Western Europe’s wildfire crisis retreats as Greece evacuates hundreds near Athens

Cotality data shows a drop in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, as nation’s median home price falls about $19,000 below its March peakGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastHouse prices have fallen in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth as the market downturn spreads across Australia.New Cotality data, released on Monday, showed prices have fallen across most of the nation since May. Continue reading...

New education secretary says it is ‘false trade-off’ by critics to suggest schools cannot pursue academic excellence alongside technical skillsLucy Powell has said she wants to be an ambitious “tiger mum” for all young people, whatever their route through education, after the government was accused of dumbing down England’s schools with plans to create more vocational routes.The new education secretary said secondary pupils should be able to pursue academic excellence as well as high-quality vocational training, and it was a “false trade-off” to suggest schools could not provide both. Continue reading...

People among the more than 50,000 who entered Spanish enclave this week describe the journey and their prospectsFour days ago, Youssef El Abbas saw an opportunity to reclaim the life he had lost years seven earlier. News was circulating that about 400 people had swum from Morocco to the neighbouring Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the north African coast, approximately 12 miles (19km) across the strait of Gibraltar from mainland Spain.Here was a chance for the 44-year-old Moroccan father of four to return to Spain, from which he had been deported when his residency expired after the loss of his job in Bilbao in 2019. Continue reading...

Volunteers painstakingly gather plastic pellets washing up on beaches after ship collision on 19 July“You’ve got a local community that really cares about the coastline,” said Alice Laverty, reflecting on the huge army of volunteers who had taken to crisis-hit beaches in north-east England with passion and only the most basic tools. “They’ve all got a dustpan, a brush, a bucket, a kitchen sieve.”On beaches from Cambois in Northumberland to Seaburn on Wearside, up to 2,000 dedicated volunteers have been painstakingly sifting through sand to find tiny, lentil-sized pellets of plastic. Continue reading...

After years of building lives in UK, potentially hundreds of thousands of EU citizens are being told they have no right to remain The UK Home Office has started stripping some EU citizens of their post-Brexit residency rights, in a move that has raised concerns about Britain’s compliance with its withdrawal agreement with Europe.The UK internal affairs authority has told at least 100 people that they were given residency rights “in error”, disrupting their lives just as they come to the end of their five-year “pre-settled status” and prepare to upgrade to the permanent “settled status”. Continue reading...

Tariffs are annoying and disruptive, but this round is less impactful – and business owners are taking them in their strideRebounding from his defeat at the supreme court in February, Donald Trump has recently announced a new round of tariffs, invoking sections of various trade acts to levy amounts on industries and countries based on reasons ranging from “forced labor” to “excess capacity”.And how are small and medium-sized businesses in the US reacting? One word: snoozefest. Continue reading...

Convicted killer seeks to withdraw guilty plea and go to trial – but that could put death penalty sentence back in playCould Bryan Kohberger, convicted 13 months ago of the murders of four University of Idaho students, now find himself on death row? That’s one potential outcome of a perplexing petition he filed last week in which he claimed he was misled by his defense attorneys into pleading guilty.A new trial could grant the wishes of family members who hoped to see the 31-year doctoral criminology student convicted by a jury in open court and sentenced to death. Or is Kohberger simply following the example of many serial killers in attempting to gain control of the narrative and extend the suffering of his victims’ families? Continue reading...

The president’s minions have trawled the statutes to restore roadblocks to trade. The invocation of Smoot-Hawley looks especially dangerousDonald Trump may have found the killer weapon to punish countries at will: by imposing tariffs on their exports to the United States.The president has been looking for a new tool since February, when the supreme court struck down tariffs he slapped on virtually all of America’s trading partners based on the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the spurious grounds that the US faced a variety of national emergencies. It’s become a parlor game among policy wonks to predict what new legal justification he would deploy to replace them.Eduardo Porter is a journalist focused on economics and politics. He writes the newsletter Being There on Substack Continue reading...

Authorities in Delaware tackle cluster with vaccination and contract tracing – but field has been weakened by cutsMeasles outbreaks are igniting throughout the United States as the nation passes the highest case count in 30 years – putting greater pressure on state and local health departments and highlighting the importance of early identification and quick action.The US has officially surpassed last year’s tally of measles cases, reaching 2,371 confirmed infections by the end of July. Those numbers have been driven by clusters in Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah – but in times of high transmission, outbreaks elsewhere become more likely. And with decreasing vaccination rates across the country, these sparks are falling on increasingly dry timber. Continue reading...

Climate scientist urges better planning as southern England had just 1% of long-term average rainfall last monthHalf of England and the whole of Wales are officially in drought and July is set to be the driest month on record as extreme heat intensified by the climate crisis continues to grip the UK and Europe this summer.The announcements this week by England’s Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales mark the third such event over the past five years, and come in the wake of four record-breaking heatwaves since May which have fuelled huge wildfires and left farmers, wildlife and protected habitats running out of water. Continue reading...

Investors scramble to make sense of a shock Chinese challenge to the dominance of western chipmakersEven for the rollercoaster world of AI, last week was particularly volatile as investors scrambled to keep up with developments that threatened the dominance of the largest western chipmakers.It began with a double whammy. On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn). Continue reading...