AFP UK

DR Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park is celebrating the birth of an eastern lowland gorilla, one of the world’s most endangered species.

“We have the pleasure of announcing the birth of a baby to the female Mwinja,” the park announced on Facebook on Friday.

“Our rangers were there and captured this moment of intimacy, on Saturday August 7. She seemed happy to be showing off her baby. Both are in very good healthy.”

The birth is “a sign of hope,” the park’s spokesman, Hubert Mulongoy, told AFP.

The park, located in a deeply troubled part of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, said the birth brought its tally of the apes — Gorilla beringei graueri — from 171 to 172.

Mwinja has already had offspring but this is the first she has had with a well-known male called Nabirembo.

The park’s gorilla population includes two tribes who live in so-called habituation, meaning that they are used to human presence nearby.

Kahuzi-Biega covers around 6,000 square kilometres (2,300 square miles) of mountains and rainforests near the western banks of Lake Kivu and the Rwandan border.

It is a magnet for intrepid eco-tourists, who are drawn to its unique landscape and rare species.

The park is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in danger because of the presence of armed groups and settlers, poaching and deforestation. 

The death toll from Turkey’s flash floods soared to 27 on Friday as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited one the hardest-hit cities to lead a prayer for the victims and pledge government help.

The devastation across Turkey’s northern Black Sea regions came just as the disaster-hit country was winning control over hundreds of wildfires that killed eight people and destroyed swathes of forest along its scenic southern coast.

A previous spate of flooding killed six people last month in the northeastern province of Rize.

Scientists believe such natural disasters are becoming more intense and frequent because of global warming caused by polluting emissions.

Turkey’s emergence as a frontline country in the battle against climate change also poses a challenge to Erdogan two years before the next scheduled general election.

The powerful Turkish leader was roundly condemned on social media for tossing out bags of tea to locals while visiting one of the fire-ravaged regions at the end of July.

Polls show that climate warming is a top priority for up to seven million members of Generation Z, whose votes Erdogan will need to extend his rule into a third decade in the 2023 elections.

Erdogan sounded both mournful and hopeful as he led a prayer for the victims before a few hundred residents in the inundated city of Kastamonu.

“We will do whatever we can as a state as quickly as we can, and rise from the ashes,” Erdogan told the crowd.

“We can’t bring back the citizens we lost, but our state has the means and power to compensate those who lost loved ones.”

– Building anger –

But the anger appeared to be building in Black Sea towns and cities over what some said was a lack of proper warning from local officials about the dangers of the incoming storms.

“They told us to move our cars but they didn’t tell us to save ourselves or our children,” Kastamonu province resident Arzu Yucel told the private DHA news agency.

“If they had, I would have taken them and left in five minutes. They didn’t even tell us that the river was overflowing,” the elderly woman said.

Turkey’s rugged Black Sea coast is dotted with villages built along valleys that frequently experience heavy flooding in the summer months.

Some longtime residents of the region said this year’s flooding was the worst they could recall.

“I am 75 years old and have never seen anything like this,” Batin province resident Adem Senol told the Anadolu state news agency.

“The water rose higher than the level of our windows, it broke down our door, even a wall,” he said. “It was a powerful stream, enough to sweep away houses.”

Emergency services said waters briefly rose in some parts as high as four metres (13 feet) before subsiding and spreading across a region stretching more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) wide.

Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli has warned that the area was facing “a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years”.

Images on television and social media showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter, and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.

The Anadolu state news agency said rescuers were focusing on a four-floor apartment building in Kastamonu that partially crumbled and another one next to it that completely collapsed.

Concern was also increasing over a likely higher death toll.

Some locals told Turkish media Friday that they still had no news from their closest family and friends.

Weather services predicted rains to continue to lash the affected area for the remainder of the week.

Greece breathed a sigh of relief Friday after “mega fires” that have ravaged much of the country were brought under control, but firefighters elsewhere in southern Europe braced for fresh outbreaks.

The scorching temperatures across the Mediterranean have increased the risk of blazes, which have already devastated parts of Italy, Turkey, Algeria and Tunisia, with the bulk of Spain and Portugal’s regions put on high alert for wildfires.

Rising temperatures and increased dryness due to changing rainfall patterns have created the ideal conditions for forest fires, with the five-year period to 2019 “unprecedented” for fire, especially in Europe and North America, according to the World Meterological Organization.

Scientists say with heatwaves becoming longer and more intense due to climate change, they lead to out-of-control wildfires that inflict unprecedented material and environmental damage.

Although rain and a drop in temperatures helped firefighters in Greece gain a hold on the active fronts on the island of Evia and the Arcadia region which have burned more than 100,000 hectares, winds forecast this weekend increased the likelihood of new flare-ups, authorities said.

The huge multinational force assisting Greece will remain in place, said civil protection spokesman Spyros Georgious. 

“They are helping to monitor the perimeters of burned areas in Evia and Arcadia, which are many kilometres long,” Georgious said. 

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called the fires Greece’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades,” which he linked directly to climate change.

– ‘Difficult’ days ahead –

In Spain on Friday, firefighters managed to tame a blaze in the northeastern Catalonia region that forced the evacuation of a few dozen campers in a protected forest. 

But another fire continued to burn near the town of Rubia in the northwest, while temperatures in some southwest provinces were expected to exceed 46 degrees Celsius (115 Fahrenheit).

In a sign of the potentially shifting front of Europe’s fires, three French Canadair aircraft that had been dispatched to Greece were redeployed to Sicily.

Firefighters have been carrying out hundreds of operations throughout the island, as well as in the southern Calabria region. Meanwhile overnight, about 30 people were evacuated after a large fire broke out in a nature reserve near Tivoli, east of Rome.

Regional authorities on Sicily recorded Europe’s highest ever temperature on Wednesday, of 48.8 degrees Celsius, although this still has to be officially confirmed.

Scorching temperatures were forecast to continue into the weekend across Italy, sending tourists in the major cities to flock to fountains and ice cream shops.

In Portugal, the government placed 14 of the 18 regions under a fire alert, with Prime Minister Antonio Costa warning the next few days would be “difficult”.

The southern shore of the Mediterranean has not been spared, as firefighters have continued to battle blazes that already killed 71 people in northern Algeria, and dozens of fires recorded since Monday in Tunisia.

In Turkey, which has barely recovered from deadly fires, at least 27 people died in flooding in the north of the country.

The death toll from Turkey’s flash floods soared to 27 on Friday as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan prepared to inspect one of the hardest-hit regions and lend his moral support.

The devastation across Turkey’s northern Black Sea regions came just as the disaster-hit country was winning control over hundreds of wildfires that killed eight people and destroyed swathes of forest along its scenic southern coast.

Turkey suffered another bout of flooding in the northeastern province of Rize that killed six people last month.

Scientists believe such natural disasters are becoming more intense and frequent because of global warming caused by harmful emissions.

Turkey’s emergence as a frontline country in the battle against climate change also poses a challenge to Erdogan two years before the next scheduled general election.

The powerful Turkish leader was roundly condemned on social media for tossing out bags of tea to locals while visiting one of the fire-ravaged regions when the wildfires were first spreading at the end of July.

Polls show that the climate is a top priority for up to seven million members of Generation Z whose votes Erdogan will need to extend his rule into a third decade in the 2023 vote.

Erdogan so far has said little about the floods.

“I offer my condolences to the loved ones of our 17 fellow citizens who lost their lives,” he said when the toll was still 17 on Thursday night.

Media reports said Erdogan would chair a crisis response meeting attended by top ministers in one of the worst-hit parts of the inundated city of Kastamonu later Friday.

– Building anger –

But the anger appeared to be building in Black Sea towns and cities over what some said was a lack of proper warning from local officials about the dangers of the incoming storms.

“They told us to move our cars but they didn’t tell us to save ourselves or our children,” Kastamonu province resident Arzu Yucel told the private DHA news agency.

“If they had, I would have taken them and left in five minutes. They didn’t even tell us that the river was overflowing,” the elderly woman said.

Turkey’s rugged Black Sea coast is dotted with villages built along valleys that frequently experience heavy flooding in the summer months.

Some longtime residents of the region said this year’s flooding was the worst they could recall.

“I am 75 years old and have never seen anything like this,” Batin province resident Adem Senol told the Anadolu state news agency.

“The water rose higher than the level of our windows, it broke down our door, even a wall,” he said. “It was a powerful stream, enough to sweep away houses.”

Emergency services said waters briefly rose in some parts as high as four metres (13 feet) before subsiding and spreading across a region stretching more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) wide.

Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli has warned that the area was facing “a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years”.

