BRAVE MAG

TOKYO (AP) — A video taken by tiny drones sent into one of three damaged reactors at theFukushimaDaiichi nuclear power plant showed a gaping hole in the thick-walled steel container of the core, with lumps of likely melted fuel debris hanging from it, in a first sighting of a pressure vessel bottom sincethe meltdown 15 years ago.

Japan Fukushima

The rare footage was taken by micro-drones — measuring 12 by 13 centimeters (4.7 by 5.1 inches) and weighing only 95 grams (3.3 ounces) each — deployed for a two-week mission to collect visual, radiation and other data from inside the Unit 3 reactor. It was released late Thursday.

The March 11, 2011 massive quake and tsunami destroyed cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing meltdowns at reactors No. 1, 2 and 3.

The three reactors contain at least 880 tons of melted fuel debris with radiation levels still dangerously high. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, which manages the plant, successfully took tiny melted fuel samples fromthe Unit 2 reactorlast year, but internal details remain little known.

TEPCO plans more remote-controlled probes and sampling to analyze melted fuel and to develop robots for futurefuel debris removalthat experts say could take decades more.

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Sending drones as close as possible to the pressure vessel's bottom was an important goal of the latest probe, according to the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings.

During multiple flight missions in the probe that began March 5, remote-controlled micro-drones, one at a time, carefully flew around debris, broken equipment and other obstacles to take footage inside the primary containment chamber, including around the bottom of the pressure vessel.

The footage showed tubes with ruptures and other damaged structures that used to be inside the pressure vessel, which originally was enclosed. It also showed brown and gray objects hanging like giant icicles.

TEPCO spokesperson Masaki Kuwajima said officials confirmed there was a hole at the bottom of the vessel and that those hanging objects, lumps and deposits are believed to be melted fuel debris.

The drones also collected radiation measurements and data to produce a detailed three-dimensional map of the inside of the Unit 3 reactor, Kuwajima said. "We have obtained valuable data that can be used for our future internal investigations and to develop melted fuel debris removal strategy."

The latest drone mission came nearly a decade after an earlier underwater robot probe provided a less clear picture of the inside of the Unit 3 reactor.

LONDON, March 20 (Reuters) - Disrupted fertiliser shipments and soaring energy prices from the war in Iran are threatening to unleash a fresh food-price surge across vulnerable nations, risking a years-long setback just as many were recovering from successive global shocks.

FILE PHOTO: Farmer walks with a bundle of fodder while working in the field, on the outskirts of Hyderabad

Developing countries were strengthening - and attracting investment - after the global pandemic and the Ukraine ‌war sent food, fuel and financial markets into turmoil. Now the Iran conflict threatens to unravel those gains and leave households struggling to feed families.

"This could have a big ‌impact on prices, food prices, over time," said Odile Renaud-Basso, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a core lender across some 40 emerging economies.

Food and fuel make up less than a quarter of the consumer inflation ​basket in most developed economies, but account for 30% to 50% in many emerging markets, said Marie Diron, managing director with Moody's Ratings.

"This exposure leaves many economies particularly vulnerable to externally driven price volatility," Diron said.

FERTILISER SQUEEZE HIKES PRICES

A major pressure point is fertiliser. The Strait of Hormuz, effectively blocked by Tehran, carries some 30% of globally traded fertilisers and Gulf producers are big suppliers of ammonia and urea, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Bank of America warns that the conflict threatens 65% to 70% of global supplies of urea, and prices are already up 30% to 40%.

"This will affect ‌planting...there will be a lower supply of commodities in the world - ⁠of staple cereals, of feed, and therefore of dairy and meat," Maximo Torero, chief economist with the Food and Agriculture Organization said of the impact if the conflict lasts even just a few more weeks.

"Very few countries are resilient to this."

Unlike fuel, there are no strategic global stockpiles for fertilisers. ⁠But some countries are more exposed than others.

Latin America - far from the war and home to energy and agricultural powerhouses Brazil and Argentina - is somewhat more sheltered, though Brazil's Agricultural Minister Carlos Favaro warned the country could face fertiliser supply problems. In oil-producing Nigeria, the Dangote fertiliser plant will help cushion the impact.

By contrast, countries such as Somalia, Bangladesh, Kenya and Pakistan typically do not keep large fertiliser stocks and are ​more ​reliant on Gulf supply chains. Kenya's fertiliser costs had already risen some 40%, the FAO said.

Rwanda, which sources much ​of its fertiliser from the Gulf, is weighing steps to protect its ‌farm sector, Finance Minister Yusuf Murangwa said during a news conference on Monday.

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"There's a lot we are trying to figure out to contain that stress."

FROM FERTILISER TO FOOD

Unlike in 2022, when Russia's war in Ukraine abruptly hit grain exports from major food producers, higher fertiliser prices, or outright shortages, could cut crop yields, while rising energy prices could feed into production and transportation costs. Benchmark global oil and gas prices have risen more than 50% since the conflict began, hiking input costs across supply chains.

Any hit to fertiliser supply is likely to be felt first in nitrogen‑intensive crops such as corn and wheat, according to data from the International Fertilizer Association. Higher feed costs will eventually spill into everything from bread to poultry and eggs.

"That's always the issue with these ‌kinds of supply shocks, that you get the energy part first, and as that subsides, you can get ​the food portion coming through the second wave," said David Rees, head of global economics at Schroders.

