The El Niño phenomenon has not yet reached its peak intensity, which the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects to occur at the end of this year, and seawater temperatures in the tropical Pacific area considered the epicenter of the event are already at record levels. The anomaly in that zone exceeded three degrees Celsius in mid‑September and has risen to a level similar to the peak of the El Niño event 11 years ago, in November 2015.

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Colombian Julián Palacios Obregón spent 650 days in immigration detention in the United States. He was sick for most of that time. A month after being transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington state, he began vomiting and suffering diarrhea with fecal incontinence that forced him to wear diapers. Although he was prescribed antibiotics that temporarily improved symptoms caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the underlying problem repeatedly returned: he remained exposed to cloudy water and to food he often described as raw or foul-smelling.

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Among so many faces, Roberto Mosquera remembered one in particular the day he arrived in Eswatini, a small country tucked away in southern Africa. He kept seeing that face over the following 14 months, which passed slowly and unbearably in the compressed world between the white and gray walls of the maximum-security cell at Matsapha prison. The man is serious, tall, dark-skinned and wears round glasses. His name is Jabulani Kunene and he is the prison official in charge. For more than a year, Mosquera has asked him the same question every time he passes by: “How long are you going to keep me locked up here?” Kunene has always given him the same answer: “I don’t know, Roberto, I don’t know.”

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The catastrophic avalanche of rock and ice on Langtang Lirung mountain, on Nepal’s northern border — which caused 1,300 deaths and as a result of which, 22 days later, more than 5,000 people remain missing — was the result of a combination of factors that simmered until they triggered an unprecedented disaster in the Himalayas. A report published on September 17 by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the group of scientists that specializes in calculating the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, sheds light on the catastrophe. Among the factors, the authors note “unusually warm conditions before the failure, supporting enhanced snow and ice melt and more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow” around the site where the collapse occurred.

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