Good morning.
In Spain, the opposition conservative party has won the most number of seats in national elections but looks unlikely to have secured a coalition rightwing majority. The vote had raised fears of the far right entering government for the first time since Spain returned to democracy after the death of Gen Francisco Franco five decades ago.
Although the polls had consistently predicted the People’s party (PP) would cruise past the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) to secure an emphatic win in Sunday’s election, early results quickly established that the race was going to be much tighter.
With 100% of the vote counted, the PP had won 136 seats to the PSOE’s 122. The conservatives’ potential coalition partners in the far-right Vox party had won 33 seats – well down on the 52 it picked up in the last election. The PSOE’s allies in the new, far-left Sumar alliance were in fourth, with 31 seats.
The results show the political hue of the next government is far from a foregone conclusion, with the left and right blocs running almost neck and neck in their race to get as close to 176 seats as possible. As Monday approached, the PP and Vox had 169 seats to the PSOE and Sumar’s 153. This suggests Spain is in for weeks of negotiating and horse-trading as the rival camps explore their options for government.
Why was an early election called? The last time Spain went to the polls – in November 2019 – the cover of the satirical magazine El Jueves showed a manic and sweating Pedro Sánchez hunched over a fruit machine, desperately hoping that his gamble of calling the second general election of the year would pay off. It did, writes Sam Jones. Four years later, however, the stakes were even higher for Spain’s socialist prime minister, for his country – and for Europe. Sánchez, a politician known for his willingness to take chances, surprised everyone at the end of May when he reacted to his party’s poor showing in regional and local elections by calling a snap general election.
Greece: wildfires break out on Corfu and Evia as 19,000 flee Rhodes blazes
Firefighters in Greece have been struggling to contain 82 wildfires burning across the country, 64 of which started Sunday, the country’s hottest day of the summer so far.
As well as huge blazes on the island of Rhodes, which forced 19,000 people to flee, wildfires also broke out on the islands of Evia and Corfu. On Evia, authorities told residents of four villages in the south of the island to evacuate to the town of Karystos, which was west of where the fire was advancing.
A vice-governor of the Central Greece region, Giorgos Kelaiditis, who was near one of the villages, told the state news service ANA-MPA that the situation was difficult. “The fire may be 2km [1.2 miles] away, but the wind is strong, the growth is low, the smoke thick and the air is hard to breathe,” he said. Northern Evia was devastated by wildfires in August 2021.
How have people been evacuated? Local police said 16,000 people were evacuated by land and 3,000 by sea from 12 villages and several hotels. Six people were briefly treated at a hospital for respiratory problems. A person who fell and broke a leg during a hotel evacuation, and a pregnant woman, remained in hospital, authorities said.
Two drones downed over Moscow, says Russian defence ministry
Russia has said it has neutralised two Ukrainian drones over Moscow in the early hours of Monday, with one crashing close to the defence ministry in the city centre.
Officials said the drones hit non-residential buildings in the capital and that there were no casualties a day after Kyiv vowed to “retaliate” for a Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Russia’s defence ministry said: “A Kyiv regime attempt to carry out a terrorist act using two drones on objects on the territory of the city of Moscow was stopped. Two Ukrainian drones were suppressed and crashed. There are no casualties.”
The Tass news agency reported one drone had crashed in the Komsomolsky Prospekt area, near the defence ministry, while another hit a business centre on Likhacheva Street, which is next to one of the city’s main ring roads. The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said the drone strikes took place at about 4am local time. He said emergency services were working at the scene and also reported no casualties.
What else is happening? An ammunition depot was struck during a Ukrainian drone attack on Dzhankoi in Crimea early Monday morning, with Russian air defence forces intercepting or suppressing 11 drones over the area, a Russia-installed official has said.
In other news …
A Texas Republican representative, Tony Gonzales, has called the tactics used to deter people at the US-Mexico border “not acceptable” and urged the Biden administration and Congress to focus more heavily on legal immigration. Gonzales said the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, was ‘doing everything” he could at the border despite justice department backlash.
