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China's searing heat is drying up the critical Yangtze River, with water flow on its main trunk about 51 percent lower than the average over the last five years, state media outlet China News Service reported

A provincial capital in southwest China has dimmed outdoor advertisements, subway lighting and building signs to save energy, official announcements said, as the area battles a power crunch triggered by record-high temperatures.

The mercury has soared beyond 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Sichuan province this week, fueling massive demand for air conditioning and drying up reservoirs in a region reliant on dams for most of its electricity.

Factories including a joint venture with Japanese car giant Toyota in provincial capital Chengdu have been forced to halt work, while millions in another city Dazhou grappled with rolling power cuts.

“Hot and muggy weather has caused the city’s electricity supply for production and daily life to be pushed to its limit,” Chengdu’s urban management authorities said in a notice on social media Thursday.

Faced with a “most severe situation”, the city — home to over 20 million people — ordered landscape illumination and outdoor advertising lights to be switched off in notices issued Tuesday, the statement said. 

Building name signs will also be darkened.

And Chengdu metro said in a video on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform that it would also turn off advertisement lights and “optimise” the temperature in stations to save energy.

Photos circulating on Weibo showed dimmed lights on metro platforms, walkways and in malls, with commuters walking in partial darkness.

The searing heat is also drying up the critical Yangtze River, with water flow on its main trunk about 51 percent lower than the average over the last five years, state media outlet China News Service reported Thursday.

Sichuan’s power woes could also have ripple effects on the wider Chinese economy — the province is a key supplier of energy generated by hydropower, including to eastern industrial powerhouses like Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

China is battling extreme weather on several fronts, with 17 people killed in a flash flood in the northwest of the country on Thursday following torrential rains.

Meanwhile, weather authorities in the eastern Jiangsu province warned drivers of tire puncture risks on Friday as the surface temperature of some roads were poised to hit 68 degrees Celsius.

The China Meteorological Administration earlier said the country was going through its longest period of sustained high temperatures since records began in 1961.

Scientists say extreme weather across the world has become more frequent due to climate change and that urgent global cooperation is needed to slow an impending disaster.

The world’s two largest emitters are the United States and China. 

But earlier this month Beijing announced it was freezing its cooperation with Washington on global warming in protest at a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

Several streets in the city of Nelson were flooded after the Maitai river burst its banks

A New Zealand city devastated by flooding will take years to recover, the mayor said on Friday, as hundreds more homes were evacuated.

The Pacific nation has been lashed by wild weather with the Nelson-Tasman district on the South Island bearing the brunt after 75 centimetres (29 inches) of rain reportedly fell over three days.

Several streets in the city of Nelson were flooded after the local river, the Maitai, burst its banks.  

Nelson Mayor Rachel Reese said the damage to roads and the city’s infrastructure will “take years, not months” to repair.

She added that it was “critical” Nelson’s residents conserve water as the city’s supply was disrupted by a landslide that damaged the main line from the local reservoir.

On a visit to witness the damage, New Zealand’s Minister for Emergency Management Kieran McAnulty pledged $200,000 ($125,000) of aid and confirmed more than 400 homes have now been evacuated in Nelson, where a state of emergency remains in place.

He added that flooding and landslides have made 60 homes potentially uninhabitable.

McAnulty told reporters one of the most striking things he saw was a street on a housing development “where the road had just been washed out, (leaving) a crater deeper than I am tall”.

Nelson resident Paul Maskell said a neighbour alerted him to the rising water on his street.

“By the time I got back, it was a foot deep in water with boulders running down the road. It was surreal,” he told the New Zealand Herald.

An elderly resident recovering after an operation had to be winched to safety by firefighters late Thursday night, after his home was threatened by flooding.

New Zealand’s South Island was bracing for another lashing of heavy rain, but other regions did not escape the extreme weather.

The nearby city of New Plymouth endured it’s wettest August day since records began with 10 centimetres falling in 12 hours.

“More than a metre of rain has fallen causing significant flows down all rivers,” said Taranaki Civil Defence controller Todd Velvin with flooding, road closures and fallen trees creating problems.

