The Fairview fire started Monday afternoon near the city of Hemet in Riverside County amid a brutal heat wave that has scorched Southern California for days. It was only 5 percent contained to date and the evacuation order and warning remain in place, according to the Riverside County Fire Department.
The department said at least 7 structures had been destroyed and several more damaged. officials estimated that thousands of structures in the area remain threatened by the fire.
The two victims of the fire appeared to be attempting to flee before being overcome by the blaze, officials said in a media briefing Tuesday morning.
Due to the blaze, all schools in Hemet Unified School District will be closed on Tuesday.
School district officials said in a statement that the decision “was not made lightly.” After considering local authorities’ advisement and evacuation orders, transportation impacts, the current level of fire containment, and the possibility of power outages with anticipated high temperatures, they felt that closing schools on Tuesday is necessary to ensure the safety of students, staff, and families.
Martin Griffiths, under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told a news conference in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, that the severe drought ravaging the country is likely to push parts of the country into famine by the end of 2022.
“Famine is at the door, and today we are receiving a final warning. I have been shocked to my core these past few days by the level of pain and suffering we see so many Somalis enduring,” Griffiths said at the end of his five-day visit to Somalia.
The Somalia Food Security and Nutrition Analysis report released Monday shows concrete indications that famine will occur in two areas in the Bay region (Baidoa and Burhakaba districts) in south-central Somalia between October and December.
According to the report, with five consecutive seasons of poor rainfall, exhausted coping capacities of affected communities, depletion of livelihood assets, and other exacerbating factors, humanitarian assistance will be required to address high levels of needs beyond December 2022.
“I repeat: This is a final warning to all of us. The situation and trends resemble those seen in the 2010-2011, in that crisis. Except now they are worse,” Griffiths said.
He said the unprecedented failure of four consecutive rainy seasons, decades of conflict, mass displacement, and severe economic issues are pushing many people to the brink of famine.
“And these conditions are likely to last through to at least March 2023,” he said, pointing out that Baidoa is the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.
“It is not the only place with needs, but it is one of them. In camps for the displaced people, we saw extreme hunger. In the hospital in Baidoa, we had the unenviable privilege of seeing children so malnourished that they could barely speak,” the UN relief chief said.
The UN said the Bay region was also the epicenter of the humanitarian crisis in 2017 when severe drought led to agropastoral and displaced populations facing a risk of famine, which was only averted due to timely, robust, and sustained humanitarian assistance.
Griffiths said 1.5 million children across Somalia will face acute malnutrition by October if the current course remains. “The drought, the worst in four decades, is forecast to continue. This is, in those often-used words, and no more true than here, a humanitarian catastrophe. We know that the needs will grow,” he said.
In the runoff, Truss, 47, beat former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak by winning approximately 57.4 percent of the Conservative Party members’ vote, Graham Brady, chair of the party’s backbench 1922 Committee, announced Monday.
The voting took place a month after Johnson was forced to step down following an avalanche of ministerial resignations over his scandal-plagued leadership.
The formal handover is scheduled for Tuesday after Truss and Johnson meet Queen Elizabeth II, who is staying at her Balmoral estate in Scotland.
Truss will be Britain’s third female prime minister after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. She faces the immediate tasks of tackling the worsening cost-of-living crisis and handling a Brexit arrangement about Northern Ireland to avoid antagonizing the EU.
“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply,” she said in her victory speech after the result was announced.
Though congratulating on Truss’s win, leader of the main opposition Labour Party Keir Starmer said in his tweets,” After 12 years of the Tories all we have to show for it is low wages, high prices, and a Tory cost of living crisis. Only Labour can deliver the fresh start our country needs.”
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Since the winter of 2021, Britain’s inflation has kept rising and successively hit new highs. Official data showed the Consumer Prices Index rose by 10.1 percent in July, far above the 2-percent target set by the Bank of England.
The central bank projected last month that higher energy prices would push Britain’s inflation to 13 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and inflation is likely to remain at very elevated levels throughout much of 2023.
