Police in eastern India have arrested three men for the alleged gang rape of a foreign tourist and assault of her husband, as they hunt for four more suspects in a case that highlights the country’s decades-long struggle to curb sexual violence against women.

The couple, who had been traveling by motorcycle from the state of West Bengal to neighboring Nepal, were found late Friday by police officers on patrol, said Pitambar Singh Kherwar, superintendent of Dumka district police in Jharkhand state.

They were taken to hospital, where the woman told the doctor she had been raped, he said.

Police know the identities of the wanted suspects and have formed a special investigative team, Kherwar said. It is unclear whether the three arrested suspects have legal representation.

The arrests come after a travel vlogger couple on Saturday posted on their Instagram account that they had “knives (held) to our throats,” during an attack in India. The woman had been raped and brought to the hospital for DNA testing, they said.

The couple posts in Spanish, and the woman says on her Instagram page that she is Brazilian.

On their Instagram story, the woman showed bruises on her face, saying, “This is what my face looks like, but it isn’t what hurts the most. I thought I was going to die.”

In a follow-up post Sunday, the couple thanked their followers for their support, saying they are doing well and that “the police is doing everything possible to catch” the remaining suspects.

India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) condemned the alleged attack.

NCW chairperson Rekha Sharma has spoken to the victim and extended all required assistance, the organization posted on social platform X on Saturday.

Jharkhand minister Mithilesh Kumar Thakur called the alleged assault a “condemnable incident.”

“If a crime has been committed, the culprits will not be spared,” he said on Saturday.

India has struggled for years to tackle high rates of violence against women, with a number of high-profile rape cases involving foreign visitors drawing international attention to the issue.

In 2018, A British woman was allegedly raped while walking to her hotel in the western state of Goa, a popular tourist destination; two years earlier, an American woman was allegedly drugged and raped by a group of men in her five-star hotel room in New Delhi. And in 2013, six men were sentenced to life in prison for the gang rape of a Swiss tourist.

According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 31,516 rape cases were recorded in 2022, an average of 86 cases per day.

And experts warn that the number of cases recorded are just a small fraction of what may be the real number, in a deeply patriarchal country where shame and stigma surround rape victims and their families.

Under India’s current laws it is still not a crime for a man to force sex or sexual acts on his wife, as long as she is over 18.

Perhaps India’s most infamous case of recent years was the 2012 gang-rape of a medical student who was beaten, tortured and left to die following a brutal attack on a public bus in New Delhi.

The case and ensuing nationwide protests drew international media scrutiny – and prompted authorities to enact legal reforms. The rape law was amended in 2013 to broaden the definition of the crime and set strict punishments not only for rape but also for sexual assault, voyeurism, and stalking.

Despite these changes, rape cases remain prevalent in the country – with victims and advocates saying the government is still not doing enough to protect women and punish attackers.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees on Monday accused Israel of detaining and torturing some of its staffers, coercing them into making false confessions about the agency’s ties to Hamas.

“Some of our staff have conveyed to UNRWA teams that they were forced to (make) confessions under torture and ill-treatment. These false confessions were in response to questioning about relations between UNRWA and Hamas and involvement in the 7 October attack against Israel,” UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma said in a statement.

Touma said that false confessions elicited “under torture” were being used “to further spread misinformation about the Agency as part of attempts to dismantle UNRWA,” but did not tie those confessions to the allegations against the 12 staffers accused of participating in the October 7 attacks.

The allegations are part of an as yet unpublished report compiled by UNRWA alleging Israel’s widespread physical and psychological abuse of Palestinians detained in Gaza during the war, including 21 UNRWA staff members, some of whom said they were beaten and threatened.

The detainees cited in the report gave testimony of beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual abuse and threats of sexual violence against both men and women detained by the Israeli military. Some of the detainees are also reported to have died while in Israeli custody, at times allegedly as a result of the abuse they suffered in detention.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to the allegations about the torture and detention of UNRWA staffers, but said in a statement that “the mistreatment of detainees during their time in detention or whilst under interrogation violates IDF values and contravenes IDF orders and is therefore absolutely prohibited.” It said that investigations into the deaths of detainees are investigated by the military police and are currently pending.

The Israeli military forcefully denied claims of sexual abuse of detainees, calling them “another cynical attempt to create a false equivalency with the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war by Hamas.” It also denied that detainees are deprived of sleep and said detainees have access to medical care.

UNRWA estimates that at least 4,000 Gazans have been detained by the Israeli military since the start of the war. As of February 19, the agency had documented the detention of 29 children and 80 women, as well as elderly individuals with Alzheimer’s and people with intellectual disabilities.

“UNRWA received widespread reports from released detainees of ill-treatment across all stages of detention. According to individuals released from detention, ill-treatment was used in attempts to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish,” says the UNRWA report, which was first reported by the New York Times.

The report also says that in each of the releases it monitored at Kerem Shalom, “ambulances were required to immediately transport some person due to their injuries or illness.”

The detainees reported being held and interrogated at military sites in Israel, sometimes for weeks on end, before being transferred into the Israeli prison system.

France became the world’s first country to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution on Monday, the culmination of an effort that began in direct response to the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Lawmakers from both houses of the French Parliament voted 780 to 72 in favor of the measure, easily clearing the three-fifths majority needed to amend the French constitution.

Monday’s vote, held during a special gathering of lawmakers at the Palace of Versailles, southwest of Paris, was the final step in the legislative process. The French Senate and National Assembly each overwhelmingly approved the amendment earlier this year.

The amendment states that there is a “guaranteed freedom” to abortion in France. Some groups and lawmakers had called for stronger language to explicitly call abortion a “right.”

Lawmakers hailed the move as a history-making way for France to send a clear signal of support on reproductive rights, with abortion under threat in the United States, as well as in parts of Europe, like Hungary, where far-right parties have come to power.

Following the vote, the Eiffel Tower was lit up with the words “my body my choice.”

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said before the vote that lawmakers had a “moral debt” to women who were, in the past, forced to endure illegal abortions.

“Above all, we’re sending a message to all women: your body belongs to you,” Attal said.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the government would hold a formal ceremony celebrating the amendment’s passage on Friday, International Women’s Rights Day.

France first legalized abortion in 1975, after a campaign led by then-Health Minister Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became one of the country’s most famous feminist icons.

While abortion is a highly divisive issue in US politics that often falls along party lines, in France it is widely supported. Many of the lawmakers who voted against the amendment did so not because they opposed abortion, but because they felt the measure was unnecessary, given the wide support for reproductive rights.

The measure’s passage is a clear victory for the French left, which has been pushing for years to guarantee abortion rights in the constitution. Before 2022, President Emmanuel Macron’s government argued — like the amendment’s current opponents — that the move was unnecessary.

However, in 2022, when the US Supreme Court ruled against Roe v. Wade and let states individually decide on the issue, France was pushed to act.

French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said perviously, before debate began in the National Assembly in January, that history was full of other examples where “fundamental rights” were believed to be safe but then taken away, “as we were recently reminded by the decision of the US Supreme Court.”

“We now have irrefutable proof that no democracy, not even the largest of them all, is immune,” he said.

The vote marks the 25th time the French government has amended its constitution since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

The Catholic Church was one of the few groups to announce its opposition to the amendment. The Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican body which focuses on issues related to bioethics, said in a statement that “in the era of universal human rights, there can be no ‘right’ to take human life.”

A conference of French bishops on Thursday also reiterated the church’s opposition to abortion ahead of the vote.

A United Nations team has found “clear and convincing” information that hostages in Gaza were sexually abused, Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict told reporters on Monday. There are “reasonable grounds” to believe the sexual violence is ongoing, she added.

According to Patten, the team also found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape occurred” during Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel, in what is the most definitive finding by the global organization on sexual assault allegations in the aftermath of the attack.

