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WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden said an interview with CBS he is “not confident at all” there will be a peaceful transfer of power to Kamala Harris if Donald Trump loses November’s election, according to an extract broadcast Wednesday.
“If Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” Biden told the US network in the interview, which was due to air fully on Sunday. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it — all the stuff about ‘if we lose there’ll be a bloodbath.’“
NEA SILATA: Six weeks before harvest, there’s no water left in the ground for farmer Dimitris Papadakis’ olive grove in northern Greece, so he has started a new morning routine.
Joined by his teenage son, he uses a truck to bring water from nearby areas. Using a small generator, he connects the vehicle to irrigation pipes to save what’s left of his thirsty crop.
“Our boreholes have almost dried up ... We now depend on tankers to irrigate our fields,” says Papadakis, who heads an agricultural cooperative in a village in Halkidiki, a three-fingered peninsula in northern Greece which is popular with tourists.
This summer, southern Europe has been hammered by successive heat waves, following on from below-average rainfall for up to three years. Drought spots on the map of the region have expanded. In Greece, the effects include water shortages, dried-up lakes, and even the death of wild horses.
The groundwater beneath Papadakis’ 270 olive trees is dwindling and becoming brackish, with the drought expected to cut his expected yield in half.
The water crisis has been exacerbated by a booming tourist season.
In Kassandra, the westernmost finger of the peninsula, the year-round population of 17,000 swells to 650,000 in the summer, placing unsustainable pressure on water resources.
“We’ve seen a 30-40 percent reduction in water supply following three consecutive winters with almost no rainfall,” says local mayor Anastasia Halkia.
Haroula Psaropoulou owns a home in the area, in the seaside village of Nea Potidea. She says it’s hard to cope with frequent household water cuts that may last up to five days during the searing heat.
“I recycle water from the bathroom sink and from washing, and I use it for the plants,” the 60-year-old Psaropoulou says. “I’ve also carried water from the sea for the toilet.”
According to the European Union’s Emergency Management Service, acute drought conditions currently exist around the Black Sea, stretching westward into northern Greece.
Along the Evros River, which divides Greece and Turkiye, severe drought means the delta now has higher levels of seawater. The extra salt is killing the wild horses that depend on the river for drinking water.
“If the horses go without water for a week, they die,” says Nikos Mousounakis, who is leading an initiative to create freshwater drinking points for the horses. “Some of them are still in bad shape, but we hope that with continued help, they’ll recover.”
Until recently, Lake Picrolimni in northern Greece was a popular destination for mud baths, but this summer it’s a shallow basin of cracked earth, dry enough to hold the weight of a car.
“It hasn’t rained for two years now, so the lake has totally dried up,” says local municipal chairman Costas Partsis. “It used to have a lot of water. People came and bathed in the muddy water. The clay has therapeutic properties for many ailments. No one came this year.”
Nearby, Lake Doirani straddles Greece’s northern border with North Macedonia. The shoreline has receded by 300 meters (yards) in recent years. Local officials are pleading for public works to restore the river’s water supply, echoing calls from experts who argue that major changes in water management are needed to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change.
“We’re experiencing a prolonged period of drought lasting about three years now, due to lower rainfall and snowfall, a result of the climate crisis and poor water management,” says Konstantinos S. Voudouris, a professor of hydrogeology at the University of Thessaloniki. “The solution lies in three key words: conservation, storage, and reuse.”
Voudouris argues that outdated water networks are losing too much water and that infrastructure improvements must focus on collecting and storing rainwater during the wet season, as well as reusing treated wastewater for agriculture.
“These drought phenomena will return with greater intensity in the future,” Voudouris said. “We need to take action and plan ahead to minimize their impact… and we must adapt to this new reality.”
BINMAR, Chad: When Milla Nemoudji, a 28-year-old from a village in southern Chad, divorced her husband following years of physical abuse, she found herself without means for survival. Though raised in a farming family, she struggled to get by in a community where access to land is customarily controlled by men.
With little support for women in her situation, divorce being relatively rare in Chad, she fought for economic independence. She sold fruits and other goods. During the rainy season, she plowed fields as a laborer. Last year, however, a women’s collective arrived in her village and she decided to join, finally gaining access to land and a say over its use. She farmed cotton, peanuts and sesame, making enough money to cover basic needs.
The village, Birman, is on the outskirts of Chad’s second-largest city, Moundou, in the densely populated Logone Occidental region. Thatched-roof homes stand amid fields where women traditionally harvest the land but, like Nemoudji, have little or no say over it.
In Chad, land access is often controlled by village chiefs who require annual payments. Women are often excluded from land ownership and inheritance, leaving them dependent on male relatives and reinforcing their secondary status in society.
The struggle for land rights is compounded by the dual legal system in Chad where customary law often supersedes statutory law, especially in rural areas. While recent legal reforms mean laws recognize the right of any citizen to own land, application of those laws is inconsistent.
For women like Nemoudji who seek to assert their rights, the response can be hostile.
“There’s no one to come to your aid, although everyone knows that you are suffering,” Nemoudji told The Associated Press, criticizing the traditional system of land rights and urging local leaders to take domestic violence seriously. “If women weren’t losing access to farmlands, they would dare to leave their husbands earlier.”
Initiatives like N-Bio Solutions, the collective Nemoudji joined, are challenging those norms. Founded by Adèle Noudjilembaye in 2018, an agriculturist and activist from a neighboring village, the collective is a rare initiative in Chad negotiating on behalf of women with traditional chiefs, who then seek out residents with available land willing to lease it.
So far, Noudjilembaye runs five such collectives with an average 25 members. Although these initiatives are slowly gaining popularity, they are limited by financial resources and some women’s hesitancy to risk the little they have.
