How India Became the First Country to Reach the Moon’s South Pole

And then there was one. 

Since earlier this month, there had been something of a footrace in space, with India and Russia vying to be the first country to land a spacecraft in the moon’s south polar region.

On July 14, the Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-3, blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in southeastern India, carrying a 1,726 kg (3,805 lb) lander, which itself contains a little 26 kg (57 lb) rover. Then on Aug. 9, Russia followed in hot pursuit, launching its 1,750 kg (3,858 lb) Luna 25 lander from the newly built Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s far eastern Amur Oblast region.

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On Aug. 23, India won the cosmic competition, setting Chandrayaan-3 down gently in the polar dust at 8:34 AM ET. “We have achieved a soft landing on the moon,” announced S. Somanath, the chairman of ISRO—the Indian Space Research Organization, to a packed mission control. “India is on the moon!”

“India’s successful moon mission is not just India’s alone,” added Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a live address to the control center and the nation. “This success belongs to all of humanity. And it will help moon missions by other countries in the future.” Moments later he expanded the celebration to X, (formerly Twitter), writing, “Historic day for India’s space sector. Congratulations to @isro for the remarkable success of Chandrayaan-3 mission.”   

That India and Russia were in a race at all despite India’s 26-day head start was due to the fact that ISRO sent Chandrayaan-3 on a relatively leisurely five-week trajectory, making an ever-widening series of looping orbits around the Earth until it at last reached the the lunar vicinity, where it was captured by the moon’s gravity. Luna 25 was sent on a more direct path, one designed to get it to the moon in less than two weeks. Both ships were targeted for landing on or about Aug. 23.

But that was then. On Aug. 16, Luna 25 achieved lunar orbit; but on Aug. 20, it crashed into the moon’s surface, after an engine firing, intended to fine-tune its descent, went awry. 

“At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted,” said Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, in a post on Telegram, translated by Google Translate. “According to the results of a preliminary analysis, [the spacecraft] switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface.” Even as heads bowed at Roscosmos, fists pumped at ISRO because that was the same day Chandrayaan-3 entered lunar orbit and posted images on X of the moon’s far side.

Modi wasn’t kidding when he said the landing was historic. Three other countries—the U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union—have also achieved soft lunar landings, but none has ever reached the south lunar pole, and that’s not for lack of trying. In 2019, Israel’s privately built and funded Beresheet spacecraft crashed after ground controllers lost touch with it when it was only 149 m (489 ft.) above the polar soil. In late April, a Japanese probe carrying a rover built by the United Arab Emirates came to ruin in the same region, when it too lost contact with Earth and went into a 4.8 km (3 mi.) death plunge before making impact with the surface. 

The moon’s south pole is one of the harder places on the lunar surface to land because it is heavily boulder strewn, without the wide, flat expanses that the Apollo astronauts and early uncrewed landers targeted in the equatorial regions of the moon’s Earth-facing hemisphere. Of the spacecraft that have crashed in the south pole, none got close enough to try to negotiate the boulder fields. That ISRO was able to do so—briefly placing Chandrayaan-3 in hover mode when it was 850 m (2,800 ft.) above the surface while it looked for a clear parking spot—is a testament both to the nimbleness of the ship and the deft touch of the engineers in mission control.

Despite the hazards, there is good reason for the world’s space agencies and private space companies to continue targeting the south pole. Scientists had long believed that the lunar regolith—or soil—might be shot through with crystals of water ice. More significantly, there had been speculation that permanently shadowed craters in the south pole might effectively be frozen lakes. India’s Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, proved those theories correct. An on-board spectrometer confirmed the existence of the icy regolith, and a 29 kg (64 lb.) impactor probe dropped on the south pole proved the existence of water there too just before it hit.

For future astronauts hoping to settle the moon and live off the land, that matters a lot. Not only can ice be harvested for drinking water, the H₂0 molecule can be broken down to provide breathable oxygen, and the hydrogen and oxygen can be recombined to make rocket fuel. It’s for that reason that NASA’s Artemis program has targeted the south pole for its first crewed lunar landing sometime in the second half of this decade. China is aiming for the same region for its own crewed landing around 2030.

