The European Union deploys 11 firefighting planes and helicopters to help battle a massive blaze in southwest France, with Spain also receiving aid.

BRUSSELS: The European Union is ramping up the number of firefighting planes and helicopters sent to help tackle the blaze raging in southwest France, the bloc’s crisis management chief told AFP Monday.

“We currently have nine aerial assets deployed on site, and tomorrow we will have 11, drawn from our European strategic reserve,” EU commissioner Hadja Lahbib said.

The fire has since Wednesday last week ravaged 42,000 hectares of pine forest in the famous wine-growing region of Bordeaux.

It has caused some 220,000 holidaymakers and residents to flee at the height of the summer holidays, and destroyed around 240 homes.

Lahbib said the assets deployed from a central fleet under the EU’s command include water-bombing aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters.

Fire crews are scrambling to tackle the fire before a new spike in temperatures expected in the coming days.

“It is a race against time that our teams are waging on the ground, alongside the French, of course,” Lahbib said.

The blaze in France comes as Spain is also grappling with major wildfires west of Madrid.

Lahbib said that so far six aircraft have been deployed from the EU’s fleet to Spain.

She said the simultaneous challenges had strained the EU’s capacities, which pool assets from across the bloc.

“Extreme conditions are looming for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, in addition to France, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa — where the situation is expected to worsen, including in Portugal starting today,” Lahbib said.

She said that in 2025 there had been a total of 19 requests to activate the EU’s emergency mechanism to help with the wildfires.

“This year, I think we’re obviously going to top that number,” she said.

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Saudi Arabia intercepts drones launched by Iran-backed groups in Iraq targeting petroleum facilities, says defence ministry.

RIYADH: The Saudi defence ministry said on Monday that its forces had intercepted and destroyed several drones launched by Iran-backed groups in Iraq targeting petroleum facilities.

The incident comes despite a brief halt in recent fighting between the US and Iran since Saturday, following 13 days of exchanges of fire between the two sides.

The Saudi ministry said the “terrorist attempts were launched from Iraqi territory and carried out by Iranian-backed terrorist militias”, according to an official statement posted on social media.

The defence ministry said the drones were targeting areas in the country’s east and the capital Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia demanded that Iraq prevent its territory from being used to launch attacks.

The kingdom “affirms the necessity for the Iraqi government to take all necessary measures to ensure the prevention of the use of its territory as a launching point for aggression”, read a statement posted by an official Saudi broadcaster.

Pro-Iran armed groups based in Iraq have not claimed any attacks in Iraq or the region since the resumption of hostilities between the US and Iran earlier this month.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations had accused pro-Iran militias in Iraq of launching waves of attacks targeting their territory during the earlier phase of the conflict.

The latest incident comes as Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have traded strikes in recent days, with the Houthis announcing the imposition of a naval blockade on the kingdom’s ports.

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The victim of the Berlin Pride festival attack was a Polish national, the foreign ministry in Warsaw confirmed.

WARSAW: The woman who died in the Berlin Pride festival attack at the weekend was a Polish national, the foreign ministry in Warsaw said on Monday.

“Shocked and deeply saddened to learn that the victim of the tragic Berlin attack was a Polish citizen,” ministry spokesperson Maciej Wewior wrote on X.

According to the German daily Bild, the 65-year-old woman from Warsaw went to Berlin with her daughter to attend the Pride festivities.

Her daughter survived the attack in which the perpetrator drove a rented van into a crowd and then slashed at people with a machete.

Another 29 people were wounded in the attack, many seriously.

Police on Sunday shot dead the presumed perpetrator Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German Islamist of Lebanese origin, in west Berlin after he approached them with a bladed weapon.

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A Ukrainian court remands the organiser of a weapons exhibition struck by Russia, killing 11 people and sparking national outrage.

KYIV: A Ukrainian court on Monday remanded in custody the organiser of a weapons exhibition that was struck by Russia in an attack that killed at least 11 people and triggered an outcry across the country.

Prosecutors brought a case against Vasyl Goncharuk, head of a weapons industry association, accusing him of negligence that led to loss of life following the Russian ballistic missile strike on a shooting range outside Kyiv on Friday.

There was widespread anger at the way the event was held, including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who said it “certainly should not have been taking place there”.

On Monday, a court in Kyiv remanded Goncharuk in custody without bail pending trial, an AFP journalist attending the hearing reported.

Hours after the strike, Russia’s defence ministry confirmed it had hit the site, which it said was “hosting a demonstration of Ukrainian and foreign-made” drones.

Ukrainian Prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko said investigators were checking whether “circumstances may have exacerbated the scale of the tragedy”.

He said that the weapons association had invited over 300 people including military personnel, state representatives and business figures without official authorisation, providing only a small shelter.

Hours after the attack on Friday, AFP reporters saw homes in ruins and victims in body bags as first responders and investigators sifted through the debris.

The event also drew criticism for being promoted on social media, and Kravchenko said investigators were “examining whether these actions could have enabled the enemy to prepare a targeted strike.”

The death toll on Monday rose from 10 to 11 after a Ukrainian diplomat working for Malta succumbed to his wounds.

Ukraine’s defence industry regularly hosts events showcasing their drones and other weapon for investors and allies.

Similar incidents of Russian attacks on Ukrainian military or defence gatherings — details of which had been widely shared ahead of time — have also triggered outcry.

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Beijing accuses US AI companies of using Chinese models for training, rejecting Washington’s theft claims as double standards.