The country’s energy regulator said in late August that the energy price cap will rise by 80 percent to 3,549 pounds (about 4,077 U.S. dollars) per year for an average household from October.
As millions of people in Britain face the prospect of escalating bills, Keith Baker, a research fellow in fuel poverty and energy policy at Glasgow Caledonian University, told Xinhua that the country could face its worst peacetime crisis since the General Strike of 1926. There has been a summer of disruption amid strikes by railway and airlines workers, and unions across sectors are threatening “waves of industrial action” in the coming weeks.
“We are now into really quite scary, unknown territory. We don’t know how much mortgage rates will go up, we don’t know how much food prices will go up, but we are seeing a trend that is certainly heading in that direction, and there’s no sign of it changing. In fact, there’s every sign it’s going to get worse,” said Baker.
Stuart Wilks-Heeg, a political expert at the University of Liverpool, told Xinhua that Truss as prime minister will probably face “the biggest set of policy challenges any prime minister has faced since at least the 1970s.”
Truss has campaigned to cut taxes, deregulation and prioritize economic growth, but experts doubt that these will be effective enough, given the severity of the situation. The Bank of England forecast last month that Britain will enter a five-quarter recession beginning in the final three months of 2022.
“She’s coming into a context which is almost unprecedented in modern British politics. It’s an extremely challenging situation. She hasn’t shown to me that she’s got the answers to the problems that we face,” Wilks-Heeg said.
Wilks-Heeg added that the leadership race took up too much time that could have been used to alleviate the situation.
“We’ve wasted a lot of time, so nothing has really happened over the summer to mitigate rising energy costs. The crisis will be looming even more urgently because we’re getting closer and closer to the winter. People’s fuel bills will already be going up, (while) inflation continues to rise,” he noted.
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A dispute over the Northern Ireland Protocol — the rules governing post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland — has strained Britain’s relations with the EU, stoking worries of a trade war if Truss presses ahead with her controversial bill to rewrite the protocol.
The Northern Ireland Protocol is a trade solution agreed by London and Brussels to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland following Brexit.
Under the protocol, Northern Ireland is part of British customs territory but is subject to the EU’s customs code, value-added tax (VAT) rules and single market rules for goods. However, a de facto Irish Sea border was thus created between the British mainland and Northern Ireland, meaning goods transported to and from Northern Ireland are subject to border controls.
Northern Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party has demanded the removal or replacement of the protocol as a precondition for it to sit in the assembly and form a devolved government.
The EU warned Truss last week that they will not participate in talks with Britain over reforms to the Northern Ireland Protocol unless she takes the bill off the table. However, she is reportedly planning to override the protocol even before the bill passes through British parliament by activating Article 16, the agreement’s emergency mechanism, when she becomes prime minister.
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These daunting challenges, if not properly tackled, could torpedo Truss’s premiership, some experts cautioned.
“More broadly, the country is in a very difficult situation. It’s not just the energy crisis. Almost every public service is struggling. There are strikes in all kinds of industries. The potential for this to overwhelm Liz Truss is very clear,” Wilks-Heeg said.
Wilks-Heeg added that Johnson might attempt to make a comeback should Truss’s leadership go wrong.
“He (Johnson) could well be successful in that, given the lack of obvious other contenders and given his obvious continuing popularity within the party,” he said.
However, Professor Iain Begg from the London School of Economics and Political Science believed the likelihood of Truss being ousted before the next general election in 2024 is low.
“I’ve seen suggestions that she might face a very rapid leadership challenge. I rather doubt it. I don’t think the Conservative Party wants to go through another convulsion, knowing how close they are to a general election. So she’s probably safe until the general election,” Begg said.
The main opposition Labour Party widened its lead in opinion polls over the Conservative Party as a summer of infighting caused damage to the Tories.
Begg added that Truss might be tempted to call an earlier general election if she gets a poll bounce after taking over.