But boots on the moon are for later. For now, Chandrayaan-3 will get to work, using its suite of on-board instruments and its little six-wheeled rover to study a region of the moon that future explorers hope to call home.

source https://time.com/6307329/india-moon-landing-south-pole/

Climate Change Made Eastern Canada’s Wildfires Twice as Likely

Climate change more than doubled the chances of the hot, dry weather that helped fuel the unprecedented wildfire season in eastern Canada that’s driven thousands from their homes and blanketed parts of the U.S. with choking smoke, according to an analysis released Tuesday.

What’s more, human-caused climate change made the fire season in Quebec — from May through July — 50% more intense than it otherwise would have been and increased the likelihood of similarly severe fire seasons at least sevenfold, researchers said.

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“The biggest takeaway is, this is because of us that we have seen so many fires this year,” due to greenhouse gas emissions, said Yan Boulanger, a research scientist in forest ecology for Natural Resources Canada. He was one of 16 researchers who collaborated on the analysis for World Weather Attribution, an initiative that aims to quickly evaluate the role of climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather events.

Canada is in the middle of its worst wildfire season on record, with more than 5,800 fires burning over 153,000 square kilometers (59,000 square miles) from one end of the country to the other, according the the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. In Quebec alone, more than 52,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles) has burned so far this year — an area 176 times larger than all of last year.

Read more: Even As Smoke Engulfs Us, We Can’t Wrap Our Heads Around Climate Change

Though the analysis looked only at a region of Quebec, hot temperatures and drought conditions also were at a record level in the rest of Canada, “and we know that those fire-prone conditions also are increasing in severity, especially out West,” Boulanger said.

Ongoing wildfires have burned dozens of structures in a resort area of British Columbia and prompted authorities to evacuate about 20,000 people from Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories.

The analysis estimated the peak intensity of the fire weather by looking at real-world observations in a metric called the Fire Weather Index — which estimates wildfire risk by combining temperature, wind speed, humidity and precipitation — averaged over seven days. The researchers then compared that to a world without climate change using multiple computer simulations and historical weather data, a technique widely accepted in the scientific community. They found that the fire-weather conditions this year were twice as likely.

They also assessed the cumulative effect of the weather conditions from January to July, determining that the duration of those conditions was seven times more likely.

Peter Reich, a forest ecologist who wasn’t involved in the analysis, said he was glad researchers didn’t try to prove climate change caused the fires, but instead looked at the probability that the conditions that led to this year’s fire season would have occurred with or without climate change.

“To me, the scariest finding is just the magnitude of the greater likelihood of intense fire weather because of climate change,” said Reich, head of the Institute for Global Change Biology at the University of Michigan and a professor at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not just 10% more likely or 20% — there’s a 700%” greater likelihood.

Although the analysis did a good job of assessing extreme fire weather, it didn’t capture how broadly it affected the entire country, especially in the arid West, which would show an even stronger connection to climate change, said Mike Flannigan, a professor for wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.

“I’ve never seen such a wide geographical area in Canada on fire at the same time … and fire season is not over yet,” he said.

Reich said the findings likely would apply across the planet because hotter temperatures increase the drying power of the air, and climate change makes fire vulnerability, severity and risk much higher by increasing the flammability of the materials and weather conditions that will produce and carry fire at the same time. “It kind of feeds on itself,” he added.

Canada’s fire season began early, after snow melted quickly and the warmest May-June period in more than 80 years combined with sparse rainfall to dry out vegetation and make it more flammable. Windy conditions also drove the wildfires throughout most of the country.

In Canada, 5% of the population identifies as Indigenous — First Nation, Métis or Inuit — yet researchers say they were disproportionately affected by wildfires because their communities often are isolated and in some of the most fire-prone areas, like the boreal forest.

