Strong winds and faulty power lines have fuelled the flames, officials said

International News via Reuters:

Firefighters in Turkey have contained six of nine wildfires tearing across western Izmir province, officials said on Friday, after the blazes killed two people and forced thousands to evacuate their homes earlier in the week.

Strong winds and faulty power lines have fuelled the flames, officials said.

“With the intense efforts of our forest heroes throughout the night and aerial intervention at first light, the fire in Cesme has been brought under control,” Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said on X on Friday.

“Our intense efforts by air and land continue to bring the fires in Odemis and Buca under control,” he added.

Greece and other Mediterranean countries are in an area dubbed “a wildfire hotspot” by scientists – with blazes common during hot and dry summers. These have become more destructive in recent years due to a fast-changing climate.

Izmir governor Suleyman Elban said the main challenge was strong and shifting winds. “It constantly changes direction,” he told reporters.

Elban said nine planes, 22 helicopters and 1,100 vehicles were battling the fires across the region.

Two people were killed on Thursday: an 81-year-old bedridden man, and a backhoe operator who died while helping firefighting efforts, state media reported.

Elban said preliminary findings indicated that recent fires in the province, including those brought under control earlier in the week, were caused by power cables.

Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Sharon Singleton

Five people were hospitalised with minor burns and injuries from shattered glass

International News via Reuters:

More than 20 people, including nine police officers and a firefighter, were injured on Friday in a huge explosion at a petrol station in an eastern district of Rome, Italian authorities said.

Website Roma Today published a photograph of a huge ball of flame and smoke rising high into the sky. Separate images released by the fire department showed the petrol station almost completely gutted.

Apart from the first responders, 16 civilians including the manager of the station were injured, the head of Rome’s police, Roberto Massucci, was quoted by Italian news agencies as saying. He added that no one was in a life-threatening condition.

Health authorities said five people were hospitalised with minor burns and injuries from shattered glass.

The large blast at the distributor of petrol, diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in the Prenestino neighbourhood was heard across the Italian capital just after 8 am (0600 GMT).

“I pray for the people involved in the explosion of a gas station (…) in the heart of my Diocese. I continue to follow the developments of this tragic incident with concern,” Pope Leo XIV wrote on X.

Firefighters and ambulance workers were caught up in the blast as they had been called to the scene earlier, after a truck hit a pipeline at the fuel distributor, local reports said.

“We are working on a tank explosion … the fire is still ongoing,” the fire department said in a statement, adding that one of its officers had been hospitalised.

A sports centre, which hosts a youth summer camp and sits opposite the station, was evacuated before the blast, a representative of the centre said in a Facebook video.

The fire spread to a nearby depot, and the shockwave from the explosion damaged nearby buildings.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was following the situation, her office said in a statement.

Additional reporting by Paolo Chiriatti in Rome; Editing by Giulia Segreti, Kate Mayberry anda Kim Coghill

Air India Express is a subsidiary of Air India, which is owned by the Tata Group

International News via Reuters:

India’s aviation watchdog reprimanded Air India’s budget carrier in March for not timely changing engine parts of an Airbus A320 as directed by European Union’s aviation safety agency, and falsifying records to show compliance, a government memo showed.

In a statement, Air India Express told Reuters it acknowledged the error to the Indian watchdog and undertook “remedial action and preventive measures”.

Air India has been under intense scrutiny since the June Boeing Dreamliner crash in Ahmedabad which killed all but one of the 242 people onboard. The world’s worst aviation disaster in a decade is still being investigated.

The engine issue in the Air India Express’ Airbus was raised on March 18, months before the crash. But the regulator has this year also warned parent Air India for breaching rules for flying three Airbus planes with overdue checks on escape slides, and in June warned it about “serious violations” of pilot duty timings.

Air India Express is a subsidiary of Air India, which is owned by the Tata Group. It has more than 115 aircraft and flies to more than 50 destinations, with 500 daily flights.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency in 2023 issued an airworthiness directive to address a “potential unsafe condition” on CFM International LEAP-1A engines, asking for replacement of some components such as engine seals and rotating parts, saying some manufacturing deficiencies had been found.

The agency’s directive said “this condition, if not corrected, could lead to failure of affected parts, possibly resulting in high energy debris release, with consequent damage to, and reduced control of, the aeroplane.”

The Indian government’s confidential memo in March sent to the airline, seen by Reuters, said that surveillance by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) revealed the parts modification “was not complied” on an engine of an Airbus A320 “within the prescribed time limit”.

“In order to show that the work has been carried out within the prescribed limits, the AMOS records have apparently been altered/forged,” the memo added, referring to the Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Operating System software used by airlines to manage maintenance and airworthiness.

