Astronomers have discovered three previously unknown moons around Uranus and Neptune, the most distant planets in our solar system.

The find includes one moon spotted orbiting Uranus — the first discovery of its kind in more than 20 years — and two detected in Neptune’s orbit.

“The three newly discovered moons are the faintest ever found around these two ice giant planets using ground-based telescopes,” said Scott S. Sheppard, astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in a statement. “It took special image processing to reveal such faint objects.”

The revelations will be helpful for missions that may be planned to explore Uranus and Neptune more closely in the future, a priority for astronomers since the ice planets were only observed in detail with Voyager 2 in the 1980s.

The three moons were announced on February 23 by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

Finding faint moons

The newfound Uranian moon is the 28th to be observed orbiting the ice giant and is also likely the smallest, measuring 5 miles (8 kilometers) across. The moon, called S/2023 U1, takes 680 Earth days to complete one orbit around the planet. In the future, the tiny satellite will be named after a Shakespearean character, in keeping with the tradition of Uranus’ moons bearing literary names.

Sheppard spotted the Uranian moon in November and December while carrying out observations using the Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. He worked with Marina Brozovic and Bob Jacobson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to determine the moon’s orbit.

The Magellan telescopes also played a key role in helping Sheppard find the brighter of the two new Neptunian moons, S/2002 N5. The Subaru telescope, located on Hawaii’s dormant volcano Mauna Kea, helped Sheppard and his collaborators astronomer David Tholen at the University of Hawaii, astronomer Chad Trujillo at Northern Arizona University, and planetary scientist Patryk Sofia Lykawka at Kindai University in Japan, to focus in on the other extremely faint Neptunian moon, S/2021 N1.

Both moons, which bring the total of Neptune’s known natural satellites to 18, were first spotted in September 2021, but required follow-up observations with different telescopes over the past couple of years to confirm their orbits.

“Once S/2002 N5’s orbit around Neptune was determined using the 2021, 2022, and 2023 observations, it was traced back to an object that was spotted near Neptune in 2003 but lost before it could be confirmed as orbiting the planet,” Sheppard said.

The bright S/2002 N5 moon is 14 miles (23 kilometers) in diameter and takes nearly nine years to complete an orbit of Neptune, while faint S/2021 N1 is about 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) across and has a lengthy orbit of about 27 years. Both will eventually get new names that reference the Nereid sea goddesses from Greek mythology. Neptune was named for the Roman god of the sea, so the planet’s moons are named after lesser sea gods and nymphs.

Finding all three moons required dozens of brief, five-minute exposures over the course of three or four hours on different nights.

“Because the moons move in just a few minutes relative to the background stars and galaxies, single long exposures are not ideal for capturing deep images of moving objects,” Sheppard said. “By layering these multiple exposures together, stars and galaxies appear with trails behind them, and objects in motion similar to the host planet will be seen as point sources, bringing the moons out from behind the background noise in the images.”

A chaotic solar system

By studying the distant, angular orbits of the moons, Sheppard hypothesized that the satellites were pulled into orbit around Uranus and Neptune due to the gravitational influence of the giant planets shortly after they formed. The outer moons orbiting all the giant planets across our solar system — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — share similar configurations.

“Even Uranus, which is tipped on its side, has a similar moon population to the other giant planets orbiting our Sun,” Sheppard said. “And Neptune, which likely captured the distant Kuiper Belt object Triton — an ice rich body larger than Pluto — an event that could have disrupted its moon system, has outer moons that appear similar to its neighbors.”

It’s possible that some of the moons around the giant planets are fragments of once larger moons that collided with asteroids or comets and broke apart.

Understanding how the giant planets captured their moons helps astronomers piece together the chaotic early days of our solar system.

More than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s war with Hamas began in October, the health ministry in the besieged enclave said Thursday, a bleak milestone that comes amid growing international pressure on Israel to halt fighting and fears of further bloodshed in the southern city of Rafah.

The towering figure underscores a horrific, months-long ordeal for Palestinians inside the strip, during which Israel’s bombing and ground campaigns have displaced the vast majority of the population and created a dire humanitarian crisis.

