AFP

France is on track to experience its driest July on record, the national weather service said Wednesday, with drought-like conditions leading to increasingly severe water restrictions around the country.

“The month of July will very likely be the driest July ever recorded since 1959,” spokesman Christian Veil from Meteo-France told AFP.

On average, just eight mm (0.3 inches) of rain fell across the country from July 1-25, less than the previous low of 16 mm which was clocked in 2020, he said.

“We’re in a very difficult situation even though we’re only at the end of July,” he said, saying soil humidity was at record lows and many trees were losing their leaves prematurely. 

Farmers across the country are reporting difficulties in feeding livestock because of parched grasslands, while irrigation has been banned in large areas of northwest and southeast France due to water shortages.

The flow of the river Loire for example, which empties into the Atlantic in northwest France, has fallen by a quarter since the start of July.

On the eastern river Rhine, which forms the France-Germany border, commercial boats are having to run at a third of their carrying capacity in order to avoid hitting the bottom because the water level is so low.

A total of 90 out of 96 administrative regions in mainland France have water restrictions of some sort, a record number, according to the environment ministry.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least five people in the northern Philippines Wednesday, toppling buildings and shaking high-rise towers more than 300 kilometres (185 miles) away in the capital Manila.

The shallow and powerful quake struck the mountainous and lightly populated province of Abra on the main island of Luzon at 8:43 am (0043 GMT), the US Geological Survey said.

Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage than deeper ones. This one left more than a hundred people injured across the hilly region, triggered dozens of landslides, damaged buildings, and knocked out power.

“We felt really strong shaking. We started shouting and rushed outside,” said university student Mira Zapata in the San Juan municipality of Abra, which took the full force of the quake.

“Our house is OK but houses down the hill were damaged.”

As buildings shook and walls cracked in the municipality of Dolores, people ran outside, Police Major Edwin Sergio told AFP.

“The quake was very strong,” Sergio said, adding that windows of the local market were broken.

In Bangued, the provincial capital of Abra, a 23-year-old woman was killed after a wall fell on her, police said. At least 78 were injured in the province.

A video posted on Facebook and verified by AFP showed cracks in the asphalt road and ground in Bangued.

“Some of the buildings here show cracks,” police chief Major Nazareno Emia added. “Power was cut off and internet as well.”

Two construction workers in the nearby landlocked province of Benguet died in separate incidents, police said. 

Another person was killed when boulders smashed into the building site where he was working in Kalinga province, police said. Six other workers were injured.

Police said an elderly woman in Suyo municipality in Ilocos Sur province suffered fatal injuries after she was buried by a landslide while out walking.

In Vigan City, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Ilocos Sur, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial period were damaged, police said.

– Ring of Fire –

The Philippines is regularly rocked by quakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in years and was felt across swathes of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.

It was followed by nearly 300 aftershocks, the local seismological agency said. Several of the subsequent quakes measured from magnitude 4.7 to 5.2, according to USGS.

Residents and office workers in Manila were evacuated from high-rise buildings.

“I grabbed money and our belongings and then I went out with my parents,” said Christina Gonzales, 19, after fleeing a city hotel. 

Verified video footage posted on Facebook showed the Bantay Bell Tower in the popular tourist destination of Vigan partially crumbling.

Two visitors suffered minor injuries from falling debris, an official said.

Other buildings in the city were also damaged. 

“We can’t rule out the possibility of another strong earthquake,” said Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose family stronghold is in the north, said he would delay visiting the region to avoid causing disruption.

He urged people to remain in emergency shelters until their homes have been checked for damage.

Military personnel have been deployed to Abra to help with rescue operations.

At least 58 landslides have been reported, Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos said.

National disaster agency spokesman Mark Timbal said road-clearing operations were under way. There had been no reports of damage to local dams. 

In October 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing more than 200 people and triggering landslides.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged. 

The powerful quake altered the island’s landscape and a “ground rupture” pushed up a stretch of ground by about three metres, creating a wall of rock above the epicentre. 

In 1990, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in the northern Philippines created a ground rupture stretching over a hundred kilometres.

Fatalities were estimated to reach over 1,200, with major damage to buildings in Manila.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least four people in the northern Philippines Wednesday, toppling buildings, and shaking high-rise towers more than 300 kilometres (185 miles) away in the capital Manila.

The shallow but powerful quake struck the mountainous and lightly populated province of Abra on the main island of Luzon at 8:43 am (0043 GMT), the US Geological Survey said.

Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage than deeper ones. This one left more than a hundred people injured across the hilly region, triggered dozens of landslides, damaged buildings, and knocked out power.

“We felt really strong shaking. We started shouting and rushed outside,” said university student Mira Zapata in San Juan municipality of Abra, which took the full force of the quake.

“Our house is ok but houses down the hill were damaged.” 