Images on television and social media showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter, and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.

The Anadolu state news agency said rescuers were focusing on a four-floor apartment building that partially crumbled and another one next to it that completely collapsed.

Concern was also increasing over how high the death toll could climb.

Some locals told Turkish media Friday that they still had no news from their closest family and friends.

Weather services predicted rains to continue to lash the affected area for the remainder of the week.

Fires burning for more than a week that caused Greece’s worst ecological disaster in decades were finally brought under control on Friday, the fire department said, as the government raced to fund reconstruction amid mounting anger.

“As of yesterday, there is no major active front, just scattered pockets,” a fire department spokesman told AFP.

Rain and falling temperatures helped the fire-dousing effort, but crews remain on alert for possible flare-ups in hard-to-access ravines on the island of Evia and in the region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, the spokesman said.

But with strong winds forecast for the weekend, the bulk of a huge multinational force that assisted Greek firefighters this week remains in place, civil protection spokesman Spyros Georgiou said.

“They are helping to monitor the perimeters of burned areas in Evia and Arcadia, which are many kilometres long,” he said.

“Many of them are actually requesting to remain.” 

In Evia, there were more than 400 Moldovans, Poles, Serbs, Slovaks, Romanians and Ukrainians assisting Greek forces. Over 550 Austrians, Czechs, French and Germans were in Arcadia.

Hundreds of homes and many businesses have been destroyed in Evia, Arcadia and the outskirts of Athens in the prolonged fire wave that struck Greece from late July and intensified last week, during the country’s worst heatwave in decades.

– ‘Climate crisis is here’ –

Greece is just one of a number of countries in the Mediterranean region that have been hit by a savage fire season.

Heatwaves have become more likely due to climate change, scientists say. As global temperatures rise over time, heatwaves are predicted to become more frequent and intense, and their impacts more widespread.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday said “the climate crisis is here… and it tells us that everything must change,” pointing to other devastating fires in Turkey, Italy and Algeria.

He described the infernos in Greece as the country’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.

Mitsotakis pledged hundreds of millions of euros in reconstruction, reforestation and flood prevention works, and a 1.7-billion-euro ($2 billion) overhaul of the civil protection agency.

“(Recovery funds) will begin to be disbursed in a few days… and they will be greater than ever before, to all those affected,” the prime minister told a news conference Thursday.

The government has come under withering criticism from locals in stricken areas whose income from agricultural products and tourism has been wiped out.

Nearly 103,000 hectares have gone up in flames between July 29 and August 13 in Greece according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

So far this year fires have burned more than 116,000 hectares (285,000 acres), compared to an average of fewer than 10,000 hectares over the previous 12 years, EFFIS said.

Finance Minister Christos Staikouras on Friday said the government would disburse an additional 500 million euros ($586 million) this year in the wake of the fire disaster.

There have been growing calls for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

Mitsotakis said the country had battled some 600 blazes in a week, some of them “mega fires”.

But he admitted that “it seemed that this particular phenomenon exceeded our capabilities and the preparations put in place.”

The death toll from Turkey’s flash floods soared to 27 on Friday as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan prepared to inspect one of the hardest-hit regions and lend his moral support.

The devastations across Turkey’s northern Black Sea regions came just as the disaster-hit country was winning countrol over hundreds of wildfires that killed eight people and destroyed swathes of forest along its scenic southern coast.

Turkey also suffered another bout of flooding in the northeastern province of Rize last month that killed six.

World scientists believe that natural disasters like those in Turkey are becoming more intense and frequent because of global warming and climate change.

They also pose a serious challenge to Erdogan two years before Turkey’s next scheduled general election.

The powerful Turkish leader was roundly condemned on social media for tossing out bags of tea to locals while visiting one of the fire-ravaged regions when the wildfires were first spreading at the end of July,

Polls show that the climate is a top priority for up to seven million members of Generation Z whose votes Erdogan will need to extend his rule into a third decade in the 2023 vote.

Erdogan so far has said little about the flooding.

“I offer my condolences to the loved ones of our 17 fellow citizens who lost their lives,” he said when the toll was still 17 on Thursday night.

His office said that Erdogan was speaking on the phone to regional leaders and promising to deliver all the assistance available to the state.

– Collapsed buildings –

Emergency services said waters briefly rose in some parts as high as four metres (13 feet) before subsiding and spreading across a region stretching more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) wide.

Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli warned on Wednesday that the area was facing “a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years”.

Rescuers have been forced to evacuate a hospital holding 45 patients — four of them in intensive care — in the region around the coastal city of Sinop.

Images on television and social media showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.

The Anadolu state news agency said Thursday that rescuers were focusing on a four-floor apartment building that partially crumbled and another one next to it that completely collapsed.

Images showed parts of both river-front buildings toppling into the rushing flood of brown water below.

Turkey’s disaster response authority said 25 people had lost their lives in the northern Kastamonu province and two in the neighbouring region of Sinop. One person was still missing.

Weather services predicted rains to continue to lash the affected area for the remainder of week.

Fires burning for over a week that caused Greece’s worst ecological disaster in decades were finally placed under control Friday, the fire department said.

“As of yesterday, there is no major active front, just scattered pockets,” a fire department spokesman told AFP.

Rain and falling temperatures helped the fire-dousing effort, but crews remain on alert for possible flare-ups in hard-to-access ravines on the island of Evia and in the region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, the spokesman said.

But with high winds forecast for the weekend, the bulk of a huge multinational force that assisted Greek firefighters this week remains in place, civil protection spokesman Spyros Georgiou said.

“They are helping to monitor the perimeters of burned areas in Evia and Arcadia, which are many kilometres (miles) long,” he said.

“Many of them are actually requesting to remain,” Georgiou said.

Hundreds of homes and many businesses have been destroyed in Evia, Arcadia and the outskirts of Athens in the prolonged fire wave that struck Greece from late July and intensified last week, during the worst heatwave in decades.

Greece is just one of a number of countries in the Mediterranean region that have been hit by a savage fire season.

Heatwaves have become more likely due to climate change, scientists say. As global temperatures rise over time, heatwaves are predicted to become more frequent and intense, and their impacts more widespread.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday described the infernos as Greece’s “greatest ecological disaster in decades”.

He pledged hundreds of millions of euros in reconstruction, reforestation and flood prevention works.

“(Recovery funds) will begin to be disbursed in a few days… and they will be greater than ever before, to all those affected,” the prime minister told a news conference Thursday.

The government has come under withering criticism from locals in stricken areas whose income from agricultural products and tourism has been wiped out.

There have been growing calls for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

Mitsotakis on Thursday said the country had battled some 600 blazes in a week, some of them “mega fires”.

But he admitted: “It seemed that this particular phenomenon exceeded our capabilities and the preparations put in place.”

They are best known for bike-riding, but the climate-vulnerable Dutch are leading the way for electric cars with the largest number of charging stations in Europe.

Teslas and other vehicles can be seen plugged in on practically every street corner thanks to a network of some 75,000 stations — nearly a third of the entire EU total.

Investing to put enough charging stations in the reach of drivers is crucial for countries that have set targets for an all-electric car future.

For Nienke Bergsma, the lightbulb moment when she decided to buy an electric car came when four charging posts were installed at the bottom of her Rotterdam road.

Bergsma, a 37-year-old mature student living in the centre of the port city, said she had wanted to “contribute to the protection of the environment”.

While it was a headache at first to get used to the rhythm of charging, she said she was now “very happy” to have taken the leap.

Around one in every five of the 400,000 new cars sold annually in the Netherlands is now electric, due partly to tax breaks and other incentives during the last decade.

But the Dutch government has also ensured that drivers have the infrastructure to support efforts to kick the addiction to fossil fuels. 

With one-third of the Netherlands lying below sea-level, the country is particularly at risk from climate change, which UN experts this week warned was at “code red”.

– ‘Encourage people’ –

The Dutch government wants all new cars to be electric from 2030 in the Netherlands, where road traffic accounts for a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite its environmentalist image, the Netherlands is one of the EU’s top five emitters, and has more cars per capita than France or Greece.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte — his VVD party is nicknamed the ‘vroom-vroom’ party due to long-time pro-car policies — only reversed course in recent years after court victories by climate groups that said the Netherlands was breaching EU rules.

Whatever the reasons, the trend is catching on, with the Netherlands proving particularly well-suited to electric vehicles.

Fully-charged, Nienke Bergsma’s Volvo has a range of 400 kilometres (240 miles), a distance that the environment and natural sciences student practically never travels.

Short distances in one of Europe’s smallest and most densely populated countries and a high-quality road network “encourage people to take up electric motoring”, said Maarten van Biezen, co-leader of the Association of Electric Motoring (VER).