Israel is facing mounting pressure globally to halt the conflict, but its campaign in Gaza has retained the support of the United States, its key ally and largest supplier of military aid. The US proposed a “temporary ceasefire” at the United Nations earlier this month, but has vetoed calls for an immediate halt in the conflict.

The new milestone highlights fears of more suffering in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city where more than 1 million people are crammed, and where Israel is expected to launch a fresh offensive.

Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and fighters but has said in recent updates that around 70% of the casualties are women and children.

Israel estimates about 10,000 Hamas fighters have been killed since October 7, when Israel declared war on the militant group. More than 1,200 people in Israel were killed during Hamas’ attacks on that day, and more than 250 were kidnapped and taken hostage in Gaza.

Nearly five months on, Israel has said that more than 100 hostages remain in captivity. Its political and military leaders have pledged to press ahead with their objectives to return those hostages and “destroy” Hamas, despite international pressure to reduce the intensity of their campaign.

Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz on February 17 warned that Israeli forces will expand military operations in Rafah if hostages are not returned by Ramadan, which is expected to begin on March 10 or 11.

“The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know – if by Ramadan our hostages are not home – the fighting will continue to the Rafah area,” Gantz said at a gathering of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem.

Israel’s Western allies have grown increasingly concerned over the nature of its bombing and ground campaigns in Gaza, with even its most important partner, the United States, raising with increased regularity the plight of the millions of Palestinians caught in the path of its offensive.

President Joe Biden remarked earlier this month that the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct has been “over the top,” his most direct rebuke to date.

Biden subsequently told Netanyahu that the military action in Rafah “should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the civilians,” according to a readout of a phone call between the two leaders, and the US later proposed a UN resolution on a “temporary ceasefire,” though it has not supported calls by other countries for a ceasefire to be immediately implemented.

As well as displacing the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million people, the war has drastically diminished supplies of water, electricity and food, and cut off access to vital life-saving care. The hospitals in the enclave have become battlegrounds, with dozens of facilities no longer functional.

The UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordination Office, OCHA, said on Tuesday that at least 576,000 people across Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and are “one step away from famine.”

Almost the entire population of 2.2 million people require food aid, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which added one in six children under the age of two is acutely malnourished.

“Gaza is seeing the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world,” Carl Skau, WFP Deputy Executive Director, told the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

A sprawling tent city has meanwhile been formed around Rafah, as more and more displaced Palestinians make the trek to the city – the last place to which they can flee north of the shuttered border with Egypt.

In recent weeks, hopes for a ceasefire-for-hostages deal have repeatedly risen and then fallen, as high-stakes diplomatic efforts to secure a pause in the fighting continue.

Biden said that he hopes there’ll be a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict by “next Monday,” saying that a deal was “close” but “not done yet.”

However, officials from Israel, Hamas and Qatar have cautioned against Biden’s optimism, suggesting that differences remain as negotiators work to secure an agreement.

This is a developing story. More to follow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the West of the risk of nuclear war if they send their own troops to fight for Ukraine, saying Moscow had the weapons to strike Western targets.

In his annual state of the nation address to Russia’s elite on Thursday, Putin said claims that Russia intends to attack Europe are “nonsense” but warned that his country might strike Western countries with nuclear weapons.

Putin referenced an idea floated by French President Emmanuel Macron, who on Monday said the possibility of sending Western troops to Ukraine “cannot be ruled out.” Several European leaders swiftly rejected the suggestion.

“Everything that they are coming up with now, with which they threaten the entire world – all this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization – don’t they understand this, or what?” Putin said.

“They must ultimately understand that we also have weapons – and they know about it, just as I now said  – we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” he warned.

His address lasted more than two hours – breaking his previous record, according to Russian state media TASS – and came shortly before Russians vote in the March 17 presidential election, when Putin is expected to sweep to a fifth term and extend his rule until at least 2030.

He lauded the progress of Russia’s military, which he said was “confidently advancing in a number of operational areas and liberating more and more territories” and now “firmly holds the initiative” in Ukraine, after Kyiv’s recent retreat from the eastern town of Avdiivka.

He confirmed Russia will bolster its military presence along its Western border to “neutralize the threats” of NATO expansion after Finland and Sweden joined the alliance following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Remarkable new images from the Odysseus mission capture the spacecraft — the first US-made vehicle to make a soft touchdown on the moon in five decades — in the moments directly after its harrowing and historic touchdown on the lunar surface.

Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the Odysseus lander, shared the photos at a news briefing Wednesday. During the news conference, officials from Intuitive Machines and NASA — which paid to fly science instruments on the mission — also confirmed that all of Odysseus’ instruments are transmitting data, leading them to declare the mission successful despite significant setbacks during the spacecraft’s dramatic descent to the surface.

Mission controllers were celebrating the success, cheering “what a magnificent job that robust, lucky lander did all the way to the moon,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus.

The spacecraft was still transmitting data from its resting place near the moon’s south pole as of Wednesday afternoon.

Odysseus experienced navigation issues in the hours leading up to its touchdown on the moon’s surface last Thursday. And when the vehicle reached its destination — landing in an eroded crater near the largely unexplored lunar south pole — it tripped on the surface, leaving the spacecraft leaning on its side, Intuitive Machines revealed Friday.

“We sat there upright with the engine firing for a period of time and then as (the engine) wound down, the vehicle just gently tipped over,” Altemus said.

As of NASA and Intuitive Machines’ news briefing on Friday, the state of spacecraft and all of its science instruments was not yet clear.

But officials revealed Wednesday that Odysseus has beaten the odds — delivering data from all six NASA instruments as well as payloads from commercial companies, including a dual-camera observatory from Toronto-based company Canadensys Aerospace.

Many of the instruments on board Odysseus were designed to collect information as the spacecraft was in transit to the moon and during the crucial moments of descent toward the lunar surface. NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar, or NDL, for example, went from being an experimental instrument taking a test flight to becoming a critical mission-saving instrument in the final hours before Odysseus made its touchdown.

“The big goal was to land your equipment softly so you could get data from it after you land — and that was done successfully,” said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate.

Altemus added: “In our mind, this is an unqualified success.”

All the data Odysseus is sharing

One of the NASA payloads — called SCALPSS, or the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies — was designed to study how the lunar soil reacted to Odysseus’ engine as it descended toward the moon.

That instrument did not collect data during the spacecraft’s touchdown because of a hardware issue, according to Sue Lederer, a project scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Despite the setback, teams on the ground were able to troubleshoot the SCALPSS instrument to begin dispatching data. All the other instruments on board Odysseus have functioned and relayed information for engineers and scientists to peruse, officials said Wednesday.

It’s not clear exactly when Odysseus, also called “Odie” or IM-1, will power down, but the spacecraft’s landing site will soon shift into a period of lunar night, a dangerous situation for the vehicle as the swing into ultra-freezing temperatures can cause damage. Altemus said that the lander could stop transmitting data on Wednesday night.

“We are projecting a time where the solar power generation will not allow Odie to continue sending down telemetry,” Altemus said. “But we will put (the vehicle) to sleep and expect to wake (Odie) up here in the next two or three weeks.”

Odysseus’ trip to the moon follows closely on the heels of two other missions: India’s Chandryaan-3, which brought a lander to the same region as Odysseus (though not as close to the pole), and Japan’s SLIM, which landed a spacecraft nicknamed “Moon Sniper” closer to the equator. Moon Sniper recently reawakened after it experienced lunar night, though Chandryaan-3 has not.

Working through challenges

The fact that Odysseus came to a rest on its side left a couple of its antennas pointed in an inopportune direction. That forced engineers on the ground to figure out a way to download as much data as possible — an ongoing effort in mission control.

The expected times of various Odysseus milestones have been moving targets.

Much is still unknown about the moon’s south pole, the region where the spacecraft landed. NASA and other institutions are heavily interested in this area because it’s believed to be home to stores of water ice, a critical resource that could provide drinking water for astronauts or even rocket fuel for future missions.

In addition to becoming the first American vehicle to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, Odysseus is also the first private spacecraft — designed and built by a commercial company — to make a soft landing on the moon.

Intuitive Machines launched the Odysseus mission as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, an effort by the space agency to robotically explore the moon using landers developed by the private sector before NASA returns its astronauts there as soon as later this decade.

