An exceptional heatwave is affecting countries across western Europe, with cities and regions of France, Spain and southern Italy experiencing unseasonal temperatures.
This image of land surface temperature was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on Wednesday, 23 June. The data were captured in the late morning, local time.
The colours shown on the image range from purples and deep reds (indicating surface temperatures up to 55ºC, seen in parts of central Spain, western France and northern Africa) to light blues that indicate lower surface temperatures in mountainous regions. Some areas were covered by cloud – shown in white.
The satellite sensed temperatures on land of 48ºC in Madrid, 44ºC in Rome and 46ºC in both Poitier in France and Zaragoza in Spain. The ground temperatures in northern Africa are visibly higher, with temperatures on the ground in Tunis reaching 49ºC. Because surfaces such as rock, sand and asphalt retain the heat, ground temperatures are considerably higher than air temperatures.
Sentinel-3 carries four instruments, including its Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) – a powerful and highly accurate sensor that measures temperatures over both land and sea. It detects heat stress over land and its data are used in agriculture as well as monitoring urban heat islands and wildfires.
The current European heatwave is caused by an atmospheric pattern of persistent high pressure – a ‘heat dome’ – which is trapped over Europe between low pressure systems on each side. Summer heat in Europe is not normally associated with El Niño and therefore, although satellite data have detected early signs of the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, it is not the driver behind the current temperatures in Europe.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2026), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Een CIDI-onderzoek over online-uitingen voor en na 7 oktober 2023 toont een forse toename van antisemitisme in het Nederlandse taalgebied. Twee experts noemen het onderzoek „grondig en transparant”, maar plaatsen ook kanttekeningen.
joshuark shares a report from Car and Driver: A new study conducted by the New York Times shows that the increase in vehicle hood height seen over the last two and a half decades, mainly due to the rise in popularity of large SUVs and trucks, has resulted in several thousand deaths that otherwise may not have happened. The study shows that while automakers and regulators have focused on occupant safety, they have turned a blind eye to pedestrian safety, which has fallen since around 2009. Researchers looked at four main datasets in their investigation: crash test data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) from 2016 to 2024; NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS); vehicle measurement data from Expert AutoStats; and vehicle registration data from S&P Global from 2002 to 2024. The researchers concluded that the increased danger to pedestrians is caused by two main culprits.
First, large SUVs and trucks have taller hoods, raising the point of impact above most people's center of gravity and pushing them to the ground, typically hard asphalt, rather than up and onto the hood, which is designed to absorb impacts. Second, with larger A-pillars designed to protect occupants in rollover crashes, modern cars tend to have larger blind spots than cars sold at the turn of the century (presuming the 21st century). The shift toward vehicles with taller hoods led to roughly 3000 deaths between 2016 and 2024. This number is conservative because it does not include crashes that take place in parking lots, driveways, or private roads, which aren't part of the federal database.
The data also showed an estimated 2.8 percent increase in the odds of a pedestrian fatality for every one-inch increase in vehicle hood height. Between two different scenarios, one decreasing the hood height of every vehicle in the dataset by 3 inches, and the second using a random sampling of hood heights from 2002 across 10,000 simulated crashes, between 2624 (for scenario two) and 3077 (for scenario one) lives could have been saved from 2016 to 2024.
In February, police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested farmer Darren Blanchard for speaking a little too long during a community meeting about data centers. The city charged Blanchard with criminal trespass, a crime with a $200 penalty, but he’s vowed to fight the charge. He recently shared video of the bodycam footage for the first time with 404 Media and answered our questions about the moment cops arrested him for going over his time at a February 17 community meeting of the Claremore City Council.
The plan in February was for the City Council to listen to the concerns citizens had about a planned data center called Project Mustang. The residents of Claremore don’t want the data center and largely feel like the construction project was approved without their input. City officials signed non-disclosure agreements on behalf of the project’s developers and haven’t been forthcoming with details about its construction.
Blanchard told 404 Media that his legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charge and requested the city’s attorney recuse himself as he was present at the city council meeting and witnessed the arrest.
“I continue to maintain that my arrest was retaliatory, as I was engaging in protected speech at a public meeting. These actions as well as the undue resulting responses by the City of Claremore should raise major concern,” Blanchard said. “For now, I am allowing the legal process to move forward at whatever pace that may be. I am confident the truth will eventually come out, and remain steadfast in that this charge should never have been brought in the first place.”
Blanchard said he has no criminal history and that his arrest has been overwhelming. “Even if my charges are dismissed and the arrest is deemed unlawful, the process I have endured is the penalty,” he said. “I went to a public meeting to speak about an issue affecting my community of Northeast Oklahoma [...] I ended up in handcuffs, jailed and later seeing that moment played and replayed nonstop on television and social media. That is not something you simply move past.”
