Southern Europe will continue to swelter next week as an intense heatwave shows no sign of abating.

Italy, Spain and Greece have been experiencing high temperatures for several days already.

The Italian health ministry issued a red alert for 16 cities including Rome, Bologna and Florence for the weekend.

The heatwave is expected to continue well into next week, with 48C (118.4F) predicted in Sardinia, according to Italian media.

The European record high of 48.8C (119.8F) was recorded in Sicily in August 2021.

The Italian weather service said the island will be at the « epicentre » of next week’s heatwave, which weather forecasters have dubbed Charon, after the ferryman who delivered souls into the underworld in Greek mythology.

Italy’s government has advised anyone in the areas covered by Saturday’s red alerts to avoid direct sunlight between 11:00 and 18:00, and to take particular care of the elderly or vulnerable.

In Rome, tour guide Felicity Hinton, 59, told the BBC the soaring temperatures combined with overcrowding has made it « nightmarish » to navigate the city.

« It’s always hot in Rome but this has just been consistently hot for a lot longer than normal, » she said.

« My tour guide friends and I are extremely stressed out. People have been fainting on tours and there are ambulances outside everywhere. »

Rome resident Elena, 62 told the BBC that she has noticed a « marked change » in summer temperatures since around 2003, and that they have been growing exponentially since.

Meanwhile, Greece has hit temperatures of 40C (104F) or more in recent days. The Acropolis in Athens – the country’s most popular tourist attraction – was closed during the hottest hours of Friday and Saturday to protect visitors.

In Spain, a forest fire on the island of La Palma has forced the evacuation of at least 500 people.

The heatwave is set to extend to the Balkans later next week – although several countries, like Serbia and Hungary, are already experiencing daily temperatures hovering around 35C (95F).

Periods of intense heat occur within natural weather patterns, but globally they are becoming more frequent, more intense and are lasting longer due to global warming.

Last month was the hottest June on record, according to the EU’s climate monitoring service Copernicus.

Extreme weather resulting from warming climate is « unfortunately becoming the new normal », the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has warned.

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Thousands of people have rallied in central Athens to protest over Greece’s deadliest rail disaster, which killed dozens of people last month.

The demonstrators expressed anger over safety deficiencies in Greece’s railway network and demanded punishment for those responsible for the head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train that killed 57 people on February 28. Police said that more than 8,000 people in Athens gathered outside Parliament to protest on Sunday.

Protesters flooded Athens’s Syntagma Square, waving banners that read “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive” and “We will become the voice of all the dead”.

“It was anger and rage that brought me here,” Markella, a 65-year-old Athens protester who gave only one name, told the AFP news agency.

Another demonstrator, 26-year-old Alexandros, added: “We’re getting desperate. You don’t know what to say, what to do – all you can do is join the protest.”

Demonstrators demand punishment for those responsible for a train collision that killed 57 people.

The protesters later marched to the offices of privatised train operator Hellenic Train. The company, which has been owned by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane since 2017, isn’t responsible for the maintenance of the railway network. State-owned Hellenic Railways is in charge of upkeep.

Authorities shut down four metro stations on two lines running through central Athens because of the protest.

The rally was organised by civil servants, a pro-communist union and university students.

In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, about 5,000 people demonstrated.

Sunday’s rallies, which passed off without serious incident, weren’t as well-attended as similar events earlier in the week, when more than 30,000 had turned out in Athens and more than 20,000 in Thessaloniki.

A memorial service was conducted for 12 students of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece’s largest university, who were killed in the train crash.

A stationmaster accused of placing the trains on the same track has been charged with negligent homicide and other offences, and the country’s transportation minister and senior railway officials resigned the day after the crash.

Public and private sector employees are expected to walk out again on Thursday.

‘Facetious’ reactions

Revelations of serious safety gaps on Greece’s busiest rail line have put the centre-right government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the defensive. He has pledged the government’s full cooperation with a judicial inquiry into the crash.

Mitsotakis, who is fighting to be re-elected later this year, has faced calls from some protesters to quit.

He has come under fire for initially pointing to “human error” for the accident, and blaming the stationmaster on duty at the time, who allegedly routed the trains onto the same stretch of track by accident.

But railway unions had long been warning about problems on the creaking, understaffed train network.

Al Jazeera’s Psaropoulos said the government “has been bending over backwards to appease public opinion.

“Just two days ago, the government announced that it would pay for national pensions equivalent to roughly $1,800 per family for each of those 57 people killed,” he said.

“The government is trying to reassure people that by the end of the month when railways start operating again – at least that is the government plan – all precautions will have been taken to have full staffing and properly trained staff on platforms and on trains.

“By the end of the summer, the prime minister has promised he’s going to have all those automated safety systems that didn’t work on the night of February 28, installed throughout the system – automatic signalling, automatic breaking and telemetry showing controllers where trains are and headed at all times.”

Elections in Greece are due later this spring, and opinion polls released over the past week have shown the ruling conservatives’ lead over the left-wing opposition shrink almost by half compared with polls published before the crash.

