AFP UK

In Athens’ parliament square, the Evzones parade under their red berets and stifling heat.

With sweat beading on their foreheads, the presidential guards rehearse their choreography in front of a cluster of tourists as a new heatwave hits the Greek capital.

“They’re amazing, but they must be suffering,” says Jim Grace, an Irish tourist who, holding a bottle of water, watches them under the scorching sun.

“We’re adapting,” says his wife Esther Grace. “We’re drinking lots of water and putting on sunscreen.”

Dubbed a “dangerous” event due to how long it will last and the small difference between maximum and minimum temperatures, the heatwave is expected to peak on Monday, with temperatures likely reaching 42 to 44 degrees Celsius (107 to 111 degrees Fahrenheit).

It’s the second one this year, part of a trend of more frequent heatwaves and rising average temperatures that prompted the municipality of Athens to appoint a climate officer earlier this month to try and mitigate the heat.

– ‘There are solutions’ –

On Monastiraki Square, Alexandra Holarou drags her cart full of sweets through tourists trying on caps and straw hats. 

“I’m going to die in this heat,” she says.

Her face red, the 60-year-old shopkeeper sets up a parasol but “there are not many options to protect oneself,” she says. 

“It’s hard, very hard to work in these conditions.”

Passers-by stay close to the walls in search of shade and air conditioning that blasts out from shops. 

The café terraces are oases where water misters and fans are running at full speed. 

“We weren’t really prepared,” confesses Frenchman Nicolas Deshayes. 

“We left this morning from Paris where it was 15 degrees.”  

Eleni Myrivili, Athens’ climate officer, tells AFP the situation will only worsen if nothing is done.

“By 2050, the number of rainy days will have dropped by 12 percent and the temperature will have risen by 2.5 degrees,” she says.

But she adds “there are solutions” such as developing green spaces in a city that looks like a sea of concrete, helping vulnerable people and raising public awareness.

“We need to rethink the public space as a whole because the consequences affect the health of our population and the economy of our country,” she says.

“There are more workplace accidents with the rise in temperatures and people go to shops less.” 

– Second heatwave of the summer – 

Greece has already experienced a heatwave earlier this summer, when temperatures reached 44 degrees Celsius for 11 days.

According to data from the National Observatory of Athens, this was the fifth longest heatwave in Greece in 40 years. 

“These climatic phenomena are becoming more and more frequent,” Konstantinos Lagouvardos, the observatory’s director of meteorological research, says. 

“Beyond the heatwaves, the most worrying thing is that average temperatures are rising considerably summer after summer. 

“The average for Athens is now 34-35 degrees, which is two degrees higher than in previous years,” he says.

“This is already the second heatwave of the summer, a third would be an unprecedented event.” 

Several municipalities have opened air-conditioned shelters for the homeless and vulnerable.  

In Piraeus, at a short distance from the port where tourists escape to the islands, about 15 people come every day to find a little respite in one such centre.

“This is the fourth time we’ve opened an air-conditioned space this year,” says Argyro Koika, a social worker at the centre.

The Ministry of Civil Protection has recommended protecting oneself from the sun by staying in shaded and air-conditioned places, avoiding physical activities and drinking water regularly. 

The father and son stood in the forest burning around them, the elder with a shovel in hand, the younger with a plastic bottle filled with gasoline.

As the son poured the fuel onto the forest floor, watching as the rising flames rendered white birch trunks black, his father shovelled dirt onto embers that popped across the other side of a trench marked for a controlled burn.

Ivan Fyodorov, 65, and his 42-year-old son Pyotr were helping firefighters on an afternoon in late July to prevent a wildfire from reaching their land in the Siberian region of Yakutia.

While large wildfires are an annual occurrence in Siberia, the blazes have hit Yakutia with an increasingly ferocious intensity the past three years, scorching its legendary vast northern forests known as the taiga.

With firefighters and emergency services struggling, hundreds of volunteers have joined the efforts to contain the blazes, which experts have linked to climate change.

Fyodorov said the first fire had come close to his farmland around the village of Byas-Kyuel in June, but they were able to beat it back. 

