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
Rubio says technical talks with Denmark, Greenland officials over Arctic security have begun
- US Secretary of State on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland
WASHINGTON: Technical talks between the US, Denmark and Greenland over hatching an Arctic security deal are now underway, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland agreed to create a working group aimed at addressing differences with the US during a Washington meeting earlier this month with Vice President JD Vance and Rubio.
The group was created after President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for the US to take over Greenland, a Danish territory, in the name of countering threats from Russia and China — calls that Greenland, Denmark and European allies forcefully rejected.
“It begins today and it will be a regular process,” Rubio said of the working group, as he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We’re going to try to do it in a way that isn’t like a media circus every time these conversations happen, because we think that creates more flexibility on both sides to arrive at a positive outcome.”
The Danish Foreign Ministry said Wednesday’s talks focused on “how we can address US concerns about security in the Arctic while respecting the red lines of the Kingdom.” Red lines refers to the sovereignty of Greenland.
Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of a NATO ally, has roiled US-European relations.
Trump this month announced he would slap new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries that opposed his takeover calls, only to abruptly drop his threats after a “framework” for a deal over access to the mineral-rich island was reached, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.
After stiff pushback from European allies to his Greenland rhetoric, Trump also announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that he would take off the table the possibility of using American military force to acquire Greenland.
The president backed off his tariff threats and softened his language after Wall Street suffered its biggest losses in months over concerns that Trump’s Greenland ambitions could spur a trade war and fundamentally rupture NATO, a 32-member transatlantic military alliance that’s been a linchpin of post-World War II security.
Rubio on Wednesday appeared eager to downplay Trump’s rift with Europe over Greenland.
“We’ve got a little bit of work to do, but I think we’re going to wind up in a good place, and I think you’ll hear the same from our colleagues in Europe very shortly,” Rubio said.
Rubio during Wednesday’s hearing also had a pointed exchange with Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, about Trump repeatedly referring to Greenland as Iceland while at Davos.
“Yeah, he meant to say Greenland, but I think we’re all familiar with presidents that have verbal stumbles,” Rubio said in responding to Kaine’s questions about Trump’s flub — taking a veiled dig at former President Joe Biden. “We’ve had presidents like that before. Some made a lot more than this one.”
