AFP

A search team retrieved the body of top US ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson from the Himalayas on Wednesday, two days after she disappeared on the slopes of Nepal’s Manaslu peak.

Nelson slipped and went missing while skiing down the world’s eighth-highest mountain, after a successful summit with her partner Jim Morrison on Monday. 

Morrison led the search operations and had left Wednesday morning on a helicopter to resume efforts to locate her. 

“The search team that left this morning on a helicopter spotted her body and is bringing her back,” Jiban Ghimire of Shangri-La Nepal Trek, which organised the expedition, told AFP.

Ghimire said that the body was brought to the peak’s base camp and will later be flown to Kathmandu. 

Nelson, 49, is described by her sponsor, The North Face, as “the most prolific ski mountaineer of her generation”.

A decade ago, she became the first woman to summit both the highest mountain in the world, Everest, and the adjacent Lhotse peak within the span of 24 hours.

In 2018, she returned to Lhotse and made the first ski descent of the mountain, which earned her the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award.

In an Instagram post last week, Nelson said her latest climb had been deeply challenging because of “incessant rain” and dangerous conditions.

“I haven’t felt as sure-footed on Manaslu as I have on past adventure into the thin atmosphere of the high Himalaya,” Nelson wrote in a post on Thursday.

“These past weeks have tested my resilience in new ways.”

-‘Let’s pray for Hilaree’ –

Mountaineers and well-wishers had earlier shared messages of support on social media, hoping for Nelson’s safe return.

“Let’s pray for Hilaree,” fellow The North Face athlete Fernanda Maciel, currently at the Manaslu base camp, wrote on Instagram on Tuesday.

Constant rain and snow have been a challenge for the 404 paying climbers attempting to reach the summit of Manaslu this year.

On the same day as Nelson’s accident, an avalanche hit between Camps 3 and 4 on the 8,163-metre (26,781-foot) mountain, killing Nepali climber Anup Rai and injuring a dozen others who were later rescued.

The deaths of Nelson and Rai are the first confirmed casualties of the autumn climbing season in Nepal.

Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest peaks and foreign climbers who flock to its mountains are a major source of revenue for the country.

The industry was almost completely shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, but the country reopened its peaks to mountaineers last year.

Typhoon Noru tore roofs from homes and caused power outages across central Vietnam Wednesday, with hundreds of thousands of people taking refuge after the storm claimed at least 10 lives in the Philippines.

In Danang, Vietnam’s third-largest city, high-rise buildings shook as the typhoon made landfall in the early hours of Wednesday, bringing winds of up to around 120 kilometres (75 miles) per hour, according to the national forecaster.

More than 300,000 people in Vietnam hunkered down in shelters overnight, after forecasters predicted the storm would be one of the biggest to ever hit the country.

Wind speeds were lower than initially feared, but forecasters said heavy rain would continue into the day and warned of landslides and serious flooding.

The defence ministry has mobilised around 40,000 soldiers and 200,000 militia members, equipped with armoured vehicles and boats in preparation for rescue and relief operations, state media said.

In the popular tourist city of Hoi An, the Hoai River was close to bursting its banks, while the ground was littered with metal roof sheeting and fallen trees which had damaged cars and blocked roads.

“The typhoon was terrible last night. I could not sleep as the wind was so strong and loud,” resident Nguyen Thi Hien told AFP.

Around 300 houses in the coastal province of Quang Tri had their roofs blown off late Tuesday as the wind began picking up speed.

“I heard the sound of fallen trees and signboards outside. I was scared. But we were prepared so luckily the losses were not that bad.”

Residents rushed to clean up the debris early Wednesday, with some shops already open and tourists walking the streets.

Almost half of Vietnam’s airports have been closed since midday Tuesday, with schools and offices across several central provinces also shut, while Danang banned the public from going out on the streets.

The central section of the highway linking Hanoi in the north with commercial hub Ho Chi Minh City in the south was closed.

– Deaths in Philippines –

The Vietnam impact came after Noru slammed into the Philippines earlier this week as a super typhoon with winds of up to 195 kph, leaving 10 dead and eight missing, the civil defence office said.

Noru was forecast to continue moving inland Wednesday, passing over Laos before hitting Thailand’s northeastern Ubon Ratchathani province on Thursday and gradually weakening into a tropical depression.

The Thai authorities warned of heavy rain, and possible flash flooding, and said people living in high-risk areas should prepare to evacuate their homes.

Vietnam is frequently lashed by heavy storms in the rainy season between June and November, with central coastal provinces the worst affected, but scientists have warned they are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer because of climate change.

Hackings, network sabotage and other cyber warfare campaigns are being intensely deployed by both sides as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, though the covert operations have not proved decisive on the battlefield — at least so far.

Western allies initially feared a tsunami of cyberattacks against Ukraine’s military command and critical infrastructure, hindering its ability to resist the Russian forces pouring across its borders.

As of mid-September, the Cyber Peace Institute, an NGO based in Switzerland, counted nearly 450 attacks — roughly 12 a week — carried out by 57 different entities on either side since the invasion was launched in February.

Yet with European and US help, Kyiv has largely withstood the high-tech onslaught.

