A sparsely populated area of Alaska home to hundreds UFO and ‘bigfoot’ style sightings has also seen 20,000 people disappear since 1970.

While many have a heard of the Bermuda Triangle, a patch of ocean in the Caribbean known for mysterious airplane and boating disasters, the so-called Alaskan Triangle has managed to slip largely under the public radar, despite having a missing persons rate more than double the national average. 

Located between Juneau, Anchorage and the small town of Barrow, the area is reportedly a hotbed of paranormal activity.

Explanations for the strange phenomenon have ranged from everything from alien activity to powerful electromagnetic fields in the area, similar to those found in the Bermuda Triangle. 

Local legends refer to a ‘sasquatch’ creature terrorizing towns. This includes one settlement called Portlock on the southern edge of the Kenai Peninsula which was abandoned in the 1950s after villagers were ‘attacked and killed’ by an unknown creature they called the Nantinaq.

In recent years however, the area has been the backdrop to thousands of unexplained vanishings.

Despite being just one per cent inhabited, Alaska has far and away the most missing people compared to any other state with  an average of 42.16 per 100,000, according to World Population Review.

The next highest state for missing persons is Arizona with 12.28, double the national average of 6.5 people per 100,000. 

One of the first disappearances to pique interest in the Alaska Triangle took place in 1972, when U.S. Reps. Hale Boggs and Nick Begich along with an aide and their pilot disappeared following a suspected plane crash.

The group was traveling from Anchorage to Juneau when they are thought to have gone down, though no wreckage or any bodies were ever found despite almost 40 days of searches. 

More recently Shanna Oman, 43, disappeared while visiting a friend in Fairbanks on June 3, 2019. Oman had made arrangements to get a ride home with a friend, but never materialized or returned home.

She left without any belongings or her dog and her disappearance has perplexed authorities who searched for days using helicopters and canine units. 

Even experienced outdoorsmen are not safe. In 2011, mountain rescuer Gerald DeBerry, 43, went out with a group in the White Mountains about 70 miles north of Fairbanks to search for a missing woman but never returned from the expedition.

A year later his ATV was discovered with the engine switched off, but no sign of its owner.

Various conspiracy theories have been posited as an explanation to the mass disappearances in the area. 

Field researcher Ken Gerhard told the History Channel that the triangle could be a ‘vile vortice’, a lozenge-shaped area with increased electromagnetic force.

He said: ‘The theory is that these particular areas are supercharged with geo electromagnetic energy and that abundance of electromagnetic energy results in some strange things’.’

A new Discovery documentary has interviewed people with some of the most compelling paranormal experiences. They include Wes Smith who saw ‘very strange’ triangular objects flying without emitting any sound.

He said: ‘It’s like everything you’ve ever been taught has gone out of the window, because how is that possible?’

UFO expert Debbie Ziegelmeyer told the Daily Star that Alaska’s sparse population makes it ‘attractive’ to extraterrestrials. 

‘They can pretty much go where they want,’ said Debbie, who is the Star Team Investigator for MUFON . ‘That’s the attraction of Alaska.’

MUFON believes that aliens could be trying to spy on the military technology on display across the Alaskan Triangle and points to a rise in UFO sightings since World War Two. 

One of the biggest disappearances was the loss of 44 military personnel aboard a a Douglas C-54 Skymaster en route from Alaska to Montana. Despite one of the biggest joint search and rescue missions by Canadian and American authorities, no trace has ever been found.

Meanwhile, cryptozoologist Cliff Barackman told the outlet that ‘anything, of any size,’ could be hiding in the Alaskan wilderness. 

He said: ‘With so much fantastic habitat and so few people to compete with, Sasquatches basically have the run of Alaska’.

More than seven in 10 Americans believe the Biden administration is withholding information about UFOs, a DailyMail.com poll has revealed.

And nearly four in 10 think that Earth has been visited by aliens from another planet in the past fifty years, according to the survey. 

We put several UFO-themed questions to 1,000 voters following a series of unprecedented Congressional hearings and a NASA investigation into unidentified craft flying in our skies.

