Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer

Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer
New South Wales Rural Fire Service firefighter Elisabeth Goh monitors a hazard reduction burn in Sydney, Australia on Sept. 10, 2023. (Reuters)
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Updated 19 September 2023
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Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer

Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer
  • Heat records are being broken in the densely populated area around Sydney
  • Persistent heavy rain has also slowed the fire service’s ability to carry out controlled burns

SYDNEY: Four years since bushfires destroyed wide swathes of southeastern Australia, killing 33, the country is once again on high alert, bracing for what weather experts say will be the hottest, driest period since the so-called Black Summer.
Just into the Australian spring, which starts in September, heat records are being broken in the densely populated area around Sydney, with some regional schools closed due to bushfire risk a month before the official bushfire season begins.
Adding to the tension, unusually heavy rain since the fires of 2019 and 2020 has spurred vegetation growth, producing more foliage to burn in an El Nino weather system, typified by hot, dry weather, which was declared on Tuesday.
“Once we’ve actually dried out the landscape from the wet conditions it’s starting from, it could be that we end up with a landscape that’s very dry but now has a lot of fuel because we’ve had such good vegetation growth,” said Jason Evans, a professor at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales.
“That would be perfect conditions for bushfires,” he said.
Australians watched with grim recognition as wildfires ripped through Europe and North America in the 2023 Northern summer. Now there is a sense that it is the Australians’ turn again, with global warming speeding up and exaggerating changes in weather patterns, according to climate scientists.
Of Australia’s 10 hottest years on record, eight were since 2010, meteorologists say.
The short amount of time since the last catastrophic bushfire season has contributed to delays in hazard reduction burns, where firefighters pre-emptively burn off areas to limit the spread of bushfires, because some volunteer firefighters quit due to trauma, says the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.
The persistent heavy rain has also slowed the fire service’s ability to carry out controlled burns. With dozens of bushfires already burning, the volunteer service said it had done just 24 percent of the hazard reduction it had planned.
“We’ve just had rain after rain after rain event so we’re quite behind,” Rural Fire Service Commissioner Bob Rogers told Reuters.
The heavy rains also mean that, despite the return of dry heat, the starting conditions are different to the fires of 2019 and 2020, which followed a lengthy drought, said Rogers.
While rich in fuel, at least it is not tinder dry like it was in the Black Summer.
Still, “we’re taking it very seriously,” he added. “While it may not be as bad as that, you don’t need a fire season to be as bad as that for it to destroy homes and indeed take lives.”


Bulgarians accused of being Russian spies appear in UK court

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Bulgarians accused of being Russian spies appear in UK court

Bulgarians accused of being Russian spies appear in UK court
LONDON: Five Bulgarian nationals accused of being part of a Russian spying network in Britain, tasked with carrying out surveillance and obtaining information about targets, appeared by videolink in a London court on Tuesday.
The three men and two women are accused of conspiring “to collect information intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy for a purpose prejudicial to the safety and interest of the state” between Aug. 30, 2020 and Feb. 8, 2023.
Orlin Roussev, 45, Bizer Dzhambazov, 41, Katrin Ivanova, 31, Ivan Stoyanov, 31, and Vanya Gaberova, 29, all Bulgarian nationals who lived in London and Norfolk, were arrested by counterterrorism police in February this year.
They did not enter a plea at this stage and were remanded in custody until their next appearance at London’s Old Bailey court on Oct. 13.
Roussev, Dzhambazov, and Ivanova had already been charged with identity document offenses and are due to appear at the Old Bailey on Thursday over those allegations.
Describing the charges, prosecutor Kathryn Selby told Westminster Magistrates’ Court the defendants were accused of being part of an organized network which had carried out surveillance and hostile action on behalf of Russia against specific targets, including for potential abductions.
Selby said Roussev’s home was the group’s alleged operating hub in Britain, and said the network had been given tasking by a person known as Jan Marsalek.
Marsalek, the former chief operating officer for collapsed payments company Wirecard, is wanted by German police over alleged fraud and his whereabouts are currently unknown.
He has not been charged with any crime in Britain but was named as an alleged co-conspirator in the charges against the five Bulgarians. The office of Marsalek’s lawyer declined to comment. Britain has been seeking to take tougher action on external security threats and potential spies, and in July passed a national security law, aiming at overhauling its means of deterring espionage and foreign interference with new tools and criminal provisions.
At the time, the government labelled Russia as “the most acute threat” to its security.
There has been no response from the Russian embassy in London to the news of the accusations.
Last November, Britain’s domestic spy chief said more than 400 suspected Russian spies had been expelled from Europe, striking the “most significant strategic blow” against Moscow in recent history.

Azerbaijan seeks ‘war crime’ suspects in sea of Karabakh refugees

Azerbaijan seeks ‘war crime’ suspects in sea of Karabakh refugees
Updated 35 min 43 sec ago
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Azerbaijan seeks ‘war crime’ suspects in sea of Karabakh refugees

Azerbaijan seeks ‘war crime’ suspects in sea of Karabakh refugees
  • The toll threatened to rise because dozens were being treated in critical condition and many remained unaccounted for
  • Yerevan has warned of possible “ethnic cleansing” by Azerbaijan

LACHIN CORRIDOR, Azerbaijan: Azerbaijani borders guards on Tuesday sought out “war crime” suspects in a sea of Armenian refugees flooding out of Nagorno-Karabakh after Baku claimed control of the separatist statelet in a lightning offensive last week.
The number of people who entered Armenia along the so-called Lachin Corridor following the operation has now surpassed 19,000, and was growing one day after a massive fuel blast on the edge of the rebel stronghold of Stepanakert rose to 20.
The toll threatened to rise because dozens were being treated in critical condition and many remained unaccounted for.
Most of the victims were stocking up on fuel for the trip down the only road connecting the impoverished and historically disputed region with Armenia.
Yerevan has warned of possible “ethnic cleansing” by Azerbaijan — a close ally of Armenia’s arch-nemesis Turkiye — after Baku launched a 24-hour blitz that forced the rebels to agree to disarm last Wednesday.
Armenians, mostly Christian, and Azerbaijanis, mostly Muslim, have fought two deadly wars over the mountainous territory since the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.
The area is now populated by up to 120,000 ethnic Armenians but is internationally recognized as part Azerbaijan.
The bad blood between the sides runs deep, with the first war in particular witnessing alleged massacres of civilians and gross human rights abuses by both sides.
An AFP team allowed to access the Lachin Corridor on an Azerbaijani government-organized tour saw that most of the people crossing the border were women, children and the elderly.
The few Armenian men in their 20s and 30s coming out Tuesday were forced to stare into a camera for identification at the last Azerbaijani border post.
“Azerbaijan intends to apply an amnesty to Armenian fighters who laid down their arms in Karabakh,” an Azerbaijani government source told AFP.
“But those who committed war crimes during the Karabakh wars must be handed over to us,” the source said.
Armenia said early Tuesday that more than 19,000 refugees had fled since the first group arrived in the country on Sunday.
AFP reporters on both sides of the border saw hundreds of cars piled high with belongings moving slowly along the jam-packed road.
Some of the vehicles crept along on flat tires and many simply walked past the last Azerbaijani checkpoint.
“They expelled us,” one man said as he walked past the Azerbaijani soldiers.
Yanik Zakaryan, 37, took part in last week’s fighting.
Now he was resting on the Armenian side of the border, grateful to Russian peacekeepers who have been patrolling the region since Azerbaijan clawed back swathes of the disputed territory in a six-week war in 2020.
“We fought well, but at one point we found ourselves surrounded,” Zakaryan told AFP. “The Russians came to get us out.”
Adding to the humanitarian drama, the separatist government on Tuesday said 13 bodies were found at the scene of a fuel depot blast on Monday and seven more people had died of their injuries.
It said 290 people had been hospitalized and “dozens of patients remain in critical condition.”
Armenia’s health ministry said it had sent a team of doctors to the rebel stronghold of Stepanakert by helicopter.
The Azerbaijani presidency said Baku had also sent medicine to help the wounded, and opened a special humanitarian corridor for Red Cross teams.
The European Union pledged to provide five million euros in humanitarian assistance.
The victims’ treatment was being complicated by shortages of medication that emerged during a nine-month blockade Azerbaijan had imposed to bring the region to heel.
Azerbaijan turned on the electricity of the rebel stronghold Stepanakert on Sunday, switching it to its own power grid as part of a “reintegration” drive.
Envoys from Baku and Yerevan were in Brussels on Tuesday to pave the way for the first meeting between their leaders since last week’s offensive on October 5.
The separatists said Tuesday that said 208 people had died in last week’s fighting.
The sides have since held two rounds of closed-door talks mediated by Russia focused on putting the region under Baku’s control.
But Azerbaijan’s forces have still not entered Stepanakert, occupying the strategic hights overlooking the rebel stronghold.
Many there are tormented by debates on whether to stay or go, which have also spilled out onto social media.
Some say that they cannot live under the authority of Azerbaijanis, while others argue that leaving now means that Armenians might never be able to return, losing the region for good.
Sveta Moussaylyan, 50, said this was the fourth time she has been forced to move due to decades of strife and changes in control over tiny hamlets.
“I’m not that old, but I’ve already seen so much!” she said.


Swedish police open arson case after mosque fire

Swedish police said Tuesday they were investigating whether a fire that reduced a mosque to rubble the previous day in Sweden.
Swedish police said Tuesday they were investigating whether a fire that reduced a mosque to rubble the previous day in Sweden.
Updated 26 September 2023
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Swedish police open arson case after mosque fire

Swedish police said Tuesday they were investigating whether a fire that reduced a mosque to rubble the previous day in Sweden.
  • “The mosque is almost completely destroyed, nothing can be saved,” mosque spokesman Anas Deneche said
  • Deneche said the mosque had been the target of several acts of violence in the past year and his family had been threatened

STOCKHOLM: Swedish police said Tuesday they were investigating whether a fire that reduced a mosque to rubble the previous day in central Sweden was arson.
“The investigation into the fire is continuing. Police will question witnesses and verify whether there were security cameras in the area,” the police said in a statement on their website.
The fire broke out on Monday around noon in Eskilstuna, a town of 108,000 people 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of Stockholm, causing no injuries, a police spokesman told AFP.
There are no suspects and no arrests have been made.
“The mosque is almost completely destroyed, nothing can be saved,” mosque spokesman Anas Deneche told AFP.
Deneche said the mosque had been the target of several acts of violence in the past year and his family had been threatened.
“But it’s still too early to draw any conclusions (about the cause of the fire), we’ll have to wait for the police to do their work,” he said.
Police said they were investigating several leads but provided no other details.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 Muslims live in Eskilstuna.


Russian Black Sea commander shown working after Ukraine said it killed him

Russian Black Sea commander shown working after Ukraine said it killed him
Updated 26 September 2023
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Russian Black Sea commander shown working after Ukraine said it killed him

Russian Black Sea commander shown working after Ukraine said it killed him
  • Ukraine’s special forces said on Monday they had killed Sokolov, Moscow’s top admiral in Crimea, along with 33 other officers in a missile attack
  • Sokolov was shown apparently taking part in a video conference with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

MOSCOW: Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and one of Russia’s most senior navy officers, was shown on Tuesday attending a video conference, a day after Ukrainian special forces said they had killed him.
In video and photographs released by the Russian defense ministry, Sokolov was shown apparently taking part in a video conference with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top admirals and army chiefs.
The video was shown on Russian state television.
Ukraine’s special forces said on Monday they had killed Sokolov, Moscow’s top admiral in Crimea, along with 33 other officers in a missile attack last week on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the port of Sevastopol.
Earlier on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had declined to comment on the Ukrainian claim, referring reporters to the defense ministry.
In the video released by the ministry, Shoigu said that more than 17,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in September and that more than 2,700 weapons, including seven American Bradley fighting vehicles, had been destroyed.
“The Ukrainian armed forces are suffering serious losses along the entire front line,” Shoigu said, adding that the Ukrainian counter-offensive had so far produced no results.
“The United States and its allies continue to arm the armed forces of Ukraine, and the Kyiv regime throws untrained soldiers to their slaughter in senseless assaults,” Shoigu said.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive has yet to yield significant territorial gains against Russian forces, which control about 17.5 percent of the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine.
According to a Sept. 19 scorecard by the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School,
Russia has gained
35 square miles of territory from Ukraine in the past month while Ukrainian forces have taken 16 square miles from Russian forces.


German police raid premises across the country in connection with migrant smuggling

German police raid premises across the country in connection with migrant smuggling
Updated 26 September 2023
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German police raid premises across the country in connection with migrant smuggling

German police raid premises across the country in connection with migrant smuggling
  • Inside the searched apartments and other buildings, police discovered many migrants without residence permits

BERLIN: More than 350 German federal police searched premises across the country early Tuesday in connection with the smuggling of migrants early on Tuesday.
The focus of the raids was on cities and towns in northern and western Germany but also in Bavaria in the south, German news agency DPA reported.
Police executed five arrest warrants, three in the northern town of Stade and two in the western town of Gladbeck. Inside the searched apartments and other buildings, police discovered many migrants without residence permits, dpa reported.
The raids were ordered by federal police at Frankfurt airport on suspicion of gang and commercial smuggling of foreigners, German news agency DPA reported.