News archive of August 2023

A fire that engulfed a five-storey building taken over for illegal housing killed more than 70 people including children in central Johannesburg on Thursday, the South African city's emergency services said.

Another 52 were injured in what is on track to become one of the deadliest fires worldwide in recent years.

The death toll from a fire that engulfed a five-storey building in central Johannesburg on Thursday has risen to 52, the South African city's emergency services said.

"We're on 52 bodies, which we have recovered and also 43 people who sustained minor injuries," Emergency Management Services spokesman Robert Mulaudzi told a local broadcaster.

The European Union's largest wildfire since the bloc started keeping records continued to rage for the 13th straight day in northeastern Greece on Thursday burning a pristine forest in the Dadia National Park.

The blaze has already burned around 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of land, according to the European Union's Copernicus Emergency Management Service. 

"Today, the Republic of Türkiye is much stronger and much more advanced than it was a quarter century, half a century, a century ago, with all its political, economic and military capabilities," President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Erdoğan said on Aug. 30. 

Erdoğan delivered a speech at the Victory Day Concert at the Presidential Complex.

About 150 migrants were rescued from overloaded sailboats provided by smugglers in two separate incidents Wednesday far off a western Greek island and off a Cycladic island near the Greek capital, the coast guard said.

The government is moving toward a clear distinction between small owners who rent their property for a few days a year to foreign or Greek visitors and owners or companies who rent a larger number of properties systematically under the short-term rental scheme.

Dozens of women have been summoned to testify in the Department of Organized Crime's preliminary investigation on the island of Crete after a request by the competent prosecutor in connection with the case of a fertility clinic in the city of Hania that may have operated as a front for an illegal adoption racket.

The case involved alleged IVF egg retrieval and embryo transfers.

Greece's leftist main opposition is holding its standing congress to approve the candidates running for party leadership at the Foundation of the Hellenic World on Saturday.

The congess' agenda includes only that topic, and its proceedings will open at 11 a.m.

The Russian ruble's wobble in value has exposed a crack in President Vladimir Putin's fortress economy, a vulnerability quickly plastered over by the Kremlin's economic team in a move that allowed the currency to regain its footing, at least for now.

The European Union's fossil fuel energy production hit a record low the first half of the year, think tank Ember Climate has reported, although green sources are struggling to fill the gap.

The decline in coal and gas generation was driven by a drop in electricity consumption across the bloc of 4.6 percent amid high power prices.