Read the daily news to learn English

Three firefighters killed on Crete and in mainland Greece as Europe battles wildfires

Three Greek firefighters have died while tackling wildfires on the island of Crete and in the south of the mainland, the Greek fire department has said, as extreme heat hinders efforts to control blazes ravaging southern Europe. The arc of brutal fires, which runs from the Atlantic coast to the eastern Mediterranean, and from the Scottish Highlands to the south of Spain, has alarmed experts because many of the fires have been out of control and burning close to towns and cities. Temperatures exacerbated by the climate crisis reached 38C on Wednesday in Bordeaux in France, where firefighters kept a huge blaze in nearby pine forests from reaching the suburbs, and 37C in Madrid, west of which Spain’s largest wildfire on record had been “technically stabilised”, according to the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska. Dozens of ground crews had managed to contain the Madrid fire overnight, emergency services for the region said on Wednesday morning, but a separate fire near València, where temperatures will peak at a cooler 32C, is still out of control. In televised comments from the Navalcarnero command centre on Wednesday morning, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the situation near the capital was improving but stressed it was the first time in Spanish history that a wildfire had been raised to “operational level 3”, with the national government taking over the disaster response. “I believe the next 12 hours will be very important,” he said. “They are going to be decisive in consolidating the work done by the national civil protection system.” Accompanied by strong winds, the fourth heatwave of western Europe’s scorching summer has alarmed firefighters, who warn it makes blazes harder to quell and raises the risk of fires restarting in areas that have been stabilised. New fires also prompted evacuations in Greece and Turkey. French authorities benefited from a calm night on Tuesday that allowed flare-ups to be swiftly extinguished but warned of “unfavourable” developing weather conditions that could hamper progress. The prefecture of Gironde said 126 firefighters had been injured since the start of the fire but the total burned area remained stable at 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) on Wednesday morning. Wildfires have burned a record-breaking area of France, data from the European Forest Fire Information System shows, while France and Spain have experienced record-breaking numbers of fires for this time of year. More than 330,000 people in southern Europe have been forced to flee their homes and hotels. Officials began to lift evacuation orders on Tuesday as fires were brought under control, allowing tens of thousands of people living in towns near Bordeaux, Madrid and València to go back to their homes. Some of them returned to find burnt-out buildings and charred belongings. José Fernández, a 74-year-old pensioner, told AFP he had “no money, no documents, no home” after he came back to the remains of what used to be his house in Pelayos de la Presa, in the Community of Madrid. “This place has been reduced to a total ruin.” Europe’s wildfire season is growing hotter and longer as carbon pollution heats the continent twice as fast as the global average. Repeated heatwaves this year have dried vegetation and turned forests and shrubland into tinderboxes, alarming EU officials, who have said wildfires could still be burning in November. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, thanked firefighters for their “courage and commitment” on Wednesday. “As the fires in France and Spain continue to ravage, European solidarity knows no limit,” she said in a social media post. “Romania and Greece have decided to extend their missions, continuing their support to the affected regions. And from Saturday, Poland will join the fray.” Earlier this week, the European Commission said it had sent France seven planes and four helicopters from countries as far away as Sweden and Turkey, while in Spain, it said it had mobilised six planes from Greece, Italy and Turkey, along with 134 personnel and 41 vehicles from Portugal. A Super Puma helicopter from Serbia was expected to arrive in Madrid on Wednesday, according to Spain’s interior ministry, with 40 personnel and 18 vehicles to shortly follow. The European Union’s crisis management team said on Wednesday it expected difficult weeks ahead, fearing a further outbreak of wildfires in Italy and Greece later in the summer. Maria Zuber, a senior official at the EU’s emergency response coordination centre (ERCC) in Brussels, which coordinates the dispatch of firefighting planes, equipment and teams to countries that have asked for help, said the next few days would be “very difficult” for France and that “now we see it will go to Greece”. Moisés Galán Santano, a wildfire expert at the ERCC, said more needed to be done to prevent wildfires and that it would be a task for many years. “The [emergency] response is not only the answer. It’s the last answer. But it’s not all the answer. We need to focus on prevention.” Earlier this year, a policy paper from the European Commission set out how countries could better prevent and recover from wildfires that are expected to become bigger and more damaging across the continent. It promoted measures such as more extensive grazing, the restoration of wetlands, rivers and floodplains, better data on forest fires and raising public awareness of risky behaviour and safe evacuation. Scientists say western Europe’s scorching summer has been deadly, costly and exacerbated by fossil fuel pollution. Rapid analyses have found June’s heatwave would have been “virtually impossible” in a world without climate breakdown, while the recent level of soil dryness in western Europe – a driver of bigger blazes – was made five times more likely. The heatwaves are estimated to have claimed at least 10,000 lives and cost grain farmers €2bn in lost crops. Vula Tsetsi, a co-chair of the European Green party, called on European institutions to take action on Wednesday and noted the European Commission had not yet published its heating and cooling plan, which was expected in April. “Climate-driven heatwaves and wildfires are already claiming lives, destroying homes and ravaging forests at a record pace,” she said. “There is a widening gap between the scale of Europe’s heatwaves – literally hitting every EU country – and the absence of decisive European action.”

US-Saudi strikes in Iraq push region into ‘uncharted territory’, analysts warn

US-Saudi strikes on Iran-backed militia in Iraq have pushed the region into “uncharted territory”, analysts have warned. Amid stark warnings of a widening and increasingly “unpredictable” conflict, Riyadh’s decision to publicly join the US in striking sites associated with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), killing at least 20 fighters, has added another complicating dimension to the war. The strikes on Wednesday came after a brief lull in direct US attacks on targets in Iran, but Tehran’s allies in Yemen and beyond have become increasingly drawn in. Iran, meanwhile, launched missiles at US military installations in Jordan in its first attack in the region since the pause in fighting with the US. Those tit-for-tat strikes seemed to indicate the pause in fighting was at an end The US president, Donald Trump, said the US would be “be hitting [Iran] hard”, even as he claimed the strikes in Iraq were coordinated with the government, despite Baghdad’s condemnation. Also on Wednesday, explosions ⁠hit a natural gas loading port on the Mediterranean Sea in Damietta, Egypt, reportedly involving a drone strike, the first reported strike on Egypt in the war. The source of the drone was unclear. The British maritime security company Ambrey said a US-owned floating storage tanker there had been hit by a drone, in another potential spread of the Middle East war. In Baghdad, the Iraqi presidency called the air raids on the PMF, also known as al-Hashd al-Shaabi – an armed alliance that includes powerful pro-Iran factions – “a blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, targeting its official institutions”. The PMF is a network of Shia-majority factions that was established in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group. Their efforts were overseen by the Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, the former head of the al-Quds force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Suleimani was killed by a US missile strike in Baghdad during Trump’s first term. The Iraqi ⁠prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, who recently met Trump, ⁠called off a planned meeting ⁠with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin ⁠Salman in ‌Jeddah on ‌Thursday in the wake of the strikes. Iraq’s Harakat ⁠Hezbollah ⁠al-Nujaba, an Iran-backed ⁠militia, added that ‌Washington’s and ‌Riyadh’s interests ‌and security would face ‌consequences. Mourners shouted Shia ⁠sectarian slogans and “Death to America!” as they carried the bodies of slain fighters in body bags out of a hospital in Mosul, northern Iraq. Iraq, heavily affected by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, through which most of its oil is exported, has struggled to prevent the war between the US and Iran spilling over its borders. Its governments have tried to maintain a delicate balance between the US, which invaded the Shia-majority country in 2003, and Iran, which has long sought to exert influence there and has backed powerful militias that played a leading role in the fight against IS. While Saudi Arabia has reportedly been involved in a handful of secretive strikes on Iran as part of the war, Riyadh’s overt involvement marks a new turning point in the conflict. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels announced a blockade of Saudi ports and cargoes at the entrance to the Red Sea barely a week ago. The latest serious flare-up in fighting follows days in which Tehran and its proxies have targeted bases and facilities of the US and its allies, including in Saudi Arabia, despite the brief US pause. The sense of growing chaos in the Middle East was summed up by Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and north Africa programme at the Chatham House thinktank. “Everyone is trying make sense of something that is increasingly senseless,” she said. “One view is that the informal [US] pause in direct strikes on Iran saw a shift from Tehran to its proxies to maintain pressure [on Washington]. But there is no longer any plausible deniability because everyone knows how the relationships are intertwined.” On the Iranian side, suggested Vakil, the unpredictability of Tehran’s tactics appeared to be a deliberate strategy to pressure Trump “either into confrontation or concession” with the aim of maintaining “a stranglehold on the strait of Hormuz”. Vakil also said countries in the region were interpreting the chaotic context of the conflict as a historic opportunity, including to weaken Iran. And on the Saudi side, she said there was a similar desire to be unpredictable. “No one wants to stay in the status quo.” “I think from the point of view of the Saudis,” said HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow in Middle East studies at the Royal United Services Institute, “there is a feeling that the Iranians are doing what they are doing because they feel that the Gulf Arab states won’t move up the escalatory ladder. The Saudis want to make it clear that assessment is wrong and that if Tehran thinks the Gulf states are easy prey, they are wrong.” The problem, Hellyer said, was that while the Saudis may have rationalised the attack on the PMF as a precisely calculated act, it may be impossible to anticipate the response. “Because we don’t know that, we are in uncharted territory not just because of the context of the war this year, but the wider issues in the region,” he said. “And it is risky because Tehran sees itself as having been targeted by the US and Israel in a war of existential survival. They see everything through a prism that they have to reset the rules of the game in the region dramatically even if they are wrong and overplaying their hand.”

‘The breath just went out of us’: people return to their homes after wildfires near Madrid

The handwritten sign taped to the front gate of a house in the mountains an hour west of Madrid offered as succinct a summary of recent events as you will find. “EMPTY,” it said. “No people or animals here.” The quiet streets of El Morro, a hamlet on the outskirts of the town of Navas del Rey, held further evidence: two burnt-out cars barely identifiable as an Audi and a Seat; blackened gnomes atop a gatepost; charred hedges whose leaves had crumbled to a fine ash; and, everywhere, the smell of burnt, or still smouldering, wood. On Wednesday, almost a week after the area was one of many evacuated as firefighters rushed to contain the blazes that have consumed tens of thousands of hectares of land west of the Spanish capital, the returning residents of El Morro were trying to process what had happened. Some phoned their insurance companies, some swept up the debris in and around their homes, and some were still too deep in shock. A man led his elderly father out of a house that had been gutted by fire, telling him it was time to go and get a change of clothes. “We’re all doing so-so,” said the son, which seemed brave but unlikely. Towards the outskirts of El Morro, a couple in late middle-age walked around what had been their garden. The house had survived bar some smoke staining, but the garden and the patio furniture had been chewed up by the fire. “We came back to the village, saw what had happened and the breath just went out of us,” said the woman. Mercedes Merino, who has lived in El Morro for 35 of her 70 years, apologised for being able to offer visitors nothing but lukewarm water – the electricity was still off – as she pointed to her blackened garden, with its flame-twisted cypress, dying loquat and sooty swimming pool. Still, at least her house had been spared. “We’ve had fires here before, but nothing like this,” she said. “I knew what we were coming back to because lots of videos of the village have been going round. We’re all feeling really low. Some people are crying and some people have lost their houses, like the guy next door.” Like the burnt-out cars, next door bore little resemblance to what it had once been. Rather than a house, it was a tangle of warped and burnt building materials, its roof collapsed into ripples of tile and its chimney absurdly horizontal. “The firefighters have been amazing,” said Merino. “But how do you stop fires like these when you live in mountains covered with pine trees? We must have a guardian angel who was watching over us and protecting our house.” Across the road, Javier Herraiz and his family, who had just returned to El Morro after fleeing south-west to Cáceres, were sitting down to a tortilla and counting their blessings. The smoke that rose over the mountains towards the end of last week, combined with a visit from the Guardia Civil to warn them that an evacuation order was imminent, had persuaded them to leave sooner rather than later. Although the damage that greeted them when they returned home on Wednesday morning was minimal, the state of the mountains and the hamlet had shaken them. “What we saw when we got here was just Dantesque,” said Herraiz, 68. “It’s such a beautiful place but all of a sudden, it had come to look like hell.” The damage to the family home amounted to little more than a warped pipe and the loss of a rainwater tank, which had probably helped protect the property as it melted and disgorged its contents over the terrace beneath. “We’ve been so lucky,” said Herraiz. “Some people have lost their houses and some of them still have mortgages to pay.” Eva Manso, whose home backs on to steep, wooded hillside, credited a sturdy brick wall – and probably a large measure of luck – with protecting her house from the flames. The wall had certainly done its job; the hills on the other side were black, its trees naked and clawed by the heat of the flames. “We’ve never been through anything like this,” said Manso. “Yes, we had the Covid lockdown and Storm Filomena, but they were nothing like this. I don’t think anyone thought this would happen.” That sense of bafflement, shock and fear was as evident in El Morro as it must be across the swathes of Spain that have been affected by another year of wildfires, from Madrid and the neighbouring province of Ávila to the eastern region of Valencia. “I never cry over life’s difficult moments, but I sometimes cry over silly little things like a mosquito being squashed,” said Merino as she sat on her porch and looked over her ruined garden. “Maybe I’ll find myself crying in a week’s time and I won’t be able to stop.”

