First Factor: Greece battles wildfires as temperature in Italy forecast to hit 46C | US information

Good morning.

Swaths of virgin pine forests have been destroyed in Greece as devastating wildfires proceed to tear by terrain turned tinder-dry by the intense warmth, writes Helena Smith, the Guardian’s correspondent in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.

As daylight broke, firefighters renewed efforts to comprise wind-fanned blazes in Boeotia, north-east Attica, Loutraki and Dervenochoria. In some circumstances firefighters backed by water-dumping planes, helicopters and vehicles, battled all through the evening to place out flames.

Troopers and volunteers are helping the nationwide hearth service. There have been studies at the moment that three volunteer firefighters had been injured by flying shards of ash as they struggled to extinguish fires across the seaside city of Saronida, south of Athens. Greeks in affected areas woke as much as apocalyptic scenes and the devastation of discovering the lack of properties and houses.

In the meantime, Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, is bracing for one in every of its hottest-ever temperatures on Italy’s islands of Sicily and Sardinia, the place a excessive of 48C (118F) has been forecast by the European House Company at the moment, AFP studies.

• What’s taking place within the US? Lengthy the most popular place on Earth, Dying Valley on Sunday approached a number of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, meteorologists stated. Temperatures in Dying Valley, which runs alongside a part of central California’s border with Nevada, reached 128F (53.3C) on the aptly named Furnace Creek, the Nationwide Climate Service stated.

• What do the specialists say about what’s taking place? The World Meteorological Group secretary normal, Petteri Taalas, stated: “The acute climate … is having a significant affect on human well being, ecosystems, economies, agriculture, vitality and water provides. This underlines the rising urgency of slicing greenhouse gasoline emissions as shortly and as deeply as attainable.”

Russia launches strikes throughout Ukraine, ‘fairly severe’ hearth reported at Black Sea port

Russia has launched a collection of airstrikes throughout Ukraine, together with on the southern port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv, hours after it stated it was pulling out of a UN-brokered grain deal which allowed Ukrainian produce to be exported by way of the Black Sea.

A “fairly severe” hearth broke out at one of many “services” in Mykolaiv, the mayor, Oleksandr Senkevich, stated on Telegram, including that he would supply additional particulars within the morning.

Air defences had been additionally activated in Odesa, the place Oleh Kiper, the top of the area’s army administration, stated air defence techniques repelled a number of waves of Russian drone assaults.

The Ukrainian air power additionally warned of drone assaults in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk areas and of the specter of ballistic missile assaults in Poltava, Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kirovohrad.

• What’s taking place with the Crimean Bridge? Partial highway visitors opened on one lane of the Crimean Bridge late yesterday, the Russian deputy prime minister Marat Khusnullin stated on his Telegram channel, virtually 24 hours after it was struck by two explosions. “Motor transport on the Crimean Bridge has been restored in reverse mode on essentially the most outer proper lane,” Khusnullin wrote, based on Reuters.

Kin of the Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr joined the White Home yesterday in condemning his “deplorable” declare that Covid-19 was engineered to focus on some ethnic teams and spare others.

The previous legal professional and nephew of John F Kennedy made the extraordinary assertion throughout a current dinner in New York Metropolis, saying the virus was “focused to assault Caucasians and Black folks”.

His remarks, additionally alleging improvement by China of viruses as a bioweapon, had been captured on video, and revealed by the New York Put up on Saturday, drawing accusations of racism and antisemitism.

“There’s an argument that it’s ethnically focused. Covid-19 assaults sure races disproportionately,” he stated. “The people who find themselves most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese language.”

Kennedy tried to disavow his phrases yesterday in a press release despatched to the Guardian by his marketing campaign workers. He stated: “The New York Put up story is mistaken. I’ve by no means, ever advised that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to ‘spare Jews’, and I unequivocally reject this disgusting and outlandish conspiracy concept.”

• What did the White Home say? On the media briefing yesterday afternoon, the White Home press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, denounced the remarks. “The claims made on that tape is fake. It’s vile,” she stated. “They put our fellow People in peril if you consider the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of claiming these kinds of issues. It’s an assault on our fellow residents, our fellow People. So it’s vital that we communicate out.”

• What else is going on? The West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who for years has held an outsized diploma of energy throughout the Democratic occasion, appeared yesterday at an occasion held by a political group exploring a third-party presidential bid. Manchin’s look has fueled hypothesis that he’s contemplating a run for the presidency, a situation that has alarmed Democrats because it may weaken President Joe Biden’s candidacy.

In different information …

• After California’s extreme drought resurfaced a historic settlement from the depths of Lake Isabella, the ghost city of Whiskey Flat has as soon as once more returned to the water. Whiskey Flat was coated once more by the beforehand drought-stricken lake within the state’s Central Valley, SFGate reported.

• An Iowa choose yesterday briefly blocked the state’s new ban on most abortions after about six weeks of being pregnant, simply days after the governor, Kim Reynolds, signed it into legislation. Meaning abortion is as soon as once more authorized in Iowa as much as 20 weeks of being pregnant whereas the courts assess the brand new legislation’s constitutionality.

• A few of Hollywood’s largest stars met yesterday to debate the actors’ strike as their union stated that with out “transformative change” your entire occupation was below menace. The assembly was attended by about 500 brokers, publicists and actors, together with Lupita Nyong’o, Laverne Cox and Melissa McCarthy.

• In an open letter to American librarians, Barack Obama has criticised “profoundly misguided” rightwing efforts to ban books from libraries in public colleges. “It’s no coincidence that these ‘banned books’ are sometimes written by or characteristic folks of color, Indigenous folks, and members of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood.”

Stat of the day: Tesla administrators comply with return $735m to settle claims they had been grossly overpaid

Tesla Inc’s administrators will return $735m to the corporate to settle claims they grossly overpaid themselves in one of many largest shareholder settlements of its sort, based on a submitting yesterday in a Delaware court docket. The settlement resolves a 2020 lawsuit by a retirement fund which holds Tesla inventory and challenged inventory choices that had been granted to Tesla administrators beginning in June 2017. The settlement doesn’t have an effect on the $56bn compensation package deal of Elon Musk, which is being challenged by shareholders in a separate lawsuit that went to trial final 12 months. A ruling is predicted quickly within the Musk case. The administrators, together with the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, agreed to return the equal worth of three.1m Tesla inventory choices, based on a court docket submitting.

Don’t miss this: ‘I’ve mourned her for many years’ – why first loves can form our lives for ever

In our early romantic relationships, there’s typically a mismatch between the power of our emotions and the stark actuality. So why do they linger in our recollections? “We now have a great deal of relationships, however in some methods we study essentially the most from the very first one,” says Catherine Loveday, a professor on the Centre for Psychological Sciences on the College of Westminster.

“I feel we may stroll down a avenue and ask everybody about their past love and so they may let you know about it intimately,” says organic anthropologist Helen Fisher who, at 78, has spent a lifetime learning love. She met up together with her past love a long time after they separated and spent an evening with him. “There are some issues about past love which can be actually dramatic,” she says, and so they can’t all be defined by novelty, or what the creator and psychotherapist Philippa Perry refers to because the “social contagion” that has us pursuing “true” love even at age 13, writes Paula Cocozza.

Local weather examine: John Kerry goals to place China tensions apart at essential local weather talks

John Kerry, the US local weather envoy, has referred to as for extra speedy motion to confront the local weather disaster in an important go to to China that’s going down in opposition to a fraught backdrop. Each nations are at present baking below report heatwaves and Kerry is dealing with hostile opposition from Republicans again house, writes Oliver Milman. Kerry’s assembly with Xie Zhenhua, his Chinese language counterpart, for 3 days of formal talks in Beijing is the primary substantive summit between the world’s two largest carbon emitters on the local weather disaster since relations had been frozen final August, when Nancy Pelosi, the then Home of Representatives speaker, visited Taiwan, a transfer condemned by China’s management. The go to comes amid roiling heatwaves the world over, together with within the US, the place greater than a 3rd of the inhabitants is below warmth warnings. China, in the meantime, has simply had its nationwide report temperature set within the western area of Xinjiang, the place it reached 52.2C (125F).

Final Factor: ‘Soul-crushing’: transformed Bay Space workplace residence fail goes viral

Extra persons are working from house today, however a video of a California office-to-residential conversion that just lately went viral on TikTok would blur the road between workplace and residential life utterly. The TikTok profile zillowtastrophes posted the video which incorporates a one-bedroom, one-bath “just lately transformed” property in San Rafael, California, simply 18 miles (30km) north of San Francisco, priced at $520,000, a steal for the realm. Changing workplace house to residential has been touted as an answer to the Bay Space’s housing disaster, however this one doesn’t appear to be a lot of a conversion. As Jessica Extra, the individual behind the zillowtastrophes profile, says within the video, the proprietor mainly simply “plopped a kitchen on this wall”, the economic carpeting appears to be like like the kind present in company workplace buildings worldwide, and the bed room undoubtedly has that conference-room really feel. You’d half count on to get up to Jim and Pam from The Workplace in the lounge.

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