BEIJING: Beijing accused US artificial intelligence companies on Monday of using Chinese examples to train their models, days after Washington threatened sanctions on Chinese firms for allegedly stealing American technology.

“It is understood that many American artificial intelligence enterprises have distilled Chinese models during their research, development and training processes,” the Chinese commerce ministry said in a statement.

Distillation is a process in which an AI model is trained to mimic the output of a larger, more capable one.

The method is widely used across the industry, but US officials say Chinese firms have deployed it at scale to illicitly copy proprietary American systems.

The Chinese ministry said the US accusations “lack factual basis and legal grounds, adopt double standards in practice, and constitute typical acts of artificial intelligence hegemonism”.

“China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate and lawful rights and interests,” it added.

Last week, a senior White House official accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of covertly copying Anthropic’s most advanced model to build its Kimi K3.

The latest Moonshot model stunned the US tech industry upon its release, setting off a fresh discussion over the AI rivalry with China.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week threatened sanctions against China, amid reports the US is also weighing a ban or curbs on foreign-made open source models that are often built through distillation.

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visits Cyprus to meet rival leaders and restart reunification talks that collapsed in 2017.

NICOSIA: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due in Cyprus on Monday, where he will meet with rival Cypriot leaders in a bid to revive reunification talks that collapsed in 2017.

Guterres’s envoy, Maria Angela Holguin, said the UN chief hoped to encourage Cypriots and their leaders to embrace peace negotiations.

“The mission of the secretary-general is to facilitate, encourage the people and the leaders to look forward to a negotiation,” Holguin told reporters Monday after meeting Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.

She said Guterres “is visiting Cyprus after pushing, supporting Cyprus for almost 10 years. So… I hope we can have some progress.”

The visit comes after elections in Turkish-speaking northern Cyprus in October that pro-unification candidate Tufan Erhurman won in a landslide against Ankara-backed outgoing president Ersin Tatar.

It also marks the first trip by a UN chief since Guterres’ predecessor Ban Ki Moon visited in 2010.

On Tuesday, Guterres will meet Christodoulides and Erhurman separately on either side of the ceasefire line, followed by a joint dinner, ahead of a trilateral meeting on Wednesday.

“This is a very important visit,” government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said. “Our aim and hope is that it will serve as the starting point” for further negotiations.

He said Guterres was personally undertaking the initiative to get Cyrus talks back on track.

He expressed hopes that the UN chief’s continued commitment, combined with developments in EU-Turkey relations, could “create an opportunity for progress”.

“If there is even the slightest glimmer of hope or window of opportunity, we will make use of it,” said Letymbiotis.

Turkey has thus far been opposed to unification efforts, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan instead calling for “the coexistence of two states” on the island.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded the north of the island in response to a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta.

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognised only by Ankara.

Decades of UN-backed talks have failed to reunify the island.

The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.

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A British funeral director faces prison after 31 bodies were found uncremated and families given wrong ashes, sparking regulation calls.

KINGSTON UPON HULL: A British funeral director faced prison Monday over a scandal that saw bodies left uncremated while relatives were handed other people’s ashes, sparking calls for better regulation of the industry.

An ex-employee described Robert Bush’s funeral parlour as “something from a horror scene”, prosecutor Chris Paxton said at the start of a five-day sentencing hearing.

Police who searched his premises after a tip-off found 31 bodies in a cold storage area that should have been cremated months earlier, including a stillborn baby that had been there for almost two years.

They also found more than 100 sets of ashes.

“There were bodies stored on the racks on both sides of the room,” the lawyer said at Hull Crown Court in northeast England.

“The vast majority were uncovered and in varying states of decomposition,” he added.

The 48-year-old previously pleaded guilty to 67 offences spanning 12 years and affecting hundreds of victims.

Jasmine Beverley, whose son Sunny was stillborn in May 2022, said Bush appeared “lovely” and presented himself as “very respectful”.

“It was a shock to learn what had actually been going on behind the closed doors,” she told BBC radio, adding Sunny’s remains were found in an brown envelope on the floor even though she believed he had been cremated.

“I discovered that he was still in there almost two years after we’d had the funeral,” she said, describing the discovery as “distressing”.

Beverley and her husband and a number of other families are campaigning for changes to funeral parlour regulation.

Bush, who ran Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, was trusted by bereaved families but mistreated them on an “almost industrial scale”, Paxton said.

Police began investigating in March 2024 after being contacted by someone over concerns for “the deceased” at the business.

The sentencing hearing is to hear statements from over 100 victims.

Bush has admitted dozens of charges including preventing lawful and decent burial, theft, and fraud.

Four of the fraud charges involved falsely presenting ashes to women as the remains of their unborn children.

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A French off-duty policeman detained a man after he allegedly attacked and wounded three women with two kitchen knives in Paris.

PARIS: A French off-duty policeman on Monday detained a man after he allegedly attacked and wounded three women with two kitchen knives in Paris, a minister and police said.

Three women aged 19, 24 and 36 were taken to hospital after the assault at around 11:30 am (0930 GMT) in the Porte de Clichy area in the north of the capital, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez and Paris police said.

Two were gravely wounded, but their lives were not in danger, Nunez said. One was hit in the lower back, the other in the abdomen.

“The perpetrator was apprehended by an off-duty police officer,” Nunez said.

The identity of the suspect and his motive were not immediately clear.

He had made “incoherent statements”, Nunez added, however warning against jumping to conclusions on his motives.

The attack comes after an Islamist radical on Saturday in the German capital of Berlin ploughed a rented minivan into a Pride parade, killing one woman and wounding 29.

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