In Spain, weather agency AEMET said temperatures were expected to reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday in at least six regions on orange alert, the second-highest level

International News via Reuters:

Temperatures were set to soar again in France and Spain on Wednesday in a fourth heatwave of the summer, increasing the threat from wildfires that have forced large-scale evacuations of people, scorched through forests and killed wildlife.

In Spain, weather agency AEMET said temperatures were expected to reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday in at least six regions on orange alert, the second-highest level.

In France, temperatures in the southwest, hit by devastating fires, were expected to rise from around 33 C on Tuesday to peak at 42 C, according to Meteo France, while dry winds from the southwest in the morning and from the west in the afternoon were likely to stoke flames.

French firefighters kept a major blaze west of Bordeaux stable overnight, but officials warned it was far from over yet.

“As we speak, the situation is stable but the fire is still not under control,” firefighter commander Matthieu Jomain told reporters. “We remain vigilant of course today, considering the forecast weather conditions, with a new rise in temperatures and higher wind speeds in the afternoon.”

DEER KILLED BY FIRE IN SPANISH FOREST

Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent, has endured record-breaking heatwaves this year, as human-driven climate change is intensifying the heat and drought that allow wildfires to spread faster.

More frequent and intense heatwaves are causing thousands of excess deaths and increasingly disrupting everyday life, from snarling road and rail travel to hindering river shipping.

Highlighting the devastation of the wildfire on the countryside and wildlife, Reuters drone footage from El Tiemblo, in Spain’s Avila province, near Madrid, showed charred deer carcasses in a forest burnt to ashes.

A Madrid resident who gave her name as Cintia was horrified by the scene in El Tiemblo, a place she has often visited.

“We love this, the wildlife, everything around us. We used to bring food up for the animals because they’re from here. They belong to this land,” she said. “And look where it is today.”

VILLAGERS TRY TO PROTECT THEIR HOMES

The impact on the forests has been widespread. The wildfire in the Landes area west of Bordeaux, a popular tourist destination, has devastated 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of mainly pine trees.

Authorities have evacuated about 220,000 people, including holidaymakers and local residents, as the fire threatened the Cap Ferret peninsula on the Atlantic coast, only accessible by one road. Hundreds left on specially chartered ferries.

Several companies on the outskirts of the historic city of Bordeaux closed their operations preventively as the flames went as close as 15 km (9 miles) from the metropolitan area.

In Lanton, also in the southwestern area of France ravaged by wildfires, volunteers carrying buckets of water have been trying to help protect their village.

“It’s hard, really, very hard, because we don’t have many resources. We try to help people however we can, with the little we have,” local pastry chef Jonathan Segalas-Talous, 29, said on Tuesday.

“We’ve lived here for years, and we want to stay. So, we do everything we can, whatever means we have to help, we use. We help.”

From Thursday onwards, danger levels in southwestern France appear likely to decrease thanks to some thunderstorms, lower temperatures and increased humidity, Meteo France said.

FIRE IN SPAIN’S CASTELLON RAGES FOR FIFTH DAY

In Spain, authorities said the situation had improved in the central provinces of Avila and Madrid, but the blaze in eastern Castellon remained out of control after burning over 10,000 hectares as weather conditions triggered several flare-ups.

Around 10,000 evacuated residents were still unable to return to their homes in Castellon. The fire’s perimeter is currently estimated at 75.5 km (47 miles), regional authorities said as the fire entered its fifth day on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Madrid’s emergency services said on X that the wildfire in the capital region had not spread overnight. Firefighting crews kept attempting to consolidate the fire’s perimeter and extinguish remaining hot spots to prevent it from reigniting, they added.

Evacuees from 15 towns in Madrid and Avila were beginning to return to their homes, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said late on Tuesday.

Additional reporting by Leonardo Benassatto in La Vilavella, Yves Herman in Bordeaux, David Latona and Emma Pinedo in Madrid, Inti Landauro, Kate Abnett and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Brussels, Janis Laizans in Bordeaux; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Alison Williams

Eight people were pulled from the rubble of a partially collapsed shopping mall near the city of Kumamoto that was torn apart by an explosion just over an hour after Tuesday’s earthquake

International News via Reuters:

Rescuers frantically searched for survivors on Wednesday, a day after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook southern Japan, killing at least 13 people, knocking out power to thousands of homes and rupturing roads across the region.

Eight people were pulled from the rubble of a partially collapsed shopping mall near the city of Kumamoto that was torn apart by an explosion just over an hour after Tuesday’s earthquake. Of them, three died.

Another three workers at the shopping centre remain unaccounted for after checks of the roughly 2,700 staff, Akio Yoshida, president of mall operator Aeon, told a press briefing on Wednesday. Customers had been evacuated right after the initial quake. 

“Even now, there are people waiting to be rescued, and this is a race against time,” Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told reporters in Tokyo. “We will marshal all available resources on the ground to save and rescue as many people as possible.”

