NORTH CAROLINA – Hundreds of people remain missing after catastrophic flooding decimated towns, destroyed roads and cut off power for more than a million homes in the US’s south-east.

The death toll has continued to rise since Hurricane Helene – which was later downgraded to a tropical storm – tore across the region. As of Tuesday, 135 people had been confirmed dead across six states, a figure that is expected to grow. At least 40 of those dead were in the west of North Carolina, where 300 roads remain closed, hampering recovery operations, as well as the delivery of much needed food and water.

President Joe Biden is expected to visit the state on Wednesday. The Democrat said he would visit Georgia and Florida “as soon as possible” to survey damage there as well. Though some of the floodwaters in the region have receded, large swathes of North Carolina remain immobilised by the effects of the storm. There was perhaps nowhere harder hit than Buncombe County, an area in the west of the state that includes the city of Asheville.

“We have biblical devastation,” Ryan Cole, an emergency official in the county, told the BBC. “This is the most significant natural disaster that any one of us has ever seen.” The extreme weather has also forced the closure of quartz mines in Spruce Pine, a tiny town about an hour north-east of Asheville, home to the world’s largest-known source of high-purity quartz.

The Spruce Pine quartz is critical for the production of semiconductors – the foundation of modern computing, necessary for devices like laptops and smartphones to function. “It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you’ll find quartz from Spruce Pine,” Rolf Pippert, mine manager at The Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, told the BBC in 2019.

Mitchell County – which contains Spruce Pine – sits about 96km (60 miles) from Buncombe. It was hammered with more than 2ft (609mm) of rain between Tuesday and Saturday, the Associated Press reported. As of last Monday, officials from Mitchell County – where Spruce Pine sits – said in a statement that the county had “no electricity service, cell service, or internet connectivity”. “Mitchell County experienced a catastrophic 500-year flood,” Mitchell County said. “A good bit of the county infrastructure has been either damaged or destroyed by floodwaters and uprooted trees and downed power lines caused by the storm.”  (BBC)

Photo: A destroyed house with a car underneath is seen in Chimney Rock, North Carolina. (Reuters)…[+]

LONDON  –  Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has controversially broken royal protocol and claimed in his upcoming memoir that Queen Elizabeth II was suffering from bone cancer before her death.

In the book, which hits shelves on October 10 and has been serialized this week in the Daily Mail newspaper – which Johnson also writes for – he recalled the monarch’s final days at Balmoral, Scotland. Johnson formally stepped down just two days before Elizabeth II’s death in September 2022, and in the years since, there has been fierce speculation over exactly how she passed away.

“I had known for a year or more that she had a form of bone cancer, and her doctors were worried that at any time she could enter a sharp decline,” he wrote in the excerpt. Johnson’s account is the first public indication by a former senior government official as to what the Queen’s cause of death might have been. It is listed as “old age” on her death certificate. Johnson isn’t the first prime minister to reminisce about his life, time in office and interactions with the late Queen in an autobiography. Former British leaders Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all did so but only in generalities and without the same level of vivid detail as Johnson.

Buckingham Palace has a policy not to comment on books released about the royal family and as such has not confirmed or denied Johnson’s assertions. Johnson, who served as prime minister between 2019 and 2022, recalls traveling to the royal residence of Balmoral for the customary outgoing audience and resignation. Upon his arrival, he remembers being greeted by the Queen’s private secretary Edward Young, who suggested to him that she had deteriorated significantly over the summer.

Thinking back on that last time the pair sat together in the Queen’s drawing room, Johnson said that he understood Young’s forewarning. “She seemed pale and more stooped, and she had dark bruising on her hands and wrists, probably from drips or injections,” he wrote. “But her mind – as Edward had also said – was completely ­unimpaired by her illness, and from time to time in our conversation she still flashed that great white smile in its sudden mood-lifting beauty.”