As buildings shook and walls cracked in the municipality of Dolores in Abra, people ran outside, Police Major Edwin Sergio told AFP.

“The quake was very strong,” Sergio said, adding that windows of the local market were broken.

“Vegetables and fruits sold in the market were also disarranged after tables were toppled.”

In Bangued, the provincial capital of Abra, a 23-year-old woman was killed after a wall fell on her, police said. At least 62 people were injured in the province.

A video posted on Facebook and verified by AFP showed cracks in the asphalt road and ground in Bangued.

“Some of the buildings here show cracks,” police chief Major Nazareno Emia added. “Power was cut off and internet as well.”

Two construction workers in the nearby landlocked province of Benguet died in separate incidents, police said. 

Another person was killed when he fell off a building site in the mountains of Kalinga province, where eight people were also injured, police said. 

In Vigan City, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the province of Ilocos Sur, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial period were damaged, police said.

– Ring of Fire –

The Philippines is regularly rocked by quakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in years and was felt across swathes of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.

It was followed by nearly 300 aftershocks, the local seismological agency said. Several of the subsequent quakes measured from magnitude 4.7 to 5.2, according to USGS.

Residents and office workers in Manila were evacuated from high-rise buildings.

“I grabbed money and our belongings and then I went out with my parents,” said Christina Gonzales, 19, after fleeing a city hotel. 

Verified video footage posted on Facebook showed the Bantay Bell Tower in the popular tourist destination of Vigan partially crumbling. 

Two visitors suffered minor injuries from falling debris, an official said.

Other buildings in the city were also damaged. 

“We can’t rule out the possibility of another strong earthquake,” said Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose family stronghold is in the north, said he would delay visiting the region to avoid causing disruptions.

He urged people to remain in emergency shelters until their homes have been checked for damage.

Military personnel have been deployed to Abra to help with rescue operations.

At least 58 landslides have been reported, Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos said.

National disaster agency spokesman Mark Timbal said road-clearing operations were underway. There had been no reports of damage to local dams. 

In October 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing over 200 people and triggering landslides.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged. 

The powerful quake altered the island’s landscape and a “ground rupture” pushed up a stretch of ground by about three meters, creating a wall of rock above the epicentre. 

In 1990, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the northern Philippines created a ground rupture stretching over a hundred kilometres. 

Fatalities were estimated to reach over 1,200 and caused major damage to buildings in Manila.

An animal market in China’s Wuhan really was the epicenter of the Covid pandemic, according to a pair of new studies in the journal Science published Tuesday that claimed to have tipped the balance in the debate about the virus’ origins.

Answering the question of whether the disease spilled over naturally from animals to humans, or was the result of a lab accident, is viewed as vital to averting the next pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The first paper analyzed the geographic pattern of Covid cases in the outbreak’s first month, December 2019, showing the first cases were tightly clustered around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. 

The second examined genomic data from the earliest cases to study the virus’ early evolution, concluding it was unlikely the coronavirus circulated widely in humans prior to November 2019.

Both were previously posted as “preprints” but have now been vetted by scientific peer review and appear in a prestigious journal.

Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.

But the findings moved him “to the point where now I also think it’s just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market,” he told reporters on a call.

Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.

This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was “zoonotic” — that it jumped from animals to people.

The first study’s team used mapping tools to determine the location of most of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.

Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market — and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.

Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus — including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs — were all sold live in the market, the team showed.

– Two introductions to humans –

The study authors also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.

The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.

“This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically,” Worobey said in a statement. 

“It really originated at that market and spread out from there.”

The second study focused on resolving an apparent discrepancy in the virus’ early evolution.

Two lineages, A and B, marked the early pandemic. 

But while A was closer to the virus found in bats, suggesting the coronavirus in humans came from this source and that A gave rise to B, it was B that was found to be far more present around the market.

The researchers used a technique called “molecular clock analysis,” which relies on the rate at which genetic mutations occur over time to reconstruct a timeline of evolution — and found it unlikely that A gave rise to B.

“Otherwise, lineage A would have had to have been evolving in slow motion compared to the lineage B virus, which just doesn’t make biological sense,” said Worobey.

Instead, the probable scenario was that both jumped from animals at the market to humans on separate occasions, in November and December 2019. The researchers concluded it was unlikely that there was human circulation prior to November 2019.

Under this scenario, there were probably other animal-to-human transmissions at the market that failed to manifest as Covid cases.

“Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not. Will we ever be able to know? No,” said co-author Kristian Andersen of The Scripps Research Institute.

“But I think what’s really important here is that there are possible scenarios and they’re plausible scenarios and it’s really important to understand that possible does not mean equally likely.”

The WHO’s technical lead for Covid, Maria Van Kerkhove, welcomed the studies’ publication in a tweet on Tuesday.

“(It is) critical we continue to study the origins of the #COVID19 pandemic to ensure that we are better prepared to prevent and mitigate future outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics,” she said.