Airplanes, helicopters, vehicles and around 700 personnel are fighting against the blazes

International News via Reuters:

Firefighters in Turkey are battling wildfires in the centre of the northwestern province of Canakkale, fanned by strong winds, and hundreds of residents have evacuated in precaution, local authorities and media said on Monday.

Airplanes, helicopters, vehicles and around 700 personnel are fighting against the blazes, city governor Omer Toraman said in a post on X.

Authorities also launched precautionary evacuations in areas at risk including a university campus, military area and residential areas and urged residents to avoid unnecessary travel to keep roads clear from traffic for emergency vehicles.

The city’s airport, the Dardanelles Strait, as well as a part of the highway were shut due to the wildfires, and local television footage showed huge plumes of smoke billowing over the hills.

Water-spraying police vehicles were extinguishing blazes that spread to some residential buildings in the area according to footage from Anadolu news agency.

Temperatures in the region reached 33 degrees Celsius with a wind speed reaching up to 66 kilometers per hour, according to Turkey’s meteorological service.

Some 50 people were affected by smoke and were treated at nearby medical facilities, with no life-threatening conditions, the governor said.

Reporting by Ezgi Erkoyun and Ali Kucukgocmen, Editing by Alexandra Hudson

A U.S. gold tariff would have been especially harmful for Switzerland, a major refining and transit hub for gold

International News via Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he would not impose tariffs on gold, a move welcomed by global bullion markets and which ended days of speculation that the yellow metal could be caught up in the ongoing global trade spat.

“Gold will not be Tariffed!” Trump said in a statement posted on his social media account. He gave no details.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection had posted a ruling on its website on Friday saying that Washington might place the most widely traded gold bullion bars in the United States under country-specific import tariffs, which would have rocked the metal’s global supply chains.

In response, a White House official told Reuters on Friday that the Trump administration was preparing an executive order “clarifying misinformation” about tariffs on gold bars and other specialty products.

A U.S. gold tariff would have been especially harmful for Switzerland, a major refining and transit hub for gold. Trump’s Monday post removes that concern.

“Delighted to hear the crisis has been averted,” said Ross Norman, an independent gold market analyst. “It will come as an enormous relief to the bullion markets, as the potential for disruption was incalculable.”

U.S. gold futures dropped 2.4% to $3,407 per ounce after Trump’s post on Monday, reducing a premium over spot gold, the global benchmark, which fell 1.2% to $3,357.

Shares of Barrick Mining fell 2.8% on Monday afternoon after the company posted quarterly results, while shares of Newmont – the world’s largest gold miner – were down slightly to $68.87. Both companies are major U.S. gold producers.

Reporting by Pratima Desai, Ernest Scheyder and Jasper Ward; writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Leslie Adler

Uribe had been vying for his party’s candidacy in upcoming presidential elections but died two months after being shot in the head at a campaign rally

International News via Reuters:

Miguel Uribe, who died on Monday, was from a prominent Colombian political family for whom the turbulence of the country’s recent decades twice became personal tragedy.

Uribe had been vying for his party’s candidacy in upcoming presidential elections but died two months after being shot in the head at a campaign rally. He was 39.

His mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 during a botched rescue mission after she was kidnapped by the Medellin Cartel, headed by drug lord Pablo Escobar. Her kidnapping and death were recounted in Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1996 book “News of a Kidnapping.”

Over 450,000 people have died and millions have been displaced in an armed conflict fueled and funded by cocaine trafficking that has lasted over six decades in Colombia.

“Violence cannot continue to mark our destiny,” said Vice President Francia Marquez on Monday in response to Uribe’s death. “Democracy is not built with bullets or blood; it is built with respect, dialogue and recognizing our differences, regardless of political position.”

Political violence has become rarer in recent years, with the government and the main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, reaching a peace deal in 2016. But in the 1980s and 1990s, four presidential candidates were murdered in separate attacks blamed on drug cartels allied with right-wing paramilitary death squads.

The Uribe family has long been prominent in Colombian politics. Miguel Uribe’s maternal grandfather, Julio Cesar Turbay, served as Colombia’s president from 1978 to 1982, while his paternal grandfather, Rodrigo Uribe Echavarria, headed the Liberal Party and supported Virgilio Barco’s successful 1986 presidential campaign.

‘WITHOUT SECURITY, THERE IS NOTHING’

Born in Bogota in 1986, Uribe enjoyed a rapid political rise. At 25, he was elected to the capital’s city council, where he was a prominent opponent of Gustavo Petro, now the president but then the city’s leftist mayor. He was critical of Petro’s handling of waste management and social programs.

In 2016, at 30, Uribe was appointed city government secretary, the youngest person ever to hold the position.

He resigned from that post in 2018 to launch an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Bogota as an independent.

In 2022, he was elected as a senator for the right-wing Democratic Center party, running on the slogan “Colombia First.”

In the Senate, Uribe cemented his role as one of the primary opposition voices to Petro, criticizing the government’s peace strategy aimed at ending Colombia’s six-decade armed conflict. Uribe said Petro’s strategy of pausing offensives on armed groups had backfired as peace talks failed.

“Colombia needs leadership, unity and work. Peace cannot be reached through impunity,” Uribe told fellow lawmakers in July 2024, on the opening day of the legislative session. “Only a serious security policy will incentivize criminals to lay down their arms and submit to the law.”

“Without security there is nothing.”

When he was shot, he had been running to be chosen as the candidate for the Democratic Center in the 2026 presidential election. He was not considered a likely frontrunner.

He and his wife, Claudia Tarazona, had been married for over nine years and he was stepfather to her daughters from a previous relationship. Their son together is 4.

He is also survived by his father and sister.

Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Bernadette Baum

About 800 people were told to abandon their homes in half a dozen villages in the north of the Castile and Leon region

International News via Reuters:

Extreme heat and strong winds caused “fire whirls” as a blaze burned several houses and forced the evacuation of hundreds of people from near a UNESCO-listed national park in northern Spain, authorities said on Monday.

About 800 people were told to abandon their homes in half a dozen villages in the north of the Castile and Leon region, where several wildfires were raging.

Residents of the town of Congosta were spraying houses, trees and pavement with their garden hoses to fend off the flames that devoured at least two buildings, while police told them to prepare for evacuation.

The smoke was too thick for firefighting aircraft to deploy.

“There are already several houses that have burned down, we don’t know what to do anymore. We’re completely defenceless and have been abandoned,” said Congosta resident Evangelina Peral Delgado, 70.

High temperatures on Sunday had caused the so-called fire whirls near Las Medulas park, forcing firemen to retreat said Juan Carlos Suarez-Quinones, chief of environment for the regional government.

“This occurs when temperatures reach around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in a very confined valley and then suddenly (the fire) enters a more open and oxygenated area. This produces a fireball, a fire whirl,” he said.

Scientists say the Mediterranean region’s hotter, drier summers put it at high risk of wildfires. Once fires start, dry vegetation and strong winds can cause them to spread rapidly and burn out of control, sometimes provoking fire whirls.

A prolonged heatwave in Spain continued on Monday with temperatures set to reach 42C in some regions.

Domingo Aparicio, 77, was evacuated to a nearby town from his home in Cubo de Benavente on Sunday after a warehouse in front of his home burned down.

“How am I supposed to feel? It’s always shocking for people close to the catastrophe,” he said.

Two or three fires may have been started by lightning strikes, Suarez-Quinones said, but there were indications that the majority were the result of arson, which he described as “environmental terrorism”.

In the northern part of neighbouring Portugal, nearly 700 firefighters were battling a blaze that started on Saturday in Trancoso, some 350 km (200 miles) northeast of Lisbon.

So far this year about 52,000 hectares (200 square miles), or 0.6% of Portugal’s total area, have burned, exceeding the 2006-2024 average for the same period by about 10,000 hectares, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

Firefighters were also battling blazes in Navarra in northeastern Spain and in Huelva in the southwest, authorities said.

Reporting by David Latona and Susana Vera in Cubo de Benavente, Charlie Devereux in Madrid and Andrei Khalip in Lisbon; Editing by Olivier Holmey and Alex Richardson