POLICY PLANNING, THINNER ​BUFFERS

Before the U.S., Israeli conflict with Iran erupted in February, global inflation had moderated, and ​some food prices were even falling. In January, global food inflation had dropped to the lowest levels since at least 2017, Rees said.

Past food-price surges ‌have triggered social unrest, putting policymakers on alert. Egypt's government subsidises bread ​to help maintain social stability. In 2022, protesters took ​to the streets from Chile to Tunisia over high prices.

Knock-on effects could deepen the squeeze. Higher fuel prices can divert crops into biofuels rather than food. An economic slowdown in the Gulf - home to millions of migrant workers - could cut remittances to countries including Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan.

Markets are already paring back expectations of a swift monetary easing ​push in emerging markets as energy-led inflation risks build, a shift that ‌could weigh on growth.

The EBRD is considering support packages, including help to afford fertilisers. FAO's Torero urged other development banks and governments to be ready with contingency ​measures if the war does not end soon.

"If it goes further than a month...we will have problems of planting, and we will have problems of yields," FAO's ​Torero warned.

(Additional reporting by Colleen Goko in Johannesburg and Philbert Girinema in Kigali;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It's the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth's warming builds.

Phoenix Record Heat

Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a110-degree Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) readingin the Arizona desert on Thursday that smashed the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S.

On Thursday, sites in Arizona and southern California had preliminary readings of 109 F (about 43 C), which would be the hottest March day on record for the United States.

"This is what climate change looks like in real time: extremes pushing beyond the bounds we once thought possible," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. "What used to be unprecedented events are now recurring features of a warming world."

March's heat would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, according to a report Friday byWorld Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists who study the causes of extreme weather events.

More than a dozen scientists, meteorologists and disaster experts queried by The Associated Press put the March heat wave in a kind of ultra-extreme classification with such events as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2022 Pakistan floods and killer hurricanes Helene, Harvey and Sandy.

The area of the U.S. being hit by extreme weather in the past five years has doubled from 20 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration'sClimate Extremes Index, which includes various types of wild weather, such as heat and cold waves, downpours and drought.

The United States is breaking 77% more hot weather records now than in the 1970s and 19% more than the 2010s, according to an AP analysis of NOAA records. In the United States, the number and average cost of inflation-adjustedbillion-dollar weather disastersin the last couple years is twice as high as just 10 years ago and nearly four times higher than 30 years ago, according to records kept by NOAA and Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and communicators who research and report on climate change.

Trying to keep up with extremes and failing

"It's really hard to even keep up with how extreme our extremes are becoming," said Climate Central Chief Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky. "It's changing our risk, it's change our relationship with weather, it's putting more people in risky situations and at times we're not used to. So yes, we are pushing extremes to new levels across all different types of weather."

For government officials who have to deal with disaster it's been a huge problem.

Craig Fugate, who directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2017, said he saw extremes increasing.

"We were operating outside the historical playbook more and more. Flood maps, surge models, heat records — events kept showing up outside the envelope we built systems around. That's just what we saw," Fugate said via email.

He added: "We built communities on about 100 years of past weather and assumed that was a good guide going forward. That assumption is starting to break. And the clearest signal isn't the science debate. It's insurers walking away."

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'Virtually impossible' without climate change

Climate scientists at World Weather Attribution did a flash analysis — which is not peer-reviewed yet — of whether climate change was a factor in this Southwest heat wave. They compared this week's expected temperatures to what's been observed in the area in March since 1900 and computer models of a world with climate change. They found that "events as warm as in March 2026 would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change."

That warming, from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, added between 4.7 degrees to 7.2 degrees F (2.6 to 4 degrees C) to the temperatures being felt, the report found.

"What we can very confidently say is that human-caused warming has increased the temperatures that we're seeing as a result of this heat dome, and it's going to be pushing those temperatures from what would have been very uncomfortable into potentially dangerous," said report co-author Clair Barnes, an Imperial College of London attribution scientist.

Examples abound of high heat and extreme weather

The Southwest heat wave is solidly in the category of "giant events," with temperatures up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (16.7 degrees Celsius) above normal, said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field.

He listed five others in the last six years: a 2020 Siberia heat wave,the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wavethat had British Columbia warmer than Death Valley, the summer of 2022 in North America, China and Europe, a 2023 western Mediterranean heat wave and a 2023 South Asian heat wave with high humidity.

And that doesn't include theEast Antarctica heat wave of 2022when temperatures were 81 degrees (45 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal. That's the biggest anomaly recorded, said weather historian Chris Burt, author of the book "Extreme Weather."

Worsening wild weather influenced by climate change isn't just super-hot days, but includes deadly hurricanes, droughts and downpours, scientists told AP.

Devastating floods hitWest Africa in 2022andagain in 2024. Iran is in the midst of asix-year drought. And the deadlyTyphoon Haiyanhitting the Philippines in 2013 shocked the world.

Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 flooded New York City and neighbors, had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. It spawned 12-foot seas over 1.4 million square miles, about half the size of the U.S., with energy equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters.

And don't forget wildfires that are worsened by heat and drought, so recent extremes should include 2025's Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which were the costliest weather disaster in the United States last year, said Climate Central meteorologist and economist Adam Smith.

"This is due to climate change, that we see more extreme events, and more intense ones and have so many records being broken," said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College of London climate scientist who coordinates World Weather Attribution

The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP'sstandardsfor working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas atAP.org.