China FM slams ‘indiscriminate attacks’ on civilians in talks with Lebanese counterpart
China FM slams ‘indiscriminate attacks’ on civilians in talks with Lebanese counterpart/node/2572540/world
China FM slams ‘indiscriminate attacks’ on civilians in talks with Lebanese counterpart
Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China Wang Yi addresses the "Summit of the Future" in the General Assembly hall at United Nations headquarters in New York City, US. (File/Reuters)
China FM slams ‘indiscriminate attacks’ on civilians in talks with Lebanese counterpart
Wang acknowledged the strikes, saying China “strongly condemns any violation of the basic norms governing international relations.”
China also urged its citizens to leave Israel on Sunday as tensions with Lebanon grew
Updated 24 September 2024
AFP
BEIJING: China’s top diplomat Wang Yi expressed support for Lebanon and condemned what he termed “indiscriminate attacks against civilians,” Beijing’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
Meeting his Lebanese counterpart in New York, Wang said: “We pay close attention to developments in the region, especially the recent explosion of communications equipment in Lebanon, and firmly oppose indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”
Last week, a series of coordinated communications device blasts across Lebanon killed 39 people and wounded almost 3,000.
And on Monday, Israeli air strikes killed 492 people, including 35 children and 58 women, and wounded 1,645 others in the country, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Wang acknowledged the strikes, saying China “strongly condemns any violation of the basic norms governing international relations.”
“No matter how the situation changes, we will always stand on the side of justice, on the side of our Arab brothers, including Lebanon,” Wang told Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib.
“Armed force does not represent truth, and might only undermines peace,” Wang said.
“Countering violence with violence will not solve the problems in the Middle East and will only lead to an even greater humanitarian disaster,” he added.
China also urged its citizens to leave Israel on Sunday as tensions with Lebanon grew.
China has repeatedly called for peace talks to resolve the crisis in Gaza.
In July, the country brokered a “national unity” deal between Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian organizations to rule Gaza together after the war.
In 2024, billions of people across the world faced climatic conditions that broke record after record: logging ever more highs for heat, floods, storms, fire and drought.
As the year drew to a close, the conclusion was both blatant and bleak: 2024 was the hottest year since records began, according to European climate scientists.
But it may not hold this dubious honor for long.
“This is life now and it’s not going to get easier. It’s only going to get harder. That’s what climate change means,” said Andrew Pershing, chief programs officer at Climate Central, a US-based non-profit climate advocacy group.
“Because we continue to pollute the atmosphere, we’re going to get, year after year, warmer and warmer oceans, warmer and warmer lands, bigger and badder storms.”
Others use still bolder language.
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” said the 2024 State of the Climate report.
Here’s how that looked this year, what 2025 holds, and why there are still reasons to be hopeful.
SOS
This was the first year when the planet was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, a time when humans did not burn fossil fuels on a mass scale, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The sheer number of days of extreme heat endured by billions of people — from the desert town of Phoenix, Arizona to the desert town of Phalodi in India’s Rajasthan — was startling.
Sunday, July 21, was the hottest day ever.
Until Monday, July 22.
The day after dipped a smidgen cooler.
These consecutive records came during Earth’s hottest season on record — June to August — according to Climate Central.
Those three months exposed billions of people to extreme heat, heavy rain, deadly floods, storms and wildfires.
A woman wades through flood waters at an inundated residential area in Garissa, Kenya, on May 9, 2024. (AFP)
Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, a global team that examines the role of climate change in extreme weather, said heatwaves were a “game changer.”
The world has not caught up: many deaths go unrecorded while some African countries lack an official definition for a heatwave, meaning heat action plans don’t kick in, she said.
“There is a huge amount of awareness that needs to be had to even adapt to today’s heat extremes but, of course, we will see worse,” Otto told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Between June 16-24, more than 60 percent of the world’s population suffered from climate change-driven extreme heat.
This included 619 million in India, where more than 40,000 people suffered heatstroke and 100+ died over the summer.
Birds fell from the sky as temperatures neared 50 C (122 F).
Millions were affected: from China to Nigeria, Bangladesh to Brazil, Ethiopia to Egypt, Americans and Europeans, too.
