AFP UK

Pakistan is struggling to deal with monsoon flooding that has affected more than 33 million people

Tens of millions of people across swathes of Pakistan were Monday battling the worst monsoon floods in a decade, with countless homes washed away, vital farmland destroyed, and the country’s main river threatening to burst its banks.

Officials say 1,061 people have died since June when the seasonal rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off after flood-swollen rivers washed away roads and bridges.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it can also bring destruction.

This year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — said the National Disaster Management Authority.

“What we see now is an ocean of water submerging entire districts,” Climate Minister Sherry Rehman told AFP Monday.

“This is very far from a normal monsoon — it is climate dystopia at our doorstep.”

This year’s floods are comparable to 2010 — the worst on record — when more than 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonial-era barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.

Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as torrents of water course downstream from tributaries in the north.

“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP.

“All that is finished.”

– Landscape of water –

Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.

“There are no landing strips or approaches available… our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer told AFP.

The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where soaring mountains and deep valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.

Many rivers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — which boasts some of Pakistan’s best tourist spots — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help, and on Sunday the first aid flights began arriving — from Turkey and the UAE.

The flooding could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

The International Monetary Fund executive board was scheduled to meet in Washington later Monday to decide whether to green-light the resumption of a $6 billion loan programme essential for the country to service its foreign debt, but it is already clear the country will need more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.

The prices of basic goods — particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas — are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

The met office said the country as a whole had received twice the usual monsoon rainfall, but Balochistan and Sindh had more than four times the average of the last three decades.

Padidan, a small town in Sindh was drenched by more than 1.2 metres (47 inches) of rain since June, making it the wettest place in the country.

– More arriving daily –

Across Sindh, thousands of displaced people are camped alongside elevated highways and railway tracks — often the only dry spots as far as the eye can see.

More are arriving daily at Sukkur’s city ring road, belongings piled on boats and tractor trollies, looking for shelter until the floodwaters recede.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Aziz Soomro told AFP the main headway of water was expected to arrive around September 5, but was confident the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.

The barrage diverts water from the Indus into 10,000 km of canals that make up one of the world’s biggest irrigation schemes, but the farms it supplies are now mostly under water.

The only bright spark was the latest weather report.

“Dry weather is forecasted for this week and there is no chance of significant rains,” said met office spokesman Zaheer Ahmed Babar.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, has been the target of strikes in recent weeks

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said Monday he was on his way to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been the target of strikes in recent weeks.

“The day has come, IAEA’s Support and Assistance Mission to Zaporizhzhya is now on its way,” Grossi tweeted, saying the team from the UN atomic watchdog would arrive at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant “later this week”.

In a photograph accompanying his tweet, the IAEA chief posed with a team of 13 people wearing caps and sleeveless jackets bearing the nuclear watchdog’s logo.

Grossi has for months been asking to be able to visit the site, warning of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which has six of Ukraine’s reactors, has been occupied by Russian troops since shortly after Moscow launched its invasion on February 24, and has remained on the frontlines ever since.

Moscow and Kyiv have traded blame for shelling around the complex, near the city of Energodar.

Its Ukraine operator Energoatom warned on Saturday of the risk of radioactive leaks and fire after new strikes.

The United Nations has called for an end to all military activity in the area surrounding the complex.

Ukraine initially feared an IAEA visit would legitimise the Russian occupation of the site before finally supporting the idea of a mission.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday urged the watchdog to send a team as soon as possible.

Between Thursday and Friday, the plant was cut off from Ukraine’s national power grid for the first time in its four-decade history due to “actions of the invaders”, Energoatom said.

It came back online Friday afternoon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed that a team of independent inspectors could travel to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant via Ukraine, the French presidency said on August 20 after a call with Emmanuel Macron.

Pakistan is struggling to deal with monsoon flooding that has affected more than 33 million people

A huge relief operation was under way Monday and international aid began trickling in as Pakistan struggled to deal with monsoon flooding that has affected more than 33 million people.

Officials said 1,061 people have died since June when the seasonal rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off by flood-swollen rivers washing away roads and bridges.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it can also bring destruction.

Officials said this year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — destroying or badly damaging nearly a million homes.

Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman called it “the monster monsoon of the decade”.

This year’s floods are comparable to 2010 — the worst on record — when more than 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonial-era barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.

Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as a result of torrents of water coursing downstream from tributaries in the north.

“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, told AFP.

“All that is finished.”

Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.

“There are no landing strips or approaches available… our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer told AFP.

The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where steep hills and valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.

Many rivers in the area — a picturesque tourist destination — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help

On Sunday, the first aid flights began arriving — from Turkey and the UAE.

The flooding could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall.

Using thousands of photographs, engineers have given a virtual rebirth to five historic sites in Mosul and the broader Nineveh province

An Iraqi museum is using computer technology and virtual reality headsets to turn back time, so visitors can explore heritage sites destroyed by jihadist fighters and in battles to defeat them.

Islamic State group fighters captured a third of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014, seizing the northern city of Mosul as their stronghold and vandalising or destroying a swathe of cultural sites across the country.

Now, using thousands of photographs, a group of local engineers have given a virtual rebirth to five historic sites in Mosul and the broader Nineveh province, including a mosque and its leaning minaret.

“It takes you to another world,” said Mahiya Youssef, pulling the VR goggles off her rose-covered hijab at the Mosul Heritage House museum, after exploring the 3D images of damaged buildings.

“I really wish it was the real Mosul, not just a virtual version”, added Youssef, 50, who works in a food factory in the northern city. “The return to reality is painful.”

The IS group’s then chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made his only confirmed public appearance at Mosul’s Al-Nuri mosque, where he declared the establishment of a “caliphate”.

Mosul’s Old City was reduced to rubble during the battle to retake the city, including the mosque and its adjacent leaning minaret, nicknamed Al-Hadba or the “hunchback”.

Iraqi authorities have accused IS of planting explosives at the site before their withdrawal. Only the minaret’s base survived.

– ‘Retrieve memories’ –

VR technology has been used before to recreate the heritage destroyed by the IS group, including a UNESCO-backed exhibit in the United States.

But this museum brings sites back to life for the people who live in Mosul.

“Many children have never seen the Al-Nuri mosque and its Al-Hadba minaret,” 29-year-old Ayoub Younes, the museum’s founder.

“We try, through virtual reality, to let the person experience visiting those sites and retrieve those memories.”

Five years after Iraqi forces and an international coalition routed the jihadists in mid-2017, historic sites, mosques and churches in Mosul are still being restored.

But large parts of the Old City remain oceans of debris.

While some residents have returned to other districts, much of the city remains a patchwork of buildings either ruined or under construction. 

The private museum with a marble facade, sitting along the Tigris river, opened in mid-June and saw more than 4,000 visitors in its first month, Younes said. 

In a sombre room, curious visitors wait to use the museum’s sole VR headset, a pair of large black googles.

Other sites on the virtual visit are the historic Al-Tahera church, tucked among the once meandering alleyways of the Old City, and the more than 2,000 year old Hatra archaeological site in the desert south of Mosul.

The jihadists took guns and pickaxes to the once extensive remains of the ancient city, releasing video footage in 2015 of their orgy of destruction. 

– ‘Saving the memory’ – 

On his computer screen, Abdullah Bashir showed a 3D replica of the mosque housing the Nabi Yunus shrine — revered by both Muslims and Christians as the tomb of Prophet Jonah — which the extremists blew up in 2014.

“We used personal photos and shots taken by residents” to reconstruct the sites in their former state, he said.

But he said there were “very few” images before 2014, citing the “lack of photos” as the main difficulty.

Bashir and other specialised engineers from QAF Lab have brought the former scenes back to life, in a project he says is “a way of saving the memory of Mosul”.

After his virtual tour, visitor Mohammed Abdullah pushed his wheelchair around the real-life displays in museum’s vaulted rooms.

Many of the exhibits are daily-life objects donated by local families, from terracotta amphoras to oil lamps, traditional wall hangings, metal containers and even an old radio.

Abdullah, 28, a student of telecommunication engineering, also said the contrast between the VR and the reality of Mosul was painful.

“Reconstruction is extremely slow, and is not equal to the devastation,” said Abdullah.