Noudjilembaye told the AP that “despite the violence and neglect, many women stay (in situations) because of financial dependency, fear of societal judgment or lack of support.”
The efforts of such collectives have broader implications for both gender equality and sustainable agriculture in Chad. Women of Binmar have adopted sustainable farming practices including crop rotation, organic farming and the use of drought-resistant seeds, which help preserve the soil and increase productivity.
In general, women who gain access to land and resources are more likely to implement sustainable agricultural practices and improve local food systems, according to the United Nations.
But in Chad, life for women who attempt to assert their rights is especially challenging.
Chad is ranked 144th out of 146 countries, according to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Indicator Report compiled by World Economic Forum. , over three times the global average, according to the United Nations. Only 20 percent of young women are literate.
For Nemoudji, her family’s response to her plight was mostly passive. They offered her a place to stay and provided emotional support but did little to confront her abuser or seek justice on her behalf.
“The system failed me when I sought help after my husband burned down my house,” Nemoudji said. When she reported the incident to the village chief, “nothing was done to solve my dispute.”
Village chief Marie Djetoyom, a woman in the hereditary role, told the AP that she was afraid to take action and risk being imprisoned in retaliation. She asserted that she must act within the customary land laws.
Despite the lack of support from traditional leaders and local authorities, women in the village of around 120 people have found strength in the collective.
“As cultural practices do not favor access to land for many women individually, the community alternative remains the best possibility to achieve the objective,” said Innocent Bename, a researcher at CEREAD, a N’Djamena-based research center.
Marie Depaque, another village woman who struggled to get by after her second husband refused to financially support her children from her first marriage, added that “our fight for land rights is not just about economic survival but also about justice, equality and the hope for a better future.”
Nemoudji dreams of better educational opportunities for the children in her community so they can break the cycle of poverty and violence. She advocates in the community for changes in the land ownership system.
“Knowing my rights means I can seek help from authorities and demand justice,” she said.
Ukrainian drones set oil tanks on fire at an depot in Russia’s Rostov region, Russian Telegram channels reported on Wednesday.
Russia’s air defense units destroyed four drones over the Rostov region overnight, the Russian defense ministry and Rostov’s governor, Vasily Golubev, said on the Telegram messaging app, but made no mention of an attack on an oil depot.
The Baza Telegram channel, which is close to Russia’s security services, said that three tanks were burning at an oil depot in the Kamensky district of the Rostov region after two drones fell on the area.
Videos posted on Russian social media showed what looked like large tanks ablaze at night. Reuters was able to identify the location of one of the videos as in Rostov’s Kamensky district.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.
A fuel storage depot in the Kamensky district was attacked in early August as well.
The attack comes while tanks were still on fire at another Rostov’s oil depot, in the Proletarsk district, some 10 days after a Ukrainian attack, Russian Telegram channels report.
Separately, Alexander Gusev, the governor of the Voronezh region that borders Ukraine, said debris from a Ukraine-launched drone over the region sparked a fire “near explosive objects.” Gusev added that there was no detonation.
The fire had been extinguished, Gusev said on Telegram, and residents from two settlements who were evacuated from their homes were returning.
The Russian defense ministry said eight attack drones were destroyed over the Voronezh region, but it provided no further detail.
Russian officials often do not disclose the full extent of damage inflicted by Ukrainian attacks.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the 30-month-old war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on its smaller neighbor. Kyiv says that its air attacks aim to destroy energy, transport and military infrastructure that’s key to Moscow’s overall war effort.
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden ordered the construction of a temporary pier to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza earlier this year even as some staffers for the US Agency for International Development expressed concerns that the effort would be difficult to pull off and undercut the effort to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into the territory, according to a USAID inspector general report published Tuesday.
Biden announced plans to use the temporary pier in his State of the Union address in March to hasten the delivery of aid to the Palestinian territory besieged by war between Israel and Hamas.
But the $230 million military-run project known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, would only operate for about 20 days. Aid groups pulled out of the project by July, ending a mission plagued by repeated weather and security problems that limited how much food and other emergency supplies could get to starving Palestinians.
“Multiple USAID staff expressed concerns that the focus on using JLOTS would detract from the Agency’s advocacy for opening land crossings, which were seen as more efficient and proven methods of transporting aid into Gaza,” according to the inspector general report. “However, once the President issued the directive, the Agency’s focus was to use JLOTS as effectively as possible.”
At the time Biden announced plans for the floating pier, the United Nations was reporting virtually all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were struggling to find food and more than a half-million were facing starvation.
The Biden administration set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million of Gaza’s people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down.
High waves and bad weather repeatedly damaged the pier, and the UN World Food Program ended cooperation with the project after an Israeli rescue operation used an area nearby to whisk away hostages, raising concerns about whether its workers would be seen as neutral and independent in the conflict.
US National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Tuesday that the project “had a real impact” of getting food to hungry Palestinian civilians despite the obstacles.
“The bottom line is that given how dire the humanitarian situation in Gaza is, the United States has left no stone unturned in our efforts to get more aid in, and the pier played a key role at a critical time in advancing that goal,” Savett said in a statement.
The watchdog report also alleged the United States had failed to honor commitments it had made with the World Food Program to get the UN agency to agree to take part in distributing supplies from the pier into Palestinian hands.
The US agreed to conditions set by the WFP, including that the pier would be placed in north Gaza, where the need for aid was greatest, and that a UN member nation would provide security for the pier. That step was meant to safeguard WFP’s neutrality among Gaza’s warring parties, the watchdog report said.
Instead, however, the Pentagon placed the pier in central Gaza. WFP staffers told the USAID watchdog that it was their understanding the US military chose that location because it allowed better security for the pier and the military itself.
Israel’s military ultimately provided the security after the US military was unable to find a neutral country willing to do the job, the watchdog report said.