The mandatory modification was required on Air India Express’ VT-ATD plane, the memo added. That plane typically flies on domestic routes and some international destinations such as Dubai and Muscat, according to the AirNav Radar website.

The lapse “indicates that the accountable manager has failed to ensure quality control,” it added.

Air India Express told Reuters its technical team missed the scheduled implementation date for parts replacement due to the migration of records on its monitoring software, and fixed the problem soon after it was identified.

It did not give dates of compliance or directly address DGCA’s comment about records being altered, but said that after the March memo it took “necessary administrative actions”, which included removing the quality manager from the person’s position and suspending the deputy continuing airworthiness manager.

The DGCA and the European safety agency did not respond to Reuters queries.

Airbus and CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and Safran, also did not respond.

The lapse was first flagged during a DGCA audit in October 2024 and the plane in question took only a few trips after it was supposed to replace the CFM engine parts, a source with direct knowledge said.

“Such issues should be fixed immediately. It’s a grave mistake. The risk increases when you are flying over sea or near restricted airpsace,” said Vibhuti Singh, a former legal expert at the India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.

The Indian government told parliament in February that authorities warned or fined airlines in 23 instances for safety violations last year. Three of those cases involved Air India Express, and eight Air India.

The Tata Group acquired Air India from the Indian government in 2022 and the Dreamliner crash has cast a shadow on its ambitions of making it a “world class airline”.

While Air India has aggressively expanded its international flight network over the months, it still faces persistent complaints from passengers, who often take to social media to show soiled seats, broken armrests, non-operational entertainment systems and dirty cabins.

Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Aditi Shah; Editing by Kim Coghill

The Commission pushed back against calls for a delay in rolling out the AI rules

International News via Reuters:

A code of practice designed to help thousands of companies comply with the European Union’s landmark artificial intelligence rules may only apply at the end of 2025, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Alphabet’s Google, Meta Platforms, European companies such as Mistral and ASML as well as several EU governments have called for a delay in implementing the Artificial Intelligence Act, partly due to the lack of a code of practice.

Publication of the Code of Practice for large language models (GPAI), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar models launched by Google and Mistral, had originally been planned for May 2.

The Commission plans to present the code in the coming days and expects companies to sign up next month and the guidance likely to kick in at the end of the year, a Commission spokesperson said.

“On the AI Act’s GPAI rules, the European AI Board is discussing the timing to implement the Code of Practice, with the end of 2025 being considered,” he said.

Signing up to the code is voluntary, but companies who decline to do so, as some Big Tech firms have indicated, will not benefit from the legal certainty provided to a signatory.

AI advocacy group The Future Society said the Code would be a key part of the AI rule book.

The Code of Practice makes clear what level of quality downstream users or business customers can expect, making it harder for U.S. companies to mislead users into adopting unreliable products, its executive director Nick Moës said.

He said the code requires legally mandated authorities and experts to assess the quality of these general-purpose AI services.

The Commission pushed back against calls for a delay in rolling out the AI rules.

“Our commitment to the goals of the AI Act, such as establishing harmonised risk-based rules across the EU and ensuring the safety of AI systems in the European market, remains unchanged,” the spokesperson said.

Campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory decried Big Tech’s role.

“Delay. Pause. Deregulate. That is Big Tech’s lobby playbook to fatally weaken rules that should protect us from biased and unfair AI systems,” said Bram Vranken, Corporate Europe Observatory researcher and campaigner.

The AI rules for GPAI models will become legally binding on August 2 but only enforced a year later for new models placed on the market starting from next month. Existing models will have two years to August 2, 2027 to comply with the rules.

Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Marguerita Choy and Jane Merriman

Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July

International News via Reuters:

China’s north and west braced for more flash floods and landslides on Thursday as annual ‘Plum Rains’ left a trail of destruction and prompted the mobilisation of thousands of rescue workers to pull people from floodwaters.

Red alerts were issued tracing the rains as they moved from the southwestern province of Sichuan through the northwestern province of Gansu, and up to the northeastern province of Liaoning.

While some Beijing-bound trains were suspended and one of the city’s airports experienced flight delays and cancellations late on Wednesday and into the early hours.

Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for policymakers as they threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions and wreak havoc on China’s $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.

Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July, when the ‘Plum Rains’ – named for their timing coinciding with plums ripening along China’s Yangtze River during the East Asia monsoon – typically reach their peak.

State media said over 1,000 rescue workers were dispatched to the town of Taiping in central China’s Henan province on Wednesday, after torrential rains caused a nearby river to burst its banks, killing five people in a flash flood and leaving three others missing.

