Thousands of soldiers, volunteers join cleanup efforts after Spain flooding kills more than 200
An arts and science centre that normally plays host to opera performances was transformed on Saturday into the nerve centre for a massive cleanup operation after catastrophic floods this week in eastern Spain claimed at least 207 lives.
Volunteers went to Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences for the first co-ordinated cleanup organized by regional authorities.
On Friday, the mass spontaneous arrival of volunteers complicated access for professional emergency workers to some areas, prompting authorities to devise a plan on how and where to deploy them.
Carlos Mazon, Valencian regional president, posted on X on Friday: “Tomorrow, Saturday, at 7 in the morning, together with the Volunteer Platform, we will launch the volunteer centre to better organize, (and) transport the help of those who are helping from the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia.”
Spain is also sending 5,000 more soldiers and 5,000 more police to the region of Valencia, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced Saturday, amid mounting criticism over the government’s response to the flooding.
Some 2,000 soldiers have already been deployed to search for dozens of people who are still missing and help survivors of the storm, which triggered a new weather alert in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, where rains are expected to continue during the weekend.
In some of the worst-hit areas, people have resorted to looting because they have no food or water. Police said on Friday they had arrested 27 people for robbing shops and offices in the Valencia area.
More than 90 per cent of the households in Valencia had regained power on Friday, utility Iberdrola said, though thousands still lacked electricity in cut-off areas that rescuers struggled to reach.
Officials said the death toll is likely to keep rising. It is already Spain’s worst flood-related disaster in more than five decades and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.
The worst flood-related disaster to hit Spain in more than five decades has killed more than 200 people and dozens were still unaccounted for, four days after torrential rains swept the eastern region of Valencia, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Saturday.
Marc Brimble, who lives in Catarroja, said people in the hard-hit town say this is the worst flooding they’ve ever seen.
In an interview on Wednesday with Nil Köksal, host of CBC’s As It Happens, he said the flash flooding followed about a year of drought in much of the country.
“The rivers were so dry and so full of debris and bits of trees and dried plants that when the rains came, it just washed over everything,” he said, adding that people in Catarroja were struggling to find drinking water because stores on the ground level were destroyed.
The extreme weather event came after Spain battled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.
As It Happens7:05Spain resident says deadly flooding has turned his town into a ‘disaster movie’
At least 95 people have been killed in Spain following devastating floods. Marc Brimble lives in the hard-hit town of Catarroja. In an interview with As It Happens host Nil Köksal, he describes residents trapped in their houses, cars stacked on top of each other, and water two metres high.
In Chiva and other parts of Valencia — Paiporta, Masanasa, Barrio de la Torre, Alfafar — vast amounts of mud flowed into houses and crawled into cars, smashing some vehicles apart and easily lifting and moving others.
The storm this week unleashed more rain on Chiva in eight hours than the town had experienced in the preceding 20 months. The deluge powered a flood that knocked down two of the four bridges in the town, and made a third unsafe to cross.
Rivers of water also wiped out thousands of hectares of lemon and orange orchards, the main products of export for Spain.
The waters have now receded and the Civil Guard divers are gone, but police keep searching the gorge, smashed homes and underground garages, concerned that the mud could be hiding more bodies.
“Entire houses have disappeared. We don’t know if there were people inside or not,” Mayor Amparo Fort told RNE radio.
The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo riverbed, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives, with many coming home from work on Tuesday evening.
The Valencia regional government has been criticized for not sending out flood warnings to mobile phones until 8 p.m. on Tuesday, when the flooding had already started in some places and well after the national weather agency issued a red alert indicating heavy rains.
People filled the streets of the village of Paiporta on Friday to try to clear the mud and debris left behind by powerful, deadly floods in the Valencia region of Spain.
Published at Sat, 02 Nov 2024 13:28:23 +0000
What ‘cancelling’ your dad’s vote says about the U.S. election’s gender divide
Can you actually cancel someone else’s vote? Not really, but in a tight presidential race in a deeply divided country, U.S. voters are still trying — or at least making light of it.
With the U.S. election just days away, social media is rife with people claiming to be “cancelling out” the votes of family members and friends with differing political views. It began with a Gen Z TikTok trend that later spread to X where voters have been posting tongue-in-cheek videos saying they’re cancelling the votes cast by their parents.
Specifically, most of the TikTok posts are about “voting to cancel your dad,” the implication often being that the voter’s father is more conservative. It’s also inspired a sub-trend of people posting about being grateful that they don’t have to cancel out a vote. (And, because it’s the internet, a sub-sub-trend of people sarcastically saying “how nice for you.”)
On X, formerly known as Twitter, the trend has broadened further, where there are also a number of posts about cancelling your partner’s vote.
“What do you mean you’re on your way to ‘cancel out your husband’s vote?’ You should be on your way to the courthouse. Divorce babe. Divorce,” wrote Lexi LaFleur Brown on a post with more than 1.6 million views.