He called for faster restoration of heritage sites both to attract tourists and to “breathe life” into nearby areas. 

Despite the bitter taste the virtual visit left, he said he has not lost hope. 

“The day will come when we will make this visit in reality,” he said. “It will be even better than the virtual one”.

Using thousands of photographs, engineers have given a virtual rebirth to five historic sites in Mosul and the broader Nineveh province

An Iraqi museum is using computer technology and virtual reality headsets to turn back time, so visitors can explore heritage sites destroyed by jihadist fighters and in battles to defeat them.

Islamic State group fighters captured a third of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014, seizing the northern city of Mosul as their stronghold and vandalising or destroying a swathe of cultural sites across the country.

Now, using thousands of photographs, a group of local engineers have given a virtual rebirth to five historic sites in Mosul and the broader Nineveh province, including a mosque and its leaning minaret.

“It takes you to another world,” said Mahiya Youssef, pulling the VR goggles off her rose-covered hijab at the Mosul Heritage House museum, after exploring the 3D images of damaged buildings.

“I really wish it was the real Mosul, not just a virtual version”, added Youssef, 50, who works in a food factory in the northern city. “The return to reality is painful.”

The IS group’s then chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made his only confirmed public appearance at Mosul’s Al-Nuri mosque, where he declared the establishment of a “caliphate”.

Mosul’s Old City was reduced to rubble during the battle to retake the city, including the mosque and its adjacent leaning minaret, nicknamed Al-Hadba or the “hunchback”.

Iraqi authorities have accused IS of planting explosives at the site before their withdrawal. Only the minaret’s base survived.

– ‘Retrieve memories’ –

VR technology has been used before to recreate the heritage destroyed by the IS group, including a UNESCO-backed exhibit in the United States.

But this museum brings sites back to life for the people who live in Mosul.

“Many children have never seen the Al-Nuri mosque and its Al-Hadba minaret,” 29-year-old Ayoub Younes, the museum’s founder.

“We try, through virtual reality, to let the person experience visiting those sites and retrieve those memories.”

Five years after Iraqi forces and an international coalition routed the jihadists in mid-2017, historic sites, mosques and churches in Mosul are still being restored.

But large parts of the Old City remain oceans of debris.

While some residents have returned to other districts, much of the city remains a patchwork of buildings either ruined or under construction. 

The private museum with a marble facade, sitting along the Tigris river, opened in mid-June and saw more than 4,000 visitors in its first month, Younes said. 

In a sombre room, curious visitors wait to use the museum’s sole VR headset, a pair of large black googles.

Other sites on the virtual visit are the historic Al-Tahera church, tucked among the once meandering alleyways of the Old City, and the more than 2,000 year old Hatra archaeological site in the desert south of Mosul.

The jihadists took guns and pickaxes to the once extensive remains of the ancient city, releasing video footage in 2015 of their orgy of destruction. 

– ‘Saving the memory’ – 

On his computer screen, Abdullah Bashir showed a 3D replica of the mosque housing the Nabi Yunus shrine — revered by both Muslims and Christians as the tomb of Prophet Jonah — which the extremists blew up in 2014.

“We used personal photos and shots taken by residents” to reconstruct the sites in their former state, he said.

But he said there were “very few” images before 2014, citing the “lack of photos” as the main difficulty.

Bashir and other specialised engineers from QAF Lab have brought the former scenes back to life, in a project he says is “a way of saving the memory of Mosul”.

After his virtual tour, visitor Mohammed Abdullah pushed his wheelchair around the real-life displays in museum’s vaulted rooms.

Many of the exhibits are daily-life objects donated by local families, from terracotta amphoras to oil lamps, traditional wall hangings, metal containers and even an old radio.

Abdullah, 28, a student of telecommunication engineering, also said the contrast between the VR and the reality of Mosul was painful.

“Reconstruction is extremely slow, and is not equal to the devastation,” said Abdullah.

He called for faster restoration of heritage sites both to attract tourists and to “breathe life” into nearby areas. 

Despite the bitter taste the virtual visit left, he said he has not lost hope. 

“The day will come when we will make this visit in reality,” he said. “It will be even better than the virtual one”.

