PARIS (Reuters) - British water treatment facilities temporarily discharge raw sewage into seas and rivers if they are inundated by heavy rainfall and risk flooding. Environmental campaigners say such discharges are becoming more common. England and Wales regulator Ofwat and the British government’s Environment Agency are investigating several water companies that admitted they might be making unpermitted sewage discharges. Pollution warnings telling beachgoers not to swim in the sea off English beaches at the height of the summer holiday season due to raw sewage being discharged has increased pressure on the British government to take action on water companies. On Friday, it set out a plan to tackle sewage discharges, requiring water companies to do more to treat sewage before it is discharged, and to invest in improving storm overflows, with fines for those who do not meet new targets.

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DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority Rohingya refugees marked the fifth anniversary of their exodus from Myanmar to Bangladesh on Thursday. At a sprawling camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, thousands of refugees gathered to commemorate what they term Genocide Remembrance Day, with speakers demanding safety from persecution inside Myanmar so they can return to the country. A refugee at the Kutupalong camp sang a song describing their suffering on the way to Bangladesh five years ago, braving bullets, forests and the sea. Many in the crowd cried as they listened.

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ROME (AFP) - Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy’s next prime minister in the September 25 general elections as her far-right Brothers of Italy party rides high in the polls, capitalising on widespread disillusionment with the status quo. FRANCE 24 reports. Brothers of Italy has seen its support increase sixfold over the past five years, and Meloni has supplanted League leader and ex-interior minister Matteo Salvini as the standard-bearer of the Italian hard right. Meloni’s party has benefitted from being the sole opposition to technocratic PM Mario Draghi’s grand coalition since February 2021.

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BRASILIA (Reuters) - Former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who spent 19 months in prison on bribery convictions, promised on Thursday to crack down on corruption if elected in Brazil’s October election. Lula said he would create new mechanisms to investigate anyone in his government accused of corruption and punish them if proven guilty. “Whoever makes a mistake will pay, you can be sure of that,” he said in an interview with TV Globo’s Jornal Nacional, a newscast with the largest audience in Brazil. Lula, who led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, was jailed in the country’s biggest corruption investigation that put dozens of politicians and businessmen in prison for graft and bribes. His convictions were later annulled allowing him to run again for office.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system, NASA said. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet, said NASA. The finding offers evidence that in the future Webb may be able to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets, according to NASA. Previous observations from other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, revealed the presence of water vapor, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere.