Flash Floods in Spain Leave More Than 70 Dead

 

Flash Floods in Spain Leave More Than 70 Dead

 

About 1,000 soldiers from emergency response units deployed to the affected areas, and the death toll was expected to rise after one of the worst natural disasters to hit the country in recent years.

 

By José Bautista and Isabella Kwai

José Bautista reported from Madrid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/spain-floods-valencia.html

Oct. 30, 2024

Updated 12:58 p.m. ET

 

At least 72 people have died and others were missing after devastating flash floods hit eastern Spain, according to the local authorities, in one of the worst natural disasters to hit the country in recent years.

 

The catastrophic floods, fueled by an unrelenting deluge that began on Monday, washed away cars, inundated homes and knocked out power across eastern Spain. Rescuers waded through neck-high waters to reach some residents.

 

In the town of Chiva in the eastern Valencia region, practically a year’s worth of rain fell over eight hours, Spain’s meteorological agency said on Wednesday, illustrating the ferocity of the storm. Other areas across the south and east saw more than a month’s worth of rain in less than 24 hours.

 

The severity of the disaster became more apparent on Wednesday as the regional authorities confirmed that 70 people had died in the Valencia region, where the storm battered cities, villages and towns along the mountainous coastline. Two other people died in the neighboring province of Castile-La Mancha, where at least five other people were missing in the municipality of Albacete, local officials said. It was the deadliest flooding disaster in Spain since 1996, when floodwaters in the Pyrenees swept away a campground, killing more than 80 people.

 

More remain missing, but the authorities in Valencia said that they could not give an exact figure. A phone line was set up to report missing people, they added, and residents were urged not to travel in the area. The death toll, officials said, was expected to rise.

 

Flooding also swept the region of Andalusia in southern Spain, which includes the cities of Seville and Málaga. The region received four times the amount of rain typical for October in a single day, Spain’s weather agency said.

 

Sign up for Your Places: Extreme Weather.  Get notified about extreme weather before it happens with custom alerts for places in the U.S. you choose. Get it sent to your inbox.

More than 1,000 soldiers from an emergency response team were sent to respond to the disaster, officials said, sharing videos of some people being airlifted from flooded areas into helicopters or waiting on rooftops.

 

“It’s been a disaster,” said Enrique Platero, a resident of Utiel, near Valencia, to the Spanish broadcaster RTVE. He said there had been no warning about the storm’s dangers. “It took us by surprise,” he said, turning away during the interview as tears came to his eyes.

 

Widespread areas appeared almost entirely submerged, and dozens of cars piled up in the flooding’s aftermath, according to footage released by the Civil Guard. Some buildings were reduced to sodden rubble.

 

The damage to roads and bridges left rescuers struggling to reach some areas, officials said on Wednesday. Some towns were still cut off by the storm, with local officials describing grim scenes as the death toll climbed. Fears were also rising for the condition of people missing.

 

“At the moment, we have a very negative outlook for those that remain missing, although of course we retain hope,” said Emiliano García-Page, head of the Castile-La Mancha region, to reporters on Wednesday.

 

“The town of Paiporta is cut off; nothing works,” said Maribel Albalat, Paiporta’s mayor, where dozens of people died, to the Actualidad Valencia, a local newspaper. “People are organizing themselves but there is no communication.”

 

The overflowing ravines and strong winds also damaged infrastructure supplying telecommunications and power in the region. About 155,000 customers were left without power, according to Iberdrola, an energy provider in Valencia, adding that workers were encountering difficulties in restoring service.

 

“It has been something out of the ordinary,” said Ricardo Gabaldón, the mayor of Utiel to RTVE, adding that helicopters and boats had been reaching stranded residents all afternoon. “The material damage is incalculable, but what worries us is the personal damage.”

 

Highways leading to the region’s capital, also named Valencia, were littered with debris and covered with mud, according to footage from local media, and the subway was flooded. Regional trains on Wednesday were halted, and schools were closed in several places.

 

The Spanish Parliament on Wednesday held a minute of silence to mourn the victims. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed in an address to help the flood-struck regions recover. “Together we are going to rebuild your streets, your squares, your bridges,” he said from Madrid. “All Spain cries with you,” he added.

 

The deluge is not yet over: More rain was expected on Wednesday, with Spain’s meteorological agency raising an emergency alert for the Valencia region to the highest level. A popular tourist destination, Valencia is also known for being a key agricultural producer, and grows citrus and other fruits and vegetables.

 

One union representing young farmers in the region, the Valencia branch of ASAJA, said that while it was too early to assess the floods’ economic impact on agriculture and livestock, it predicted that thousands of hectares of citrus, persimmons, vegetables, vines and other crops would lose their harvest this season.

 

Some areas recorded “historic accumulations of water,” the union said, and the force of the water in inland areas uprooted thousands of vines and other crops that had just gone through one of the driest years in history. Other farms nearer to the coast were also flooded, the union said.

 

Though storms are typical during the fall in Spain, local residents were shocked at the sheer amount of rain: more than 70 gallons per square yard in some villages. In the village of Chiva, more than 100 gallons per square yard of rain fell in eight hours, practically a year’s worth, Spain’s meteorological agency said.

 

The agency added that it expected some 40 gallons per square yard of rain before 6 p.m. local time on Wednesday over parts of Valencia, Andalusia and Murcia. The storm was moving toward the north and northwest of Spain, with rain expected to continue until at least Thursday.

 

Flooding is a complex phenomenon and while linking climate change to a single flood event requires extensive scientific analysis, scientists have said that climate change is causing heavier rainfall in many storms. Warmer atmosphere holds, and releases, more water.

 

Meteorologists have said that the rainfall in Spain is most likely the result of a sudden “cold drop,” known in Spanish as a “gota fría.” That happens when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, allowing the hotter, moist air at the surface to rise quickly and producing giant rain clouds. Then, the storm system pushes these moisture-rich clouds over land.

 

The Mediterranean is also getting hotter, which is making such rainfalls more violent and more frequent. In August, the sea hit its highest recorded temperature.

 

The record rainfall that led to devastating floods in Belgium and Germany in the summer of 2021 was made much more likely by global warming, scientists have determined.

 

Isabella Kwai is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news and other trends. More about Isabella Kwai

Dozens killed as heavy rains, flash floods slam Spain • FRANCE 24 English

Espagne : inondations meurtrières

Mass Evacuation in Spain! City washed away after severe flooding in Vale...

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Billions of Ways to Influence an Election

 

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Billions of Ways to Influence an Election

 

The world’s richest men have their own rocket fleets, their own media and their own schemes to succeed with Donald J. Trump.

 

David Streitfeld

By David Streitfeld

David Streitfeld has covered Silicon Valley, and the people it made wealthy, since the late 1990s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/technology/jeff-bezos-elon-musk-election.html

 

Oct. 30, 2024

Updated 12:41 p.m. ET

 

Entrepreneurs become legends when they make big bets on technology that pay off in a huge and dramatic way. Elon Musk is now applying that all-or-nothing philosophy to a presidential election, tying his reputation and perhaps his future to a win by Donald J. Trump.

 

Jeff Bezos, the reigning swashbuckler of the internet age until Mr. Musk came along, was playing a cooler game, content to let Mr. Musk take the headlines and the risk. Then last week Mr. Bezos ventured — well, stumbled — into the heart of the news.

 

Among his many properties is The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013. The paper’s editorial board was preparing to recommend the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, when Mr. Bezos canceled the endorsement at the last minute.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, just a ho-hum announcement of something not happening. Instead the greatest salesperson of the era, whose customer obsession had made Amazon into a colossus of modern retail, got the greatest customer rejection of a lifetime.

 

A quarter-million Post readers canceled their subscriptions, a figure first reported by NPR and then by The Post itself. That is about 10 percent of the total circulation. The speed and decisive force of the cancellations was a bit of a shock but also weirdly appropriate, said Danny Caine, author of “How to Resist Amazon and Why.”

 

“Amazon invented the whole notion of one-click culture, where you click a button and there’s a bunch of toilet paper on your porch,” he said. “You can’t get rid of a Tesla in your driveway with one click. But you can with the newspaper that Jeff Bezos owns.”

 

Those canceling said they felt Mr. Bezos was trying to curry favor with Mr. Trump, a charge he denied. The furor immediately exceeded any damage incurred by Mr. Musk since he endorsed Mr. Trump in July and became the former president’s most visible fan, cheerleader and acolyte.

 

If customers are rejecting the electric vehicles made by Mr. Musk’s car company, Tesla, for political reasons, it hasn’t clearly shown up in the sales numbers. Mr. Musk implicitly dismissed the notion on X on Tuesday, reposting an admirer’s note that said it wasn’t happening.

 

Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos and other extremely rich people are confronted with unusual opportunities and invisible perils in the tightest, most dramatic, chaotic and highest stakes political battle in modern times. Everyone has a stake in this election, of course, but the very wealthy have so much at stake — or at least think they do — that they are perhaps inevitably trying to shape it, too.

 

There has always been money in politics, and rich people who sought their reward in Washington. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first cabinet was known as “eight millionaires and a plumber.” But until recently, it was literally considered bad business for successful public figures to declare favorites too stridently and make too many demands.

 

Michael Jordan established the standard for many celebrities in 1990. The basketball superstar, who went to college in North Carolina, was asked about whether he would endorse Harvey Gantt, the Black candidate running to dethrone Jesse Helms, the Republican senator with a long opposition to civil rights.

 

“Republicans buy sneakers, too,” Mr. Jordan said. Mr. Helms narrowly beat Mr. Gantt.

 

Mr. Jordan later said it was an off-the cuff remark, a joke even, but he did not really back away from it. “I never thought of myself as an activist,” he said. “I thought of myself as a basketball player.”

 

Many billionaires now are activists. One reason is there are more of them — the ranks of U.S. billionaires are up 38 percent by one estimate since Mr. Trump first took office in 2016 — and they have even more money. For all the specter of antitrust and regulation, life has been very good for the rich and their companies. The stock market is perpetually at a record high.

 

Even this ocean of money has a limit, however. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who ranks just behind Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos as one of the richest men in the world, last year backed the presidential aspirations of Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican. Mr. Ellison spent at least $30 million but could not make Mr. Scott a viable candidate.

 

Mr. Ellison came up with the funding for his candidate but was otherwise quiet. Mr. Musk is anything but reticent and has become a full-scale surrogate for Mr. Trump, as well as one of his biggest donors. Speaking at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Mr. Musk told the crowd, “We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.”

 

Mr. Musk would no doubt like to get the government off his own back. His companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, are the subject of over 20 investigations or reviews, a New York Times examination found. Tesla’s push for autonomous driving is a particular focus for regulators. Just last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was investigating several self-driving crashes involving fog and dust.

 

Mr. Musk, who has offered himself to Mr. Trump as a sort of inspector general for government waste, has regularly tussled with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The commission has probed the entrepreneur’s 2022 purchase of X, then called Twitter. Mr. Musk did not show up for a deposition in September, leading to an S.E.C. request that sanctions be imposed on him.

 

Beyond the regulatory scrutiny, Mr. Musk is tied to the government through funding. NASA announced in June that SpaceX got an $843 million contract to “de-orbit” the space station when it is ready for retirement in a few years. SpaceX has contracts to launch military and spy satellites. It also received contracts in 2021 and 2022 worth a total of $4 billion to take humans to the moon twice. It is working on many other projects involving the government.