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Turkish president says will pause talks, partly over dispute with Greek PM and what Ankara calls airspace violations.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey is halting talks with Greece, partly over a dispute with the Greek prime minister and what Ankara calls airspace violations, marking the latest reversal in the neighbours’ long-testy relationship.

Last year, after a five-year hiatus, the two NATO members resumed talks to address their differences in the Mediterranean Sea and other bilateral issues. The talks have made little progress and the countries have frequently traded barbs.

Erdogan said on Wednesday that Turkey had cancelled a bilateral cooperation platform, dubbed the High-Level Strategic Council, with Greece, adding in a speech to legislators from his governing party that Ankara wanted a foreign policy that “had strong character”.

“You keep putting on shows for us with your planes,” Erdogan said, referring to a dispute with Athens about airspace over islands in the Aegean Sea. “What are you doing? Pull yourself together. Do you not learn lessons from history?”

“Don’t try to dance with Turkey. You’ll get tired and stuck on the road. We are no longer holding bilateral talks with them. This Greece will not see reason,” he said.

The countries have long been at odds about a range of issues such as maritime boundaries, overlapping claims over their continental shelves, airspace, refugees and Cyprus.

The talks had made little headway, but were a means for the two countries to air out their grievances without resorting to a potential armed standoff as had occurred as recently as two years ago.

Tensions flared again last week when Erdogan said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “no longer exists” for him, accusing him of trying to block sales of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey during a visit to the United States.

On Tuesday, Mitsotakis told reporters after a European Union summit that he had briefed his EU counterparts about Turkey’s “aggressiveness” and “provocations which cannot be tolerated by Greece or the European Union”.

“I will not be involved in a game of personal insults,” he said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday Greece was violating international agreements that determine the demilitarised status of islands in the Aegean, warning that if Athens did not change course Ankara would launch challenges over the islands’ status.

Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Cavusoglu’s comments showed Turkey was threatening Athens.

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Years after the Syrian refugee crisis subsided, asylum seekers from other nations face even higher obstacles to enter Europe, which is more ambivalent about accepting them than ever.

LESBOS, Greece — A 31-year-old law school graduate, Masomeh Etemadi says she left Iran with her husband and two children to escape persecution as a Hazara minority. Now, she says, she doesn’t care where in Europe her family ends up. As long as it isn’t here.

“Here” is between two olive trees on a hillside near what, until last week, was Europe’s largest refugee camp, Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos. The camp, whose cramped and squalid conditions had made it a byword for the desperation of migrants trying to reach Europe, was set alight by an angry group of its inhabitants protesting coronavirus restrictions. Some 12,600 people were left homeless.

“Europe says, ‘We want to help refugees.’ Greece says, ‘We don’t want you here,’ and I understand that — there aren’t even enough jobs for the locals,” Ms. Etemadi said as she changed a diaper in the shade of a tree. “But if Europe really wants to help us, why don’t they come here and help us?”

The answer to her question — one that continues to haunt Europe — amounts to a kind of migrant fatigue that has yet to subside even years after the continent’s migration crisis has.

Next week, the European Union will try once again to fix its broken asylum system by forging a new compromise among its member states, a process that will force it to confront its inadequate response. Few issues are more heated, and most leaders wish it would simply go away.

“The fire at Moria has shifted public attention to the dire conditions of Greece’s refugee camps,’’ said Camino Mortera-Martinez, a senior analyst with the Center for European Reform, a think tank, noting that the problem is not new.

“Greece has been struggling with thousands of stranded asylum seekers since Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis,” she added. “The E.U.’s much-awaited proposal to fix its migration problems will do very little to prevent tragedies like Moria’s in the future, unless the politics in the continent change.”

Five years ago, the war in Syria propelled nearly a million refugees to Greek shores. The number of asylum seekers now landing is relatively minuscule by comparison — and most are no longer Syrians.

They are often people like Ms. Etemadi whose troubles are less immediate, more intimate than the cataclysms of war, and certainly less pressing to Europe.

With the movement of Syrians lessening in recent years, the appetite to help resettle people escaping farther-flung places or complicated lives, conflicts and poverty has diminished among Europeans, and the sense of urgency has lessened.

In 2015, images of desperate refugees trying to make the Aegean crossing to Greece gained global attention and eventually prodded Germany to accept nearly one million people. Chancellor Angela Merkel hoped others would follower her lead.

But few northern and eastern European countries opened their doors the way Germany did, leaving the problem mostly in the lap of countries at the European Union’s southern borders — Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain — where frustrations have deepened.

Today, the Greek government has secretly pushed back migrants, and the European Union is struggling to figure out what to do with Moria’s 12,600 homeless — a number that would have arrived in Greece over just three days at the height of the 2015 crisis.

The Greek authorities have put together a new tent camp, but human rights organizations, inhabitants of Lesbos and the migrants themselves have all demanded that the asylum seekers be moved off the island and into new homes across Europe.

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