Kaitaia, a town near the top of North Island, was cut off by flooding and landslides, and around 400 homes were left without power in the far north.

Experts say climate change driven by human activity is boosting the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts and flooding.

Daniel Kingston, senior geography lecturer at the University of Otago, attributed the heavy rain to an “atmospheric river” — a narrow band of water vapour high in the atmosphere over New Zealand.

“It’s safe to say that with respect to the influence of climate change, it is more than likely playing a role,” Kingston told AFP.

Carnac in northwestern France is one of the most famous megalithic sites in the world with some 3,000 standing stones 

A huge megalithic complex of more than 500 standing stones has been discovered in southern Spain which could be one of the largest in Europe, archaeologists told AFP Thursday. 

The stones were discovered on a plot of land in Huelva, a province which flanks the southernmost part of Spain’s border with Portugal, near the Guadiana River. 

Spanning some 600 hectares (1,500 acres), the land had been earmarked for an avocado planation. 

But before granting the permit, the regional authorities requested a survey in light of the site’s possible archaeological significance — and revealed the presence of the stones. 

“This is the biggest and most diverse collection of standing stones grouped together in the Iberian peninsula,” said Jose Antonio Linares, a researcher at Huelva University and one of the project’s three directors. 

It is likely that the oldest standing stones at the La Torre-La Janera site were erected during the second half of the sixth or fifth millennium BC, he said. 

“It is a major megalithic site in Europe,” he said. 

At the site, they found a large number of various types of megaliths, including standing stones, dolmens, mounds, coffin-like stone boxes called cists and various enclosures. 

“Standing stones were the most common finding, with 526 of them still standing or lying on the ground,” said the researchers in an article published in Trabajos de Prehistoria, a prehistoric archaeology journal in the Iberian Peninsula.

The height of the stones was between one and three metres (3-10 feet). 

– ‘Excellently conserved’ –

At Carnac in northwestern France, which is one of the most famous megalithic sites in the world, there are some 3,000 standing stones. 

One of the most striking things was finding such diverse megalithic elements grouped together in one location and how well preserved they were, said Primitiva Bueno, co-director of the project and a prehistory professor at Alcala University near Madrid. 

“Finding alignments and dolmens on one site is not very common,” she told AFP.

“Here you find everything all together: alignments, cromlechs and dolmens and that is very striking,” she said, hailing the site’s “excellent conservation”. 

An alignment is a linear arrangement of upright standing stones along a common axis, while a cromlech is a stone circle and a dolmen is a type of megalithic tomb usually made of two or more standing stones with a large flat ‘capstone’ on top. 

Most of the menhirs were grouped into 26 alignments and two cromlechs, both located on hilltops with a clear view to the east for viewing the sunrise during the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, the researchers said. 

Many of the stones are buried deep in the earth.

They will need to be carefully excavated with the work scheduled to run until 2026 but “between this year’s campaign and the start of next year’s, there will be a part of the site that can be visited”, Bueno said. 

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, were first developed in the 1940s and are now found in a variety of products, including nonstick pans, water-resistant textiles and fire supression foams

“Forever chemicals” used in daily items like nonstick pans have long been linked to serious health issues –- a result of their toxicity and extreme resistance to being broken down as waste products.

Chemists in the United States and China on Thursday said they had finally found a breakthrough method to degrade these polluting compounds, referred to as PFAS, using relatively low temperatures and common reagents.

Their results were published in the journal Science, potentially offering a solution to a longstanding source of harm to the environment, livestock and humans.

“It really is why I do science — so that I can have a positive impact on the world,” senior author William Dichtel of Northwestern University told reporters during a news conference.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, were first developed in the 1940s and are now found in a variety of products, including nonstick pans, water-resistant textiles and fire suppression foams.

Over time, the pollutants have accumulated in the environment, entering the air, soil, groundwater and lakes and rivers as a result of industrial processes and from leaching through landfills.

A study published last week by Stockholm University scientists found rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink because of PFAS contamination. 

Chronic exposure to even low levels has been linked to liver damage, high cholesterol, reduced immune responses, low birth weights and several kinds of cancer.

