AFP UK

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo (L) speaks with European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager (R) as they participate in a US-EU dialogue on December 5, 2022

US and European Union officials met for trade and technology talks Monday, but hanging in the balance are heightened tensions over American subsidies for its green industry that Europe considers anti-competitive.

Officials touched on issues such as fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and questions over economic coercion, but all eyes were on Washington’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) during a meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, held just outside Washington.

The act, designed to accelerate the US transition to a low-carbon economy, contains around $370 billion in subsidies for green energy, as well as tax cuts for US-made electric cars and batteries.

EU countries have poured criticism on the IRA, seeing it as a threat to European jobs, especially in the energy and auto sectors.

Monday’s talks, the third of their kind, are part of a push “to grow the bilateral trade and investment relationship,” according to a National Security Council statement.

Both sides took stock of a dedicated task force’s work on the IRA, noting “preliminary progress made,” said a joint US-EU statement released Monday.

“We acknowledge the EU’s concerns and underline our commitment to address them constructively,” the statement added.

– ‘More solid response’ –

“Clearly they are trying to set out our concerns in a non-confrontational manner,” a European official involved in the talks told reporters Monday.

“It was flagged as a dispute, obviously, to which I think we’re still waiting for a more solid response,” he added.

Asked about “tweaks” recently mentioned by US President Joe Biden — so that European companies would not be unfairly treated — the official said the “assessment is that this will be extremely difficult.”

But both sides reached an agreement on a host of other issues, including an information-sharing system on public support for the semiconductor sector to increase transparency.

Both parties also launched a “transatlantic initiative on sustainable trade” with an aim to decarbonize energy-intensive industries and help with the transition to more circular economies, the statement added.

– Insufficient space –

EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has decided not to take part in the meetings, his office said, finding that they no longer give enough space to issues of concern to many European industry ministers and businesses.

Last month, Breton threatened to appeal to the World Trade Organization and consider “retaliatory measures” if the United States did not reverse its subsidies.

The plan was also a subject of discussions between President Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron at a state visit last week.

Biden said both sides have agreed to discuss practical steps to coordinate and align their approaches, though he added that he would not apologize for the act, which was never intended to disadvantage US allies.

The Trade and Technology Council is co-chaired by the United States’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Trade Representative Katherine Tai, as well as European Commission Executive Vice Presidents Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis.

Earth is visible as a crescent in the minutes after Orion finished its engine burn around the Moon

NASA’s Orion spaceship made a close pass of the Moon and used a gravity assist to whip itself back towards Earth on Monday, marking the start of the return journey for the Artemis-1 mission.

At its nearest point, the uncrewed capsule flew less than 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the surface, testing maneuvers that will be used during later Artemis missions that return humans to the rocky celestial body.

Communication with the capsule was interrupted for 30 minutes when it was behind the far side of the Moon — an area more cratered than the near side and first seen by humans during the Apollo era, although they didn’t land there.

The European Service Module, which powers the capsule, fired its main engine for over three minutes to put the gumdrop-shaped Orion on course for home.

It was the last major maneuver of the mission, which began when NASA’s mega Moon rocket SLS blasted off from Florida on November 16. From start to finish, the journey should last 25 and a half days.

Orion will now make only slight course corrections until it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on Sunday, December 11 at 9:40 am local time (1740 GMT). It will then be recovered and hoisted aboard a US Navy ship.

Earlier in the mission, Orion spent about six days in “distant retrograde orbit” around the Moon, meaning at high altitude and traveling opposite the direction the Moon revolves around Earth.

A week ago, Orion broke the distance record for a habitable capsule, venturing 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) from our planet.

Re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere will present a harsh test for the spacecraft’s heatshield, which will need to withstand temperatures of around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800degrees Celsius) -– or about half the surface of the Sun.

Under the Artemis program — named for the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — the United States is seeking to build a lasting presence on the Moon in preparation for an onward voyage to Mars.

Artemis 2 will involve a crewed journey to the Moon, once again without landing. 

