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Hurricane Erin intensifies into a Category 4 storm – Erin is the Atlantic season’s first hurricane and is set to escalate over the weekend though the threat of direct impacts in the Bahamas and along the east coast of the US appears to be receding.

Erin is the Atlantic season’s first hurricane and is set to escalate over the weekend though the threat of direct impacts in the Bahamas and along the east coast of the US appears to be receding.

Erin is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of Anguilla with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kmph), as the NHC warned of possible flooding and landslides.

Tropical storm watches have been issued for Anguilla, Barbuda, St. Martin, St. Barts, Saba, St. Eustatius and St. Maarten while heavy rains are expected in Antigua and Barbuda, the US and British Virgin Islands and southern and eastern Puerto Rico. Up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain is anticipated, with isolated totals of up to 6 inches (15 centimeters), according to the NHC.

The NHC also highlighted the threat of dangerous swells but said the possibility of direct impacts in the Bahamas and along the east coast of the United States “appears to be gradually decreasing.”

In which direction is Hurricane Erin headed?
Hurricane expert Michael Lowry said Erin is forecast to eventually take a sharp turn northeast that would put it on a route between the US and Bermuda.

“All of our best consensus aids show Erin turning safely east of the United States next week, but it’ll be a much closer call for Bermuda, which could land on the stronger eastern side of Erin,” he said.

Erin is the Atlantic season’s first hurricane and is expected to become a major Category 3 storm late this weekend, passing around 200 miles north of Puerto Rico.

“US rapper Sean Kingston sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for $1 million fraud scheme.

US rapper Sean Kingston sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for $1 million fraud scheme

The 35-year-old was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and four counts of wire fraud, alongside his mother Janice Eleanor Turner.

The rapper Sean Kingston was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on Friday after being convicted of a $1 million (£738,000) fraud scheme.

The 35-year-old, whose legal name is Kiesan Paul Anderson, and his mother Janice Eleanor Turner, were both convicted in March for conspiracy to commit wire fraud plus four counts of wire fraud.

Turner was sentenced to five years in prison last month, while her son’s sentencing was rescheduled.

The pair were both arrested in March 2024 after a Swat team raided Kingston’s rented mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s criticism of Goldman Sachs’ research on tariff risks could prompt some analysts to water down their research, investors and academics said, an outcome that could leave investors with less reliable information.The reams of research that banks such as Goldman produce are used by institutional investors, such as hedge funds and asset managers, in deciding how to allocate capital.

Trump’s comments — in which he lambasted Goldman, its economics team and CEO David Solomon and accused them of making “a bad prediction” — have triggered a debate on Wall Street about the possible fallout, according to interviews with banking industry sources and investors.

President Donald Trump said he would not impose new sanctions on Russia or its trading partners for now following his meeting with Vladimir Putin, saying the talks went “very well” despite their failure to reach a breakthrough on the war in Ukraine.

“Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about it. I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now. I think the meeting went very well,” Trump told Fox News after the summit, referring to the possibility of imposing tariffs on China for buying Russian oil.

Trump had threatened to hit Moscow with steep secondary sanctions if it did not agree to end its war on Ukraine by Aug. 8, but he backed down from that threat after Putin agreed to an in-person meeting.

Friday’s two hour and 45-minute meeting, considerably shorter than the six to seven hours the Kremlin had forecast, took place in Anchorage, Alaska, in a “three-on-three” format.

KP’s death toll reaches 307 with 184 fatalities in Buner; AJK reports 11 fatalities. The death toll from recent flash floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa surged to 307 on Saturday as various districts, especially hard-hit Buner, reported more loss of lives, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said on Saturday.

This adds to the casualties in Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, where the unprecedented floods have claimed at least 12 and nine lives, respectively, besides causing widespread destruction.In a separate daily situation report on its website, the PDMA said 93 more bodies — all men — were recovered in Buner, taking the district’s toll to 184.

Buner DC Kashif Qayum Khan also confirmed the casualties to Dawn.com, adding that rescue teams were continuing their search as 30 remained missing in the Chagharzai tehsil, while “over 100” were injured.

The KP government has declared the severely affected mountainous districts of Buner, Bajaur, Swat, Shangla, Mansehra and Battagram as disaster-hit areas.

