World

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil registered the highest number of fires in the Amazon for the month of May since 2004, and the highest ever for the Cerrado savanna region last month, according to official figures released on Wednesday.

Fueling fears over the future of the world’s biggest rainforest, the national space agency, INPE, said satellite data showed a total of 2,287 fires in the Brazilian Amazon basin in May, an increase of 96 per cent from May 2021.

It is the second-highest number on record for the month, after 2004, when there were 3,131.

In the Cerrado, a biodiverse tropical savanna to the south of the Amazon, there were 3,578 fires, according to INPE figures, an increase of 35 per cent from May 2021.

It was the highest figure for May in the region since records began in June 1998.

Environmentalists called the numbers further evidence of a surge in fires and deforestation under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

“These numbers are not a fluke data point, they are part of a constant upward trend in environmental destruction in the past three years — the result of an intentional government policy,” the executive director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Brazil office, Mauricio Voivodic, told reporters.

“Science is being ignored, and the future will make Brazil pay a high price for it.”

Experts say fires in the Amazon, a key buffer against climate change, are nearly all set intentionally to clear land for activities such as farming and ranching.

May typically sees fewer fires than the peak of the dry season in August and September. The high numbers early in the year raised fears 2022 could be particularly destructive.

Bolsonaro, who is closely allied with Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector, has faced international criticism over a sharp increase in de-forestation in the Amazon and other ecosystems on his watch.

Since he took office in 2019, average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased by 75 per cent from the previous decade, according to official figures.

There is also alarm over the Atlantic Forest on Brazil’s eastern coast, where de-forestation increased by 66 per cent last year, according to a report last week by environmental group SOS Mata Atlantica.

KYIV — Russian forces have seized control of half of eastern Ukraine's key city of Severodonetsk, a senior official said Tuesday, hours after EU leaders struck a watered-down deal to ban more than two-thirds of Moscow's oil imports.

In central Ukraine, two Russian soldiers were sentenced to more than 11 years in jail each after a court found them guilty of firing artillery at civilian areas soon after Moscow's February 24 invasion.

Severodonetsk is one of several industrial hubs that lie on Russia's path to capturing the Donbas' Lugansk region, where Moscow has shifted the bulk of its firepower since failing to capture Kyiv in the war's early stages.

"Unfortunately, the front line divides the city in half. But the city is still defending itself, the city is still Ukrainian, our soldiers are defending it," said Oleksandr Stryuk, head of Severodonetsk's military and civil administration.

Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday earlier described the situation as "extremely complicated", conceding that parts of the city were controlled by Russian forces.

But as Russian troops edged closer to the Severodonetsk city centre, EU leaders at a summit in Brussels were tightening the economic screws on Moscow.

A compromise oil embargo deal reached late Monday, meant to punish Russia for its invasion, cuts "a huge source of financing for its war machine", European Council chief Charles Michel tweeted.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the key figures who blocked an agreement by the 27-nation bloc, hailed the deal for preserving Budapest's supply of cheap crude from Moscow.

"Families can sleep peacefully tonight, we kept out the most hair-raising idea," Orban, whose country borders war-torn Ukraine to the west, said in a video message.

'Save your lives' 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had urged Europe to forge their "independence" from Russian energy.

The situation on the eastern front line in Donbas has become increasingly desperate, with Ukrainian towns facing near constant shelling by Russian forces.

“We see some cars driving around with Ukrainian flags so we figure that means we are still part of Ukraine,” said Yevgen Onyshchenko, a 42-year-old plumber in a powerless apartment in Severodonetsk’s twin city Lysychansk.

“But otherwise, we are in the dark.”

A French journalist, Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff, was killed while covering civilian evacuations in the area on Monday.

An overnight rocket attack killed at least three people and wounded six in the city of Slovyansk, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kirilenko said Tuesday on Telegram.

“I repeat once again that there are no safe places in the Donetsk region, so I call again: Evacuate, save your lives,” he said.

In the southern region of Kherson, the country’s military leadership said Ukrainian forces have pushed back, as prosecutors pressed ahead with prosecutions of captured Russian soldiers.

The servicemen convicted on Tuesday, Alexander Bobykin and Alexander Ivanov, were both handed sentences of 11 years and six months for firing Grad missiles on two villages in the north-eastern Kharkiv region in the early days of the war.

