The UK parliament has finally passed a contentious bill that will allow the government to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for their claims to be considered by the East African nation.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts had been stuck between opposition in the Houses of Parliament and challenges in the British courts, as lawmakers and activists have sought to scupper the legislation on human rights grounds.

Sunak’s inability to implement the policy has caused considerable embarrassment, as the British government has sent millions of pounds to Rwanda to fund a scheme which to date has failed to deliver any results.

It is designed to deter irregular migration into the United Kingdom, particularly people traveling on illegal – and dangerous – small boats from France, arranged by criminal gangs.

In theory, the legislation will see some landing in the UK sent to Rwanda where their asylum claim will be considered. If their claim is accepted, they will stay in Rwanda. If it is declined, the bill says they cannot be deported by Rwanda to anywhere other than the UK, though it is unclear what would ultimately happen in this scenario.

Two years after the scheme was first conceived, the absence of any deportations so far has been considered a major failure for Sunak, who has previously marked out stopping small boats as a key priority.

The Supreme Court of the UK ruled last year that the policy is unlawful “because there are substantial grounds for believing that asylum seekers would face a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement to their country of origin if they were removed to Rwanda.”

Refoulement is the practice where asylum seekers or refugees are forcibly returned to a place where they would face persecution or danger, against important principles of international human rights law.

The judges also found that Rwanda’s asylum system, its poor human rights record, and its previous failure to comply with non-refoulement agreements meant that the British government could not be sure asylum seekers would have their claims considered safely and properly.

They also noted that, as recently as 2021, the UK government criticized Rwanda for “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture.”

The government responded by introducing the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in January of this year, which effectively enshrines in UK law that Rwanda is a safe country, overriding the judges’ concerns.

Home Secretary James Cleverly said in a video posted on X on Monday that “the Safety of Rwanda Bill has passed in Parliament and it will become law within days.”

He added that the act would “prevent people from abusing the law by using false human rights claims to block removals. And it makes clear that the UK Parliament is sovereign, giving the government the power to reject interim blocking measures imposed by European courts,” he added.

Even with the bill passed, it is possible that the government will face legal challenges in the European Court of Human Rights, as the UK is still a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights. The European court has previously barred it from sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. 

The bill has suffered long delays because of attempts to amend it. A process colloquially known as “ping pong,” where the two parts of the UK’s parliament – the House of Commons and the House of Lords – send legislation back and forth, has been going on for months. Every time the House of Lords makes amendments to the bill, the House of Commons, where Sunak has a majority, must vote to remove them.

The bill’s passage is not necessarily a major political win for Sunak. Even if the policy stopped all the small boat crossings Sunak says he wants to prevent, it would still barely touch the sides in terms of the UK’s net migration figures. In 2022, the number of people arriving by small boats was 45,744, according to Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. Net migration the same year, according to government figures, was 745,000.

This is a problem for Sunak and his governing Conservative Party, as they are set to face the public in a general election that must be called before the end of this year. Parties on the right – most notably Reform UK, the new political home of arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage – will push the issue of illegal migration as hard as possible.

There is also a danger that Sunak gets dragged into a wider debate around the UK leaving the ECHR, should deportations be blocked by the European court after the bill passes. This issue has already caused deep divisions between different sections of the Conservative Party.

To date, the Rwanda policy has cost the British government £220m ($274m), and that figure could rise to £600m after the first 300 people have been sent to East Africa. That leaves Sunak open to criticism from both the left and the right, who can say not only that the policy violates international human rights law, but that it is expensive and ineffective.

The opposition Labour Party, currently expected to win at the next general election, has already said that it will scrap the policy should it come to power.

Early results from Ecuador’s referendum suggest President Daniel Noboa has won public backing for security measures aimed at boosting his war on crime.

His government looks on track to win support for nine of the 11 proposals it put forward in Sunday’s vote, including for four of its key security measures, according to data from the National Electoral Council (CNE).

And the good news for Noboa was compounded Monday when police announced they had arrested a notorious alleged gang leader.

