Jet2 and Tui have cancelled all flights to Rhodes as wildfires continue to tear through the Greek holiday destination for a sixth consecutive day. The Jet2 planes were scheduled to depart from the East Midlands, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Newcastle and Stansted airports full of tourists bound for the Greek island. But the planes left emply and will instead be used to evacuate holidaymakers fleeing the blaze. Fire crews are now in a race against time to stop the fires from spreading further with 21mph (34kph) winds forecast for tomorrow. Thousands of tourists were forced to flee their hotels and images captured their dramatic evacuation off of beaches by a fleet of private boats while the fires raged in the background. Becky Mulligan, a 29-year-old training manager from Leicester, was staying at the Princess Sun Hotel in the Kiotari resort on Rhodes’s southeast coast when she, her daughter, 5 and sister, 20 say they were forced to flee. “I thought I was going to die. It was like hell on earth,” she told The Independent. Read More Wildfires on Greek island of Rhodes force thousands of holidaymakers to evacuate From body bags of ice to pavement burn: US grapples with new extreme heat reality Hiker, 71, dies in Death Valley shortly after being asked by reporter why he was braving heat: ‘Why not?’ July 2023 is set to be world’s hottest month in ‘hundreds, if not thousands, of years’

Volodymyr Zelensky has landed in Canada in his latest North American visit to shore up support from Western allies against Russia’s continuing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian president reached Canada late on Thursday for an unannounced visit shortly after he left Washington and concluded meetings with US president Joe Biden and lawmakers in Washington. He also addressed the UN annual meeting in New York on Wednesday. Mr Zelensky was received by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau on the tarmac of the Ottawa airport, marking his first visit to the country since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year. Visuals showed the Ukrainian leader and the country’s first lady Olena Zelenska being warmly greeted by Mr Trudeau as the three shook hands. Mr Zelensky will address the Canadian parliament on Friday as part of his campaign. The war-time president will be joined by Mr Trudeau, who will also deliver a speech. After delivering their speeches, Mr Zelensky and Mr Trudeau are expected to visit Toronto to meet with the local Ukrainian community. The North American nation is home to about 1.4 million people of Ukrainian descent, close to four per cent of their population. Mr Zelensky had previously addressed the Canadian parliament virtually in March 2022 after the invasion began and visited Canada only once before that in 2019. It is important for the Ukrainian leader to see the extent to which Canada supports Kyiv in the war, UN envoy Bob Rae said. “We have done a lot to help him and we need to do more. We are going to continue to do everything we can to support the Ukrainian people,” he said. Despite being under its own duress of military spending, Canada has offered more than 8.9bn Canadian dollars (£5.3bn) to Ukraine during the course of conflict. It is the Trudeau administration’s highest per-capita direct financial aid to Ukraine in the coalition of G7 industrial nations. Security preparations were underway in Canada days before, even as the visit remained unannounced, according to a report by public broadcaster CBC News. Mr Zelensky will likely ask for additional military support during this visit, the report said. Unconditional support for Ukraine has started to thin out as the country heads into another fall and winter of war, but its allies are now forced to debate how many resources they can spare. In Washington, Mr Zelensky had to make a hard pitch for aid, stating that lack of support will result in Ukraine’s loss against Russian forces invading the country. The counteroffensive has seen mixed results in the past few weeks, with slower gains and experts suggest the progress in the next few months can prove to be critical. The battlefield will see rains and turn the ground muddy, making it difficult for tanks to move and ultimately slow down the pace of battle further before a gruelling winter begins. Read More Ukraine-Russia war - live: Kyiv tanks break through gap in Putin’s final line of defence near Verbove Zelensky makes passionate plea to US lawmakers on key Washington visit Zelenskyy to speak before Canadian Parliament in his campaign to shore up support for Ukraine Zelensky says he had ‘very strong dialogue with senators’ after closed-door meeting over Ukraine aid What are Abrams tanks and why is the US sending them to Ukraine?

Alcohol addiction ruins millions of lives every year, but scientists may have found a cure for this terrible affliction. A new treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been trialled in monkeys with impressive results and, if these translate to human trials, the impact could be monumental. A team of neuroscientists and physiologists from across the US tested a new type of gene therapy to see if they could directly target the underlying brain circuitry associated with sustained heavy drinking. As they noted, in the journal Nature Medicine, people suffering from AUD commonly return to alcohol use even if they attempt to quit. This is largely to do with what’s known as mesolimbic dopamine (DA) signalling – meaning how the central nervous system circuit communicates the feelgood neurotransmitter dopamine. A protein called glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) is key to keeping these neurons in this reward circuitry functioning. However, experts have found that levels of GDNF are reduced in people with AUD during periods of alcohol abstinence, most notably in a region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as IFLScience notes. Therefore, the researchers decided to test whether using gene therapy to deliver more GDNF to the VTA could help reinforce this crucial dopaminergic signalling and prevent patients from suffering an alcoholic relapse. The team of scientists explained how alcohol consumption in non-addicts prompts the release of dopamine, creating a pleasurable buzz feeling, but chronic alcohol use causes the brain to adapt and stop releasing so much dopamine. “So when people are addicted to alcohol, they don’t really feel more pleasure in drinking,” Dr Kathleen Grant, a senior co-author of the study, said in a statement. “It seems that they’re drinking more because they feel a need to maintain an intoxicated state.” For their research, Dr Grant and her colleagues used eight rhesus macaque monkeys, who were exposed to increasing concentrations of alcohol over four 30-day “induction” periods. The monkeys then had free access to alcohol and water for 21 hours a day for six months, during which they developed heavy drinking behaviours. This was then followed by a 12-week abstinence phase, with the GDNF treatment performed four weeks in for half of the subjects. The gene therapy was delivered using a a viral vector containing a copy of the human GDNF gene injected directly into the primate’s VTA, according to IFLScience. And the results were truly jaw-dropping. “Drinking went down to almost zero,” Dr Grant said. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether. They decreased their drinking to the point that it was so low we didn’t record a blood-alcohol level.” The most exciting aspect of their findings is the suggestion that gene therapy could offer a permanent solution for people with the most severe cases of AUD. This will be a welcome glimmer of hope to many, given that some 29.5 million people were diagnosed with AUD in the US alone in 2021, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Of these 29.5 million sufferers, almost a million (894,000) were aged between 12 and 17. It’ll likely be some time before we know for sure whether the gene therapy can be rolled out in humans, but it’s an important first step in tackling this devastating disorder. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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