World

Greek planes and helicopters on Wednesday stepped up their battle against a wildfire raging for a second day that has forced hundreds of people to flee mountainside suburbs north of Athens.  

Nearly 500 firefighters, 120 vehicles, nine planes and 10 helicopters supported by army units sought to prevent the flames from causing further damage in the suburbs of Penteli, Pallini, Anthousa and Gerakas, home to tens of thousands of people.

Greece has been so far spared a scorching heatwave that saw deadly wildfires destroy vast tracts of land in France, Portugal and Spain, but has instead faced gale-force winds.

Experts blame climate change for extreme weather events and warn that worse is yet to come.

Thirty people, including three firefighters, required medical attention for burns and breathing difficulty, the Greek fire department said.

Several buildings have sustained varying degrees of damage, AFP images showed.

“The sky was red… we left without taking anything with us,” a Pallini resident who lost his car and shed to the flames told ERT television.

“The civil protection authority was late in alerting us. The fire was scorching our backs, we left in the nick of time. Had we stayed another 30 seconds it would have burned us,” he added.

The house next door was completely gutted, the man said.

– ‘Two active fronts’ –

Authorities warned residents to stay indoors and keep their windows shut. 

With winds racing at over 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour, smoke from the fire billowed as far as the island of Crete, hundreds of kilometres to the south, satellite imagery showed.

Residents say fires have struck the area three times in the last three decades.

Greek media reported that an 80-year-old man in Anthousa shot himself dead in despair over the fire, which broke out on Tuesday afternoon.

The wildfires around Mount Penteli north of Athens were fanned overnight by strong winds that constantly changed direction.

“There are two active fronts,” civil protection official Vassilis Kokkalis told Athens 98.4 radio. “The winds are so strong that the planes are prevented from making targeted water drops,” he added.

The fire was threatening businesses on a major Athens highway, he added.

“It’s a fire that will be a cause for concern for several days,” Kokkalis said.

Residents in several areas, a paediatric hospital and the national observatory at Athens were evacuated as a precautionary measure.

– ‘Insane’ –

The police said some 600 people had been moved to safety overnight.

“It was insane, we did not know where to flee,” an elderly resident of Anthousa told ERT.

“Embers were falling from the sky, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

Greece has set up a crisis cell and firefighters battled 117 wildfires in the country in the last 24 hours.

Another 87 firefighters were battling a blaze in the Peloponnese, a southern peninsula.

Athens has asked European countries to send firefighters. A squad from Romania was assisting in Wednesday’s fire.

A heatwave and wildfires last year destroyed 103,000 hectares (255,000 acres) and claimed three lives in Greece.

The country’s worst fire disaster in 2018 in the coastal suburb of Mati, claiming 102 lives, was just a few kilometres from the area affected by Wednesday’s blaze.

Firefighters battling twin fires in southwest France said Wednesday the blazes were being brought under control thanks to improved weather conditions, but had not been stopped completely. 

“Our assessment is generally positive. The situation improved overnight,” local fire service spokesman Arnaud Mendousse said, saying that only 300 more hectares (740 acres) had burned since Tuesday evening. 

French President Emmanuel Macron is due to visit the fire-hit Gironde region where a total of 20,600 hectares (50,900 acres) of forest have gone up in flames since last week and 37,000 people have been evacuated.

Temperatures have dropped from above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday to the mid-20s on Wednesday.

“We’ve been able to really work on our defences against the fire,” local government official Fabienne Buccio told reporters Tuesday evening. “We managed to improve, advance and create significant fire breaks.”

“Cooler weather” had helped, she said, though the area was not expecting significant rainfall that would help extinguish the flames.

The pine forests along the Atlantic coast were bone-dry after months of drought-like conditions that have affected the entire country.

The biggest blaze is in a thinly populated area south of Bordeaux near the village of Landiras, which is being treated by police as suspected arson.

A 39-year-old local man arrested on Monday was released overnight after investigators concluded “the evidence and statements collected exonerated him.”

He had been arrested but not charged in 2014 over a separate forest fire, the local prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

A second blaze has ripped through a popular ocean-front tourist area behind the Dune du Pilat, Europe’s biggest sand dune, near the Bay of Arcachon.

It is thought to have been caused by a van that caught fire last week.

Macron is expected to meet members of the emergency services, local officials and volunteers as he tours the area Wednesday alongside Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

Russian shelling pounded eastern and southern Ukraine as President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would only ease the path for Black Sea exports of Ukrainian grain if the West lifts sanctions on Russia’s shipments.

Russian strikes hit the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing one person, local authorities said.

AFP journalists said a four-story residential building had been hit in the city in the Donbas region. One man with a bloodied head lay on the ground, before being taken away by the emergency services.

“He was just walking by and was hit,” said one woman, who declined to give her name, visibly shaken after the bombardment.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has killed thousands and displaced millions, but also hampered shipments from one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and other grain, sparking fears of global food shortages.

Putin, in Tehran for talks with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Tuesday said “progress” had been made in discussions towards exporting grain from Ukraine.

After talks with both Erdogan and Iran’s president, Putin told reporters that any deal hinged on the West’s willingness to yield some ground.

“We will facilitate the export of Ukrainian grain, but we are proceeding from the fact that all restrictions related to possible deliveries for the export of Russian grain will be lifted,” he said.

NATO member Turkey has been using its good relations with both the Kremlin and Kyiv to try and broker an agreement on a safe way to deliver the grain.

– ‘Victory before winter’ –

On Wednesday, Russian and Ukrainian delegations are due to meet in Istanbul alongside Turkish and UN representatives, with hopes rising for an announced accord.

The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned this week that the grain impasse was “an issue of life and death for many human beings”.

And a document consulted by AFP Tuesday showed that the European Commission is proposing to unblock assets at Russian banks linked to trade in food and fertiliser.

Along the Black Sea coast, Kyiv said that a barrage of seven cruise missiles had wounded at least six people, including a child, in the southern coastal region of Odessa.

The Russian defence ministry claimed that strikes on Odessa had destroyed a stockpile of Western-supplied weapons.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered troops earlier this week to prioritise the destruction of long-range artillery supplied by the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies.

Observers credit the weapons with altering battlefield dynamics, giving Ukraine the capacity to hit Russian arms depots and command posts deep inside territory controlled by Moscow.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, during a visit to the United States, urged the West to drastically step up its supply of precision rocket systems, calling them a “game-changer”.

In Washington, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the United States believes that Russia is moving ahead with plans to annex more Ukrainian territory. 

“Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an annexation playbook, very similar to the one we saw in 2014,” when it invaded and annexed Crimea, Kirby said.

Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak underlined in an interview published Tuesday that Ukraine had to win its war with Russia before winter, telling Ukrainian weekly Novoye Vremya that if Moscow has time to regroup, it will be “more difficult”.

– Suspected treason –

On the diplomatic front, Russia’s close ally Syria announced Wednesday it was severing ties with Ukraine, according to an unidentified foreign ministry official, cited by state news agency SANA.

Kyiv had already announced it was cutting ties with Syria late last month, after Damascus recognised the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday endorsed the president’s decision to sack the country’s top prosecutor and security chief, backing Ukraine’s largest political shake-up since Russia invaded.

Several Ukrainian deputies said lawmakers at the parliamentary session in Kyiv had overwhelmingly backed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s shock call to remove the senior officials.

“Parliament voted to dismiss Iryna Venediktova as prosecutor general,” said David Arakhamia, a lawmaker affiliated with Zelensky.

Other deputies said the plea to remove security chief Ivan Bakanov had secured the required 226 votes.

Zelensky late Sunday said he was suspending the senior law enforcement officials — and that 650 cases of suspected treason were under investigation.

He replaced Bakanov on Monday and described the shake-up in the security services as an “audit”, saying 28 security officials were facing dismissal.

The governor of Mykolaiv, a southern region under constant Russian rocket fire, meanwhile on Tuesday promised a $100 reward for anyone who could help to identify people who have been collaborating with Russia by providing it with the locations of Ukrainian troops or coordinates of potential targets. 

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China on Wednesday slammed Washington as “a destroyer of peace” in the Taiwan Strait, following the latest in a series of passages by US warships through the waterway. 

Beijing views Taiwan as part of its territory to be re-taken one day — and the narrow body of water that separates the island and mainland China is a flashpoint between the two sides.

In contrast to Beijing’s position, the United States and other countries see the strait as part of international waters and thus open to all, and this year a US warship has transited the route almost every month.   

On Tuesday, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Benfold “conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit … through international waters”, the US Seventh Fleet said in a statement. 

“The ship transited through a corridor in the Strait that is beyond the territorial sea of any coastal State,” it added.

China’s Eastern Theatre Command said Wednesday it had deployed naval and air forces to “follow and monitor the whole process”.