The verdict after the trial in the Poltava region comes one week after another court, in the capital Kyiv, gave a 21-year-old Russian solider a life sentence, the country’s first judicial reckoning on Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general was in The Hague on Tuesday meeting her counterpart from the International Criminal Court and other officials as they seek wider war crimes prosecutions.

But while Ukraine is pushing for solidarity from its allies, European leaders meeting on Tuesday for a second day played down the chances of a rapid embargo on Russian gas to follow the partial ban on oil imports.

Europe is heavily reliant on Russian gas.

“With gas it is quite different. Therefore the gas embargo will not be an issue in the next package of sanctions” Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said.

The compromise oil deal hatched on Monday exempts deliveries by pipeline, after Orban warned halting supplies would wreck Hungary’s economy.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said the ban “will effectively cut around 90 per cent of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year”.

The agreement also includes plans for the EU to send 9 billion euros ($9.7 billion) in “immediate liquidity” to Kyiv, Michel announced.

Michel said the sanctions involved disconnecting Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, from the global SWIFT system, banning three state broadcasters and blacklisting individuals blamed for war crimes.

Russia’s Gazprom, meanwhile, turned off the tap to The Netherlands on Tuesday, halting gas shipments after Dutch energy firm GasTerra ignored a demand that gas supplied from April 1 be paid for in rubles.

Danish energy company Orsted has also warned its gas shipments could be cut off when a Tuesday payment deadline had passed.

Washington, however, is taking a cautious line regarding weaponry for Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden said Monday he would not send long-range rocket systems that could hit Russian territory, despite urgent requests from Kyiv for exactly that.

Ukraine has received extensive US military aid, with legislators approving another $40 billion assistance package in May.

POKHARA, Nepal — Nepali rescuers have retrieved all 22 bodies from a plane that crashed in the Himalayas, authorities said on Tuesday.

Air traffic control lost contact with the Twin Otter shortly after it took off from Pokhara in western Nepal on Sunday morning and headed for Jomsom, a popular trekking destination.

Its wreckage was found a day later, strewn across a mountainside at an altitude of around 4,400 metres.

“All 22 bodies have been carried to Kathmandu by Nepal Army’s [Mi-17] helicopter,” Tribhuvan International Airport spokesman Teknath Sitoula told AFP.

“After postmortem, they will hand over the dead bodies to their family members.”

About 60 people were involved in the search mission, including the army, police, mountain guides and locals, most of whom trekked uphill for miles to get there.

Many spent the night camped at the high-altitude site.

The chief of Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority, Pradeep Adhikari, said the government had formed a committee to investigate the accident. 

“Our pilots fly in very challenging terrains and in unpredictable weather. We are looking into what can be done to minimise such accidents, especially in monsoon and pre-monsoon periods,” Adhikari said.

The cause of the crash is yet to be confirmed, but Pokhara Airport spokesman Dev Raj Subedi said on Monday that the aircraft, operated by Nepali carrier Tara Air, did not catch fire in the air.

The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have also been recovered from the crash site, Sitoula said Tuesday.

There were 16 Nepalis, four Indians and two Germans on the twin-prop aircraft.

The Germans, in their 50s, were heading for a two-week trek in the remote Upper Mustang area with their Nepali guide.

Poor safety record

According to the Aviation Safety Network website, the aircraft was made by Canada’s de Havilland and first flew more than 40 years ago.

Its operator Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a privately owned domestic carrier that services many remote destinations across Nepal. 

It suffered its last fatal accident in 2016 on the same route when a plane with 23 on board crashed into a mountainside.

An investigation concluded that the crew repeatedly entered clouds and descended despite unfavourable weather conditions and warnings, and also deviated from their route.

Nepal’s air industry has boomed in recent years, carrying goods and people between hard-to-reach areas as well as foreign trekkers and climbers. 

But it has been plagued by poor safety due to insufficient training and maintenance.

The European Union has banned all Nepali carriers from its airspace over safety concerns.

The Himalayan country also has some of the world’s most remote and tricky runways, flanked by snow-capped peaks with approaches that pose a challenge even for accomplished pilots.

The weather can also change quickly in the mountains, creating treacherous flying conditions.

In March 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines plane crash-landed near Kathmandu’s notoriously difficult international airport, killing 51 people and seriously injuring 20.

That accident was Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane died when it crashed on approach to Kathmandu.

Just two months earlier, a Thai Airways aircraft had crashed near the same airport, killing 113 people.

WASHINGTON — US President Joe Biden said Monday he would not send rocket systems to Ukraine that could hit targets well inside Russian territory, despite urgent requests from Kyiv for long-range weapons.

"We are not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia," Biden told reporters in Washington.

Pro-Western Ukraine has received extensive US military aid since Russia invaded its neighbour in late February, but says it needs long-range rockets equivalent to what Moscow's forces use.

Kyiv has asked the United States for mobile batteries of long-range rockets, the M270 MLRS and the M142 Himars, which can launch multiple rockets at the same time with a range of up to 300 kilometres, eight times or more the distance of artillery in the field.

This could give Ukrainian forces the ability to reach, with great precision, targets far behind Russian lines, though it is unclear if that is their intent.

"If the West really wants Ukraine's victory, maybe it is time to give us long-range MLRS?" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's advisor Mykhailo Podoliak tweeted recently.

"It is hard to fight when you are attacked from a 70km distance and have nothing to fight back with."

The United States earlier in May announced another $40 billion assistance package amid speculation it included such weapons.

Since failing to capture Kyiv in the war's early stages, Russia's army has narrowed its focus, hammering cities with relentless artillery and missile barrages as it seeks to consolidate its control.

Russian forces edged toward the centre of the eastern Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk on Monday, while President Volodymyr Zelensky prepared to appeal to EU leaders at an emergency summit where a ban on Russian oil imports is on the agenda.

Meanwhile, Russia forces continued their push in the eastern Donbas region, upping the pressure on the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.

Russia’s army has narrowed its focus, hammering cities with relentless artillery and missile barrages as it seeks to consolidate its control.

The situation in Severodonetsk, just across the Donets river from Lysychansk, was “very difficult”, the local Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said in a statement on social media.

“The Russians are advancing into the middle of Severodonetsk,” while the fighting continued, Gaiday said.

POKHARA, Nepa — Nepali rescuers on Monday retrieved 16 bodies from the mangled wreckage of a passenger plane strewn across a mountainside that crashed in the Himalayas with 22 people on board.

Air traffic control lost contact with the Twin Otter aircraft operated by Nepali carrier Tara Air shortly after taking off from Pokhara in western Nepal on Sunday morning headed for Jomsom, a popular trekking destination.

Helicopters operated by the military and private firms braved poor weather to scour the remote mountainous area all day on Sunday, aided by teams on foot, but called off the fruitless search when night fell.

After resuming on Monday, the army shared on social media a photo of aircraft parts and other debris littering a sheer mountainside, including a wing with the registration number 9N-AET clearly visible.

"So far, 16 bodies have been recovered and teams are searching for the remaining six. Chances of survival are low but our efforts continue to find them," Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Deo Chandra Lal Karn told AFP.

There were about 60 people working at the crash site, including army, police, mountain guides and locals, most of whom trekked for miles on foot to get there.

The authority said that the plane "met an accident" at 4,420 metres in the Sanosware area of Thasang municipality in Mustang district.

"Analysing the pictures we received, it seems that the flight did not catch fire. Everything is scattered in the site. The flight seems to have collided with a big rock on the hill," said Pokhara Airport spokesman Dev Raj Subedi.

Families 

Four Indians were onboard, as well as two Germans, with the remainder Nepalis including a computer engineer, his wife and their two daughters who had just returned from the United States.

The four Indians were a divorced couple and their daughter and son, aged 15 and 22, going on a family holiday, Indian police official Uttam Sonawane told AFP.

“There was a court order for [the father]to spend time with the family for 10 days every year, so they were taking a trip,” Sonawane said.

Pradeep Gauchan, a local official, said that the wreckage was difficult to reach and that poor weather was hampering the operation.

“One team has been dropped close to the area by a helicopter but it is cloudy right now so flights have not been possible,” Gauchan told AFP earlier in the day.

“Helicopters are on standby waiting for the clouds to clear,” he said.

According to the Aviation Safety Network website, the aircraft was made by Canada’s de Havilland and made its first flight more than 40 years ago in 1979.

Past crashes 

Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a privately owned domestic carrier that services many remote destinations across Nepal.

It suffered its last fatal accident in 2016 on the same route when a plane with 23 on board crashed into a mountainside in Myagdi district.