The posts are generally light in tone, but experts have noted that they reflect the vast gender divide in U.S. politics and the role that could play in what polling experts have called one of the most gendered elections in history.
- This Sunday, Cross Country Checkup is asking: What would a Donald Trump victory mean to you? What would it mean for Canada? Fill out this form and you could appear on the show or have your comment read on air.
After Republican nominee Donald Trump said he would protect women as president whether they ‘like it or not,’ Democratic nominee Kamala Harris said the comment was ‘very offensive’ and showed the former U.S. president did not understand women’s ‘agency … and their ability to make decisions about their own lives.’
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appointed three of the justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who formed the conservative majority that overturned federal abortion rights. As the fallout from the 2022 decision spreads, he has taken to claiming at public events and in social media posts that he would “protect women” and ensure they wouldn’t be “thinking about abortion.”
As both campaigns sprint toward Tuesday’s presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is making the pitch that women should be free to make their own decisions about their bodies and that if Trump is elected, more restrictions will follow.
The TikTok videos point to a serious concern — the challenge of maintaining relationships across political lines — but do so in a really lighthearted manner, says Zorianna Zurba, a pop culture expert and assistant professor in the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“The choice here is drastic,” said Zurba. “They’re using the language of TikTok to make light of a very uncomfortable and very serious situation.”
Can the content creators you see on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms change how you vote? We spoke with content creators and experts in the U.S. to find out.
Walz’s daughter jumps on trend
In early voting so far, 1.2 million more women than men have voted across seven battleground states, according to data from analytics firm TargetSmart. That doesn’t necessarily translate into Democratic gains.
But in the 2020 presidential election, 55 per cent of women supported the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 110,000 voters. This year, men appear to be leaning toward Trump and women toward Harris, though the size of the gap varies across polls.
On Tuesday, Hope Walz jumped on the trend. The daughter of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz posted a video on the Kamala HQ TikTok account on why she doesn’t have to cancel out her dad’s vote.
“My dad is literally running for Vice President to protect the rights of women and girls, tackle climate change, lower costs for families, and make Kamala Harris the next President of the United States,” she wrote in the video, alongside a photo of her sitting on her dad’s shoulders as a baby.
By Friday it already had more than six million views.
Cancelling your husband’s vote
The gender divide is also the topic of a few recent ads encouraging female voters to make their own decisions. Pro-democracy organization the Lincoln Project recently released an ad called “The Secret,” in which two men think their wives are voting for Trump, but instead they vote for Harris.
In another ad narrated by Julia Roberts, for the Evangelical voting advocacy group Vote Common Good, a woman whose husband appears to be a Trump supporter secretly votes for Harris.
George Clooney narrates a second ad for the organization, in which male voters walk into a polling station saying “Let’s make America great again,” and one secretly votes for Harris after looking at his daughter.
“Before you cast your vote in this election, think about how it will impact the people you care about the most,” Clooney says as a young girl waves and says, “Daddy!” to the man voting.
There’s a very specific talking point coming out of Conservative and right-wing media, supported by the manosphere culture, that it “goes against God” to vote against your husband, says pop culture and digital media expert Shana MacDonald, the O’Donovan Chair in Communication at the University of Waterloo.
So it’s interesting, she says, how the Democratic campaign is responding with ads like these saying this is an issue of women’s rights.
“This is an issue of a dominant strain of sexism that is circulating and influencing and reforming women’s sense that they have a right to choose who they vote for, and it’s kind of dispelling that myth,” MacDonald said.
The ads have angered some Trump supporters, like political activist Charlie Kirk, who said on Megyn Kelly’s podcast this week that the “marital subversion tactic” represents “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family.”
The ‘manosphere’ is a digital phenomenon dedicated to a variety of men’s issues, including self-improvement, life skills, men’s rights activism and more. It’s a polarizing place, fuelled by political commentators, men’s forums, celebrity and social media influencers. This video is from the documentary Harder Better Faster Stronger. Watch it now on CBC Gem.
What’s at stake?
Harris “quite smartly” hasn’t made her own gender and the fact she could be the first female U.S. president a wedge issue, MacDonald says, explaining it would make her a target for what she sees as an increasing misogynistic backlash.
But women’s rights and reproductive justice have become a wedge issue amid the rise of an anti-woman sentiment in some large influencer cultures, such as the manosphere and Trad Wives, she added.
What do you mean you’re on your way to “cancel out your husband’s vote?” You should be on your way to the courthouse. Divorce babe. Divorce.
—@lexilafleur
“This is very clearly an election where bodily autonomy and reproductive justice rights are absolutely at stake, there’s no doubt,” MacDonald said.
“I think it’s really interesting how much this election has brought out really clear wedge issues and divisions that run along gender lines.”
Of course, you can’t actually cancel out someone’s vote, Zorba pointed out, explaining that votes are cumulative. However, she pointed out, if the trend “encourages people to get out and vote, that’s a good thing.”
Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000
