MEXICO CITY: A judge was shot dead Wednesday in Mexico’s once-thriving beach city of Acapulco, local media and the state prosecutor’s office said.
Local press identified the slain judge as Edmundo Roman Pinzon, president of the Superior Court of Justice in Guerrero state, saying he was shot at least four times in his car outside an Acapulco courthouse.
The southern state of Guerrero is one the areas hardest hit in Mexico by violence linked to organized crime, and has seen a string of deadly attacks this year.
In October, the mayor of the state capital Chilpancingo was killed and decapitated just days after taking office.
Weeks later, armed clashes between alleged gang members and security forces left 19 people dead in the state. Last month, a dozen dismembered bodies were discovered in vehicles in Chilpancingo.
Acapulco, the state’s most populous city, was once a playground for the rich and famous, but has lost its luster over the last decade as foreign tourists have been spooked by bloodshed that has made it one of the world’s most violent cities.
On Wednesday, the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office said in a statement that it was “investigating the crime of aggravated homicide against Edmundo N,” in line with the usual practice of not giving full names.
The killing comes just over a week after President Claudia Sheinbaum led a meeting of the National Public Security Council in Acapulco, with state governors in attendance.
Spiraling violence, much of it linked to drug trafficking, has seen more than 450,000 people murdered in Mexico since 2006, when the government launched an offensive against organized crime.
Sheinbaum, who took office in October as Mexico’s first woman president, has ruled out launching a new “war on drugs,” as the controversial program was known.
She has pledged instead to stick to her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to address the causes of crime.
Last year, 1,890 murders were recorded in Guerrero.
Mexican judge shot dead in violence-plagued Acapulco
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Mexican judge shot dead in violence-plagued Acapulco
UN condemns suicide attack on Afghan minister
- Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani was the brother of Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the feared Haqqani network responsible for some of the most violent attacks during the Taliban’s two-decade insurgency
The Minister for Refugees and Repatriation, Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani, was killed on Wednesday afternoon in a suicide bombing at the ministry’s offices in the capital Kabul.
“There can be no place for terrorism in the quest for stability,” the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said on X, offering condolences to the victims’ families.
The European Union and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation also condemned the attack, along with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.
Haqqani — who is on US and UN sanctions lists and never appeared without an automatic weapon in his hand — was the brother of Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the feared Haqqani network responsible for some of the most violent attacks during the Taliban’s two-decade insurgency.
He was also the uncle of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the current interior minister.
Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani’s funeral was set for Thursday at 2 p.m. in Paktia province, south of Kabul.
The Daesh group claimed responsibility for the attack, saying a bomber detonated an explosive vest inside the ministry, according to a statement on its Amaq news agency, as translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Taliban authorities had already blamed Daesh for the “cowardly attack” — the first targeting a minister since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
Violence has waned in Afghanistan since the Taliban forces took over the country in 2021, ending their war against US-led NATO coalition forces.
However, the regional chapter of Daesh, known as Islamic State Khorasan, is active in Afghanistan and has regularly targeted civilians, foreigners and Taliban officials with gun and bomb attacks.
Climate change forged a new reality in 2024: ‘This is life now’
- In 2024, billions across the world faced climatic conditions that broke record after record
- 2024 was the hottest year since records began, according to European climate scientists
LONDON/MEXICO CITY: Intolerable heat. Unsurvivable storms. Inescapable floods.
In 2024, billions of people across the world faced climatic conditions that broke record after record: logging ever more highs for heat, floods, storms, fire and drought.
As the year drew to a close, the conclusion was both blatant and bleak: 2024 was the hottest year since records began, according to European climate scientists.
But it may not hold this dubious honor for long.
“This is life now and it’s not going to get easier. It’s only going to get harder. That’s what climate change means,” said Andrew Pershing, chief programs officer at Climate Central, a US-based non-profit climate advocacy group.
“Because we continue to pollute the atmosphere, we’re going to get, year after year, warmer and warmer oceans, warmer and warmer lands, bigger and badder storms.”
