AFP UK

A major fire on a tiny Honduran resort island burned out of control Saturday, consuming homes and businesses and forcing hundreds of people to evacuate.

“We cannot stop it. It is uncontrollable,” said Mireya Guillen, the deputy mayor of the island of Guanaja, located in the Caribbean off the north coast of mainland Honduras. Its 6,000 inhabitants live mainly from tourism.

A huge cloud of black smoke rose from the island, as military helicopters dropped bags of water on the flames.

Aided by police, people raced to save beds, furniture and other belongings as the blaze approached, video on social media showed.

The fire started for unknown reasons in the wee hours of Saturday in seaside homes and spread quickly.

It has consumed 30 homes and businesses and forced the evacuation of some 400 people, firefighters and other officials said. Four have been hospitalized with burns.

Guanaja, which measures 19 square km (7 square miles), is one of the three Bay Islands of Honduras. The others are Roatan and Utila.

The wild boars root through Rome’s rotting rubbish, as furious residents cry foul: there are political fortunes at stake in Italy’s mayoral elections this weekend, but in the Eternal City garbage is the biggest talking point.

From the capital to Milan, Naples and Bologna, voters head to the urns Sunday and Monday for ballots being closely watched as a test ahead of the general election in 2023.

But in Rome — one of the world’s dirtiest cities, according to a ranking last month by the British magazine Time Out — residents are more concerned with the perennial transport, flooding, waste and pothole woes in this city of 2.8 million inhabitants.

Rome’s current mayor, Virginia Raggi from the anti-establishment Five Stars Movement (M5S), has won praise for taking on the city’s fierce new mafia, the Casamonica family of loan sharks and drug traffickers.

But her widely-mocked plans to use sheep as lawnmowers and bees to combat pollution — while rotting refuse piles up next to playgrounds, buses spontaneously combust in the heat and weeds run wild — may cost her dearly.

The candidate of the right-wing alliance, Nicola Michetti, is likely to pocket the most votes due to a split on the left, according to the last polls published before a pre-election blackout.

But he is not predicted to get over the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a run-off in two weeks — and polls say he may then lose in round two to the Democratic Party’s Roberto Gualtieri, a former economy minister.

– ‘Killer seagulls’ –

Lawyer Michetti, 55, says pick him to clean up the city, or “today we have seagulls and boars, tomorrow it could be cholera”.

His champion, the head of far-right Brothers of Italy party Giorgia Meloni, accuses Raggi of playing the zoologist not the mayor.

“Boars, rats as big as labradors, killer seagulls, we’ve seen it all,” she said this week, saying Rome had become an international joke.

Gualtieri and rival centre-left candidate Carlo Calenda, meanwhile, have called for round tables with experts to tackle the problem of the wild boars.

In the picturesque neighbourhood of Trastevere in Rome, where bins often overflow onto the cobbles, 60-year old resident Tiziana De Silvestro, out walking her dog, said the root of the problem was rubbish left overnight outside bars and restaurants.

“Now the city is full of animals, crows, seagulls, not to mention mice and cockroaches,” she said.

Volunteers sick of the filth have begun in recent years to organise periodic cleaning sessions — but say the city should do its part.

“There are many young people, many voluntary associations that are reacting, that are trying to say: ‘enough is enough’,” Cristiano Tancredi from “Retake Roma” told AFPTV.

“I think the next mayor will have to take this into consideration: there is a great demand from citizens who want a better city, a different city,” he said.

Some 12 million voters are eligible to cast ballots in the elections, which are being held not only in the country’s largest cities but in more than 1,000 smaller centres, including Morterone in Lombardy, which has just 33 inhabitants.

Red-roofed, left-wing stalwart Bologna is considered a safe seat, while the centre-left is confident of taking Milan and Naples too. The race is closer in Turin, which the centre-right is hungrily eyeing.

As the winter months near, Kashmiri beekeepers like Abid Hussain are preparing for an annual migration southward in search of warmer climes, more honey and bigger payouts.

Hussain wears protective gear on his arms and face as he readies to send his convoy of bees hundreds of kilometres from the Himalayan region into the desert state of Rajasthan.

“Everything comes to a halt in Kashmir in winter, including nature,” says Hussain, who takes his colonies 750 kilometres (465 miles) to vast mustard fields around Sri Ganganagar on the edge of Rajasthan’s Thar desert.

Dozens of his fellow beekeepers make the same autumn journey, travelling across twisting mountain highways and the northern Indian plains to reach warmer provinces.

Honeymakers started taking the journey in the 1980s, when an insect disease nearly wiped out the local population and a replacement European species — much more sensitive to the Himalayan cold — was introduced.

Now hundreds of millions of bees feast on rich farm crops to the south of Kashmir every year and help feed a honey-making boom for the beekeepers.

Each hive can net Hussain, who transports tens of millions of bees, as much as 9,000 rupees ($120) worth of honey during his time in Sri Ganganagar.

While the bees get fed, the mustard farmers are happy to have their crops pollinated for future harvests.

For the beekeepers, the annual pilgrimage is crucial to their survival, says Parvez Ahmad Sofi, a professor at Kashmir’s agriculture university.

“Migration saves the bees from the harsh weather, helps them reproduce colonies and produce honey,” he said.

Without it, the beekeepers have only two harvests a year, instead of four if they travel south.

As temperatures rise in February, Hussain will begin his return north, stopping for two months in the ancient city of Pathankot near the Pakistan border.

He will lease land and wait for the flowers on lychee trees to blossom in early April, allowing him one more harvest before the final journey home.

But back in the Kashmir Valley, authorities say the region’s temperatures are rising, while freak winter storms remain a threat to its wildlife.

Nearly 750 tonnes of honey were produced there last year and, while experts say the region could make more, storms, warmer winters and unpredictable rains have hit production in recent years.

Hussain says the changing climate in Kashmir makes the annual migration increasingly vital to his livelihood.

“Hot weather can destroy the flowers and the bees cannot collect nectar,” he said.

“In recent times, there has been more heat and too much rain.”

Graphene, a Nobel Prize-awarded material with promising applications for greener energy and nanomedicine, has been the topic of much disinformation by coronavirus anti-vaxxers claiming it can be used to “magnetize” and “control” people.

– What is graphene? –

Often referred to as a “miracle material,” graphene is one of the world’s strongest materials, and one of the lightest.

A form of carbon just one atom thick — many times thinner than a human hair — graphene is transparent, but stronger than steel.

It was aired as a theoretical substance in 1947, but for decades, physicists thought it would be impossible to isolate.

The problem was resolved in 2004 by scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who used ordinary sticky tape to lift a layer from a piece of graphite — the stuff in pencil lead. 

That layer was itself pulled apart using more tape, and the process repeated until just the thinnest of layers remained — a graphene sheet.

In 2010, the pair received the Nobel Physics Prize for their efforts.

Graphene, a super conductor of heat and electric energy, is “among the most promising materials for technologies of the future,” Argentine chemistry researcher Marcelo Mariscal, a specialist in nanotechnology, told AFP.

It is the focus of research into the manufacturing of ultra-strong but lightweight and flexible electronic devices, satellites, airplanes and cars, greener alternatives to batteries, and a delivery vehicle for gene or molecular therapy — potentially also for use in vaccines.

– What is the link to Covid-19 vaccines? 

As has been the case with 5G and microchip technology, graphene has been the subject of several “trojan horse” conspiracy theories according to which governments or powerful individuals are supposedly seeking to remotely “control” people who receive some sort of mini device through coronavirus vaccines, or track their whereabouts through GPS.

This control could be exercised from 5G towers transmitting signals to people supposedly carrying graphene particles, one theory goes.

In another widely-disseminated claim, social media users alleged they had been “magnetized” by the vaccine, posting images of magnets, coins or cutlery allegedly attached to the arm in which they received the jab.

Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that vaccines containing graphene have altered people’s “electromagnetic field” and that this can be fatal.

– What is the truth? –

To start with, none of the vaccines approved for use by the World Health Organization contain graphene or its derivative, graphene oxide.

Conspiracies were fueled when Canada in April recalled certain anti-coronavirus facemasks with a graphene layer over concerns that inhaled particles inhaled could cause asbestos-like lung damage.

In July, their sale was resumed after a review found that “biomass graphene particles are not shed from these masks in quantities that are likely to cause adverse lung effects.”

Experts also dispute the alleged magnetizing properties of graphene.

The material “is magnetic only in very specific laboratory conditions,” Diego Pena of the Spanish Research Centre for Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials told AFP. 

A video of a brain autopsy widely circulated on social media as evidence of the alleged lethal effects of graphene in a vaccinated person, was in fact from a patient with bleeding on the brain, and filmed before Covid-19 was even identified.

Experts say the hype about graphene’s promising applications — most of them still in the research phase — have contributed to it being a popular target for disinformation.

“The material is known, everyone knows it’s real, but not everyone understand how it works,” said Ester Vazquez Fernandez-Pacheco, director of the Regional Institute for Applied Scientific Research (IRICA) in Spain.

It is, therefore, “very easy to make people believe things that have no scientific basis.”

At least 2.4 million people in Kenya risk going hungry by November as drought ravages the north and east of the country, a nearly threefold increase from last year, the World Food Programme warned Friday.

The East African country has been hit by an accumulation of calamities in recent years, including a months-long locust invasion from December 2019 and poor rainfall in 2020 and 2021, which has left the arid northern and eastern regions facing an emergency.

President Uhuru Kenyatta declared the drought a natural disaster last month, with 2.1 million people already grappling with hunger, according to the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA).

The WFP’s alarming projection is nearly three times the figure recorded last year between October and December, when 852,000 people were facing severe food insecurity, the UN agency said.

“This drought comes right on the back of Covid-19 which has had a tremendous economic impact on livelihoods. It comes on the back of locusts and, in some areas, floods,” WFP representative and country director Lauren Landis told AFP.

“We’re desperately worried that the next short (rainy) season coming in October will also fail and that means then we’re going to be in (an) extremely dire situation,” she said.

“I fear we’re going to reach the level of 2017, our last big drought here in Kenya. I think we’re looking at 2.5 million people in the coming months that will be affected.”

East Africa endured a harrowing drought in 2017 which also brought neighbouring Somalia to the brink of famine.

Experts say extreme weather events are happening with increased frequency and intensity due to climate change.

– Malnourished children –

The drought in Kenya has already left vulnerable populations reeling, the WFP said, with over 465,200 children under five and more than 93,300 pregnant and breastfeeding women suffering from acute malnutrition. 

The Kenyan government announced earlier this month that it had allocated two billion shillings ($18 million, 15.5 million euros) to support an emergency response, with an emphasis on providing clean drinking water to residents of Kenya’s 23 worst-hit counties.

“Experts are telling us signs are showing we might not get good rains, so we are preparing for the long haul,” said Eugene Wamalwa, the minister in charge of decentralisation. 

The Council of Governors, which brings together the leaders of the country’s 47 counties, said they had set aside 1.34 billion shillings to fund emergency operations.

The authorities have also dispatched 14 trucks of food for livestock, the main source of income in the affected regions. 

The food and water shortages have severely affected the ability to farm crops and rear cattle, raising the risk of conflict as people compete for access to land and essential supplies.

– Human-animal conflict –

As conditions have worsened, several instances of violence have been reported, with pastoralists clashing over access to increasingly scarce water points.

Human-animal conflict has also increased. In mid-August, two elephants escaped from a reserve and entered the town of Isiolo in central Kenya, where they injured a man who tried to chase them away. 

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, the elephants left the reserve in search of water and food. 

“Drought brings together a conflict for resources. Everyone is searching for water, everyone is searching for feed for livestock, farmers are trying to still grow crops, all doing it with limited resources,” said Landis.

“We’ve already seen (violence) in many places in Kenya and I sense it will only get worse.”

The WFP has appealed for $139 million (120 million euros) in fresh funding to tackle the humanitarian crisis, with only $28 million raised so far.

“That’s simply for getting us through to the next rainy season. Should that rainy season fail, the needs will be even higher,” Landis warned.

“We’ve really reached the breaking point.”

Hundreds of young people led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg marched in Milan Friday to demand swift climate action a month ahead of the crucial COP26 environmental summit in Glasgow.

The Fridays for Future marches that brought large crowds of youth together in cities across the globe were interrupted by two years of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“We have to bring attention back to the huge issue that is the climate crisis,” 15-year-old Maria told AFP, dressed in a white hazmat suit and green face paint.

“We are so happy to be back in the street,” added the Italian teenager, marching under a giant wave of green cloth.

A few high-profile guests led the front of the parade including Thunberg and Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate.

Both were in Milan as part of the official UN gathering for the youth version of the COP26 climate summit, to which 400 young people were invited.

“The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not,” read a sign in the crowd.

Other messages included the ever-popular “There’s no planet B” or drawings of an ailing Earth with a thermometer in its cartoon mouth crying: “Save me”. 

Some signs expressed thanks to Thunberg or quoted her infamous “How dare you?” speech at the UN General Assembly that went viral two years ago.

– ‘Blah, blah, blah’ –

Taking the microphone at the end of the march, Thunberg repeated her criticism of leaders who she says are all talk and no action.

“We see through their lies and their blah blah blah, and we are tired of it,” she said, “hope is us: the people.”

“We are the change together! Let’s never stop, let’s continue the fight,” she added, while the crowd chanted “Greta!” in unison.

“We will not allow (ourselves) to be silenced,” said Nakate before going on to list storms, floods and droughts that have cost lives across the African continent.

The march took place as ministers from several dozen countries gathered for meetings to prepare the COP26 summit in Scotland.

At their first session the day before, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres once again called for urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the most ambitious goal of the Paris accord.

“I cannot emphasise enough that time is running out. Irreversible climate tipping points lie alarmingly close,” Guterres told the ministers.

“We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”

Hundreds of young people led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg marched in Milan Friday to demand swift climate action a month ahead of the crucial COP26 environmental summit in Glasgow.

The Fridays for Future marches that brought large crowds of youth together in cities across the globe were interrupted by two years of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Last week it was Berlin that played host to Thunberg, the unofficial leader of a movement that brought millions to the streets across the world in 2019.

“We have to bring attention back to the huge issue that is the climate crisis,” 15-year-old Maria told AFP, dressed in a white hazmat suit and green face paint.

“We are so happy to be back in the street,” added the Italian teenager, marching under a giant wave made of green cloth.

A few high-profile guests led the front of the parade including Thunberg and Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate.

Both were in Milan as part of the official UN gathering for the youth version of the COP26, to which 400 young people were invited.

“The world is waking up and change is coming whether you like it or not,” read a sign in the crowd.

Other messages included the ever-popular “There’s no planet B” or drawings of an ailing Earth with a thermometer in its cartoon mouth crying: “Save me”. 

Some signs expressed thanks to Thunberg or quoted her infamous “How dare you?” speech at the UN General Assembly that went two years ago.

“There will always be more of us,” said German student Frida, 24, who is studying in Italy. “It shows that the climate matters to a lot of people.”

The march took place as ministers from several dozen countries gathered for meetings to prepare the COP26 summit.

At their first session the day before, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres once again called for urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels — the most ambitious goal of the Paris accord.

“I cannot emphasise enough that time is running out. Irreversible climate tipping points lie alarmingly close,” Guterres told the ministers.

“We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”

The wild boars root through Rome’s rotting rubbish, as furious residents cry foul: there are political fortunes at stake in Italy’s mayoral elections this weekend, but in the Eternal City garbage is the biggest talking point.

From the capital to Milan, Naples and Bologna, voters head to the urns Sunday and Monday for ballots being closely watched as a test ahead of the general election in 2023.

But in Rome — one of the world’s dirtiest cities, according to a ranking last month by the British magazine Time Out — residents are more concerned with the perennial transport, flooding, waste and pothole woes in this city of 2.8 million inhabitants.

Rome’s current mayor, Virginia Raggi from the anti-establishment Five Stars Movement (M5S), has won praise for taking on the city’s fierce new mafia, the Casamonica family of loan sharks and drug traffickers.

But her widely-mocked plans to use sheep as lawnmowers and bees to combat pollution — while rotting refuse piles up next to playgrounds, buses spontaneously combust in the heat and weeds run wild — may cost her dearly.

The candidate of the right-wing alliance, Nicola Michetti, is likely to pocket the most votes due to a split on the left, according to the last polls published before a pre-election blackout.

But he is not predicted to get over the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a run-off in two weeks — and polls say he may then lose in round two to the Democratic Party’s Roberto Gualtieri, a former economy minister.

– ‘Killer seagulls’ –

Lawyer Michetti, 55, says pick him to clean up the city, or “today we have seagulls and boars, tomorrow it could be cholera”.

His champion, the head of far-right Brothers of Italy party Giorgia Meloni, accuses Raggi of playing the zoologist not the mayor.

“Boars, rats as big as labradors, killer seagulls, we’ve seen it all,” she said this week, saying Rome had become an international joke.

Gualtieri and rival centre-left candidate Carlo Calenda, meanwhile, have called for round tables with experts to tackle the problem of the wild boars.

In the picturesque neighbourhood of Trastevere in Rome, where bins often overflow onto the cobbles, 60-year old resident Tiziana De Silvestro, out walking her dog, said the root of the problem was rubbish left overnight outside bars and restaurants.

“Now the city is full of animals, crows, seagulls, not to mention mice and cockroaches,” she said.

Volunteers sick of the filth have begun in recent years to organise periodic cleaning sessions — but say the city should do its part.

“There are many young people, many voluntary associations that are reacting, that are trying to say: ‘enough is enough’,” Cristiano Tancredi from “Retake Roma” told AFPTV.

“I think the next mayor will have to take this into consideration: there is a great demand from citizens who want a better city, a different city,” he said.

Some 12 million voters are eligible to cast ballots in the elections, which are being held not only in the country’s largest cities but in more than 1,000 smaller centres, including Morterone in Lombardy, which has just 33 inhabitants.

Red-roofed, left-wing stalwart Bologna is considered a safe seat, while the centre-left is confident of taking Milan and Naples too. The race is closer in Turin, which the centre-right is hungrily eyeing.

Australia’s powerful mining sector has backed a 2050 net-zero carbon target, heaping pressure on the country’s coal-championing government to follow suit.

The Minerals Council of Australia — which represents mining heavy hitters like BHP and Rio Tinto — said a 2050 target was achievable through “significant investment in technology”.

“A more sustainable minerals sector is not only important for Australia’s post-Covid recovery, it is also helping to sustain and improve the lives of millions around the world,” chief executive Tania Constable said.

Australia is currently one of the world’s leading exporters of fossil fuels, particularly coal and natural gas.

Its conservative government continues to fund new coal projects despite the global climate crisis and mounting questions about whether new mines make economic sense.

Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison has so far shied away from setting a net-zero target carbon emissions target, despite pressure from the United States, Britain and other allies ahead of climate talks in Glasgow.

Morrison has threatened to boycott the landmark UN climate summit, which begins late this month.

At the same time, his government has slowly shifted focus away from a 2030 carbon-neutral target to a less ambitious 2050 target — which critics say is too little, too late.

A series of senior figures within Morrison’s government, and now closely tied industry groups, have backed the 2050 target publicly.

But there is still division within Morrison’s ruling coalition.

He faces reelection before May next year and will almost certainly need the stridently pro-coal and climate-sceptic National Party to form a government.

Polls show most Australians favour concrete action to tackle climate change, with those calls only intensifying following a string of climate-worsened bushfires and other natural disasters.

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, one of the world’s most active, has erupted but its lava so far is limited to its central crater and not threatening inhabited areas, authorities said Thursday.

Lava fountains began appearing Wednesday on the surface of the crater’s lava lake and have reached the “height of a 5-story building,” the US Geological Survey wrote on Twitter

Cracks first appeared in the Halema’uma’u crater earlier Wednesday and very quickly gave way to the lava fountains, which at times exceed a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius, the USGS said.

The eruptions that have regularly rocked Kilauea since the 1950s have made it a popular destination for tourists.

Officials at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where Kilauea is located, have begun mobilizing staff to cope with an expected influx of visitors.

“We do expect visitation to increase as the word gets out and spread through the weekend,” Hawaii Volcanoes National Park spokeswoman Jessica Ferracane told the Honolulu Star.

Kilauea does not present any immediate danger but the USGS said it “continues to monitor the volcano closely” because the beginning of eruption phases “are dynamic and uncertain.”

Kilauea is one of the five volcanoes on the island of Hawaii, the largest in this Pacific archipelago. 

In 2018, a Kilauea eruption destroyed several hundred homes. About 20 people who took a boat trip to watch the magma flow into the sea were injured, including one seriously, by a jet of lava.