Then came the second. Then the third. 

“At that point we didn’t have the strength. It’s good these guys came,” he said of the dozen firefighters working nearby. 

Citing government inaction, Fyodorov said that he and his family have taken the fight into their own hands.

Pyotr had been helping him for 17 days straight, while his other three sons and daughter travelled four hours by car from the regional capital Yakutsk at the beginning of July to do their part.

“We haven’t been able to cut our hay yet because we’ve been busy fighting the fires,” Fyodorov said.

Asked what he would do if the fires keep intensifying in the coming years, he said: “I’ll fight the fires, what else can I do.”

“I’ve lived my whole life in the taiga. I’m dependent on nature,” he added. “We have to protect it.” 

– ‘Nothing to breathe’ –

The fires have not only affected the taiga.

For days in July Yakutsk was covered in a smog that monitors called one of the world’s worst-ever air pollution events.

In the city of some 300,000 people on a late July weekend evening, volunteers were preparing to leave in a convoy for the Gorniy district, which is home to Byas-Kyuel and where some of the most intense fires had raged that month. 

Some three dozen members of a local athletics club gathered around a dummy on the floor in a volunteer centre where two emergencies ministry officials conducted a rapid rescue training session. 

“Our job is to get you ready as quickly as possible,” one yelled out to the group.

The men, eager to get moving, half-listened as they shuffled back and forth.

“When our homeland is burning, we can’t stand on the sidelines,” said the club’s 50-year-old head, Turgun Popov. 

He told AFP that their goal was not to put out the fire on their own, but to give professionals “the chance to rest for a couple of hours or a couple of days because they have been putting out the fires for months.”

Earlier that day the centre had sent 10 volunteers by helicopter to the Lena Pillars national park — a natural rock formation on the UNESCO heritage list — and was planning to send more that week. 

As the emergencies ministry officials trained the sporting club members, 25-year-old volunteer Lili Odun received two phone calls from others interested in deploying.

Popov motioned to the hazy sky outside to explain why people were volunteering. 

“There’s nothing to breathe,” he said. 

In Athens’ parliament square, the Evzones parade under their red berets and stifling heat.

With sweat beading on their foreheads, the presidential guards rehearse their choreography in front of a cluster of tourists as a new heatwave hits the Greek capital.

“They’re amazing, but they must be suffering,” says Jim Grace, an Irish tourist who, holding a bottle of water, watches them under the scorching sun.

“We’re adapting,” says his wife Esther Grace. “We’re drinking lots of water and putting on sunscreen.”

Dubbed a “dangerous” event due to how long it will last and the small difference between maximum and minimum temperatures, the heatwave is expected to peak on Monday, with temperatures likely reaching 42 to 44 degrees Celsius (107 to 111 degrees Fahrenheit).

It’s the second one this year, part of a trend of more frequent heatwaves and rising average temperatures that prompted the municipality of Athens to appoint a climate officer earlier this month to try and mitigate the heat.

– ‘There are solutions’ –

On Monastiraki Square, Alexandra Holarou drags her cart full of sweets through tourists trying on caps and straw hats. 

“I’m going to die in this heat,” she says.

Her face red, the 60-year-old shopkeeper sets up a parasol but “there are not many options to protect oneself,” she says. 

“It’s hard, very hard to work in these conditions.”

Passers-by stay close to the walls in search of shade and air conditioning that blasts out from shops. 

The café terraces are oases where water misters and fans are running at full speed. 

“We weren’t really prepared,” confesses Frenchman Nicolas Deshayes. 

“We left this morning from Paris where it was 15 degrees.”  

Eleni Myrivili, Athens’ climate officer, tells AFP the situation will only worsen if nothing is done.

“By 2050, the number of rainy days will have dropped by 12 percent and the temperature will have risen by 2.5 degrees,” she says.

But she adds “there are solutions” such as developing green spaces in a city that looks like a sea of concrete, helping vulnerable people and raising public awareness.

“We need to rethink the public space as a whole because the consequences affect the health of our population and the economy of our country,” she says.

