The British government confirmed Sunday it may scrap a big chunk of an overdue and over-budget high-speed rail line once touted as a way to attract jobs and investment to northern England. British media reported that an announcement is expected this week that the line will end in Birmingham – 100 miles (160 kilometers) from London -- rather than further north in Manchester. The Conservative government insists no final decision has been made about the embattled High Speed 2 project. But Cabinet minister Grant Shapps said it was “proper and responsible” to reconsider a project whose costs have ballooned because of high inflation driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. “We’ve seen very, very high global inflation in a way that no government could have predicted,” said Shapps, a former transportation secretary who now serves as the U.K.'s defense minister. “It would be irresponsible to simply spend money, carry on as if nothing had changed,” he told the BBC. The projected cost of the line, once billed as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, was estimated at 33 billion pounds in 2011 and has soared to more than 100 billion pounds ($122 billion) by some estimates. HS2 is the U.K.’s second high-speed rail line, after the HS1 route that links London and the Channel Tunnel connecting England to France. With trains traveling at a top speed of around 250 m.p.h. (400 kph), the new railway was intended to slash journey times and increase capacity between London, the central England city of Birmingham and the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds. Though it drew opposition from environmentalists and lawmakers representing districts along the route, the project was touted as a way to strengthen the north’s creaky, overcrowded and unreliable train network. The government hailed it as a key plank in its plan to “level up” prosperity across the country. The north of England, which used to be Britain’s economic engine, saw industries such as coal, cotton and shipbuilding disappear in the last decades of the 20th century, as London and the south grew richer in an economy dominated by finance and services. The government canceled the Birmingham-to-Leeds leg of HS2 in 2021 but kept the plan to lay tracks on the 160 miles (260 km) between London and Manchester. Former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a longtime champion of the project, said cutting it back even further “makes no sense at all.” “It is no wonder that Chinese universities teach the constant cancellation of U..K infrastructure as an example of what is wrong with democracy,” Johnson said. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said people in northern England were “always treated as second-class citizens when it comes to transport.” “If they leave a situation where the southern half of the country is connected by modern high-speed lines, and the north of England is left with Victorian infrastructure, that is a recipe for the north-south divide to become a north-south chasm over the rest of this century,” Burnham, a member of the opposition Labour Party, told British TV channel Sky News. The government has also delayed work on bringing the line all the way to Euston station in central London. When it opens, some time between 2029 and 2033, trains will start and finish at Old Oak Common station in the city’s western suburbs. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that would create “a ridiculous situation where a ‘high speed’ journey between Birmingham and central London could take as long as the existing route, if not longer.” “The government’s approach to HS2 risks squandering the huge economic opportunity that it presents and turning it instead into a colossal waste of public money,” Khan said in a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Shapps says HS2 cannot have ‘open-ended cheque’ as Sunak set to wield axe It would be ‘irresponsible’ to keep spending money on HS2, cabinet minister says How the timeline for banning petrol and diesel cars has shifted over the years

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Major wildfires burning for days in northeastern Greece and on the fringes of the country's capital have incinerated more tracts of forest and forced additional evacuations Thursday as firefighters struggled against strong winds and arid conditions to bring the multiple fronts under control. The wildfires have left 20 people dead over the last week. Eighteen of those, including two boys aged between 10 and 15, are believed to be migrants who crossed the nearby border with Turkey. Their bodies were found by firefighters near a shack in a burnt forest area in northeastern Greece. Sixty firefighters have been injured battling the flames, fire department spokesman Ioannis Artopios said Thursday. Elsewhere in Europe, fires on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands, northwestern Turkey near the border with Greece, Portugal and Italy were being brought under control, officials said. In Greece, dozens of firefighting aircraft, including from other European countries, assisted hundreds crews on the ground trying to beat back multiple fires raging across the country. On Wednesday alone, firefighters battled 99 separate blazes across the country, authorities said. In Greece’s northeast, a major fire in the Alexandroupolis area that forced numerous evacuations, including of the city’s general hospital, was burning for a sixth day with few signs of abating. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service, the Alexandroupolis fire had scorched more than 723 square kilometers (280 square miles) by Wednesday, making it one of the largest on European soil in several years. Copernicus is the EU space program’s Earth observation component and uses satellite imagery to provide mapping data. On the outskirts of Athens, a major fire that destroyed homes in the foothills of Mount Parnitha on Wednesday was racing across the mountain’s forested slopes and threatened the heart of a national park that's one of the last wooded areas near the Greek capital. Evacuation orders were issued for several outlying suburbs overnight into Thursday, while other neighborhoods were put on standby for possible evacuation. With firefighting forces stretched to the limit, Greece has asked other European countries for assistance. Germany, Sweden, Croatia and Cyprus have sent aircraft, while dozens of Romanian, French, Czech, Bulgarian and Albanian firefighters have been helping on the ground. Artopios, the Greek fire department spokesman, said 260 firefighters, including more than a dozen from France, were battling the Parnitha fire supported by a multinational force of 10 planes and 11 helicopters. Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian and Czech firefighters with vehicles were helping in the Alexandroupolis fire. With their hot, dry summers, southern European countries are particularly prone to wildfires. European Union officials have blamed climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Europe, noting that 2022 was the second-worst year for wildfire damage on record after 2017. Gale-force winds combined with hot, dry weather to whip up the flames over the past week in Greece, making the blazes exceptionally difficult to bring under control. Weather conditions this summer have been “the worst since meteorological data have been gathered and the fire risk map has been issued in the country,” Greece’s Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias said Wednesday. Extensive parts of the country have been placed at Level 5 - the highest for fire risk - seven times this year. Kikilias said that was double the number of 2021, four times that of 2019 and seven times more than in 2012. In Spain’s Tenerife, a fire that has scorched 150 square kilometers (58 square miles) was being brought under control by Wednesday night. “It’s a very tough battle that the firefighting teams are winning,” Canary regional government counselor Manuel Miranda said Wednesday evening. In Turkey, firefighters in the northwestern Canakkale province on Thursday brought a wildfire under control less than 48 hours after it erupted amid high temperatures and strong winds, Turkish Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said. Yumakli said the fire, which had forced the evacuation of 11 villages, had affected 40 square kilometers (15 square miles) including 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) of agricultural land. A firefighting volunteer who was injured and six other people who suffered from smoke inhalation were being kept under observation in hospitals, Yumakli said. “We are extremely happy that there was no loss of life,” Yamukli said. “However, we are heartbroken for other creatures of the ecosystem that were affected.” Shipping traffic through the Dardanelles Strait, a major maritime thoroughfare linking the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara, was being partially restored to one lane only, after being completely suspended as fire-dousing aircraft use the waterway to pick up water. Yumakli said another fire in central Turkey has also been brought under control and there were no other active wildfires in the country on Thursday. Two large fires in Portugal and a smaller one in Italy were brought under control by Thursday, those countries' authorities said, but temperatures - and the risk of new fires - remained high. ____ Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report. Read More Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide From Europe to Canada to Hawaii, photos capture destructive power of wildfires Tropical storm hits Caribbean, wildfires rage in Greece. What to know about extreme weather now ‘Frustrated’ British Museum boss says dealer did not mention more missing items

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MAY 2023