The wildfires sweeping across Europe feel deeply personal to Professor Marta Yebra, even though she now lives thousands of kilometres away. Born in Spain and now based in Canberra, the bushfire specialist has devoted much of her career to helping Australia – one of the most fire-exposed nations on Earth – better confront its own destructive blazes. She leads the Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, created after Australia’s catastrophic 2019–20 Black Summer fires, which burned an area

Four days ago, Youssef El Abbas believed he had found a way to recover the life he had lost seven years earlier. Reports were spreading that roughly 400 people had swum from Morocco to the nearby Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the North African coast, about 12 miles (19km) across the Strait of Gibraltar from mainland Spain. For the 44-year-old Moroccan father of four, it seemed like an unexpected opportunity to return to Spain, the country he had been forced to leave in 2019 after losing his job