Fires have burned houses, farms and factories and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists since Tuesday

International News via Reuters:

Firefighters battled multiple wildfires across Greece on Wednesday, including blazes threatening villages and towns near the western city of Patras and on two tourist islands.

Fires have burned houses, farms and factories and prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists since Tuesday.

Dozens of people have been taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation since Tuesday, public broadcaster ERT reported. Some 13 firefighters have been treated for burns and other injuries, fire brigade spokesman Vassilis Vathrakogiannis told a televised briefing on Wednesday.

Nearly 5,000 firefighters assisted by 33 aircraft were deployed from dawn to contain the flames stoked by winds and hot, dry conditions near Patras, on the tourist islands of Chios and Zakynthos and in at least three inland spots.

“Today, it will be another very difficult day, as the wildfire risk for most of the country’s regions will be very high,” Vathrakogiannis said. Temperatures were forecast to reach 34 degrees Celsius (93.2 Fahrenheit) in some places.

Flames and dark smoke billowed over a cement factory that was set alight by a wildfire that swept through olive groves and forests and disrupted rail traffic near Patras on Wednesday.

“What it looks like? It looks like doomsday. We came from Athens with our volunteer association Kleisthenis, we can’t do anything more. May God help us and help people here,” said volunteer firefighter Giorgos Karavanis, who was working on the fire near Patras.

Authorities ordered residents of a town of about 7,700 people near Patras to evacuate on Tuesday and issued new alerts on Wednesday, advising residents of two nearby villages to leave their homes.

On the island of Chios, the coast guard used boats to take people to safety on Tuesday as flames reached the shores.

Spain, Portugal, Turkey and the Balkans have also battled wildfires in recent days as a heatwave pushed temperatures over 40 C (104 F) across parts of Europe.  In Albania and Montenegro, wildfires have destroyed houses and possessions since last week. 

Reporting by Louiza Vradi in Patras and Angeliki Koutantou in AthensAdditional reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic in BelgradeEditing by Frances Kerry

Trump and Putin are due to meet in Alaska on Friday to discuss ending Russia’s war in Ukraine

International News via Reuters:

Oil prices fell on Wednesday after the IEA noted supply overtaking demand this year, while investors awaited Friday’s meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Brent crude futures fell 45 cents, or 0.7%, to $65.67 a barrel at 0831 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures edged down 53 cents, or 0.8% at $62.64.

Both contracts settled lower on Tuesday.

Trump and Putin are due to meet in Alaska on Friday to discuss ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has shaken oil markets since February 2022.

“Oil prices drifted lower on expectations that Friday’s summit would not result in additional sanctions on Russia, ensuring the country’s oil continues to flow predominantly to the south and east,” said PVM Oil analyst Tamas Varga in a note.

The International Energy Agency on Wednesday raised its forecast for oil supply growth this year following OPEC+’s decision but lowered its demand forecast due to lacklustre demand across the major economies.

Long-term support, however, came from OPEC’s updated monthly report on global supply and demand, Varga said, which raised its global oil demand forecast for next year and trimmed its estimate for growth in supply from the United States and other producers outside the wider OPEC+ group, pointing to a tighter market.

Investors also awaited further cues after an industry report showed U.S. crude stockpiles climbed last week.  

Crude inventories in the United States, the world’s biggest oil consumer, rose by 1.52 million barrels last week, market sources said, citing American Petroleum Institute figures on Tuesday. Gasoline inventories dropped while distillate inventories gained slightly. [API/S]

Analysts polled by Reuters expect today’s Energy Information Administration report to show crude inventories fell by about 300,000 barrels last week. [EIA/S]

The EIA on Tuesday in its Short Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecast Brent prices to average less than $60 per barrel in the fourth quarter, which would be the first quarter with average prices that low since 2020, stating that growth in the global oil supply would surpass growth in demand for petroleum products.

