Sudan conflict: Pregnant woman and baby killed in shooting – but husband left unaware
Men in crisp white thobes sit on mats under a leafy thorn tree carefully cutting pieces of white material.
They slowly stitch them together with tender, experienced precision.
Another shroud for another life lost to senseless violence.
More men arrive and they raise their hands in prayer to grieve the recently deceased.
The latest victim of the militias terrorising their community lies in a two room morgue a few metres away.
Fatma was eight months pregnant and travelling on a cart with her young son and daughter to Hajr Hadeed in eastern Chad.
She left her husband in the violence of al Geneina, the state capital of West Darfur in Sudan, where fleeing residents are reporting a citywide massacre.
Fatma’s sister Zeinab says her five-year-old nephew El-Sheikh was holding his pregnant mother’s body when the cart arrived in the village.
She rushed with close relatives to Adre Central Hospital.
Men stitch together shrouds with tender, experienced precision
They could feel the heaviness of Fatma’s body, but held out hope that the baby in her belly was still alive.
Hospital workers were cleaning the blood from the floor when they arrived at Dr Mahmoud Adam’s office.
He said Fatma was dead when she arrived and was quickly able to ascertain that the baby too had died.
“Since the war in Khartoum started so many wounded civilians are passing through the border from Darfur,” said Dr Mahmoud, whose hospital now has treatment tents operated by the medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in its grounds.
He recalls the 2003 genocide and observes there is little difference between then and now.
“It is so sad that to see people dying and suffering like this,” he said.
The floor shows signs of where Fatma’s blood has just been washed away
We walk over to the morgue where Fatma lies covered on a cement slab.
“She was shot in the back of the head,” he said.
Dr Mahmoud believes she died instantly.
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Zeinab sits under a tree just outside the morgue building.
Her eyes are wet and wide and every couple of minutes she muffles her sobs with her dark tobe.
Fatma’s small children lie silently across her lap.
More family arrive from their village as the body is prepared for burial.
The dead woman’s sister, Zeinab, waits outside the morgue with other grieving family members
Zeinab is handed different phones as family from across the region call to extend their condolences.
One call that doesn’t come is from Fatma’s husband Adam in al Geneina where telecommunications have been down for more than a week.
The only information from there is coming from the fleeing residents who have safely made it across the violence-ridden region.
The city ‘is on fire’
They say the city is on fire and that there are too many deaths to count.
Deep in the al Geneina blackout, Adam is still unaware that his wife and unborn child have been killed.
MSF doctors treat the wounded in the hospital’s grounds
No one can reach him to deliver the news.
Fatma emerges from the morgue wrapped in the white shroud.
She’s lifted onto the back of a military grade Toyota pick-up by the men from her family as wailing rings out from the crowd of women.
Dread and panic
The cries carry more than just loss, but notes of dread and panic.
The fearful anticipation that there is more grief to come.
Last month was the warmest January on record, according to new data.
The finding has baffled scientists, who had expected changes in ocean currents in the Pacific to take the edge off rising global temperatures.
Figures released by the European Copernicus climate service show average temperatures around the world in January were 1.75C warmer than before greenhouse gas emissions started to rise significantly in the industrial revolution around 150 years ago.
That’s 0.1C above the record set last January. And it comes after a year in which temperatures topped 1.5C, the target for climate negotiations, for the first time.
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2024 was the warmest year on record
Dr Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, warned that the rising pace of climate change would increase the risk of extreme weather and its consequences.
“This January is the hottest on record because countries are still burning huge amounts of oil, gas and coal,” she said.
“The Los Angeles wildfires were a stark reminder that we have already reached an incredibly dangerous level of warming. We’ll see many more unprecedented extreme weather events in 2025.”
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January had been expected to be slightly cooler than last year because of a natural shift in weather patterns and ocean currents in the Pacific, called La Nina.
But that hasn’t been enough to slow the upward trend in temperatures.
‘Frankly terrifying’
Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical & climate hazards at UCL, said: “The fact that the latest robust Copernicus data reveals the January just gone was the hottest on record – despite an emerging La Nina, which typically has a cooling effect – is both astonishing and, frankly terrifying.
“Having crashed through the 1.5C limit in 2024, the climate is showing no signs of wanting to dip under it again, reflected by the fact that this is the 18th of the last 19 months to see the global temperature rise since pre-industrial times top 1.5C.
“On the basis of the Valencia floods and apocalyptic LA wildfires, I don’t think there can be any doubt that dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown has arrived.”
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The consequences of a warming atmosphere are also being directly felt in the UK, with more intense rainfall increasing the risk of surface flooding.
The Environment Agency released figures in December showing 4.6 million properties in England are at risk from flooding as drainage systems are overwhelmed by rainfall. That’s a 43% increase on previous estimates.
But adapting to a climate change is hugely expensive.
The government on Wednesday announced it would spend £2.65bn over two years to shore up existing flood defences and protect an extra 52,000 homes and businesses – a tiny fraction of the number at risk.
World
Ancient scrolls near Pompeii were preserved but unreadable – are they now revealing their secrets?
Ancient scrolls charred by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago may finally be starting to reveal their secrets.
UK scientists say they have made a historic breakthrough in their efforts to decipher the artefacts – with the assistance of AI.
Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were found in the 1750s in the remains of a lavish villa at the Roman town of Herculaneum, which along with nearby Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.
While the heat and ash from the volcano was catastrophic for the town, it preserved the scrolls – though in an unreadable state.
An X-ray scan of part of one of the scrolls. Pic: AP
Scholars and scientists have been working for more than 250 years on ways to decipher the scrolls, which are too fragile to be unrolled physically.
In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the “Vesuvius Challenge” competition, offering cash prizes for efforts to decipher the scrolls with technology.
On Wednesday, the challenge announced a “historic breakthrough,” saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the challenge, said the organisers were “thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll”, saying it “contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll”.
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The scroll was scanned by Diamond Light Source, a lab in Harwell, near Oxford, by using a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to create an intensely powerful X-ray.
AI was then used to piece together the images, searching for ink that reveals where writing is located. A 3D image of the scroll can then be formulated that allows experts to unroll it virtually.
Little of the text has been deciphered so far. One of the few words that has been made out is the ancient Greek for “disgust”.
Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library, said: “We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.
“And then don’t forget that there is like 1,000 more scrolls in Naples.”
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