“The frequent US provocations and showboating fully demonstrate that the United States is a destroyer of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and a risk maker,” said its spokesman Colonel Shi Yi.

He added Chinese forces were always “on high alert to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had closely monitored the destroyer’s passage and “the situation was normal”. 

In June, Taipei clashed with Beijing over the latter’s restating of its position that the strait was not international waters, accusing China of trying to endanger regional peace with its territorial claims. 

British, Canadian, French and Australian warships have all made passages through the Taiwan Strait in recent years, sparking protests from Beijing. 

The USS Benfold’s passage on Tuesday coincided with a visit to Taiwan by former US defence chief Mark Esper, who called Taiwan “a good friend we must support and defend” during a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen. 

Esper said the time had come for Washington to “move away from strategic ambiguity” over whether it would intervene militarily on Taiwan’s behalf. 

“Strategic ambiguity” has been the United States’ longstanding policy on Taiwan, designed both to ward off a Chinese invasion and to discourage the island territory from ever formally declaring independence.

The final two candidates to become UK prime minister will be decided Wednesday, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt battling it out with frontrunner Rishi Sunak. 

Former finance minister Sunak was only two votes short of securing his place in the final two after Tuesday’s voting, but the race behind him tightened as Truss clawed back five votes to finish only six behind Mordaunt.

The final two will be announced at four pm (1500 GMT), before the race then moves to Conservative party members who will decide the new leader and prime minister. The result will be announced on September 5.

Tuesday’s vote means Britain will get either its first British-Asian prime minister or the third female leader in its history.

Sunak, whose resignation helped to topple outgoing leader Boris Johnson, is all but guaranteed to make the final cut.

But Mordaunt — the one-time bookmakers’ favourite — is now the outsider with punters betting that the right wing of the party will swing behind Truss after Kim Badenoch was voted out on Tuesday.

Former minister David Davis, a backer of Mordaunt, accused Sunak of lending votes to Truss in order to face her in the runoff.

“Rishi just re-allocated some (votes) … He wants to fight Liz, because she’s the person who will lose the debate with him,” he told LBC Radio.

A YouGov poll published before the vote showed that, despite his popularity with parliamentary colleagues, Sunak was the least appealing candidate to the members. 

Mordaunt had headed the same poll previously.

She now trails Truss after a damaging few days in which her former boss, one-time UK Brexit pointman David Frost, slammed her work ethic and questions were raised over her stance on transgender rights.

– Race gets personal –

In a statement after Tuesday’s vote, Mordaunt said: “We are so nearly across the finish line. I am raring to go and excited to put my case to members across the country and win.”

The BBC announced it will host a live televised debate with the final two candidates on Monday, with all remaining candidates agreeing to take part if they get through.

Sky News on Monday scrapped a planned debate between the remaining contenders after Sunak and Truss pulled out.

Johnson announced on July 7 he was quitting as Conservative leader after a government rebellion in protest at his scandal-hit administration.

His government having survived a confidence vote on Monday, Johnson is now almost certain to stay on as prime minister until his successor is announced on September 5.

Under Britain’s parliamentary system, the leader of the biggest party is prime minister and can be changed mid-term without having to call a general election.

Johnson chaired his last cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning and is due to face his final weekly question-and-answer session with MPs in parliament on Wednesday.

In the two previous televised debates — on Channel 4 Friday and the ITV network Sunday — the contenders clashed notably on whether to cut taxes to help ease a soaring cost-of-living crisis.

But Sunday’s clash turned more acrimonious — and personal — with candidates encouraged to directly criticise one another and their proposals.

Sunak called out Truss for voting against Brexit, her previous membership of the Liberal Democrats and her position on tax.

In turn, Truss questioned Sunak’s stewardship of the economy.

Badenoch attacked Mordaunt for her stance on transgender rights — a rallying call in the “culture wars” exercising the Tory right.

A senior European Union lawmaker said Wednesday that Taiwan’s future should be decided by its own people and that the EU backs the island’s “sovereign” existence, in a pointed warning to Beijing.

Taiwan lives under the constant threat of invasion by China, which claims the self-ruled democratic island as part of its territory and has vowed to seize it one day, by force if necessary. 

Beijing’s increased sabre-rattling has spurred greater shows of diplomatic support for Taipei and prompted visits from Western politicians.

Nicola Beer, one of the European Parliament’s vice-presidents, arrived on Tuesday for what Taiwan’s foreign ministry described as “the first official visit” by an MEP of her rank. 