NASA's SLS rocket and the Orion capsule on top of it, on August 26, 2022 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, prior to lift-off for NASA's Artemis 1 mission to the Moon

NASA’s most powerful rocket yet is set to blast off Monday on the maiden voyage of a mission to take humans back to the Moon, and eventually to Mars.

Fifty years after the last Apollo mission, the space program called Artemis is to get under way with the blast off of the uncrewed 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at 8:33 am (1233 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Tens of thousands of people are on hand along the beaches of Florida to watch this launch that’s been decades in the making. They include Vice President Kamala Harris.

Hotels around Cape Canaveral are booked solid with between 100,000 and 200,000 spectators expected to attend the launch.

The goal of the flight, baptized Artemis 1, is to test the SLS and the Orion crew capsule that sits atop the rocket.

The capsule will orbit the Moon to see if the vessel is safe for people in the near future. At some point Artemis will see a woman and a person of color walk on the Moon for the first time.

“This mission goes with a lot of hopes and dreams of a lot of people. And we now are the Artemis generation,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Saturday.

The massive orange-and-white rocket has been sitting on the space center’s Launch Complex 39B for a week.

Its fuel tanks were to be filled overnight Sunday into Monday with more than three million liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

NASA said there is an 80 percent chance of acceptable weather for a liftoff on time at the beginning of a launch window lasting two hours.

For the first time a woman  — Charlie Blackwell-Thompson — will give the final green light for liftoff. Women now account for 30 percent of the staff in the control room; there was just one back with Apollo 11.

Cameras will capture every moment of the 42-day trip and include a selfie of the spacecraft with the Moon and Earth in the background.

The Orion capsule will orbit around the Moon, coming within 60 miles (100 kilometers) at its closest approach and then firing its engines to get to a distance 40,000 miles beyond, a record for a spacecraft rated to carry humans.

– Temperatures half as hot as the Sun –

Besides the weather, any kind of technical snafu could delay the liftoff at the last minute, NASA officials have said, stressing that this is a test flight.

If the rocket is unable to take off on Monday, September 2 and 5 have been penciled in as alternative flight dates.

One of the primary objectives of the mission is to test the capsule’s heat shield, which at 16 feet in diameter is the largest ever built.

On its return to the Earth’s atmosphere, the heat shield will have to withstand a speed of 25,000 miles per hour and a temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). That is half as hot as the Sun.

Taking the place of people for now, dummies fitted with sensors will take the place of crew members, recording acceleration, vibration and radiation levels.

It will deploy small satellites to study the lunar surface.

A complete failure would be devastating for a program that is costing $4.1 billion per launch and is already running years behind schedule.

– Life on the Moon –

“What we are starting with the launch Monday is not a near term sprint, but a long term marathon to bring the solar system and beyond into our sphere,” said Bhavya Lal, NASA associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy.

The next mission, Artemis 2, will take astronauts into orbit around the Moon without landing on its surface. The crew of Artemis 3 is to land on the Moon in 2025 at the earliest.

While the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon were exclusively white men, the Artemis program plans to include the first woman and person of color.

And since humans have already visited the Moon, Artemis has its sights set on another lofty goal — an eventual crewed mission to Mars.

The Artemis program is to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon with an orbiting space station known as Gateway and a base on the surface.

Gateway would serve as a staging and refueling station for a voyage to Mars that would take a minimum of several months.

Tourists at a space t-shirt store shop near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, August 27, 2022

Seeing a rocket blast off to the Moon is “a once-in-a-lifetime thing to experience,” says Joanne Bostandji. 

The 45-year-old has traveled all the way from northern England to Florida with her husband and two children for a space-themed vacation, and they’re prepared to make sure they don’t miss a second of the action as NASA’s newest and most powerful rocket is scheduled to launch for the first time Monday. 

“The plan is to drive very early in the morning and get a spot” on Cocoa Beach, she said, not far from the Kennedy Space Center. 

“I know it’s going be from a far distance, but I still think it’s going be a sight to behold,” Bostandji told AFP as the family waited to enter a park dedicated to space exploration.  

Between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors are expected to attend the launch of the mission, called Artemis 1, which will propel an empty capsule to the Moon as part of a test for future crewed flights.