The first woman and next man are to land on the lunar south pole during Artemis 3, which is set for no sooner than 2025, though likely significantly later given timeline delays.

Mount Semeru spews smoke and ash in Lumajang, Indonesia, on Monday

Rescuers evacuated more people Monday from nearby villages after the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Semeru, with officials warning of danger from cooling lava despite less activity from the volcano.

More than 2,400 villagers have now fled their homes and taken shelter in 11 evacuation centres after the highest mountain on the country’s main island of Java erupted early morning Sunday.

“The military, police, local disaster and village officials keep evacuating people in Curah Kobokan where the hot ash cloud and cold lava might travel,” Abdul Muhari, a spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency, told local television.

“So far the total number of evacuees is 2,489.”

Officials have announced a state of emergency for the next two weeks and authorities have been distributing free masks to protect against ash in the air while setting up public kitchens for evacuees.

On Monday morning, dozens of evacuees in Lumajang district where Semeru is located ventured back to their ash-covered homes to retrieve important belongings, before returning to shelters, according to an AFP journalist.

Some shepherded livestock while others carried appliances such as TVs and refrigerators as the volcano spewed ash in the background.

Muhari said visual observation of Semeru on Monday morning indicated less intense volcanic activity but he warned of potential danger from lava flows that had cooled after heavy rain.

“What we worry about is economic activities such as sand mining. We want to make sure the route where the hot ash cloud and the cold lava might travel is completely free of activity,” he said.

The government’s alert status indicating danger from the volcano was raised to its highest level Sunday. It had previously been at its second-highest level since a major eruption last December.

Last year’s eruption killed 51 people and damaged more than 5,000 homes while forcing nearly 10,000 people to seek refuge.

Many of the victims from that disaster were sand miners working high on the slopes of the volcano.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” where the meeting of continental plates causes substantial volcanic and seismic activity. The Southeast Asian archipelago nation has nearly 130 active volcanoes.

Trees scarred by the spruce bark beetle in Kampu, Finland

Deep in the Finnish woods, the moss and blueberry shrubs hide a deadly threat to the boreal forests that are as important to the planet as the Amazon rainforest.

With chunks of their bark peeling off and needles falling from dying branches, more and more trees are being killed by the spruce bark beetle, which is venturing further and further north with climate change.

The tiny brown insects attack the Picea abies, one of Finland’s most common tree species, and can cause massive damage to forests.

Burrowing through the bark to lay their eggs, the beetles eat their way around the spruce and kill it by stopping water and nutrients reaching the higher branches.

“The species has caused huge damage across Central and Eastern Europe, especially since 2018,” Markus Melin, a scientist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, told AFP.

With climate change, the risk of the beetle spreading is a “lot higher now”, Melin added.

“We have to accept it and adapt to it. Things are changing fast up here.”

While the threat is greatest in southern Finland, the sweltering summer of 2021 saw bark beetle damage “unusually high up north” in the Kainuu region of northern Finland.

– ‘Nasty loop’ –

“It is well known that the spruce bark beetle is one of the species that benefit most from global warming,” Melin said.

The beetles thrive on weakened trees. Hot summers mean there are more water-starved spruce, while warm winters mean there is no frozen ground to brace the trees against storms.

Warm weather also speeds up the life cycle of the beetles, meaning they can reproduce faster.

“Extreme warm summers benefit the bark beetle directly. They have less mortality, reproduction is faster,” Melin said.

While the beetles normally go for weak trees, once their numbers reach a tipping point they can start attacking healthy ones.

“It becomes a nasty loop,” Melin said.

If foresters do not react in time by removing weakened spruce, “suddenly there are so many beetles that they can attack healthy trees” further speeding the “cycle of destruction”, Melin said. 

When complete, the antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa will form the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive radio telescope

Australia on Monday started building a vast network of antennas in the Outback, its section of what planners say will eventually become one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world.

When complete, the antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa will form the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive instrument that will aim to untangle mysteries about the creation of stars, galaxies and extraterrestrial life.

The idea for the telescope was first conceived in the early 1990s, but the project was plagued by delays, funding issues and diplomatic jockeying.