Pro-Russian rebels in a separatist sliver of Moldova have asked President Vladimir Putin to protect their region from what they claim are threats from Moldova’s government.

Transnistria, which illegally split from Moldova as the Soviet Union crumbled, has remained firmly within the Kremlin’s orbit while Moldova, which borders Ukraine, is bidding to join the European Union.

In a special congress on Wednesday, politicians in Transnistria asked Moscow to guard it from “increasing pressure from Moldova,” and the Kremlin later said protecting its “compatriots” was a priority, Russian state media RIA Novosti reported.

While the congress initially sparked fears that Moscow could press ahead with its longstanding plan to destabilize Moldova’s increasingly pro-Western government, Moldova dismissed it as “propaganda.”

Here’s what you need to know.

What happened in Transnistria?

Meetings of Transnistria’s Congress of Deputies, a Soviet-era decision-making model, are rare but often significant. A Congress of Deputies gave birth to Transnistria in 1990, sparking a war between the Moscow-backed separatists and the fledgling Moldovan republic two years later.

No country officially recognizes Transnistria, where Russia has kept a steadily dwindling military presence for decades, now standing at around 1,500 troops.

Before Wednesday, the congress’ most recent meeting was in 2006, when it passed a referendum calling to join Russia. When Transnistrian politicians unexpectedly announced a new meeting, analysts suggested this could lead to fresh calls for unification with Russia. Moldovan and Ukrainian officials downplayed this speculation.

The congress stopped short of this extreme outcome, instead passing a resolution appealing to Russia to provide more than 220,000 Russian nationals in Transnistria with greater “protection” from Moldovan authorities.

“Transnistria will persistently fight for its identity, the rights and interests of the Transnistrian people and will not give up on protecting them, despite any blackmail or external pressure,” the resolution said, according to Russian state media TASS.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said “protecting the interests of the inhabitants of Transnistria, our compatriots, is one of the priorities.”

Moldovan authorities dismissed the congress as an attempt to stoke “hysteria.”

“There are no dangers of escalation and destabilization of the situation in this region of our country,” spokesperson Daniel Voda wrote on Telegram. “What is happening in Tiraspol [the region’s capital] is a propaganda event.”

Meanwhile, US State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said Wednesday that the United States is “watching Russia’s actions in Transnistria and the broader situation there very closely.”

Why hold a congress now?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has had a profound effect on Transnistria’s economy. Ukraine closed its border with Transnistria when the war began, cutting off about a quarter of the enclave’s trade. While it still receives Russian gas free of charge, the agreement to allow gas transit through Ukraine will expire in December, and there is no guarantee the agreement will be extended.

The war also spurred Moldova to try to resolve its decades-long conflict with Transnistria. Partly in response to the war, the EU granted Moldova candidate status in June 2022, and in December 2023 gave the green light to begin accession negotiations.

While Moldova’s President Maia Sandu indicated she would be willing to join the EU without Transnistria, reunification may streamline the process. A recent blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that “Moldova’s strategy is to hurry the process along by making life as difficult as possible” for Transnistria.

In this vein, Moldova unexpectedly scrapped customs duty reliefs for Transnistrian businesses in January, forcing them to pay levies to both Transnistria and Moldova.

“By offering the separatist region tax exemptions, the Moldovan government had been practically funding the existence of a separatist regime in Tiraspol,” Minzarari said – an arrangement the government no longer felt it had to tolerate.

Minzarari said the dispute had created opportunities for Russian authorities to “fish in troubled waters.”

Why is Russia interested in Moldova?

If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had gone as planned, it would have captured the capital Kyiv in days and the rest of the country in weeks, sweeping across Ukraine’s coastline to the southwestern city of Odesa near Transnistria.

The then-commander of Russia’s Central Military Region, Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekaev, said one aim of the so-called “special military operation” was to establish a corridor through southern Ukraine to Transnistria, as Russia seeks to reunite with its “compatriots abroad.”

Although Ukraine halted Moscow’s progress at Kherson, around 350 kilometers (220 miles) from Transnistria, analysts have stressed that Russia has retained designs on Moldova.

“The Kremlin seeks to use Transnistria as a Russian-controlled proxy that it can use to derail Moldova’s EU accession process, among other things,” the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, warned in a report last week.