“But it’s a perilous thing to do, as Theresa May found to her cost in 2017. She started off with a huge polling majority, and then she squandered it by ill-advised policies, but also by a lackluster campaign,” he said.
Speaking at a press briefing after a videoconference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Macron said France is ready to deliver more gas to Germany while the latter will offer more electricity to France, if the current energy crisis persists in winter.
“We are going to finalize the gas connections in order to be able to deliver gas to Germany…It (Germany) will be ready to produce more electricity to bring to us in extreme situations,” Macron said.
The French president said that he was in favor of solidarity measures at the European level to deal with the current energy crisis.
“We are in favor of common gas purchasing practices that will make it possible to buy cheaper,” he explained.
However, he said there was “no need” for a gas pipeline linking France and Spain.
Concerning the high energy prices in Europe, Macron proposed to set up control mechanisms for speculative operations at the European level.
Days ahead of a European Union (EU) energy ministers’ meeting, Macron said that he supports a price cap on gas purchased from Russia at the EU level.
Macron assured his countrymen that France is not in a situation for energy rationing, but called on people to limit heating to 19 degrees Celsius to save energy.
“If we collectively know how to behave more soberly and save energy everywhere, then there will be no rationing or cuts,” he stressed.
On Friday, Macron chaired a Defense Council meeting on the energy crisis. French Minister for Energy Transition Agnes Pannier-Runacher said after the meeting that France’s gas reserves were 92 percent full in preparation for possible shortages this winter.
According to the minister, 32 of the country’s fleet of 56 nuclear reactors are currently offline for routine maintenance, but French multinational electric utility company EDF has committed to restarting all of them for this winter.
As of 8:30 p.m. Monday, 16 people were missing and over 50 injured, said Wang Feng, deputy director of the Sichuan provincial emergency management department.
Among the dead, 29 were from Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture which administers Luding County, and the other 17 were from Ya’an City. Over 50,000 people in Ganzi and Ya’an have been evacuated to safety.
The 6.8-magnitude earthquake jolted Luding County at 12:52 p.m. Monday (Beijing Time), according to the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).
Sichuan has activated the highest level of emergency response for the earthquake.
As of 6 p.m. Monday, the province had deployed over 6,500 rescuers, four helicopters and two unmanned aerial vehicles to the frontline.
“There were many aftershocks, and some roads were blocked. We had to climb over the debris to get to the town square of Moxi,” said a rescuer from the provincial forest fire brigade.
On the way to Moxi Town, Xinhua reporters saw houses and infrastructure that had been damaged to varying degrees, and some roads partially collapsed.
The town’s electricity and communications had been cut, and emergency power-generation equipment was supplying electricity for residents taking shelter on the square.
Liu Fang, a local official, said that after the earthquake, she and other colleagues immediately evacuated the residents to the square about several hundred meters away.
According to the medics on the scene, after the earthquake, medical staff from the health centers in Moxi and neighboring villages and townships responded immediately. As of 8 p.m., more than 50 slightly injured people had received treatment at a medical site on the square.
A local special police rescue team had received calls saying a man in his 40s was trapped under a collapsed house, and they immediately rushed to the rescue.
However, excavators and other rescue machines could not reach the scene due to the narrow passage. The team thus dug the debris with their bare hands, and successfully rescued the man, who was sent to hospital.
So far, the special police rescue team has rescued more than 30 trapped people.
The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Emergency Management earmarked 50 million yuan (about 7.25 million U.S. dollars) to support rescue and relief work. The provincial government also allocated 50 million yuan to Ganzi.
Relief supplies, including some 3,000 tents and 10,000 folding beds, were allocated to Luding County, where the epicenter was located.
According to a TASS report, a group of 10 Russian tourists and two guides set out on the trek on Tuesday. On Saturday, nine people started climbing the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano, while three remained in the camp at an altitude of 3,300 meters.
The victims climbing the volcano died at an altitude of about 4,150 meters. Rescuers onboard a helicopter are trying to extract the other climbers.