More than four in 10 respondents said they would feel safer if Donald Trump were President of the US if aliens were to invade Earth, while a third said they would feel safer under Joe Biden. The rest were unsure.

J.L Partners conducted the poll from September 15 through 20, asking questions to Americans by phone, text and in its dedicated app.

Participants ranged in age from 18 to over 65. Scarlett Maguire, Director at JLP, said: ‘Biden’s approval rating isn’t the only thing that has fallen to Earth recently. 

‘Only four in 10 Americans believe recent reports of UFOs are human in origin, and just one in four rule out extra-terrestrials having visited in the last 50 years. 

‘And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for a demographic that embraces astrology, 18-29-year-old women are one of the groups most likely to think we have already had a close encounter of the third kind.’

‘As with crime and the economy, the public’s trust in the Biden administration’s handling of UFOs doesn’t survive first contact. 

‘Even Democrats don’t believe they have been told everything about UFOs. And when Mars attacks, there is only one man in town to save the day: more Americans – including independents – would choose Trump over Biden to defend them.’

When asked about the recent strange sightings by US Navy pilots, a total of 27 percent said they were ‘probably alien in origin.’

A 41 percent majority said the strange flying objects were of human origin, and 32 percent said they did not know.

However, males, Black voters, non-graduates and Republicans were among the highest groups to believe the sightings were extraterrestrial in origin.

The poll revealed that more Americans than not believe the Biden Administration is withholding information about UFOs. 

More than 66 percent of Republicans answered ‘definitely’, compared to just 22 percent of Democrats.

DailyMail.com also asked respondents if aliens attacked Earth, who do they think we would be safer under, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Forty-three percent voted for Trump, 32 percent said Biden and 25 percent gave ‘don’t know’ as their answer. 

Every age, race, education level and political party chose Trump. 

Trump appeared on the ‘Hugh Hewitt’ podcast this month, where he said he was briefed on UFOs during his presidency. 

The former president explained how he spoke with ‘a couple of people from the Air Force’ who experienced strange objects in the sky.

When asked if he believes in them, Trump responded: ‘I have, I always have an open mind.’

Biden has steered clear of the topic in interviews.

In 2021, the president was asked about Barak Obama’s statements that there is footage and records of objects in the sky — these unidentified aerial phenomena – but said he does not know what they are.

Biden responded: ‘I would ask him again.’

However, earlier this year, he announced an interagency group to look into unidentified objects in US airspace.

White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby, who briefed reporters in February, announced the formation of the inquiry team. 

‘The president, through his national security adviser, has today directed an interagency team to study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks,’ Kirby said.

He explained that the team will include ‘every element’ of the government and stressed its formation was intended to ‘redouble’ the United States’ efforts to understand and, hopefully, prevent incidents with what he described as ‘high-altitude, low-speed craft.’

A tranche of UFO videos, including some never-before-seen, were quietly released by the US Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the country.

The agency uploaded 10 videos showing craft moving strangely in our skies.

The videos were released on August 9 without warning, a press release or much in the way of context, only to be discovered by UFO enthusiasts and online investigators last week.

The videos document a fighter jet pursued by a baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider and yet another apparent floating orb, hovering this time near a parked 16-wheeler truck.

But the enigmatic nature of the drop — which offered little detail regarding the times and locations of these sightings, plus more than a few sweeping redactions — has left more questions than answers.

MEMOIR

High Caucasus

by Tom Parfitt (Headline £25, 332pp)

The children arrived at school on September 1, 2004, the first day of the school year, ‘carrying new satchels and bunches of flowers for their teachers . . .’

One of the first-graders, seven-year-old Dzera Kudzayeva, had been chosen for the ‘first bell’ ritual, in which a new girl is hoisted on the shoulders of one of the oldest boys and rings a handbell. The town was called Beslan.

Shortly after the children assembled, the militants arrived, jumping off a flat-bed truck, firing automatic rifles in the air and shouting Allahu Akbar! 

They shot two security guards and then took hundreds of children and their teachers hostage inside the school. 