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake in northern Quebec evacuated for nine days in June because of heavy smoke from wildfires that came within 9 miles (15 kilometers) of the reserve where about 350 to 400 people live, often miles apart, said Chief Casey Ratt, 50, who never experienced a forest fire before this year.

Ratt blames climate change, saying summer heat is more intense and the winters aren’t as cold. Ice that used to form in October or November, now often doesn’t form until January and then melts faster in the spring. He said the moose also are covered with ticks because many of the birds that used to eat them no longer show up.

“I think this will be the norm moving forward,” leaving them at risk for future fires, Ratt said.

Scientists say that risks will increase as the planet continues to warm. “That’s a very big wake-up call” for communities that need to adapt, Boulanger said.

Flannigan said widespread, hotter fires are “the new reality” and will require new approaches to preventing and battling increasingly dangerous and intense blazes.

“Unfortunately, we’re going to see more fire and smoke in the future,” he said, explaining that there won’t be enough rain to compensate drier fuels, leading to higher-intensity fires that are becoming almost impossible to extinguish.

He added: “We’re really in uncharted territory.”

source https://time.com/6307512/climate-change-made-eastern-canadas-wildfires-twice-as-likely/

The Face Of Rural Addiction is Not What You Think

If you were asked 30 years ago, at the height of the crack and heroin epidemics, what the typical drug user looked like, what would you say? You would probably say they were some combination of urban, poor, and Black or Latino. And you wouldn’t be too far off.

But by the early and mid-2000s you might have noticed that drug use was seemingly becoming more common outside of the nation’s impoverished, non-white inner cities. This was when pharmaceutical companies began to be prosecuted for deliberately misleading clinicians and patients on the benefits and risks of pain medications, like Oxycontin and Vicodin. And it was when the media began to take notice of how the social scourge of drugs had “finally” caught up to Middle White America, and began to focus on the drug-fueled struggles of white people. In less than a decade, the vision of the modern drug user became white, and the narrative around drugs changed. No longer were drug users criminals and lost causes—now they were redeemable and in need of medical and social support. In 1995, 18% of Americans admitted they had drug use issues in their family, according to a Gallup poll. In 2021, that percentage surged to 32%, punctuating how much closer to home the drug epidemic—no longer a fringe, sensationalized issue—was becoming for the average American.

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Hollywood’s embrace of white drug users

Hollywood execs took notice of these trends and began to invest in America’s newest pain points, with Emmy-winning TV series like Breaking Bad and Hulu’s Dopesick reinforcing the disingenuous trope of the opioid crisis as a white crisis.

Yet, while America has finally digested the idea that “hard” drug users can be white, the real, not-so-new face of addiction is a Black one. But it’s not the Black drug users you’ve seen on The Wire, or likely anywhere else on screen. The new face is rural Black people. Ones who work as farmers and landscapers. Ones who live in communities where dollar stores serve as the center of commerce and community. Once viewed through a very narrow—and racialized—lens, the drug-using population in America has become more of a melting pot than America itself—eclectic and deeply and often precariously interconnected. 

While rural areas in the Deep South have always had large Black populations owning to its centrality in the slave trade, in the last two decades, other rural communities in the U.S., particularly the Midwest and Northeast, have been diversifying. Nearly a quarter of rural Americans now identify as people of color. In part due to the clunky and inconsistent ways that the federal government defines “rural,” the rural Black drug user has largely been invisible to researchers and interventionists. And it’s not just opioids like heroin afflicting the population, but stimulants like crack and methamphetamine (usually seen as a “white drug”), which are cheaper and prolong highs.

Read More: Drug Overdose Deaths Rose More Among Black and Indigenous Americans During COVID-19 Pandemic

Our team of researchers—from Cornell University, Southern Illinois University, and University of Chicago—conduct research with rural Black opioid users in central New York and southern Illinois, two areas of the country with persistent opioid overdoses. Most, but not all of our Black participants are middle-aged men, with roots or connections to larger nearby cities like Chicago and New York City. Most of them or their families were at some point priced-out of the larger, hyper-competitive city life, and now have minimal prospects for upward mobility—but at least an opportunity for affordable housing and some semblance of peace. This isn’t always what they find.