Portugal suffered its first death Friday from the fires raging there, as Spain’s weather agency warned of a “very high to extreme risk” of more wildfires there during Europe’s intense heatwave.

Further east, Greece was still fighting blazes on one Aegean island, but the situation had improved for several other southern European countries.

Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced the death of the former mayor of the eastern town of Guarda, Carlos Damaso, who had been fighting the fires.

The president said he had cut short his holidays and returned to work, joining a meeting of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority.

For days now, several thousand firefighters have been battling fires in various parts of the country.

Portugal, like Spain, has invoked the EU’s civil protection mechanism to ask for help, requesting four firefighting aircraft to use until Monday, its presidency said on X.

In Spain, three people have died in the fires, including two young volunteers in their thirties who lost their lives trying to extinguish a blaze in the Castile and Leon area.

One of them, Jaime Aparicio Vidales, was buried in the town of Quintanilla de Florez, Zamora province, Castile and Leon, on Friday.

Much of the country has already endured nearly two weeks of high temperatures, and on Friday the searing heat spread to Cantabria, which had so far been spared.

Temperatures in the northwestern region were forecast to pass 40C, said Aemet, the national weather agency.

The risk of fires on Friday and over the weekend through to Monday was “very high or extreme in most of the country,” it added.

‘Nothing left to burn’
Spain has endured a devastating wildfire season, with 157,501 hectares (389,193 acres) reduced to ashes since the start of the year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Yet that figure is still short of 2022, when more than 306,000 hectares went up in smoke.

On Thursday, France sent two water-bombing planes to help try to douse the flames in the northwestern region, where a dozen fires were still raging.

The railway line between Madrid and the northwestern region of Galicia remained closed, as well as 10 main roads.

Marco Raton, 35, works on a pig farm in Sesnandez de Tabara near one of the fires in Castile and Leon that forced several thousand people to flee their homes.

He and his friends did not think twice when they saw the fire arrive on Tuesday, he said.

They grabbed “everything we had — backpacks, fire bats and garden hoses — put on appropriate clothing and went over to help,” he added.

“As soon as we arrived, we started seeing burned people being evacuated, a car on fire, a burning tractor, warehouses, garages,” he told AFP.

He felt “helpless,” he added.

Raton had thought there was “nothing left to burn” after devastating fires in the same region in 2022. Now he was convinced that “this will continue to happen to us year after year.”

The mayor of Ferreruela, Angel Roman, called for fire breaks of cleared brush to be established around the villages. “The countryside, if it’s clean, can stop the fire,” he said.

France on red alert
Meteorologists in France, meanwhile, put the southern department of Aude — where a devastating fire has already killed one person and injured several others — on red alert.

The fire, which broke out on August 5, has still not been fully extinguished and temperatures are expected to reach 40C there on Saturday.

“We are in a situation of extreme vigilance,” said Lucie Roesch, general secretary of the local prefecture.

Further east, lower temperatures and reduced winds were helping to improve the situation in Greece and the Balkans, where rain was forecast in many parts of the region.

Firefighters remained in Patras, Greece’s third-largest city, monitoring scattered outbreaks.

The most active blaze was still on the Mediterranean island of Chios, in the northeastern Aegean Sea, where eight aircraft have been deployed to try to douse the flames.

The risk of fire remained high in the Attica region that includes the capital, Athens, and the southern Peloponnese peninsula, the Civil Protection agency warned on Friday.

In Albania, initial government estimates said thousands of cattle had been killed and 40 homes destroyed in just three days of wildfires.

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, has called on Russian and U.S. leaders to prioritize a new round of prisoner exchanges during their upcoming bilateral meeting in Alaska.

“We don’t know and you don’t know how things will unfold after your talks. Maybe the results will make a difference. Maybe they will be forgotten in a week. But there is a way to ensure this summit goes down in history no matter what,” Navalnaya said in a video address published on social media Friday.

“To achieve this, you must take an irreversible step, something that cannot be undone…Namely: launch a new round of prisoner exchanges,” she added.

Navalnaya stressed that a face-to-face meeting offers a rare opportunity to strike a deal without “years of shuttle diplomacy” by “simply exchanging the lists” of prisoners included in a swap.

“I know those lists are already prepared,” she said