Putin justified Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and military operations in Donetsk and Luhansk as an effort to protect Russian-speaking citizens in eastern Ukraine, whom he alleged were under threat from Kyiv.

Minzarari said there were “strong parallels” between that rhetoric and the sort used recently by the Transnistrian government. In an interview with RIA Novosti, President Vadim Kranoselsky claimed that the Moldovan government was preparing to carry out terror attacks against Transnistria ahead of a possible invasion, without providing evidence.

However, other analysts argue that, rather than underscoring Russia’s influence on the region, the situation in Transnistria is instead a reminder of how Moscow has so far failed to achieve its key war aims.

Tensions were high in the Central African country of Chad on Wednesday after several people were killed following an alleged attack on the country’s intelligence services was foiled overnight, the government said.

The country’s communications ministry said the situation took “a dramatic turn” after a “deliberate attack” was allegedly carried out by members of the opposition Socialist Party Without Borders (PSF) on the headquarters of the country’s National State Security Agency (ANSE) in the capital N’Djamena.

Dillo said in a Facebook post on Wednesday morning that the military had surrounded him and others at the party’s headquarters.

Law enforcement officers managed to foil the attack “with efficiency,” the ministry said, claiming that the situation was now “completely under control.”

The government also accused the finance secretary of the opposition party for being behind an assassination attempt against the president of the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

It’s not clear if it was a separate incident or the court president was in the security agency’s office during the attack.

The tensions come as Chad gears up for presidential elections in May which will mark the first of their kind since military leader General Mahamat Idriss Deby took over in 2020 after his father was killed on the battlefield.

“It is important to highlight that every person searching to disrupt the democratic process underway in the country will be taken to court,” the government warned.

No details on the total number of casualties from the attack were provided in the statement with the authorities promising to release the death toll “later on.”

Internet monitoring firm, Netblocks said shortly after 7aET its network data showed there had been a “disruption to internet connectivity” in the country following the reports of a “deadly attack” on the intelligence agency headquarters.

The wife of the late Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny said she is concerned that police will crack down on mourners after it was announced his funeral will take place on Friday in Moscow.

Yulia Navalnaya on Wednesday addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, shortly after Navalny’s aides announced they had arranged his funeral after spending more than a week trying to retrieve his body and find a suitable venue.

“I thought that in the 12 days since Alexey’s murder, I would have time to prepare for this speech. But first we spent a week getting Alexey’s body and organizing his funeral. Then I chose the cemetery and coffin,” Navalnaya said.

“I’m not sure yet whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband,” she added.

Navalny’s death was met with grief and anger across the world as well as inside Russia, where the smallest acts of political dissent carry huge risks. More than 400 people were detained at makeshift memorials for Navalny across 32 Russian cities, according to human rights monitoring group OVD-Info.

Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokesperson, confirmed his funeral will be held at Borisov Cemetery in Moscow’s Maryino district, where Navalny lived. She said the service will take place at 2 p.m. local time (6 a.m. ET) in the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God and encouraged mourners to arrive early.

Nalavny’s aides said they began to look for a church soon after his death but that many venues were not willing to host his funeral.

“Everywhere they refused to give us anything. Somewhere they directly referred to the ban,” Ivan Zdhanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote Wednesday on X. “We don’t care about the message. Alexey needs to be buried.”

With Navalny’s wife and team in exile, his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, spent more than a week on a solitary mission in Siberia to retrieve her son’s body from Russian authorities, whom she accused authorities of “blackmailing” her by threatening to bury her son without a funeral unless she agreed to “conditions for where, when and how” he should be buried. The Kremlin denied her allegations.

No more ‘boring’ sanctions

Yulia Navalnaya told the European Parliament that they needed to combat Russian President Vladimir Putin with renewed vigor and learn from the innovative methods of her husband.

She said the world “rushed to Ukraine’s aid” in the initial months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, but that, after two years of fighting, “there is much exhaustion, much blood, much disappointment – and Putin has gone nowhere.”

“Everything has already been used: Weapons, money, sanctions. Nothing is working. And the worst has happened. Everyone got used to the war. Here and there people start to say: Well, we’ll have to come to an agreement with Putin anyway,” she said.