Norwegian teenager guilty of travelling to UK to carry out contract killing

A Norwegian teenager has been found guilty of travelling to England to carry out a killing ordered by an international crime gang linked to Iran. Johannes Kongsnes Natland, 19, from Stavanger, Norway, agreed to shoot an unknown person for €25,000 (£21,500) in March last year. Two days after he arrived in the UK armed police arrested him in a hotel room in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, seizing two guns and ammunition. After deliberating for 17 hours and six minutes, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty of conspiracy to murder following a retrial. Natland blinked but did not visibly react to the verdict. Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb remanded him into custody to be sentenced in October. Natland, who worked part-time in a pizza restaurant, was recruited by the Foxtrot Network, a Swedish organised crime group with links to the Iranian government. Natland told jurors he agreed at first to the murder plot in exchange for money to pay for drugs, thinking it was just a “joke” or “scam”. Once he realised he was in a “pickle” with the Foxtrot Network, Natland said he planned to “shoot himself in the foot” to avoid carrying out the assassination. The potential victim of the foiled murder plot has never been identified. The Metropolitan police said their counter-terrorism officers “uncovered a significant amount of evidence demonstrating that Natland was fully aware he was being asked to kill someone in the UK”. “I’m going on crazy mission,” Natland had texted his girlfriend. “It will be a bit cool to kill someone. If I don’t get caught we have to celebrate.” When armed police banged on his hotel room door, Natland emerged from his room smiling, only wearing his boxer shorts, and mimed shooting one of the officers with his empty hands. In a search of his room, officers found a plastic bag under his bed containing a semi-automatic pistol, a revolver and 19 rounds of ammunition. At his trial, one of Natland’s friends recalled a conversation where the defendant bragged he was “going to get a lot of money and somebody is going to die”. Natland told jurors these statements were “bravado” and he was secretly “terrified”. “I wasn’t an international assassin,” he said. “I thought people had this impression and expected me to be this guy. I knew I wasn’t.” But jurors heard Natland lied after his arrest and had tried to persuade his girlfriend not to give evidence during his phone calls from prison. The prosecutor Alistair Richardson said: “The reality is the defendant is a troubled but dangerous young man. A young man who agreed to kill in a foreign country for money.” The court heard that Natland, a talented young footballer, began taking drugs aged 13. He spent a short period of time in a care home, where he first met a teenage member of the Foxtrot Network and was passed on to a recruiter known as “Generalen”. On 17 March 2025, Natland took a flight from Stavanger to Manchester airport on a temporary passport. He was stopped by Border Force officials in Manchester, who bailed him to return to the airport and catch the next direct flight home. Instead, he took a taxi to Huddersfield, where he picked up £2,000 in cash, two guns and bullets, as well as a stolen Nissan with a fake number plate. He was arrested the following day at 5.15am. Natland was controlled by an English-speaking boss called “Agent 47” – an apparent reference to the Hitman game and movie series – whose identity and whereabouts remain unknown. Despite several high-ranking arrests in recent years, Foxtrot is still the dominant gang in Sweden and thought to be responsible for the majority of gang violence in the country including mass shootings and murders across the country. But with many of the gang’s key figures now believed to be fugitive abroad – including the leader, Rawa Majid, known as the Kurdish Fox, who is still at large and believed to be in Iran – the police operation to find them is global. Last year up to 30 of the wanted Swedes who were arrested outside Sweden had connections to Foxtrot, according to police. In June, Poya Shafie, described as the person who planned Foxtrot’s murders and who was one of the men closest to Majid, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Swedish court after being arrested in Iraq.