Days passed; the situation became chaotic, with local men arming themselves with guns, and Russia’s ruthless special forces, Spetsnaz, arriving.

The militants were Chechens, seeking revenge in the pro-Russian Christian republic of North Ossetia for the countless brutalities Russia had inflicted on their own Muslim homeland of Chechnya, paying brutality back with even worse brutality.

They released a few breastfeeding mothers and their babies, but the rest of the captive children were made to strip to their underwear, herded into a baking hot gymnasium and denied drinking water. They were forced to drink their own urine.

Finally, chaos erupted, bombs exploded, fire broke out and the building was stormed — resulting in the deaths of 333 people, including 186 children. 

Parfitt, a correspondent in Moscow for British newspapers, saw it all.

‘In a man’s arms, a girl of nine or so had blood trickling from the corners of her mouth . . . the corpses of four children lay covered in sheets . . . a man in camouflage with his fists raised in bloody rags . . .’

Many journalists witness dreadful things to bring us the news, but Beslan was an especially hideous massacre of the innocents. 

Even though Parfitt insists, bravely, that he didn’t suffer from PTSD afterwards, he certainly struggled.

Soon there came recurring nightmares, especially one in which he saw a mother who had just lost her child in the massacre, falling to the ground in slow motion, ‘floundering, plunging before my helpless sight. Three seconds torn from a reel of terror and decelerated into endless purgatory.’

One evening, ‘I was pulling on my socks when I began gabbling incoherently’. He decided he had to do something. 

And so he did what many traumatised survivors have done: he turned to nature, to mountains, to forests and rivers, and to the slow, wordless magic of a very, very long walk.

He would trek from end to end across the Caucasus mountain range, through its many troubled but beautiful republics, like Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya itself: eight regions in all, with the Foreign Office advising against visiting all but two of them.

Parfitt hoped to experience a more tranquil region, to find his own peace, and try to understand how something so atrocious could have happened.

The result is this book, High Caucasus, one of the most harrowing, beautifully written and finest accounts of a mountain trek that I have ever read — an instant classic. 

You might describe it as a secular pilgrimage in search of some kind of salvation, or at least partial healing and understanding. 

Parfitt comes to absolutely love this landscape: ‘The North Caucasus had cast a spell over me that no place has matched, before or since.’

He vividly evokes a world where life is very tough, but so are the people: a world where Abkhazian women trek miles across the border to sell armfuls of mimosa blossoms for a few roubles to the Russians, while the menfolk shoot bears and then ‘sell the fat for people to rub on their chests when they’re ill’.

He meets numerous jolly, if often tipsy, shepherds with huge moustaches, wearing sheepskin jackets, spending months up in the high summer pastures with their flocks, defending them from wolves and sleeping in sparse huts. 

They are always keen to press vodka upon this exotic foreign walker, and discuss the world together.

An orthodox priest tells him he has heard that London is very bad for crime. ‘East 17,’ he said. ‘Same as the group.’ ‘Ah,’ says Parfitt, ‘Walthamstow.’

There are many such comic moments, as when he fears he’s heading into a gunfight, hearing bullets fly, but a local assures him: ‘More likely a wedding.’

Soon he encounters ‘a pristine blue Rolls-Royce Phantom with a man sitting on the passenger window and firing a Kalashnikov into the air’. All very cheery, nothing to worry about.

Parfitt concludes his great adventure with the feeling that history is something all peoples must both remember and forget, so as not to be trapped into attitudes of smouldering hatred and longing for revenge.

And yes, nature heals, as do long days with simple but far from stupid people.

At last the Caucasus comes to mean not just the horrors of Beslan, but also ‘a curtain of cloud rising like smoke over a ridge . . . a bowl of mulberries on a sunlit windowsill’, while ‘above all, filling the horizon from west to east in a chain of wonder, rises the frosty palisade of the mountains: vast, sparkling, immutable’. 

A magical book.

• Researchers found seeing someone yawn makes people more vigilant to threats 
• Previous study found seeing yawns increased people’s ability to detect snakes

By Sophie Freeman

Published: 17:41 EDT, 19 September 2023 | Updated: 19:34 EDT, 19 September 2023

They used to live in caves, hunt their food and were generally tougher than modern-day humans.