The “historic nature” of Monday’s flight, the first of several as the United States returns to the Moon, “certainly has increased public interest,” Meagan Happel of Florida’s Space Coast Office of Tourism told AFP.

Traffic jams are expected to start by 4 am, with the launch scheduled at 8:33 am (1233 GMT). 

And even more people might show up if the launch faces a weather delay, as the make-up date falls on a weekend. 

– Space cruise –

Sabrina Morley was able to find an apartment to rent not far from the beach, and plans to bring her two children and a few dozen other people on a boat chartered for the occasion by a company called Star Fleet Tours. 

For $95 a ticket, “we’ll go out into the ocean as close as they can get to the launch and we’ll watch the launch from the boat,” she said

“I’ve never been this close to a launch before,” said the 43-year-old, who grew up in Orlando, less than an hour away. 

As a child, she could see space shuttles taking off from her backyard, like “an orange ball of smoke” rising into the sky.

“We would hear the sonic booms,” she remembered. 

Morley likes that NASA’s Artemis program aims to land a woman on the Moon for the first time, with a crew to head up in 2025 at the earliest.

“Representation matters,” she said, glancing at her two-year-old daughter, who is already wearing an imitation astronaut helmet on her head. 

– Good for business – 

The return of prestigious space launches is an economic boon for the region. A family of three will spend an average of $1,300 over four or five days, according to the tourism office. 

On the main road to Merritt Island, the peninsula where the Kennedy Space Center is located, Brenda Mulberry’s space memorabilia shop is packed with tourists. 

As soon as they enter, visitors are greeted with Artemis T-shirts for sale, printed in-house — there were 1,000 copies made Saturday alone. 

The last few days has seen an influx of customers, Mulberry, who founded “Space Shirts” in 1984, told AFP. 

“They’re just excited I think to see a NASA launch because the private space business is not so motivating to the people,” she said.

This rocket, called the SLS — a large model of which is displayed in front of her shop — “belongs to the people,” Mulberry said. 

“It’s their rocket. It’s not SpaceX rocket,” she added.

There is an air of nostalgia for the Apollo rocket program — it’s been 50 years since the last time a crewed mission went to the Moon, in 1972.

“My family, they had to go to the neighbor’s house to watch (the Apollo missions) because they didn’t have a television,” Bostandji, who was not yet born, said. 

“Now we’re going to see it hopefully for real.”

Highways are frequently the only dry places in a landscape of flooded farmlands in pakistan's southern Sindh province

Pakistan’s flooded southern Sindh province braced Sunday for a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north as the death toll from this year’s monsoon topped 1,000.

The mighty Indus River that courses through Pakistan’s second-most populous region is fed by dozens of mountain tributaries to the north, but many have burst their banks following record rains and glacier melt.

Officials warned torrents of water are expected to reach Sindh in the next few days, adding misery to millions already affected by the floods.

“Right now, Indus is in high flood,” said Aziz Soomro, the supervisor of Sukkur Barrage — a massive colonial-era construction that regulates the river’s flow and redirects water to a vast system of canals.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it also brings destruction.

Officials say this year’s monsoon flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — destroying or badly damaging nearly a million homes.

On Sunday, the country’s National Disaster Management Authority said the death toll from the monsoon rains had reached 1,033, with 119 killed in the previous 24 hours.

It said this year’s floods were comparable to 2010 — the worst on record — when over 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who cancelled a trip to Britain to oversee relief operations, said he had never seen anything like it before.

“Village after village has been wiped out. Millions of houses have been destroyed. There has been immense destruction,” he said after flying over Sindh by helicopter.

Thousands of people living near flood-swollen rivers in Pakistan’s north were ordered to evacuate from danger zones, but army helicopters and rescuers are still plucking laggards to safety.

“People were informed around three or four o’clock in the morning to evacuate their houses,” rescue worker Umar Rafiq told AFP. 

“When the flood water hit the area we had to rescue children and women.”

Many rivers in the area — a picturesque tourist destination of rugged mountains and valleys — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

Guest house owner Nasir Khan, whose business was badly hit by the 2010 flooding, said he had lost everything.

“It has washed away the remaining part of the hotel,” he told AFP.

