World

LOS ANGELES — Disastrous flooding could hit parts of California this weekend, forecasters warned on Friday, as the eighth storm in succession barreled in over land already too waterlogged to soak up any more rain.

The most populous US state has been pummeled by near-record downpours over a very wet three weeks, which have already caused flooding, landslides and widespread power outages.

At least 19 people are known to have died as communities struggle to cope with the constant deluge.

On Friday yet another system moved in, with forecasters warning the Monterey Peninsula could be cut off and the whole city of Salinas, home to 160,000 people, flooded.

"The entire lower Salinas Valley will have disastrous flooding," the National Weather Service said.

"The entire city of Salinas is in danger of flooding. Most of Castroville will flood. All roads near the Salinas River will be flooded and impassable. 90,000 acres or more of agricultural land in the Salinas Valley will have disastrous flooding.

"Many roads, homes and agricultural land areas in the Salinas Valley will have major flood damage."

The Salinas River, already swollen by weeks of torrential rain, was expected to peak some time on Friday, breaching its banks in a flood that could last until Sunday.

Kelley O'Connell said the bursting of a levee near her home had worried her.

"If they release water from the dams or we get more rain, we're just a field away," she told the San Francisco Chronicle as she collected sandbags.

Evacuation orders and warnings were widespread, with forecasters saying major roads could become impassable, including highways that link the Monterey Peninsula with the rest of the county.

“Residents both on the peninsula and in the Salinas area should expect to be cut off for two to three days,” Monterey county officials said earlier this week.

Monterey county sheriff Tina Nieto told reporters Thursday that floodwater could strand people.

“This is a slow-moving event” and not all places will be impacted at once, she said.

“The river crests at different times.”

Resident John Guru said he was taking no chances, with four days’ supplies at home and two days’ worth in his car in case he is caught out on the road.

“I’m not sure how bad it’s going to be,” he told the Monterey Herald.

“I will find a place if needed and do whatever it takes,” he said, adding: “This is crazy, I was not anticipating anything like this.”

Snow 

Workers have rushed out in between storms to clear up some of the mess left behind, shoveling mud from roads even in the heart of Los Angeles.

Crews have cut up felled trees and heavy machinery have been drafted in to move rockslides.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses have been left without power at various times, sometimes repeatedly, as rickety infrastructure has taken a battering.

And it’s not over yet, forecasters say.

“The ongoing unsettled weather in the West associated with the active Atmospheric River pattern unfortunately continues into this weekend with another couple rounds of heavy precipitation forecast,” the NWS said.

Over the mountains, that precipitation was falling as snow, with more than a meter expected in the Sierra Nevada range, making travel dangerous or impossible, even as thousands of skiers and snowboarders head for fresh powder over the Martin Luther King, Jr Day holiday weekend.

Among those who have died in the last three weeks were drivers who were found in submerged cars, people struck by falling trees, a husband and wife killed in a rockfall, and people whose bodies were discovered in floodwaters.

Winter storms are not unusual in California, where most of the annual rain comes in a fairly concentrated period.

But global warming, driven by the industrial era’s unchecked use of fossil fuels, is supercharging storms, making them wetter and wilder.

At the same time, the western United States is aridifying, with much of the region in its 23rd year of drought.

Hydrologists say the recent rains are helping — California has received an average of almost 23 centimetres of rain since late December, but are not a fix.

“A few weeks of storms is not enough in this drought for California, but it certainly is nice. It’s certainly making a good dent,” Jay Lund, director of University of California, Davis, told the Chronicle.

PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron has said he will not "ask forgiveness" from Algeria for French colonisation but hopes to continue working towards reconciliation with his counterpart Abdelmajid Tebboune.

"It's not up to me to ask forgiveness, that's not what this is about, that word would break all of our ties," he said in an interview for Le Point magazine published late Wednesday.

"The worst thing would be to decide: 'we apologise and each go our own way'," Macron said.

"Work on memory and history isn't a settling of all accounts," he added.

But in the interview, he also expressed hope that Tebboune "will be able to come to France in 2023", to return Macron's own trip to Algiers last year and continue their "unprecedented work of friendship".

