Peruvian authorities on Thursday scrambled to roll out a plan to fight fires raging out of control across the nation, razing crops, damaging archeological treasures and leaving several regions in a state of disaster.
Firefighters said battling the blazes has grown increasingly difficult.
“We’re tired,” said a volunteer firefighter in the forests of the northern Amazonas region who declined to give his name. “We put the fire out, it lights back up. We put it out, the fire breaks out again.”
Photo: AP
Firefighters in the area retreated from the flames on Thursday.
“They’re out of control,” said Arturo Morales, another volunteer firefighter. “We need help.”
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte on Wednesday declared a 60-day state of emergency in the San Martin, Amazonas and Ucayali regions, allocating extra resources to stop the fires from spreading.
“We’re rolling out everything we have,” Boluarte said in a speech.
She called on farmers to stop burning grasslands, which she said caused flames to spread out of control.
Forest fires in Peru are frequent from August to November, with the government blaming farmers or people who are looking to illegally take over land.
About 240 fires have broken out this season in 22 of the country’s 25 regions, though more than 80 percent had been controlled by Wednesday.
However, some are threatening to spark up again with dry weather, winds and their remote locations making them difficult to access.
The flames have already reached seven archeological sites and are threatening the indigenous Shipibo-Konibo community in the Amazon, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture said.
In total, nearly 2,300 hectares of farmland has been burned and 140 people have been injured, official data showed on Wednesday.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS