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The current strain has so far killed 1,587 people, and there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment.

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According to its information, extreme heat, drought, and wildfires in Europe could lead to the most significant decline in grain production in decades

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Bloomberg Athens Deputy Bureau Chief Paul Tugwell says Greece's wildfire response is under severe strain as gale-force winds, dry conditions and difficult terrain hamper firefighting efforts, with major blazes continuing to spread in central and southern parts of the country. He says European Union countries are coordinating firefighting resources across borders as climate change extends the wildfire season and raises concerns about the long-term economic and insurance costs of increasingly destructive fires. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Japan’s Kumamoto prefectural government said on Saturday it has ended rescue operations at an Aeon shopping centre where seven workers died in an explosion shortly after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the southwestern Japan prefecture four days earlier. Officials said there should be no more people unaccounted for after local police and firefighters, joined by the Self-Defence Forces and others, searched the shopping centre in Kashima. Its second floor collapsed in a possible gas explosion...

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In France, the wildfire in Gironde has now been brought under control, according to the Interior Minister, meaning the flames are no longer spreading. Around 42,000 hectares have been burned over the past nine days.

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French officials on Saturday said that firefighters had managed to stop the spread of the country's largest wildfire in more than 70 years but added that the blaze is not yet under control. France has for weeks been battling wildfires after a series of deadly heatwaves, which scientists have linked to human-made climate change.

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Evacuation orders were issued on Friday for areas west and northwest of Athens, as new wildfires broke out near the Greek capital. Firefighters battled to contain the flames, but winds of around 50 miles per hour hampered efforts by water-bombing aircraft. Meanwhile, fires in other parts of the country were brought under control, although the risk of new outbreaks remains very high.

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The Pulitzer-winning author of Less and Villa Coco explores the art of writing humour – plus 10 of the best novels to make you laugh In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco instructed all citizens to remain in their houses due to a pandemic, the first thing I did was order all the books of Agatha Christie. I was not alone; I think many of us immersed ourselves in reliable narratives to drown out the chaos. It did not matter if it ended in marriage or murder; the reliability was what mattered. Later when I realised I would need to hole up for some time, my reading shifted to a different kind of novel. And because, like Christie, our world has an endless supply of new terrors, it is the comic novel that still fills my reading hours. Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. Most would agree, of course, that Wodehouse wrote comic novels, but I turn to books hardly anybody would classify that way – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, for instance – that yet seem to me to be a hoot. I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny. Continue reading...

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The AIDS epidemic could stage a comeback amid unequal access to breakthrough prevention medicines and a sharp decline in global funding, according to a UN report released on Monday ahead of the opening of the 26th International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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The UN emergency food agency appealed for immediate funding on Wednesday, warning that deepening hunger is undermining the response to an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that has now infected more than 3,200 people.

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The wildfires burning across Europe and North America highlight the urgent need for action now – as climate change, land-use pressures and human activity make severe fires more likely in the future.

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Authorities want stage altered if risk is ‘extreme’ 2025 champion Ferrand-Prévot faces sterner challenge The Tour de France Femmes is facing pressure to re-route part of its key stage to the summit of Mont Ventoux next Friday because of the wildfires threat in Provence. The women’s Tour, which begins in Lausanne on Saturday, is expected to keep the famous climb to the top of the “Giant of Provence”, but the current routing of the stage through the Ventoux’s foothills could be affected. Continue reading...

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This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov … Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next. ” Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, the daughter of the Luiselli-like narrator asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end? ” It’s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end”. Beginning Middle End charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story would be similarly unimpressed. After a “slow, entangled” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer comes, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who’s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year. Continue reading...

