CANARY ISLANDS - Spain heads the list of EU countries affected by wildfires so far this year, with 185,00 acres burned, according to the European Forest Fire Information System - with Spaniards warned to brace themselves for further searing temperatures. A wildfire raging on the popular UK tourist destination of Tenerife was started on purpose, police have confirmed, with 12,000 people evacuated since the blaze erupted on Tuesday. Speaking today, Canary Islands regional President Fernando Clavijo announced police have opened three lines of investigation - although he did not say whether there had been any arrests.

SOUTH AFRICA - From August 22nd to 24th, Johannesburg, South Africa, will become the center of the multipolar world, as the most relevant emerging economies of the planet – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – gather to hold its 15th summit. The BRICS group arrive at this new high-level meeting flexing its political and economic muscle, fielding dozens of applications from hopeful countries, and developing its economic structures to attempt a de-dollarization of the world’s economy.

SOUTH AFRICA - China plans to push for the BRICS bloc to become a full-fledged rival of the G7 during its upcoming summit in South Africa, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The newspaper noted that there’s no agreement between Beijing and New Delhi on whether BRICS — which currently comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — should be a non-aligned economic club or a political force that openly challenges the West. In early August, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said Russia believes that “in one form or another, the expansion of BRICS will contribute to the further development and strengthening of this organization.”

GERMANY - Germany withdraws support for Ukraine as public anger reaches boiling point. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that due to the public’s lack of support for Ukraine, the German government would begin pulling back on its support for the Zelenskyy regime. Scholz addressed an event organized by the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper on Friday, and reporters asked him about the dangers of escalation in Ukraine, given Germany is supplying Kiev with weapons, including Leopard 2 battle tanks. Currently German officials are debating whether or not to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles, which Moscow would surely view as another major escalation. A new poll published Friday shows that the majority of Germans are against sending Taurus missiles, given the obvious risk of escalation with Russia.

USA - Panicking Californians were trapped in cars and climbed trees in bid to escape dangerous floodwaters and mudslides as Tropical Storm Hilary battered the state bringing down bridges and powerlines and leaving vehicles stranded on flooded roads. The first tropical storm to hit Southern California in 84 years brought havoc across the state, leaving 25 million people under flood warnings and schools to close today following fears of devastating destruction.

GUATEMALA - Authorities are on high alert as Guatemala’s Volcan de Fuego (Volcano of Fire) started erupting on Thursday. The volcano is continuing to display intense activity. This latest eruptive phase is classed as ‘strombolian activity,’ meaning it produces frequent eruptions, and began at 5.45 am local time on Thursday. The ash column reached 4,800 meters above sea level, and a lava flow of more than 2 km (1.2 miles) was reported. The volcanic explosions are causing rumblings, shock waves, lava flows and small pyroclastic flows, according to INSIVUMEH.

CANADA - Residents of western Canada scrambled to evacuate Saturday as raging wildfires encroached on two metropolitan areas – separate blazes that have sent tens of thousands fleeing over the course of just days. The devastating fires in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories are just the latest in a summer of dramatic wildfires across the country that have left millions of acres scorched. According to estimates, 19,000 people were evacuated from Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories' capital, over 48 hours, its environment minister Shane Thompson said late Friday. The city, home to some 20,000, was largely a ghost town following the largest ever evacuation from the region. More than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) south in British Columbia, fire also bore down on Kelowna, a city of 150,000 people in the Okanagan Valley.

USA - Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

CHINA - In a bid to secure a domestic food supply and cut down reliance on foreign imports, China is expanding its farmlands. As explained by the newspaper the China Daily, “the rapidly ageing rural population has made it more challenging for China to ensure food security,” bringing about a decline in the number of farmers and forcing the country to depend more on imported produce. Since China is the world’s second-most populous country, with over 1.4 billion people, it is natural that its food demands are astronomical and growing year on year, as the population eats more with development and imports increasing accordingly.

GERMANY - A survey shows nearly two-thirds of voters want to pull the plug on Germany's ruling coalition. The poll comes immediately after figures that show most Germans are unhappy with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his government. As many as 64% of Germans who answered in the survey released on Saturday said a change of government would make the country a better place. The poll, for the mass-circulation newspaper Bild, comes the day after a separate survey found that most Germans were dissatisfied with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the coalition.

RUSSIA - Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for prelanding orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme. Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it lost contact with the craft 1.57pm (SA time) on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into prelanding orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday. “The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon,” Roskosmos said. Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the US which both have advanced lunar ambitions.

MEXICO - As US relations with China have fractured over the years, Mexico has emerged as the new manufacturing base for America. Doing business overseas has become increasingly more expensive. Due to the rising costs, experts believe that Mexico has now overtaken China to become the top manufacturer for American companies. At the beginning of 2023, Mexico became the top US trading partner with bilateral trade between the two countries totaling $263 billion during the first four months of this year, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Mexico’s emergence followed fractious US relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014,” said the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

USA - Rural hospitals in Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Oregon are closing down their maternity wards due to a staff shortage and lower birth rates, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. University hospitals in Ashland, Ohio, OSF Healthcare in Pontiac, Illinois, and Trinity Health in Troy, New York, and Baker City, Oregon, will all shut down their maternity wards by the end of the year. In Pontiac, the local hospital, OSF St James, saw a decline in births. The number of deliveries went from 500 babies a year to less than 180 a year. “Hospitals across the country are experiencing a trend of declining birth rates. This, along with staffing shortages, has resulted in having to make this difficult decision,” the hospital’s chief operating officer said.

UK - Britain’s top demographics expert has said the falling number of babies born in Britain is a “good thing” after new data showed the number of births had hit a 20-year low. Professor Sarah Harper CBE, founder and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, said falling birth rates in the West were “good for… our planet”. Her comments came after official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed there were 605,479 live births in England and Wales last year, the lowest number since 2002. The total was down 3.1 percent compared to 2021 and is part of a long-term decline in the number of births across Britain and the developed world.

USA - In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them. They aren’t wrong. Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise. Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’ democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”