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🌎  7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• Russian flag in Bakhmut, pro-Kremlin blogger killed: The head of the Wagner mercenary force said his troops had raised the Russian flag in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, but Ukraine’s military said its army was still defending the city. Meanwhile, authorities have detained the woman suspected in Sunday’s assassination of war blogger Maxim Yuryevich Fomin aka Vladlen Tatarsky in a St Petersburg cafe explosion.

• Trump to face court hearing on Tuesday: Former U.S. President Donald Trump is set to fly to New York City on Monday, ahead of his scheduled court date related to hush money paid to a porn star before the 2016 election. Meanwhile, security is tightening in Manhattan. Trump’s lawyers have said he will enter a plea of not guilty.

• Oil prices surge: Oil prices surged Monday in the biggest daily rise in almost a year, after OPEC+ and its allies including Russia jolted markets by announcing further production cuts of about 1.16 million barrels per day on Sunday. Brent crude was trading at $84.22 a barrel and is now up $4.33, or 5.4%, after touching the highest in a month at $86.44 earlier.

• Finnish Prime Minister defeated by conservatives: Finland's left-wing Prime Minister Sanna Marin was defeated in the country’s parliamentary election, coming in third behind the center-right and right-wing parties. Finnish conservative leader Petteri Orpo, whose party secured 20.8% of the vote, is expected to form a coalition with right-wing populist Finns Party.

• Montenegro’s Former Economy Minister defeats long-standing president: Montenegro’s longtime president Milo Đukanović conceded defeat on Sunday to Jakov Milatović, a 37-year-old banker who promised to speed up the country’s accession talks with the European Union. Đukanović had been in power for 32 years.

• ChatGPT banned in Italy: Italy has become the first Western country to ban the advanced chatbot ChatGPT. The Italian data-protection authority said there were privacy concerns in regards to the bot, created by U.S. start-up OpenAI and backed up by Microsoft. As a response, OpenAI blocked the access to the website in the country.

• Twitter strips check mark off New York Times: Twitter has removed the blue check mark on The New York Times main account. The move comes after Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk posted derogatory remarks about the newspaper. Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from fakes on the social media platform.

🗞️  FRONT PAGE

Amsterdam-based de Volkskrant reports from “Behind the Russian frontline,” as it lends its front page to the Ukrainian volunteers carrying out clandestine actions on Russian territory. Four of them died recently, and will be buried without honors or medals, due to the secrecy linked to their actions. “We understand that the state cannot officially recognize their mission,” says one father quoted by the Dutch daily. "But we hope history will rectify this."

#️⃣  BY THE NUMBERS

89.03%

Parisians were called to vote Sunday to decide the future of self-service scooters in the French capital. Of ballots cast, 89.03% were for eliminating the electric scooters in the capital, which will be banned from Sept. 1. However, participation was very low at 7.46%.

📰  STORY OF THE DAY

How Miyawaki “pop up” forests spread across the urban jungle of Lisbon

Two years ago, forests planted according to a method invented by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, began to spread across urban spaces in the Portuguese capital. It's a way to bring real enclaves of nature to urban realities in record time, reports Ana da Cunha for Portuguese news website Mensagem.

🌳 Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki created a concept which involves native species planted in high density and allows the creation of new forests born in record time — just 20 or 30 years. On the campus of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, locals came together to break ground and sow the seeds of what will become, in the near (but not so near) future, a true forest. Two years later, what started out as an unprecedented experience has taken root.

🇵🇹 For David Avelar and António Alexandre, both with the Horta FCUL team at the University of Lisbon, the idea began to germinate in 2020, when the internet world dragged them to the Miyawaki forests, which were already spreading across Europe, with examples of success in the Netherlands and the UK. Still, it was uncharted territory: none of this had been tested in Portugal, where climatic conditions are different.

🌱💧 Two years later, what is the result? The last survey indicated a 75% survival rate for the new forest. Some plants, like myrtles, are now growing after two years. “There are more and more plants, and the ability to become resilient is becoming better and better, which is great, because we don't always have to intervene," says Alexandre. A ton of water has also been saved. Alexandre estimates that a forest like this needs just a fifth or even a tenth of the water a lawn would need.

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO

➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED

📣 VERBATIM

“The death penalty has not brought the results it was intended to bring.”

— The lower house of Malaysia’s Parliament approved reforms Monday to repeal the mandatory death penalty for 11 offenses, including murder and drug trafficking. It will still be optional for some offenses. Malaysia’s Deputy Law Minister Ramkarpal Singh said before the vote that the death penalty had not been effective in deterring people from committing crimes. Under the amendments passed on Monday, whipping and imprisonment for 30 to 40 years

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