Reporting by Seher Dareen in London and Jeslyn Lerh in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Stephen Coates

The sale is not yet certain as there are other interested parties

International News via Reuters:

Mercedes-Benz is in advanced talks with France’s BNP Paribas about the sale of the German carmaker’s leasing subsidiary Athlon, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

The sale is not yet certain as there are other interested parties, Bloomberg reported, citing several people familiar with the matter.

The subsidiary is valued at about 1 billion euros ($1.17 billion), it cited one of the sources as saying.

Mercedes, at the time Daimler AG, bought Athlon – one of the leading leasing providers in Europe, with a presence in 20 countries – from Dutch bank Rabobank in 2016 for $1.1 billion.

A Mercedes spokesperson said the company is continuously reviewing strategic options for its business, including Athlon.

BNP, which is already active in the vehicle leasing business through subsidiary Arval, was not immediately available for comment.

($1 = 0.8529 euros)

Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach, writing by Miranda Murray, editing by Thomas Seythal

Global warming is giving the Mediterranean region hotter, drier summers, scientists say

International News via Reuters:

Firefighters across Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and the Balkans were battling wildfires on Tuesday, with another heatwave pushing temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across parts of Europe.

Global warming is giving the Mediterranean region hotter, drier summers, scientists say, with wildfires surging each year and sometimes whipping up into “whirls”.

“We are being cooked alive, this cannot continue,” said a mayor in Portugal, Alexandre Favaios, as three fires burned.

On the outskirts of the Spanish capital Madrid, a fire killed a man working at a horse stable and reached some houses and farms but was contained by Tuesday, regional authorities said.

A man also died in a fire in Albania, while a 61-year-old Hungarian seasonal worker is suspected to have died of heat-related causes while picking fruit in Lleida, in Spain’s eastern Catalonia region.

In Montenegro’s mountainous Kuci area, northeast of the capital Podgorica, one army soldier was killed and another badly injured when a water tanker they were operating overturned, the Defence Ministry said.

In Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, beachgoers and celebrity chef Jose Andres filmed flames and black smoke on the hills above whitewashed villas.

More than 2,000 people were evacuated from there as the fire – believed to have started in eucalyptus and pine forests – spread, officials said. Helicopters doused the blaze with seawater.

Authorities in Albania, Montenegro, Germany, Spain, Italy and France issued various types of heat warnings.

In Spain, temperatures reached 44 C (111 F) in some regions, according to meteorology service AEMET, with minimal rainfall and windy conditions expected to exacerbate the fire risk.

SPANISH MILITARY HELPS

Spain’s Interior Ministry has put national services on standby, while almost 1,000 members of the armed forces are already supporting firefighting.

The country’s rail operator said trains between northwestern Galicia and Madrid were halted because of a fire.

In Spain’s largest region, Castile and Leon, more than 1,200 firefighters battled 32 wildfires on Tuesday and thousands of residents were told to leave their homes.

Meanwhile, police said it had arrested a firefighter near the walled city of Avila northwest of Madrid, who had confessed to starting a fire two weeks ago because of the potential income from work extinguishing it.

In north Portugal, more than 1,300 firefighters backed by 16 aircraft were battling three large fires. One of them, in the Vila Real area, has been burning for 10 days.

“It’s been 10 days that our population is in panic, without knowing when the fire will knock on their door,” local mayor Favaios told broadcaster RTP, pleading for more government help.

In Albania, swathes of forest and farmland have been burnt by wildfires in the past week, and 30 separate fires continue to burn stoked by strong winds.

The Defence Ministry said four army helicopters and 80 soldiers were helping firefighters. It also reported the death of a man suspected of having started in his backyard a fire that spread across a wider area.

In neighbouring Montenegro, authorities backed by helicopters from Serbia and Croatia contained a wildfire near Podgorica on Tuesday, with the capital covered by smoke. In Gornja Vrbica, residents helped firefighters stop a fire from reaching a local church and cemetery, Pobjeda daily reported.