Others use still bolder language.
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” said the 2024 State of the Climate report.
Here’s how that looked this year, what 2025 holds, and why there are still reasons to be hopeful.
SOS
This was the first year when the planet was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than it was in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, a time when humans did not burn fossil fuels on a mass scale, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The sheer number of days of extreme heat endured by billions of people — from the desert town of Phoenix, Arizona to the desert town of Phalodi in India’s Rajasthan — was startling.
Sunday, July 21, was the hottest day ever.
Until Monday, July 22.
The day after dipped a smidgen cooler.
These consecutive records came during Earth’s hottest season on record — June to August — according to Climate Central.
Those three months exposed billions of people to extreme heat, heavy rain, deadly floods, storms and wildfires.
Friederike Otto of World Weather Attribution, a global team that examines the role of climate change in extreme weather, said heatwaves were a “game changer.”
The world has not caught up: many deaths go unrecorded while some African countries lack an official definition for a heatwave, meaning heat action plans don’t kick in, she said.
“There is a huge amount of awareness that needs to be had to even adapt to today’s heat extremes but, of course, we will see worse,” Otto told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Between June 16-24, more than 60 percent of the world’s population suffered from climate change-driven extreme heat.
This included 619 million in India, where more than 40,000 people suffered heatstroke and 100+ died over the summer.
Birds fell from the sky as temperatures neared 50 C (122 F).
Millions were affected: from China to Nigeria, Bangladesh to Brazil, Ethiopia to Egypt, Americans and Europeans, too.
Climate Central said one in four people had no break from exceptional heat from June to August, the highs made at least three times more likely by climate change.
During those months, 180 cities in the Northern Hemisphere had at least one dangerous extreme heatwave — a phenomenon made 21 times more likely by human action, Climate Central said.
TOO HOT TO WORK
“The number of days where you are starting to push the physiological limits of human survival (are rising),” said Pershing, citing Pakistan and the Arabian Gulf as two areas that neared breaking point this year.
Hundreds died during the Hajj pilgrimage to Makkah as Saudi Arabia topped 50 C (122 F).
In the US Midwest and Northeast, Americans broiled under a heat dome when high pressure trapped hot air overhead.
NASA’s Earth Observatory said extreme heat was often exacerbated by hot nights, a dearth of green space or air con, or a surfeit of concrete, which absorbs heat.
Heat and drought fueled wildfires this year, with blazes in the Mediterranean, United States and Latin America. Fires burned from the Siberian Arctic to Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands.
“(The Pantanal) is a wet area that is not supposed to burn for months on end so that is probably something I would look out for next year where we see wildfires in ecosystems that are not traditionally burning ecosystems,” said Otto.
THE MOST VULNERABLE
The “new normal” hits the vulnerable hardest.
“The people who are succumbing to heat-related deaths are not the millionaires and billionaires,” said Pershing.
“If you are a reasonably well-to-do person you can afford air conditioning, you have a vehicle that can get you where you need to go, you have ways to keep yourself cool. If you don’t have access to these things or you lose them because of a power outage or another storm, that creates these additional vulnerabilities.”
In Africa, nearly 93 percent of the workforce faces extreme heat.
On the Arabian Peninsula, it is more than 83 percent of workers.
European and Central Asian workers could be next in line.
For Otto, the answer to this fast-spreading risk lies in empathy, putting the poor and vulnerable — “the vast majority of the global population” — at the center of climate action.
“In Bangladesh, when you put the survival of the poorest in the center of the action, you actually have a society that is really well-equipped to deal with tropical cyclones,” she said.
“People know what to do and there are drills and practices.”
Silver linings, though, are rare.
“Empathy is in short supply,” said Otto.
BOILING SEAS
Ocean temperatures also hit alarming levels in 2024, wreaking havoc on land and sea.
Hurricane Milton came barely two weeks after Hurricane Helene, with abnormally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico turbo-charging the twin storms that lashed the US Southeast.
“In that some places in the Gulf of Mexico ... temperatures were 400 times more likely because of climate change,” Pershing said.
