CNN

By Holly Yan, CNN

(CNN) — It’s been one week since Nolan Wells and his friends went on a Fourth of July trip to Horn Island – an uninhabited stretch of pristine wilderness off the Mississippi coast with no shelters, no facilities and no communications.

His friends made it back home. Wells, a student and wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, did not. His body was found by a National Park Service agent face-down in the water off the shoreline Monday morning.

Now, many questions remain unanswered: Why didn’t he return on the boat with his friends? Why didn’t he have his cellphone with him? Was Wells involved in an altercation? Did he break off from his friends to speak with a girl on the island?

While the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department is still investigating, Wells’ death has stoked speculation and distrust in part due to Mississippi’s fraught racial history, the fact that Wells appeared to be the only person of color in an image with friends on the trip, and an earlier comment from the sheriff saying he didn’t suspect foul play – but didn’t explain why.

“This does not smell right,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at a news conference Friday. “Some people are saying, ‘Reverend, are y’all bringing in race?’ Well, we’re not bringing in race. But we’re not discounting race, either, because we don’t know what it is. So, to tell us, ‘Don’t rush to judgment saying it was racist’ is fine. But then I’m telling you, don’t rush to judgment saying it was not racism, because we do not know.”

But nothing about the case – other than speculation about race – is particularly unusual, CNN law enforcement analyst Charles Ramsey said. It’s quite common for law enforcement officers to take a week or longer to gather all the necessary evidence and interviews to determine what caused a death.

Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter did not respond to CNN’s questions Friday, such as whether all of Wells’ friends from the trip had been interviewed. But Ledbetter previously told CNN affiliate WXXV, “It’s gonna take a lot of hard work” to get to the bottom of this case.

Here’s what that work could entail:

Key interviews

It’s important to interview each of the friends Wells traveled with, anyone who was on the beach at the time, and a girl he was purportedly talking to on the island, Ramsey said.

“They’ve got to interview them one at a time, individually, to make sure the story is consistent,” said Ramsey, who previously led the Philadelphia and Washington, DC, police departments.

Attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing Wells’ family, said he’s dismayed by the lack of clear details that have emerged in the case.

“A young woman he was talking to says that ‘Well, Nolan said he was going back to get on the boat with the boys.’ The boys say that Nolan told them he was going to stay and talk to

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Por Holly Yan, CNN

Ha pasado una semana desde que Nolan Wells y sus amigos realizaron un viaje con motivo del 4 de julio a Horn Island, una extensión de naturaleza virgen e inhabitada frente a la costa de Mississippi, carente de refugios, instalaciones o servicios de comunicación.

Sus amigos regresaron a casa. Wells, estudiante y receptor abierto (wide receiver) del Southwest Mississippi Community College, no lo hizo. Su cuerpo fue hallado el lunes por la mañana por un agente del Servicio de Parques Nacionales, boca abajo en el agua, cerca de la orilla.

Ahora quedan muchas preguntas sin respuesta: ¿por qué no regresó en la embarcación con sus amigos?, ¿por qué no llevaba consigo su teléfono móvil?, ¿se vio envuelto Wells en algún altercado?, ¿se separó del grupo para hablar con una chica en la isla?

Aunque el Departamento del Sheriff del condado de Jackson continúa investigando, la muerte de Wells ha avivado las especulaciones y la desconfianza, en parte debido a la conflictiva historia racial de Mississippi, al hecho de que Wells parecía ser la única persona de color en una fotografía del grupo durante el viaje, y a un comentario previo del sheriff indicando que no sospechaba de un acto delictivo, sin explicar los motivos.

“Esto no huele bien”, declaró el viernes el reverendo Al Sharpton en una conferencia de prensa. “Algunos dicen: ‘Reverendo, ¿están ustedes sacando a relucir el tema racial?’. Bueno, nosotros no estamos introduciendo el factor racial. Pero tampoco lo descartamos, porque no sabemos qué sucedió. Así que está bien que nos digan: ‘No se apresuren a decir que fue un acto racista’. Pero yo les digo: no se apresuren a decir que no fue racismo, porque no lo sabemos”.

Sin embargo, nada en el caso —salvo las especulaciones sobre la raza— resulta particularmente inusual, señaló Charles Ramsey, analista de temas policiales de CNN. Es bastante común que las fuerzas del orden tarden una semana o más en recopilar todas las pruebas y testimonios necesarios para determinar la causa de una muerte.