Although PFAS chemicals can be filtered out of water, there are few good solutions for how to dispose of them once they have been removed.

– 10 down, thousands to go –

Current methods to destroy PFAS require harsh treatments, such as incineration at extremely high temperatures or irradiating them with ultrasonic waves.

And incineration isn’t always foolproof, with one New York plant found to still be releasing some of the compounds into the air through smoke.

PFAS’ indestructability comes from their carbon-flouride bonds, one of the strongest types of bonds in organic chemistry. 

Fluorine is the most electronegative element and wants to gain electrons, while carbon is keen to share them.

PFAS molecules contain long chains of these bonds, but the research team was able to identify a glaring weakness common to a certain class of PFAS.

At one end of the molecule, there is a group of charged oxygen atoms which can be targeted using a common solvent and reagent at mild temperatures of 80-120 degrees Celsius, decapitating the head group and leaving behind a reactive tail.

“Once that happens, that provides access to previously unrecognized pathways that cause the entire molecule to fall apart in a cascade of complex reactions,” said Dichtel, ultimately making benign end products.

A second part of the study involved using powerful computational methods to map out the quantum mechanics behind the chemical reactions the team performed to destroy the molecules. 

The new knowledge could eventually guide further improvements to the method.

The current study focused on 10 PFAS chemicals including a major pollutant called GenX, which for example has contaminated the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, a water source for 350,000 people.

But it represents just the tip of the iceberg, since the US Environmental Protection Agency has identified more than 12,000 PFAS chemicals.

“There are other classes that don’t have the same Achilles’ heel, but each one will have its own weakness,” said Dichtel in a statement. 

“If we can identify it, then we know how to activate it to destroy it.”

A black dehorned rhinoceros is seen in August 2012 at the Bona Bona Game Reseve in South Africa

A US judge sentenced an extradited Liberian man to 63 months in prison for conspiring to traffic millions of dollars’ worth of horns and ivory from endangered rhinoceros and elephants, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Moazu Kromah, a Uganda resident, was extradited from the west African country to the United States in June 2019, pleading guilty in March of this year to one count of conspiracy to commit wildlife trafficking and two counts of wildlife trafficking, the office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, said in a statement.

The trafficking plot involved the illegal poaching of more than around 35 rhinoceros and more than 100 elephants.

Williams praised the more than five-year sentence handed down by US District Judge Gregory H. Woods. 

“Today’s sentence demonstrates that those who are responsible for the decimation of global populations of endangered and threatened animals protected by international agreements will face serious consequences,” he said. 

Kromah, 49, and accomplices had buyers in the United States and Southeast Asia, trafficking some 190 kilograms (nearly 420 pounds) of rhinoceros horns and at least some 10 tons of elephant ivory from East African countries between roughly 2012 and 2019.

The estimated average retail value of the rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory was at least around $3.4 million and $4 million respectively.

During the investigation, law enforcement agents intercepted multiple packages bound for Manhattan buyers containing rhinoceros horns.

They concealed some of the animal parts in pieces of art such as African masks and statues, the New York investigators say. 

Poaching is fueled by a seemingly insatiable demand for rhino horn in Asia, where people pay huge sums for a substance — coveted as a traditional medicine — that is composed mainly of keratin, the same substance as in human nails.

Kromah is one of five men accused of being part of the criminal enterprise. 

Kenyan Mansur Mohamed Surur was extradited to the United States last year and pled guilty to trafficking and drug dealing charges, according to a June statement from Williams’s office.

Guinean Amara Cherif is also in US custody and pled guilty to the charges against him in April this year. 

Co-defendants Badru Abdul Aziz Saleh and Abdi Hussein Ahmed have reportedly been arrested.

An Algerian woman in front of the ruins of her home, destroyed in a wildfire in the city of El Kala, on August 18, 2022

Algerian firefighters on Thursday brought under control a string of forest blazes that have killed at least 38 people including 12 who died in a bus trapped by the flames.

Deadly fires have become an annual scourge in Algeria, where climate change has turned large areas of forest into a tinderbox in the blistering summer months.

Authorities have been accused of being ill-prepared, with few firefighting aircraft available despite record casualties in last year’s blazes and a cash windfall from gas exports amid soaring global energy prices.

Fire service spokesman Farouk Achour told AFP late Thursday that 16 fires were still burning across seven districts but that those in the worst-hit eastern areas, El Tarf and Souk Ahras, were under control.

In Souk Ahras, a large crowd gathered to mourn five members of the same family who perished in the flames.

The justice ministry launched an inquiry after Interior Minister Kamel Beldjoud suggested some of the fires were deliberately started, and authorities on Thursday announced four arrests of suspected arsonists.

At least 38 people have been killed including more than 10 children and 10 firefighters, according to multiple sources, including local journalists and the fire service.

Most were in the El Tarf region near Algeria’s eastern border with Tunisia, an area which has been sweltering in 48 degree Celsius (118 Fahrenheit) heat.

At least 200 more people have suffered burns or respiratory problems, according to various Algerian media. 

Algerian television showed people fleeing burning homes, women carrying children in their arms. 

A journalist in El Tarf described “scenes of devastation” on the road to El Kala, a northeastern seaport.

“A tornado of fire swept everything away in seconds,” he told AFP by telephone. 

An AFP team in El Kala saw burned-out cars, exhausted people and charred trees amid the strong smell of smoke.

A witness, who asked not to be named, said 12 people had burned to death in their bus as they tried to escape when the fire ripped through an animal park.

Takeddine, a worker at the park who declined to give his full name, said staff had helped families with young children to escape as fire surrounded the park.

“Nobody came to help us, neither the fire service nor anyone else,” he told AFP. 

One of his colleagues died in the process, he added.

– Authorities criticised –

A medic in El Kala said 72 people had been admitted to the city’s hospital, where nine had died and another nine remained in intensive care.

Associations across Algeria called for donations of money and medical supplies to help the victims.

The fire service said Thursday afternoon that 1,700 firefighters had been deployed to battle the fires, of which 24 were still raging.

A journalist in the mountainous area of Souk Ahras told AFP that a huge blaze in a forest nearby had sparked panic in the city of half a million people, where nearly 100 women and 17 newborn babies had to be evacuated from a hospital.

The scenes were reminiscent of fires last year which killed at least 90 people and seared 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of forest and farmland in the country’s north.

That disaster provoked criticism of authorities over the lack of firefighting aircraft.

Algeria had agreed to buy seven such aircraft from Spanish firm Plysa, but cancelled the contract following a diplomatic row over the Western Sahara in late June, according to specialist website Mena Defense.

Authorities have rented a Russian water bomber, but it broke down and is not expected to be operational again until Saturday, Interior Minister Kamel Beldjoud said. 

The civil protection service and the army have access to several firefighting helicopters.

– ‘The forest is weakened’ –

Experts have called for a major effort to bolster the firefighting capacity of Africa’s biggest country, which has more than four million hectares of forest.

One specialist, who asked not to be named, told AFP that in the 1980s the country had 22 Grumman aircraft for battling forest fires but that they had been “sold on the cheap, without any alternative solution being proposed”.

Since early August, fires have destroyed more than 800 hectares of forest and 1,800 hectares of woodlands, according to Beldjoud.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Aimene Benabderrahmane defended the government’s response, saying that the country had ordered four new firefighting aircraft — but that they would not be available until December.

He added that strong winds had exacerbated the blazes and said authorities were “deploying all their means” to extinguish them.

Retired academic and forestry expert Rafik Baba-Ahmed said in a video published on social media that “winds of over 90 kilometres (55 miles) per hour make the work of water bombers difficult if not impossible”.

He said bad land management had added to the problem.

“Today, the forest is weakened. It has been chipped away at,” he said.

Some Piedmontese cattle on the farm in northwest Italy died suddenly from prussic acid poisoning

An Italian farm became an open-air morgue earlier this month after around 50 cows were poisoned by young sorghum plants, an accident experts blame on drought.

