What happened
German police yesterday shot dead a man suspected of carrying out a deadly attack at Berlin’s Pride celebrations less than 24 hours earlier. Authorities said officers opened fire after Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese heritage, charged at them with a “stabbing weapon” after being tracked to a community garden in the city’s Spandau district.

A van allegedly driven by Ballout rammed into a crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten park on Saturday as partygoers celebrated Christopher Street Day, the city’s “oldest Pride event,” The Washington Post said. Authorities said the suspect then attacked bystanders with a machete. A woman was killed and 29 people were injured, with three in a critical condition.

Who said what
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters that “everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack.” Hundreds of mourners gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate yesterday “to grieve the victims of the attack and express the anger and shock over what is seen as an attack on the LBGTQ+ community,” Deutsche Welle said. It “was an attack on all of us,” one speaker said. “But we will not let it defeat us.”

What next?
German authorities will review security arrangements for major public events — including upcoming Pride celebrations — amid concerns about possible copycat attacks.

What happened
Massive wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have forced nearly 400,000 people to evacuate. The French blazes have scorched “an area four times the size of Paris,” The Associated Press said, and are spreading toward the wine region city of Bordeaux. Near Madrid, “the biggest wildfire in Spain’s recent history” has burned around 200 square miles of countryside, Reuters said. Firefighters are racing to contain the fires as another European heatwave looms. 

Who said what
“We don’t know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting,” a spokesperson for the National Firefighters Federation of France told Agence France-Presse. “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario.” The fires have caused “incalculable” damage to Spain’s cultural heritage, the country’s King Felipe VI told reporters. Western Europe is experiencing an “extreme summer” of intense heatwaves and dry weather, “setting the stage” for wildfire conditions, The New York Times said.  

What next?
Temperatures are forecast to again “reach abnormally hot levels” across the Spain and France fire zones this week, CNN said. “Difficult hours lie ahead,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told reporters ahead of a crisis meeting with his Cabinet today. 

A rocky super-Earth 48 light-years away, approximately 1.7 times the diameter and 5.6 times the mass of our planet, may be capable of sustaining life. The exoplanet, LHS 1140 b, was leaking helium, which could indicate the presence of an atmosphere, a necessary factor for life to flourish, according to a study in the journal Science.

LHS 1140 b shares many qualities with Earth. Though its temperatures are colder than our planet’s, it “orbits a red dwarf star within the star’s habitable zone,” which is the sweet spot in which “temperatures and environmental conditions are within the range that could support liquid water on the planet’s surface,” said a news release about the study. This is the “first time anyone has found an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star,” said lead study author Collin Cherubim in the release. 

While the findings are promising, “at this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” Cherubim said to The New York Times. “But we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.” 

The question remains whether LHS 1140 b is “bare rock with no atmosphere that sometimes burps up some gas that then immediately escapes” or if there’s a “steady-state atmosphere there that will leak out stuff like the Earth does from time to time,” said University of Florida assistant professor of astronomy Jason Dittmann, who discovered the planet, to The Independent.

Even if this exoplanet is not the next Earth, “if one potentially organic world is out there, countless others could be too,” said Time. The existence of potentially viable planets “dramatically” boosts the odds of alien life.