He said that he’s glad his arrest has brought attention to the fight against data centers. Communities deserve transparency, due process and protection from being industrialized without meaningful public input. But personally, it has been traumatic,” he said. “What concerns me most is the chilling effect. If someone can be arrested after speaking at a public meeting, others may decide it is safer to stay quiet. That should trouble everyone, regardless of where they may stand on data centers, artificial intelligence, energy infrastructure or matters of economic development.”
Blanchard said he’s not shocked by the rise of anti-data center sentiment in America. “Across the country, people are beginning to recognize that these projects are not just abstract technology investments. They impact land, water, electricity rates, housing, agriculture and the overall character of our communities,” he said.
“A pattern is unfolding where these developers come in with promises of jobs and investment, public officials are swayed to move quickly, oftentimes incognito via nondisclosure agreements and the long-term costs are pushed onto residents who had little say in the process,” he said. “Whether it is rising utility bills, unsustainable demands on our water, transmission lines and the concern for eminent domain, nonsensical tax incentives or the loss of farmland and rural ways of life, people are asking a very basic question: who is this ultimately serving?”
Blanchard raised some of these issues during the February community meeting. In an attempt to accommodate the overwhelming number of people who wanted to speak, the City of Claremore established a hard and fast three minute time limit for people talking during public comments.
In the bodycam footage, Blanchard went a few seconds over that three minutes and two police officers swooped in.
“You need to leave,” one officer said.
“I’m done with the mic,” Blanchard said. He held up documents he brought with him. “Can I present my records?”
“Sir, you’ve been asked to leave,” the cop said. Blanchard walks to the front of the room, begins to give his documents to the city council and the officers follow.
“You can give them to Sarah and then let’s go,” one of the officers said. “You’ve been asked to leave.”
“This is a public meeting,” Blanchard said as he sorted through the documents.
“OK. You can give them to Sarah but you’ve been asked to leave,” the officer said.
“On what grounds?” Blanchard said.
“Right now,” the officer said.
“I said on what grounds?” Blanchard said.
“Arrest him,” an officer, identified from the police report as Sergeant Sanger, said. Then the two officers had Blanchard’s hands behind his back and in cuffs. The crowd booed and shouted.
“That’s a cowardly thing to do,” a woman shouted over the noise of the crowd as the officers escorted Blanchard out.
A man yelled, “So you can break the law but we can’t?”
Another woman rushed to one of the police officers, her phone out and filming. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, people.”
The arrest hasn’t stopped Blanchard from speaking out. He’s appeared on local news outlets several times and is speaking out against the data center in public every chance he gets. “When utility bills rise, when land is taken or devalued, when public resources are committed and when tax breaks are handed out without real accountability, that functions as a de facto tax on the local citizenry. So the question becomes one of representation,” Blanchard told 404 Media. “Were the people truly heard, or were these decisions effectively made before the public ever entered the room?
He’s also confident he’ll prevail in the courts. “I still believe justice will be done, but again, the process itself has already become part of the punishment. That cannot be undone,” he said.
The Claremore Police Department did not respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment.
Wimbledon will remain on free-to-air television until at least 2033 after BBC on Thursday signed a new deal with the All England Club before the Championships start next week. BBC’s existing deal was due to expire after next summer and signing a six-year extension is a major boost for the corporation, as other than the men’s football World Cup, European Championship and Olympics, Wimbledon is the broadcaster’s biggest live sporting asset.
The All England Club has taken tentative steps towards embracing pay television in the UK in recent years and has sold secondary rights to the men’s and women’s finals to TNT Sports, but is not thought to have given serious consideration to breaking a relationship with BBC that began in 1927 with their first radio coverage from SW19.
NEW YORK (ANP) - Micron Technology hoorde donderdag tot de grote winnaars op de beurzen in New York. De chipfabrikant heeft het afgelopen kwartaal een vijftien keer zo hoge winst geboekt als een jaar eerder. Vanwege de grote investeringen van techbedrijven in de bouw van datacenters voor kunstmatige intelligentie is de vraag naar de geavanceerde geheugenchips van het Amerikaanse bedrijf hard gestegen.
De resultaten overtroffen de verwachtingen van analisten. Micron verwacht daarnaast voor het huidige kwartaal een omzet van 50 miljard dollar, wat ook boven de schattingen van kenners was. Het aandeel werd 19 procent meer waard.
De Dow-Jonesindex ging in de vroege handel 0,5 procent vooruit tot 52.096 punten. De breed samengestelde S&P 500 won 0,6 procent tot 7398 punten. Techbeurs Nasdaq kreeg er ook 0,6 procent bij en steeg naar 25.624 punten.
Fulfilling the purpose for which it was built almost 2000 years ago, football fans packed the Roman Theatre of Amman to watch the Jordan v Algeria World Cup match. I don’t know whether Roman rulers, builders, and architects envisioned their works would remain standing & useful millennia after their construction, but longevity is certainly not a priority these days.
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