“There are more workplace accidents with the rise in temperatures and people go to shops less.” 

– Second heatwave of the summer – 

Greece has already experienced a heatwave earlier this summer, when temperatures reached 44 degrees Celsius for 11 days.

According to data from the National Observatory of Athens, this was the fifth longest heatwave in Greece in 40 years. 

“These climatic phenomena are becoming more and more frequent,” Konstantinos Lagouvardos, the observatory’s director of meteorological research, says. 

“Beyond the heatwaves, the most worrying thing is that average temperatures are rising considerably summer after summer. 

“The average for Athens is now 34-35 degrees, which is two degrees higher than in previous years,” he says.

“This is already the second heatwave of the summer, a third would be an unprecedented event.” 

Several municipalities have opened air-conditioned shelters for the homeless and vulnerable.  

In Piraeus, at a short distance from the port where tourists escape to the islands, about 15 people come every day to find a little respite in one such centre.

“This is the fourth time we’ve opened an air-conditioned space this year,” says Argyro Koika, a social worker at the centre.

The Ministry of Civil Protection has recommended protecting oneself from the sun by staying in shaded and air-conditioned places, avoiding physical activities and drinking water regularly. 

Scientific studies with poor methodology and inaccurate findings are exacerbating a Covid-19 misinformation crisis that is discouraging vaccination and putting lives at risk.

The intense public interest in the pandemic and divisive debate in the United States over how to address it facilitates the spread of faulty research papers online, including by vaccine opponents. And even if a study is retracted, it is too late.

“Once the paper is published, the damage is irrevocable,” said Emerson Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which focuses on identifying and exposing disinformation.

Flawed papers “have been fuel to the fire for Covid-19 skeptics and conspiracy theorists. They are frequently the subject of viral online activity. Their findings are further filtered through salacious and misleading articles from fringe websites,” Brooking told AFP.

Inaccurate information about vaccines is especially dangerous at a time when uptake of the shots has slowed in the United States, where health officials say almost all recent Covid-19 deaths occurred among those who were not immunized.

– ‘Shock your socks off’ –

Medical journal Vaccines published a peer-reviewed paper in late June titled “The Safety of Covid-19 vaccinations — we should rethink the policy.” It concluded that Covid-19 shots were causing two people to die for every three they saved — findings that quickly spread on social media.

A tweet from scientist and Covid-19 vaccine critic Robert Malone summarizing the paper garnered thousands of retweets. A video in which conservative pundit Liz Wheeler discussed the study — which she said “will shock your socks off” — has been viewed more than 250,000 times on Facebook.

But Vaccines then retracted the paper, saying it contained “several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings.”

At least four Vaccines board members resigned as a result of the study’s publication, including Katie Ewer, an associate professor and senior immunologist at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute. 

“It should have been recognized that this paper would have a big impact,” said Ewer, who was not involved in its publication. “That no one at the journal picked up on that… is very worrying, especially for a journal dedicated to vaccines.” 

Malone’s tweet about the paper is no longer available, but Wheeler’s video still appeared on Facebook weeks later.

The Gateway Pundit, a website that frequently publishes inaccurate claims, reported earlier in the year that a Stanford University study found mask wearing, which US health authorities recommended to help slow the spread of Covid-19, to be “ineffective” and harmful. 

– ‘Do a better job’ –

The study — “Facemasks in the Covid-19 era: A health hypothesis” — was subsequently retracted by the journal Medical Hypotheses, which said it selectively cited published papers and included “unverified” data.

The Gateway Pundit’s article — which has been shared tens of thousands of times as a link or screenshot on social media — was updated to say the study’s author was unaffiliated with Stanford, but it failed to mention the retraction.

Some of the biggest scientific journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, have retracted papers related to the coronavirus crisis, and even a limited number of faulty studies can cause extensive damage online.

Scientific papers have been drawn into the public eye in “an unprecedented way,” so experts must “do a better job” of explaining their work to a lay audience that may lack the skills to assess them, said Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at the Harvard Medical School.

