分类： world

On a Sunday morning that was supposed to bring excitement and lifelong memories for first-time skydivers, a catastrophic aviation disaster unfolded in northeastern France, leaving a community in mourning and families reeling from sudden, devastating loss. All 11 people aboard a skydiving sightseeing plane died when the aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff, an incident that official have confirmed is the deadliest skydiving-related aviation accident the country has seen in three decades.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez confirmed the identities of the victims: five experienced skydiving instructors, five first-time tandem jumpers, and the plane’s pilot. In a haunting detail that adds to the tragedy, many of the victims’ waiting family members were at the nearby Nancy-Essey airfield and watched the plane plummet to the ground directly in front of them. “Some of the victims’ families witnessed the aircraft falling with their own eyes. So there is tremendous emotion and an even greater psychological trauma,” Nunez told reporters in the aftermath of the crash.

According to officials, the crash occurred mere moments after the plane departed the airfield located on the outskirts of Nancy. The aircraft went down approximately 300 meters from the active runway, after suffering what local regional prefect Yves Séguy described as a sudden in-flight malfunction. “It fell almost vertically,” Séguy said, noting that the crash site narrowly avoided a nearby residential neighborhood. “Had it occurred just a few dozen meters away, the accident could have caused collateral casualties,” he added, a small stroke of fortune that prevented an even higher death toll.

Data from flight tracking service Flightradar24 aligns with official accounts, showing the plane banked sharply to the left immediately after lifting off, hitting the ground less than 60 seconds after departure. Investigators have confirmed the plane was a single-engine Pilatus PC-6, a model commonly used to transport skydivers, passengers and light cargo. Nancy Mayor Mathieu Klein confirmed that all five novice skydivers were scheduled to complete tandem jumps, the common introductory skydiving format that pairs a first-time jumper with a certified instructor strapped to the same parachute system.

Local resident John Curaku, speaking to French broadcaster BFM-TV, described the chilling moments he experienced from his nearby home. He told reporters he was in his yard when he heard the distinctive sound of an engine cutting out, followed immediately by a deafening impact. Rushing to the crash site to offer help, Curaku said he found no signs of life among the wreckage, with two of the victims’ bodies thrown several meters from the crumpled fuselage.

First responder and emergency services teams arrived at the scene within minutes, securing the wreckage and cordoning off the area to preserve evidence for the ongoing investigation. Local authorities have also deployed crisis counselors to provide immediate mental health support for traumatized family members and first responders who responded to the crash. France’s Paris prosecutor’s office has taken the lead on the official investigation into the cause of the disaster. While officials have not ruled out any potential causes, Nunez emphasized that investigators would not speculate on what led to the crash before preliminary forensic and technical analysis is complete.

A historic, all-time heat wave sweeping across Europe has left a trail of tragedy, disruption, and urgent warnings about the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change, with new official data confirming over 1,000 excess deaths in France alone at the event’s peak.

France’s national public health agency announced Sunday that the sharp, deadly uptick in mortality occurred between Wednesday and Friday of last week, when much of the country was trapped under unprecedented high temperatures. In the months leading up to the heat wave, France recorded an average of 900 to 1,000 daily deaths. But at the height of the extreme heat, that number jumped to more than 1,200 deaths on Wednesday, and climbed to over 1,400 deaths on both Thursday and Friday. The agency confirmed a minimum of 1,000 additional deaths across those three days, noting that the final toll is expected to rise as data on at-home fatalities is fully processed. Eighty-five percent of the excess deaths involved people aged 65 or older, with the steepest increases concentrated in the three-quarters of French territory placed under extreme heat red alerts.

As the heat dome shifted eastward across the European continent over the weekend, multiple nations toppled decades-old temperature records. In Germany, preliminary data from the German Weather Service (DWD) shows that a new all-time high nighttime temperature was set Sunday in the eastern Saxony community of Kubschütz, where temperatures never dropped below 29.4°C (84.9°F). That record came just hours after Möckern-Drewitz in Saxony-Anhalt set a new daytime high of 41.5°C (106.7°F), breaking a record that had been set just one day prior.

The extreme heat has also sparked dangerous wildfires across Germany, with two major blazes breaking out in forested areas still contaminated with unexploded World War II ammunition — turning routine firefighting into a deadly high-risk operation. In Gohrischheide in eastern Germany, one of the blazes ignited in a large forest still laced with leftover ordnance. Near the southwestern town of Traisen, a second large wildfire also broke out in an area contaminated with unexploded bombs and shells. Operations had to be paused after explosions rocked the fire zone, and specialized ordnance disposal teams were deployed to continuously evaluate risk for firefighters.

