'It's terrifying': Race against time to rescue Brazil's flood victims after dozens killed

05/05/24 2:14 PM

Porto Alegre (Brazil) (AFP) – Authorities were racing against time on Sunday to rescue people from raging floods and mudslides that have killed more than 50 and forced nearly 70,000 to flee their homes in southern Brazil.Viewed from the air, Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state, is completely flooded, with streets waterlogged and the roofs of some houses barely visible.The Guaiba River, which flows through the city of 1.4 million people, reached a record high level of 5.09 meters (16.9 feet), according to the local municipality, well above the historic peak of 4.76 meters that had stood as a record since devastating 1941 floods.The water was still advancing into economically important Porto Alegre and around a hundred other localities, with increasingly dramatic consequences.In addition to some 70,000 residents forced from their homes, Brazil's civil defense agency also said more than a million people lacked access to potable water amid the flooding, describing the damage as incalculable.The agency put the death toll at 55, although that did not include two people killed in an explosion at a flooded gas station in Porto Alegre that was witnessed by an AFP journalist.At least 74 people are also missing, it said.Rosana Custodio, a 37-year-old nurse, fled her flooded Porto Alegre home with her husband and three children."During the night on Thursday the waters began to rise very quickly," she told AFP via a WhatsApp message."In a hurry, we went out to look for a safer place. But we couldn't walk... My husband put our two little ones in a kayak and rowed with a bamboo. My son and I swam to the end of the street," she said.Her family was safe but "we've lost everything we had."'It's terrifying'The rainfall eased Saturday night but was expected to continue for the next 24-36 hours, with authorities warning of landslides.Authorities scrambled to evacuate swamped neighborhoods as rescue workers used four-wheel-drive vehicles -- and even jet skis -- to maneuver through waist-deep water in search of the stranded.Rio Grande do Sul Governor Eduardo Leite said his state, normally one of Brazil's most prosperous, would need a "Marshall Plan" of heavy investment to rebuild after the catastrophe.Long lines formed as people tried to board buses in many places, although bus services to and from the city center were canceled.The Porto Alegre international airport suspended all flights on Friday for an undetermined period. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva posted a video of a helicopter depositing a soldier atop a house, who then used a brick to pound a hole in the roof and rescue a baby wrapped in a blanket. The speed of the rising waters unnerved many."It's terrifying because we saw the water rise in an absurd way, it rose at a very high speed," said Greta Bittencourt, a 32-year-old professional poker player.'Going to be much worse'With waters starting to overtop a dike along another local river, the Gravatai, Mayor Sebastiao Melo issued a stern warning on social media platform X, saying, "Communities must leave!"He urged people to ration water after four of the city's six treatment plants had to be closed.Leite, the governor, said in a live transmission on Instagram the situation was "absolutely unprecedented," the worst in the history of the state, which is home to agroindustrial production of soy, rice, wheat and corn.Residential areas were underwater as far as the eye could see, with roads destroyed and bridges swept away by powerful currents.Rescuers faced a colossal task, with entire towns inaccessible.At least 300 municipalities have suffered storm damage in Rio Grande do Sul since Monday, according to local officials.'Disastrous cocktail'Roughly a third of the displaced have been taken to shelters set up in sports centers and schools.The rains also affected the southern state of Santa Catarina.Lula, who visited the region Thursday, blamed the disaster on climate change.The devastating storms were the result of a "disastrous cocktail" of global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon, climatologist Francisco Eliseu Aquino told AFP on Friday. South America's largest country has recently experienced a string of extreme weather events, including a cyclone in September that killed at least 31 people.

'No big deal': Ex-Trump aide shrugs off Hope Hicks throwing him under the bus

05/06/24 9:48 PM

Former President Donald Trump's onetime press secretary appears unfazed by his former colleague Hope Hicks' tearful trial testimony in which she claimed he was responsible for a public statement denying money was paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Hogan Gidley appeared on CNN Monday afternoon to discuss with Jake Tapper a blockbuster moment in the Manhattan criminal court where Trump stands accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush money paid ahead of the 2016 presidential election. "Nothing like being name-checked in this trial," said Gidley. "Honestly, I don't even remember that situation or that comment."Gidley made light of Hicks' testimony and any roll his name might play in the ongoing criminal trial. ALSO READ: Trump’s Manhattan trial could determine whether rule of law survives: criminologist "I'm not afraid to stand up and say, if I said I'm the one who did it, 'Of course," Gidley said. "But t's always kinda funny to watch these things kind of bleed out of the courtroom."Gidley said he was contact by multiple reporters after Hicks testified she believed he'd given a statement to the Wall Street Journal for a Jan. 12, 2018, article entitled "Trump Lawyer Arranged $130,000 Payment for Adult-Film Star's Silence." "No big deal, " Gidley said. "No harm, no foul, but it's just kinda funny.""Are you are you still in touch with Hope Hicks?" Tapper pressed him."We talk in texts pretty regularly," confirmed Gidley. "I just had to chuckle at some of those comments she made."Gidley then tapped into his knowledge of Hicks for an analysis of the impact Friday's testimony had on his former colleague."I can imagine how gut-wrenching this is for her, someone who served the White House, who always had Donald Trump's best interests at heart," said Gidley. "Then she kinda goes into private life doing what she wants to do personally, professionally, and then kinda gets pulled back into these types of things."You saw kind of where her heart is on these matters when she broke down in tears, I think they had to even take a recess because of it," Gildey said. "So she's a great person, and I hate the fact that that these slime balls are trying to bring her into this whole process."Watch the video below or at the link here. Hogan Gidley shrugs off his name coming up at Trump trial www.youtube.com

'Taboo': French women speak out on rapes by U.S. soldiers during WWII

05/06/24 3:59 PM

Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944.But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out.Nearly a million U.S., British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany's grip on Europe.Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the "liberators" arrive, as was everybody around her.But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two U.S. soldiers -- often called GIs -- arrived at the family's farm."They were drunk and they wanted a woman," Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote "so nothing is forgotten".In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. "They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each."Aimee's voice broke as she read from the letter. "Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day," she said."My mother sacrificed herself to protect me," she said. "While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead."The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.In truth, hundreds or even thousands of rapes between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a handful to research what she called "a taboo" of World War II."Many women decided to remain silent," she said. "There was the shame, as often with rape."She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.- 'Easy to get' -Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women that were "easy to get" to add to their motivation to fight.The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans."Here's What We're Fighting For," read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: "The French are nuts about the Yanks."The incentive of sex "was to motivate American soldiers", Roberts said."Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans," she added.In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers "as if it was yesterday" how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI."The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house," 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby U.S. garrison to alert them."I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that he was American," she said.Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret "that poisoned her whole life" until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard."Lying on her hospital bed she told me, 'I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,'" Plassard told AFP.Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: "Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel," she said.French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel "OK Joe!", including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts."Those sentenced to death were almost all black," said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.- 'Shameful secret' -Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged publicly in French villages."Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army," said Baron."Once a black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal," he said.This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation of white Americans by "scapegoating many African-American soldiers".Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.Racial stereotypes on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary."If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he never stayed near the rape scene. The next morning, he was gone," Roberts said.After her book "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France" appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her."People were angry at my book because they didn't want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI," she said. "Even if it means we have to keep on lying."AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the subject.