Early results from the referendum suggest 72% of the public approve of allowing the military to patrol with police to combat organized crime (something that can presently only happen under a state of emergency) and 65% back allowing the extradition of Ecuadorians under certain conditions (among them, guarantees of humane treatment and no use of the death penalty).

Both those proposals would require modifying Ecuador’s Constitution, which currently forbids the extradition of Ecuadorians under any circumstances. If the final results of the vote continue to show public backing for these measures, they will go into effect as soon as they are published in the official registry. It is unclear exactly when this would happen.

Two other security-related proposals – harsher prison sentences for some violent crimes and the establishment of a permanent armed forces presence in prisons to prevent weapons smuggling – also look on track to receive wide approval margins. These two proposals would not require changing the Constitution and will need the agreement of the National Assembly before they can go into effect.

The two measures that look likely to be rejected by the public are to allow workers to be contracted by the hour and to recognize international arbitrage to resolve investment disputes.

The early results will be seen as a win for Noboa, who swept into office last November as the youngest president in Ecuador’s history on the back of a promise to rein in the rampant crime that has transformed the once tranquil country into one plagued by drug cartel violence.

Since he came to office he has embarked on an uncompromising agenda in which he has declared “war” on more than 20 criminal gangs he has labeled as “terrorists,” declared a 90-day state of emergency, and authorized a highly controversial raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito to capture a fugitive Ecuadorian former vice president accused of corruption.

It was Ecuadorians’ growing discontent with the deteriorating security conditions that led Noboa’s predecessor Guillermo Lasso to call a snap election last year.

On Sunday, as an estimated 13 million Ecuadorians headed to the polls for the referendum, the country’s national prisons agency announced the director of the Manabi region prison had been killed in an attack.

Gang leader arrested

In another boost for Noboa, police said in a post on X that they had arrested notorious alleged gang leader Fabricio Colon Pico on Monday morning.

The arrest comes after several months of operations and investigative work by specialized units of the national police.

Colon Pico, the alleged leader of the Los Lobos gang, escaped from a prison in the central city of Riobamba in January, the city’s mayor said at the time.

Days earlier he had been captured after being publicly identified by Attorney General Diana Salazar as being part of a plan to attack her.

Colon Pico’s jailbreak came as another notorious gang leader – José Adolfo Macías, also known as “Fito,” of the rival gang Los Choneros – also escaped from prison, prompting a deployment of more than 3,000 members of the police and military to find him.

The top section of a giant television tower in Kharkiv has crashed to the ground after the structure was hit by a Russian missile, a Ukrainian official says.

Video circulating on social media shows the moment the top of the mast broke, rotated through 180 degrees, and fell to earth. Smoke could already be seen billowing from the structure where it had apparently been struck by what Kharkiv prosecutors said was a Kh-59 cruise missile.

Subsequent videos also posted on social media show the mast lying where it fell, surrounded by trees at the foot of the tower.

The structure – which stood more than 240 meters high – was erected in the early 1980s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv region military administration, said staff at the tower had been in the shelter at the time of the attack and no one had been injured. The digital TV signal in the city was “suffering interruptions,” he added.

Kharkiv – located just 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the border with Russia – has seen a big increase in Russian strikes since the start of the year.

A month ago, the city’s main power plant was destroyed in a Russian strike, along with all electricity substations in the city, according to the mayor.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a phone conversation with his US counterpart Joe Biden, during which he told the American president about the attack on the TV tower, said Russia was trying to “make the city uninhabitable.”

These almost daily barrages on Ukraine’s second largest city are one of the reasons Kyiv has made air defenses among its top priorities for new US military aid.

The US Senate is expected to vote this week on legislation worth $60 billion after it was approved in the House on the weekend.

The Pentagon has said it can get materiel moving “within days” of receiving the green light.

The Israeli military intelligence chief has resigned over his “leadership responsibility” for the Hamas-led October 7 attacks into southern Israel, which led to the killing of 1,200 people and another 250 kidnapped.

Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva is the first senior military figure to step down over the Hamas attacks on October 7, which was the deadliest day for Israel since its founding.

“It was decided that MG Aharon Haliva will end his position and retire from the IDF, once his successor is appointed in an orderly and professional process,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Monday, thanking him for his 38 years of service.