The flood-swollen rivers were also yielding unlikely riches.

Locals scrambled to snag thousands of valuable cedar, pine and oak logs that had likely been illegally harvested in the mountains but were being washed downstream.

– Climate change to blame –

Officials blame the devastation on human-driven climate change, saying Pakistan is unfairly bearing the consequences of irresponsible environmental practices elsewhere in the world.

Pakistan is eighth on NGO Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index, a list of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

Exacerbating the situation, corruption, poor planning and the flouting of local regulations mean thousands of buildings have been erected in areas prone to seasonal flooding.

The government has declared an emergency and mobilised the military to deal with what Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman has called “a catastrophe of epic scale”.

In parts of Sindh, the only dry areas are the elevated roads and railroad tracks, alongside which tens of thousands of poor rural folk have taken shelter with their livestock.

Near Sukkur, a row of tents stretched for two kilometres, with people still arriving by boats loaded with wooden charpoy beds and pots and pans — the only possessions they could salvage.

“Water started rising in the river from yesterday, inundating all the villages and forcing us to flee,” labourer Wakeel Ahmed, 22, told AFP.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Soomro told AFP every sluice gate was open to deal with a river flow of more than 600,000 cubic metres per second.

The flooding could not come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall and the former prime minister Imran Khan was ousted by a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April.

While the capital Islamabad and adjoining twin garrison city of Rawalpindi have escaped the worst of the flooding, its effects were still being felt.

“Currently supplies are very limited,” said Muhammad Ismail, a produce shopkeeper in Rawalpindi.

“Tomatoes, peas, onions and other vegetables are not available due to the floods,” he told AFP, adding prices were also soaring.

Highways are frequently the only dry places in a landscape of flooded farmlands in pakistan's southern Sindh province

Pakistan’s flooded southern Sindh province braced Sunday for a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north as the death toll from this year’s monsoon topped 1,000.

The mighty Indus River that courses through Pakistan’s second-most populous region is fed by dozens of mountain tributaries to the north, but many have burst their banks following record rains and glacier melt.

Officials warned torrents of water are expected to reach Sindh in the next few days, adding misery to millions already affected by the floods.

“Right now, Indus is in high flood,” said Aziz Soomro, the supervisor of Sukkur Barrage — a massive colonial-era construction that regulates the river’s flow and redirects water to a vast system of canals.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but it also brings destruction.

Officials say this year’s monsoon flooding has affected more than 33 million people — one in seven Pakistanis — destroying or badly damaging nearly a million homes.

On Sunday, the country’s National Disaster Management Authority said the death toll from the monsoon rains had reached 1,033, with 119 killed in the previous 24 hours.

It said this year’s floods were comparable to 2010 — the worst on record — when over 2,000 people died and nearly a fifth of the country was under water.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who cancelled a trip to Britain to oversee relief operations, said he had never seen anything like it before.

“Village after village has been wiped out. Millions of houses have been destroyed. There has been immense destruction,” he said after flying over Sindh by helicopter.

Thousands of people living near flood-swollen rivers in Pakistan’s north were ordered to evacuate from danger zones, but army helicopters and rescuers are still plucking laggards to safety.

“People were informed around three or four o’clock in the morning to evacuate their houses,” rescue worker Umar Rafiq told AFP. 

“When the flood water hit the area we had to rescue children and women.”

Many rivers in the area — a picturesque tourist destination of rugged mountains and valleys — have burst their banks, demolishing scores of buildings including a 150-room hotel that crumbled into a raging torrent.

Guest house owner Nasir Khan, whose business was badly hit by the 2010 flooding, said he had lost everything.

“It has washed away the remaining part of the hotel,” he told AFP.

The flood-swollen rivers were also yielding unlikely riches.

Locals scrambled to snag thousands of valuable cedar, pine and oak logs that had likely been illegally harvested in the mountains but were being washed downstream.

– Climate change to blame –

Officials blame the devastation on human-driven climate change, saying Pakistan is unfairly bearing the consequences of irresponsible environmental practices elsewhere in the world.

Pakistan is eighth on NGO Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index, a list of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

Exacerbating the situation, corruption, poor planning and the flouting of local regulations mean thousands of buildings have been erected in areas prone to seasonal flooding.

