Two US astronauts who have been stuck for months on the International Space Station (ISS) said Wednesday they have plenty of food, are not facing a laundry crisis, and don’t yet feel like castaways.Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the ISS in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, and were due to spend only eight days on the orbiting laboratory.But problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system prompted NASA to change plans, with a return flight now scheduled for late March at the earliest.Williams said spirits were still high despite the unexpectedly long stay in space.”It’s just been a joy to be working up here,” he said during a call with NASA officials.”It doesn’t feel like we’re cast away,” he added. “Eventually we want to go home, because we left our families a little while ago but we have a lot to do while we’re up here.”Wilmore chuckled while offering reassurance about food supply.”We are well fed,” he said.Laundry requirements are also not comparable to Earth, he explained. “Clothes fit loosely up here. It’s not like on Earth where you sweat and it gets bad. I mean, they fit loosely. So you can wear things honestly, for weeks at a time, and it doesn’t bother you at all,” he said. After the propulsion problems developed, NASA ultimately decided to return the spacecraft to Earth without its crew, and to bring the two stranded astronauts back home with the members of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission.Crew-9’s two astronauts arrived at the ISS aboard a Dragon spacecraft in late September, with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams. The plan was for all four to return home in February 2025.But the return was postponed last month when NASA announced that Crew-10, which would relieve Crew-9 and the stranded pair, would now launch no earlier than March 2025, and both teams would remain on board for a “handover period.”According to those timelines, Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to spend more than nine months in space.”When we get home, we’ll have lots of stories to tell,” Williams said. 

A prolonged dry spell combined with strong winds has created the “perfect conditions” for Los Angeles wildfires to rage out of control, even though experts say it’s too soon to pinpoint exactly how much climate change contributed.At the same time, perennial debates over suburban sprawl and forest management are intensifying, spurred by political mudslinging from incoming President Donald Trump and his close ally Elon Musk.”We see these fires spread when it is hot and dry and windy, and right now all of those conditions are in place in southern California,” Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, told AFP. “The clearest climate signal for those three conditions is with the temperature,” she added.While it’s not yet known what started the blazes, “human-caused climate change is intensifying the heat that drives wildfires, increasing temperatures in southern California up to two-degrees Celsius (3.6F) since 1895,” Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told AFP.2024 is set to be named the hottest year on record for both the United States and the world, capping a decade of unprecedented heat.- ‘Widening’ fire season -Although wildfire activity can vary greatly from year to year, short-term extreme weather conditions helped create the “perfect conditions” for the rencent blazes, said wildfire scientist Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.Last year’s El Nino weather system brought heavy rains that fueled excessive vegetation growth in the first half of 2024. But the second half of the year was marked by drought across southern California, setting the stage for what scientists call “precipitation whiplash,” another potential hallmark of climate change that turned the region into a tinderbox.Low humidity — combined with strong, dry Santa Ana winds blowing inland — further parched the already desiccated shrublands.Small embers can also be carried by the wind to ignite new areas, explained Rory Hadden, Professor of Fire Science at the University of Edinburgh. This can quickly overwhelm firefighters “and can also make escape challenging as visibility is reduced,” he added.”The ongoing wildfires in California are unprecedented, in the sense that they are dramatic for this time of the year,” said Apostolos Voulgarakis, an atmospheric scientist at Imperial College London, adding that research shows the state’s fire season is “widening” as a consequence of climate change.Attribution studies, which use statistical modeling to measure humanity’s impact on climate, will be needed to determine the precise culpability of human-driven warming on the current fires. However, scientists broadly agree that rising temperatures are making such fire-prone conditions more frequent. A recent UN Environment Programme report found a potential global increase in extreme fires by up to 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century.- Prescribed burns and political feuds – As more people move into wildfire-prone ecosystems — partly driven by housing costs in safer coastal areas — the danger to lives and property only grows.Dahl noted that this dynamic is especially visible in places like Lake Tahoe, which has attracted newcomers, resulting in a marked growth in what is called the “wildland-urban interface.”Forest management is also under scrutiny. The United States long practiced aggressive fire suppression before gradually embracing prescribed burns — a tactic supported for centuries by Native American tribes. California treats about 125,000 acres (50,000 hectares) of wildlands each year with controlled burns, but it isn’t clear if that’s sufficient, and the state’s patchwork of regulations governing land under state, federal or private jurisdictions pose challenges to scaling it. In the political arena, Musk took to X to slam “nonsense regulations” he believes hamper more active fire prevention, while Trump labeled Gavin Newsom “the incompetent governor,” highlighting how the growing number of disasters is increasingly fueling ideological battles.