The UN team, which was led by Patten, visited Israel between January 29 to February 14 for a mission “aimed at gathering, analyzing, and verifying information on conflict-related sexual violence” during October 7 and its aftermath, according to a 24-page report.

Patten stressed on Monday that the mission “was neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature,” adding that the team had 33 meetings with Israeli institutions while in Israel, interviewed 34 people, including survivors and witnesses to the October 7 attack, and released hostages, as well as reviewed 50 hours of footage of the attacks.

The mission was not able to meet with any victims of sexual violence on October 7 “despite our efforts,” Patten said. “On the very first day, I made a call for survivors to come forward. But we received information that a handful of them were receiving very specialized trauma treatment and were not prepared to come forward,” she said.

Hamas has previously denied that its militants committed rape during the October 7 attack.

“We strongly reject and denounce the coordination of some Western media outlets with the Zionist misleading campaigns that promote unfounded lies and allegations aimed at demonizing the Palestinian resistance, the latest of which is the allegation that resistance members committed ‘sexual violence’ during the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” Hamas’ political office said in a statement on Telegram in December.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Across sweeping desert vistas, spectacular star dunes stand out. The distinctive mounds are among the tallest sand dunes on Earth, and their pyramid shapes are sculpted by a crossfire of winds gusting from multiple directions, creating spiraling sand ridges that pinwheel outward from a central peak.

While star dunes are commonly found in sandy deserts worldwide, scientists have long wondered about their formation and their puzzling absence in the geological record.

Now, an investigation of a star dune in Erg Chebbi, a region of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, has revealed surprises about its age and growth — and hinted that ancient evidence of star dunes may have been hiding in plain sight all along.

Using radar scans and analysis of sand grains buried deep inside the star dune, scientists mapped the mound’s internal structure. The researchers calculated that the oldest part of the dune’s base formed around 13,000 years ago. But for about 8,000 years, the research team discovered, the star dune — which covers 0.4 miles (700 meters) and stands 328 feet (100 meters) tall — didn’t grow much at all. In fact, most of the growth to its present size took place over the past 1,000 years, much more rapidly than expected, researchers reported March 4 in the journal Scientific Reports.

The new study’s scans also revealed that the dune was on the move.

“Knowing how fast these things are moving is quite important for infrastructure in these areas,” as their migration could affect construction of roads or pipelines, he added.

Below the surface

When these radio waves bounced back to the receiver’s antenna, they produced high-resolution images showing the shapes of different sediment layers below the researchers’ feet, Bristow explained.

The next step was to collect sand samples at different depths to find out when those sands were deposited. To do that, the scientists extracted tubes of sand cores from Lala Lallia by digging a shallow pit and hammering hollow pipes made of metal or plastic into the dune “so we end up with these little tubes of sand inside an opaque container,” Duller said. In the lab, the researchers then peered inside individual sand grain crystals of quartz and feldspar to measure environmental radiation that accumulated over thousands of years in the dune’s dark depths.

“There’s radioactivity everywhere, at very low levels,” Duller said. “Some of it gets stored within the crystals.”

Exposure to daylight scrubs radiation from these crystal reservoirs within 10 to 30 seconds, he added. But once sand grains are buried, radiation from the environment around them starts building up. In the laboratory at Aberystwyth, the scientists made the collected grains release their stored energy as light, then analyzed light intensity to calculate their age, a technique called optically stimulated luminescence dating. The researchers shined a light on the minerals to free trapped electrons, producing a luminescent signal that the researchers then measured to determine how long the crystals had been in darkness.

“The brighter the light, the older the sediment,” Duller explained. By measuring the brightness of grains from different depths in the dune, the research team was  able to calculate when the structure first formed, when it had its biggest growth spurt, and its rate of movement.

A mystery solved

The new findings also addressed a longstanding mystery for geologists: Where is all the ancient evidence of star dunes?