France's 100-year colonisation of Algeria and the viciously fought 1954-62 war for independence have left deep scars on both sides, which Macron has by turns prodded and soothed over his political career.

In 2017, then-presidential candidate Macron dubbed the French occupation a "crime against humanity".

A report he commissioned from historian Benjamin Stora recommended in 2020 further moves to reconcile the two countries, while ruling out "repentance" and "apologies".

Macron has also questioned whether Algeria existed as a nation before being colonised by France, drawing an angry response from Algiers.

"These moments of tension teach us," Macron told the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud in the interview.

"You have to be able to reach out your hand again and engage, which President Tebboune and I have been able to do," he added.

He backed a suggestion for Tebboune to visit the graves of Algerian 19th-century anti-colonial hero Abdelkader and his entourage, who are buried in Amboise in central France.

"That would make sense for the history of the Algerian people. For the French people, it would be an opportunity to understand realities that are often hidden," Macron said.

Algeria and France maintain enduring ties through immigration, involvement in the independence conflict and post-war repatriations of French settlers, touching more than 10 million people living in France today.

BARCELONA — The Spanish supreme court on Thursday dropped sedition charges against former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont over a failed 2017 independence bid that sparked Spain's worst political crisis in decades.

But the court maintained lesser charges of misuse of public funds and disobedience against Puigdemont, who lives in self-imposed exile in Belgium to avoid prosecution in Spain and holds a seat in the European Parliament.

The move follows a reform of Spain's criminal code in December that abolished the offence of sedition and replaced it with the charge of public disorder that carries softer penalties.

The reform — which was fiercely opposed by the right-wing opposition Popular Party (PP) — also lowered the penalty for misuse of public funds.

Both offences were used against Catalan leaders who staged a 2017 independence referendum deemed illegal by the courts, followed by a unilateral declaration of independence for the wealthy northeast region.

Puigdemont, who headed the Catalan government at the time of the independence push, now potentially faces a shorter prison term if he is convicted than was the case before the sedition charge was dropped.

The supreme court in 2019 sentenced former Catalan vice president Oriol Junqueras to 13 years behind bars for sedition and misuse of public funds for his role in the separatist push.

Since taking power in June 2018, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has sought to defuse the conflict in Catalonia.

In 2021, he pardoned Junqueras and eight other Catalan separatist leaders who were convicted over their roles in the separatist push.

Analysts say the criminal code reform, which came into effect on Thursday, is part of an attempt to win support in vote-rich Catalonia ahead of Spain's general election expected later this year.

It is also seen as a bid to assure Catalan pro-independence party ERC continues to support Sanchez's minority government in tight parliamentary votes.

'Red carpet' 

The main opposition PP has denounced the reform as "tailor-made for convicts". Some of Sanchez's own Socialists have also been critical.

Top PP official Elias Bendodo on Thursday accused Sanchez of having paved the way for Puigdemont to return to Spain "on a red carpet".

But the government's main spokesperson, Isabel Rodriguez, defended the criminal code reform, saying it brought Spanish law in line with its European peers.

She said there are "tools to pursue" the events of the failed independence bid which "continue to have a criminal sanction", she told reporters.

Puigdemont and a number of his separatist colleagues fled to Belgium in October 2017, fearing arrest after the failed independence bid. He became a member of the European Parliament in June 2019.

Supreme court judge Pablo Llarena said on Thursday he would submit a new extradition request to Belgian authorities for Puigdemont to face trial on the lesser charges, pending EU courts' rulings on whether Puigdemont has immunity as a European lawmaker.

Belgium has so far denied Spain's extradition request for Puigdemont, and it was not clear how having the charge of sedition dropped would affect the chances of him being sent back by Belgian officials.

Puigdemont's lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, told Catalan radio he was "convinced" his client would soon be able to return to Spain, adding he expected European courts would confirm he has immunity at the end of February or in March.

LONDON — The British and Japanese prime ministers signed what Downing Street called a “hugely significant” new defence deal allowing UK troops to deploy in Japan as the pair met in London on Wednesday.

Rishi Sunak and Fumio Kishida signed the agreement at the Tower of London, with the UK leader telling his guest “the relationship between our two countries is stronger than ever, not just across trade and security but also our values”.