Nepal’s air industry has boomed in recent years, carrying goods and people between hard-to-reach areas as well as foreign trekkers and climbers.

But it has long been plagued by poor safety due to insufficient training and maintenance.

The European Union has banned all Nepali airlines from its airspace over safety concerns.

The Himalayan country also has some of the world’s most remote and tricky runways, flanked by snow-capped peaks with approaches that pose a challenge even for accomplished pilots.

The weather can also change quickly in the mountains, creating treacherous flying conditions.

In March 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines plane crash-landed near Kathmandu’s notoriously difficult international airport, killing 51 people and seriously injuring 20.

That accident was Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane died when it crashed on approach to Kathmandu airport.

Just two months earlier a Thai Airways aircraft had crashed near the same airport, killing 113 people.

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — The battle for control of the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas raged on Sunday as Russian forces tightened their grip around the key cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.

The situation in Lysychansk had become "significantly worse", the regional governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiy Gaiday, said on the messaging service, Telegram.

"A Russian shell fell on a residential building, a girl died and four people were hospitalised," he said.

Meanwhile, on the eastern bank of the Donets river, Russian forces "carried out assault operations in the area of the city of Severodonetsk", according to the Ukrainian general staff.

Fighting was advancing street-by-street in the city, Gaiday said.

More than three months after Moscow invaded its pro-Western neighbour, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for "direct serious negotiations" between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

The two European leaders also "insisted on an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal of Russian troops" in an 80-minute phone call with the Russian leader on Saturday, the German chancellor's office said.

On Sunday, Zelensky visited the country's war-ridden east for the first time since the Russian invasion, on a trip to Kharkiv region, from where Moscow has retreated in recent weeks.

Zelensky's office posted a video on Telegram of him wearing a bullet-proof vest and being shown heavily destroyed buildings in Kharkiv and its surroundings.

"2,229 buildings have been destroyed in Kharkiv and the region. We will restore, rebuild and bring back life. In Kharkiv and all other towns and villages where evil came," the post said.

The Ukrainian leader has been based in Kyiv since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale attack on February 24.

In the video, Ukrainian soldiers showed Zelensky destroyed trucks on the side of a road going through a field.

“In this war, the occupiers are trying to squeeze out at least some result,” Zelensky said in a later post.

‘Very difficult’ 

Russia has shifted its focus to the eastern Donbas region as it attempts to consolidate areas under its control.

“The situation is very difficult, especially in those areas in the Donbas and Kharkiv regions, where the Russian army is trying to squeeze at least some result for itself,” Zelensky said in his daily address to the nation late Saturday.

Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry had said the “town of Krasny Liman [Moscow’s name for Lyman]has been entirely liberated from Ukrainian nationalists”.

Lyman lies on the road to Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, which is “now surrounded”, according to a police official in Lugansk province cited by Russian state media.

But governor Gaiday insisted that “Severodonetsk has not been cut off.

“There is still the possibility to deliver humanitarian aid,” he told Ukrainian television.

‘Constant shelling’ 

In Severodonetsk, where an estimated 15,000 civilians remain, a local official said “constant shelling” made it increasingly difficult to get in or out.

“Evacuation is very unsafe, it’s isolated cases when we manage to get people out. Now the priority is for the wounded and people who need serious medical assistance,” said Oleksandr Stryuk, head of the city’s military and civil administration.

The water supply was also increasingly unstable, as a lack of electricity meant the pumps at city wells no longer functioned, he said.

Residents had gone more than two weeks without a mobile phone connection, he added.

Governor Gaiday said the sole road link to the outside world was expected to be the focus of continued Russian attacks.

“Next week will be very hard, as Russia puts all its resources into seizing Severodonetsk, or cutting off the [area] from communication with Ukraine,” he said.

Putin ‘ready’ to export grain 

In their call with Putin, Scholz and Macron pointed to a looming global food security crisis.

In addition to capturing key ports such as Mariupol, Russia has used its warships to cut off other cities still in Ukrainian hands, blocking grain supplies from being transported out.

Russia and Ukraine supply about 30 per cent of the wheat traded on global markets.

Russia has tightened its own exports and Ukraine has vast amounts stuck in storage, driving up prices and reducing availability across the globe.

Putin has repeatedly rejected any responsibility, instead blaming Western sanctions.

But on Saturday, he told Macron and Scholz that Russia was “ready” to look for ways to allow more wheat onto the global market.