The SKA Observatory’s Director-General Philip Diamond described the beginning of its construction as “momentous”.

The telescope “will be one of humanity’s biggest-ever scientific endeavours”, he said.

Its name is based on the planners’ original aim, a telescope that could observe a one-square-kilometre surface, but the current South African and Australian sections will have a combined collecting area of just under half that, according to the observatory.

Both countries have huge expanses of land in remote areas with little radio disturbance — ideal for such telescopes.

More than 130,000 Christmas tree-shaped antennas  are planned in Western Australia, to be built on the traditional lands of the Wajarri Aboriginal people.

They have dubbed the site “Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara”, or “sharing sky and stars”.

“We honour their willingness to share their skies and stars with us as we seek to find answers to some of the most fundamental science questions we face,” said Diamond.

The South African site will feature nearly 200 dishes in the remote Karoo region, according to the organisation.

Comparison between radio telescopes is difficult as they operate in different frequencies, according to SKA’s planners.

But they have said that the two sites will give SKA higher sensitivity over single-dish radio telescopes because its arrays are spread out, forming a much bigger “virtual dish”.

The project will help in “charting the birth and death of galaxies, searching for new types of gravitational waves and expanding the boundaries of what we know about the universe”, said telescope director Sarah Pearce.

Danny Price from the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy said the telescope would be extremely powerful.

“To put the sensitivity of the SKA into perspective, the SKA could detect a mobile phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars, 225 million kilometres away,” he said.

The SKA Observatory, headquartered at Jodrell Bank in Britain, has said the telescope should start making scientific observations by the late 2020s.

The organisation has 14 members: Britain, Australia, South Africa, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.

Mount Semeru spews smoke and ash in Lumajang on Sunday

Indonesia’s Mount Semeru erupted Sunday spewing hot ash clouds a mile high and rivers of lava down its side while sparking the evacuation of nearly 2,000 people exactly one year after its last major eruption killed dozens.

The burst from the highest mountain on Indonesia’s main island of Java, around 800 kilometres (500 miles) southeast of the capital Jakarta, prompted authorities to raise the alert status for the volcano to the highest level.

Villages around Semeru were being battered by a mix of volcanic ash and monsoon rains. Videos shared with AFP by a local rescue group showed a huge black cloud rising from the volcano, engulfing the sky and blocking the sun.

One resident described the panic when the ash clouds descended on their village.

“It was dark, I could not see anything. It was raining water and ash,” the person, who did not want to be named, told AFP.

“I didn’t know where to take shelter. I had to flee.”

“Hot avalanches” triggered by piles of lava at the top flooded down the 3,676-metre (12,060 feet) mountain, said Abdul Muhari, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).

A spokesperson for Indonesia’s Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Centre (PVMBG) told broadcaster Kompas TV that the higher alert level meant local villages were in danger.

However, no casualties or injuries were reported on Sunday after the PVMBG warned nearby residents not to travel within eight kilometres (five miles) of the crater.

The geological agency said that by evening Semeru was “still in the eruption phase” though the size of the ash clouds was decreasing.

“Overall the activity is still very high,” it said in a statement.

The internet in the area was down and phone signals were patchy after the eruption, according to an AFP journalist.

– Rain and ash –

The BNPB said 1,979 people had been taken to 11 shelters, with at least six villages affected by the eruption.

Local administration official Indah Amperawati Masdar said residents would only be allowed to return home when the hot clouds had dissipated.

Residents were also told to avoid a southeastern area 13 kilometres (eight miles) along a river in the direction the ash was travelling.

The majority of residents in the two villages most at risk had been evacuated, said Patria Dwi Hastiadi, a spokesperson for the Lumajang Disaster Mitigation Agency.

Locals fled on motorbikes, some three at a time with their belongings, while others helped the elderly evacuate safely. One resident was covered in mud that had rained down on him as a mix of rain and ash.

Japan’s weather agency had earlier warned that a tsunami could be triggered by the eruption affecting southern islands in the country’s Okinawa prefecture, Kyodo news agency reported. But Japan’s meteorological agency later said no significant tidal changes were observed.

Semeru last erupted exactly one year ago, killing at least 51 people and damaging more than 5,000 homes.

That disaster left entire streets filled with mud and ash that swallowed houses and vehicles, forcing nearly 10,000 people to seek refuge.

Semeru’s alert status had remained at its second-highest level since a previous major eruption in December 2020.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the meeting of continental plates causes substantial volcanic and seismic activity.

The Southeast Asian archipelago nation has nearly 130 active volcanoes.

Indonesia's Mount Semeru spews smoke and ash in Lumajang, East Java

Thousands of villagers living near Indonesia’s Mount Semeru were racing for refuge Sunday to the wail of emergency sirens as lava snaked towards their homes under a black sky after the volcano erupted.

Locals fled on motorbikes sometimes three at a time as a mushroom cloud of ash approached and monsoon rains lashed the area in East Java.

“It was dark and raining. The rain did not consist only of water, but also volcanic ash. It was like mud,” said an AFP journalist on the scene.

Indonesian authorities raised their alert level for the volcano to its highest after the crater spewed hot ash a mile into the sky.

It came only a year after the volcano last erupted, killing at least 51 people and laying waste to homes.

Rescue workers were once again rushing to evacuate villagers in the area Sunday as a colossal plume of ash engulfed all light.

One emergency responder, Gunawan, filmed the clouds above as a midday sky turned ominously dark as though midnight.

“It’s getting dark, bro,” he said to the camera as a seismograph whistled in the background.

The internet was down and phone signals were patchy but villagers were alerted to the danger by sirens and the beating of bamboo drums by local volunteers.

Semeru is the highest mountain on Indonesia’s main island of Java and lies around 800 kilometres (500 miles) southeast of the capital Jakarta among a cluster of craters in a moon-like landscape.

The Southeast Asian archipelago nation has nearly 130 active volcanoes.

– ‘Cheers’ –

The eruption last year left locals combing through ruined belongings after their homes were blanketed in ash.

It remains to be seen what damage the eruption will inflict this time with the lava still edging towards homes and their owners told to remain eight kilometres (five miles) from the crater.

Many villagers, mostly women and children, took shelter in local halls and schools, some as far as 20 kilometres (12 miles) away.

Gunawan, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, said everyone was safe for now, even if their possessions and homes might not be by day’s end.

As he flashed a peace sign at a camera against the backdrop of dark haze and monsoon rains at his rescue post, he tried to reassure people.

“Salam tangguh, salam presisi!” he said, meaning “cheers”, his voice relaxed but muffled behind a gas mask.

The start-up OpenAI designs sophisticated artificial intelligence software capable of generating images (DALL-E) or text (GPT-3, ChatGPT)

California start-up OpenAI has released a chatbot capable of answering a variety of questions, but its impressive performance has reopened the debate on the risks linked to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The conversations with ChatGPT, posted on Twitter by fascinated users, show a kind of omniscient machine, capable of explaining scientific concepts and writing scenes for a play, university dissertations or even functional lines of computer code.

“Its answer to the question ‘what to do if someone has a heart attack’ was incredibly clear and relevant,” Claude de Loupy, head of Syllabs, a French company specialized in automatic text generation, told AFP.

“When you start asking very specific questions, ChatGPT’s response can be off the mark,” but its overall performance remains “really impressive,” with a “high linguistic level,” he said. 

OpenAI, cofounded in 2015 in San Francisco by billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who left the business in 2018, received $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019. 

The start-up is best known for its automated creation software: GPT-3 for text generation and DALL- E for image generation.

ChatGPT is able to ask its interlocutor for details, and has fewer strange responses than GPT-3, which, in spite of its prowess, sometimes spits out absurd results, said De Loupy.  

– Cicero –

“A few years ago chatbots had the vocabulary of a dictionary and the memory of a goldfish,” said Sean McGregor, a researcher who runs a database of AI-related incidents.

“Chatbots are getting much better at the ‘history problem’ where they act in a manner consistent with the history of queries and responses. The chatbots have graduated from goldfish status.” 

Like other programs relying on deep learning, mimicking neural activity, ChatGPT has one major weakness: “it does not have access to meaning,” says De Loupy.

The software cannot justify its choices, such as explain why its picked the words that make up its responses.

AI technologies able to communicate are, nevertheless, increasingly able to give an impression of thought.

Researchers at Facebook-parent Meta recently developed a computer program dubbed Cicero, after the Roman statesman.

The software has proven proficient at the board game Diplomacy, which requires negotiation skills.

“If it doesn’t talk like a real person — showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game — it won’t find other players willing to work with it,” Meta said in research findings.

In October, Character.ai, a start-up founded by former Google engineers, put an experimental chatbot online that can adopt any personality.

Users create characters based on a brief description and can then “chat” with a fake Sherlock Holmes, Socrates or Donald Trump.

– ‘Just a machine’ –

This level of sophistication both fascinates and worries some observers, who voice concern these technologies could be misused to trick people, by spreading false information or by creating increasingly credible scams.

What does ChatGPT think of these hazards?

“There are potential dangers in building highly sophisticated chatbots, particularly if they are designed to be indistinguishable from humans in their language and behavior,” the chatbot told AFP. 

Some businesses are putting safeguards in place to avoid abuse of their technologies.

On its welcome page, OpenAI lays out disclaimers, saying the chatbot “may occasionally generate incorrect information” or “produce harmful instructions or biased content.”

And ChatGPT refuses to take sides.

“OpenAI made it incredibly difficult to get the model to express opinions on things,” McGregor said.

Once, McGregor asked the chatbot to write a poem about an ethical issue.

“I am just a machine, A tool for you to use, I do not have the power to choose, or to refuse. I cannot weigh the options, I cannot judge what’s right, I cannot make a decision On this fateful night,” it replied.

On Saturday, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman took to Twitter, musing on the debates surrounding AI. 

“Interesting watching people start to debate whether powerful AI systems should behave in the way users want or their creators intend,” he wrote.

“The question of whose values we align these systems to will be one of the most important debates society ever has.”

A murmuration of starlings in the sky over Rome

A human “murmuration” using dance techniques previously showcased by French choreographer Sadeck Waff at the Tokyo Paralympics will deliver a powerful message of “hope” to next week’s United Nations biodiversity talks.

The COP15 talks organisers are preparing for multiple protests, with security measures including a three-metre (nine-foot) high fence around the venue in Montreal, Canada.

But a coalition of Britain’s leading conservation charities has chosen a more creative approach to highlight its call for urgent targets to end biodiversity loss.

Spearheaded by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), they have joined forces with Waff and 80 young British dancers to create a video of one of his trademark “murmuration” dances that mimics the motion of a flock of birds.

Paris-based Waff says the latest in his dance series, which draws its name from the collective noun for a flock of starlings, is about “recovery and hope”.

“I hope that the dance inspires everyone to appreciate the power and beauty of cooperation as well as the urgency of the conversation that needs to take place, in order to save and protect the nature that we all rely on,” he told AFP.

It is hoped a new global biodiversity framework will be agreed at the Montreal talks, which run from December 7 to 19.

The UN has said world leaders will not attend the gathering but the RSPB is asking British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to be present.

– Synchronicity –

The conservation charity wants Sunak to push for a global deal that gives biodiversity its “Paris moment” like the agreement reached at the 2015 climate conference in the French capital.

Naturalist and BBC nature series presenter Chris Packham told AFP it was a “once in a decade opportunity” for world leaders to set targets that ensure “biodiversity is restored for generations to come”.

He said the dance was a vital means of communicating the need to reverse biodiversity loss to everyone — not just those already signed up to the message.

“The RSPB has an audience. I have an audience. But it’s not big enough. We need to spread it by using other aspects of our culture,” Packham said.

“The idea that it is mimicking a murmuration — which is a flock of birds working in synchronicity together to achieve a purpose — sends the kind of message that we all need to be working with that synchronicity.”