In October, Haliva admitted to an “intelligence failure” by his unit in not alerting the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

“During my visits to IDF Intelligence bases over the last 11 days, I have repeatedly said that this war began with an intelligence failure. The Intelligence Directorate, under my command, has failed to alert this terror attack launched by Hamas,” Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva said then in a letter to IDF’s intelligence personnel.

“We didn’t fulfil our most important task, and as the head of the Intelligence Directorate, I take full responsibility for this failure.” These were Haliva’s first comments since the attack.

They came after Israel’s top domestic security official took responsibility on for the attacks.

Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar wrote in a statement then that, “despite a series of actions we carried out, we weren’t able to create a sufficient warning that would allow the attack to be thwarted,” adding, “The responsibility is on me,” according to Israel’s Army Radio station.

The attack was widely seen as a major Israeli intelligence failure, with a number of top defense and security officials coming forward in October to take responsibility to some extent for missteps that led to the attacks.

In December, a report from the New York Times claimed Israel obtained Hamas’ plan for the attack more than a year in advance. The report said Israeli officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, and deemed it too complex for the group to carry out. Other outlets, including Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have also reported the claim.

Soon after the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received sharp public criticism after he accused security chiefs in a later-deleted social media post of failing to warn him about the impending attack.

China has accused the United States of “stoking military confrontation” with the recent deployment of a powerful missile launcher capable of firing weapons with a range of up to 1,600 kilometers to exercises in the Philippines.

The US Army’s Mid-Range Capability (MRC) ground-based missile system arrives in a region on edge following a series of dangerous Chinese-Philippine face-offs in the South China Sea, during which Philippine ships have been targeted with water cannons, injuring several Filipino sailors.

It’s the first-ever deployment of the MRC missile system, also known as the Typhon system, to the Indo-Pacific theater, and it comes amid a series of US-Philippine military exercises, including the largest-ever edition of the annual bilateral Balikatan drills beginning Monday.

The US Army has not said how long the Typhon system will remain in the Philippines, but its involvement in the series of joint exercises between the two treaty allies, the first of which began on April 8, sends a signal the US can put offensive weaponry well within striking distance of Chinese installations in the South China Sea, the southern Chinese mainland and along the Taiwan Strait, analysts say.

The Typhon system is capable of firing the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6), a ballistic missile defense munition that can also target ships at sea at a range of 370 kilometers (230 miles), according to the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

It also can fire the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, a maneuverable cruise missile with a range of 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles), according to the CSIS.

According to Beijing its presence in the region increases the risks of “misjudgment and miscalculation.”

During a regular news briefing last week, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian accused the US of seeking a “unilateral military advantage,” and underscored Beijing’s strong opposition to the deployment.

“We urge the US to earnestly respect other countries’ security concerns, stop stoking military confrontation, stop undermining peace and stability in the region, and take concrete actions to reduce strategic risks,” Lin said.

The US Army is calling the deployment, which began April 11 for the Salaknib exercise, a “landmark” in its regional capability.

Diplomatic fallout

The apparent diplomatic fallout comes as attendees from 29 countries, including the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, attend a two-day Western Pacific Naval Symposium, which began in the eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao on Sunday.

The attendees will discuss “maritime peace, maritime order based on maritime security cooperation and international laws, and global maritime governance,” according to Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency.

Those are the same rules Washington and Manila accuse Beijing of ignoring with aggressive Chinese actions that have injured Filipino sailors and damaged vessels around disputed features in the South China Sea.

The 1951 mutual defense treaty between the US and the Philippines – the oldest such US pact in Asia-Pacific – stipulates both sides would help defend each other if either were attacked by a third party.

China’s missile advantage

Analysts say the deployment of the Typhon missile battery is the first signal of US plans to address what has long been an advantage for Beijing in the region.

“This in some way ‘equalizes’ the prior situation where (Chinese) missiles have threatened US forces along the First Island Chain (which includes the northern Philippines, Japan and Taiwan), and even further eastward along the Second Island Chain centering on Guam,” said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

A 2021 report for the US Army’s professional journal Military Review puts the current missile advantage of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) in stark terms.