The agreement is the latest sign of the UK’s growing interest in the Asia-Pacific region, and Tokyo’s efforts to strengthen its alliances to face the challenges posed by China.

The deal creates a legal basis for the deployment of British and Japanese troops on each others’ territory for training and other operations.

Sunak’s office called it “the most significant defence agreement between the two countries in more than a century”.

“This Reciprocal Access Agreement is hugely significant for both our nations — it cements our commitment to the Indo-Pacific and underlines our joint efforts to bolster economic security,” he said.

Negotiations on the deal began in 2021.

Japan signed a similar accord with Australia last January, and Tokyo has recently overhauled its defence and security policy to address growing pressure from China.

Euan Graham, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described the deal as “quite a significant step up for both countries in terms of their bilateral defence relationship”.

British ships and aircraft can visit Japan and vice-versa, but the process is “diplomatically complicated” and requires foreign ministry clearance each time.

The new agreement will create a “standing framework” instead.

That will make it easier to “bring a destroyer to visit Yokosuka, or to bring in an army group, or to bring in some Royal Marines who want to train with the Japanese amphibious forces”, Graham told AFP.

Japan has a pacifist post-war constitution, which limits its military capacity to ostensibly defensive measures.

But last month, the government approved plans to hike defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP by 2027, up from the traditional 1 per cent level, and warned that China poses the “greatest strategic challenge ever” to its security.

Britain has also become increasingly forceful in its approach to China, with Sunak warning in November that Beijing poses a “systemic challenge” to UK values and interests.

The UK, Italy and Japan said last month that they will jointly develop a future fighter jet.

The new “Global Combat Air Programme” is slated to produce its first jets by 2035, merging the three nations’ costly existing research into new aerial war technology, from stealth capacity to high-tech sensors.

A British patrol ship also last year took part for the first time in “Exercise Keen Sword”, the regular Pacific training operation carried out by the Japanese and US navies.

Kishida is on a tour of G-7 allies for security-focused talks, culminating in a meeting with US President Joe Biden on Friday.

In Paris, he and Emmanuel Macron pledged deeper ties, with the French president promising to maintain “joint actions in the Pacific” and France’s “unfailing support” against North Korean aggression.

Japan holds the G-7 presidency this year and Kishida has vowed the group will maintain support for Ukraine, which is thought to have been on the agenda in his talks with Sunak.

Sunak said the pair would also discuss trade, including the UK’s possible accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Signed by 11 Asia-Pacific countries in 2018, the partnership is the region’s biggest free-trade pact.

OUIDAH, Benin — Every year in Benin, locals celebrate a festival in tribute to the deities of Voodoo, the indigenous religion worshipping natural spirits and revering their ancestors.

Increasingly, the festival is drawing people of African descent from America, Brazil and the Caribbean seeking to discover the religion and land of their ancestors enslaved and shipped away from the beaches of west Africa.

Voodoo, known locally as Vodoun, originated in the Dahomey kingdom — present-day Benin and Togo — and is still widely practised sometimes alongside Christianity in coastal towns like Ouidah, once a trading hub where memorials to the slave trade are dotted around the small beach settlement.

“We come here first to search for our origins and reconnect with Mother Earth,” said Louis Pierre Ramassamy, 45, from Guadaloupe who was in Benin for the first time and visiting Ouidah.

He came to discover the Vodoun festival, but his stay goes beyond that.

He said he wants to follow the footsteps of his ancestors, who were taken from Ouidah centuries ago and to rediscover the divinity practised by his maternal grandmother.

Consultations and sacrifices were made for him in a Vodoun convent in Ouidah to help him reconnect, he said.

“If luck does not smile on me this time, I will come back another time. I need this reconnection for my personal development,” the tourist told AFP, his camera focused on the movement of voodoo practitioners on Ouidah’s imposing Atlantic Ocean beach.

Dozens of followers dressed in white cloth face the ocean each festival to pay hommage in Ouidah to Mami Wata, a goddess of the sea.

Accompanied by drums and dancing, followers dressed in colourful traditional robes and gowns watched “Zangbeto” rituals — whirling dancers dressed as guardians of the night.

Nearby is an arch, the “Door of No Return”, in memory of those jammed onto slave ships from Ouidah’s beach bound for the New World.