The Piedmontese cattle on the farm in Sommariva del Bosco, near Turin in northwest Italy, died suddenly due to acute prussic acid poisoning on August 6, according to the local IZS animal welfare body.

This acid comes from dhurrin, which is naturally present in young sorghum plants, although not in the same high concentrations as those found in samples taken at the site.

“We suspect that the drought caused this very large quantity of dhurrin within the sorghum plants,” said Stefano Giantin, a vet at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale for northwest Italy, who is on the case.

With normal growing plants, the amount of dhurrin would lower as the plants grew larger. But since the ongoing drought has stunted the growth of sorghum plants, dhurrin has concentrated inside them.  

Prussic acid poisoning in cattle is quick and brutal, with symptoms occurring 10-15 minutes after ingestion and death some 15-30 minutes later. It causes respiratory, nervous and muscular disorders.

Dhurrin naturally occurs in sorghum, particularly in young shoots that use it as a defence against herbivores, but when digested, releases prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide.

But “normally, it doesn’t cause death”, Giantin told AFP.

In the samples taken from Sommariva del Bosco, the concentration of dhurrin in the shoots was at an unusually high level, which Giantin said appeared to be the result of the drought that has hit Italy and much of Europe this summer.

A dose of more than 700 mg/kg of prussic acid is considered fatal for cattle, but the animals at Sommariva were found to have quantities of more than 900 mg/kg in their blood.

The only way of saving affected cows is to inject them with sodium thiosulfate, to neutralise the hyrogen cyanide.

With this, experts were able to save around 30 cows on August 11, when three more farms in Piedmont were hit by the same phenomenon — although not before 14 died.

Cycling 2.6 kilometres daily like in The Netherlands would also bring with it health benefits due to more exercise and improved air quality

The world would save nearly 700 million tonnes of carbon pollution each year — more than Canada’s annual emissions — if every person adopted the Dutch way of life and cycled on a daily basis, new research showed Thursday.

The transport sector currently accounts for a quarter of all fuel-related greenhouse gas emissions, which are warming the planet. 

Half of those emissions are from passenger cars, and worldwide transport demand is predicted to triple by mid-century. 

As they seek to decarbonise transport, governments and industry have turned towards electric vehicles, with 6.75 million units sold in 2021 alone. 

Vehicle sales are tracked and published each year. However, it has been difficult to calculate the production and ownership of a much older, low-carbon technology: the bicycle. 

An international team of researchers has now compiled the first global dataset of bicycle ownership and use by country dating back to the early 1960s, using statistical modelling to fill in any information gaps.

They found that between 1962-2015 global production of bikes outstripped that of cars, with China accounting for nearly two-thirds of the more than 123 million bikes manufactured in 2015.

Writing in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, the team showed that bicycle ownership was generally higher in upper-income and upper-middle-income countries — but then so was the percentage of journeys undertaken by car. 

This meant that high bicycle ownership does not necessarily lead to high bicycle use. 

Among the 60 countries included in the dataset, the share of bicycle use for journeys was only five percent. Some countries, simply lack bicycle stocks, while others with high bike ownership, such as the United States, tended to view cycling as more of a leisure activity than a mode of transport. 

– ‘Going Dutch’ –

The team calculated that if everyone emulated the Danish commute of cycling an average of 1.6 kilometres (1 mile) each day, the world could save some 414 million tonnes of CO2 a year — equivalent to Britain’s annual emissions. 

“Going Dutch” and cycling 2.6 kilometres daily like people do in The Netherlands would save 686 million tonnes, and bring with it associated health benefits due to more exercise and improved air quality. 

“A worldwide pro-bicycle policy and infrastructure development enabled modal shift like the Netherlands and Denmark can lead to significant untapped climate and health benefits,” the authors wrote.

They said this dual benefit demanded better bicycle data collection, and said there was “an urgent need to promote sustainable bicycle use via supporting policy, planning, and infrastructure development.”

The study’s lead author, Gang Liu, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark’s Department of Green Technology, said the research showed that bicycles had an important future role in lowering global transport’s carbon footprint.

“Addressing such gigantic challenges requires not only technology-side strategies, such as lightweight design or electrification,” he told AFP. 