Rural Black people have the highest poverty rates among rural residents, at 30% vs.12% poverty among rural whites. Rural Black people also have higher rates of mental illness, cardiovascular disease, cancer diagnosis, and sexually transmitted infections. In addition, they experienced disproportionate patterns of COVID-19-related deaths, highlighting the all-encompassing ways that rural Black people are both socially and medically vulnerable.

Rising overdoses in Black Americans

While researchers have increasingly recognized opioid use disorder as equal opportunity, rural Black people have represented, at best, a blip on epidemiologists’ radar. This is changing. One study found the steepest increase in overdoses in recent years has been among younger urban Black Americans (178%), followed by younger rural Black Americans (98%) and then younger urban white Americans (93%). And while rates of opioid use disorder are generally higher among whites, overdose deaths have increasingly been higher among Black individuals; in short, when Black people overdose, they’re more likely to die from it than white people. And this effect is even more pronounced in rural areas, where access to emergency services still lags far behind suburban and urban areas in the country.

In these communities, Black drug users are no more a medical anomaly than white drug users, and yet due to the low density, they can’t help but stand out. As Luke, a 25-old Black man in our study explained, “Everybody knows everybody. And that’s the biggest thing that’s different. So, you got to make sure you’re on your P’s and Q’s and doing what you’re supposed to do because everybody can see you.” (Luke asked us not to use his real name to protect his privacy). It’s this simultaneous visibility and invisibility that makes life for rural Black drug users especially intricate, driving higher rates of isolation, which is perfect kindling for initiating drug use and overdosing without social support.

Along these lines, key factors that drive and sustain disproportionately high-risk drug use among rural Black people include the limited socialization and recreation opportunities in rural areas, and a predominance of physically-intensive jobs in farming, manufacturing, construction, and mining, where workplace discrimination and social isolation are high. Further, government neglect is implicated in the crumbling infrastructure and low-quality housing that characterizes rural Black areas. In a nutshell, it’s these additive components that increasingly propel and deepen hazardous drug use patterns in these communities.

Vulnerable populations

A variety of other dynamics make rural Black communities especially vulnerable. This includes high levels of stigma against drug use, prohibitive policies against medications for opioid use disorder like suboxone and methadone, which are effective in helping drug users manage their symptoms and taper off usage, and, relatedly, restrictions against public benefits such as Medicaid– typically states with the highest rates of rural overdoses have rejected expansion under Obamacare. Rural communities also have substantially less access to naloxone, a vital tool in efforts to reverse overdoses that was recently approved for over-the-counter sales but remains expensive for the average rural consumer (and is dispensed at stores that may not be common in their communities). In brief, the issues are broad and wide, yet hiding in plain sight. 

There are no easy answers to the question of how to address the complex challenges facing rural Black drug users. Would an increase in resources—healthcare clinics, mental health services, naloxone, and suboxone—help? Of course. But unless the underlying issues that ultimately create and sustain risks in this population are addressed—the racism and classism in and around rural areas that serve as a microcosms of core, ongoing issues in the U.S.— it’s all for naught. To that end, the one critical resource that cannot be cultivated through policy is empathy. But as a start, as we continue to think about the “two Americas” that exist, one for whites and one for the non-whites, we can at least push ourselves to more thoughtfully consider geography in that equation.

source https://time.com/6307190/the-face-of-rural-addiction-is-not-what-you-think/

Hawaii Already Had a Massive Homelessness Problem. The Maui Wildfires Are Making It Worse

The flames of the Maui fires have engulfed a community in grief, displacing thousands of locals, burning down more than 2,500 acres, destroying artifacts and museums in historic towns, and taking down the homes of hundreds more since early August.