“The conventional arm of the PLARF is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough antiship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Army Maj. Christopher Milhal wrote.

While the Typhon can’t bring those kinds of numbers into play for US forces, its mobility represents a problem for Chinese mission planners — giving it important deterrent value, analysts say.

In announcing the Typhon deployment, the US military noted how the system was delivered to the Philippines via an 8,000-mile, 15-hour flight from Washington state by a US Air Force C-17 cargo jet.

Analysts don’t expect the Typhon system to be permanently based in the Philippines, but Koh said the ability to move the batteries to a range of “pre-surveyed launch sites” around the region on short notice increases their survivability and challenges relatively new and untested Chinese intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and targeting capabilities.

Whether the Typhon’s likely temporary status mitigates the fallout remains unknown. but China has previously reacted furiously to missile deployments in what it sees as its backyard.

Writing in the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance Blog, analyst Rupert Schulenberg noted that in 2016, when South Korea agreed to the deployment of a THAAD defensive missile system on the Korean Peninsula, “Beijing responded with an unofficial economic boycott that cost South Korea’s economy $7.5 billion in 2017 alone.”

The current deployment of the Typhon was something that would not have even been an option for the US military until 2019. Development of ground-launched missile systems of the type were banned under the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union.

But the US formally withdrew from the treaty in 2019, with then-President Donald Trump “citing Russian noncompliance and concerns about China’s intermediate-range missile arsenal.”

Balikatan exercises begin

Meanwhile, the US and the Philippines kicked-off the largest of their series of joint exercises Monday, with the three-week Balikatan drills — Tagalog for shoulder-to-shoulder — involving thousands of military personnel.

A report from the official Philippine News Agency said Manila would use the annual exercises to showcase its military’s most advanced systems, including a missile frigate, light fighter jets, close-combat support aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters.

Philippine officials previously indicated the naval portion of the exercise would for the first time extend beyond the 12-nautical-mile limit of Philippine waters — and into the country’s exclusive economic zone, some 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from Philippine shores, though no exact route has been provided.

It will also include French naval participation in a group sail from Palawan Island, according to Philippine officials.

Palawan, which sits between the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea, is about 200 kilometers from Second Thomas Shoal, a contested feature in the Spratly Islands that has been the site of numerous face-offs between Philippine and Chinese coast guard vessels.

This story has been updated.

This is Bill Weir’s fourth letter on Earth Day to his young son. His new book, “Life As We Know it (Can Be),” is available now in stores.

Dear River,

This is your fourth Earth Day, and so much has happened in your little lifespan that what started as an annual record of anger and regret has grown into a book full of hopeful solutions.

There are still dark days to be sure, and since you love animals so much, I can’t bring myself to explain just how many of your favorites are on extinction’s brink.

But so much has happened that I wake with more wonder than worry; when disasters strike, I remember the advice of Mister Rogers, who taught me that every time there is a scary event on TV, “Look for the helpers. There are always helpers.”

And while technology in the hands of the soulless can divide us, it can also connect the helpers in ways that can save entire ecosystems.

So, on this Earth Day, kiddo, let’s focus on a win.

I recently stumbled upon an Earth repair success story in the wilds of South America. It stars a family of little monkeys with big white hair. They were snacking on fruit and nectar, bouncing through the forest overstory when we first locked eyes.

“You guys have no idea how lucky you are,” I muttered at the Dr. Suess faces peering through my long lens.

Cotton-top tamarins are known locally as titis, and while only a few thousand remain in the shrinking forests of northwest Colombia, the family I saw is among the safest in the world thanks to one woman watching them with affection from below, hundreds of helpers watching monitoring them through a satellite from above, and a very long series of fortunate events.

The fate of the titis really began to turn when a woman I met in the jungle began her career as landscape architect, was hired to help build a zoo in Barranquilla and first fell in love with the cotton-topped titi. “I mean, how could you not?” Rosamira Guillen laughed, gesturing up at the family above.