John Croft obituary

John Croft, who has died aged 103, was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during the second world war, and subsequently in London, where he worked on Soviet cipher systems used to send secret messages to European communist parties and sympathisers. Croft was studying history as an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1942 when his tutor asked if he might be interested in intelligence work. “The prospect, whatever that involved, seemed enticing and I gratefully accepted the opportunity,” he later recalled. He was subsequently interviewed in Oxford by Col John Tiltman, Bletchley Park’s chief codebreaker. “Tiltman himself appeared to me almost the parody of a regular army officer, with toothbrush moustache and rather clipped speech; as I was to discover later, he was a man of outstanding skill and experience.” A few months later, Croft was ordered to report to Bletchley for training in how to break basic codes and hand ciphers, along with a number of other recruits, including the future author Angus Wilson, who was to become a lifelong friend. Croft was then put to work in the Testery, the section (run by Ralph Tester) which carried out the initial manual and linguistic process of breaking a recently intercepted German Lorenz enciphered teleprinter system. Tiltman managed to break into a single message as a result of a mistake by an operator, and the mathematician Bill Tutte worked out the internal cipher system. However, the settings changed daily and were different for each teleprinter link – Croft was one of the codebreakers brought in to break the cipher on a daily basis. The Lorenz ciphers, codenamed Fish by Bletchley, were used on the highest security links between Berlin and the various German fronts, and often carried personal orders from Adolf Hitler to his generals. The final breaking of individual messages was carried out in the Newmanry, run by Max Newman, where a number of different machines were used to decipher the messages, culminating in December 1943 in the creation of the Colossus computer, the world’s first digital computer. Croft recalled that one of the highlights of his time in the Testery was “the breaking of a personal message from Hitler demanding the apprehension of the Yugoslav partisan leader General Draza Mihailovic, for which the reward would be ‘a large quantity of gold’”. But the work was sometimes boring and Croft enlisted the help of an aunt, who had a close friend in MI6, to engineer a move to Bletchley’s diplomatic and commercial section, based in Mayfair. He was assigned to the section’s offices on the top floor of Aldford House, on Park Lane, where he briefly worked on Finnish diplomatic ciphers, before being transferred to a new section set up to read the messages between Moscow and communist parties and sympathisers across Europe. The section head was the mathematician Bernard Scott, who had managed to break into the messages, which used a substitution cipher, with the 36 letters of the Russian alphabet transposed as numbers. The indicators of each day’s keys were taken from an English edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and Scott and Croft spent a day searching through the editions on the British Library shelves looking for the one used to encipher the key, without success. “With the advance of the Russian armies in 1944, the traffic on the network began to increase rapidly,” Croft recalled. “It was mainly concentrated in the Balkans, although some but not extensive radio activity was identified as far afield as southern France and in other areas behind the allied lines.” The need for more hands led to three more codebreakers being brought in, including Ernst Fetterlein, who had been Tsar Nicholas II’s official codebreaker and had fled to Britain after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Kim Philby, who was now the head of a new counter-espionage section inside MI6 dealing with Soviet spies, was a recipient of the decoded messages and on one occasion he visited the section and was introduced to Croft. “Fetterlein kept copies of his translations in a locked wooden cupboard,” Croft recalled. Shortly after Philby’s visit, “Fetterlein arrived to find that his cupboard had been forced open and his papers disturbed,” he said. Although nothing was taken, Croft made no secret of his belief that Philby, who was subsequently exposed as a Soviet double agent and part of the Cambridge spy ring, was responsible. John was born in Brondesbury, north London, to Doris (nee Phillips) and Oswald Cohen. The family was descended from Dutch Jewish immigrants and changed their name to Croft in the late 1930s. Oswald was an executive at the London offices of Paramount Pictures. His son was educated at the Hall preparatory school in Hampstead, and then Westminster school, before going to Christ Church. After the war, Croft returned to Oxford to finish his degree and then applied to join GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the peacetime successor to Bletchley, based at Eastcote in west London, but he was refused and an appeal to the then foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, failed. Croft then had a second encounter with a member of the Cambridge spy ring when he briefly considered taking a degree in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute in London, and was interviewed by its director, Anthony Blunt. When Blunt asked Croft what he had done during the war, he gave the official response that he had worked for “a department of the Foreign Office”. Croft recalled that Blunt, who would later be exposed as the “fourth man”, was “remote and chilly” for the rest of the interview. He studied for a master’s in sociology at LSE and graduated in 1953. After a spell as a teacher at North Hammersmith secondary school for boys, Croft joined the Home Office, eventually, in 1972, becoming head of the Home Office Research Unit, where one of his colleagues was the novelist PD James, another great friend. Croft retired in 1981 and was appointed CBE the following year. While working at the Home Office, he took up painting in oils and became a highly regarded abstract artist, focusing on “non-figurative, minimalist work derived from landscape”. His paintings were included in group shows from the 1960s onwards, and were described by the art critic Brian Sewell as “exquisitely judged, hard-edged abstracts”. He had two solo exhibitions, at the Gardner Arts Centre (now the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of Sussex in 1970, and at the University of Warwick in 1971. After a period living in the Isle of Man, Croft moved with his parter, Ray Kelly, a former employee of British Airways, to Bath. Kelly died in 1999. • Ivor John Croft, codebreaker, civil servant and artist, born 6 January 1923; died 12 July 2026