Climate Central said one in four people had no break from exceptional heat from June to August, the highs made at least three times more likely by climate change.
Smoke billows from the Airport Fire in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, US, on September 9, 2024. (AFP)
During those months, 180 cities in the Northern Hemisphere had at least one dangerous extreme heatwave — a phenomenon made 21 times more likely by human action, Climate Central said.
TOO HOT TO WORK
“The number of days where you are starting to push the physiological limits of human survival (are rising),” said Pershing, citing Pakistan and the Arabian Gulf as two areas that neared breaking point this year.
Hundreds died during the Hajj pilgrimage to Makkah as Saudi Arabia topped 50 C (122 F).
In the US Midwest and Northeast, Americans broiled under a heat dome when high pressure trapped hot air overhead.
NASA’s Earth Observatory said extreme heat was often exacerbated by hot nights, a dearth of green space or air con, or a surfeit of concrete, which absorbs heat.
Heat and drought fueled wildfires this year, with blazes in the Mediterranean, United States and Latin America. Fires burned from the Siberian Arctic to Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands.
“(The Pantanal) is a wet area that is not supposed to burn for months on end so that is probably something I would look out for next year where we see wildfires in ecosystems that are not traditionally burning ecosystems,” said Otto.
THE MOST VULNERABLE
The “new normal” hits the vulnerable hardest.
“The people who are succumbing to heat-related deaths are not the millionaires and billionaires,” said Pershing.
“If you are a reasonably well-to-do person you can afford air conditioning, you have a vehicle that can get you where you need to go, you have ways to keep yourself cool. If you don’t have access to these things or you lose them because of a power outage or another storm, that creates these additional vulnerabilities.”
This aerial photo shows a fisherman collecting dead fish, caused by renovation works and ongoing hot weather conditions, from a reservoir in southern Vietnam's Dong Nai province on April 30, 2024. (AFP)
In Africa, nearly 93 percent of the workforce faces extreme heat.
On the Arabian Peninsula, it is more than 83 percent of workers.
European and Central Asian workers could be next in line.
For Otto, the answer to this fast-spreading risk lies in empathy, putting the poor and vulnerable — “the vast majority of the global population” — at the center of climate action.
“In Bangladesh, when you put the survival of the poorest in the center of the action, you actually have a society that is really well-equipped to deal with tropical cyclones,” she said.
“People know what to do and there are drills and practices.”
Silver linings, though, are rare.
“Empathy is in short supply,” said Otto.
BOILING SEAS
Ocean temperatures also hit alarming levels in 2024, wreaking havoc on land and sea.
Hurricane Milton came barely two weeks after Hurricane Helene, with abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico turbo-charging the twin storms that lashed the US Southeast.
“In that some places in the Gulf of Mexico ... temperatures were 400 times more likely because of climate change,” Pershing said.
Climate Central found a similar link between October’s floods in Spain and unusually warm waters in the Tropical Atlantic.
Human-driven climate change made these elevated sea surface temperatures up to 300 times more likely, Climate Central said.
“WE NEED DRILLS”
Otto said this year’s extremes, notably Europe’s floods, illustrated a “failure of imagination” and a refusal to adapt.
“We don’t just need the weather forecast or warnings. We need drills. We have to practice survival wherever heavy floods can happen and they can happen everywhere,” she said.
Infrastructure also failed.
“The way that we have canalized rivers and sealed all the surfaces ... will mean disastrous damages every time there is a flood ... There is always this short-termism that it’s expensive to fix it now but of course it will save lots of money and livelihoods later,” she said.
For Pershing, adaptation is “an exercise in imagination because we haven’t seen these kinds of events before ... That is the challenge of climate change: we’re going to be confronted year after year with conditions we’ve never experienced.”
SO WHAT NEXT?
Nobody expects a quick end to extreme weather but Otto is hopeful that humans may change their polluting ways.
“That is a reason for optimism ...clinging to fossil fuels (is) increasing inequality and destroying livelihoods but it increasingly makes less sense ...for national economies.”
In another upbeat note, Otto said better preparations in Europe meant fewer deaths in this year’s floods than previously.