But a new study finds if you have Neanderthal genes, you are twice as likely to develop a life-threatening form of Covid. 

DNA from the species that went extinct around 40,000 years ago is associated with autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes and prostate cancer.

A team of Italian researchers found people with three Neanderthal gene variations were twice as likely to have severe pneumonia and three times as likely to be hospitalized with a ventilator after contracting the virus. 

While the findings were part of an experiment, people can investigate how much Neanderthal DNA they have using commercial ancestry tests.

Neanderthals were a close human ancestor who mysteriously died around 40,000 years ago. 

The species lived in Africa with early humans for millennia before moving across to Europe around 300,000 years ago. 

They were later joined by humans, who entered Eurasia around 48,000 years ago, and mated, which led to some genes appearing in humans today.

The new study, published in the journal iScience, was led by researchers with the nonprofit Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research.

The team analyzed a sample of nearly 1,200 people in the Bergamo province, home to the pandemic’s epicenter in early 2020.

Scientists found that 33 percent of people in Bergamo with the Neanderthal haplotype, a set of DNA variants along a single chromosome that tend to be inherited together, developed severe cases of Covid. 

More than 75 percent of the participants were born in the Bergamo province, chosen as the sample region due to the severe cases and deaths associated with Covid.

In March 2020 alone, 670 people died in this city of 120,000 inhabitants and almost 6,000 in the province of the same name — five or six times the normal toll for that time of year. 

The team conducted an ORIGN test during the experiment, which included breaking down each subject’s ancestry. 

The three variants were identified on chromosome 3, known as the 3p21.31 locus.

‘The lead variant at this locus lies in an intron of LZTFL1 and is in linkage with markers spanning a cluster of inflammatory genes, including CCR9, CXCR6, and XCR1,’ reads the study.

A 2020 study found similar results, which stated having Neanderthal genes could make you more at risk from severe Covid.

In a study of 3,199 hospital patients with coronavirus in Italy and Spain, researchers found the genetic signature was linked to a more severe illness. 

Lead author Professor Hugo Zeberg, from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, said: ‘The increase in risk is 60 to 70 percent if you carry one copy of the Neanderthal variant and three times the risk if you have two copies – one from your father and one from your mother.

‘Later studies estimate the risk increase to be even higher, with twice the risk if you have one copy and up to a five-fold increase if you have two copies.’

The gene variant was first found in the remains of a Neanderthal in Croatia some 50,000 years ago and continues to be found in millions of modern-day humans.

Not everyone has this variant – it is most common among people of South Asian ethnicity, of whom around 50 percent have it.

This difference may contribute to the differences in severity of Covid-19 that have been observed between different populations. 

It is less common in Europe, where about 16 percent of people carry it.

Bangladesh has the highest number of carriers at 63 percent.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE WEIMAR YEARS 

by Frank McDonough (Apollo £25, 592pp)

A Munich housewife dragged a suitcase full of banknotes to her local grocery store. She left it outside while she went in to do some shopping. When she came out, someone had stolen the luggage, but had tipped out the worthless money.

This was in 1923, at the height of hyperinflation in Germany. A loaf of bread cost 700 marks in January, 100,000 in May, two million in September, 670 million in October and 80 billion in November. A cup of coffee costing 5,000 marks was worth 8,000 marks by the time you’d drunk it.

The jacket of McDonough’s brilliant new book on the Weimar years (a prequel to his acclaimed two-volume The Hitler Years), shows a photo of German children playing on a street, using blocks of worthless banknotes to build a castle. Those notes also made good wallpaper.

What had gone wrong to cause this economic madness? McDonough tells the whole complicated story of the Weimar Republic with superb mastery of his material, lavishly illustrated with full-page photos of mass protests and rallies, and a succession of Chancellors with moustaches, leading inexorably to the rise of the dictator with the moustache.

Frame by frame, through 15 years of well-intentioned but chaotic democracy, we watch the ground being laid for the catastrophe of the Hitler regime.

What this book shows with terrifying clarity is that everything in global politics connects. The seeds of disaster were sown in 1919. The Allied victors of World War I, determined to punish Germany for their ‘war guilt’, demanded enormous, crippling reparations payments.

Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was obliged to pay 20 billion gold marks by 1921, then two billion per year for the next five years, rising to four billion for the following four years, then six billion per year till 1963.

Germany squealed and protested and felt utter revulsion for this punishment. For one thing, it didn’t accept guilt for having started the war. Nor did lots of Germans even accept that Germany had lost the war, as their territory was never conquered. They kept requesting ‘payment holidays’ from the Allies.

The Prime Minister Lloyd George took pity on them, advising the French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré that this merciless ‘pauperisation of the German people’ was counterproductive. Poincaré strongly disagreed. He would not let up on his extortionate demands. When the Germans started overprinting money in 1922, thus lowering the value of its currency, Poincaré thought they were bankrupting themselves on purpose to wriggle out of the payments. So France carried out its threat of invading and occupying the Ruhr area until Germany paid up.

It was at this humiliating moment that the German government instigated a policy of ‘passive resistance’. Germans were encouraged to go on strike and cease to do business with the Allies. And how did the government finance this policy? By using 30 factories to print bank notes night and day to pay workers and businesses: a version of the ‘furlough’ system. It was a disaster. At the height of the craziness, the highest-denomination was a 100-trillion-mark banknote.

With hindsight, we know that any democracy — however chaotic — was better than the evil dictatorship and killing machine that would follow. But McDonough shows how the Weimar system was fraught with flaws from the outset.

This book acts as a salutary warning of the dangers of proportional representation. During the years from 1918 to 1933, there were just two presidents (Ebert until 1925 and Hindenburg until 1933), but 20 different coalition governments, under a succession of Chancellors who lasted for an average of nine months each.

There were far too many political parties, each with its own acronym, making some of these pages a bewildering mass of capital letters.

Forty-one parties contested the 1928 elections. This was an unworkable fragmentation of politics, whose failure Hitler pounced on to argue for the need for a single strong ‘Fuhrer’. He blamed ‘the November Criminals’ (as he called the politicians who’d signed the Versailles treaty) for unleashing an era of poverty and chaos.

If only the New York Times had been right in 1924. When Hitler came out of his spell in jail after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, they wrote: ‘It is believed he will retire to private life and return to Austria.’ If only the pledge signed by Germany, France and Belgium in the Locarno Treaties of 1925, that they would ‘never attack each other again,’ had been kept.

Thanks to a few moderate, adaptable, fundamentally good politicians, particularly Gustav Stresemann (Chancellor from August to November 1923, then Foreign Minister till his too-early death in 1929), constructive talks were opened up between Germany and the U.S., who came up with the Dawes Plan, then the Young Plan to help Germany meet its (new, slightly lowered) reparations payments by managing its own economy better.

But always in the background you hear the drumbeat of the fledgling Nazi party and the increasing success of Hitler and Goebbels’s propaganda method: ‘Find out what people hate and make them hate it more.’

Another inbuilt flaw of the Weimar Republic was Clause 48 of its Constitution, which granted the president powers to appoint and dismiss elected governments, dissolve parliament and suspend civil rights during times defined by him as a ‘national emergency’.

President Hindenburg and his inner circle felt a ‘supreme indifference’ towards sustaining democratic government. In the early 1930s, they were basically running Germany themselves. This paved the way for a dictatorship.

It was Weimar’s penultimate Chancellor Franz von Papen who won Hindenburg over to Hitler, seeing that his popularity was rising inexorably. ‘It is my unpleasant duty,’ Hindenburg said to his circle in January 1933, ‘to appoint this fellow Hitler as Chancellor.’ He stipulated that it must be of a ‘national coalition’. To which we can only utter a hollow laugh.

Those 13 Weimar years had been politically chaotic, but they allowed a remarkable cultural and artistic freedom to flourish. Although this is mainly a political book, McDonough dips in and out of the cultural life.