Two more people died in a landslide at a construction side in Gansu province caused by heavy rains over Wednesday and Thursday, a separate state media report said.

During a two-day visit to the northern province of Hebei, which borders Henan, Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing urged local officials to step up efforts ahead of anticipated heavy rain to minimise casualties by preemptively evacuating people, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

While China has a nationwide severe weather monitoring and forecasting system, scientists say very localised predictions remain a challenge, testing the ability of particularly rural communities with fewer forecasting resources to evacuate local populations quickly ahead of any extreme weather.

Further south, in China’s Guangxi region, several buildings slid down hillsides over the last two days after their foundations gave way in waterlogged soil, local media reported.

Footage verified by Reuters shows a five-storey building under construction in the town of Xinzhou collapsing into a nearby river within seconds, as the ground beneath it suddenly gave way.

Between June 30 and July 1, the Lengshui River which flows through Xinzhou experienced its worst flooding in records going back to 2005, said a separate local media report, citing the Ministry of Water Resources. The report also instructed readers on how to recognise early signs of flash flooding.

Meanwhile, in Pingliu Village, some 80 km (50 miles) west of Xinzhou, 21 people from seven households were evacuated on Tuesday after a landslide collapsed two houses and damaged four others, other local media reported.

In contrast, the national meteorological centre forecast scorching heat along the country’s eastern seaboard.

Reporting by Joe Cash, Xiuhao Chen and Arthur Wei; Editing by Michael Perry

Carbon credits, or offsets, involve funding projects that reduce CO2 emissions abroad

International News via Reuters:

The European Commission has proposed an EU climate target for 2040 that allows countries to count carbon credits bought from developing nations towards the EU goal for the first time.

Here’s what that means, and why the EU move on Wednesday faced criticism from campaigners and some scientists.

WHAT ARE CARBON CREDITS?

Carbon credits, or offsets, involve funding projects that reduce CO2 emissions abroad in place of cuts to your own greenhouse gas emissions.

Examples include forest restoration in Brazil, or converting a city’s petrol buses to electric. The buyer counts “credits” for those emission reductions towards its climate goal, and the seller gets finance for their green project.

Proponents say the system generates much-needed funding for CO2-cutting efforts in developing nations and lets countries work together to cut emissions around the world.

However, the reputation of CO2 credits has been dented by a string of scandals in which credit-generating projects failed to deliver the climate benefits they claimed. 

WHY IS THE EU BUYING THEM?

The European Commission proposed allowing up to 3 percentage points of the EU’s 2040 target – to cut net emissions by 90% from 1990 levels – to be covered by carbon credits bought from other countries.

The EU’s existing climate targets require countries to meet the goals entirely by cutting emissions at home.

The bloc’s executive Commission said last year it hoped the EU could agree a 90% emissions-cutting target for 2040, with no mention of carbon credits.

Tumultuous geopolitics and the economic woes of European industries have since stoked political pushback, with governments from Germany to Poland demanding a softer target.

In response, the Commission said it would add flexibilities, and landed on carbon credits as a way to retain a 90% emissions-cutting goal while reducing the domestic steps needed to reach it.

EU countries and the European Parliament must negotiate and approve the goal.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS?

The EU plan was welcomed by countries including Germany, which had pushed to include carbon credits in the goal, and by carbon credit project developers as a boost for climate finance.

But environmental campaigners said the EU was shirking domestic CO2-cutting efforts and warned against relying on cheap, low-value credits. 

The EU’s climate science advisers had also opposed buying credits under the 2040 target, which they said would divert money from investments in local clean industries.

The EU banned international credits from its own carbon market after a flood of cheap credits with weak environmental benefits contributed to a carbon price crash. 

To try to address the risks, the Commission said it would buy credits in line with a global market and rules for trading carbon credits which the U.N. is developing. These include quality standards aimed at avoiding the problems that unregulated credit trading has faced in recent years.

Brussels will also propose rules next year on specific quality standards for the carbon credits the EU buys. 

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

The EU doesn’t yet know. Carbon credit prices today can be as low as a few dollars per tonne of CO2, up to more than $100, depending on the project.

EU emissions records suggest the bloc would need to buy at least 140 million tonnes of CO2 emissions to cover 3% of the 2040 target, roughly equivalent to the Netherlands’ total emissions last year.

One senior Commission official said the bloc was determined not to hoover up cheap junk credits.

“I don’t think that would have any additional value. The credits we see currently on voluntary carbon markets are very, very cheap, and that probably reflects a lack of high environmental integrity,” the senior official said.

Reporting by Kate Abnett; additional reporting by Virginia Furness; editing by Philippa Fletcher