Across German population centers, emergency services were stretched far beyond normal capacity. Berlin fire department reported 500 additional ambulance dispatches on Saturday, nearly all tied to heat-related health emergencies. In a creative effort to cool overheated residents and tourists, Berlin police deployed two water cannons — typically used for crowd management during protests — in front of the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, spraying cooling water over crowds who gathered to beat the heat.

The extreme heat also inflicted widespread damage to German transportation infrastructure. High temperatures caused the joint sealant on tram tracks and switches across Leipzig to melt and clump, forcing a full suspension of all tram service through early Monday. National rail operator Deutsche Bahn issued an urgent weekend advisory urging passengers to cancel all non-essential travel, as highway concrete surfaces buckled and cracked across the country under sustained high temperatures.

The current heat wave extends across the continent, with other nations also facing major risks. Greece’s civil protection authority issued a “very high fire risk” warning for five regions on Sunday. The country, which has a dry, mountainous mainland and more than 100 populated islands that make wildfire containment particularly challenging, has recently adopted new satellite technology to speed up wildfire detection and response. In northern Europe, Denmark, which set new national temperature records on Saturday, was hit by severe thunderstorms in the wake of the extreme heat, with public broadcaster DR recording 1,156 lightning strikes across the country by Sunday morning.

A new rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution, a network of international climate scientists based in Europe, released Friday confirmed that the record-shattering heat and humidity across the continent would not have been possible without human-induced climate change. The study found that this level of extreme heat would have been effectively impossible to occur just 50 years ago, and current temperatures are at least 200 times more likely to occur today than they were just two decades ago.

On Sunday, Russian authorities confirmed that Ukraine had continued its intensifying campaign of long-range drone attacks across Russian territory, igniting a major blaze at a key southern oil refinery and leaving at least two civilians dead.

This latest wave of strikes forms part of Kyiv’s expanding strategic campaign targeting Russian fuel logistics and military supply chains, a push Ukrainian officials frame as a deliberate effort to force the Kremlin to engage in meaningful peace negotiations. According to Veniamin Kondratyev, governor of Russia’s Krasnodar Krai—located east of Moscow-occupied Crimea—falling debris from intercepted Ukrainian drones sparked the fire at the Slavyansk-na-Kubani refinery. Regional officials confirmed one fatality in Slavyansk-na-Kubani itself, with a second person injured in a neighboring rural settlement. Visuals shared across Russian social media platforms showed thick plumes of black smoke billowing from the facility, though the Associated Press has not yet been able to independently verify the authenticity of these images.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly claimed responsibility for the coordinated strikes, confirming that a second Russian refinery in the Yaroslavl region, roughly 430 miles northeast of the Ukrainian border, was also hit in the overnight operation. In a post on the Telegram messaging platform, Zelenskyy framed the attacks as part of what he calls Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” campaign against Russian war capacity. “Each strike means a reduction in the resources that fuel the Russian war machine, and another step toward peace,” he wrote.

Over the past several months, Ukraine has dramatically ramped up the frequency and scale of long-range strikes targeting Russian military industrial sites and energy infrastructure. The strategic goal of this campaign is twofold: to cut into Moscow’s revenue generated from energy exports that fund its full-scale invasion, now in its third year, and to bring the realities of the war home to the Russian public. Western officials familiar with the battlefield situation note that the campaign has already helped slow Russian offensive momentum on front lines in Ukraine and put sustained domestic and international pressure on the Kremlin.

The Slavyansk-na-Kubani refinery ranks among the largest oil processing facilities in southern Russia, with an annual crude processing capacity of nearly 4 million tons, per data published by its operating company. It also serves as a critical hub for petroleum product exports bound for global markets through Russian Black Sea ports, supplying fuel oil, naphtha, and marine fuel to international buyers.

Russian officials have not yet released any official confirmation of damage to the Yaroslavl region refinery. However, regional governor Mikhail Evraev announced Sunday morning that multiple key highways connecting Moscow to the regional capital city of Yaroslavl were temporarily shut down in response to what he described as “an enemy attack by Ukrainian drones.” Russia’s federal civil aviation authority also confirmed that Yaroslavl’s main airport temporarily suspended operations overnight, joining a number of other airports across southern and western Russia that implemented temporary flight ground stops during the assault.

The strikes were not limited to energy infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. In Russia’s Belgorod region, which shares a border with northeastern Ukraine, acting governor Alexander Shuvayev confirmed Sunday that a separate Ukrainian drone strike killed one civilian and injured a second.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that its air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 213 Ukrainian drones launched during the overnight wave of attacks, with intercepts reported over Russian mainland territory, occupied Crimea, and the Black and Azov seas. In a reciprocal escalation, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia launched its own massive overnight assault on Ukraine, deploying 142 long-range attack drones and eight short- and long-range missiles. Ukrainian air defenses successfully intercepted 125 of the drones and seven of the missiles, the service confirmed.

Coverage of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict is updated continuously on the Associated Press’ dedicated hub.