But she said her husband, who spent years documenting corruption in Russia, had shown that Putin is not invulnerable.

“This is the answer to the question. If you really want to defeat Putin, you have to become an innovator. You have to stop being boring. You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions that is no different from the previous ones,” she said.

Instead, she said European politicians needed to pursue Putin’s “friends, associates, the keepers of mafia money. You and all of us must fight the criminal gangs.”

She urged lawmakers to “apply the methods of fighting organized crime” rather than standard “political competition.”

“No diplomatic notes, but investigations into the financial machinations. Not statements of concern, but the search of mafia associates in your countries for discrete lawyers and financiers who are helping Putin and his friends to hide money.”

Navalnaya’s comments come as Western officials have for months debated whether to divert some 300 billion euros ($327 billion) of frozen Russian assets to help repair Ukraine’s war-torn economy.

Navalnaya lamented that her husband could not live to see the Russia he had attempted to build.

“My husband will never see what the beautiful Russia of the future will look like. But we must see it. And I will do my best to make his dream come true. The evil will fall and the beautiful future will come,” she said.

France is one step closer to enshrining abortion rights in its constitution after French senators overwhelmingly endorsed the change on Wednesday.

A total of 267 senators voted in favor of the change, with 50 voting against it. The constitutional amendment faces a final test next Monday when it needs to secure the backing of three-fifths of lawmakers at a joint congress of parliament, which will see both houses vote together.

“I am committed to making women’s freedom to have an abortion irreversible by enshrining it in the constitution,” Emmanuel Macron said in a post on X, celebrating the Senate vote.

The bid for constitutionalization became a priority for the French government following the overturning by the United States Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, though the cause has been championed for several years by left-wing lawmakers and women’s rights activists.

Currently, abortion rights in France are protected by a 1975 law which has been amended on numerous occasions, most recently in 2022, to lengthen the time frame for legal abortions from 12 to 14 weeks of pregnancy. Like all laws, however, it could be revoked by a vote in the French parliament.

The move has overwhelming support from the French public, according to polling, but has faced criticism from right-wing lawmakers. Backers of the bill say constitutionalization would safeguard abortion rights even if an anti-abortion majority were to be voted into office.

France’s decision to constitutionalize abortion comes amid roll-backs on reproductive rights around the world, which have seen right-wing governments in Europe crack down on abortion access.

In Eastern Europe, both Hungary and Poland have introduced restrictions on abortion, measures that were frequently mentioned by France’s own lawmakers during a debate in the National Assembly in January.

Firefighters in Australia are battling a huge blaze that has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people amid some of the worst fire conditions the country has seen in recent years.

Hot, dry and windy conditions have created “extreme to catastrophic fire dangers” in parts of Victoria and South Australia, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

Severe thunderstorms are also forecast in the region, which bring the threat of dry lightning – strikes that occur during a storm where the rain evaporates before hitting the ground.

Around 30,000 people had been ordered to evacuate parts of Victoria before midday Wednesday, when authorities warned it would be too late to leave.

Temperatures are rapidly rising to the 40°C range (104°F), with wind gusts reaching 60 to 70 kilometers per hour (37 to 43 mph), according to an update from Jason Heffernan, chief officer at Victoria’s Country Fire Authority (CFA), the state’s volunteer fire service.

“Extreme fire dangers are coming to fruition, and in fact we’re currently seeing catastrophic conditions in Casterdon, Hamilton and Kanagulk in the Wimmera weather district,” he said.

“The frontal system making its way through the state has slowed. So, we will see these winds and these temperatures stay around for a bit longer than expected. And I don’t expect this change to come through metropolitan Melbourne now until between 9 and even 10 o’clock this evening.”

Firefighters have been battling a bushfire that started last Thursday in the rural town of Bayindeen, about 190 kilometers (118 miles) west of Melbourne, and is not yet under control, according to the state’s emergency department.

Six homes have already been destroyed and authorities fear windy and dry conditions may fan the flames close to high-density residential areas.

An “extreme” fire rating has been issued for large parts of Victoria, while the state’s western Wimmera region was given a “catastrophic” risk, meaning that if fires start, they will be “uncontrollable and uncontainable,” according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

More than 100 state forests have been closed, the Forest Fire Management of Victoria said on social platform X. Dozens of schools and child care centers have also been shut.

