In its latest heatwave bulletin published on Saturday, the Italian health ministry says that by Monday, some 25 of the country’s 27 major cities will be on red alert.<\/p>\n
It says it expects only two – Reggio Calabria in the southern tip of Italy’s “boot” and Messina, facing it across on the island of Sicily – to be on the second-highest “amber” alert.<\/p>\n
The ministry urges residents in the affected areas to avoid exposure to heat and direct sunlight during the hottest hours between 11:00 and 18:00, stay indoors and drink plenty of fluids.<\/p>\n
The extreme heat is being caused by a subtropical anticyclone from North Africa that is now strengthening over the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, firefighters in Greece, France, Portugal and Spain are still tackling blazes spanning thousands of hectares.<\/p>\n
In France, some 2,500 people were evacuated in the south-eastern Var region on Friday evening after a blaze – which had been contained for several days – reignited, local officials said.<\/p>\n
But a massive fire in the south-western Gironde region is now under control, and some 200,000 local evacuated residents have been able to return to their homes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its latest heatwave bulletin published on Saturday, the Italian health ministry says that by Monday, some 25…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-723258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}