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Among the charred remains were 78 long-term and temporary housing units owned by Ka Hale A Ke Ola, a homeless resource center in Maui. The center is one of many short-term emergency shelters that were constructed in 2003 to help the nearly 6,000 people in the state who are unhoused on any given night.

While much of the world recognizes Hawaii as a lush paradise, the Aloha state has the fifth highest rate of homelessness when compared to all other U.S. states, territories, and Washington, D.C. At the center of the issue lies a complicated relationship with tourism—which fuels but can also harm the state—and rising living and housing costs. While shelters were already working to help house families and individuals with unstable living conditions, the Maui fires have further exacerbated the issue, leaving thousands more unhoused and further tightening the already limited housing supply in Maui.

“For individuals and families in our shelter that have a history of homelessness, I think there might be a sense [that this] just couldn’t make it harder for [them] to find a home now,” Kurt Schmidt, the shelter programs director at Ka Hale A Ke Ola, says. “Now we have these thousands of people that have lost their homes, and so, I think it’s probably disheartening for them and frustrating.”

Understanding the homelessness crisis 

Maui largely depends on tourism for its income. It is an industry that contributes 80% of the county’s wealth, employs residents, and keeps restaurants and small businesses alive. But that dependence on tourism comes at a cost for locals.

Hawaii’s visual appeal makes it a hotspot for out-of-state buyers, who make up about half of all condominium sales in Maui. The state also has the lowest property tax rates in the country, making it ideal for purchasing a home, even if home owners decide to not live there. But if those homes are not in use or being occupied by locals, then it puts “upward pressure on housing prices without providing new housing, hurting local affordability,” according to a University of Hawaii report.

Hawaii leads the way as the most expensive state for housing, with rates that are 2.7 times higher than the national average, according to a University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization report. Researchers point to increased mortgage interest rates as a barrier to homeownership, but data shows that rental properties are no better, with new listings averaging a monthly rate of $2,500.

Read more: The Climate Crisis and Colonialism Destroyed My Maui Home. Where We Must Go From Here

Much of the rising costs have to do with the low housing supply. Maui County has seen a net housing loss over the past five years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And across the state more broadly, Hawaii has the most restrictive land use regulations in the country, making it difficult to construct new homes. 

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green issued an emergency proclamation on homelessness this January—which was last renewed in July—that expedites the construction and repair of housing that is designed to transition people out of homelessness. But finding housing on the island is just one part of the picture. 

Hawaii’s location—some 2,400 miles away from the mainland—also makes it the state with the highest cost of living, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.

“We’re the most remote island in the world,” says Ashley Kelly, the chief operating officer at the Family Life Center, which connects people with unstable living or financial situations to a variety of social support services. “That really inflates the cost of our food [and] electricity…And so when you factor all those things together, it does make a higher cost of living.” Both Kelly and Schmidt tell TIME that many of their patrons have to work two jobs to make ends meet because of low wages on the island. 

And while efforts like the emergency proclamation have been useful, the destruction of the fires has put even more pressure on the state’s low housing supply. 

“Prior to this there just wasn’t enough housing on the island to begin with, not enough that was affordable,” says Schmidt. “And now we have thousands that are displaced because of [the fire] that are going to be competing for the same type of housing that was there minus everything that was lost.” 

Direct impact of the fire 

The fires have also impacted families that had recently found housing through the Family Life Center. Kelly tells TIME that the day after the fires, at least five leases for families who were going to be placed into permanent housing were revoked. In the following days, the center also started getting calls from former patrons who told Kelly they were being evicted after recently being placed into homes. 

“In every single case, it was because somebody lost a home in the fire and they needed to reside in what was their rental property, or a family member of theirs lost a home in the wildfire and they wanted their family to now reside in their rental property,” Kelly said. “Finding housing for any new clients is just not possible right now.”  

Ka Hale A Ke Ola was in the process of purchasing an old hotel complex that would provide more housing opportunities for patrons, but the hotel was burned down in the fire. “It would have been potentially anywhere from 30 to 45 units that we would have had available for not just formerly homeless but working individuals that meet the income guidelines,” Schmidt says.  

