Tropical Storm Ophelia came ashore on Saturday along the Atlantic Coast where it doused the region with torrential downpours and unrelenting winds that caused flooding and widespread power outages.

Nearly 8 million people across the Mid-Atlantic – from New York to South Carolina – were under tropical storm, storm surge and flooding warnings as of midday on Saturday, the National Weather Service said.

After making landfall near Emerald Isle, North Carolina around 6:15 a.m. EDT (10:15 UTC), Ophelia was moving inland on a northerly path as it dumped heavy downpours and whipped strong winds in its wake.

Some spots could see up to 10 inches (25 cm) of rain and winds of more than 50 miles (80 km) per hour that combined were producing storm surge flooding in parts of North Carolina, the service said.

One of the hardest hit communities was Washington, North Carolina, where video footage on social media showed flood waters reaching homes and partly submerging vehicles in parts of the town that sis on the banks of the Pamlico River.

“Some areas are even cut-off, seeing water rescue crews moving throughout town just incase the call comes later,” storm chaser Bryce Shelton said on X, describing the conditions in the town of 10,000 people.

In Virginia, the state’s department of emergency management said in a X post that its crews were staged across the commonwealth, ready to conduct any needed swift water rescues and debris removal.

By midday, more than 65,000 homes and businesses in the North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and were without power.

A £9m water treatment scheme to remove metal pollution from rivers in the north-east of England and Cumbria is due to be completed next year.

Contamination from old metal mines has left the River Nent in Cumbria with very high levels of cadmium, lead and zinc, which are toxic to wildlife.

Construction of the Nent Haggs Mine Water Treatment Scheme began in 2020.

Dr Hugh Potter from the Environment Agency (EA) said it will make a “vital” difference.

“This project will have an immediate impact on water quality in the rivers Nent and South Tyne and, in future, will help improve sediment quality in the Tyne estuary,” he said.

Most metal mines in the north of England closed by the early 1900s but have filled with rainfall, with contaminated groundwater then polluting nearby rivers.

This problem affects about 1,500km (930 miles) of waterways in England and the government has said it wants to halve that number by 2038.

The River Nent is the most metal polluted river in the north of England, with levels more than 200 times what is considered safe, the EA and Coal Authority said.

The watercourse has half the number of fish and river flies as would be expected if there was no pollution.

The Nent is a tributary of the River South Tyne, flowing to the River Tyne and then the North Sea, so the metals accumulate in Tyne estuary sediments.

One of the most significant sources of pollution is the Haggs adit, an abandoned mine water drainage tunnel at Nentsberry, which discharges about three tonnes of zinc each year, the EA said.

The Nent Haggs treatment scheme will capture the water as it comes out of the mine and remove about 90% of the metals via treatment ponds and reed beds at West Foreshield.

The proposed Abuja-Lagos highway will be completed in four years, the Federal Government has assured.

Minister of Works David Umahi gave the assurance at a briefing on Saturday.

He said travelling from Lagos to Abuja will take four hours on the new highway.

He said the road will be built entirely with concrete, which is cheaper than asphalt.

The Dean, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nigeria Nsukka, UNN, Prof. Emenike Ejiogu has proposed to inject 7,000 megawatts of electricity across the 774 local government areas in Nigeria through the gasification plant.

Prof. Ejiogu who is also the Director, Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Power and Energy Development, ACE-SPED, further said that Nigeria must adopt energy mix in order to stave off energy crisis crippling the economy, adding that the conventional national grid has proven to be insufficient in meeting the country’s energy needs.

He spoke as the 190th Inaugural Lecture of the University of Nigeria at the Princess Alexandra Auditorium, UNN, adding that through gasification plant, 10,000 megawatts of electricity can be injected into all the 774 local government areas in Nigeria through distributed energy generation.

While presenting the topic of the lecture titled ‘My Engineering Odyssey: Energy Security, Energy Sustainability and Bringing Power to the People,’ he explained that the gasification plant is an engineering system which is designed and fabricated locally with 100% local content, and which converts organic solid materials into synthetic gas for electric power generation and other uses.

“The conventional power industries in Nigeria with huge generating plants, produce huge amount of power and transmit it at a long distance. The disadvantage of this is that you have to cover the entire country with transmission lines which would result in huge financial losses. The technical manpower is not equally there to maintain this power arrangement because most of the materials are imported.

“In this situation, the best thing to think of is distributed-generation of energy. This can be done by creating micro and mini grids across locations in Nigeria so that we can generate power and distribute locally. Gasification plant is one of the enabling technologies that can help you achieve this. The advantage of distributed-generation is that you can generate your power locally and manage it locally.

“When you have a lot of these micro and mini grids, you can begin to tie them together so that in the end, you will have a network. With this arrangement, you can infuse huge amount of energy into our power sector without huge investment in transmission lines and other materials. This is an enabling technology because you can easily go into the 774 local government areas across the country and give each of them 10 megawatts of power which would result to 7,740 megawatts of power. This is already more than what our national grid is generating and transmitting. If the political will is there, you can infuse huge amount of energy in our sector within a period of two to three years. It is only the gasification technology that can give you that flexibility because we would be producing fuel from waste materials and coal which are in abundance in this country,” he explained.

He also said “With the current epileptic power supply in the country occasioned by the frequent collapse of the national grid, this is time to give proper attention to alternative power source.

“Our designed gasification plant converts solid wastes into gas, just like the refineries which turns crude oil into petrol and other products. What we need is the fund to mass produce it.

“Organizations can comfortably depend and run on it, what is required is to change the already existing diesel generators and modify them to run on gas and it will serve as mini-grid.

“Depending on public power supply alone has negatively impacted on production outputs and services of organisations in Nigeria, which as well have affected the national economy because some organisation can no longer operate under the epileptic power supply with price of diesel always on a high side,” he said.

In his address, the Vice Chancellor of UNN, Prof. Charles Igwe, who was also the chairman of the occasion, said that Nigerian universities cannot really be autonomous if the managements can produce services which would make them self-sustaining.

He described Prof. Ejiogu’s lecture as germane, especially as the country is still grappling with epileptic power supply, adding that keying into the lecturer’s alternative power generation would save Nigeria some cost of running only on the conventional power.

Palacio de los López is a palace and the official workplace of the President of Paraguay, located in the capital city of the Republic of Paraguay, Asunción.

Also, Palacio de los López is the official seat of the national government and one of the treasures of the Asunción’s cultural heritage.

The Palace is located, more precisely, in the center of the capital city, overlooking the Bay of Asunción, and got its name from the General Francisco Solano López.

He is the son of Carlos Antonio López who was the leader of Paraguay from 1841 to 1862, and has ordered for the palace to be built as a residence for his son.

The architect responsible for the construction is Alonso Taylor, an English architect whose work began in 1857.

All of the materials used for the Palace to be built are from several places in Paraguay; stones from the quarries of Emboscada and Altos, woods and odrajes of Ñeembucú and Yaguarón, bricks of Tacumbú, iron pieces molten in Ybycuí, etc.

The Palace has a shape of the letter U, counting two floors, with a tower that has four floors on which stands the flag of the Republic.

There are unique ornaments all around the building and small garden in front of the entrance which is welcoming the foreign delegations visiting this majestic architectural masterpiece.

Even though there were several various European artists who came to Paraguay to handle the decoration of the building, the López Palace was almost finished in 1867.

That was the year when the War of the Triple Alliance broke out and the palace was bombed and looted by the Brazilian-Argentinean coalition.

Francisco Solano López had to go to the battlefield and never got the chance to live inside this amazing piece of architecture.

Yet, the successors tried to restore the building, but the coups d’etats prevented them from living there, which made it suspicious that it must have been cursed.

Nowadays, it is in perfect shape as it is the governing place for the nation, and the spectacular lightning at night is well worth visiting the capital of this small South American nation.