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Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton; The Channel by Jana Prikryl; Stepmother by Helen Mort; Drunken Driving by Martina Evans Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, £12.99) Written in unrhymed couplets that shrink and grow across the page like a concertina going through its scales, Welton’s poems focus attention on the city through the seasons: weeds through concrete, wasps emerging from the gaps between bricks, frozen towels on a clothesline, the shadows of jackdaws on a lawn. His gaze is neutral, and it often falls on that which we’d normally turn away from, things slightly out of place, or that disturb our sense of propriety: “more cardboard in the recycling bin / than the recycling bin can contain”. This is a poetry of things, like the poetry of Francis Ponge, but as Welton says: “no thinginess without thought”. Welton’s thoughts – though whether they are his or whether they emerge from his surroundings or from the act of writing itself, it is impossible to say – are couched in deliciously riddling couplets: “it is not the habit of patterns / to emphasise the pattern of habits”. He reminds us forcefully that poetry is all around us and within us, that anything can go in a poem: a sandwich, a desiccated lump of duck shit, the pile of junk left outside a house during a refurbishment. Poems can mirror our world in all its messiness, and in doing so let us see it a little bit better. The Channel by Jana Prikryl (Faber, £12.99 The casual violence of King Lear, the greed, the bureaucracy, and the indifference to human life, make the play particularly resonant to contemporary audiences. In her fourth collection, Prikryl channels the voice of Cordelia to think back through her own family story of displacement from the Czech Republic. Shakespeare’s Lear becomes “a document of fact / of things that happened and keep happening”, enabling Prikryl to explore her own separation from friends and family and her experiences of migration, where home is nowhere. In Dover Calais a ferry trip to France is meshed with the story of Cordelia’s exile, morphing into an account of a ferry disaster which in turn cuts to a scene where refugees make for shore in small boats: “Waves / unreal, and driving rain, the two-year-old / left face-down on a beach nine years ago / came up for me”. Like the scissored-off hospital undershirt in In the Mould, Prikryl’s language cuts off, ending abruptly: “or was the famous sweetness / of grandmother a bluff / which through and through was too”. This rewiring of the sentence creates dazzling leaps of thought, jumping from refugee camps to Shakespeare’s Fool battling with a tsunami of text messages to dissident window cleaners out of the novels of Milan Kundera to tender moments shared with her father. It’s a bold “stepping out of form” that turns its back on the neatness of the lyric, and by doing so creates a new poetic language which, like the language of Calvino in Invisible Cities, is able to connect everything to everything. Continue reading...

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Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public. Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled. Continue reading...

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The leading U. S. automakers are mentioning EVs on their investor calls at pre-pandemic rates, according to new data from TechCrunch and Hudson Labs.

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Two earthquakes above M5 strike off southern Philippines

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The seed bank has 285 members and stores traditional small-grain seeds that farmers can access during droughts and other difficult growing seasons.

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UNAIDS has warned that cuts to international HIV prevention funding could trigger a resurgence of the epidemic, putting decades of progress at risk.

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Central Europe was sweltering under the latest heatwave in an already record-breaking summer on Friday, with several countries taking steps to reduce the risk of fires and ease pressure on water and energy networks. Europe’s wildfire threat is expanding, as high winds and heat force evacuations from Greece to the UK, even as blazes were brought under control in France and Spain. In Hungary, Prime Minister Péter Magyar has called on businesses to voluntarily reduce their electricity consumption,...

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Driven by a surge in visitors from across Asia and a blockbuster June stadium concert by K-pop juggernaut BTS, international tourism in South Korea’s southern port city of Busan shattered post-pandemic records during the first half of this year. Busan welcomed more than 2.42 million foreign visitors between January and June – a 43.9 per cent jump compared to the same period last year, according to municipal data released on Thursday. The strong turnout puts the coastal metropolis well on track...

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Playing strategic and role-playing mobile games has been a major leisure activity for Peter Lee* since he graduated in 2020, when social distancing measures during the Covid-19 pandemic left him with little to do outside working hours. Unlike console games, Lee gained a sense of belonging in the mobile gaming world, as he could interact and cooperate with players from different countries whenever and wherever he wanted. To enhance his team’s performance in battles, the 28-year-old bought loot...

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When a powerful earthquake jolted southern ⁠Japan this week, rattling ⁠homes and knocking out water and ⁠electricity, Tomoko Takaoka bundled up her beloved fluffy dogs and went in search of a safe place to stay. Unable to reach her parents, the 31-year-old factory worker turned to a nearby evacuation centre only to discover that Ku the chihuahua and Sheri the chihuahua-poodle mix were not welcome. Faced with the choice of sheltering without them or staying together, she chose the latter,...

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Redesign of the capital’s squares and buildings for a future of more heat and floods

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Wildfire on Paros that started in a saturated landfill leads to mayor’s arrest

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Macau’s gaming revenue fell 8.4% in July, declining for a second consecutive month as travel disruptions from Typhoon Noul and lingering distractions from the World Cup dented spending.

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Residents returned to Navas del Rey after Spain's wildfires, finding burned homes and scorched gardens as firefighters continued battling nearby blazes.

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A French veterinary team in Bordeaux is caring for pets of Gironde wildfire evacuees, providing food, treatment and support while families await their return home.

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"Rivers are running low, farmers are having to harvest crops early, wildfire risk is increasing, and millions of people are living under restrictions on water use," the UK Environment Agency said in its announcement.

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Rescue efforts are continuing as time runs down on the critical three-day window for rescues following the quake. Officials have not detailed how many people were reported missing but local media say dozens remain unaccounted for.