But ocean temperatures are a key concern for 2025.
“The amount of heat stored in the ocean … really has my attention because we are not quite sure if there is something different going on in the climate system,” said Pershing.
Another risk — complacency.
“People do have a way of getting used to conditions and you can kinda get numb to it,” Pershing said.
And complacency can breed paralysis.
“This was the hottest year, last year was the hottest year — probably next year will be the hottest year again,” said Otto.
Fire danger diminishes in Southern California even as crews continue to battle Malibu blaze
Malibu is a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles renowned for its stunning scenery of seaside bluffs and Zuma Beach featured in Hollywood films
Updated 22 min 22 sec ago
AP
MALIBU: As weather improved in Southern California, firefighters found some success Wednesday battling a wind-driven blaze burning in steep, nearly inaccessible areas that forced thousands, including celebrities, from their homes in Malibu, fire officials said.
With much of the coastal city under evacuation orders and warnings, residents waited anxiously to see whether their properties had been spared by the fire, which erupted late Monday and grew to more than 6 square miles (16 square kilometers). The blaze, dubbed the Franklin Fire, was just 7% contained.
About 20,000 residents remained under evacuation orders and warnings Wednesday evening, said Capt. Jennifer Seetoo of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
Firefighters had “a lot of success” battling the blaze Wednesday thanks to the improving weather, but it continued to burn in an area of very steep terrain that is difficult to access, CalFire Assistant Chief Dusty Martin said.
The National Weather Service said the week's strongest Santa Ana winds, with gusts that reached 40 mph (64 kph), have passed. Forecasters said that all red flag warnings, which indicate conditions for high fire danger and Santa Ana winds, were discontinued.
Santa Anas are notorious seasonal winds that blow dry air from the interior toward the coast, pushing back moist ocean breezes.
Much of the devastation occurred in Malibu, a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles known for its stunning bluffs and Zuma Beach, which features in many Hollywood films.
Flames burned near horse farms, celebrities’ seaside mansions, and Pepperdine University, where students were forced to shelter in place on campus for a second night Tuesday.
Faculty members are determining how best to complete the semester, which ends at Pepperdine this week. Final exams were postponed or canceled, depending on the class, university spokesperson Michael Friel said. An early analysis showed little to no damage to structures on campus, the university said.
It’s unclear how the blaze started. Officials said nine structures had been destroyed and at least six others had been damaged, though crews had only surveyed about 25% of the affected area, said Deputy Chief Albert Yanagisawa of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Lonnie Vidaurri’s four-bedroom home in the Malibu Knolls neighborhood is one of those destroyed. After evacuating to a hotel in Santa Monica with his wife and two young daughters, a neighbor called to tell Vidaurri that firefighters would need to break into his house.
“It’s pretty torched all around,” said Vidaurri, 53. He expects that the family’s pet bunnies did not survive the fire, and that they lost most of their things. “My girls cried, obviously, but it could have been worse.”
Mimi Teller, a Red Cross spokesperson who worked in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, said many people arrived in their pajamas and were “definitely in shock.”
“Nobody even had a backpack, it was, ‘Get out now,’” Teller said. “One lady didn’t even have a leash for her dog, she just scooped them up.”
Shawn Smith said he was asleep early Tuesday when someone knocked on his RV at 3 a.m. to wake him up to evacuate the Malibu RV Park.
“You could see the fires rolling in, in over the canyon. It was like ‘Holy crap, this is real,'” he said.
He returned Wednesday to find that the RV park had been saved — firefighters stopped the flames just before they entered the area.
“We got lucky,” he said.
Van Dyke, one of many celebrities with homes in Malibu, said in a Facebook post that he and his wife, Arlene Silver, evacuated as the fire swept in. Although the couple and most of their animals evacuated safely, one of their cats, Bobo, escaped as they were leaving. “We’re praying he’ll be OK and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires," he wrote.
Cher evacuated from her Malibu home when ordered and is staying at a hotel, her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, said Tuesday.
The fire erupted shortly before 11 p.m. Monday and swiftly moved south, jumping over the famous Pacific Coast Highway and extending all the way to the ocean.