For now, hundreds of displaced families have relocated to family members’ homes, or moved to hotels that have opened their doors to locals. Schmidt says many of the people who have temporarily moved into hotels are hotel staff who would not have been able to work at their jobs without housing. The Red Cross predicts families will need housing support from hotels for about seven to eight months, though their stay may be extended if necessary.

In the interim, shelters like the Family Life Center have now pivoted towards purchasing 60 quick-assembly modular homes. The container-like homes are located on a 10-acre lot owned by King’s Cathedral, a church in Kahului, and offer more privacy for families as opposed to communal spaces in mass shelters. 

That housing-first approach is the most ideal to Schmidt, who says that the state either needs to build and renovate homes, or provide more housing opportunities for low income individuals. “We don’t need more shelter,” Schmidt says. “We just need more housing, and that’s more affordable housing.”

source https://time.com/6307247/maui-wildfires-displace-thousands-worsening-homelessness/

Sam Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty Again to Narrower FTX Fraud Indictment

Sam Bankman-Fried again pleaded not guilty in his fraud case over last year’s implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, this time to a narrower slate of charges, as his lawyers fought for access to their jailed client.

The 31-year-old embattled crypto mogul appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday for the first time since a judge revoked his bail after concluding that he likely tried to tamper with two witnesses. He has appealed the ruling but in the meantime is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York.

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Dressed in a tan inmate uniform, former FTX co-founder entered his plea to seven counts of fraud and money laundering, contained in a revised US indictment filed on Aug. 14 that cut the number of counts almost by half. The other charges, which weren’t included in an agreement by the Bahamas to extradite him to the US, were split off into a separate case.

Bankman-Fried, who ran his crypto empire from the island country, is accused of orchestrating a yearslong fraud at FTX and its trading affiliate Alameda Research, both of which collapsed in November. He is due to go on trial on Oct. 2.

‘Bread and Water’

Before his $250 million bail package was revoked, Bankman-Fried was living at his parents’ California house. At Tuesday’s hearing his lawyers complained that they were struggling to build his defense without access to him. He hasn’t been permitted to review any of the millions of pages of evidence in the case for the 11 days he has been in the federal lockup, his lawyer Christian Everdell said, calling it a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Everdell said his team had been presented with a plan for Bankman-Fried to review the evidence with his lawyers two days a week from 9 to 3, using a laptop in a cell block in the courthouse, which he said was inadequate.

“It means he cannot help prepare his defense,” Everdell said.

Bankman-Fried’s other lawyer, Mark Cohen, said his client hadn’t been given any Adderall since he was jailed and has only a few doses left of another prescription drug, the antidepressant Emsam. Cohen also complained that his client’s request for vegan meals had gone unheeded and that Bankman-Fried was still being served a “flesh diet.”

So he is “literally subsisting on bread and water” and a little peanut butter, Cohen said.

Most Serious Charges

The counts on which Bankman-Fried will be tried this year are the most serious he faces. Prosecutors say the alleged fraud scheme cost customers and investors billions of dollars. 

Bankman-Fried had contested the validity of five of the 13 counts in an earlier indictment, arguing they weren’t part of the extradition pact that paved the way for his return to the US in December. The government severed those five charges from the trial and dropped a sixth.

The case is US v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cr-673, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

source https://time.com/6307251/bankman-fried-ftx-plea-not-guilty/

Greek Authorities Say 18 Bodies Found in an Area Struck by a Major Wildfire

ALEXANDROUPOLIS, Greece — Firefighters scouring the area of a major wildfire in northeastern Greece burning out of control for a fourth day found the bodies of 18 people, authorities said Tuesday. They were examining whether the group might have been migrants who entered the country through the nearby border.

The discovery in the Avanta area of the city of Alexandroupolis came as hundreds of firefighters battled dozens of wildfires breaking out across the country, fanned by gale-force winds. On Monday, two people died and two firefighters were injured in separate fires in northern and central Greece.

