The Guardian view on Europe’s wildfires: politics must catch up with the new reality | Editorial

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A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in … Read more

Weather tracker: Why Europe’s wildfires are proving so fierce and difficult to stop | Spain

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A combination of an unusually wet winter, very low rainfall since spring and repeated record-breaking summer heatwaves is likely to explain why wildfires have ignited, spread and resisted control so readily across France and Spain in recent days. About 90% of wildfires are started by human activity, typically igniting “fine fuels” such as vegetation grass, … Read more

Am I a chicken-shop lefty? Here’s what a French fast food row taught me about politics | Coco Khan

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How do you like your progressive politics? Are you net-zero left or anti-identity politics left? A “legalising drugs” kind of radical or someone whose public sector solidarity includes police? Nato or Nat-no? The reputation for infighting in lefty spaces – where policy disagreements harden into personal tests of morality – needs neither introduction nor encouragement. … Read more

What’s behind Maga influencer Laura Loomer’s about-face on Ukraine? | Donald Trump

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Laura Loomer, the online Maga provocateur, has never worked in the White House or anywhere else in the government, but her sudden conversion to the Ukrainian cause this week is significant because her social media posts often have real policy implications in the second Trump administration. The rightwing commentator has spent the last few days … Read more

If Trump really cares about forced labor, he should look at the US – rather than slap more tariffs on the world | Eduardo Porter

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Don’t believe the Trump administration’s rationale for its new volley of tariffs against everybody. The new levies, ostensibly to punish countries for failing to do enough to curb forced labor, switched on at 12.01am on Friday, to coincide with the expiration of a temporary 10% blanket duty that Donald Trump imposed in February, ostensibly to … Read more