A member of the Japanese yakuza criminal underworld pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal, US authorities said Wednesday.Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa and co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offenses, and both were remanded.He was then additionally charged in February 2024 with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material and lethal narcotics from Myanmar, and to purchase military weaponry on behalf of an armed insurgent group, prosecutors said.The military weaponry to be part of the arms deal included surface-to-air missiles, the indictment alleged.”As he admitted in federal court today, Takeshi Ebisawa brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” said Acting US attorney Edward Kim, using another name for Myanmar.”At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma.”Prosecutors alleged that Ebisawa, 60, “brazenly” moved material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, alongside drugs, from Myanmar.From 2020, Ebisawa boasted to an undercover officer he had access to large quantities of nuclear materials that he sought to sell, providing photographs of materials alongside Geiger counters registering radiation.During a sting operation including undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.””The (US) laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Department said in its statement at the time.One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had available more than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 — referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as ‘yellowcake’.”The indictment claimed Ebisawa had suggested using the proceeds of the sale of nuclear material to fund weapons purchases on behalf of an unnamed ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar.Ebisawa faces up to 20 years imprisonment for the trafficking of nuclear materials internationally.Prosecutors describe Ebisawa as a “leader of the Yakuza organized crime syndicate, a highly organized, transnational Japanese criminal network that operates around the world (and whose) criminal activities have included large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking.”Sentencing will be determined by the judge in the case at a later date, prosecutors said.

Dozens of evacuated Los Angeles residents stared incredulously at the thick cloud of black smoke blotting out the sun, scarcely able to believe the scale of the wildfires, and fearing that their homes could be destroyed next.They have gathered above Santa Monica Canyon, near the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood where devastating flames first broke out among multi-million dollar mansions on Tuesday.Residents continue to evacuate, or return briefly to collect their belongings.Gusts are still so strong that expensive Teslas and Alfa Romeos rock on their tires. A police car with a megaphone orders bystanders to “leave the area now.””You got the ashes to worry about in your lungs. You got your life to worry about with these 80- to 100-mile an hour gusts,” Sarahlee Stevens-Shippen told AFP.”We’ve just been in panic mode.”The 69-year-old retiree has lived here since the 1970s.Clad in a mask, she returned to her home at dawn to retrieve a few cherished possessions that she had been unable to gather in her hurry to flee the night before.”When I saw the glow of the fire coming over the mountain yesterday about eight o’clock, I took off,” she said.The flames had “already jumped the coast highway nearby and some palm trees were catching on fire,” she recalled.During the night that followed, at least two more substantial fires broke out to the north of the Los Angeles urban sprawl, in Altadena and the San Fernando Valley.Two people are confirmed to have died so far. Tens of thousands have evacuated their homes. And authorities warn that the danger is far from over, with treacherous windy conditions set to remain until later in the week.”This has been a shock that is still sinking in. But we’re in survival mode, so we’re just grabbing certain necessities and getting out,” said Stevens-Shippen.- ‘Never imagined’ -Carrying a large blue plastic bag stuffed full of clothes, Martin Sansing also emerges from the canyon. A television producer, he and his wife have just fled their four-bedroom villa.When Sansing bought the home for $1.6 million 15 years ago, he thought this neighborhood below the mountains that surround Los Angeles would be safe.”We’re in a pretty urban area. We’re not like, on a hill or anything like that,” he said.”I never imagined we would be affected.”Every fall and winter, California is swept by hot, dry Santa Ana winds. For firefighters, these are a nightmare, as they greatly increase the risk of fires spreading.This week, their strength reached an intensity not seen in more than a decade, meteorologists say.To compound the disaster, South California is experiencing a very dry winter, which makes vegetation more flammable. And there is a surplus of brush and shrubs, thanks to the two previous, unusually wet winters.”It’s hard not to think it’s unrelated to what’s happening on the planet,” said Sansing, 54.”These things seem to be more frequent and more intense.”- ‘So fast’ -At an evacuation center a few miles (kilometers) away, Arlinda Henderson is still trying to come to terms with what has happened.The Pacific Palisades resident has lived in her home with her husband since 1984. Over those four decades, she has experienced evacuations, but never anything of this severity.”This time was different — the fire just came down the hill so fast because of the wind,” she said.”I’d never seen anything like it.”The former flight attendant only had time to grab a few family photos and her pet cat before leaving her home — perhaps for the final time.”I think our house is gone. I’ve tried calling home, and I’ve tried a couple of neighbors. It’s just not ringing,” sighed the 76-year-old.She fears that her home insurance will refuse to continue to cover her against wildfires if she rebuilds in the neighborhood.”I can’t believe LA is surrounded” by wildfires, she said.