the shift in winds, the weather is unpredictable, and fire moves fast,” department spokeswoman Brandi Swan told the Los Angeles Times.

– Weather whiplash –

More than two decades of drought has left the US West tinder dry and vulnerable to fast-moving fires that burn hotter and are more destructive.

Scientists say human-caused global warming is interfering with the natural weather cycle, amping up the hots and making the storms wetter and more unpredictable.

The kind of weather whiplash climatologists say is becoming more frequent could be on display later in the week, with forecasters predicting the heat wave in the southwest could give way to torrential rain.

While Wednesday and Thursday were expected to continue to be very hot, with the mercury topping 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) in several places, a hurricane looming off the Pacific coast of Mexico looked set to bring up to six inches (15 centimeters) of rain to some parts of Arizona and California.

“This amount of rainfall is likely to produce scattered instances of flash flooding, particularly near recent burn scars,” the NWS said.

The soaring temperatures have put enormous pressure on California’s creaking power grid, with record demand for electricity to cool homes.

Rolling blackouts were narrowly avoided on Tuesday after the California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, issued an emergency call for households to turn up their air conditioner thermostats and switch off unnecessary lights.

“Consumer conservation played a big part in protecting electric grid reliability,” the body tweeted. “Thank you, California!”

California has abundant solar installations, including on homes, which typically provide for around a third of the state’s power requirements during daylight.

But when the sun goes down, that supply falls quickly, leaving traditional generation to plug the gap. The problem is particularly acute in the early evening when temperatures are still high, but solar starts dropping out of the power mix.

Hurricane or tropical storm warnings are in effect for much of the coast of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula, including Cabo San Lucas

Hurricane Kay gathered strength in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday and was on course to bring strong winds and heavy rain to Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula, forecasters said.

The storm has become a Category Two hurricane — the second lowest on a scale of five, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).

At 1800 GMT, Kay packed maximum sustained winds of around 105 miles (170 kilometers) per hour and was located about 210 miles southwest of Baja California’s southern tip, the NHC said.

Hurricane or tropical storm warnings were in effect for much of the peninsula’s coastline, and there was a risk of flash flooding, landslides and destructive waves, it said.

Authorities opened storm shelters in the state of Baja California Sur, home to several beach resorts including Cabo San Lucas.

The center of Kay was expected to pass to the west of southern Baja California on Wednesday before moving north close to the peninsula’s western coast,  the NHC said.

Heavy rain and large swells could also affect the US state of California in the coming days, it warned.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, generally between the months of May and November.

This year was the first since 1997 that no tropical cyclones formed in the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico in August, according to the NHC.

US President Joe Biden's focus on the cancer fight comes as NASA is once again looking to return to the Moon

President Joe Biden will evoke John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech on putting an American on the moon next week when he outlines his government’s goal of halving cancer deaths, the White House said Wednesday.

Biden will mark the 60th anniversary of JFK’s “Moonshot” speech with an event at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston “to deliver remarks on the Cancer Moonshot and the goal of ending cancer as we know it,” the White House said.

While Kennedy used his speech to announce the program that ultimately put a human on the Moon for the first time in 1969, Biden will discuss what he calls the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to cut cancer death rates by half in the next 25 years.

Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia and daughter of the assassinated JFK, told CNN she approved of the parallels drawn by Biden in the struggle to conquer space and the deadly disease.

“Sixty years after my father challenged Americans to land on the moon, President Biden is welcoming great challenges as new opportunities by setting us on a bold course to end cancer as we know it,” she said.

Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 when Biden was vice president to Barack Obama.

The following year, Obama asked Biden to lead the Cancer Moonshot plan. In February of this year, Biden relaunched the program, which seeks to provide government funding and support for everything from medical research to improving access to healthcare and better environmental conditions.

Biden’s focus on the cancer fight comes as NASA is once again looking to return to the Moon.

Two attempts to launch the agency’s huge Artemis 1 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida were shelved last week due to problems with a fuel leak. The next possible launch window is between September 19 and October 4.

The rocket is to carry an empty capsule in a test flight before an eventual crewed mission back to the lunar surface.