AFP UK

Roaring blazes encircled a Turkish thermal power plant Tuesday and forced farmers to herd panicked cattle toward the sea as wildfires that have killed eight people raged on for a seventh day.

The nation of 84 million has been transfixed in horror as the most destructive wildfires in generations erase pristine forests and rich farmland across swaths of Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean coasts.

Frightened tourists have been forced to scamper onto boats for safety and dozens of villages have been evacuated as wild winds and soaring heat fan the flames.

An AFP team in the Aegean city of Hisaronu saw farmers pulling their screaming animals out of burning barns and shepherding to them to the relative safety of the beach.

“The fire happened in an instant,” local farmer Mevlut Tarim said after managing to pull some of his panicked herd through pitch-black smoke and patches of burning turf encircling his farm.

“One of my cows died. It burned,” he recalled. “I had never seen anything like it. You can’t even call it a fire. It was really like a bomb.”

– ‘Whole new dimension’ –

Officials in neighbouring Greece have blamed two blazes on the island of Rhodes and the Peloponnese peninsula on a record heatwave they link to climate change.

Another fire near Mount Parnitha cut off Athens from large stretches of northern and southern Greece.

Temperatures in excess of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Farenheit) across the south of Turkey have set off a record surge in electricity use that caused power outages Monday in cities such as Ankara and Istanbul.

But the mayor of the Aegean coast city of Milas said he was more worried about what might happen should an uncontrolled fire raising massive plumes of smoke over the region engulf the local thermal power plant.

Mayor Muhammet Tokat posted an increasingly urgent series of messages on Twitter showing the blazes spreading up a hill toward the presumed location of the plant.

“The fire has reached the residential complexes,” he tweeted. “Going beyond this hill will mean that the fire will reach a whole new dimension.”

He later reported briefing Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu about the unfolding crisis and then sheltered with some other local officials by the beach.

– Anger at Erdogan –

Tokat is a member of Turkey’s main opposition party and one of a growing chorus of voices critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the disaster.

The Turkish leader came under a torrent of angry ridicule on social media for tossing out bags of tea to confused locals while visiting the affected region under heavy police escort last weekend.

Erdogan also tweeted a message of thanks to “all friendly countries” after being criticised for being slow or unwilling to accept foreign offers of help.

Many Turks turn to social media for news after a crackdown that followed a failed 2016 coup against Erdogan saw top TV channels and newspapers fall under government influence.

Erdogan’s media aide Fahrettin Altun warned that “information spread on social media platforms, instant messaging groups and forums is fake news” designed to make Turkey look weak.

HaberTurk television also released a letter from the media regulator telling broadcasters they may be fined if they continue airing live footage of the fires and running stories “that provoke fear and worries in the public”.

The government said Tuesday it had contained 147 fires and was still fighting nine.

Turkey’s defence and interior ministers said they were also mobilising their forces to help the firefighters.

The Milas mayor suggested the help was arriving too late.

“It was obvious that this would happen,” he tweeted as the fire neared the power plant. “I am going to cry in anger.”

Boeing said Tuesday it was delaying an uncrewed flight of its Starliner capsule to the International Space Station (ISS), pushing back a key test it last attempted in 2019.

The spaceship had been due to launch on a United Launch Alliance (ULA)  Atlas V rocket built from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:20 pm Eastern time (1720 GMT).

“We’re confirming today’s #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch is scrubbed,” Boeing Space tweeted.

Boeing said more details would be forthcoming soon, but a weather update in the morning had placed the chances of launch at only 50 percent.

The test flight was supposed to take place Friday but had to be rescheduled after a Russian science module inadvertently fired its thrusters following docking with the ISS, pushing the orbital outpost off kilter. 

After NASA ended the Space Shuttle program in 2011, it gave both Boeing and SpaceX multi-billion dollar contracts to provide its astronauts taxi services to the space station and end US reliance on Russian rockets for the journey.

SpaceX’s program has moved forward faster, having now undertaken three crewed missions. 