Spain faces ‘complex’ three days with risks of heatwave and strong winds reigniting some fires – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. France and Spain are on high alert as the fourth heatwave of the summer complicates ongoing efforts to tackle devastating wildfires in both countries. Authorities expressed cautious optimism after making some progress in battling the blazes overnight (10:15, 14:30, 15:02), but warned against complacency as worsening weather conditions raised fears of some fires reigniting in the coming hours as temperatures are expected to hit high 30s and low 40s C. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez said this morning that next 12 hours will be “decisive” for a large wildfire burning near Madrid (11:41). Serious wildfires were also reported in other countries in Europe (15:23), with two firefighters killed battling a wildfire on the southern Greek island of Crete (16:56). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

Body found in suitcase in Athens is that of 38-year-old British woman

A body found in a suitcase in an abandoned building in central Athens has been identified as that of a 38-year-old British woman. Eleven days after the find, police shed some light on the mystery of a body that until Wednesday had remained unidentified, after appealing to foreign law enforcement agencies. “The remains, we can confirm, have been identified as belonging to a British woman,” one well-placed source said. “Her next of kin have been informed.” They added that it had been ascertained the victim had been born in Scotland in 1988. Late on Wednesday, Greek media named the victim as Elizabeth Jane Ross. She had been staying in the city with friends, who reported seeing her for the last time on 15 July. Adding to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of her death, it was revealed that her mobile phone had been fully operational until news of her identification was reported. Police were alerted after a homeless man reportedly discovered the suitcase on 18 July in a derelict building in Kypseli, a district popular among foreign nationals in downtown Athens, according to the public broadcaster ERT. Ross had reportedly flown to the region from the US, arriving in Greece, on 29 June, from Cyprus. Greek homicide officers sent fingerprints to Interpol after drawing a blank on local databases. US authorities had provided evidence on the basis of the DNA that police released on Wednesday. Detectives cordoned off the building on Evelpidon Street as they investigated the circumstances of Ross’s death. A police spokesperson, Konstantina Dimoglidou, had previously said CCTV was being examined to try to trace Ross’s movements before her death. Authorities were treating the incident “as a criminal act, given how the body was found”, she told Skai TV. Airlines are also believed to have been approached as investigators try to reconstruct Ross’s journey to Greece and determine whether she was travelling alone. Officials in Greece and Cyprus were scouring flight logs and hotel bookings. Local media, citing the results of a postmortem, said Ross had been dead for eight days before the discovery. There was “no evidence” of a struggle or signs of injury. Greek officials did not rule out UK investigators joining the inquiry. The British embassy acknowledged it had been informed but made no further comment. Greece is no stranger to British tourists dying in what is a popular holiday destination – often by drowning or as a result of road accidents – “but incidents like this are very rare”, officials said.

Bird flu is spreading locally and Australia faces more wildlife deaths. How bad could it get?