Johnson described the weekly prime minster audiences with the monarch as “a privilege” and “a balm.” “She radiated such an ethic of ­service, patience and leadership that you really felt you would, if necessary, die for her,” he continued. “That may sound barmy to some people (and totally obvious to many more), but that loyalty, primitive as it may appear, is still at the heart of our system. “You need someone kind and wise, and above politics, to personify what is good about our country. She did that job brilliantly.” (BBC)…[+]

Photo: Boris Johnson with Queen Elizabeth II in 2019, served the late monarch as her prime minister for three years. (AFP)

BRUSSELS  –  NATO must ensure that Ukraine prevails in its war against Russia, the new head of the transatlantic military alliance said after he took charge. Mark Rutte branded Ukraine his “top priority” as he formally became NATO secretary-general at a ceremony in Brussels on Tuesday. The former Dutch prime minister took over the job from Jens Stoltenberg more than three months after the alliance’s 32 members appointed him.

Stating that he “cannot wait to get to work”, Rutte told journalists: “We have to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent, democratic nation.” He also noted that, amid the growing war between Israel and Hezbollah, monitoring the situation in Lebanon is also at the top of his list. The new NATO chief also asserted that he is not worried about the upcoming presidential election in the United States as he could work with either candidate.

It has been suggested that the Republican candidate, former US President Donald Trump, could cut support to Ukraine or weaken security guarantees for some NATO members should he return to the White House after the November elections. Rutte noted Trump’s continued push for NATO allies to spend more on defence, but said he was not worried as he had worked with the US presidential hopeful before.

“He was also pushing us on China, and I think he was right there,” he added. The NATO chief also noted that ramping up Western defence industry production and deepening ties with partners in the Asia Pacific as important tasks. “Mark has the perfect background to become a great secretary-general,” a visibly emotional Stoltenberg said as he ended a decade in office.

“He has served as prime minister for 14 years and led four different coalition governments … therefore he knows how to make compromises, create consensus, and these are skills which are very much valued here at NATO,” he said. Rutte will likely need to call on such skills to navigate uncertainty over future Western support for Ukraine. Aside from the ambiguity around future US support, the European Union’s policies have been weighted down by opposition from the likes of Hungary.

Meanwhile, Russian forces have been advancing on the battlefield more than two-and-a-half years after the Kremlin’s all-out invasion. On Tuesday morning, seven people, including three women, were killed when Russian troops shelled the southern city of Kherson, according to Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office. The attack came in an area near a central bus stop and a central market at about 9am (06:00 GMT), the office said in a statement.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin published a video showing the blurred corpses in civilian clothes lying near a market stall with tomatoes and other vegetables. Russia has denied targeting civilians but has regularly struck towns and cities behind the front line. Kyiv has urged its allies to raise military aid to help it repel such attacks.  (Al Jazeera)…[+]

Photo: Mark Rutte and Jens Stoltenberg give a press statement in Brussels. (Reuters)

BANGKOK  –  Emergency workers in Thailand have recovered the bodies of 23 people from a bus which crashed and caught fire just outside the capital, Bangkok.

The bus was carrying dozens of school children back from a trip to the north of the country. The vast majority of victims are believed to be children. Videos from the scene showed flames engulfing the bus as it burned under an overpass, with huge clouds of dense black smoke billowing into the sky.  Transport Minister Suriyahe Juangroongruangkit said the bus was powered by “extremely risky” compressed natural gas.

Witnesses say the bus crashed into the concrete barrier dividing the highway just north of Bangkok, after a front tyre burst. The bus was quickly consumed by an intense fire, and many on board were unable to get out. The cause of the fire is still unknown. Nineteen children and three teachers are reported to have survived, sixteen of whom are being treated in hospital for their injuries.

“This is a very tragic incident,” Mr Suriyahe told reporters at the scene. “The ministry must find a measure… if possible, for passenger vehicles like this to be banned from using this type of fuel because it’s extremely risky.” Piyalak Thinkaew, who was leading the search, said it was hard to identify the bodies because they were so badly burnt. “Some of the bodies we found were very, very small,” he told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus. “The kids’ instinct was to escape to the back so the bodies were there,” he said. Forensic police said of the 23 bodies found, eleven were male, seven female and a further five were unidentifiable.

The driver has fled the site of the crash but authorities are confident he will be tracked down, according to Thailand’s Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. The ages of the children on board remains unclear, but the school caters for pupils between three and 15 years old. Thailand has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with unsafe vehicles and poor driving contributing to roughly 20,000 fatalities a year.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, said an investigation was underway. “We have to investigate the trace of driving from the tire marks, the burning trace, and CCTV footage,” he said. (BBC)…[+]

Photo: Fire response teams inspect the bus. (EPA)