Eleven people have been killed after the concrete roof of a school gymnasium collapsed in China’s Qiqihar city – many of them believed to be young volleyball players – with authorities saying the illegal stacking of materials on the roof may have caused the cave in.
A woman has been found dead in Montana after coming into contact with a grizzly bear on a trail west of Yellowstone national park. The investigation into the attack was continuing, the state’s fish, wildlife and parks department said. It did not confirm the cause of death.
Calls for a federal government takeover of New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail are likely to grow after a stabbing suspect died in his cell early Sunday morning. It was the prison’s seventh inmate death this year and the 26th since New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, took office in January 2022.
A fifth bus of asylum seekers from Texas arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday as part of the Texas governor Greg Abbott’s plans to transport people away from his state. On Saturday, the LA mayor Karen Bass’s office said the bus arrived at about 11.30am at Union Station.
Stat of the day: Greta Gerwig makes history as Barbie has biggest opening weekend for film directed by a woman
Greta Gerwig has made history as Barbie took $377m at the box office during its opening weekend around the world, the biggest ever for a film directed by a woman. In North American, Barbie claimed top spot with $155m in ticket sales across 4,243 locations in the US and Canada, surpassing The Super Mario Bros Movie and this year’s Marvel releases to become the biggest opening of the year in North America. The social media-fuelled fusion of Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer as “Barbenheimer” brought moviegoers back to the theatres in record numbers to see both films as a double feature. Oppenheimer also soared past expectations, taking in $80.5m from 3,610 theatres in the US and Canada, making it Nolan’s biggest non-Batman debut and one of the best ever starts for an R-rated biographical drama.
Don’t miss this: ‘We are winning’ – are US Jews who oppose Israeli settlements finally getting somewhere?
Mike Levinson has been pushing back for 40 years and finally thinks he may be getting somewhere. “There’s a change and the politicians see it. I think it scares them,” said Levinson, holding a sign demanding “Stop Israeli settler violence” as he marched through New York Thursday. “There’s a tremendous change going on in the American Jewish community. There are a lot of Jews, especially young people, who are not so quick to automatically and unconditionally support everything that Israel does. People are accepting the fact that it’s OK to be Jewish and criticise Israel.”
Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It has been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.
Climate check: Why aren’t we more scared of the climate crisis? It’s complicated
This summer, millions of people in the US have experienced the intense effects of the climate crisis. The “heat dome” that has gripped the south-west for the past three weeks is expanding into the south-eastern states. In the north-east, people have been killed and crops wiped out by catastrophic flooding. Canada’s worst wildfire season on record has not only caused tens of thousands of Indigenous people to be displaced, but the accompanying smoke has also billowed over into the north-eastern and midwest US, setting records for poor air quality. In many cases, these events have caused irreparable damage and trauma to those directly affected, and can certainly feel like they’re encroaching on those people on the periphery. And yet despite the fact that we’re living through a climate disaster, most Americans aren’t cowering in fear every day about the future of our planet. There’s a psychological reason for that.
Last Thing: Rebranding Twitter – the shaky history of corporate makeovers
Elon Musk has revealed a new logo for Twitter, choosing a “minimalist art deco” X as part of a rebrand of the platform. However, the overhaul could prove highly risky, given the history of customer backlashes to previous high-profile corporate rebrands. Here are a couple of high-profile fails Musk may want to learn from. The oil company BP unveiled a new sunburst logo in 2000, named the Helios mark after the Greek sun god, as it sought to rebrand itself as an environmentally aware energy firm. It said its name would stand in future for “beyond petroleum” rather than British Petroleum, but environmental campaigners were unimpressed and accused the firm of greenwashing. The clothing brand Gap was forced into a breakneck reversal of its logo change plans in the space of six days in 2010. Consumers were excoriating on social media about the new design, which swapped the familiar blue square containing the company’s name in skinny serif-font capitals for a black lower-case Helvetica “Gap” with a small blue square over the “p”.
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