The fires come more than four years since bushfires destroyed wide swathes of southeastern Australia, killing 33 nationwide, in what has been called the Black Summer wildfires of 2019 to 2020.

The state of Victoria suffered immensely from the fires, which raged for more than 90 days and burned more that 1.5 million hectares of land, the majority of which were forests, parks, and plantations that covered critical animal habitats, according to the state’s Country Fire Authority.

More than 400 homes were destroyed, and 6,800 livestock killed in the disaster that caused billions of dollars of economic damage to Victoria.

Experts have warned that Australia could see another catastrophic fire season this year as the impacts of El Niño event — a natural climate fluctuation which can bring hot and dry conditions to parts of the country — with the underlying trend of human-caused global warming.

As the world continues to heat up, increasing the likelihood of the “fire weather” that fuels faster and more intense blazes, scientists say the risk of extreme bushfire seasons will increase.

After nearly five years of tireless work, the animation team at Kugali Media is finally seeing its comic book series “Iwájú” come to life in a big way – and now audiences around the world can join in.

The animated series is a coming-of-age story set in a futuristic Lagos, Nigeria. The show was picked up by Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2020, which called it a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” with the pan-African entertainment company. All six episodes are now available to stream on Disney+.

Hamid Ibrahim, CEO of Kugali, co-founded the company in 2017 with two friends, Tolu Olowofoyeku and Olufikayo “Ziki” Adeola. He says the team began working on “Iwájú” two years later as part of the company’s mission to share “high quality African stories with the world.”

Embracing the “soul of Lagos”

Ibrahim says Africa is at the heart of every story Kugali tells. But with so many countries and cultures, they strive be intentional with their storytelling.

“We’re telling an African story, but a lot of viewers do not understand African culture,” he said. “Hopefully (by watching) they get to understand it better.”

“Iwájú” is brought to life through Nigerian voice actors Simisola Gbadamosi and Siji Soetan, who play Tola and her best friend Kole. Other characters from the show include voice acting by Dayo Okeniyi, Femi Branch and Weruche Opia.

To accurately depict the “soul of Lagos,” Ibrahim says they relied on Olowofoyeku to be the team’s cultural consultant since he is the only Kugali Media executive based in Lagos full-time.

“I was there to make sure that everything felt authentic and grounded,” Olowofoyeku said. “The fact that the language, the way the characters talk is 100% Nigerian … I’m very happy about that because there is no scene where you will feel it doesn’t really feel Nigerian.”

“It’s not about showing the good side or the bad side, it’s about showing the real thing about it,” Ibrahim said, adding they tried to capture “all the little details” of the city to help audiences better understand the nuances. “It also allows us to teach people about the culture. And the more we teach about the culture, the more some things become normal.”

Pushing the African story forward

While the show premiered on February 28 on Disney+, the streaming service is not yet available in Africa. Instead, “Iwájú” will be airing on the Disney Channel across the continent at specific times, beginning on April 22, according to the company.

As audiences tune in to watch “Iwájú,” Ibrahim says he hopes the family show will speak to viewers of all ages.

“I want (the kids) to pick up the heart. To approach something which seems impossibly difficult and be able to persevere through it and know that there’s going to be setbacks, ups and downs … but to keep pushing through, and you’ll hopefully discover something better,” he said.

“For us at Disney, great storytelling is at the heart of everything that we do … It’s telling authentic stories where our audiences can see themselves and their worlds reflected,” she said at the Lagos premiere, adding Disney felt the Kugali team shared that same philosophy.

Along with the six-episode series, the soundtrack featuring music by Nigerian composer Ré Olunuga and a game called “Disney Iwájú: Rising Chef” are also being released. The game will allow players to “explore authentic African delicacies through (a) fast-paced and accessible cooking game,” according to Disney, “that celebrates the culture and cuisine of Nigeria.”

With “Iwájú” on air, Ibrahim says the Kugali Media team is ready start working on showcasing the next African story.

“This is a first step to creating more and more things,” he said. “I want to see one of our stories told and funded completely (within) Africa and then we bring that to the West.”