Estonia does not need a president who can be everything at once, but an institution that helps keep our constitutional order in balance when the world around us is not, Mari-Liis Jakobson writes.

In what officials say is a first for Estonia, a Tallinn court fined plaintiffs over false academic references generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in a legal filing.

Estonia's rising debt burden reflects years of decisions by every major ruling party, not just the current coalition, says Bank of Estonia economist Kaspar Oja.

Former Reform Party leader Siim Kallas says the party needs a fresh direction and a clear platform ahead of the upcoming election and that the coalition will reach a consensus and elect Estonia's next president in the Riigikogu in early September.

In what officials say is a first for Estonia, a Tallinn court fined plaintiffs over false academic references generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in a legal filing.

Estonia has more than 400 churches, and at least 50 of them will need roof repairs in the coming years.

G-alagrupi viimases voorus algab laupäeva hommikul Eesti aja järgi kell 6 mäng Uus-Meremaa – Belgia. Kohtumise kulgu on võimalik jälgida käesolevas uudises.

Autoralli MM-hooaja kaheksas etapp peetakse kivistel Kreeka teedel. Thierry Neuville (Hyundai) hoiab pärast esimest pikemat võistluspäeva esikohta, WRC2-klassis võitleb võidu eest Robert Virves. Postimees vahendab rallit otseblogis

Germany's highest ever temperature of 41.3C is recorded provisionally in Saarbrücken, over the border from France.

A nine-year-old and five women were killed when Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen drove into the market in 2024.

The US president says "Numerous European countries" have been discussing bringing in such a levy.

King Charles paid £12.9m in tax for 2024-2025 - here's what we know about his unique tax situation.