Alec Gellis, 31, stayed behind Monday night to save his home in Malibu’s Serra Retreat neighborhood from the flames. He used pumps in the home’s swimming pool to help spray water over the house and surrounding vegetation, turning the lush area “into a rainforest.”
Gellis said there were flames within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the home on all sides. “The whole canyon was completely lit up.”
Utilities preemptively shut off power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses, starting Monday night, to mitigate the impacts of the Santa Ana winds, whose strong gusts can damage electrical equipment and spark wildfires.
As of Wednesday afternoon, electricity was still out for roughly 600 Southern California Edison customers, and the majority of those were in Los Angeles County, said utility spokesperson Gabriela Ornelas.
“We have been making significant progress,” she said.
But outages in Malibu were not included in that figure, Ornelas said. Some 3,300 customers in the Malibu area remained without power, due to safety shutoffs and for firefighter safety. Power was first shut off to most customers in Malibu on Monday evening.
The Woolsey Fire that roared through the area in 2018, killing three people and destroying 1,600 homes, was sparked by Edison equipment. Asked Wednesday if Edison equipment was involved in the Franklin Fire, Ornelas referred all questions regarding the cause to fire officials.
Trump taps election denier to head Voice of America
Kari Lake is a hardline conservative who ran in 2022 as governor of the southwestern state of Arizona and for US Senate in 2024, losing both times
She has repeatedly refused to accept her past election defeats, as well as Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden
Updated 31 min 48 sec ago
AFP
WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appointed election denier Kari Lake to be the new director of Voice of America, the state-funded international media organization.
VOA has reach around the world, with programming in a slew of African, Asian and European languages, including Somali, Dari and French.
It receives US funding but is generally considered a reliable, independent media operation, covering global and US news for international audiences.
However, previous leadership under Trump’s first administration came under fire for politicizing the outlet.
Lake, a former television news anchor, is a hardline conservative who ran in 2022 as the Republican candidate for governor of the southwestern state of Arizona and for US Senate in 2024, losing both times.
She has repeatedly refused to accept her past election defeats, as well as Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
As he prepares to take office in January, Trump’s staffing announcements have consisted of close allies.
“I am pleased to announce that Kari Lake will serve as our next Director of the Voice of America,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social website.
“She will be appointed by, and work closely with, our next head of the US Agency for Global Media... to ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”
In his first term, Michael Pack, Trump’s head of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, raised concerns when he moved in 2020 to strip an internal firewall at the organization meant to insulate the newsroom from political interference.
A VOA White House reporter was also investigated for supposed anti-Trump biases during Trump’s first administration.
Vulnerable Afghans struggle as Taliban rebuild Kabul roads
Thousands affected by road development works spearheaded in Kabul by Taliban authorities since they swept to power in 2021
3,515 families forced from homes between Apr-Oct when seven informal settlements demolished to make way for development plans
Updated 37 min 33 sec ago
AFP
KABUL: Mohammed Naeem knew the Kabul street where he and his brothers built matching apartment buildings was too narrow, but he was still in disbelief as their homes were reduced to rubble to widen the road.
He had received notice 10 days earlier that he would have to destroy three-quarters of his building immediately, one of thousands affected by road development works spearheaded in Kabul by the Taliban authorities since they swept to power in 2021.
Afghanistan’s largest city, Kabul has seen rapid and unruly urban development in the past decades, with side effects of snarled traffic and unregulated building.
While authorities and some residents praise the city’s road improvements as long overdue, many in the country — one of the poorest in the world — have been devastated by the loss of homes and businesses.
“We are pleased the government is constructing the road, the country will be built up,” said 45-year-old Naeem, perched on a pile of bricks in his gutted house in western Kabul, but he is desperate for the compensation the government promised.
“I’m in debt and I don’t have money, otherwise I could take my children somewhere away from the dust and all the noise... I could restart my life.”
This photograph taken on October 30, 2024 shows Afghan school children walking past a house demolished under a redevelopment plan by Taliban authorities, in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood of Kabul. (AFP)
Unemployed for years and having lost his tenants, Naeem and his family had no option but to stay in the shorn-off building — even as the harsh winter approaches — with its spacious apartments reduced to two rooms and a kitchen cordoned off by tarpaulin at the top of a broken staircase.
