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At least 24 people are dead after a section of a highway in China’s rain-hit southern province of Guangdong collapsed in the early hours of Wednesday, the start of a long Labour Day holiday. The cave-in occurred at around 2am in Dabu County of Guangdong’s northern Meizhou City. Nearly 18 metres (59 feet) of the mountainous highway crumbled into the forested slope below, trapping 20 vehicles and 54 passengers in all, the local government said, issuing revised casualty figures. It had earlier said 18 vehicles and about 50 passengers were affected. In a statement, it said 30 victims had been sent to hospital, while around 500 public security, emergency response, firefighting, health and sanitation and other workers were taking part in the rescue work. The condition of the hospitalised patients was “not life-threatening at the moment”, the statement said, but did not specify the level of their injuries. The reason for the collapse has yet to be declared and the matter is under investigation. The accident occurred as China began a five-day break for Labour Day, one of the four major holiday and travel periods for the country when highways are toll-free and see heavy traffic. The others are Lunar New Year, called Spring Festival in China, the Tomb Sweeping Festival and National Day in October. Footage and pictures shared by local news outlets showed flames and smoke rising from the collapsed section, while charred cars were visible on the gouged out slope. The stricken highway links Guangdong to south-eastern Fujian province. According to state news agency Xinhua, the Ministry of Emergency Management has sent a working group to the scene to guide the rescue work, while National Fire and Rescue Administration chief Zhou Tian is also at the scene to instruct workers. It is the latest tragedy to hit Guangdong province, which has experienced a string of extreme weather events in recent weeks, from fatal floods to a deadly tornado. Guangdong authorities warned on Wednesday that more heavy rainfall was expected during the holiday, with higher risks of floods and landslides in some areas.
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The temperature in St. Petersburg, known as Russia’s northern capital, climbed to 21.5 degrees Celsius on Wednesday – the highest-ever reading for that day of the year, a leading specialist at the Fobos weather center has said.
“This is a new daily record for the maximum air temperature for April 10, and is as much as 4.8 degrees higher than the previous record registered on the same day in 1890,” Mikhail Leus wrote in a post on Telegram on Wednesday. While St. Petersburg residents flocked to outdoor cafes and parks to enjoy the warm weather, climate experts say the unusual temperature is yet another indicator of climate change’s impact on Russia, from prolonged wildfire seasons to melting permafrost. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday that March was the hottest on record, and the tenth straight month of historic heat. Every month since June 2023 has beaten the “hottest ever” milestone, experts noted, adding that March 2024 was no exception. Globally, last month was 1.58 degrees warmer than an average March during the “pre-industrial” reference period of 1850 to 1900, climate scientists said. The average European temperature for the month was 2.12 degrees Celsius above the historical average, marking it the second-warmest March on record for the continent, according to C3S. The agency said March temperatures were above average in parts of Antarctica, Greenland, eastern North America, eastern Russia, Central America, parts of South America, and southern Australia. Fueled by a mix of human-caused warming and the El Nino climate pattern, all-time monthly highs were observed both in the atmosphere and in the oceans, C3S said. The continued record-breaking heat comes after the year 2023 was officially declared the hottest on record, and likely the hottest in tens of thousands of years. The Blog Tags Widget will appear here on the published site.
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