MOMBASA: Still recovering from the effects of the first battering, the southeastern African nation of Mozambique is bracing for a rare second hit by long-living Tropical Cyclone Freddy late on Friday night, a regional weather center said Tuesday.
The United Nations’ monitoring station on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion warned that Freddy will “gradually intensify to the stage of a tropical cyclone or even an intense tropical cyclone” over the Mozambique Channel before making landfall overnight on Friday into Saturday.
Freddy is expected to intensify this Thursday as it approaches coastal Mozambique, with current windspeeds at sea averaging 110 kilometers (around 70 miles) per hour, gusts of 155 kilometers (around 100 miles) an hour, and barreling in the northeasterly direction. It is projected to make landfall on the country’s second most populous province of Zambezia.
Its reemergence has baffled meteorologists with its constant shift of direction and multiple record-breaking feats. Freddy has intensified four separate times, a first for a tropical cyclone in the southern hemisphere. It also now holds the world record for what’s known as “accumulated cyclone energy,” a metric to gauge a cyclone’s strength over time.
Freddy hammered eastern Madagascar last month before moving across the channel and slamming Mozambique, killing 21 people across both nations. The deluge affected an approximate 213,000 people and destroyed over 28,000 homes in the Mozambican capital of Maputo and nearby provinces, according to Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management.
It then appeared to have dissipated before it reemerged, looping around the Mozambican Channel. It was initially destined to Madagascar for a second time but shifted course back to mainland Africa.
French weather agency Meteo-France said in a bulletin Tuesday that as Freddy gathers more pace, it also poses severe weather risks to Toliara, the capital of Madagascar’s Atsimo-Andrefana region, with strong winds and the sea remaining “dangerous due to the cyclonic swell.” Freddy is currently soaking southern Madagascar as it hovers over the channel.
The UN weather agency said Freddy is on course to become the longest-lived tropical cyclone in history after traversing the entire Indian Ocean for a month.
November to April is classified as the cyclone season in the southwest Indian Ocean and climate scientists say that climate change is intensifying cyclones, making them longer, wetter and more frequent. ___
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Cyclone Freddy to slam Mozambique Friday in rare second hit
Cyclone Freddy to slam Mozambique Friday in rare second hit
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