Waff’s hand ballets have been variously described as mesmerising, hypnotic and beautifully expressive.

His previous video to round off the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics — held in 2021 due to the pandemic — and hand over to the 2024 games in Paris featured over 120 amateur and professional wheelchair-using performers.

To a stirring composition by French singer-songwriter and music video producer Woodkid, the troupe drawn from people of all ethnicities, genders and physical abilities moved as one in time to the music.

A clip of the video immediately went viral and has since generated millions of views.

– Performers –

Waff’s latest “murmuration” dance was performed by students from Britain’s Bird College of Dance and Musical Theatre near London.

All dressed in black, only the performers’ heads, hands and forearms are clearly visible, while Waff, also in black, stands in front leading the performance.

Dancer Rex Boadu, 22, said it had been an “incredible experience” to work with Waff, who has previously choreographed Grammy winners Shakira and Chris Brown.

“It’s hard to look away from it once you start looking at it and digesting and interpreting the message,” he said adding that he hoped the video would “make people think” and research the issue for themselves.

A wave of mud and debris swept through the small town of Casamicciola Terme, following heavy rains on Ischia

Ischia, the little Italian island hit by a deadly landslide last weekend, is a victim of geography and weather but also of illegal construction, experts and politicians agree.

Eleven people died and one woman remains missing after a wave of mud and debris swept through the small town of Casamicciola Terme, following heavy rains across the lush island off the coast of Naples.

But WWF Italia, the environmental organisation, said it was a “predictable tragedy, with specific causes and responsibilities”.

It blamed the “repeated and irresponsible management of the island’s territory which, with the acceleration of the effects of climate change under way, has now become a bomb primed and ready to explode”.

“It sounds like hypocrisy to mourn the victims of recent days, when we continue to build where we should not.”

Experts say that both illegal and legal construction, combined with deforestation, reduces the ability of the soil to absorb large quantities of water.

Buildings erected without permission is a widespread problem across Italy.

The minister for civil protection, Nello Musumeci, acknowledged this week that “the sad and widespread problem of illegal construction” is a subject that “can no longer be avoided”.

But Ischia, an island of volcanic origin which suffered a deadly earthquake in 2017, is particularly vulnerable.

Some “49 percent of the territory of Ischia is classified as at a high or very high risk of landslide… with more than 13,000 people living in these areas”, Environment Minister Gilberto Pichetto said.

According to the latest report from the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), 93.9 percent of Italian communes are at risk of landslides, flooding or coastal erosion.

“You don’t need to be a specialist to understand that illegal buildings cannot be tolerated, because they constitute a risk multiplier that goes far beyond the people that live there,” said WWF.

– ‘Swiss clinic’ –

Faced with unauthorised construction, successive Italian governments have often responded with amnesties, although the bureaucratic process is often so long and complicated that it can take years for a decision.

In Ischia alone, some 27,000 requests for amnesties have been filed in recent years, according to Italian media reports.

And when the order finally comes to knock down an illegal building, its residents often find ways to avoid it.

In one case, the occupants of a condemned house brought children from across their family into the building, because the presence of minors nullifies the order, retired Naples prosecutor Aldo De Chiara told La Stampa newspaper.

The prosecutor, who specialised in the fight against illegal construction, said that in other cases, “when the police arrive, they find in the illegal rooms, whether the veranda or the living room, patients on IV drips like in a Swiss clinic”.

However, others see illegal construction as a scapegoat.

“When there is a landslide in the north of Italy we talk about climate change, when it is in the south, we talk about illegal construction,” said Sergio Piro, who runs three hotels on Ischia, including one in Casamicciola Terme.

“It’s true there is illegal construction, but in this case it was a section of the mountain that came off because there had been no preventative work, in particular of drainage canals,” the 47-year-old told AFP.

He noted other parts of the island were not as affected after last weekend’s bad weather.

The torrent of mud passed a few hundred metres (yards) from Piro’s own house: “I heard a huge noise when this torrent of rocks and soil hit the first houses.”