Australia has entered a new phase in dealing with the incursion of deadly H5N1 bird flu, with authorities confirming on Wednesday that local transmission of the highly virulent strain had taken place. “We have had what is suggestive of local transmission for the first time,” Julie Collins, the federal minister for agriculture, fisheries and forestry, said on Wednesday afternoon, after 11 new suspected detections were reported in South Australian birds. “We will expect to see increased evidence and deaths of wildlife … given there has been some local transmission,” she said. “This small shift in the situation will be very disappointing to many, but is certainly not an unexpected development as the last continent to detect H5 bird flu.” Now that authorities believe transmission of H5 strain is occurring locally, what does this mean for Australia’s wildlife, and how bad could things get? What’s the current status of H5N1 bird flu in Australia? On Wednesday morning, South Australian authorities announced 11 new suspected bird flu detections in greater crested terns in the state’s south-east, including four cases on Kangaroo Island. That brings Australia to a total of 27 confirmed detections. Julie Collins, the agriculture minister, said the Consultative Committee on Emergency Animal Diseases – comprising federal and state and territory authorities – had met on Wednesday and agreed that “some local transmission has occurred between a number of greater crested terns that are resident in South Australia”. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Dr Beth Cookson, Australia’s chief veterinary officer, said genetic sequencing showed all confirmed cases detected to date were related to sub-Antarctic strains of the virus. Clare Scriven, the SA minister for primary industries, said earlier on Wednesday: “This is concerning but not unexpected. We knew that eventually when bird flu arrived in Australia it would spread. It has spread on every other continent around the globe.” To date, there have been no H5 detections in poultry or agricultural industries in Australia. “The risk to human health remains low,” Collins said. How could bird flu affect wildlife on Kangaroo Island? One of the Kangaroo Island bird flu detections was at Seal Bay, home to the country’s third-largest Australian sea lion population. Conservationists have expressed fears for the sea lion population there. Alexia Wellbelove, campaigns director at the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS), said Australian sea lions were “now on the frontline of the potential wildlife crisis”. About 80% of the Australian sea lion population is found in South Australia; the endangered mammal has seen populations decline by 60% in four decades, with remaining numbers about 12,000. “In South America, this virus killed 30,000 sea lion pups in just six months following transmission from birds to marine mammals,” Wellbelove said. “On our own Heard Island, it killed more than 13,000 elephant seal pups in a single season … we now have to face the very real possibility of similar devastation here at home, in a species already teetering on the edge.” Scriven said on-beach tours at Seal Bay were temporarily paused to keep people separate from the “very vulnerable” animal population and to reduce the risk of spreading infection. What can be done to stop the spread of bird flu? Not much, unfortunately. Cookson said on Wednesday: “We do know from the overseas experience that once the virus becomes more widespread in wild bird populations it will not be possible to avoid losses in susceptible wildlife in the natural environment.” Authorities had anticipated the arrival of H5N1 in Australia through migratory birds “for a number of years”, she said. They will continue to focus on surveillance, to confirm where the virus is circulating and to “reduce the impacts where possible”. Collins said the federal government had invested more than $113m preparing for the virus’s arrival. “We have also, working with states and territories, now released a further $24m.” Without listing specific animals, Cookson said the government was taking “a number of actions in high-priority conservation species, including site- and species-specific planning”. There would also be a focus on protecting captive breeding populations, and implementing farm biosecurity measures to “limit contact between wild birds and poultry”. Groups including the AMCS and the Invasive Species Council have called on the federal government to establish a $200m national wildlife resilience fund, “focused on emergency protection and recovery for our most at-risk species”. How bad could bird flu get in Australia? Worldwide, the H5N1 variant has caused “unprecedented levels of ongoing outbreaks”, killing millions of wild birds and tens of thousands of mammals. Large-scale deaths have not yet occurred in Australia, but the major concerns relate to potential wildlife impacts: more than 150 native bird species have been assessed as being at “very high risk” of extinction or major decline if they are infected – including the red goshawk, fairy tern, plains-wanderer, shy albatross, black swan and western hooded plover. More than 10 mammal species are at very high risk, including the Australian sea lion, the subantarctic fur seal and the Australian fur seal. There could also be significant impacts on the poultry industry. Globally, an estimated 140m farmed birds have died or been culled since January last year. In the United States, the virus was linked to a 220% spike in egg prices in the first quarter of 2025. Western Australia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry has warned that if the virus were to reach commercial flocks, it could push egg prices above $10 a carton. Mass culls could be necessary, and the RSPCA has called for fast-tracked research into more humane killing methods, such as the use of nitrogen in gas or foam. Human-to-human transmission of the virus is not common, but since 2003, there have been 1,000 reported cases of H5N1 in humans globally, with a 48% fatality rate.