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With their hot, dry summers, southern European countries are particularly prone to wildfires. Another major blaze was burning across Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands for a week, although no injuries or damage to homes was reported from that blaze.

European Union officials have blamed climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Europe, noting that 2022 was the second-worst year for wildfire damage on record after 2017.

In Greece, police activated the country’s Disaster Victim Identification Team to identify the 18 bodies, which were found Tuesday near a shack in the Avanta area, Ioannis Artopios, a spokesman for the fire department, said in a televised statement.

“Given that there have been no reports of a missing person or missing residents from the surrounding areas, the possibility is being investigated that these are people who had entered the country illegally,” Artopios said.

Alexandroupolis lies near the country’s border with Turkey, along a route often taken by people fleeing poverty and conflict in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and seeking to enter the European Union.

Avanta, like many nearby villages and settlements, had been under evacuation orders, with push alerts sent to mobile phones in the area.

Overnight, a massive wall of flames raced through forests toward Alexandroupolis, prompting authorities to evacuate another eight villages and the city’s hospital. Flames turned the sky over the city red as choking smoke and swirling flecks of ash filled the air.

About 65 of the more than 100 patients in the hospital were transported to a ferry boat docked in the city’s port, while others were taken to other hospitals in northern Greece. The ferry later set sail with more than 20 of the patients for the port town of Kavala, where they were to be transferred to another hospital.

Deputy Health Minister Dimitris Vartzopoulos, speaking on Greece’s Skai television, said smoke and ash in the air around the Alexandrouplolis hospital were the main reasons behind the decision to evacuate the facility.

“We evacuated within four hours,” he said.

The coast guard said patrol boats and private vessels evacuated another 40 people by sea from beach areas west of Alexandroupolis and were ferrying them to the city’s port.

In the northeastern Evros border region, a fire was burning through forest in a protected national park, with satellite imagery showing smoke from the blaze blanketing much of northern and western Greece.

New fires broke out in several parts of the country during the day Tuesday, including in woodland northwest of Athens and an industrial area on the western fringes of the Greek capital.

Small explosions resounded from the industrial area of Aspropyrgos as the flames reached warehouses and factories, while authorities shut down a highway and ordered the evacuation of nearby villages.

With firefighting forces stretched to the limit, Greece appealed for help from the European Union’s civil protection mechanism.

Five firefighting planes from Croatia, Germany and Sweden, and a helicopter, 58 firefighters and nine water tanks from the Czech Republic were heading to Greece Tuesday, while 56 Romanian firefighters and two water-dropping aircraft from Cyprus arrived on Monday. French firefighters were also in Greece, helping tackle a blaze on the island of Evia on Monday.

“We are mobilizing actually almost one third of the aircraft we have in the rescEU fleet,” said EU spokesman Balazs Ujvari.

The fire risk level for several regions, including the wider Athens area, was listed as “extreme” for a second day Tuesday. Authorities have banned public access to mountains and forests in those regions until at least Wednesday morning and ordered military patrols.

In Spain, firefighters battled to control a wildfire burning for a week on the popular Canary Islands tourist destination of Tenerife. It is estimated that the blaze, which has scorched 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres), has already burnt a third of Tenerife’s woodlands.

“The wildfire may be stabilized by tonight,” said Tenerife Gov. Rosa Dávila, who nonetheless added that the blaze “is still active.”

More than 12,000 people were evacuated during the past week. Authorities said Tuesday that 1,500 have been able to return to their homes. Authorities have described the fire as the worst in decades on the Atlantic archipelago.

Large parts of Spain were under alert for wildfires due to a heatwave that sent temperatures spiking over 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit). While Spain’s south often has extremely high temperatures, the country’s weather agency issued an alert for the northern Basque Country, where temperatures were forecast to reach 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) Wednesday.

Greece’s deadliest wildfire killed 104 people in 2018, at a seaside resort near Athens that residents had not been warned to evacuate. Authorities have since erred on the side of caution, issuing swift mass evacuation orders whenever inhabited areas are under threat.