Climate Central found a similar link between October’s floods in Spain and unusually warm waters in the Tropical Atlantic.
Human-driven climate change made these elevated sea surface temperatures up to 300 times more likely, Climate Central said.
“WE NEED DRILLS”
Otto said this year’s extremes, notably Europe’s floods, illustrated a “failure of imagination” and a refusal to adapt.
“We don’t just need the weather forecast or warnings. We need drills. We have to practice survival wherever heavy floods can happen and they can happen everywhere,” she said.
Infrastructure also failed.
“The way that we have canalized rivers and sealed all the surfaces ... will mean disastrous damages every time there is a flood ... There is always this short-termism that it’s expensive to fix it now but of course it will save lots of money and livelihoods later,” she said.
For Pershing, adaptation is “an exercise in imagination because we haven’t seen these kinds of events before ... That is the challenge of climate change: we’re going to be confronted year after year with conditions we’ve never experienced.”
SO WHAT NEXT?
Nobody expects a quick end to extreme weather but Otto is hopeful that humans may change their polluting ways.
“That is a reason for optimism ...clinging to fossil fuels (is) increasing inequality and destroying livelihoods but it increasingly makes less sense ...for national economies.”
In another upbeat note, Otto said better preparations in Europe meant fewer deaths in this year’s floods than previously.
But ocean temperatures are a key concern for 2025.
“The amount of heat stored in the ocean … really has my attention because we are not quite sure if there is something different going on in the climate system,” said Pershing.
Another risk — complacency.
“People do have a way of getting used to conditions and you can kinda get numb to it,” Pershing said.
And complacency can breed paralysis.
“This was the hottest year, last year was the hottest year — probably next year will be the hottest year again,” said Otto.
Fire danger diminishes in Southern California even as crews continue to battle Malibu blaze
- Malibu is a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles renowned for its stunning scenery of seaside bluffs and Zuma Beach featured in Hollywood films
MALIBU: As weather improved in Southern California, firefighters found some success Wednesday battling a wind-driven blaze burning in steep, nearly inaccessible areas that forced thousands, including celebrities, from their homes in Malibu, fire officials said.
With much of the coastal city under evacuation orders and warnings, residents waited anxiously to see whether their properties had been spared by the fire, which erupted late Monday and grew to more than 6 square miles (16 square kilometers). The blaze, dubbed the Franklin Fire, was just 7% contained.
About 20,000 residents remained under evacuation orders and warnings Wednesday evening, said Capt. Jennifer Seetoo of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
Firefighters had “a lot of success” battling the blaze Wednesday thanks to the improving weather, but it continued to burn in an area of very steep terrain that is difficult to access, CalFire Assistant Chief Dusty Martin said.
The National Weather Service said the week's strongest Santa Ana winds, with gusts that reached 40 mph (64 kph), have passed. Forecasters said that all red flag warnings, which indicate conditions for high fire danger and Santa Ana winds, were discontinued.
Santa Anas are notorious seasonal winds that blow dry air from the interior toward the coast, pushing back moist ocean breezes.
Much of the devastation occurred in Malibu, a community of about 10,000 people on the western edge of Los Angeles known for its stunning bluffs and Zuma Beach, which features in many Hollywood films.
Flames burned near horse farms, celebrities’ seaside mansions, and Pepperdine University, where students were forced to shelter in place on campus for a second night Tuesday.
Faculty members are determining how best to complete the semester, which ends at Pepperdine this week. Final exams were postponed or canceled, depending on the class, university spokesperson Michael Friel said. An early analysis showed little to no damage to structures on campus, the university said.
It’s unclear how the blaze started. Officials said nine structures had been destroyed and at least six others had been damaged, though crews had only surveyed about 25% of the affected area, said Deputy Chief Albert Yanagisawa of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Lonnie Vidaurri’s four-bedroom home in the Malibu Knolls neighborhood is one of those destroyed. After evacuating to a hotel in Santa Monica with his wife and two young daughters, a neighbor called to tell Vidaurri that firefighters would need to break into his house.