Overall, 13 people were killed, five were in cardiac arrest and at least eight others seriously injured, authorities said. Hospitals were reported to be treating dozens of other patients.

Authorities are investigating a possible gas explosion at the Aeon mall. Rescuers reported smelling gas inside the building but the cause of the incident was still under investigation, said Japan’s top government spokesperson, Minoru Kihara.

Emergency fire rescue teams, police and around 170 army personnel were focusing on areas of the building where calls for help had been received. More than 4,500 troops have been deployed to help with recovery efforts across the quake zone.

Five people died and another two were injured at a Nippon Paper Industries factory where the quake knocked over a chimney, public broadcaster NHK said. A local government official earlier said seven were missing in the incident.

BUILDINGS, BRIDGES COLLAPSE

Across the prefecture, which also suffered a deadly earthquake a decade ago, around 260,000 people were instructed to go to evacuation centres, authorities said. Police said they received 386 emergency calls after the quake hit, including reports of collapsed buildings and people seeking rescue.

The quake’s epicentre was about 20 km (12 miles) south of Kumamoto City, central Kyushu’s largest city with a population of around 700,000. The quake has been followed by more than 100 small aftershocks that continued through Wednesday.

In nearby Yatsushiro city — among the hardest-hit areas — many homes had damaged roofs and a handful of buildings collapsed. Roads leading to the coastal town were cracked and buckled in places, and many businesses remained shuttered.

Part of a bridge had collapsed into the Kumagawa River, drawing a steady trickle of curious residents to the site.

Local resident Masahiro Miyamoto, 40, said he was driving when the earthquake struck, and saw telephone poles and buildings topple over.

“I came straight home and have been helping with the clean-up ever since,” he told Reuters as he removed rubble from a ruined gate at a neighbourhood temple.

Authorities have warned residents in the areas that felt the biggest tremors to be on alert for further strong quakes for about a week, as well as for the risk of landslides. On Japan’s seismic intensity scale, Tuesday’s tremor measured the highest level of 7 in some areas.

With more than 36,000 homes still without power and others without water, authorities are warning about the risk of heat-related illness as temperatures hit 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday.

SOME HOSPITALS OVERSTRETCHED

One hospital in Uki city, near the epicentre, said a power outage caused by the earthquake meant it was unable to function. 

“It’s become like a field hospital,” the head of the administrative department told NHK. Another hospital in the city said it had suspended admissions as it could no longer handle additional emergency cases after accepting 86 injured people following the quake, including three with serious injuries.

Several passengers aboard high-speed trains at the time of the quake were also injured, operators said, adding that services were immediately suspended after the jolt.

Some major companies with plants in the area, including Renesas Electronics , Sony, Tokyo Electron and Honda, have suspended operations at their plants. Toyota Motor also said it would suspend work at three factories outside Kumamoto prefecture through Friday in consideration of the situation at suppliers.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, evacuated workers from its local plant as a precaution after the quake but said it had begun resuming operations late on Tuesday.

Located on the “Ring of Fire” of volcanoes and oceanic trenches partly encircling the Pacific Basin, Japan accounts for about 20% of the world’s earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or more.

A massive earthquake in Kumamoto 10 years ago killed 275 people and injured a further 2,739, according to an official count, and damaged thousands of buildings including the walls of the city’s castle, a top tourist site.

The castle was also among several historic buildings damaged in Tuesday’s quakes alongside shrines with heavy tiled roofs that partially collapsed and a 17th-century tea house.

Reporting by Tim Kelly in Yatsushiro, Joseph Campbell in Kumamoto, Kaori Kaneko and Mariko Katsumura in Tokyo; Writing by John Geddie and Chang-Ran Kim; Editing by Stephen Coates, Kate Mayberry, Lincoln Feast and Raju Gopalakrishnan

Australia’s world-first law barring accounts for under-16s took effect last December, drawing criticism from social media companies, mostly based in the United States

International News via Reuters:

Elon Musk’s X accused Australia of trying to give its internet regulator unfair information-gathering powers and undermining U.S. law with plans for tougher enforcement of a teen social media ban.

Australia’s world-first law barring accounts for under-16s took effect last December, drawing criticism from social media companies, mostly based in the United States.

But the contention by X, whose parent company is Musk’s just-listed SpaceX, amounts to one of the world’s most powerful people injecting a geopolitical element into the debate.

The plans did not give “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy”, X told an Australian senate committee.

In its submission published on Tuesday, X took aim at plans to give the eSafety Commissioner wider rights of document discovery and double a maximum fine to A$99 million ($69 million).

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia … to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said, a move it described as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles.

The amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity”, it added, using a phrase denoting respect for a foreign country’s legal system.

A U.S. congressional committee has already asked the eSafety Commissioner to testify, accusing her of imperiling American free speech.

The billionaire Musk himself called the Australian social media ban a “backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians” in an earlier post on X.