When she learned that the illegal pet trade and slash-and-burn cattle ranching were erasing a species that lived only in her homeland of Colombia, her architect mind suddenly shifted from building zoos to rebuilding forests.

And River, it didn’t take long to understand that this job could not be done by dropping seeds from drones. It would take shovels and sweat and an intimate acre-by-acre knowledge of the ecology. It would take community organizing and youth education and economic development so the titi’s human neighbors wouldn’t need to cut down trees and poach animals to survive.

But to connect enough fragmented habitat for the remaining gene pool to thrive, she would need land. And the cooperation of cattle ranchers who do not share her love for toy-sized primates.

“I would be happy to just hang out with the monkeys and in the forest than to have to interact with people,” she laughed as we bumped over dirt roads in her worn pickup, and described how wanton deforestation can change water cycles and trigger ecosystem crash.

“In a country like Colombia, where there’s so many challenges, people don’t realize that if you screw up the forest we’re all going to be screwed. The ranchers see us as romantic,” she laughed with grim resignation.

But still, Rosamira wanted to be a helper, and in a search for funding met an American super-helper named Charlie Knowles.

As the scion of a family that invented the small microphones used in everything from Apollo spacecraft to Richard Nixon’s office to the iPhone, Charlie went into software and made enough of a fortune to retire at 34. Inspired by the story of biologist Laurie Marker who sold all her possessions and moved to Namibia to save cheetahs, Charlie told me he felt the same calling but knew that he had none of the skills required.

“What are my core competencies?” he asked himself. “I’m really good at throwing parties and raising money.”

With a cheetah borrowed from a petting zoo as a conversation starter, his first party raised $5,000, and with kindred souls from Silicon Valley, he set out to disrupt the world of nature philanthropy. “I became really frustrated by the lack of transparency,” Charlie told me. “I didn’t feel I knew where my money was going or what the impact it was having.”

So – alongside Akiko Yamazaki, John Lukas – Charlie co-founded the Wildlife Conservation Network and instead of telling donors to simply write a check and trust the process, WCN set out to create venture capital for animals like the titi and helpers like Rosamira.

They created expos to connect philanthropists in wealthy American suburbs with data-proven, wilderness-restoring, boots-on-the-ground conservationists. And they helped those folks make their operations more efficient and effective and often expanded their original vision of what was possible.

More than 20 years later, Charlie tells me that WCN supports hundreds of projects around the world with raves from the likes of Jane Goodall and a rare perfect score of 100 from the watchdog Charity Navigator.

One million-dollar donation funded over 200 scholarships for kids to study conservation. Another donor personally installed over 50 solar power arrays around the world. And at an expo in 2006, the fate of the titis turned for the better when the Vargas family walked in.

“I told my 12-year-old daughter, Kira, to go interview all the conservationists at the expo,” Chris Vargas told me. As another successful tech entrepreneur with a heart for wildlife and some money to give, he was searching for maximum bang for his buck.

“And on the drive home. I said, ‘Who is your favorite?’ Mine was Rosamira. She’s Steve Jobs and Jane Goodall all wrapped into one. Her energy, her passion, her clarity of purpose and her just sheer ingenuity,” Chris said. “But I wanted my daughter’s vote, without missing a beat she goes, ‘Daddy, you know that that woman from Colombia? Rosamira? She was my favorite’. So we high fived.”

For 18 years, the Vargas family would support Rosamira as she revived her corner of Colombia, one tree at a time. But when she needed $1.2 million to buy nearly 1,000 acres of neighboring ranchland, Chris needed to find more helpers.

“We thought, ‘Why don’t we just build a website? And build a technology that lets anybody in the world click on a map, pick an acre, pick ten acres, pick 50 acres, and get all that feedback one exactly what happened with your money.’”

Combining the eyes of a satellite and the hearts of nature lovers, Chris began an experiment in crowdsourced conservation he called ReWorld.

For a one-time donation of around $1,200, he promised to secure two-and-a-half acres of degraded Colombian forest, bring it back to life and preserve it for the titis forever. Thanks to real-time images from the satellite, the donors would be able to watch their hectare grow from scrub brush and dirt into trees that look like broccoli tops from the sky.

