• Around 10,000 evacuated in Delhi, says local media.
• More thunderstorms expected on Wednesday.
• 130 people killed in August alone in north India.

Flooding across northern India killed at least five people on Wednesday, officials said, with more thunderstorms expected and local media reporting that 10,000 people have been evacuated from the river banks in capital Delhi.

The monsoon season in India has been particularly intense this year, killing at least 130 people in August alone in north India, wiping out villages and destroying infrastructure.

The latest round of flooding has hit northern Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab, where the Chenab and Tawi rivers have risen above the danger mark at several spots.

The swollen rivers have triggered landslides and damaged many roads, disconnecting parts of the mountainous regions of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) and Himachal from the rest of India.

At least five people were killed on Wednesday after landslides battered Rajouri and Mandi districts in IIOJK and Himachal Pradesh respectively, officials said.

The India Meteorological Department warned of heavy to very heavy rain in the region on Wednesday, with more downpours expected in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.

The Central Water Commission said the swollen Yamuna had breached its danger mark on Tuesday in Delhi.

Local media reported that nearly 10,000 people had been evacuated to relief camps set up by the government along the main highways as a precautionary measure for those living in low-lying areas.

Residents living along the Yamuna in Delhi were evacuated in 2023 as well after floodwaters entered their homes and the river hit its highest level in 45 years.

Many tourist spots in Himachal Pradesh have been hit by landslides in recent weeks, as raging rivers damaged infrastructure.

Educational institutions were ordered shut, authorities said, asking people to remain indoors due to flood warnings.

In neighbouring Punjab, the government said 30 people have been killed and nearly 20,000 evacuated since August 1.

Water gushing through the plains in India’s breadbasket Punjab state has destroyed 150,000 hectares of crops, the government said on Tuesday.

Continuous rain prompted authorities to release water from dams, which has caused flooding in plains in India and Pakistan in recent days.

On the other side of the border, Pakistani authorities issued an alert for more floods in the eastern heartland province of Punjab on Wednesday, after India warned it would release water downstream from its dams, officials said.

New Delhi has previously given four such warnings to Islamabad, the officials said.

The worst floods in four decades have killed at least 43 people in Punjab, with more than 3.3 million affected since August 26, the provincial disaster management authority said.

The death toll across the country since the start of the monsoon season in late June stands at 881, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump is set to imminently ask the conservative-majority Supreme Court to validate his broad emergency tariffs after two setbacks at lower courts, but will face tough legal questions as his administration presses ahead with backup plans.

Legal and trade experts said that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices may slightly improve Trump’s odds of keeping in place his “reciprocal” and fentanyl-related tariffs after a federal appeals court ruled 7-4 last week that they are illegal.

Trump said on Tuesday that his administration would seek as early as Wednesday an expedited ruling by the Supreme Court “because we need an early decision.” He warned of “devastation” if the duties he imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) are struck down.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed on Friday with a lower court in finding that IEEPA does not grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs and the 1977 statute does not mention the term among regulatory powers it allows in a national emergency.

The ruling marked a rare setback for Trump, who has sought to re-order the global economy in the US’s favor with tariffs by declaring a national emergency over decades of trade deficits.

Top administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, say they expect the Supreme Court to uphold the use of IEEPA to justify tariffs, but will turn to other legal means if needed. The tariffs will remain in place at least through October 14 to allow time for the government to file the Supreme Court appeal.

Major questions doctrines

Trump’s Department of Justice has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorise a president to “regulate” imports or block them completely.

How far that unwritten regulatory authority goes is the biggest challenge for Trump’s appeal, and two losses have led some legal scholars to predict that the Court of International Trade’s original ruling against the tariffs will ultimately be upheld.

“I have a really hard time believing that the Supreme Court is going to read IEEPA in such a broad way that the President can write and rewrite the tariff code in any way he wishes, on any particular day for any particular reason,” said John Veroneau, a former Republican-appointed deputy US Trade Representative and partner at Covington and Burling.

Veroneau said that the case will test the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine”, which holds that if Congress wants to give an executive agency the power to make decisions of “vast economic and political significance,” it must do so explicitly.

The doctrine was used against former President Joe Biden in 2023 when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that he overstepped his authority by moving to cancel up to $400 billion in student loans — an order that the court said had a “staggering” scope of impact.

A key question is whether the court will apply the same standard to Trump’s tariffs. Comparing these to the impact of the student loan cancellations, the appeals court said in its decision that “the overall economic impact of the tariffs imposed under the government’s reading of IEEPA is even larger still.”