Desert environments are typically well-preserved in the geological record, and dunes leave behind clues about their distant past in layers of compressed sandstone. But ancient evidence of star dunes is exceptionally rare, save for one known example in Scotland dating to the Permian-Triassic (about 251.9 million years ago).

“Why is that? Where have all the star dunes gone?” Duller asked. The answer, the scientists wrote, may be a matter of perspective. Star dunes are so big; perhaps eroded parts of their preserved structures were previously identified as standalone remnants of other types of dunes, the study authors reported.

“When you look at each piece individually of a star dune in the geological record, it’s going to look like something else,” Duller said. “But when you get all of these pieces together — and you can see these large troughs of cross-bedded sands in the middle, you can see these arms stretching out in each direction — that’s when you can confidently say it’s a star dune.”

One possible explanation for why ancient star dunes were overlooked for so long  is that, for a long time, it was unknown just how common they were, Goudie suggested.

“The fact that star dunes have not been identified very much in the stratigraphic record may partly be because many geologists were not very much aware of star dunes and only knew about longitudinal dunes and barchans (crescent-shaped dunes),” Goudie said. “Now, with the help of Google Earth, we know just how widespread these features are.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

The death toll from a Russian drone attack on an apartment block in the Ukrainian city of Odesa has risen to ten after the body of a third child was pulled from the rubble, officials said Sunday, the latest civilian victims of a relentless Russian bombing campaign.

“The body of another baby has just been found next to the woman’s body. The child is believed to be less than a year old,” Oleh Kiper, the head of Odesa regional military administration on Sunday, wrote on Telegram.

The bodies of a mother and her four-month-old were also found in the rubble on Saturday, authorities said,

According to Saturday’s daily address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a toddler named Mark was also killed – he was two, set to turn three on Sunday.

The attack left the front facade of an apartment block in ruins.

Andriy Kostin, Prosecutor General of Ukraine noted that there is no military facility nearby, calling the attack a deliberate targeting of civilians.

Sunday has been declared a day of mourning in Odesa, according to the city’s administration.

Zelensky said the attack showed the need to further strengthen the country’s air defense capacities.

“One of the enemy drones hit a residential building in Odesa. 18 apartments have been destroyed,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday.

“More air defense systems, more missiles for air defense is what saves lives,” he said.

Ukraine has been asking its western allies for more military aid as Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its third year.

Republican leadership in the House has so far been refusing to hold a vote on providing more funding.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Sky-gazers across North America are in for a treat on April 8 when a total solar eclipse will pass over Mexico, the United States and Canada.

The event will be visible to millions — including 32 million people in the US alone — who live along the route the moon’s shadow will travel during the eclipse, known as the path of totality. For those in the areas experiencing totality, the moon’s shadow will completely cover the sun. Those along the very center line of the path will see an eclipse that lasts between 3½ and 4 minutes, according to NASA.

The next total solar eclipse won’t be visible across the contiguous United States again until August 2044. (It’s been more than six years since the “Great American Eclipse” of 2017.) And an annular eclipse won’t appear across this part of the world again until 2046.

Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming eclipse.

What is a total solar eclipse?

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, completely blocking the sun’s face.

Those within the path of totality, or locations where the moon’s shadow will completely cover the sun, will see a total solar eclipse. People outside the path of totality will still be able to see a partial solar eclipse, where the moon only blocks part of the sun’s face.

During a total solar eclipse, the sky will darken as it would at dawn or dusk, and there are several stages of the eclipse for sky-gazers to anticipate.

The moon doesn’t suddenly appear between Earth and the sun — the event begins with a partial eclipse in which it looks like the moon is taking a “bite” out of the sun, causing the sun to resemble a crescent. Depending on your location, the partial eclipse can last between 70 and 80 minutes, according to NASA.

When the moon begins to cross in front of the sun, the star’s rays will shine around valleys on the moon’s horizon, creating glowing drops of light around the moon in a phenomenon called Baily’s beads.