I just got word that Rosamira signed the papers today.

“It may take a day to cut a hectare of forest,” she told me as we hiked past her plantings and into a meticulous greenhouse. “But to rebuild it, it takes about 20 years.”

What happens now? Well, Charlie and Chris are hoping the developed world will build trustworthy and verifiable carbon and biodiversity credit markets to help fund operations like Project Titi, though they both admit it will be incredibly complicated.

Still, River, when days get dark and I feel that need to look for the helpers, I sometimes flash to the series of fortunate events that gave almost 1,000 acres of forest to the titis — and I imagine all the spots that need similar love.

With enough helpers, what else is possible?

President Joe Biden travels to Triangle, Virginia, Monday to mark Earth Day, where he’ll unveil $7 billion in grant funding for solar power under the Inflation Reduction Act and announce new steps to stand up his administration’s American Climate Corps – a program popular with youth climate groups.

The announcements come days after the Biden administration made several significant conservation announcements, including barring oil drilling on nearly half of the national petroleum reserve in Alaska.

Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Solar for All program, the administration will announce funding awards to states territories, tribal governments, municipalities and nonprofits “to develop long-lasting solar programs that are targeted towards the communities and people who need them most,” EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe told reporters.

Per McCabe, the funding will enable nearly one million households in low-income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from solar power, saving more than $350 million in electric costs annually and more than $8 billion over the life of the program for overburdened households.

Biden will also announce new action on the federal Climate Corps – a workforce training and service initiative aimed at preparing young Americans for jobs in clean energy and climate resilience. The government will ease Climate Corps members’ transition to other federal jobs after they graduate from the program.

He also plans to announce a new partnership between the administration and TradesFutures, the non-profit arm of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, allowing Climate Corps members to access some of the union’s apprenticeship programs.

He’ll also tout an announcement from three states — Vermont, New Mexico and Illinois — launching their own state-based climate corps. Climate corps programs will employ people doing conservation work, as well as work constructing renewable energy like wind and solar.

Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks in Virginia’s Prince William Forest Park, a site developed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, on which the American Climate Corps is modeled.

“In the midst of a depression, President Roosevelt called on the American people to come together, to take on the challenge and unlock the opportunity that sat inside of that– the opportunity to heal, to lift folks up, and to move America forward,” White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said Friday. “President Biden will talk about how the United States, in the face of a climate crisis fully manifest to the American people in communities all across the country, is also an opportunity for us to come together.”

Heavy rains hammered southern China on the weekend, flooding homes, streets and farmland and threatening to upend the lives of tens of millions of people as rescuers rushed to evacuate residents trapped by rising waters.

At least 11 people are missing, six of whom are from the town of Jiangwan near Shaoguan city in the province’s mountainous north, where heavy downpours have triggered landslides that injured six people, state-run news agency Xinhua said Monday.

Days of rainstorms have lashed Guangdong province, an economic powerhouse home to 127 million people, bringing widespread floods that have forced more than 82,500 people to be relocated, state media reported, citing the local government.

Since April 16, sustained torrential rains have pounded the Pearl River Delta, China’s manufacturing heartland and one of the country’s most populated regions, with four weather stations in Guangdong registering record rainfall for April.

The Pearl River basin is subject to annual flooding from April to September, but the region has faced more intense rainstorms and severe floods in recent years as scientists warn that the climate crisis will amplify extreme weather, making it deadlier and more frequent.

Last year, China encountered “more intense and extreme” downpours during the flood season than in previous years, with 72 national weather stations registering record daily rainfall and 346 stations breaking monthly records, according to the China Meteorological Administration.

Since last week, at least 44 rivers in the Pearl River basin have swelled above the warning line, threatening to burst their banks, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

On the Bei River, which flows into the Pearl River, authorities have warned of a “once a century” flood expected to reach 5.8 meters (19 feet) above the warning limit. The tributary had already burst its banks on April 8, marking the earliest arrival of its annual flood season since records began in 1998, according to Guangdong authorities.

Aerial footage aired by CCTV on the weekend showed villages inundated by murky flood waters, with only roofs and treetops visible in some places.