Boeing’s program is lagging behind. During an initial uncrewed test flight in December 2019, the Starliner capsule experienced software glitches that caused problems with the way it fired its thrusters.

As a result, Starliner did not have enough fuel to reach the ISS and had to return to Earth prematurely, and a subsequent investigation showed it almost experienced a dire flight anomaly while reentering the atmosphere too.

NASA later called the mission a “high visibility close call,” a rare designation reserved for near-catastrophes.

Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, told reporters last week he had confidence this time around. 

“We want it to go well, we expect it to go well, and we’ve done all the preparations we can possibly do,” he said.

“Starliner is a great vehicle, but we know how hard it is, and it’s a test flight as well and I fully expect we’ll learn something on this test flight.”

The spacecraft will be carrying more than 400 pounds (180 kilograms) of cargo and crew supplies to the ISS and will return more than 550 pounds of cargo, including air tanks, when it lands in the western US desert at the end of its mission.

A forest fire broke out on Tuesday cutting the main motorway linking Athens to northern and southern Greece, officials said, as the nation reels under a severe heatwave.

The civil protection service issued warnings to residents to be on the alert as the blaze spread at the foot of Mount Parnitha, 30 kilometres (20 miles) north of the capital.

Local media reported dozens of children had been evacuated from a holiday camp in the area near the suburb of Varympompi.

The fire brigade said five helicopters, four water-bombing aircraft, 35 fire trucks and 104 firemen were fighting the flames in the zone that includes the former Greek royal family’s summer palace of Tatoi.

“We are facing the worst heatwave since 1987,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said this week.

Experts have warned climate change was increasing both the frequency and intensity of the wildfires.

More than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of pine and olive were torched by a fire that broke out on Saturday near the city of Patras, 200 kilometres (125 miles) west of Athens. It was brought under control on Monday.

Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias announced there had been 1,584 fires across Greece in July compared to 953 in 2019, with 116 new blazes in just the previous 24 hours.

Temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) have been forecast for this week.

A fire on the Greek island of Rhodes, near the Turkish coast, has been burning since Sunday with firefighters struggling to gain the upper hand.

Turkey is suffering its worst fires in at least a decade, claiming the lives of eight people and forcing hundreds to evacuate in southern areas popular with tourists.

Farmer Mevlut Tarim says the furious fire that burned his cow alive, killed eight people and scorched vast swathes of Turkey was like an explosion.

“The fire happened in an instant,” the 67-year-old told AFP after managing to pull and push some of his screaming animals through pitch-black smoke and patches of burning turf encircling his farm. 

He said he, too, was lucky to be alive.

“One of my cows died. It burned,” he recalled. “I had never seen anything like it. You can’t even call it a fire. It was really like a bomb.”

Tarim’s story is similar to those of other farmers as the deadliest and most destructive fires in generations rage across Turkey’s southern coast for a seventh day.

Thousands of farm animals have perished and huge chunks of lush forest coating the rolling hills have turned into skeletal sticks and ash.

The anguished farmers have been trying to direct their herds toward the relative safety of the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts.

But guiding the panicked animals is difficult and the winds whipping up the firestorms around them are unpredictable.

And the exhausted firefighters dumping seawater on the flames from helicopters and dousing the wreckage with hoses are not always able to arrive in time to help farmers such as Tarim.

– ‘Not running away’ –

Lemis Sapir is a local insurance agent who felt it was his duty to stay put and help out any way he could.

“I didn’t feel like running away,” the 44-year-old said. “We are going to give all the help we can.”

Turkish social media have been filled with images of brave locals trying to put the fires out with everything from garden watering pitchers to tree branches.

Sapir said the burning town of Hisaronu on the Aegean Sea has received reinforcements from other regions.

“But because of the height of the mountains, which are steep, and the very thick forest, the firefighters can’t intervene,” he said.

“The air reinforcements are not strong enough. There are fires in too many places in Turkey at the moment and we can’t respond to them all.”