 

Mr. Bezos, too, has business with the government. Most notably, the U.S. Department of Justice is bringing Amazon to court, accusing it of antitrust violations.

 

When Mr. Trump was president, Amazon and its chief executive were sometimes the subject of his barbs. The company bid on a $10 billion cloud computing contract that the Pentagon awarded Microsoft. Amazon sued, saying Mr. Trump had undermined its bid. The contract was canceled. Ultimately four tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, got a part of the cloud deal.

 

The most vulnerable Bezos property in a new and vindictive Trump administration is probably the one he cares about most: his space company, Blue Origin. The company will compete with SpaceX and a third firm to provide launch services for national security rockets over the next five years.

 

On Friday, when The Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate, Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, had a brief meeting with Mr. Trump in Texas. Mr. Bezos did not respond to a request for comment but said in a piece he wrote in The Post on Monday that he knew this “would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision” and that the whole thing was a coincidence. That article drew over 24,000 comments, few of them favorable to Mr. Bezos.

 

A few hours later, Mr. Musk posted on X: “Kudos to @JeffBezos.” It’s possible he was tweaking Mr. Bezos, like the time an interviewer asked about him and Mr. Musk responded “Jeff who?” Mr. Musk did not respond to a message for comment.

 

For Gordon L. Johnson II, a New York securities analyst and die-hard Tesla skeptic, everyone is acting rationally: “They’re trying to save their tails.”

 

The best-case scenario for Mr. Musk if Mr. Trump wins, he said, “is that Trump says, ‘Forget about the open cases the D.O.J. and S.E.C. have against you,’ ” he said. “The risk if Kamala wins is that the current investigations continue.”

 

As for Mr. Bezos, he is also doing the sensible thing, Mr. Johnson said.

 

“If you want to protect your business interests, cowardice is a rational thing,” he said. “We’ve never had a president threatening the things Trump has threatened.”

 

Mr. Johnson knows he, too, must behave rationally.

 

“I have a ‘sell’ rating on Tesla,” he said. “If Trump wins and Musk is in government, who knows what is going to happen to his enemies. I have a 4-month-old son and Daddy going to jail would be a problem. I’m not rich. I’d drop my coverage of Tesla.”

 

Which would be another win for Mr. Musk.

 

David Streitfeld writes about technology and the people who make it and how it affects the world around them. He is based in San Francisco. More about David Streitfeld

How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter | NYT Journalists Kate Conger and Ryan M...

Review

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter review – the ego has landed, just not on Mars

This article is more than 1 month old

New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac paint a damning portrait of the billionaire who turned the social media platform into a smaller business and a larger cesspool

 

Andrew Anthony

Sun 29 Sep 2024 18.00 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/29/character-limit-how-elon-musk-destroyed-twitter-review-kate-conger-ryan-mac

 

If Elon Musk is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker) and the hypersensitive ego.

 

All of these sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this damning account.

 

As the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on Musk’s controversial acquisition of the social media platform Twitter, now renamed X, which the authors describe as “a new, harsher and much more cynical social media company”. It seemed an unlikely development for someone who became the richest person in the world through building extraterrestrial rockets and electric cars, but Musk started out as an internet entrepreneur making his first fortune with an online city guides business, before becoming even more filthily rich from the sale of his share in PayPal.

 

He was also a Twitter addict, one of those people who couldn’t let a day pass – and often an hour – without posting his opinion or reposting someone else’s. In a previous era the gilded classes liked to demonstrate their affluence and influence with the ownership of newspapers. But as early as 1998 Musk had seen the writing on the screen.

 

“I think the internet,” he declared back then, “is the be-all and end-all of media.”