“Large-scale cyberattacks have indeed occurred, but it’s generally agreed that they have clearly failed to produce the ‘shock and awe’ effect some predicted,” according to Alexis Rapin, a researcher at the University of Quebec.

Writing for the strategic studies site Le Rubicon, he said the most devastating attacks often take months or even years to plan and execute, “making it very difficult to synchronise them with a conventional military campaign.”

Another factor may be the massive help Ukraine has had from its allies, including software and expertise to protect its systems as well as counterattacks that may be hampering Moscow’s cyber strategy.

“Russia has been under constant cyber assault over the last few months from an international coalition of volunteer, non-governmental hacking organisations, the most prominent being the ‘Anonymous’ movement,” said Arnault Barichella, a researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris.

While it remains unclear how effective these “spontaneous” attacks have been, “Russia simply underestimated Ukraine’s cyber resilience, in the same way that it underestimated the country’s armed forces,” he wrote in a recent report.

– Hybrid war –

Nonetheless, the war on Europe’s eastern flank offers on-the-ground proof that cyber assaults will be part and parcel of 21st century armed conflicts.

Even before the first Russian tank rolled into Ukraine, hackers in mid-January launched the WhisperGate malware against around 70 Ukrainian government sites, followed by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaign that disrupted banks, radio stations and websites.

Moscow was then suspected of being behind the Hermetic Wiper virus that knocked out some 300 IT systems in Ukraine, while hackers targeted the Viasat satellite operator to deactivated thousands of internet modems.

“Most people did not hear about the fact that almost every Russian attack came with a cyberattack before and during operations — cyber usually does not kill people,” said Eviatar Matania of the Israel National Cyber Bureau.

And in most cases, IT networks that come under attack can often be restored in a few days if not hours, limiting their use when hostilities have escalated to open warfare.

More likely, cyber campaigns will be ongoing between rival states, aiming to destabilise and demotivate as opposed to seeking a knockout blow on the battlefield.

“Currently cyber is more important in peacetime than in conventional war — in cyber we are all the time in conflict,” Matania told AFP.

Rapin agrees that cyber warfare is most suited to sabotage, espionage and information wars aimed at sapping morale — the sort of clandestine warfare waged before any shots are fired.

The tactics appear essential, however, when laying the groundwork for conventional military campaigns in which even just a few hours of having a communications or electricity network offline could offer a decisive advantage for ground and air forces. 

“Cyber operations aren’t some magical dust that gets sprinkled on at the end of an operation,” said Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Center security think-tank.

“They are woven into, or closely integrated, with the full suite of US military capabilities and security cooperation activities,” not least pre-battlefield planning, he told AFP.

But the impacts of cyber assaults are often not revealed until months or years after they are deployed.

It took nearly two years before the public learned about the Stuxnet computer virus that allegedly destroyed around 1,000 of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, used to refine uranium for use in atomic weapons — widely thought to be the result of a US and Israeli campaign.

And if Russian President Vladimir Putin determines that his Ukraine invasion is faltering, the retaliation in the cyber domain could prove more potent than seen up to now.

“You cannot underestimate the danger of a cyber escalation, especially if the Russian military operations on the ground flounder and the Kremlin feels as if its back is against the wall,” Barichella said.

Earth’s climate is changing so quickly that humanity is running out of chances to fix it, primatologist Jane Goodall has warned in an interview.

Goodall, a grandee of environmentalism whose activism has spanned decades, said time was rapidly shortening to halt the worst effects of human-caused global warming.

“We are literally approaching a point of no return,” Goodall told AFP in Los Angeles.

“Look around the world at what’s happening with climate change. It’s terrifying.

“We are part of the natural world and we depend on healthy ecosystems.”

Goodall is best known for her pioneering six-decade study of chimpanzees in Tanzania, which found “human-like” behavior among the animals, including a propensity to wage war, as well as an ability to display emotions.

Now 88 years old, the Briton is a prolific writer and the subject of a number of films. She has also been immortalized as both a Lego figure and a Barbie doll.

Goodall said her own environmental awakening came in the 1980s while working in Mongolia, where she realized that hillsides had been denuded of tree cover.

“The reason the people were cutting down the trees was to make more land, to grow food as their families grew, and also to make money from charcoal or timber,” she said. 

“So if we don’t help these people find ways of making a living without destroying their environment, we can’t save chimpanzees, forests, or anything else.”

Goodall says she has seen some changes for the better over recent decades, but urged quicker action.

“We know what we should be doing. I mean, we have the tools. But we come up against the short-term thinking of economic gain versus long-term protection of the environment for the future,” she said. 

“I don’t pretend to be able to solve the problems that this creates because there are major problems. And yet, if we look at the alternative, which is continuing to destroy the environment, we’re doomed.”

Goodall was speaking Sunday on the sidelines of a celebration of her $1.3 million Templeton Prize.

The prize is an annual award for an individual whose work harnesses science to explore the questions facing humanity.

The cash went to the Jane Goodall Institute, a global wildlife and environment conservation organization, which runs youth programs in 66 countries.

“The program’s main message is that every single one of us makes an impact on the planet every day, and we get to choose what sort of impact we make,” Goodall said.

“It’s actually my greatest reason for hope.”