Turkey’s response to the disaster has turned a huge political scandal that has piled pressure on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The opposition accuses the powerful Turkish leader of being too slow to accept offers of foreign assistance — including from regional rival Greece — and failing to properly maintain firefighting planes.

Erdogan’s office counters that the entire emergency rescue force has been fully mobilised for days and calls claims of mismanagement “fake news” designed to make Turkey look weak.

Local store manager Yasemin Akkaya said this was not the time to play politics or argue about Turkey’s geostrategic might.

“This is not the time to be proud,” Akkaya said.

“We are a powerful country. Our people are strong. But I have my water cut off at home,” he said. “Do we need water? Yes, because the area of the fire is very large.”

Farmer Tarim shakes his head as he surveys the damage.

“Look around. It’s a disaster,” he said. “We are lucky to be alive.”

Bangladesh extended its strict lockdown on Tuesday and announced plans to vaccinate at least 10 million people in a week as the country battles a major Covid-19 surge.

The vaccination drive from August 7 will be led by tens of thousands of health workers at 14,000 health centres, senior minister A.K.M Mozammel Haque said.

“More than 10 million people will be vaccinated in a week. Elderly people, workers and shopkeepers will be given the priority,” Haque said.

Health ministry spokesman Maidul Islam Prodhan said there was enough stock to inoculate 12 million people following the arrival of vaccines from China and the US under the Covax initiative.

The minister also said that the nationwide lockdown in place since July 1 — except for a religious festival in mid-July — would be extended until August 10.

Shops and public transport will resume from next week, but only vaccinated shopkeepers and transport workers would be allowed out of their homes to work, Haque said.

Bangladesh has so far reported some 1.3 million cases and some 21,160 deaths — figures experts said are a gross undercount.

China’s climate envoy on Tuesday said the world’s most populous nation would release its updated plans to reduce carbon emissions “in the near future” as nations prepare to meet later this year for a pivotal global conference.

Climate negotiators from 196 countries and the European Union as well as businesses, experts and world leaders will gather in Glasgow in November for the COP26 summit. 

The meeting is the crucial next step in getting the world’s nations to agree to the kind of reduction in carbon emissions needed to stave off catastrophic climate change.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries are meant to have submitted updated 2030 climate targets ahead of COP26. 

But nearly half have yet to do so, including key global emitters like China and India.

On Tuesday, China’s top climate negotiator said Beijing’s updated plans would soon be released, potentially before the Glasgow meet. 

“In the near future relevant policy papers will be out there, there will be detailed implementation plans,” Xie Zhenhua told an online webinar organised by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

“Then we’re going to talk about that support to the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow,” he added, according to a simultaneous English translation of his speech.

The United Nations is pushing for a global coalition committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 which will cover all countries. China has said it will aim for carbon neutrality by 2060.

The 2015 Paris Agreement adopted a collective promise to cap the planet’s rising surface temperature at “well below” two degrees Celsius and an aspirational limit on 1.5 degrees. 

– Beijing’s reluctance –

Many scientists now say 1.5 degrees must be reached to effectively tackle climate change and say huge emitters like China will be crucial in making that a reality. 

Record-smashing heatwaves, floods and drought across three continents in recent weeks — all amplified by global warming — have added pressure for decisive action in Glasgow.

China is reluctant to commit to 1.5 degrees.

“Some countries are pushing to rewrite the Paris Agreement,” Xie said. “That is, they want to strive to change the target of control for the rise of temperature from two degrees Celsius to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

“We have to understand the different situations in different countries, and strive to reach a consensus,” he added. 

China argues that industrialised nations, especially in the West, were able to get wealthy before carbon reduction controls came in and that it and other developing economies should not be expected to make as heavy reductions.

Critics of that view say the world cannot afford for huge populous nations like China and India to be slow on reducing their own carbon footprints.

“While China has pledged carbon neutrality in mid-century, which is great, it has not so far announced plans to do enough in the 2020s in my judgment,” Todd Stern, President Barack Obama’s former climate negotiator, who has often sat opposite Xie at summits, told the same webinar.