Last month, a wildfire on the resort island of Rhodes forced the evacuation of some 20,000 tourists. Days later, two air force pilots were killed when their water-dropping plane crashed while diving low to tackle a blaze on Evia.

In Italy, authorities evacuated 700 people from homes and a campsite on the Tuscan island of Elba after a fire broke out late Monday.

According to the Italian Society of Environmental Geology, more than 1,100 fires in Europe this summer have consumed 2,842 square kilometers (about 1,100 square miles), well above an average of 724 fires a year recorded from 2006-2022. The fires have removed wooded areas capable of absorbing 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

“When we add the fires in Canada, the United States, Africa, Asia and Australia to those in Europe, it seems that the situation is getting worse every year,″ said SIGEA president Antonello Fiore.

—Becatoros reported from Athens, Greece. Associated Press writers Joe Wilson in Barcelona, Raf Casert in Brussels and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed.

source https://time.com/6307152/greece-wildfires-bodies-found/

Ecuadorians Vote to Stop Oil Drilling in the Amazon Rainforest

Ecuadorians voted on Sunday to stop an oil-drilling project in the Yasuni region of the Amazon with 59% voting yes on a proposition that will end the practice.

Ecuador’s government estimates that 1.67 billion barrels of oil are located under Yasuni National Park, home to over 4,000 plant species, 173 different types of mammals, and at least two uncontacted indigenous tribes. According to UNESCO, it is one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. At today’s oil price of approximately $80 per barrel, the oil under the park would be worth over $133 billion.

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In 2007, shortly after he was elected, Ecuador’s then-president Rafael Correa introduced a proposal asking that wealthy nations compensate the Ecuadorian government for not drilling in Yasuni park. Correa asked for $7.2 billion over the course of 10 years, which was equivalent to half the revenue expected to be generated by the oil reserves. The move initially received press from environmental activists, and both Spain and Germany pledged their support. However, a trust fund that the government set up to receive deposits received only $13 million by 2013. 

Ultimately, his plan failed to get the necessary support from other nations; Correa and his government announced that they would go ahead with drilling. Ecuador, like many other low- and middle-income countries, was then facing a mounting debt crisis, and paying extremely high interest rates after defaulting twice in the previous 20 years. At the time, leaders in the country felt that increasing fossil fuel extraction could help relieve some of that debt—one third of Ecuador’s government revenue comes from oil. Drilling in the Yasuni region officially began in 2016 and the country has since begun selling oil from the region to the rest of the world. Currently, over 66% of oil from the Yasuni region is shipped to the United States.

Subsequent governments have maintained that approach to managing Ecuador’s resources—indeed, Guillermo Lasso, elected to the presidency in 2021, has suggested doubling down on it. In a speech last year, Lasso told the public that “Now that the global trend is to abandon fossil fuels, the time has come to extract every last drop of benefit from our oil, so that it can serve the poorest while respecting the environment.” 

But indigenous communities disagree with the government’s rhetoric that their approach is respecting the environment. “It hurts me to see the little that is left of our rainforest inside this protected area,” Nemo Guiquita, a leader of the Waorani tribe which is indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon, told NBC News in 2021. “We should be fighting to protect our rainforest in Ecuador, but instead they are granting more oil concessions.” 

Indigenous leaders were at the forefront of pushing for a ban on oil drilling in the Yasuni. In recent weeks, a group of indigenous Waorani activists traveled to 12 cities throughout the country to persuade residents to vote yes on the referendum. 

Roy Brouwer, an environmental economist at the University of Waterloo, who conducted a study on the economic value of the Amazon rainforest, says that Indigenous populations tend to place an extremely high value on the environmental sanctity of the forest. 

“They’ve lived in the Amazon for 11,000 years. How are you going to compensate these people by taking away their livelihood, cutting the forest and having them move out of the area where they live for 11,000 years? There’s no monetary compensation for that.”

source https://time.com/6307145/ecuador-rainforest-oil-vote/