“Russia is ready to help find options for the unhindered export of grain, including the export of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports,” the Kremlin quoted him as saying.

He also called for the lifting of sanctions to allow “an increase in the supply of Russian fertilisers and agricultural products” to the global market.

Zelensky to speak to EU 

Urgent calls by Zelensky for more advanced weaponry from Ukraine’s Western allies appear to paying off, with Washington agreeing to send advanced long-range rocket systems, according to US media reports.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not confirm the plans to deliver the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, highly mobile equipment capable of firing up to 300 kilometres that Kyiv has said it badly needs.

But he said Washington was “still committed to helping them succeed on the battlefield”.

Putin warned Macron and Scholz that ramping up arms supplies to Ukraine would be “dangerous” and risk “further de-stabilisation”.

On Sunday, the Russian defence ministry said it had destroyed a Ukrainian armed forces arsenal in the southeastern city of Kryvyi Rih with “long-range high-precision missiles”.

Russian forces also targeted a Ukrainian anti-air defence system near Mykolaivka in the Donetsk region, as well as a radar station near Kharkiv and five munitions depots, one of which was close to Severodonetsk.

As Zelensky seeks to ramp up international pressure on Moscow, he will speak to EU leaders at an emergency summit Monday on an embargo on Russian oil.

Agreement is being held up by Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has close relations with Putin.

UVALDE, United States — US President Joe Biden arrived on Sunday in Uvalde to console residents mourning 19 children and two teachers who were gunned down at an elementary school in the small Texas town.

Biden and First Lady Jill Biden were to visit a memorial outside the school and attend a Catholic Mass, as well as meet with first responders and mourning relatives of the dead.

Harrowing accounts emerged of the ordeal faced by survivors of Tuesday’s attack, as Biden called for action to prevent future massacres in a country where efforts to tighten firearms regulations have repeatedly failed.

“We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of the people and of our children,” Biden said on Saturday in a speech at the University of Delaware.

As residents gathered in a central square in Uvalde over the weekend to pay homage to the victims, haunting stories emerged of students who played dead while the teen gunman sprayed bullets and police held back from storming in to the rescue.

Ten-year-old Samuel Salinas was sitting in his fourth-grade classroom when the shooter, later identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, barged in with a chilling announcement: “You’re all going to die.”

Then “he just started shooting”, Salinas told ABC News.

Texas authorities admitted on Friday that as many as 19 police officers were in the school hallway for nearly an hour without breaching the room where the shooter was, thinking he had ended his killing. Officials called this delay the “wrong decision”.

Ramos was finally killed by police.

Survivors of the attack have described making desperate, whispered pleas for help in 911 phone calls during his assault. Some played dead to avoid drawing the shooter’s attention.

Eleven-year-old Miah Cerrillo even smeared the blood of a dead friend on herself as she feigned death.

‘Don’t move’ 

Salinas said he thinks Ramos fired at him, but the bullet struck a chair, sending shrapnel into the boy’s leg. “I played dead so he wouldn’t shoot me,” he said.

Another student, Daniel, whose mother would not provide his last name, said he saw Ramos fire through the glass in the classroom door, striking his teacher.

The bullets were “hot”, he told The Washington Post, and when another bullet ricocheted and struck a fellow student in the nose, he said he could hear the sickening sound it made.

Though his teacher lay on the floor bleeding, she repeatedly told the students, “’Stay calm. Stay where you are. Don’t move,’” Daniel recalled.

He was finally rescued by police who broke the windows of his classroom. Since then, he has had recurrent nightmares.

A makeshift memorial has sprung up at Uvalde’s courthouse square.

Twenty-one simple white crosses have been erected around a fountain — one for each victim. And people have left growing piles of stuffed animals and flowers, as well as heart-rending messages: “Love you” and “You will be missed”.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday attended the funeral of a victim of another recent mass shooting — Ruth Whitfield, who was among 10 people killed when a self-described white supremacist opened fire in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York on May 14.

‘Have the courage’ 

She also urged US lawmakers to take action on guns.

“Congress must have the courage to stand up, once and for all, to the gun lobby and pass reasonable gun safety laws,” Harris tweeted.

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest school attack since 20 children and six staff were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

Despite years of growing paralysis on the issue in Congress, Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said on Sunday there were “serious negotiations” on getting approval for some new gun control measures.