As totality nears, Baily’s beads will quickly disappear until a single point of light remains, resembling a glistening giant diamond ring.

The diamond ring will disappear when totality arrives, and there is no longer any sign of direct sunlight. Bright stars or planets may shine in the dark sky, and the air temperature will drop as the sun disappears. The sudden darkness causes animals to grow quiet.

The chromosphere, or part of the sun’s atmosphere, may glow in a thin pink circle around the moon during totality, while the sun’s hot outer atmosphere, or corona, will appear as white light.

As the moon continues its trek across the sun’s face, the diamond ring and Baily’s beads and the partial solar eclipse will appear on the opposite side of the moon until the sun fully reappears.

Where can I see the eclipse?

The total solar eclipse will be visible in parts of Mexico, Canada and more than 10 US states, while a crescent-shaped partial solar eclipse is expected to appear in 49 states — weather permitting.

The eclipse will first appear over the South Pacific Ocean and begin its journey across North America. Mexico’s Pacific coast is the first point of totality on the path, expected at 11:07 a.m. PT (2:07 p.m. ET).

The pathway will continue across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Then, it will cross over Canada in southern Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, ending on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland at 5:16 p.m. (3:46 p.m. ET).

Use our interactive map to determine what the eclipse will look like from your viewing location.

How do I safely view the eclipse?

The only time it’s safe to view the sun without eye protection is during the “totality” of a total solar eclipse, or the brief moments when the moon completely blocks the light of the sun and no sunlight is visible, according to NASA.

Otherwise, wear certified ISO 12312-2 compliant eclipse glasses or use a handheld solar viewer before and after totality, and at all times during a partial eclipse.
Separately, you can observe the sun with a telescope, binoculars or camera that has a special solar filter on the front, which acts the same way eclipse glasses would.

Directly staring at the sun can result in blindness or disrupted vision. During the 2017 total solar eclipse, a young woman was diagnosed with solar retinopathy, retinal damage from exposure to solar radiation, in both eyes after viewing the eclipse with what doctors believed were eclipse glasses not held to the safety standard. There is no treatment for solar retinopathy. It can improve or worsen, but it is a permanent condition.

Sunglasses won’t work in place of eclipse glasses or solar viewers, which are 100,000 times darker and held to an international safety standard.

The lenses of solar eclipse glasses are made of black polymer, or resin infused with carbon particles, which blocks nearly all visible, infrared and ultraviolet light, according to The Planetary Society. Sunglasses don’t block infrared radiation.

For safe manufacturers and resellers of eclipse glasses and filters for optical devices, including cameras and smartphones, check out the list curated by the American Astronomical Society.

Put on your eclipse glasses before looking up and remember to turn away from the sun before you remove them again. Always keep an eye on any children wearing eclipse glasses to make sure they don’t remove them while looking at the sun.

If you normally wear eyeglasses, keep them on and put eclipse glasses over them or hold a handheld viewer in front of them, according to the American Astronomical Society.

Don’t look at the sun through any unfiltered optical device — camera lens, telescope, binoculars — while wearing eclipse glasses or using a handheld solar viewer, according to NASA.

Solar rays can still burn through the filter on the glasses or viewer, given how concentrated they can be through an optical device, and can cause severe eye damage.

If you bought eclipse glasses to see the “ring of fire,” save your eclipse glasses and viewers for the total solar eclipse in April by storing them at room temperature in an envelope or their original packaging to avoid scratches.

What can we learn from eclipses

Eclipses afford scientists the opportunity to study the sun and how it interacts with Earth in unique ways, and NASA has selected several projects to fund during the total solar eclipse.

“Scientists have long used solar eclipses to make scientific discoveries,” said Kelly Korreck, program scientist at NASA, in a statement. “They have helped us make the first detection of helium, have given us evidence for the theory of general relativity, and allowed us to better understand the Sun’s influence on Earth’s upper atmosphere.”