In a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen, Beer voiced Europe’s concerns over Beijing “moving in a direction that could unilaterally alter the status quo” with Taipei. 

“This must not happen, under no circumstances, under no pretext. Only the Taiwanese people can decide on Taiwanese future,” she said. 

“Don’t doubt Europe’s reassurance in your strive for a democratic, peaceful and sovereign existing.”

Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office has said the island’s future should be decided by “all Chinese people”.

Beer said Europe will “stand up against any provocation” and urged China to refrain from “threatening gestures”.

China should play a constructive role in maintaining the status quo “based on neutral and respectful dialogue”, she added. 

Beer, a lawyer and a member of Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party, said upon her arrival on Tuesday that Europe must support Taiwan’s democracy, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s crackdown in Hong Kong. 

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has deepened fears within Taiwan and among key Western allies that Beijing might do the same under President Xi Jinping. 

Beijing has ramped up military, diplomatic and economic pressure since the 2016 election of Tsai, as she views the island as a sovereign nation and not part of Chinese territory.

China often hits out at visits like Beer’s, with government statements blaming foreign politicians for “sending false signals” to advocates of Taiwan independence.

Six-time prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected as crisis-wracked Sri Lanka’s new president by the country’s parliament Wednesday, with the backing of the party of the ex-leader — who fled abroad after his palace was stormed by protesters.

Official results showed Wickremesinghe polled 134 votes in a three-cornered parliamentary vote, with his main opponent Dullas Alahapperuma getting 82 and leftist Anura Dissanayake just three, giving him an absolute majority on first preferences.

“Our divisions are now over,” Wickremesinghe said in a brief acceptance speech in parliament, inviting Alahapperuma “to join me and work together to bring the country out of the crisis we are facing”.

He said he hoped to be sworn in later Wednesday at a simple ceremony within the tightly guarded parliament building.

The 73-year-old takes charge of a bankrupt nation that is in bailout talks with the IMF, with its 22 million people enduring severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine.

But he is despised by the protesters who forced his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa from his palace after months of demonstrations over an unprecedented economic crisis as an ally of the former leader.

The Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, the largest in parliament, backed Wickremesinghe for the presidency.

Wickremesinghe has pledged to crack down hard if protesters take to the streets and hundreds of heavily armed troops and police stood guard outside the parliament, but there were no signs of demonstrators.

As acting president, Wickremesinghe extended a state of emergency that gives police and security forces sweeping powers, and last week ordered troops to evict protesters from state buildings they had occupied.

Opposition MP Dharmalingam Sithadthan said ahead of the vote that Wickremesinghe’s hardline stance against demonstrators had gone down well with MPs who had been at the receiving end of mob violence, describing him as the “law-and-order candidate”.

Wickremesinghe automatically became acting president when Rajapaksa resigned and political analyst Kusal Perera said he had “regained the acceptance of the urban middle classes by restoring some of the supplies like gas and he has already cleared government buildings showing his firmness”.

But he appears to be indebted to the Rajapaksas, a clan of four brothers who have dominated Sri Lankan politics for much of the last two decades, for his victory.

Gotabaya’s departure wounded the group after two of his brothers also quit their posts as premier and finance minister earlier this year.

But former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, the deposed Gotabaya’s elder brother and the head of the family, remained in the country, and party sources said he had pressed SLPP legislators to support Wickremesinghe.

Wickremesinghe is expected to name public administration minister Dinesh Gunawardena, 73, his schoolmate and a strong Rajapaksa loyalist, as the new prime minister.

Outside the presidential secretariat, where protesters camped for months to demand Rajapaksa step down, civil enginer Nuzly Hameem said he was “disappointed” by the result.

“We expected more from our parliamentarians,” he told AFP. 

The protests would “obviously” continue, he said, but added “We are burnt out. It’s been four months.”

– Absolute majority –

One by one, the legislators entered ballot booths set up on the floor of the chamber to choose between the three candidates.

Previous elections have been marred by allegations of corruption and vote-buying.

Wickremesinghe’s main opponent in the vote was SLPP dissident and former education minister Alahapperuma, a former journalist who was supported by the opposition.

The third candidate was Anura Dissanayake, 53, leader of the leftist People’s Liberation Front (JVP), whose coalition has three parliamentary seats.

Lawmakers in 225-member house ranked candidates in order of preference, with more than half the vote needed for victory — a mark Wickremesinghe crossed on first preferences.

He is elected for the balance of Rajapaksa’s term, which runs until November 2024.