“Our ancestors foresaw this return of Afro-descendants. They are eagerly awaited by the ghosts of our ancestors,” said Hounnongan Viyeye Noumaze Gbetoton, one of the Vodoun dignitaries in Ouidah.

“When they return, it is to take blessings and recharge their batteries to move forward.”

Brazilian Anaica Durand said she had passed this stage.

She managed to reconnect with her family of origin, the family of Almeida from Benin and is delighted with it.

January 10 has now become a moment of great festivity for her to revel in the songs, dances and celebrations around Vodoun.

‘True identity’ 

Like her, Alexandra Bajeux is on her second stay in Ouidah. This year, she came to pay hommage to the Snake deity Dan.

“All the consultations revealed that it was the cult of my ancestors,” she smiles, white loincloth tied at the waist.

The 29-year-old Haitian plans to settle in Ouidah to devote herself full-time to this religion.

“Dan is happiness and he is a source of wealth,” said the young woman who swears “to have finally found the happiness that she lacked”.

“Our major objective is that the indigenous culture never fades away... Sooner or later, all Afro-descendants will return to the fold. This is what our ancestors say,” said Hounnongan Viyeye Noumaze Gbetoton.

Francis Ahouissoussi, a Benin sociologist specialising in religious issues, explains this attachment of descendants of African slaves as “a natural need that they must fill”.

According to him, many Afro-descendants feel they “are in a permanent quest for their true identity”, part of which is addressed for some by the role of Vodoun.

For Brazilian Ana Beatriz Akpedje Almeida it felt like she was connecting the deities she knew from Brazil and others and to her ancestors.

“I think most people from the diaspora can connect with this kind of knowledge,” she said. “Voodoo is a perspective about humanity.”

US visitor Chastyl told AFP it was also her first time in Benin.

“I have seen so many divinities and a lot of dancing,” she said. “I don’t have any family here, they are all in the United States, but obviously somewhere, we are from here.”

PARIS — The last eight years were the warmest on record even with the cooling influence of a La Nina weather pattern since 2020, the European Union's climate monitoring service said on Tuesday.

Average temperatures across 2022, which saw a cascade of unprecedented natural disasters made more likely and deadly by climate change — make it the fifth warmest year since records began in the 19th century, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Pakistan and northern India were scorched by a two-month spring heatwave with sustained temperatures well above 40ºC, followed in Pakistan by flooding that covered a third of the country, affected 33 million people, and caused some $30 billion in damage and economic losses.

France, Britain, Spain and Italy set new average temperature records for 2022, with Europe as a whole enduring its second hottest year ever, Copernicus said in an annual report.

Heatwaves across the continent were compounded by severe drought conditions.

European temperatures have increased by more than twice the global average over the past 30 years, with the region showing the highest rate of increase of any continent on the globe.

"2022 was yet another year of climate extremes across Europe and globally," said deputy head of the Copernicus climate change service Samantha Burgess in a statement.

"These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world."

Large swathes of the Middle East, China, central Asia and northern Africa also saw unprecedented warmth averaged across the whole of 2022.

China and western Europe reported negative impacts on agriculture, river transport and energy management related to weather conditions.

Earth’s polar regions experienced record temperatures last year as well.

The remote Vostok station deep in the interior of East Antarctica reached a relatively balmy minus 17.7ºC, the warmest ever measured in its 65-year history.

Antarctic sea ice reached it lowest minimum extent in the 44-year satellite record in February, during the southern hemisphere summer.

At the other end of the globe, Greenland experienced September temperatures 8C higher than average, accelerating ice sheet loss that has become a major contributor to sea level rise.

The hottest years on record globally so far are, in descending order,  2016, 2020, 2019 and 2017, according to Copernicus.

The atmospheric concentrations of the two main greenhouse gases that drive global warming, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), also continued a decades-long climb to record levels.

CO2 levels rose to 417 parts per million, the highest level in over two million years. Methane rose to 1,894 parts per billion to levels not seen in 800,000 years.

“Atmospheric concentrations are continuing to rise with no sign of slowing,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, director of the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service.

A world barely 1.2C above pre-industrial levels has already been buffeted by record heatwaves, droughts and temperatures, and is headed for a disastrous 2.8ºC above that benchmark.

