By JAKE OFFENHARTZ and PHILIP MARCELO

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City police are investigating two detectives who worked security at an upscale Manhattan townhouse where a man says he was kidnapped and tortured for weeks by two crypto investors who wanted to steal his Bitcoin, a city official said Thursday.

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One of the detectives serves on Mayor Eric Adams’ security detail and is believed to have picked up the victim from a local airport and brought him to the townhouse, the official said. It’s not immediately clear if the other detective, who is a narcotics officer, has any connection to the incident.

The detectives have been placed on modified leave pending the outcome of the inquiry, according to the official, who was briefed on the case and spoke anonymously to The Associated Press because they are not authorized to discuss the internal investigation.

It is not uncommon for members of the NYPD to do private security work outside of their city jobs but they need to receive prior approval. At this point, the official said, the department is looking into whether the officers received that approval.

Adams’ office confirmed one of the detectives provides security detail for the Democrat, but said the mayor has no knowledge of what the officer does on his personal time.

“Every city employee is expected to follow the law, including our officers, both on and off duty,” the mayor’s office said in an emailed statement. “We are disturbed by these allegations.”

In response to an emailed inquiry, an NYPD spokesperson confirmed two members were placed on modified duty Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the labor union representing NYPD detectives didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.

Wayne Gosnell, center, attorney for John Woeltz, cryptocurrency investor charged for kidnapping and false imprisonment, exits a courtroom, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Crypto investors John Woeltz and William Duplessie have been charged in the case. Their lawyers have declined to comment.

Authorities allege that on May 6, the two men lured the victim, who they knew personally, to a posh townhouse in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood by threatening to kill his family.

The man, a 28-year-old Italian national who has not been named by officials, said he was then held captive for 17 days, as the two investors tormented him with electrical wires, forced him to smoke from a crack pipe and at one point dangled him from a staircase five stories high.

He eventually agreed to hand over his computer password Friday morning, then managed to flee the home as his captors went to retrieve the device.

The investigation into the officers began, incidentally, on the same day Adams headlined a crypto convention in Las Vegas, where he described New York as the Bitcoin capital of the country.

By TAMMY WEBBER

The landslide that buried most of a Swiss village this week is focusing renewed attention on the role of global warming in glacier collapses around the world and the increasing dangers.

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How glaciers collapse — from the Alps and Andes to the Himalayas and Antarctica — can differ, scientists say. But in almost every instance, climate change is playing a role.

In Switzerland, the mountainside gave way Wednesday near the village of Blatten, in the southern Lötschental valley, because the rock face above the Birch Glacier had become unstable when mountain permafrost melted, causing debris to fall and cover the glacier in recent years, said Martin Truffer, a physics professor at the University of Alaska who studies how glaciers move.

While the debris insulated the glacier and slowed melting, its weight caused the ice to begin moving — which accelerated dramatically a few weeks ago. Authorities ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as all livestock, from the village in recent days, “when it became clear that there’s a whole mountainside that’s about to collapse,” said Truffer, who grew up in Switzerland.

Glacial lakes pose threat

Lakes that form at the base of glaciers as they melt and retreat also sometimes burst, often with catastrophic results. Water can even lift an entire glacier, allowing it to drain, said Truffer, adding that Alaska’s capital of Juneau has flooded in recent years because a lake forms every year on a rapidly retreating glacier and eventually bursts.

This combo shows the village of Blatten photographed on Friday, May 23, 2025 at the top and the village of Blatten one day after a massive avalanche, triggered by the collapse of the Birch Glacier, at the bottom, showing the destruction it caused as it swept down to the valley floor and demolished the village of Blatten, Switzerland, Thursday, May 29, 2025. (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

In 2022, an apartment building-sized chunk of the Marmolada glacier in Italy’s Dolomite mountains detached during a summer heat wave, sending an avalanche of debris down the popular summer hiking destination, killing 11.

A glacier in Tibet’s Aru mountain range suddenly collapsed in 2016, killing nine people and their livestock, followed a few months later by the collapse of another glacier.

There also have been collapses in Peru, including one in 2006 that caused a mini tsunami; most recently, a glacial lagoon overflowed in April, triggering a landslide that killed two.

“It’s amazing sometimes how rapidly they can collapse,” said Lonnie Thompson, a glacier expert at the Ohio State University. “The instability of these glaciers is a real and growing problem, and there are thousands and thousands of people that are at risk.”

Scientists say melting glaciers will raise sea levels for decades, but the loss of inland glaciers also acutely affects those living nearby who rely on them for water for drinking water and agriculture.

No way to stop the melting

Scientists say greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal have already locked in enough global warming to doom many of the world’s glaciers — which already have retreated significantly.

For example, glaciers in the Alps have lost 50% of their area since 1950, and the rate at which ice is being lost has been accelerating, with “projections … that all the glaciers in the Alps could be gone in this century,” Thompson said.