“Not all of the studies that have been produced and widely shared during the pandemic have been scientifically robust,” Majumder said.

“This is particularly troubling because poorly-executed studies have proven to be capable of influencing individual-level decision-making during the pandemic, including those pertaining to vaccination.”

Governments around the world on Thursday raced to head off a surge in coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant, with US President Joe Biden offering new incentives to vaccine holdouts and Israel authorizing booster shots.

The World Health Organization warned the highly transmissible strain of the virus, first detected in India, could unleash a “fourth wave” of cases in its Eastern Mediterranean zone — an area stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.

Those countries are especially at risk because vaccination rates are low — only 5.5 percent of the region’s population has been fully vaccinated. So in nations where vaccines are more available, public officials are sounding the alarm.

“People are dying — and will die — who don’t have to die,” Biden said in a speech on his administration’s new initiatives aimed at curbing the spread. “If you’re out there and unvaccinated, you don’t have to die.”

He said all federal government workers would be asked to reveal their vaccination status — and those without the jab would have to mask in the workplace and submit to Covid-19 tests.

The Democratic president also said he would ask the Pentagon to consider making the coronavirus vaccine mandatory for active duty military personnel, and asked state and local governments to offer $100 to holdouts who get the shot.

“If incentives help us beat this virus, I believe we should use them. We all benefit if we can get more people vaccinated,” Biden said.

In Israel, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that those over the age of 60 would be offered a third dose of vaccine — a booster shot available from Sunday.

“I call on all elderly people who have already been vaccinated to receive this additional dose,” Bennett said. “Protect yourselves.”

“The decision was based on considerable research and analysis, as well as the rise in risk of the Delta variant wave,” Bennett said.

Israel quickly rolled out its vaccination campaign and had dropped many restrictions on public gatherings in June, but infections soared, and masks are once again mandatory in enclosed public places.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also urged people living in Covid hotspots — even the vaccinated — to mask up indoors.

The surge in cases across America has left the early vaccine adopters angry at those who have so far opted against the jab.

“It’s almost like they don’t care about the rest of the world. They’re being selfish and self-centered,” Alethea Reed, a 58-year-old health care administrator in Washington, told AFP.

– Mixed bag of measures –

The global coronavirus situation is a mixed one: while some places like the French territory of La Reunion and Spain’s Catalonia region are instituting new curbs, others are easing up on restrictions.

Portugal said it would lift its anti-virus measures in several phases from Sunday, with shops and restaurants allowed to open for longer hours and working from home no longer compulsory.

But at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, already delayed by a year due to the pandemic, the virus continued to wreak havoc, with nearly 200 infections among the athletes, media and employees taking part in the Games.

Among them were US pole vault hopeful Sam Kendricks, a two-time world champion, and two high-profile golfers: world number one Jon Rahm and 2020 US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.

Japan hit a new record for the number of daily cases — more than 10,000 — on Thursday, and a state of emergency already in place in Tokyo was to be extended to four more regions.

“The current situation is the worst ever,” a top government advisor on the virus, Shigeru Omi, warned, according to national broadcaster NHK.

In Mexico, the national statistics institute said more than 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus were recorded in 2020 — 35 percent more than originally reported by the government

And in China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged in the city of Wuhan, small outbreaks driven by the Delta variant were reported in three provinces. 

China is racing to vaccinate at least 65 percent of its 1.4-billion population by the end of the year.

So far, the virus has killed more than 4.1 million people around the world, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources. The United States has the highest death toll, at more than 612,000.

Four people were reported dead Thursday and more than 180 injured as thousands of firefighters battled huge blazes spreading across the Mediterranean resort regions of Turkey’s southern coast.

Officials also launched an investigation into suspicions the fires that broke out Wednesday in four locations to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya were the result of arson.

Turkey’s disaster and emergencies office said three people were killed — including an 82-year-old who lived alone.

The NTV channel later said a 25-year-old man died in Marmaris while trying to bring aid.