One project will rely on NASA’s high-altitude research planes to take images of the eclipse from 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) above Earth’s surface to capture previously unseen details in the sun’s corona. The images could also help scientists search for asteroids that orbit near the sun.

Amateur radio operators will try an experiment during both the annular and total solar eclipses to see how these phenomena change the way radio waves travel. Operators in different locations will record the strength of their signals and how far they travel. Scientists are interested in tracking this distance because the sun directly influences Earth’s upper atmosphere, or ionosphere, which allows radio communications to travel farther. But when the moon blocks the sun, that can change.

Scientists and citizen scientists alike are planning to observe the sun’s most active regions as the moon passes over them using the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope during both eclipses.

The sun is currently approaching solar maximum later this year, and scientists are eager to capture this peak of activity through a variety of observations that can only occur during eclipses.

Shehbaz Sharif has become Pakistan’s prime minister for a second time nearly a month after an inconclusive general election marred by delays and widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

No party secured a majority in the February 8 poll. Candidates affiliated with the PTI party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan were forced to run as independents, but still secured most seats, with 102.

The Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz party (PMLN), headed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who is also the older brother of Shehbaz Sharif, came in second with 73 seats, and their long-term rivals the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won 54 seats.

After winning his brother’s backing, Shehbaz Sharif returns to a role he held until parliament was dissolved last year, and will lead a coalition government with the PMLN.

Following the vote in the lower house of parliament, opposition party members began chanting at Sharif as he addressed parliamentarians, calling him a thief.

Under the coalition, the PPP’s Asif Ali Zardari takes the presidency. Zaradari is the widower of the assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose family dominates the party.

Shehbaz Sharif was first sworn in as Pakistan’s prime minister in April 2022, after Imran Khan was dramatically ousted from power in a parliamentary no-confidence vote.

Khan has since been jailed and sentenced to at least 14 years in prison on multiple charges, including corruption and revealing state secrets.

In February, Khan and his wife were sentenced to a further seven years in prison after a district court ruled their 2018 marriage violated the law. Khan has rejected the charges as politically motivated.

Pakistan’s new government is already facing clear challenges, including mounting discontent over the country’s worsening poverty. Sharif will be tasked with starting further talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a deal to secure Pakistan’s economy.

Loyal supporters of Khan who have continued to rally against authorities are also likely to pose an issue for Sharif.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Texas is no stranger to winter wildfires, but the ferocity of the Smokehouse Creek fire — the state’s largest on record after burning through more than 1 million acres — caught even the experts off guard.

Its severity was due to a perfect storm of environmental factors: highly flammable grasses and strong winds combined with record-high temperatures and dry conditions — the kind of extreme weather often exacerbated by climate change.

This fire adds to an ever-lengthening list of rapidly spreading, destructive wildfires in the US and elsewhere. As humans continue to heat up the world with fossil fuel pollution, scientists warn these kinds of fires will only become more common.

The past several years have brought some of the United States’ most devastating fires. The fire that ripped through Maui in August, whipped up by a combination of heat, drought and strong winds, killed at least 100 people and was the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century.

In California, 80% of the state’s largest wildfires have occurred in the last decade, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.

But it’s not just the US grappling with alarming new fire behavior. Canada experienced its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with flames scorching more than 18 million hectares (44.5 million acres) — more than double the previous record.

In Greece, winds and record temperatures led to deadly fires last summer, the largest ever recorded in the European Union. And in early February, wildfires tore through parts of Chile, killing more than 130 people.

“We have certainly seen plenty of extreme and catastrophic fires and fire seasons across the globe in the past decade,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate professor at the University of California, Merced.

In many cases, climate change is playing a role, he added, “enabling more active fire seasons and very large fire events.”

Why did the Texas fires grow so explosively?

Then, a hard freeze late in the fall meant all that grass went dormant. Sapped of moisture, they were highly flammable. It only took a short period of warm, dry weather for them to dry out further, providing a carpet for the fire to spread.

Temperatures were unseasonably hot the day the fires started, climbing to more than 85 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the panhandle, Kanclerz said.