Split decision

Balancing this will be the Supreme Court’s traditional deference to the president on matters of foreign affairs and national emergencies, an issue where the 6-3 conservative majority may come into play. Six of the seven appeals court judges voting against the IEEPA tariffs were appointed by Democratic presidents, but there were crossover votes among both parties’ appointees.

“Given the Federal Circuit’s majority opinion and the dissent were quite robust, the Supreme Court will likely address the meat of whether IEEPA allows the administration to impose tariffs,” said Ryan Majerus, a former senior Commerce Department official and a partner with King and Spalding.

“That decision, either way, will have significant implications for where the administration’s trade policy goes next,” Majerus said.

The Trump administration has already been expanding tariff investigations under other legal authorities, including the national security-focused Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 under which a probe into furniture imports has been launched.

Bessent told Reuters that another option could be a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which allows the president to impose tariffs of up to 50% on imports from countries that are found to discriminate against US commerce. The statute, Section 338, has been largely dormant for decades but would allow for quick imposition of tariffs.

If the IEEPA tariffs ultimately are struck down, trade lawyers said that a major headache for the Trump administration will be refunds of paid duties. Majerus said importers can lodge protests at the Customs and Border Protection agency to obtain refunds, but these efforts may end up in litigation.

CBP reported that as of August 25, collections of Trump’s tariffs imposed under IEEPA totaled $65.8 billion.

A source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking said that lawyers sifted through the ruling over the Labor Day holiday weekend to gauge possible outcomes and expected a quick appeal to the Supreme Court, with a final decision likely in early 2026.

A badly burned tortoise that survived a Greek wildfire wriggles in an Athens animal clinic despite lots of painkillers, one of the latest victims of climate change that is playing havoc with the country’s wildlife.

Most of the scorched scales on its back had to be removed with forceps.

“It was really depressed and had its mouth open trying to breathe because of the smoke” when volunteers brought it in, said vet Grigorios Markakis.

Even though “it’s much better” now, the prognosis is not good, he told AFP. “If the whole shell is burned, imagine what happened inside… All the internal organs will be dysfunctional.”

Markakis, 28, cares for orphaned, injured or sick creatures, from hedgehogs to snakes to storks, from a first aid station of the Greek wildlife protection group Anima.

The NGO has seen a surge in animal admissions — largely because of climate change, which scientists say is driving longer, more intense and more frequent heatwaves worldwide, fuelling wildfires and generating other dangers for wildlife.

Greece suffered several major forest fires this summer amid high temperatures, especially around Athens and in the western Peloponnese.

The government said around 45,000 hectares (111,200 acres) have burned this year.

“These fires are now harder to suppress and often wipe out vast areas of critical habitat, killing animals directly and displacing many more,” said Nikos Georgiadis, from the World Wildlife Fund Greece.

“Prolonged droughts, rising temperatures, and forest dieback all degrade habitats, reduce food and water availability, and make survival more difficult for many species,” he told AFP.

Thirsty vultures

Anima staffer Anna Manta said “more and more animals” are being brought to them because of the prolonged heat.

“Most get exhausted or they are forced to leave the nests really, really early,” she told AFP. Birds “just jump off the nests… because they get roasted alive”, she told AFP.

In July, when Greece suffered a searing heatwave with temperatures above 40C, Anima admitted 1,586 animals. In June it was 2,125 — nearly 300 more than during the same period last year.

“Last year we thought that it was the worst year we had ever seen… And then we had June,” Manta said.

The centre has received many young emaciated and exhausted vultures.

“Down in Crete, they can’t find water. Most of them go to the sea to drink water. They get poisoned because their body cannot process salt,” said Manta.

The team treats them with medicine and fluids for a few days, before taking them to outdoor cages to socialise. They are released back into the wild after six months.

One such juvenile griffon vulture had just received IV fluids into a vein. Afterwards an employee carried it out — with a pained look on her face because lice from the weak bird were crawling onto her.

“Climate change affects also the microorganisms, the parasites, the diseases, by affecting their transmission,” said Markakis.

“The transmission is probably easier because these microorganisms can live for longer periods,” he said.

‘It was magic’

Perched on a computer monitor was a long-eared owl. When Anima president Maria Ganoti began typing, the bird turned and looked down at the keyboard with its big orange eyes.

Later, it turned again to stare when people brought in a shoebox with a quail attacked by cats, followed by a fox hit by a car — an increasing phenomenon.

Georgiadis said the root cause of such incidents was habitat degradation and “the expansion of urban areas close to or into forests, (which) pushes foxes and other animals to venture into cities”.

Before Markakis took the injured fox to the operating table, he told how one of his “best life moments” was treating and releasing a cub that had severe head injuries back into the wild.

“I just gave it a last look, I opened the door (of its cage) and it immediately disappeared — without even a thank you!” he laughed. “But it was magic.”