The fires first emerged across a sparsely populated region about 75 kilometres (45 miles) east of Antalya — a resort especially popular with Russian and other eastern European tourists.

But they were creeping closer Thursday to sandy beaches dotted with hotels and resorts.

Images on social media and Turkish TV showed residents jumping out of their cars and running for their lives through smoke-filled streets lit up by orange flames.

The heavy clouds of smoke turned the sky dark orange over a beachfront hotel complex in the town of Manavgat.

At least 183 people were hospitalised.

Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said a hotel was also being evacuated near the tourist city of Bodrum — some 300 kilometres west of Antalya — as new fires broke out across the southern coast.

– Full mobilisation –

The fires were raging with temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and wind gusts of 50 kilometres (30 miles) an hour.

But Antalya mayor Muhittin Bocek said he suspected foul play because the fires started in four locations at once.

“This suggests an arson attack, but we do not have clear information about that at this stage,” Bocek said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said an investigation had already been launched.

The Russian embassy said Moscow had sent three giant firefighting aircraft to dump fire retardant on the burning forests to contain the flames.

Greece’s foreign minister Nikos Dendias told his Turkish counterpart that Greece, whose ties with its neighbour are tense, was “ready to help if needed,” the Turkish ministry said.

Azerbaijan also offered help.

More than 4,000 Turkish firefighters had been dispatched across the region to help contain the damage and search for people needing help.

They rescued 10 people on Thursday who were stranded on a boat in a lake that was surrounded by burning forest.

“All of the state’s means have been mobilised,” Environment Minister Murat Kurum said. “All our teams are in the field.”

Russia said it successfully docked the Nauka laboratory module with the International Space Station on Thursday — though the troubled unit caused yet another fright after accidentally firing and briefly throwing the entire station out of position.

The mission comes after more than a decade of delays and as Russia seeks to boost its space industry, which has fallen behind since the collapse of the Soviet Union and struggles to keep up with competition from the United States. 

A few hours after docking, Nauka’s propulsive devices unexpectedly fired, forcing personnel aboard the multinational manned orbital platform to fire thrusters on the Russian segment of the station to counter the effect.  

The module started firing “inadvertently and unexpectedly, moving the station 45 degrees out of attitude,” NASA said on Twitter. “Recovery operations have regained attitude and the crew is in no danger,” it added. 

In a press call, NASA’s human spaceflight program chief Kathy Lueders called the incident a “pretty exciting hour”, and praised the crew for stabilising the situation.

The US space agency also revealed that the SpaceX Dragon docked to the orbital station was powered up and ready to evacuate crew if needed. 

An uncrewed test launch of a Boeing Starliner crew capsule to the ISS will be pushed back from Friday until at least August 3 while an investigation is underway.

Earlier, the Russian space agency Roscosmos showed the new addition to its segment of the ISS docking with the nadir (Earth-facing) port of the Zvezda service module at 1329 GMT. 

“There is contact!!!” Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin tweeted as Russia completed the first docking of an ISS module in 11 years. 

It will now take several months and multiple spacewalks to fully integrate the module with the space station.

– Decades in the making –

The Nauka module blasted off last week from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carried by a Russian Proton rocket.  

Nauka — which means “science” in Russian — will be primarily used for research and storing laboratory equipment. 

It will also provide more storage space, new water and oxygen regeneration systems and improved living conditions for cosmonauts of the Russian ISS sector.

The Nauka multipurpose laboratory module was conceived as early as the mid-1990s when it was intended as a back-up for the Russian control module Zarya. 

It was later repurposed as a science module but joined a line-up of stagnating Russian space projects that have fallen victim to funding problems or bureaucratic procedures.

The launch of the 20-tonne Nauka — one of the largest modules on the ISS — was initially scheduled for 2007 but has been repeatedly delayed over various issues. 

While last week’s launch was successful, Nauka experienced several “hiccups in orbit” during its eight-day journey to the ISS, the European Space Agency said.

“We won’t lie… We had to worry for the first three days,” Rogozin told journalists after Nauka had docked, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. 