A roaring blaze raced toward a Turkish thermal power plant Tuesday and farmers herded panicked cattle toward the sea as wildfires that have killed eight people raged on for a seventh day.

The nation of 84 million has been transfixed in horror as the most destructive wildfires in generations erase pristine forests and rich farmland across swaths of Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean coasts.

Frightened tourists have been forced to scamper onto boats for safety and dozens of villages have been evacuated as wild winds and soaring heat spread the flames.

An AFP team in the Aegean city of Marmaris saw farmers pulling their screaming animals out of burning barns and pulling them to the relative safety of the beach.

Officials in neighbouring Greece have blamed two smaller fires on the island of Rhodes and the Peloponnese peninsula on a record heatwave they link to climate change.

Temperature in excess of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Farenheit) across the south of Turkey also set off a record surge in electricity use that caused power outages Monday in cities such as Ankara and Istanbul.

Turkey’s energy ministry blamed the outages on drought-like conditions that have emptied dams responsible for hydropower production and a “record level” in electricity use in the heat.

But the mayor of the Aegean coast city of Milas said he was more worried about what might happen should an uncontrolled fire raising massive plumes of smoke over the region engulf the local thermal power plant.

– ‘Whole new dimension’ –

Milas Mayor Muhammet Tokat posted an increasingly urgent series of messages on Twitter showing the blazes spreading up a hill toward the presumed location of the plant.

“This is a critical place,” he said in one video showing the blazes.

“The fire has reached the residential complexes,” he posted an hour later. “Going beyond this hill will mean that the fire will reach a whole new dimension.”

Tokat is a member of Turkey’s main opposition party and one of a growing chorus of voices critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the disaster.

The Turkish leader came under a torrent of angry ridicule on social media for tossing out bags of tea to confused locals while visiting the affected region under heavy police escort last weekend.

Many Turks turn to social media for news after a crackdown that followed a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016 saw top TV channels and newspapers fall under government influence.

Erdogan’s media aide Fahrettin Altun warned that “information spread on social media platforms, instant messaging groups and forums is fake news” designed to make Turkey look week.

“Please, let’s rely on official authorities’ statements,” he tweeted.

The government said late Monday it had put out 145 fires and was still fighting nine.

Turkey’s defence and interior ministers said they were also mobilising their forces to help the firefighters.

The police said they intended to use water spraying tanks of the type used to dispurse unsanctioned demonstrations and rallies.

But the Milas mayor said his earlier appeals for help from firefighting planes have gone unanswered.

“It was obvious that this would happen,” he tweeted as the fire neared the power plant. “I am going to cry in anger.”

Boeing will be aiming to get its spaceflight program back on track Tuesday with an uncrewed flight of its Starliner capsule to the International Space Station (ISS), after its last such test in 2019 ended in failure.

The spaceship is due to launch on an Atlas V rocket built by the United Launch Alliance from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:20 pm Eastern time (1720 GMT).

A livestream of the mission, Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), will be up on NASA’s website.

About 30 minutes after launch, the Starliner capsule will fire its thrusters to enter orbit and begin a daylong trip to the space station, with docking set for 1:37 pm on Wednesday.

The weather forecast currently predicts a 60 percent chance of launch, with clouds and lightning the main possible hurdles.

The test flight was supposed to take place Friday but had to be rescheduled after a Russian science module inadvertently fired its thrusters following docking with the ISS, sending the orbital outpost out of its normal orientation. 

After NASA ended the Space Shuttle program in 2011, it gave both Boeing and SpaceX multi-billion dollar contracts to provide its astronauts taxi services to the space station and end US reliance on Russian rockets for the journey.

SpaceX’s program has moved forward faster, having now undertaken three crewed missions. 

Boeing’s program is lagging behind. During an initial uncrewed test flight in December 2019, the Starliner capsule experienced software issues, failed to dock at the ISS and returned to Earth prematurely.