Data published by eSafety and studies since the ban have shown most Australian teenagers under 16 still have social media accounts.

eSafety has said it is preparing a potential enforcement lawsuit against five platforms but is slowed by its limited powers.

The regulator told the panel its currently-limited power to compel documents was at odds with other regulators, making it dependent on “representations from providers about their own compliance”.

eSafety also lacked power to compel documents from third-party age assurance providers hired by the platforms, establishing “significant” barriers to the progress of investigations, it added.

DIGI, an industry group representing several platforms, told the senate inquiry eSafety already had extensive enforcement powers that had not been fully tested, and urged greater clarity on whom it could demand documents from.

Google’s YouTube and TikTok said in separate submissions there was no known failsafe method to weed out and block underage users.

Parliament has yet to pass the bill for greater enforcement powers. The senate committee will deliver its findings on August 25, after holding hearings.

($1=1.4397 Australian dollars)

Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

Iran, for its part, rejected an Omani proposal to jointly manage the Strait of Hormuz and said it had fired on ships in the strait and at U.S. bases in Jordan

International News via Reuters:

The United States and Saudi Arabia jointly struck Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq on Wednesday, the first U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East since President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran last week.

Iran, for its part, rejected an Omani proposal to jointly manage the Strait of Hormuz and said it had fired on ships in the strait and at U.S. bases in Jordan.

The renewed combat and diplomatic setbacks pushed oil prices up for the first time since last week, signalling no quick end to the war the United States and Israel started in February.

Iraqi men shouted Shi’ite sectarian slogans and “Death to America!” as they carried the bodies of slain fighters in body bags out of a hospital in Mosul in northern Iraq, footage from Iraq’s Al-Ahad television showed.

Washington and Riyadh said they had jointly struck the Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq in retaliation for drone attacks on Saudi oil targets launched from Iraq.

Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, powerful Iran-backed paramilitary groups incorporated into the formal Iraqi security forces, said at least 20 members were killed and 32 wounded in U.S.-Saudi strikes targeting several bases across Iraq.

It was the first major U.S. military action in the Middle East since last Friday, when Trump abruptly suspended an intensive bombing campaign after 13 days, having been advised by commanders that the strategy had run its course.

It was also the first time during the war that Saudi Arabia had publicly declared its participation in joint strikes alongside the United States. The joint strikes potentially widen the conflict by drawing Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia into combat against Shi’ite proxies of Iran on a new front.

Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government, one of the few in the world to maintain close military and diplomatic ties with both Tehran and Washington, called an emergency meeting.

Washington has long called on the Baghdad government to crack down on Iran-backed paramilitaries, but efforts to do so in the past have provoked domestic unrest.

The deep ties between Iran and Iraq, the two biggest Shi’ite-majority countries, have been on display this week as hundreds of thousands of Iranian religious pilgrims visit shrines in Iraq for an annual holiday, crossing the border over land. Some carried portraits of Iran’s slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, revered as a high-ranking cleric in both countries.

Saudi Arabia has also been drawn into the conflict on another front, with the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen announcing a blockade of Saudi oil exports in the Red Sea last week and firing on ships and oil facilities.

Hours before launching the joint attacks with Saudi Arabia on Iraq, the U.S. military said its air defences had averted a surprise Iranian attack on U.S. troops in the region.

Jordan’s military said its air defences had intercepted and shot down five Iranian missiles. Three of the four U.S. service members killed this month were killed in Jordan, where U.S. bases have become primary Iranian targets.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had fired several ballistic missiles at U.S. military installations in Jordan, and had struck three tankers that were attempting to transit through the Strait of Hormuz along an unauthorised route.

TEHRAN REJECTS OMANI PROPOSAL

Fighting had first resumed this month after a U.S.-Iran deal reached in June on a framework to end the war collapsed over the fate of the strait, the world’s most important energy shipping route, which Iran says it controls and where it aims to collect fees.

Oman proposed a plan for joint regional control of the strait this week, with the backing of Gulf states, that would allow the payment of voluntary service charges. But a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday that Iran had rejected the Omani proposal as “unreasonable”.

The official said a 50-50 joint control arrangement with Oman would not serve Iran’s interests, though Tehran considers Oman a valuable neighbour. Iran wants sole control over the inbound route and partial control over the outbound route.

The United States has been telling ships to use a route near the Omani shore rather than sailing close to Iran. The Revolutionary Guards Navy said in a statement it continued to maintain full control over the strait and would respond to “unlawful U.S. military interference”.

The renewed fighting sent oil prices rising 4.6%, with Brent crude futures trading at almost $88 a barrel at 1030 GMT. The price, which had briefly spiked above $100 last week for the first time since May, had tumbled into the mid-80s this week after it emerged over the weekend that Trump had called off the bombing.

Reporting by Timour Azhari, Parisa Hafezi, Doina Chiacu, Ahmed Tolba, Kanishka Singh and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff, editing by Andrei Khalip