SANTIAGO (AFP) – Chile has declared a state of disaster in several central-southern regions after a devastating heat wave sparked forest fires that left at least 13 people dead, authorities said Friday. More than 100 homes have been affected and 47,000 hectares of forest destroyed since the fires broke out on Wednesday. “We have to announce that there are 13 deaths in total, 11 in the Santa Juana municipality,” head of the Senaprad national disaster agency Mauricio Tapia said. Two crew members of a helicopter that was fighting the fires died in a crash Friday afternoon, Chile’s agriculture minister Esteban Valenzuela said. “I am very sad about the helicopter crash which killed the pilot and a mechanic who were working to fight the fire” in the La Araucania region, said Valenzuela. Tapia later added that the pilot was Bolivian and the mechanic Chilean. The death toll included at least four civilians and a firefighter previously reported killed.

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OHIO (Reuters) – A train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio on Friday night causing a massive fire in the area, local media reported. Emergency crews have been evacuating residents from their homes within a 1.6km radius of the fire, according to several reports. It is not immediately clear if there are any casualties. The East Palestine police department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for details. Freight railroad company Norfolk Southern Corp is “coordinating closely with local first responders while mobilizing our own teams”, a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The person did not immediately respond to queries about what the train was carrying or what caused the derailment.

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ISLAMABAD (AP) – Pakistan has banned Wikipedia after threatening the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia over what its “sacrilegious content”, the Wikimedia Foundation announced on Saturday. Social media giants Facebook and YouTube have also been blocked in the past by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority over content deemed blasphemous, a highly sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan. Their ban was lifted. According to local media outlet Dawn, a PTA spokesperson said the website was blocked on Saturday due to non-compliance with the institution’s order. The PTA on Wednesday said the website had until late Friday to heed the warning. “PTA has degraded Wikipedia services in the country on account of not blocking/removing sacrilegious contents,” the authority added. Pakistan blocked YouTube from 2012 to 2016 after it carried a film about the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that led to protests across the Muslim world.

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BRASILIA (AFP) – Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says his right-wing predecessor Jair Bolsonaro actively participated in planning for his supporters to storm government buildings on January 8. In an interview with broadcaster RedeTV, Lula said he is sure Bolsonaro was actively involved in the riot and is still trying to participate. “Today I am well aware and will say it loud and clear: that citizen [former president Bolsonaro] prepared the coup,” he was quoted as saying. Refusing to accept his election loss to Lula, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters broke into the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court buildings in Brasilia a week after Lula’s inauguration. The president was not in the capital at the time. The accusations against Bolsonaro - who is in the U.S. state of Florida in late December - came as a Brazilian senator accused the former president of attending a meeting on how to prevent a transfer of power. According to Senator Marcos do Val, the plan was to force the president of the Superior Electoral Court, Alexandre de Moraes, to make an incriminating statement while secretly recording him.

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ADDIS ABABA (Xinhua) – About 22.6 million people in Ethiopia are food insecure due to a combination of drought, conflict and increase in food prices, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) has warned.
The UNOCHA said in its latest situation update that an estimated 11.8 million people are food insecure in Ethiopia’s drought-affected areas of Afar, Somali, Oromia, and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNP) regions, and Dire Dawa city administration. It also warned of the worsening food insecurity among internally displaced persons countrywide. The UNOCHA said since mid-November 2022, the UN and international non-governmental organizations brought about 114,000 metric tons (MT) of food into the conflict-affected Tigray region as of Jan. 24. And as of Jan. 23, partners assisted 16.3 million people in targeted locations across the country, completing round 1 of food distribution. An estimated 15.5 million people received food under round 2, and close to 8.1 million in round 3, which commenced in 2022.

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GENEVA (Xinhua) – The rapid loss of the world’s wetlands must urgently be reversed by restoring vital ecosystems, the head of the Convention on Wetlands says. Awareness on the issue must also be raised, Musonda Mumba, secretary general of the Convention on Wetlands, said on the occasion of World Wetlands Day. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s wetlands have been degraded or lost, Mumba said, meaning we are losing wetlands three times faster than forests. “There is an urgency to raise global awareness on wetlands to arrest and reverse their rapid loss, and encourage actions to restore and conserve these vital ecosystems,” she emphasized. The world only has seven years left to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, she added. The Convention called on individuals to make conscious choices to minimize their own impact on wetlands, to educate and activate others to get involved in wetland restoration, and join wetland restoration efforts locally. Mumba recommended that governments and other stakeholders should create a national inventory of wetlands, set specific targets for wetland restoration, and promote good management practices.