There were 899 cabaret venues in Berlin in 1930. The all-night dancing, the uninhibited cross-dressing, the liberal attitude towards homosexuality, the wonderful freedom of artistic expression in movements such as the Bauhaus, all had their 13 years to breathe freely, before being snuffed out by puritanical, racist and philistine Hitler.

Yes, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing rise of unemployment didn’t help the Weimar Republic, but McDonough stresses this was not the sole cause of its death and the rise of Nazism.

Britain and the U.S. suffered the same economic crash, but managed to avoid a Fascist dictatorship. He believes Hindenburg’s decision in 1930 to create a presidential authoritarian regime opened the path for Hitler — a catastrophe for Germany and the world.

Some 10,000 people are still missing in Libya after ‘catastrophic’ floods obliterated entire neighbourhoods, with officials warning the death toll is ‘huge’ and could end up in the thousands. 

Mediterranean storm Daniel hit the county on Sunday night and wreaked havoc and flash flooding in towns across in eastern Libya but the worst hit was Derna, where heavy rainfall broke dams and washed away entire communities.

There are still areas that rescuers are struggling to reach in the city and many of the thousands who are missing there are believed to have been carried away by the fast-paced and churning waters after two upstream dams burst.

‘The situation is catastrophic,’ said Othman Abduljaleel, the health minister in Libya’s eastern government. ‘The bodies are still lying on the ground in many parts (of the city). Hospitals are filled with bodies. And there are areas we have yet to reach.’

Authorities estimated earlier that as many as 2,000 people may have perished in Derna alone. The Ambulance and Emergency Authority, which coordinates search and rescue efforts, said about 2,300 people died in Derna but did not clarify what that figure was based on.

Tamer Ramadan, Libya envoy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said 10,000 people were missing after the unprecedented flooding. 

‘Our teams on the ground are still doing their assessment (but) from what we see and from the news coming to us, the death toll is huge,’ he told reporters in Geneva via video link from Tunis.

‘It might reach to the thousands,’ he said in English. ‘We don’t have a definite number right now.’

Referring to Friday’s devastating earthquake in Morocco, on the other side of North Africa, Ramadan said the situation in Libya was ‘as devastating as the situation in Morocco.’

Ossama Hamad, Prime Minister of the government in eastern Libya, said that many of the missing were believed to have been carried away after two upstream dams burst. He said the devastation in Derna is far beyond the capabilities of his country.

After more than a decade of chaos, Libya remains divided between two rival administrations: one in the east and one in the west, each backed by different militias and foreign governments. The conflict has left the oil rich North African country with crumbling and inadequate infrastructure.

Derna was declared a disaster zone and more bodies were still under the rubble in the city’s neighborhoods, or washed away to the sea, according to Abduljaleel, the health minister.

Residents posted videos online showing major devastation. Entire residential blocks were erased along Wadi Derna, a river that runs down from the mountains through the city center. Multi-story apartment buildings that once stood well back from the river were partially collapsed into mud.

Abduljaleel said the city was inaccessible and bodies were scattered all over, according to Libya’s state-run news agency. 

‘The situation was more significant and worse than we expected. An international intervention is needed,’ he was quoted as saying.

Emergency responders, including troops, government workers, volunteers and residents were digging through rubble to recover the dead. They also used inflatable boats to retrieve bodies from the water. Excavators and other equipment have yet to arrive in Derna.

But for some rescuers, their efforts to save others had fatal consequences in a sign of just how dangerous the work is. The Libyan Red Crescent said three of its workers had died while helping families in Derna.

Many residents described scenes of chaos when floods hit the centre. They heard loud explosions at night and realized that dams outside the city collapsed, sending a wall of water that ‘erased everything in its way,’ said Ahmed Abdalla, a Derna resident.

World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris meanwhile described the situation in Libya as ‘a calamity of epic proportions’.

Experts have described storm Daniel – which killed at least 27 people when it struck parts of Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey in recent days – as ‘extreme in terms of the amount of water falling in a space of 24 hours’.