“It’s pretty torched all around,” said Vidaurri, 53. He expects that the family’s pet bunnies did not survive the fire, and that they lost most of their things. “My girls cried, obviously, but it could have been worse.”
Mimi Teller, a Red Cross spokesperson who worked in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, said many people arrived in their pajamas and were “definitely in shock.”
“Nobody even had a backpack, it was, ‘Get out now,’” Teller said. “One lady didn’t even have a leash for her dog, she just scooped them up.”
Shawn Smith said he was asleep early Tuesday when someone knocked on his RV at 3 a.m. to wake him up to evacuate the Malibu RV Park.
“You could see the fires rolling in, in over the canyon. It was like ‘Holy crap, this is real,'” he said.
He returned Wednesday to find that the RV park had been saved — firefighters stopped the flames just before they entered the area.
“We got lucky,” he said.
Van Dyke, one of many celebrities with homes in Malibu, said in a Facebook post that he and his wife, Arlene Silver, evacuated as the fire swept in. Although the couple and most of their animals evacuated safely, one of their cats, Bobo, escaped as they were leaving. “We’re praying he’ll be OK and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires," he wrote.
Cher evacuated from her Malibu home when ordered and is staying at a hotel, her publicist, Liz Rosenberg, said Tuesday.
The fire erupted shortly before 11 p.m. Monday and swiftly moved south, jumping over the famous Pacific Coast Highway and extending all the way to the ocean.
Alec Gellis, 31, stayed behind Monday night to save his home in Malibu’s Serra Retreat neighborhood from the flames. He used pumps in the home’s swimming pool to help spray water over the house and surrounding vegetation, turning the lush area “into a rainforest.”
Gellis said there were flames within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the home on all sides. “The whole canyon was completely lit up.”
Utilities preemptively shut off power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses, starting Monday night, to mitigate the impacts of the Santa Ana winds, whose strong gusts can damage electrical equipment and spark wildfires.
As of Wednesday afternoon, electricity was still out for roughly 600 Southern California Edison customers, and the majority of those were in Los Angeles County, said utility spokesperson Gabriela Ornelas.
“We have been making significant progress,” she said.
But outages in Malibu were not included in that figure, Ornelas said. Some 3,300 customers in the Malibu area remained without power, due to safety shutoffs and for firefighter safety. Power was first shut off to most customers in Malibu on Monday evening.
The Woolsey Fire that roared through the area in 2018, killing three people and destroying 1,600 homes, was sparked by Edison equipment. Asked Wednesday if Edison equipment was involved in the Franklin Fire, Ornelas referred all questions regarding the cause to fire officials.
Trump taps election denier to head Voice of America
- Kari Lake is a hardline conservative who ran in 2022 as governor of the southwestern state of Arizona and for US Senate in 2024, losing both times
- She has repeatedly refused to accept her past election defeats, as well as Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden
WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appointed election denier Kari Lake to be the new director of Voice of America, the state-funded international media organization.
VOA has reach around the world, with programming in a slew of African, Asian and European languages, including Somali, Dari and French.
It receives US funding but is generally considered a reliable, independent media operation, covering global and US news for international audiences.
However, previous leadership under Trump’s first administration came under fire for politicizing the outlet.
Lake, a former television news anchor, is a hardline conservative who ran in 2022 as the Republican candidate for governor of the southwestern state of Arizona and for US Senate in 2024, losing both times.
She has repeatedly refused to accept her past election defeats, as well as Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
As he prepares to take office in January, Trump’s staffing announcements have consisted of close allies.
“I am pleased to announce that Kari Lake will serve as our next Director of the Voice of America,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social website.
“She will be appointed by, and work closely with, our next head of the US Agency for Global Media... to ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”
In his first term, Michael Pack, Trump’s head of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, raised concerns when he moved in 2020 to strip an internal firewall at the organization meant to insulate the newsroom from political interference.