– Russia’s future on ISS –

Launched in 1998 and involving Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency, the ISS is one of Russia’s few remaining collaborations with the West.

The ISS is divided into two sections: the Russian Orbital Segment, and the remainder run by the US and other partners.

For years, NASA was reliant on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the ISS and paid millions of dollars for a seat on a Soyuz rocket.

But last year Russia lost its monopoly for manned flights to the ISS after the successful mission of US billionaire Elon Musk’s Space X. 

In April, Russia said it was considering withdrawing from the ISS programme citing ageing infrastructure, and was planning to launch the first core module of a new orbital station in 2025.

Russia has announced a series of projects in recent years, including a mission to Venus and a station on the Moon, but as the Kremlin diverts funding to military ventures, analysts question the feasibility of these ambitions. 

Four people were reported dead Thursday and more than 180 injured as thousands of firefighters battled huge blazes spreading across the Mediterranean resort regions of Turkey’s southern coast.

Officials also launched an investigation into suspicions the fires that broke out Wednesday in four locations to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya were the result of arson.

Turkey’s disaster and emergencies office said three people were killed — including an 82-year-old who lived alone.

The NTV channel later said a 25-year-old man died in Marmaris while trying to bring aid.

The fires first emerged across a sparsely populated region about 75 kilometres (45 miles) east of Antalya — a resort especially popular with Russian and other eastern European tourists.

But they were creeping closer Thursday to sandy beaches dotted with hotels and resorts.

Images on social media and Turkish TV showed residents jumping out of their cars and running for their lives through smoke-filled streets lit up by orange flames.

The heavy clouds of smoke turned the sky dark orange over a beachfront hotel complex in the town of Manavgat.

At least 183 people were hospitalised.

Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said a hotel was also being evacuated near the tourist city of Bodrum — some 300 kilometres west of Antalya — as new fires broke out across the southern coast.

– Full mobilisation –

The fires were raging with temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and wind gusts of 50 kilometres (30 miles) an hour.

But Antalya mayor Muhittin Bocek said he suspected foul play because the fires started in four locations at once.

“This suggests an arson attack, but we do not have clear information about that at this stage,” Bocek said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said an investigation had already been launched.

The Russian embassy said Moscow had sent three giant firefighting aircraft to dump fire retardant on the burning forests to contain the flames.

Greece’s foreign minister Nikos Dendias told his Turkish counterpart that Greece, whose ties with its neighbour are tense, was “ready to help if needed,” the Turkish ministry said.

Azerbaijan also offered help.

More than 4,000 Turkish firefighters had been dispatched across the region to help contain the damage and search for people needing help.

They rescued 10 people on Thursday who were stranded on a boat in a lake that was surrounded by burning forest.

“All of the state’s means have been mobilised,” Environment Minister Murat Kurum said. “All our teams are in the field.”

Three people were reported dead Thursday and more than 100 injured as thousands of firefighters battled huge blazes spreading across the Mediterranean resort regions of Turkey’s southern coast.

Officials also launched an investigation into suspicions the fires that broke out Wednesday in four locations to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya were the result of arson.

Turkey’s disaster and emergencies office said three people were killed — including an 82-year-old who lived alone — and 122 injured by the fires.

“Treatment of 58 of our citizens continues,” it was quoted as saying by the Anadolu state news agency.

The fires first emerged across a sparsely populated region about 75 kilometres (45 miles) east of Antalya — a resort especially popular with Russian and other eastern European tourists.

But they were creeping closer Thursday to sandy beaches dotted with hotels and resorts.

Images on social media and Turkish TV showed residents jumping out of their cars and running for their lives through smoke-filled streets lit up by orange flames.

The heavy clouds of smoke turned the sky dark orange over a beachfront hotel complex in the town of Manavgat.

Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said a hotel was also being evacuated near the tourist city of Bodrum — some 300 kilometres west of Antalya — as new fires broke out across the southern coast.

– Full mobilisation –

The fires were raging with temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and wind gusts of 50 kilometres (30 miles) an hour.

But Antalya mayor Muhittin Bocek said he suspected foul play because the fires started in four locations at once.

“This suggests an arson attack, but we do not have clear information about that at this stage,” Bocek said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said an investigation had already been launched.

The Russian embassy said Moscow had sent three giant firefighting aircraft to dump fire retardant on the burning forests to contain the flames.

Greece’s foreign minister Nikos Dendias told his Turkish counterpart that Greece, whose ties with its neighbour are tense, was “ready to help if needed,” the Turkish ministry said.

More than 4,000 Turkish firefighters had been dispatched across the region to help contain the damage and search for people needing help.

They rescued 10 people on Thursday who were stranded on a boat in a lake that was surrounded by burning forest.

“All of the state’s means have been mobilised,” Environment Minister Murat Kurum said. “All our teams are in the field.”

Russia said it successfully docked the Nauka laboratory module with the International Space Station on Thursday — though the troubled unit caused yet another fright after accidentally firing and briefly throwing the entire station out of position.

The mission comes after more than a decade of delays and as Russia seeks to boost its space industry, which has fallen behind since the collapse of the Soviet Union and struggles to keep up with competition from the United States. 

A few hours after docking, Nauka’s propulsive devices unexpectedly fired, forcing personnel aboard the multinational manned orbital platform to fire thrusters on the Russian segment of the station to counter the effect.  

The module started firing “inadvertently and unexpectedly, moving the station 45 degrees out of attitude,” NASA said on Twitter. “Recovery operations have regained attitude and the crew is in no danger,” it added. 

NASA later said the issue was “corrected” and that “all systems are operating normally”. 

Earlier, the Russian space agency Roscosmos showed the new addition to its segment of the ISS docking with the nadir (Earth-facing) port of the Zvezda service module at 1329 GMT. 

“There is contact!!!” Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin tweeted as Russia completed the first docking of an ISS module in 11 years. 

It will now take several months and multiple spacewalks to fully integrate the module with the space station.

– Decades in the making –

The Nauka module blasted off last week from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carried by a Russian Proton rocket.  

The launch was closely watched by the European Space Agency as the module was travelling with the European Robotic Arm, the first robot arm that will be able to work on Russia’s ISS segment. 

Nauka — which means “science” in Russian — will be primarily used for research and storing laboratory equipment. 

It will also provide more storage space, new water and oxygen regeneration systems and improved living conditions for cosmonauts of the Russian ISS sector.

The Nauka multipurpose laboratory module was conceived as early as the mid-1990s when it was intended as a back-up for the Russian control module Zarya. 

It was later repurposed as a science module but joined a line-up of stagnating Russian space projects that have fallen victim to funding problems or bureaucratic procedures.

The launch of the 20-tonne Nauka — one of the largest modules on the ISS — was initially scheduled for 2007 but has been repeatedly delayed over various issues. 

While last week’s launch was succesful, Nauka experienced several “hiccups in orbit” during its eight-day journey to the ISS, the European Space Agency said.

“We won’t lie… We had to worry for the first three days,” Rogozin told journalists after Nauka had docked, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. 

Nauka replaces the long-serving Pirs docking module, which joined the ISS in 2001 as a temporary addition but ended up staying in service for two decades.

Making room for Nauka, Pirs detached from the ISS earlier this week, its burnt-up remains falling into the Pacific Ocean.

– Russia’s future on ISS –

Launched in 1998 and involving Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency, the ISS is one of Russia’s few remaining collaborations with the West.

The ISS is divided into two sections: the Russian Orbital Segment, and the remainder run by the US and other partners.

For years, NASA was reliant on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the ISS and paid millions of dollars for a seat on a Soyuz rocket.

But last year Russia lost its monopoly for manned flights to the ISS after the succesful mission of US billionaire Elon Musk’s Space X. 

In April, Russia said it is considering withdrawing from the ISS programme citing ageing infrastructure, and is planning to launch the first core module of a new orbital station in 2025.

Russia has announced a series of projects in recent years, including a mission to Venus and a station on the moon, but as the Kremlin diverts funding to military ventures, analysts question the feasibility of these ambitions.