Switzerland, which has the most glaciers of any country in Europe, saw 4% of its total glacier volume disappear in 2023, the second-biggest decline in a single year after a 6% drop in 2022.

A massive debris avalanche, with the village of Kippel in the foreground, is seen on Thursday, May 29, 2025, one day after the collapse of the Birch Glacier causing the demolishing of the village of Blatten in Switzerland. (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)

A 2023 study found that Peru has lost more than half of its glacier surface in the last six decades, and 175 glaciers disappeared due to climate change between 2016 and 2020, mostly due to the increase in the average global temperature.

A study published Thursday in Science said that even if global temperatures stabilized at their current level, 40% of the world’s glaciers still would be lost. But if warming were limited to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — the long-term warming limit since the late 1800s called for by the 2015 Paris climate agreement — twice as much glacier ice could be preserved than would be otherwise.

Even so, many areas will become ice-free no matter what, Truffer, the University of Alaska expert.

“There’s places in Alaska where we’ve shown that it doesn’t take any more global warming,” for them to disappear, Truffer said. “The reason some … (still) exist is simply because it takes a certain amount of time for them to melt. But the climate is already such that they’re screwed.”

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

By FABIANO MAISONNAVE

CAXIUANA NATIONAL FOREST, Brazil (AP) — A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest.

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But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese— set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is the longest-running project of its kind in the world, and has become a source for dozens of academic articles in fields ranging from meteorology to ecology and physiology.

Understanding how drought can affect the Amazon, an area twice the size of India that crosses into several South American nations, has implications far beyond the region. The rainforest stores a massive amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is the main driver of climate change. According to one study, the Amazon stores the equivalent of two years of global carbon emissions, which mainly come from the burning of coal, oil and gasoline. When trees are cut, or wither and die from drought, they release into the atmosphere the carbon they were storing, which accelerates global warming.

Creating drought conditions and observing the results

To mimic stress from drought, the project, located in the Caxiuana National Forest, assembled about 6,000 transparent plastic rectangular panels across 2.5 acres, diverting around 50% of the rainfall from the forest floor. They were set 3.3 ft above ground  on the sides to 13.1 ft above ground in the center. The water was funneled into gutters and channeled through trenches dug around the plot’s perimeter.

Next to it, an identical plot was left untouched to serve as a control. In both areas, instruments were attached to trees, placed on the ground and buried to measure soil moisture, air temperature, tree growth, sap flow and root development, among other data. Two metal towers sit above each plot.

In each tower, NASA radars measure how much water is in the plants, which helps researchers understand overall forest stress. The data is sent to the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where it is processed.

“The forest initially appeared to be resistant to the drought,” said Lucy Rowland, an ecology professor at the University of Exeter.

That began to change about 8 years in, however. “We saw a really big decline in biomass, big losses and mortality of the largest trees,” said Rowland.

This resulted in the loss of approximately 40% of the total weight of the vegetation and the carbon stored within it from the plot. The main findings were detailed in a study published in May in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. It shows that during the years of vegetation loss, the rainforest shifted from a carbon sink, that is, a storer of carbon dioxide, to a carbon emitter, before eventually stabilizing.

There was one piece of good news: the decades-long drought didn’t turn the rainforest into a savanna, or large grassy plain, as earlier model-based studies had predicted.

Next steps include measuring forest recovery

In November, most of the 6,000 transparent plastic covers were removed, and now scientists are observing how the forest changes. There is currently no end date for the project.

“The forest has already adapted. Now we want to understand what happens next,” said meteorologist João de Athaydes, vice coordinator of Esecaflor, a professor at the Federal University of Para and coauthor of the Nature study. “The idea is to see whether the forest can regenerate and return to the baseline from when we started the project.”

During a visit in April, Athaydes guided Associated Press journalists through the site, which had many researchers. The area was so remote that most researchers had endured a full-day boat trip from the city of Belem, which will host the next annual U.N. climate talks later this year. During the days in the field, the scientists stayed at the Ferreira Penna Scientific Base of the Emilio Goeldi Museum, a few hundred yards from the plots.

Four teams were at work. One collected soil samples to measure root growth in the top layer. Another gathered weather data and tracking soil temperature and moisture. A third was measured vegetation moisture and sap flow. The fourth focused on plant physiology.

A white tree that is dead stands within a section of the Caxiuana National Forest that is used as a control plot for an experiment on drought run by the Esecaflor project in Para state, Brazil, Saturday, March 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

“We know very little about how drought influences soil processes,” said ecologist Rachel Selman, researcher at the University of Edinburgh and one of the co-authors of the Nature study, during a break.

Esecaflor’s drought simulation draws some parallels with the past two years, when much of the Amazon rainforest, under the influence of El Nino and the impact of climate change, endured its most severe dry spells on record. The devastating consequences ranged from the death of dozens of river dolphins due to warming and receding waters to vast wildfires in old-growth areas.