The U.S. conducted a strike against Iran on Friday in response to an attack on a commercial ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the most significant test yet of the deal to end hostilities that President Donald Trump signed last week. U.S. Central Command said Friday that American aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage sites, along with coastal radar sites. On Thursday, Iran attacked a Singaporean cargo ship that was exiting the strait along the Omani coast with a one-way drone attack, Central Command said. Trump earlier Friday called Iran’s attack on the ship a “foolish violation” of the ceasefire. The attacks jeopardize a temporary peace framework that the Trump administration has trumpeted as an effective means for lasting peace in the region and the end of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Negotiations have been ongoing, and the president and his administration have issued several public statements claiming Iran has agreed to keep the strait open and allow for an inspections regime of its nuclear program. The U.S. strikes were in keeping with other recent airstrikes on Iranian targets, and appeared calculated to keep any new flare-up in fighting to a minimum. American aircraft have hit similar targets several times over the past several weeks, and each time U.S. officials have characterized them as “defensive” in nature. The U.S. retains a formidable military presence in the region, with around 50,000 troops on the ground and at sea. Two aircraft carriers remain prowling the Gulf of Oman, along with several destroyers and submarines in the region capable of firing long-range missiles deep inland. There are also about 2,500 Marines aboard the USS Tripoli and accompanying ships on station as well, with another 2,500 en route, currently in the Pacific. Friday’s strikes represent a low-point in peace negotiations aiming for a permanent end to the war. Pakistani and Qatari mediators had said earlier this week that the first round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran had been productive, and Israel and Lebanon brokered a peace framework with the U.S. earlier Friday, though details on the agreement were not released. The attacks further complicate the immediate future of one of the world’s most vital shipping arteries. The United Nations-backed International Maritime Organization scuttled its efforts at evacuating shipping vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf following the drone attack Thursday. The organization’s secretary general said in a statement Thursday the ship that had been attacked was not transiting under the group’s framework.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright had a message for Europe as it bakes beneath a record heat wave this week: Stop your whining. “Always more people die in the winter than die in the summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is,” he said this week in video remarks delivered to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering of influential conservative figures, many of whom dispute the facts of climate change. Wright zeroed in on European deaths in the winter of 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove up energy prices, saying “the mortality impacts of that are devastating.” His comments came as governments across Europe warned that this week’s record-high temperatures posed life-threatening risks, echoing the dangers of a 2022 heat wave that killed more than 60,000 people on the continent. Among those attending the conference were Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s populist right-wing party, Reform U.K., and Steve Koonin, who was handpicked by Wright to co-author a U.S. government report that misrepresented mainstream climate science. House Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered video remarks to an audience that included Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of Britain, and Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer. (Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the owner of POLITICO, also spoke at the conference.) It’s not the first time Wright has described cold temperatures as a greater danger than heat. Insufficient heating is a wintertime killer — in Europe deaths from cold currently outnumber those from heat by a ratio of 8 to 1. But heat is an acute — and growing — threat to populations as climate change intensifies and prolongs deadly heat waves, killing tens of thousands of people across Europe in the last decade. In the U.S., heat is the biggest weather-related killer, surpassing cold. Wright’s comments came as June temperatures soared to new heights in London and other parts of Europe, a region that is warming twice as fast as the global average and lacks widespread air conditioning. The heat wave has forced schools to shutter, disrupted travel and strained power supplies. Several events around London Climate Action Week, the city’s premier climate event, were cancelled due to sweltering conditions, including an event about how to address extreme heat. Around 40 people have drowned in France while trying to keep cool. The searing heat resembles scorching periods of unusual temperatures in the U.S. earlier this year. But the political responses in Europe and America are as opposite as winter and summer. “Believe me, when I was a child it wasn’t 35 degrees [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in London in June. What we are seeing, not just in Britain but around the world, impels us to act,” Britain’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said Tuesday. As the war in Iran has squeezed energy supplies globally, Europe has doubled down on its pledge to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. But it is also under pressure from the Trump administration to buy more American LNG. President Donald Trump frequently rails against European leaders for investing in what he calls “loser” energies, such as wind and solar. “Understand climate change for what it is: a slow-moving phenomenon that ultimately will be addressed by better technologies. The biggest needle mover by far today is natural gas,” Wright, who led fracking-services company Liberty Energy before entering the Trump administration, told the conference this week. AC gets heated In essence, the U.S. is telling Europe not to care about climate change, even as the continent is reeling from its effects. “You can’t really compare heat and cold deaths,” Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London, said in an email, noting that the connection with heat and mortality is much more direct than with cold. “Cold deaths are only an issue in countries that actually get cold, which is also the countries where we have the best data. But heat wave deaths are soaring in the Global South, in particular Africa.” Air conditioning is one way to address the challenge, but its use has stirred political divisions across Europe. Some greens worry that widespread use has environmental impacts, puts more pressure on the grid and would require major retrofits to infrastructure that’s designed for cooler, wetter weather when it’s only needed for a narrow window of time. In France, the far-right National Rally has been calling for everyone to have access to it. Trump himself has acknowledged that air conditioning can save lives, if it’s powered by fossil fuels. His assertions came as he announced the rollback of a key determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. “Fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions out of poverty all over the world, and you see it with the blackouts all over where they don’t use it,” he said in February, blaming renewable energy for blackouts and high electricity prices that he said limited peoples’ access to cooling. “And people are dying because there was no air conditioning or there was no heating, lots of other things, bad things happened,” he said. For many Europeans, this week’s heat wave is further proof that the political measures being taken by the continent to address climate impacts are necessary. They include an EU law that calls for a 90 percent reduction in climate pollution by 2040. The U.K. is aiming to cut emissions 87 percent by 2042. “Even though the ones of us who work with it every day tend to use arguments of security and competitiveness probably more often than fighting climate change right now, the essence of what we do, the real reason why we need to do this, the crisis that will not go away is climate change,” Dan Jørgensen, the EU energy commissioner, said on the sidelines of London Climate Action Week. ‘Virtually impossible’ without climate change An analysis released Friday by World Weather Attribution found that extreme heat hitting parts of Europe and the U.K. would have been “virtually impossible” just a few decades ago without fossil-fuel-driven climate change. Of more than 850 cities that scientists analyzed, 45 percent have broken or are expected to break their highest heat stress levels for June — a metric combining high heat and humidity to assess dangerous conditions for human health. Rising temperatures in Europe have sparked fresh debate about the need for better cooling systems. And advocates worry that the impacts of heat will be even more severe in other places such as India, where there is less capacity to deal with it. Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States, even though air conditioning is more prevalent than in Europe. In 2023, the death toll from heat was at least 2,300 people, according to federal records that were removed from the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Trump took office. Cold temperatures killed fewer than half as many people that year, the CDC said. The Trump administration has cut programs aimed at tempering the dangers of heat. Proposed worker protections have stalled at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the U.S. Labor Department. And as electricity prices increased due to the war in Iran, the administration proposed zeroing out a $4.5 billion program to help low-income people pay their energy bills, including for heating and cooling. Europe faces its own challenges. Lawmakers are locked in a debate over weakening the EU’s emissions trading system, and the bloc’s energy ministers met Friday under pressure from oil and gas producers to soften a law aimed at cutting methane pollution. Europe also remains dependent on the U.S. for natural gas as it weans itself off supplies from Russia. But despite Wright’s efforts to downplay the heat threat — and climate change more broadly — politicians in Europe say they’re not deterred. “Let’s just say this plainly, when Russia invaded Ukraine, some told us to ignore one fossil fuel shock and return to business as usual. And now, facing this second shock, just four years on, we hear the same arguments,” said Miliband, Britain’s energy secretary. “Those who are saying this are wrong.” Zia Weise contributed to this report.

Cape Verde erupted in celebration after the national team qualified for the World Cup knockout stage and made history.

The US has struck Iran for the first time since the two sides reached a Memorandum of Understanding on June 17.

Activists aim to repeat disruption of Jeff Bezos’s wedding when billionaire Tilman Fertitta drops anchorProtesters in Venice are planning to disrupt a visit by the billionaire US ambassador to Italy in his 117-metre superyacht, which they fear he plans to dock in the lagoon city.“We ruined the party for Jeff Bezos’s wedding last year – this year let’s ruin the ambassador’s tour!” said Stella Faye, a 28-year-old researcher and activist, at a meeting of about 40 demonstrators on Thursday. Continue reading...

Accumulation on Switzerland’s glaciers from last winter expected to all be gone by Monday amid ‘enormous’ melt rates across AlpsSwiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave battering Europe, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos).The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day. Continue reading...

US president says levy would supersede any trade deals Washington has with other capitals

Carmaker’s move will ratchet up the pressure on European policymakers to slap restrictions and trade barriers on China