In eastern Libya, the storm hit the coastal town of Jabal al-Akhdar especially hard, as well as Benghazi, where a curfew was declared and schools closed for several days.

Workers said they buried more than 200 bodies in one cemetery in Derna on Monday. Footage overnight showed dozens more bodies on the ground, covered by blankets or sheets, in a hospital yard in Derna.

The storm hit other areas in eastern Libya, including the town of Bayda, where about 50 people were reported dead. The Medical Center of Bayda, the main hospital, was flooded and patients had to be evacuated, according to footage shared by the center on Facebook.

Other towns that suffered, included Susa, Marj and Shahatt, according to the government. Hundreds of families were displaced and took shelter in schools and other government buildings in the city of Benghazi and elsewhere in eastern Libya.

Northeast Libya is one of the country’s most fertile and green regions. The Jabal al-Akhdar area – where Bayda, Marj and Shahatt are located – has one of the country’s highest average annual rainfalls, according to the World Bank.

Authorities in eastern and western Libya rushed to help Derna residents. The Health Ministry in Tripoli said a plane carrying 14 tons of medical equipment, drugs and body bags, along with health care workers headed Tuesday to Benghazi. Other agencies across the country said they would send humanitarian aid to Derna.

The prime minister also announced three days of mourning and ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff.

Controlling eastern and western Libya, Cmdr. Khalifa Hifter deployed troops to help residents in Benghazi and other eastern towns. 

Ahmed al-Mosmari, a spokesperson for Hifter’s forces, said they lost contact with five troops who were helping besieged families in Bayda.

Foreign governments also sent messages of support to Libya.

Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates were among those that said they would send humanitarian assistance and teams to help with search and rescue efforts. The U.S. Embassy said Monday it was contacting the United Nations and Libyan authorities on how to deliver aid to the most affected areas.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi convened his military commanders on Tuesday to arrange urgent assistance to Libya. He said in televised comments that the military would deploy equipment and personnel in coordination with eastern Libyan forces to help affected communities.

Since a 2011 uprising that toppled and later killed long-time ruler Moammar Gadhafi, Libya has lacked a central government and the resulting lawlessness has meant dwindling investment in the country’s roads and public services and also minimal regulation of private building. 

The country is now split between rival governments in the east and west, each backed by an array of militias.

Derna itself, along with the city of Sirte, was controlled by extremist groups for years, at one point by those who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, until forces loyal to the east-based government expelled them in 2018.

Known for its white-painted houses and palm gardens, Derna is about 900 kilometers (560 miles) east of the capital of Tripoli. 

It is controlled by the forces of powerful military commander Khalifa Hifter, who is allied with the east Libya government. The rival government in west Libya, based in Tripoli, is allied with other armed groups.

Much of Derna was built by Italy when Libya was under Italian occupation in the first half of the 20th century. 

The UK is home to 92 counties, each with its own distinctive look and feel. 

Now, a film editor has tasked artificial intelligence (AI) with putting faces to these counties – with hilarious results. 

Duncan Thomsen, 53, used the software Midjourney to create images of ‘average people’ in 13 counties. 

The results suggest that the average residents in County Antrim are young with red hair, while people living in Anglesey are elderly (and wrapped up for the cold weather!). 

So, do you agree with what AI thinks the average people look like in your county? 

‘All counties have personality,’ Mr Thomsen explained. 

‘They are their likes and quirks. I wanted to see if I could turn that personality into people and reflect that into photography.’

AI responds to prompts and commands set by the user and creates pictures by referencing billions of images online.

Mr Thomsen, from Brighton, used the software Midjourney, through the application Discord.

He typed in certain phrases to achieve the results.

For example, for Tyne and Wear, he typed in: ‘Tyne and Wear as a portrait characterised by their clothes, haircuts and personalities’.

He also added: ‘Social, outgoing and proud of local roots, interests music, art and football, quicks never turn down a night out with friends’.

The AI-generated images show Londoners as trendy and cool, while Somerset folk look more bohemian.

And those from Oxfordshire are portrayed as young and urban, compared to Norfolk residents who are seen as older and rural.