NASA later identified 80 corrective actions Boeing needed to take and characterized the test as a “high visibility close call” during which time the spacecraft could have been lost twice.

Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, told reporters last week he had confidence this time around. 

“We want it to go well, we expect it to go well, and we’ve done all the preparations we can possibly do,” he said.

“Starliner is a great vehicle, but we know how hard it is, and it’s a test flight as well and I fully expect we’ll learn something on this test flight.”

The spacecraft will be carrying more than 400 pounds (180 kilograms) of cargo and crew supplies to the ISS and will return more than 550 pounds of cargo, including air tanks, when it lands in the western US desert at the end of its mission.

Months after Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker began making a documentary about the largest-ever wildfire in California, the blaze lost its crown to an even bigger inferno.

The 2017 Thomas Fire is now only the seventh worst by area destroyed — and is likely to be overtaken soon by the Dixie Fire raging through the state’s northern forests, as climate change makes wildfire season longer, hotter and more devastating.

“One of the things that I learned in the course of making this film, is these fires happen all the time — they happen over and over and over again,” said Walker.

“It’s just terrible proof of the thesis of the film. I didn’t mean to be proven right, or to make such a topical film, but that’s where we find ourselves.”

“Bring Your Own Brigade,” in theaters Friday, takes a wide-ranging look at the causes, conflicts and possible solutions that swirl around the increasingly deadly wildfires in the western United States.

It begins with harrowing footage of two fires in November 2018 that devastated Malibu and Paradise — two Californian cities at different ends of the socio-economic scale — in which a total of 88 people perished.

Filmmakers were embedded with firefighters during the carnage, and the movie focuses on the characters and personal stories of emergency responders and the stubborn residents who have since returned to live in communities that were reduced to ashes.

Along with tales of heroism, the film quickly finds that many of those most affected by the wildfires — and the climate change that scientists say heightens the risk of blazes — are often the most reluctant to change their behavior.

Malibu residents vote down a proposal to pay more taxes to fund more firefighters, instead turning their ire on the emergency officials who they say failed to save their homes.

And the city of Paradise rejects a series of cheap and effective proposals to help prevent further tragedies, shunning solutions as simple as a law requiring five feet (1.5 meters) of “defensible space” that must be cleared of vegetation around homes.

“For a town like Paradise not to be able to adopt different building standards means that they’re just going to be in the same position again,” said Walker. 

“We haven’t managed to convince them even that these small compromises or small costs are worthwhile. I think that was really illuminating,” she told AFP.

– ‘American individualist’ –

While addressing climate change directly, the film also explores other causes of wildfires that should in theory be easier to fix.

It makes the seemingly paradoxical case that large-scale logging — a solution proposed by former president Donald Trump — actually makes wildfires worse.

The deadly Camp Fire in Paradise ripped through a nearby timber plantation, able to spread rapidly through thickly planted trees, logging debris, and invasive species such as highly flammable grasses.

Walker also talks with members of indigenous groups such as the Plains Miwok, who protected themselves from massive wildfires for centuries before Europeans arrived by lighting small, carefully managed “prescribed burns.” 

The practice — designed to remove hazardous vegetation — is becoming increasingly common again in California, although residents often oppose it over safety fears and air quality concerns.

“When we’re not in this emergency state, it’s hard to want to make compromises and sacrifices,” said Walker, who has received two Oscar nominations including for 2010 documentary “Waste Land.”

“I think that’s not uniquely a American thing, although I think that it is perhaps epitomized by the gun-toting American individualist.”

This year’s fire season suggests that attitude will need to change fast.

By late July, the number of acres burned in California was up more than 250 percent from 2020 — itself the worst year in the state’s modern history.

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct “cousin” species.

The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.

But the finding was contentious, and “a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing,” a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d’Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.

A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes — instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.

What’s more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.

More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.

This “supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments,” said d’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.

It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal “art” to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old. 

But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be. 

The team wrote that the pigments are not “art” in the narrow sense of the word “but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.”

The cave formations “played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities,” though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.