Thousands of firefighters backed by the military and water-bombing aircraft yesterday battled dozens of wildfires across Spain and Portugal, as the death toll increased to six since the outbreaks began.

At least 11 people were killed and dozens more injured in a factory blast in a Russian region outside Moscow, Russian authorities said yesterday.

All of Spain was on a heatwave alert yesterday, while the weather agency warned that much of the country was at “very high to extreme risk” from wildfires.

England’s water shortfall was classed as “nationally significant” as it experienced its driest first six months of the year since 1976, the Environment Agency said yesterday.

World food commodity prices rose in July to their highest in over two years, as a jump for vegetable oils and record levels for meat outweighed falling cereal, dairy and sugar prices, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said.

A rare first edition of JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” sold for 43,000 pounds ($57,000) at auction on Wednesday, after it was found during a house clearance in southwest England.

The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

The Kremlin yesterday said that a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Ukraine was set for the “coming days” as US-led efforts to broker peace rumble on.

Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday signed a decree that would allow Russia to increase its greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by 2035 compared with 2021 levels.

A Russian attack that set ablaze a holiday camp in central Ukraine yesterday killed two people and wounded another dozen, local authorities said.

A “one-in, one-out” deal in which Britain can return some migrants who cross the Channel in small boats back to France came into force yesterday, the UK government announced.

Russia said yesterday that its army had seized a new village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, accelerating its claimed advance into the key industrial area.

Websites of banned Russian media can still be easily accessed across the EU in the “overwhelming majority” of cases, experts said yesterday, slamming the bloc’s “failure” to publish up-to-date guidance.

A volcano erupted for the first time in 450 years in Russia’s eastern Kamchatka region, the nation’s emergency authority said yesterday, days after one of the strongest earthquakes on record hit the region.

The amount of aid entering Gaza remains “very insufficient” despite a limited improvement, the German government said on Saturday after ministers discussed ways to heighten pressure on Israel.

Negotiators will take another stab at reaching a global pact on plastic pollution at talks opening Tuesday in Geneva but they face deep divisions over how to tackle the health and ecological hazard.

US President Donald Trump threatened fresh sanctions Thursday while slamming Russia’s military actions in Ukraine as “disgusting,” as strikes on Kyiv killed at least 16 people.

British researchers have discovered a rare handprint on a 4,000-year-old Egyptian artefact, a Cambridge museum said on Monday.

The United States struck a framework trade deal with the European Union yesterday, imposing a 15 percent US import tariff on most EU goods, while averting a spiralling battle between two allies that account for almost a third of global trade.

A Russian rocket put an Iranian communications satellite into space yesterday, Iranian state media reported, the latest achievement for an aerospace programme that has long concerned Western governments.