 

Although Twitter wasn’t the be-all and end-all of anything other than cultural warfare, by the end of the last decade it was established as a vital resource for tens of millions around the globe, and the company aspired to rival Facebook. Its chief executive was Jack Dorsey, a curious hippy-billionaire given to gnomic statements, who tried to navigate a path for the platform between the jagged rocks of libertarian principle and liberal concern. It wasn’t an entirely successful strategy, and a divided board eventually encouraged his exit.

 

His successor, Parag Agrawal, was a devoted technocrat who seemed to believe that all solutions to the toxic social conflicts associated with the platform could be found in better coding. But he never really got a chance to make his mark because he was immediately shown the door when Musk bought the company for $44bn just over two years ago. Or rather he was legally compelled to buy it after making an inflated offer from which, despite his best efforts, he was unable to back out. The court case that clarified Musk’s obligation also revealed a cache of text messages the billionaire sent relating to the acquisition. They show a rash, impatient character given to bouts of intimidation, grandstanding, depression and megalomania.

 

According to the authors, he became obsessed with becoming the most followed contributor on his own platform

 

He practically forced Twitter to sell to him without any due process, and then complained long and hard that he hadn’t had the opportunity to assess the company’s true worth. Nor did he have any kind of coherent plan about where to take the business. He loathed its advertising model, and set about alienating the companies that provided most of Twitter’s income, yet his alternative – raising money through a verification system – was ill-conceived and counterproductive.

 

 

The more revenue declined, the more he stripped the workforce, thus losing expertise that in turn stymied efforts to reform the business. As he tweeted six months after the purchase: “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”

 

The justifying cause to which he lays claim is free speech, a noble concept that tends to splinter on impact with complex reality.

 

While the authors may be a touch too inclined to see any questioning of liberal shibboleths as tantamount to hate speech, there’s little doubt that if Twitter always had its nasty elements it has become a larger cesspool, if smaller business, under Musk.

 

Throughout it all, with only minor exceptions, he carries on tweeting – or what are we supposed to call it now, X-ing? According to the authors, he became obsessed with becoming the most followed contributor on his own platform, launching a frenzied investigation when the numbers began tailing off, convinced that disgruntled members of the old regime had thrown a digital spanner in the works.

 

There is growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health, and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise

 

At one point, when a tweet he makes supporting one Super Bowl team gets less attention than President Biden’s backing of the same team, he walks out of the event and flies to San Francisco to oversee efforts to find out how this presidential scene-stealing had been allowed to happen.

 

There is growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health, and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise. The kind of polarised and insular thinking that algorithms on platforms such as Twitter/X are primed to spread is in a way personified by Musk, who has persuaded himself that he is on a crusade to save America and the world from what he calls the “woke mind virus”.

 

It’s not as if there aren’t troubling aspects to some of the more self-righteous social justice movements, but Musk has climbed into bed with Donald Trump, both men citing popular support while being chiefly focused on self-enrichment and the gratification of their overweening vanity.

 

By the end of this book, you can’t help but feel that Mars may well be the right place for this strange and obscenely wealthy character.

 

Elon Musk suffers 'billions in losses' after failed Twitter takeover

Lawfare Daily: ‘How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter’ with Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Tyler McBrien, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac

Thursday, September 19, 2024, 8:00 AM

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily---how-elon-musk-destroyed-twitter--with-kate-conger-and-ryan-mac

 

Tyler  McBrien

Kate Conger

Ryan Mac

 

On April 14, 2022, New York Times technology reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac woke up to a stunning four-word tweet from Elon Musk’s Twitter account: “I made an offer.” Having long covered the technology and social media beat, they read Musk’s terse post as the “unbelievable but inevitable culmination of two storylines we had pursued for a decade as journalists in Silicon Valley.”

 

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien spoke to Conger and Mac about the cloak-and-dagger corporate dealings that preceded the offer, as well as the drama that unfolded after the ink dried, which they reported in detail in their new book, “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.” They discussed Musk’s predecessors—Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal—as well as the platform’s troubled history of content moderation, and why the billionaire wanted it all for himself.