KINGSTON: Hurricane Beryl churned toward Jamaica Tuesday, with forecasters warning of potentially deadly winds and storm surge, after the storm killed at least seven people and caused widespread destruction across the southeastern Caribbean.
The powerful hurricane, which is rare so early in the Atlantic season, weakened Tuesday but was still an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 storm, and is expected to pass “near or over” Jamaica on Wednesday, meteorologists said.
Beryl is the first storm since US National Hurricane Center records began to reach the Category 4 level in June, and the earliest to reach Category 5 in July.
A hurricane warning was in place for the island nation, according to the NHC, which said rain and flash flooding was to be expected in addition to the life-threatening wind and high water levels.
Across Jamaica, emergency response preparations were underway, with shelters stocking up on provisions, people safeguarding their homes and boats being pulled from the water.
“I urge all Jamaicans to stock up on food, batteries, candles, and water. Secure your critical documents and remove any trees or items that could endanger your property,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness said on X.
Hurricane warnings were also issued in the Cayman Islands, which Beryl is “expected to pass near or over” on Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the NHC.
In the Dominican Republic, massive waves were seen crashing into the shore along Santo Domingo as the storm passed to the country’s south, AFP photographers reported.
Beryl has already left a trail of death in its wake with at least three people killed in Grenada, where Beryl made landfall Monday, as well as one in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and three in Venezuela, officials said.
Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said the island of Carriacou, which was struck by the eye of the storm, has been all but cut off, with houses, telecommunications and fuel facilities there flattened.
“We’ve had virtually no communication with Carriacou in the last 12 hours except briefly this morning by satellite phone,” Mitchell told a news conference.
The 35-square kilometer island is home to around 9,000 people. At least two people there died, Mitchell said, with a third killed on the country’s main island of Grenada when a tree fell on a house.
In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, one person on the island of Bequia was reported dead from the storm, and a man died in Venezuela’s northeastern coastal state of Sucre when he was swept away by a flooded river, officials there said.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed concern about the region, saying on X that his organization “stands ready to support the national authorities with any health needs.”
Experts say it is extremely rare for such a powerful storm to form this early in the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from early June to late November.
Warm ocean temperatures are key for hurricanes, and North Atlantic waters are currently between two and five degrees Fahrenheit (1-3 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Beryl “sets an alarming precedent for what is expected to be a very active hurricane season.”
NOAA said in late May that it expects this year to be an “extraordinary” hurricane season, with up to seven storms of Category 3 or above.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell, who has family on the island of Carriacou, said climate change was “pushing disasters to record-breaking new levels of destruction.”
“Disasters on a scale that used to be the stuff of science fiction are becoming meteorological facts, and the climate crisis is the chief culprit,” he said Monday, reporting that his parents’ property was damaged.
As of 2300 GMT, Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 240 kilometers per hour as it headed toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Tuesday, according to the NHC.
A hurricane watch and tropical storm warnings have also been issued for parts of Haiti.
Hurricane Beryl kills seven as it churns toward Jamaica
https://arab.news/cgwu2
Hurricane Beryl kills seven as it churns toward Jamaica
- Beryl is the first storm since US National Hurricane Center records began to reach the Category 4 level in June
- Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 240 kilometers per hour as it headed toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands on Tuesday
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