Details of the accident were not immediately known.
The Kamchatka peninsula is famous for its array of active and dormant volcanos, hot springs and abundant wildlife. Klyuchevskaya Sopka, with a height of about 4,750 meters, is the highest active volcano in Eurasia.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice party, made the claim at a ceremony presenting a report over Poland’s losses from the German invasion.
Kaczynski said that although the reparations process would be “lengthy and difficult,” the issue was to “gain damages for everything that Germany, that the German state, that the German nation, did in Poland in the years 1939-1945.”
He added that “dozens of countries around the world … have received damages from Germany while Poland has not,” which he attributed to a lack of initiative.
Kaczynski said a general principle applied in international relations whereby if one state does another great harm, it must make good for that harm.
“And there is no reason why Poland has been excluded from the action of that principle,” he said.
Around 6 million Poles, including 3 million Polish Jews, were killed during the Second World War, and the capital Warsaw was levelled following a 1944 uprising in which about 200,000 civilians died, according to a Reuters report. (1 Polish zloty = 0.21 U.S. dollars)
In addition to the travel ban on these “high-ranking military, politicians and public figures,” the activities of three non-governmental organizations from Canada are now recognized as undesirable in Russia, the ministry said.
A total of 818 Canadians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have been under Moscow’s sanctions, including an entry ban, official data showed.
{BERLIN, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) — German carmaker BMW on Wednesday started the in-house production of fuel cell systems for its hydrogen-powered ix5 sport utility vehicle (SUV), which is to be rolled out worldwide for testing and demonstration purposes from the end of this year.}
The car combines hydrogen technology with an electric drive and a high-performance battery. The combination is “adding a unique form of drive system for the premium segment,” according to BMW.
“As a versatile energy source, hydrogen has a key role to play on the road to climate neutrality. And it will also gain substantially in importance as far as personal mobility is concerned,” Oliver Zipse, chief executive officer (CEO) of BMW AG, said at a press conference.
BMW has been working on hydrogen drive technology with fuel cells since 2015. Previously, the carmaker had already tested hydrogen combustion engines, which were deemed less effective in the end.
At its hydrogen competence center in the Bavarian capital of Munich, BMW is stacking the individual fuel cells from Toyota with other components to form a complete fuel cell system.
The BMW fuel cell system alone has an output of 125 kilowatts (kW) or 170 hp (horsepower). Together with the electric motor and a power battery developed for the hydrogen car, the powertrain can deliver 275 kW/374 hp.
The state of Bavaria will invest 500 million euros (500 million U.S. dollars) in hydrogen technology with a research center and hydrogen filling stations, Minister President Markus Soeder said at the press conference. “Hydrogen has a future and Bavaria is a leader in electromobility.”
However, the federal government should also support the development of the technology, Soeder said. “There is an urgent need for hydrogen networks in the south from the federal government as well.”
Total trade value stood at 3.39 trillion yuan (about 492.6 billion U.S. dollars), according to the data.
Service exports expanded 22.8 percent year on year to 1.64 trillion yuan, and service imports were 1.75 trillion yuan, up 18.9 percent from a year ago.
The service trade deficit dropped 20.1 percent to 107.73 billion yuan between January and July.
China’s trade of knowledge-intensive services maintained steady growth in the period, rising 10.2 percent year on year to about 1.42 trillion yuan.
Sectors such as telecommunications and information services saw rapid increases in exports, while insurance services were among the fastest growing areas in imports.
Travel service trade continued to recover, with its trade value expanding 7.5 percent from a year ago to 462.23 billion yuan.
In contrast to merchandise trade, service trade involves transportation, tourism, telecommunications, construction, advertising, computing, and accounting.
The ministry said it would promote the negative list on cross-border service trade nationally and seize opportunities coming from implementing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership to expand service trade with all member countries.
New business models such as bonded artwork exhibitions will be nurtured, and the imports of technologies and services in carbon emission reduction and environmental protection will be encouraged, the ministry added.