His toddler son, the youngest of six, swings a hammer against jagged bricks, imitating the laborers his father hired to dismantle their home of a decade.
For now, it’s a game, his mother told AFP, but sometimes he asks, “Why are you breaking the house down, dad?” she said, tears in her eyes. “Will you build another one?“
Some residents told AFP they were rushed to leave, with nowhere else to go, or did not receive any support from the government.
The municipality says those whose homes and businesses were completely or partially destroyed would be compensated and given “more than enough” time to move out and find new residences.
Kabul municipality representative Nematullah Barakzai said the government had paid out two billion Afghanis (nearly $30 million) in compensation this year, with road construction accounting for more than half of 165 projects.
“If you want a city to be organized and city services to reach to everyone equally, you need a planned city... all these roads are approved and essential,” Barakzai said.
While Kabul’s roads are paved, they are often narrow, without traffic lights or markers, with chaotic bumper-to-bumper traffic and accidents a daily occurrence.
The Land Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission recovered nearly 33,000 acres of state land in Kabul in two years “from usurpers, power abusers and illegitimate descendants,” justice ministry spokesman Barakatullah Rasuli told AFP.
“This process is continuing rapidly in all of Afghanistan’s provinces,” he said.
This month, the authorities announced work had started on a construction project to tackle population growth and lack of housing in the capital.
Widowed Najiba — not her real name — lost all but one of the eight rooms of the mud-brick home she built for herself and her four children to road expansion.
After a year and a half she has not received compensation, she said.
“I want either that they give me my money or new land so I could build a house, I don’t have anything else,” she told AFP.
“They say these lands belong to the government, if it was government land they should have told us at first.”
Some residents have praised the demolition of homes belonging to former warlords that had blocked roads in central Kabul since a construction boom after the end of the first Taliban rule in 2001.
The removal of barriers and opening of the street at the US embassy, closed after the Taliban’s return to power, has also been met with approval.
But the most vulnerable people have been the hardest hit by the clearances, such as the many internally displaced by Afghanistan’s decades of war, non-governmental groups said.
Sources familiar with the Kabul evictions told AFP 3,515 families were forced from their homes between April and October when seven informal settlements were demolished to make way for development plans, 70 percent of them dispersing around Kabul.
In June, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reported that around 6,000 people became homeless when authorities demolished internally displaced people’s settlements in the capital and called for evictions to halt “until legal safeguards, due process, and the provision of alternative housing are in place.”
Trump invites China’s Xi Jinping to attend inauguration, CBS News reports
Updated 43 min 13 sec ago
Reuters
WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration next month, CBS News reported on Wednesday, citing multiple sources.
The invitation to the Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington occurred in early November, shortly after the Nov. 5 presidential election, and it was not clear if it had been accepted, CBS reported.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump said in an interview with NBC News conducted on Friday that he “got along with very well” with Xi and that they had “had communication as recently as this week.”
It would be unprecedented for a leader of China, a top US geopolitical rival, to attend a US presidential inauguration.
Trump has named numerous China hawks to key posts in his incoming administration, including Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state.
The president-elect has said he will impose an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods unless Beijing does more to stop trafficking of the highly addictive narcotic fentanyl. He also threatened tariffs in excess of 60 percent on Chinese goods while on the campaign trail.
In late November, China’s state media warned Trump that his pledge to slap additional tariffs on Chinese goods over fentanyl flows could drag the world’s top two economies into a mutually destructive tariff war.
Separately on Wednesday, China’s US Ambassador Xie Feng read a letter from Xi to a US-China Business Council gala in Washington, in which the Chinese leader said Beijing was prepared to stay in communication with the US
“We should choose dialogue over confrontation and win-win cooperation over zero-sum games,” Xi said in the letter.
Xie added that the two countries should not decouple supply chains. But Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to Beijing, said in a prerecorded video address that China at times tried to “sugar coat” challenging and competitive relations.
“No amount of happy talk can obscure our profound differences,” Burns said. (Reporting by Jasper Ward, David Brunnstrom, Michael Martina and Costas Pitas; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