El sheriff del condado de Jackson, John Ledbetter, no respondió el viernes a las preguntas de CNN, como por ejemplo si ya se había interrogado a todos los amigos que acompañaron a Wells en el viaje. Sin embargo, Ledbetter declaró anteriormente a WXXV, una cadena afiliada a CNN, que “hará falta mucho trabajo arduo” para esclarecer este caso.

Esto es lo que dicho trabajo podría implicar:

Es importante entrevistar a cada uno de los amigos con los que viajaba Wells, a cualquier persona que estuviera en la playa en ese momento y a una joven con la que supuestamente él estaba hablando en la isla, señaló Ramsey.

“Tienen que entrevistarlos uno por uno, individualmente, para asegurarse de que la versión de los hechos sea coherente”, afirmó Ramsey, quien anteriormente dirigió los departamentos de Policía de Filadelfia y de la ciudad de Washington.

El abogado Ben Crump, representante de la familia de Wells, expresó su desconcierto ante la falta de detalles claros que han surgido en torno al caso.

“Una joven con la que él hablaba dice: ‘Bueno, Nolan dijo que iba a regresar para subir al barco con los chicos’. Los chicos dicen que Nolan les comentó que se quedaría hablando con la joven. Es una contradicción”, señaló Crump.

Uno de los aspectos más extraños del caso tiene que ver con el teléfono celular de Wells. Crump calificó de insólito que un adolescente no tuviera consigo su teléfono y destacó que los padres de Wells lograron localizar el aparato antes que la Policía.

Los padres afirmaron que los datos del historial de ubicación hallados en las aplicaciones del teléfono les plantearon dudas. Asimismo, expresaron s

By Tim Lister, CNN

(CNN) — Nearly 20 people are still unaccounted for after a wildfire ripped through a tinder-dry area close to Spain’s Mediterranean coast on Thursday, according to regional officials.

At least 12 people were killed by the rapidly spreading blaze, and four received severe burns.

The wildfire – near Almeria on the Mediterranean – is the first in Europe this year to claim multiple victims, but just one of several that have claimed thousands of hectares in recent weeks as much of southern Europe endures unprecedented heat.

This week has also seen two widespread fires in France, with one in the Pyrenees forcing the evacuation of 12,000 people, as well as a major fire in central Portugal, with satellite imagery showing plumes of smoke drifting well into the Atlantic.

Summer fires in southern Europe are nothing new, but they are happening earlier in the year and are of growing intensity, according to researchers.

In much of France and Spain, an exceptionally wet winter left a lot of vegetation that quickly turned to tinder as three successive heatwaves sent temperatures into the high-thirties Celsius.

That has led to a spike in the number of larger fires, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

To date this year, the countries of the European Union have seen 314 fires of over 30 hectares each, nearly double the 158 at the corresponding date last year, and the second highest figure since 2016. And as of July 8, they had consumed 160,000 hectares, compared to the average since 2006 of just under 100,000 hectares.

“Very extreme conditions dominate a large area of western and central Europe, with the heaviest concentration across France, Spain and northern Portugal, the Alpine arc extending into northern Italy, the south of the UK and southeast Ireland,” according to EFFIS in a bulletin this week.

Besides the immediate casualties, fires contribute to the amount of carbon dioxide and toxic smoke in the atmosphere, which can have its own deadly consequences. .

Fires in August last year in Spain and Portugal led to more than 2,000 premature deaths from smoke exposure as well as unprecedented spread of fires at night, according to new research by Spanish and US scientists.

The total energy created by those “was similar to the annual energy production of a 1,000 MW nuclear reactor,” the researchers found. The pattern of “big fires getting bigger” is an indicator that fire intensity is increasing, they noted – with rural depopulation also a factor as more land goes untended.

This may have been a factor in the Almeria fire – some victims had tried to escape by car along a track only to be surrounded by flames, according to Spanish officials.

Besides the fire risk, the heat domes that trap high temperatures across Europe are having a cascade of other consequences.

In France, more than 2,000 deaths during the last week of June were attributed to the heat. France saw its hottest day ever on June 24. Deaths rose 29% in the last week of June compared to the week before, according to French health minister Stéphanie Rist, who noted a “clear increase” in deaths among those over 45.

Not surprisingly, more and more households in France are installing air conditioning. Only 24% of French households have air conditioning according to France’s energy transition agency – up from 18% just two years ago, but still far below the roughly 50% seen in neighboring Italy.

But air conditioning units pump heat

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