AUSTRALIA – Residents in an Australian region engulfed by bushfires were given two hours to return home to collect their belongings before Christmas on Tuesday, as emergency crews try to contain the blaze. Communities around the Grampians, in Victoria, have been evacuated amid warnings from authorities that conditions there in the days ahead could be the worst since Australia’s most severe fire season on record, the so-called “Black Summer” of 2019-20. The bushfires have already burnt over 41,000 hectares (101,000 acres) of land in the past week, however there have been no deaths or loss of property.

Intense heat forecast for Boxing Day has also prompted a string of fire warnings across the country. Throughout Victoria, temperatures are expected to reach 40C (104F) and be accompanied by strong dry winds, while parts of South Australia and New South Wales could also face bushfire conditions on Thursday into Friday.

“We’re expecting to see extreme fire danger across almost the entire state,” Luke Hegarty, a spokesman for Victoria’s State Control Centre, said. “This is the most significant fire danger that the state has seen – across the whole sections of state that we’re talking about – since Black Summer. It’s important that people understand that Thursday is a day with serious potential,” he added.

Four interstate firefighting forces and two incident management teams – made up of over 100 personnel – will land in Victoria in the coming days to provide reprieve for emergency crews that have been working around the clock to fight the current fires. The decision to give families around the Grampians temporary access to their homes “to get Christmas items … presents and the like” on Tuesday morning was made by the state’s Country Fire Authority chief officer, Jason Heffernan. (BBC)

Photo: Authorities have warned that conditions in the coming days could mirror Australia’s worst fire seasons on record.

BRAZIL – Brazilian authorities have halted the construction of a factory for Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD, saying workers lived in conditions comparable to “slavery”. More than 160 workers have been rescued in Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia, according to a statement from the Public Labour Prosecutor’s Office (MPT). They were allegedly put in a “degrading” environment and had their passports and salaries withheld by a building company. BYD said in a statement that it had cut ties with the firm involved and remained committed to a “full compliance with Brazilian legislation”. The factory was scheduled to be operational by March 2025, and was set to be BYD’s first EV plant outside of Asia.

The workers, hired by Jinjiang Construction Brazil, lived in four facilities in Camaçari city. At one such facility, workers were made to sleep on beds without mattresses, according to prosecutors. Each bathroom was also shared among 31 workers, forcing them to get up extremely early in order to be ready for work. “The conditions found in the lodgings revealed an alarming picture of precariousness and degradation,” the MPT said. “Slavery-like conditions”, as defined by Brazilian law, include debt bondage and work that violates human dignity. The MPT added that the situation also constitutes “forced labour”, as many workers had their wages withheld and faced excessive costs for terminating their contracts. BYD said affected workers had been moved to hotels.

It added that it had conducted a “detailed review” of the working and living conditions for subcontracted employees, and asked on “several occasions” for the construction firm to make improvements. (BBC)

Photo: The BYD Yuan Pro electric vehicle. (Getty Images)

A NASA probe is set to make history this Christmas Eve as it becomes the closest human-made object to the sun. Tomorrow at 11:53 GMT, the Parker Solar Probe will pass within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the sun’s surface. That is more than eight times closer than the distance between our home star and the nearest planet, Mercury. As it reaches its closest point, the probe will also become the fastest human-made object ever made as it reaches a staggering 430,000 mph (692,000 kph).

In a moment that has been compared to the moon landing of 1969, Parker will ‘touch’ the sun’s surface to gather vital data. During that brief flyby, the probe will pass through the sun’s super-hot outer atmosphere called the corona – the origin of solar storms which have the potential to cause chaos on Earth. Although the Parker probe will endure temperatures exceeding 1,400 °C (2,550 °F) its near-indestructible heat shield should allow it to survive the extreme conditions.  Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), says: ‘No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory.’ The Parker Solar Probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in August 2018 before embarking on the 93 million-mile (149 million km) journey to the sun.

The goal was to gather more data about the sun’s corona by flying as close as possible through the stellar atmosphere. Because the gravitation pull is so strong at this distance, the probe needs to be moving incredibly fast to avoid slipping into the heart of the sun. To do this, the probe has been repeatedly ‘slingshot’ around the sun and Venus, getting progressively faster with each pass. In 2021, Parker made its first successful pass of the solar corona, dipping into a region where temperatures can reach over one million degrees Centigrade for up to five hours. Since then, Parker has completed 21 solar slingshots, but tomorrow the probe will smash its own record for both speed and distance. (Dailymail)