In Guangning county, Zhaoqing city, footage shared by residents on short video app Douyin shows muddy brown water gushing through village streets and sweeping away cars. In Shaoguan, a man is seen pushing his scooter through shoulder-high flood waters. And in Qingyuan city, social media footage shows strong gales and rain felling trees and flipping over motorcycles.

Authorities raised the flood control emergency response for the Pearl River Delta to level 2 on Sunday – the second highest in a four-tier system.

Many cities have suspended schools and hundreds of flights have been canceled in the metropolises of Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

More than 80 houses have either collapsed or been severely damaged, resulting in a direct economic loss of nearly 140 million yuan ($20 million), Xinhua reported.

In 1987, Faris, a pilot in the Syrian Air Force, spent eight days in space with the Soviet Union’s Interkosmos spaceflight program. Faris flew with a Soviet crew to Mir space station becoming the first and only Syrian astronaut and second Arab to make it to space.

Syrians gathered to watch the moment when the former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, father of current President Bashar, spoke with Faris during a phone call broadcast live on state TV, while Faris was in space, and asked him what he could see. Faris responded, “I see my beloved country, I see it wonderful and beautiful as it truly is.” These words, though seemingly innocuous, marked the beginning of his downfall.

In a 2023 documentary aired on news network Al Jazeera, Faris revealed he had chosen not to read a pre-written speech during the live phone call and ad-libbed instead, irking the Syrian dictator who was not used to sharing the limelight with another Syrian.

Upon his return to Syria, Faris was celebrated as a national hero by tens of thousands of Syrians. However, Hafez al-Assad took a different view. During a medal ceremony, where the protocol was for the president to hang the medal around the recipient’s neck, Faris was instead handed the medal in a box.

Faris said in an interview in his later years that he had asked the president to fund a national space program to help educate more Syrians to follow his footsteps into space, but Assad refused because – according to Faris – he was not interested in helping his countrymen to develop themselves.

Faris said the “curtain fell” in his dealings with Hafez al-Assad during their last meeting attended by Saudi astronaut Prince Sultan bin Salman. Assad reminded Faris of a moment during takeoff when he exclaimed “Ya Allah”, which literally translates as “Oh God” but in colloquial Arabic is akin to saying, “let’s go,” which Assad claimed was offensive to the Russians. Faris countered, “The Russians were not upset; it was a normal thing for them.”

Faris lived a quiet life in Aleppo following his return to Earth. Following Hafez’s death and the ascension of his son Bashar al-Assad to the presidency, Faris was supportive of the Syrian revolution that started in 2011.  Faris decided in 2012 to defect and publicly oppose the Syrian regime, putting his family and himself in life-threatening danger.

“When we decided to leave Syria, I scattered my children in different neighborhoods of Aleppo to meet at a particular point. We left in a car with the person who helped us escape,” Faris told Al Jazeera in 2023.

“There was a helicopter overhead, but as soon as we entered a town where the Free Syrian Army had machine guns, they withdrew,” Faris added.

Days later, Faris moved to Turkey to live as a refugee. He became very popular among the Syrian refugee community in Istanbul. In 2020, Faris was granted Turkish citizenship, as reported by the Turkish state broadcaster TRT.

Faris, who had lived in Russia between 1985-1987 for training in the closed Star City in the Moscow region ahead of his space journey and was later awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, was critical of Russia’s support of the Syrian regime. In a March 2016 interview with AP, Faris said he regretted Moscow propping up the dictatorship in Syria, saying: “I am very sorry about the Russian interference, which has stood on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad, and has begun to kill the Syrian people with their planes.”

More than 13 million Ecuadorians are expected to head to the polls Sunday for a referendum dominated by security issues, in a vote that could shape the political future of President Daniel Noboa and his tough-on-crime agenda.

Noboa, the son of a banana tycoon, swept into office last November as the youngest president in Ecuador’s history on the back of a promise to rein in the rampant crime that has transformed the once tranquil country into one plagued by violence and turf wars between drug cartels.