Rowland explained that the recent El Nino brought short-term, intense impacts to the Amazon, not just through reduced rainfall but also with spikes in temperature and vapor pressure deficit, a measure of how dry the air is. In contrast, the Esecaflor experiment focused only on manipulating soil moisture to study the effects of long-term shifts in rainfall.

“But in both cases, we’re seeing a loss of the forest’s ability to absorb carbon,” she said. “Instead, carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, along with the loss of forest cover.”

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

By ALEXA ST. JOHN

In one of the nation’s first wrongful-death claims seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its role in the changing climate, a Washington state woman is suing seven oil and gas companies, saying they contributed to an extraordinarily hot day that led to her mother’s fatal hyperthermia.

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The lawsuit filed in state court this week says the companies knew that their products have altered the climate, including contributing to a 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that killed 65-year-old Juliana Leon, and that they failed to warn the public of such risks.

On June 28, 2021, an unusual heat wave culminated in a 108-degrees Fahrenheit day — the hottest ever recorded in the state, according to the filing. Leon had just driven 100 miles from home for an appointment, and she rolled down her windows on the way back because her car’s air conditioning wasn’t working.

Leon pulled over and parked her car in a residential area, according to the lawsuit. She was found unconscious behind the wheel when a bystander called for help. Despite medical interventions, Leon died.

The filing names Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66 and BP subsidiary Olympic Pipeline Company. ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell declined to comment when reached by The Associated Press. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.

“Defendants knew that their fossil fuel products were already altering the earth’s atmosphere,” when Juliana was born, Thursday’s filing said. “By 1968, Defendants understood that the fossil fuel-dependent economy they were creating and perpetuating would intensify those atmospheric changes, resulting in more frequent and destructive weather disasters and foreseeable loss of human life.”

The filing adds: “The extreme heat that killed Julie was directly linked to fossil fuel-driven alteration of the climate.”

The lawsuit accuses the companies of hiding, downplaying and misrepresenting the risks of climate change caused by humans burning oil and gas and obstructing research.

International climate researchers said in a peer-reviewed analysis that the 2021 “heat dome” was “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

Scientists have broadly attributed the record-breaking, more frequent, longer-lasting and increasingly deadly heat waves around the world to climate change that they say is a result of burning fossil fuels. Oil and gas are fossil fuels that, when burned, emit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide.

“We’ve seen a really advanced scientific understanding about this specific effects that climate change can cause in individual extreme weather events,” said Korey Silverman-Roati, a senior fellow at the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Scientists today are a lot more confident in saying that but for climate change, this would not have happened.”

Silverman-Roati said the specificity of the case could clarify for people the consequences of climate change and the potential consequences of company behavior.

The lawsuit was first reported by The New York Times.

“Big Oil companies have known for decades that their products would cause catastrophic climate disasters that would become more deadly and destructive if they didn’t change their business model,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement on the case. “But instead of warning the public and taking steps to save lives, Big Oil lied and deliberately accelerated the problem.”

Unprecedented action

States and cities have long gone after fossil fuel industry stakeholders for contributing to the planet’s warming. Recently, Hawaii and Michigan announced plans for legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by climate change, though the states have been met by counter lawsuits from the U.S. Justice Department.

The current administration has been quick to disregard climate change and related jargon. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, again; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — an agency whose weather forecasting and research workforce has been gutted — will no longer track the cost of weather disasters fueled by climate change; and the Environmental Protection Agency has been called on to a rewrite its long-standing findings that determined planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

Meanwhile, the federal government has ramped up support for oil and gas production in the name of an “American energy dominance” agenda, and it rolled back a host of other efforts and projects to address climate change.

FILE – Chris Cowan, with Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare’s street outreach team, loads water and other cooling supplies before visiting homeless camps on Aug. 12, 2021, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard, File)

Around the world, other climate cases are being watched closely as potentially setting unique precedent in the effort to hold major polluters accountable. A German court ruled this week against a Peruvian farmer who claimed an energy company’s greenhouse gas emissions fueled global warming and put his home at risk.

Still, a case that looks to argue these companies should be held liable for an individual’s death is rare. Misti Leon is seeking unspecified monetary damages.

“Looking ahead, it’s hard to imagine this will be an isolated incident,” said Don Braman, associate professor at George Washington University Law School. “We’re facing an escalating climate crisis. It’s a sobering thought that this year, the hottest on record, will almost certainly be one of the coolest we’ll experience for the foreseeable future.

“It is predictable or — to use a legal term, foreseeable — that the loss of life from these climate-fueled disasters will likely accelerate as climate chaos intensifies,” he added. “At the heart of all this is the argument about the culpability of fossil fuel companies, and it rests on a large and growing body of evidence that these companies have understood the dangers of their products for decades.”

Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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