The Dutch began to encourage electric cars “very early”, in 2012, far sooner than Paris or Berlin, he said.

In addition to the 75,000 public charging stations, around 190,000 Dutch people have their own charging post at home.

– ‘Frustrating’ –

Around 30 percent of Europe’s electric vehicle charging points are in the Netherlands, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

France and Germany, the EU’s biggest countries, round out the top three, each accounting for 20 percent of the bloc.

“No other country has the same density of charging points as the Netherlands,” the Dutch government business agency RVO said.

Around half of the public or semi-public stations are in the two provinces where Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam are located, accounting for a third of the country’s population.

Most can be used just by scanning a card.

In towns, every electric car user has the right to a charging station within 200 metres of their home; while in the countryside motorists have their own posts, with 75 percent of those generating electricity for them by solar power.

The standard chargers “fill up” a car overnight or in several hours. Rapid chargers such as those at motorway service stations can refill cars’ batteries in 30 minutes.

But despite everything there still aren’t enough, said Bergsma, who charges her car every four nights. 

Even avoiding the evening rush hour she often has to spend 15 minutes looking for a charger, and said she now always makes sure she never empties the battery to avoid getting stuck.

“It’s frustrating,” she said, pointing to a charger blocked by a large plant box.

At least 21 people died as heavy downpours struck central China’s Hubei province, authorities said Friday, weeks after record floods wreaked havoc and killed hundreds in a neighbouring province.

China has been battered by unprecedented rains in recent months, extreme weather that experts say is increasingly common due to global warming.

In Hubei, torrential rains caused power cuts and landslides, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing the evacuation of nearly 6,000 people, the province’s Emergency Management Bureau said, as reservoirs reach dangerous levels.

“Twenty-one people were killed and four others are missing as heavy rain lashed townships from Wednesday,” state broadcaster Xinhua reported Friday.

Footage showed families wading in water that had risen to almost hip level and carrying essentials in plastic bags in Yicheng, which saw a record 480 millimetres (around 19 inches) of rain on Thursday. Rescuers carried people to safety on bulldozers.

“Yesterday the water levels rose to about two to three metres. My neighbour’s house was completely destroyed,” a resident from one of the worst affected areas in the city of Suizhou told local media.

“We haven’t seen so much rain in 20 or 30 years.”

Hundreds of firefighters and thousands of police and military have been dispatched to the worst affected areas, China’s Ministry of Emergency Management said.

Around 100,000 people were evacuated in the southwestern province of Sichuan last weekend as heavy rains caused several landslides. 

More than 300 people were killed in central China’s Henan province last month after record downpours dumped a year’s worth of rain on a city in three days.

China’s Meteorological Administration warned that heavy rainfall was likely to continue until next week, with regions along the Yangtze River, including Shanghai, vulnerable to flooding.

Tens of thousands of people were urged to evacuate on Friday as “unprecedented” levels of torrential rain hit western Japan, raising the risk of floods and landslides, the weather agency said.

The downpours are forecast to continue for several days over a large swathe of the country, from the northern Tohoku region to Kyushu in the south.

“There is a possibility that a grave disaster will occur” in the coming days, a Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) official told an emergency news conference shown live on public broadcaster NHK.

In Unzen city in southern Nagasaki prefecture, two houses were hit by a landslide with one woman in her 50s feared dead, a local official told AFP.

The heaviest rain was in Hiroshima prefecture, where non-compulsory evacuation orders were issued to at least 69,500 people and the top flood alert announced.

In the city of Hiroshima, “we have issued a special heavy rain warning. This is a level of heavy rain that we have never experienced before”, the JMA said in a statement.

The agency official also called the rain in some areas “unprecedented”.

The land ministry warned that water levels are extremely high in three rivers — two running through the Hiroshima region, and one in southern Kumamoto.

Scientists say climate change is intensifying the risk of heavy rain in Japan and elsewhere, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

Downpours last month caused a devastating landslide in the central resort town of Atami that killed at least 21 people.

And in 2018, more than 200 people died as floods inundated western Japan during the country’s annual rainy season.

On Friday, the JMA said that in the 24 hours from 6am on Friday, 300 millimetres (12 inches) of rain is expected in the northern part of Kyushu, with 200 to 250 millimetres forecast in many other parts of the country.