“But also needs demand-side strategies, such as alternative mobility patterns — sharing mobility, on-demand mobility, and ride sharing — and transport mode change, such as reducing short-distance car use by cycling.”  

Rescue workers at a campground in Coggia, Corsica, where a 13-year-old girl was killed Thursday when a tree fell on her bungalow

Brutal storms with winds gusting up to 224 kilometres per hour (140 miles per hour) left five people dead on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica early Thursday, including a 13-year-old girl who was killed when a tree fell onto her campground bungalow, authorities said.

It was the third day of intense rains across much of southern France that had produced flash floods and lightning, but left no casualties until now. 

The girl was killed at a campground near Sagone, on the island’s rugged western coast, where nine others were also injured, including one seriously, rescue workers told AFP.

At a nearby beach in Coggia, a 72-year-old woman died after the roof of a beachside hut was blown off and landed on the vehicle she was in, regional authorities said.

“I was woken around 7:30 am by a very huge storm” that knocked out both electricity and mobile phone networks, said Benjamin Roux, a 26-year-old tourist, at the beach near where the woman was killed.

He had been planning to go scuba diving, but instead helped the passengers of a boat who were sleeping aboard when it was suddenly thrown onto the shore by the choppy waves.

“They managed to get out without injuries, but they’re just devastated,” he told AFP.

Further north near the resort of Calvi, a 46-year-old Frenchman was also killed at a campground, and a 23-year-old Italian woman suffered serious injuries while camping nearby.

Maritime authorities later said a fisherman had died near Girolata, and a female kayaker near Erbalunga, north of Bastia.

“Several rescues of pleasure boats” were also undertaken near the capital Ajaccio, said Jean-Jacques Peraldi, head of the SDIS fire and rescue service.

Maritime authorities reported 60 to 70 sea rescue operations, mainly along the western coast that bore the brunt of the overnight storm, which the Meteo France weather service said was now moving towards Italy.

Authorities had urged people to avoid travel and take other precautions after storm alerts were issued Wednesday for several Mediterranean departments, but also along the Normandy coast and near the southeast city of Lyon.

Around 35,000 homes on Corsica remain without electricity, power provider EDF said.

A protected turtle nest is seen at Lara beach in Cyprus

A row has erupted in Cyprus after a community leader threatened to dig up the nests of protected turtles because his village is missing out on land development compensation.

On Thursday the authorities said his “inexcusable” threat would undo decades of conservation efforts if it went ahead.

Yiangos Tsivikos, leader of the Ineia community in the Akamas region in the west of the Mediterranean island, posted a video on YouTube on Wednesday saying he would dig up turtle nests on the nearby Lara beach.

He claimed that nest markings there were fake, and called on the agriculture minister and media to go to Lara beach on Sunday to watch him dig up the nests.

“Residents are ready for war,” Tsivikos said.

The fisheries department warned Akamas residents that Cyprus sea turtles and their eggs have been protected by law since 1971.

Conservationists estimate the number of turtle nests in Lara at around 2,000 in 2021. Lara is a habitat of enormous ecological importance for both loggerhead and green sea turtles.

Akamas residents have been protesting over the government’s Akamas development plan which they claim prevents them from commercially exploiting their land.

Environmentalists also oppose the plan, saying it endangers the eastern Mediterranean island’s nature reserve, home to unique fauna and endangered species.

Ineia residents say that while the other villages will receive compensation under the plan, they will not.

Agriculture Minister Costas Kadis conceded on Wednesday that the community of Ineia and landowners in the area were most affected by the plan.

“Akamas should be preserved, but on the other hand, the area’s residents should not suffer,” he added.

Protection of the turtles’ habitat, the Lara-Toxeftra Akamas area, was secured in 1989.

“Sea turtles are included in the Barcelona Convention for specially protected areas, and biological diversity of the Mediterranean ratified by Cyprus in 2001,” the fisheries department said.

“They are also protected by the EU Habitats Directive, transferred into national legislation in 2003,” it said, adding that actions to destroy or try to destroy turtle nests or eggs are prohibited.