Strong winds helped the fire pick up, and the passage of a windy cold front whipped it up further, causing the fire to shift direction and expand.

The region’s geography compounded the situation. The fire was able to rage across the open landscape with little to stop it, making firefighting efforts extremely challenging. The fire grew explosively, engulfing up to 150 football fields of land every minute in the first few days.

Kanclerz said it was clear before the fires broke out that wind, temperature and humidity indicators added up to critical fire conditions.

“But the magnitude of the fire exceeded our expectations,” he said.

It’s hard to witness, he added. Huge fires in these parts of Texas are “not unheard of,” he said, “but we hate to see the frequency of them.”

A shifting climate

Wildfires are fueled by a knot of factors, both natural and human-caused, but scientists say that global warming is loading the dice in favor of more intense and severe blazes.

Hotter temperatures are the clearest climate change-fueled contributor to wildfires. Heat sucks the moisture from vegetation making it much more combustible. “Drier fuels are a critical part of fire, the drier the fuel the easier it is to start a fire,” said Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta.

As well as drying out vegetation, heat could also change the vegetation. In Hawaii, hotter summers have made it easier for fast-growing and more combustible invasive species to take hold, displacing native vegetation such as shady forests.

Periods of drought, which are becoming longer and more intense as the world warms, also dry out vegetation and increase the likelihood of fires igniting and spreading rapidly. The Maui fires happened as a third of the island struggled with drought.

But drought isn’t always needed for fires to spread explosively, Abatzoglou said – something evidenced by the fact that as of earlier in the week, there was no drought where the Smokehouse Creek fire ignited and spread to.

In West Texas, shorter periods of dryness can be enough to fuel huge fires when there is a bumper crop of grasses as well as high winds, he said.

Scientists are still working to understand what impact, if any, global warming is having on the winds that whip up wildfires.

Research has found climate change is fueling the rapid intensification of hurricanes, pushing storms to explode at a deadly pace. Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm which passed about 700 miles south of Hawaii’s Big Island, enhanced the strong winds that helped drive the Maui fires.

But it’s hard to attribute climate change to the winds that fueled the Texas fires, Abatzoglou said, “any link right now is most likely weak.”

Overall, however, climate projections “paint a future of more extreme fire weather conditions for the general region,” he added.

It’s a picture that extends across the US, according to a recent report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group, which found wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying as climate change increases the likelihood of the kind of extreme weather that favors fires.

West Texas is one of the most affected states, said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at Climate Central. The Texas High Plains region, for example, experiences 32 additional days of warm, dry, windy conditions compared to the 1970s, she said.

“As long as the climate keeps warming and makes fire weather more common, the risks will only keep rising.”

Hundreds of people have been flocking to the grave of late Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

Images from OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights group that monitors Russian repression, show a long line of people queuing at Navalny’s grave and laying flowers at the Borisovsky Cemetery in Moscow.

“People leave flowers, say goodbye, mourn,” the group reported.

Navalny’s mother Lyudmila was among the mourners on Sunday, visiting her son’s grave for the second day, accompanied by the mother of his widow Yulia, Reuters reported.

Thousands of mourners defied threats of arrest and gathered for Navalny’s funeral on Friday, two weeks after he died aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony.

There was heavy security in place and some in the crowd chanted his name or anti-Putin slogans.

The opposition leader’s death sparked condemnation from world leaders and accusations from his aides that he had been murdered, though the Kremlin has denied any involvement in his death.

At least 103 people were detained across 20 Russian cities on the day of Navalny’s funeral, OVD-Info reported on Sunday. Riot police were present, searching and filming the mourners and making them go through metal detectors, according to the group.

“Some of those who came said that they hid flowers under their coats along the way, fearing arrests along the way,” they said. “That didn’t stop people from coming and saying goodbye.”

He was immediately arrested upon his arrival and spent the rest of his life behind bars on charges he dismissed as politically motivated.