Mr Thomsen said: ‘Somerset is fun because I like the colour and the beard on the man – it made me laugh.

‘I also liked the Scottish and the Welsh, because they are very characterful.’

Mr Thomsen added that the opportunities with AI are endless.

And he believes the software will be used more and more in everyday life as time goes on.

He said: ‘I got an eye for image through my day job and have been fortunate to have worked with some really great people.

‘It’s allowed me to cross-reference everything I’ve worked on and explore my imagination without limits, and this is the result.’

The AI-generated images come shortly after MailOnline asked AI bot, ChatGPT, to expose what ‘negative stereotypes’ exist of people from all 92 UK counties.

While the bot insisted that it did not condone stereotypes, it offered a list of those associated with each place when prompted.

On the whole, residents of the UK were deemed to have bad teeth while being overly polite and obsessed with the Royal Family.

Citizens were also called out for eating an unhealthy mix of ‘fried foods and stodgy dishes’ while maintaining a very ‘stiff upper lip’.

• People who felt safe were 10% less likely to die from cardiovascular diseases
• The study showed people who felt safe were 9% less like to die from all causes

By Louis Goss

Updated: 21:03 EDT, 24 August 2023

A jagged land of glaciers, gentoo and giant petrels is one of the most remote places on Earth. 

King Edward Point is a haven for wildlife surrounded by Icey waters and during the harshest months of the year, only 10 people occupy the land making it the smallest ‘capital city’ in the world by population. 

Situated on South Georgia Island, around 1,400km south-east of the Falkland Islands, it is a permanent British Antarctic Survey research station. 

It is the capital of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, on the northeastern coast of South Georgia.  

Found midway along South Georgia, King Edward Point Research Station lies at the entrance to King Edward Cove, a small bay within Cumberland East Bay, only accessible by boat. 

Since 1909, King Edward Point has been the residence of a British Magistrate administering the island. 

It is often confused for Grytviken, which is the site of a disused whaling station nearby, at the head of King Edward Cove. 

In summer, between 20 to 40 people inhabit the station, but in winter only ten people dare to stay. 

Three Government Officers are employed to live and work at the station on an overlapping rota and the British Antarctic Survey staff are employed on contracts of 17 months. 

Workers include one fisheries scientist; one zoological field assistant, for seals and penguins. Two boating officers, a doctor, a station leader and two technicians – both electrical and mechanical. 

The main focus of the research conducted is to provide scientific advice to assist Marine Protected areas, attention is also drawn to sustainable management of the commercial fisheries around the island. 

The team have published a number of ‘projects’ from Gentoo Penguin Tracking to understanding the Impact of plastics.  

Staff will have to endure harsh climate and should expect snow at any time, temperatures vary from a frosty -15C in winter and +20C in summer, but the island is usually covered in snow from May to October. 

Each take turn to cook, clean and make bread and a traditional formal three0course meal is prepared on Saturday evening. 

They endure training in navigation, search and rescue before moving and on arrival and receive advanced first aid training. 

According to the British Antarctic Survey, their team makes their own entertainment and participate in ‘hill waking, skiing, a half marathon, model yacht racing, film nights and an annual entry to the Antarctic film festival’.

Alongside minimal staff members is an array of wildlife, from gentoo, macaroni and king penguins, to giant petrels, elephant seals pintail ducks and sooty and wandering albatross. 

Alongside South Sandwich Islands, five million seals of four different species live. In addition to 65 million breeding birds of 30 different species including the world’s only subantarctic songbird, the endemic South Georgia pitpit.

In the warmer months, elephant seals and fur seals breed on the beach before the research station. 

The waters surrounding the island are also a key habitat for migrating whales and plenty of fish and Antarctic krill occupy it.  

To prevent harm to the environment which they are occupying, King Edward Point researchers take ‘every care’ to reduce the risk of spreading new alien species. 

As a result, fresh produce is inspected and washed on delivery and non-native species are returned for identification. 

Visitors must scrub their footwear, and vigorously inspect their clothing before arrival.