The Paris Agreement, agreed by nearly all the world’s nations in 2015, calls for capping global warming a 1.5ºC, which scientists say would limit climate impacts to manageable levels.

But CO2 and CH4 emissions from production and use of fossil fuels, the main driver of warming, have continued to rise, even as the decarbonisation of the global economy has accelerated.

BRUSSELS — NATO and the EU vowed Tuesday to bolster their backing for Ukraine to fight off Russia's invasion and ramp up cooperation between Europe and the US-led alliance.

Longstanding designs by NATO and EU to forge greater cooperation have gained impetus from the West's support of Ukraine.

"We must continue to strengthen the partnership between NATO and the European Union. And we must further strengthen our support to Ukraine," NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said after signing a joint declaration with the EU's top officials.

Countries in NATO and the EU, which share 21 members, have funnelled billions of dollars of arms to Kyiv that have helped it push back Moscow's forces.

The United States, Germany and France have announced they will now also supply Ukraine with armoured fighting vehicles — but Kyiv has pleaded for modern heavy tanks to be sent as well.

“I think that Ukraine should get all the necessary military equipment they need and they can handle to defend the homeland,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

“This means of course, advanced air defence systems, but also other types of advanced military equipment, as long as it is necessary to defend Ukraine.”

Stoltenberg said Kyiv’s Western backers will meet next week with Ukraine’s defence minister “to discuss exactly what types of weapons are needed and how can allies provide those weapons”.

“This is not only about adding more systems, more platforms, more weapons, but also ensuring that the platforms, the weapons we have already provided, are working as they should,” he said.

Moscow’s attack on Ukraine has upended the European security order and spurred calls for the EU and NATO to work more closely together to protect the continent.

‘NATO remains 

the foundation’ 

The two organisations agreed that NATO, backed by the military might of the United States, remains the bedrock for Europe’s security despite attempts by the EU to boost its role in defence.

“Our declaration makes clear that NATO remains the foundation of collective defence and remains essential for Euro-Atlantic security,” Stoltenberg said.

“It also recognises the value of a more capable European defence that contributes positively to our security and is complementary to and interoperable with NATO.”

European Council President Charles Michel agreed that NATO remained fundamental to defending the EU, but insisted a push spearheaded by France for greater European “strategic autonomy” was not dead.

“Making Europe stronger makes NATO stronger, because strong allies make strong alliances,” Michel said.

The efforts to expand the EU’s role in defence have sparked warnings it could overlap with NATO and worries from eastern European members who do not want to water down Washington’s position as their major security guarantor.

NATO and the EU have for years been talking about improving their coordination and Tuesday’s joint declaration was the third cooperation pledge agreed since 2016.

The latest version had originally been envisioned to come out in 2021, but was redrafted after the start of the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine in February.

The two sides have worked together to bolster their cyber defences and improve infrastructure to shift troops more swiftly around Europe.

They now say they want to step up joint work on protecting critical infrastructure, addressing challenges in space, and tackling misinformation.

MOSCOW — Russian-backed separatist forces in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine said on Monday they had seized a village near the key city of Bakhmut that Moscow has been trying to capture for months.

The village of Bakhmutske in "the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic was liberated by the armed forces of the Russian Federation", on Monday, read a statement from separatist authorities on Telegram.

AFP could not independently verify the claim.

The village lies northeast of Bakhmut, a wine-making and salt-mining city that used to have a population of 70,000 people and is now an epicentre of fighting.

In a statement on social media, the Kremlin-linked mercenary group Wagner responded to the reports saying its forces had already "liberated" Bakhmutske last month.

The village is just outside the city of Soledar, also the scene of heavy fighting.

Separately, Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on social media that Soledar was being stormed "exclusively" by the group's units.

Observers of the conflict have pointed to competing ambitions of the Russian defence ministry, pro-Russian separatist forces that have held parts of Donbas since 2014 and Wagner, including the rising public profile of Prigozhin.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address Sunday that the area between Bakhmut and Soledar is "one of the bloodiest places on the front".

In September, Moscow claimed to have annexed Donetsk and three other Ukrainian regions following referendums not recognised by Kyiv and the West.