Since then he has embarked on an uncompromising agenda in which he has declared “war” on more than 20 criminal gangs he has labeled as “terrorists,” declared a 90-day state of emergency, and authorized a highly controversial raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito to capture a fugitive Ecuadorian former vice president accused of corruption.

Experts say Sunday’s vote will reveal a lot about how much public backing there is for Noboa and the decisions he’s made in the past six months and could well be a deciding factor in whether he seeks another term when his current one ends in May 2025.

The referendum will ask 11 questions, five that will modify the Constitution if approved and six that are advisory. More than 13 million of Ecuador’s population of nearly 18 million are eligible to vote – and in Ecuador, voting is obligatory.

Among the biggest proposals are measures to allow the military to patrol with police to combat organized crime (something that can currently only happen under a state of emergency, which has a 90 day limit); to allow the extradition of Ecuadorians (currently prohibited by the Constitution); and to raise the penalties for those found guilty of violent crimes.

“We require urgent reforms that allow us to protect our security,” Noboa told a military event in March. “This process can only continue, it can only be sustained, if we give the National Police and the Armed Forces the clear and firm support that we are proposing in the referendum.”

Descent into violence

Ecuador, home to the Galapagos islands and a tourist-friendly dollar economy, was once known as an “island of peace,” nestled between the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia.

But the country’s deep ports have made it a key transit point for cocaine making its way to consumers in the United States and Europe. Rival criminal organizations are locked in a battle to control these trafficking routes.

This violence is increasingly spilling over into the public sphere in brutal fashion. According to figures by the Ecuadorian National Police, the murder rate in 2016 was 5.8 homicides per 100,000 people. By 2022, it had spiked to 25.6, a similar level to that of Colombia and Mexico, countries with a long history of drug cartel violence.

It was Ecuadorians’ growing discontent with the deteriorating security conditions that led Noboa’s predecessor Guillermo Lasso to call a snap election last year.

Noboa, a relative political novice at the time, won that election in a run-off vote with a tough-on-crime message that gained further resonance when anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated at a campaign event.

Just a few weeks into Noboa’s term, he declared a nationwide state of emergency after the security situation deteriorated in spectacular fashion following the escape of the notorious gang leader Adolfo Macias, also known as Fito, from a prison in Guayaquil, the country’s biggest and arguably most dangerous city.

In response to the escape, the government deployed more than 3,000 police officers and members of the armed forces to find Fito. It was unsuccessful.

Criminal groups then responded by embarking on a wave of violent attacks – including taking over a TV station that was broadcasting live on air – in a show of strength meant to discourage the crackdown.

Hours later, Noboa took the unprecedented step of declaring an “internal armed conflict” and ordered Ecuador’s armed forces to “neutralize” the members of more than 20 gangs, which he labeled as terror groups.

Embassy controversy

Noboa burnished his credentials as an uncompromising enforcer this month when he ordered police to raid the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas, who was facing embezzlement charges and had been seeking asylum there. Glas has denied the charges, which he claims are politically motivated.

The raid made waves internationally as, under diplomatic norms, embassies are generally considered protected spaces.

Mexico decried the raid as “an outrage against international law,” and has since severed diplomatic ties. Various other Latin American countries have rallied around Mexico while the United Nations has also voiced concern.

Noboa, on the other hand, claims to have no regrets, saying the security crisis in Ecuador called for “exceptional decisions,” and that he could not allow a convicted criminal to escape justice.

What else is on the agenda?

In an open letter published recently, Noboa tied the embassy raid to the upcoming referendum, claiming “a vast majority of Ecuadoreans” would defend his decision with their vote.

It’s unclear though if support for Noboa will be blunted by an energy shortage that has led him to order 8-hour nationwide power cuts and a complete shutdown of the private and public sector for a two-day period.

The crisis has been sparked by low reservoirs levels, as Ecuador relies largely on hydropower. However, without showing evidence, Noboa has blamed “saboteurs” and says he has ordered an investigation.

Beyond security, other proposals in the referendum include measures that would enable companies to hire workers on hourly wages and the recognition of international arbitrage to resolve investment disputes.

The referendum has met opposition among some groups who claim the matters can be dealt with in the National Assembly.

All proposals can be approved or rejected individually.