The government has declared an emergency and mobilised the military to deal with what Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman has called “a catastrophe of epic scale”.

In parts of Sindh, the only dry areas are the elevated roads and railroad tracks, alongside which tens of thousands of poor rural folk have taken shelter with their livestock.

Near Sukkur, a row of tents stretched for two kilometres, with people still arriving by boats loaded with wooden charpoy beds and pots and pans — the only possessions they could salvage.

“Water started rising in the river from yesterday, inundating all the villages and forcing us to flee,” labourer Wakeel Ahmed, 22, told AFP.

Sukkur Barrage supervisor Soomro told AFP every sluice gate was open to deal with a river flow of more than 600,000 cubic metres per second.

The flooding could not come at a worse time for Pakistan, where the economy is in free fall and the former prime minister Imran Khan was ousted by a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April.

While the capital Islamabad and adjoining twin garrison city of Rawalpindi have escaped the worst of the flooding, its effects were still being felt.

“Currently supplies are very limited,” said Muhammad Ismail, a produce shopkeeper in Rawalpindi.

“Tomatoes, peas, onions and other vegetables are not available due to the floods,” he told AFP, adding prices were also soaring.

Ethereum's change in blockchain technology will reduce electricity usage drastically

The world’s second biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, ethereum, will soon overhaul its blockchain technology to curb the network’s much-criticised environmental impact.

Ethereum, whose digital unit ether tumbled in a crypto crash earlier this year, will in September undergo a major technical revolution.

So what is the backdrop for the looming reset — known as the Merge — and how will it calm prices and cut electricity usage?

– Why does crypto use so much energy? –

Bitcoin, ethereum and other such currencies are “mined” by solving complex puzzles using powerful computers that consume enormous amounts of energy in vast warehouses, often near cheap electricity sources.

A blockchain is the decentralised and secure ledger for recording those transactions, which occur when encrypted codes are passed across a computer network.

Users validate their success via a so-called “proof of work” mechanism that rewards them with cyber currency — but only after they have proved their participation in such energy-intensive mining.

The lucrative crypto industry is worth about $1.0 trillion, despite crashing in the first half of 2022.

However, ethereum is still down by a hefty 55 percent in value so far this year.

– Why is ethereum popular? –

Ethereum is nevertheless regarded as vital because it is where most virtual assets, including headline-grabbing non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are bought and sold.

That is partly because users can create “smart contracts” or algorithmic computer code, which carry out customised transactions for different functions.

“The ethereum blockchain is the base layer infrastructure of the majority of the whole crypto ecosystem,” summarised Lennart Ante, CEO and co-founder of the Blockchain Research Lab.

“Everything relies on ethereum,” he told AFP.

“In the last few years, there have been other similar platforms such as Solana or Cadano, but none of these have this huge network and this huge amount of developers and projects, and historical success.”

– Why is it changing? –

Ethereum’s broad adoption makes it even more important to address environmental concerns and change tack, as those worries had sparked a partial boycott.

“Proof-of-work mining is environmentally destructive, expensive, and inefficient,” summarised digital currency specialist Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University.

Yet the carbon footprint of a decentralised blockchain system is difficult to assess because electricity sources are not always identified.

– What is the switch? –

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has planned for a switch to a so-called “proof of stake” mechanism from the middle of September.

This means that participation no longer requires proof of electricity usage, and instead relies on staking blocks of ether.

Users will then validate, or effectively bet their currency, in order to try and win more ether.

Ethereum currently consumes about 45 terawatt hours of power per year.

Bitcoin in contrast is estimated to use 95 terawatt hours of power per year, equivalent to Pakistan’s annual consumption.

– What are pros and cons? –

Experts estimates the upgrade will use 99 percent less energy than the current set-up.

It would therefore allow users to execute quicker and more efficient transactions.

“The energy consumption would be close to zero,” Ante told AFP.

“You do not need any of the hardware anymore, only the software.”

At the same time, the new approach is not without risks.

Some users might decide to switch to rival networks where they can still able to use enormous amounts of energy to mine currency.

Prasad also cautioned that the proof-of-stake method was “not perfect” owing to liquidity and governance concerns.