A VOA White House reporter was also investigated for supposed anti-Trump biases during Trump’s first administration.
Vulnerable Afghans struggle as Taliban rebuild Kabul roads
- Thousands affected by road development works spearheaded in Kabul by Taliban authorities since they swept to power in 2021
- 3,515 families forced from homes between Apr-Oct when seven informal settlements demolished to make way for development plans
KABUL: Mohammed Naeem knew the Kabul street where he and his brothers built matching apartment buildings was too narrow, but he was still in disbelief as their homes were reduced to rubble to widen the road.
He had received notice 10 days earlier that he would have to destroy three-quarters of his building immediately, one of thousands affected by road development works spearheaded in Kabul by the Taliban authorities since they swept to power in 2021.
Afghanistan’s largest city, Kabul has seen rapid and unruly urban development in the past decades, with side effects of snarled traffic and unregulated building.
While authorities and some residents praise the city’s road improvements as long overdue, many in the country — one of the poorest in the world — have been devastated by the loss of homes and businesses.
“We are pleased the government is constructing the road, the country will be built up,” said 45-year-old Naeem, perched on a pile of bricks in his gutted house in western Kabul, but he is desperate for the compensation the government promised.
“I’m in debt and I don’t have money, otherwise I could take my children somewhere away from the dust and all the noise... I could restart my life.”
Unemployed for years and having lost his tenants, Naeem and his family had no option but to stay in the shorn-off building — even as the harsh winter approaches — with its spacious apartments reduced to two rooms and a kitchen cordoned off by tarpaulin at the top of a broken staircase.
His toddler son, the youngest of six, swings a hammer against jagged bricks, imitating the laborers his father hired to dismantle their home of a decade.
For now, it’s a game, his mother told AFP, but sometimes he asks, “Why are you breaking the house down, dad?” she said, tears in her eyes. “Will you build another one?“
Some residents told AFP they were rushed to leave, with nowhere else to go, or did not receive any support from the government.
The municipality says those whose homes and businesses were completely or partially destroyed would be compensated and given “more than enough” time to move out and find new residences.
Kabul municipality representative Nematullah Barakzai said the government had paid out two billion Afghanis (nearly $30 million) in compensation this year, with road construction accounting for more than half of 165 projects.
“If you want a city to be organized and city services to reach to everyone equally, you need a planned city... all these roads are approved and essential,” Barakzai said.
While Kabul’s roads are paved, they are often narrow, without traffic lights or markers, with chaotic bumper-to-bumper traffic and accidents a daily occurrence.
The Land Grabbing Prevention and Restitution Commission recovered nearly 33,000 acres of state land in Kabul in two years “from usurpers, power abusers and illegitimate descendants,” justice ministry spokesman Barakatullah Rasuli told AFP.
“This process is continuing rapidly in all of Afghanistan’s provinces,” he said.
This month, the authorities announced work had started on a construction project to tackle population growth and lack of housing in the capital.
Widowed Najiba — not her real name — lost all but one of the eight rooms of the mud-brick home she built for herself and her four children to road expansion.
After a year and a half she has not received compensation, she said.
“I want either that they give me my money or new land so I could build a house, I don’t have anything else,” she told AFP.
“They say these lands belong to the government, if it was government land they should have told us at first.”
Some residents have praised the demolition of homes belonging to former warlords that had blocked roads in central Kabul since a construction boom after the end of the first Taliban rule in 2001.
The removal of barriers and opening of the street at the US embassy, closed after the Taliban’s return to power, has also been met with approval.
But the most vulnerable people have been the hardest hit by the clearances, such as the many internally displaced by Afghanistan’s decades of war, non-governmental groups said.
Sources familiar with the Kabul evictions told AFP 3,515 families were forced from their homes between April and October when seven informal settlements were demolished to make way for development plans, 70 percent of them dispersing around Kabul.
In June, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reported that around 6,000 people became homeless when authorities demolished internally displaced people’s settlements in the capital and called for evictions to halt “until legal safeguards, due process, and the provision of alternative housing are in place.”