More help was expected from Austria, Slovenia and Italy under the EU civil protection mechanism.

Dragana Vukovic, whose house in southeastern Piperi was reduced to ruins, told Reuters: “Everything that can be paid for and bought will be compensated, but the memories that burned in these four rooms and the attic cannot be compensated.”

‘OUT OF CONTROL’

In Greece at Europe’s southernmost tip, wildfires in some cases fanned by gale-force winds forced the evacuation of several villages and a hotel on the tourist islands of Zakynthos and Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea along with four other parts of the mainland.

A wildfire in the southern Greek region of Achaia forced residents of five villages near an industrial zone to flee, while 85 firefighters and 10 aircraft tried to stop a fire from reaching houses near the western Greek town of Vonitsa.

The picture was similar in Turkey where a large blaze in the northwestern province of Canakkale burned for a second day, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

Reporting by Pietro Lombardi and David Latona in Madrid, Andrei Khalip in Lisbon, Angeliki Koutantou in Athens, Fatos Bytyci in Finiq, Albania, Stevo Vasiljevic in Podgorica; writing by Aislinn Laing, Editing by Andrei Khalip, Andrew Cawthorne and Tomasz Janowski

OpenAI, Yahoo and private-equity firm Apollo Global Management have also expressed interest in Chrome

International News via Reuters:

Perplexity AI made a $34.5 billion unsolicited all-cash offer for Alphabet’s Chrome browser on Tuesday, a bid far above its own valuation as the startup reaches for the browser’s billions of users pivotal to the AI search race.

Run by Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity is no stranger to headline-grabbing offers: it made a similar one for TikTok US in January, offering to merge with the popular short-video app to resolve U.S. concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.

OpenAI, Yahoo and private-equity firm Apollo Global Management have also expressed interest in Chrome as regulatory pressure threatens Google’s grip on the industry.

Google did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. The company has not offered Chrome for sale and plans to appeal a U.S. court ruling last year that found it held an unlawful monopoly in online search. The Justice Department has sought a Chrome divestiture as part of the case’s remedies.

Perplexity did not disclose on Tuesday how it plans to fund the offer. The three-year-old company has raised around $1 billion in funding so far from investors including Nvidia and Japan’s SoftBank. It was last valued at $14 billion.

Multiple funds have offered to finance the deal in full, Perplexity said, without naming the funds. Alphabet’s shares were up 1.6% in afternoon trading.

As a new generation of users turns to chatbots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity for answers, web browsers are regaining prominence as vital gateways to search traffic and prized user data, making them central to Big Tech’s AI ambitions.

Perplexity already has an AI browser, Comet, that can perform certain tasks on a user’s behalf and buying Chrome would allow it to tap the browser’s more than three billion users, giving it the heft to better compete with bigger rivals such as OpenAI. The ChatGPT parent is also working on its own AI browser.

Perplexity’s bid pledges to keep the underlying browser code called Chromium open source, invest $3 billion over two years and make no changes to Chrome’s default search engine, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters.

The company said the offer, with no equity component, would preserve user choice and ease future competition concerns.

Analysts have said Google would be unlikely to sell Chrome and would likely engage in a long legal fight to prevent that outcome, given it is crucial to the company’s AI push as it rolls out features including AI-generated search summaries, known as Overviews, to help defend its search market share.

A federal judge, Amit Mehta, is expected to issue a ruling on remedies in the Google search antitrust case sometime this month.

“Judge Mehta is a pretty orthodox guy. It’s very possible that he would hold off on requiring a sale until the appeals process is worked out and that could be a very lengthy period of time,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, professor at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

   “It would go to the DC Circuit, which is skeptical of forced divestitures, and it’s possible it would even go to the Supreme Court after that. So that process could run out for a couple of years.”

Perplexity’s bid is also below the at least $50 billion value that rival search engine DuckDuckGo’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, suggested Chrome may command if Google was forced to sell it.

Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Devika Syamnath