On August 18, 2025, as part of the 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival, Lebanese artist Adam delivered a mesmerizing performance, captivating a packed audience with a selection of his finest songs, including Kheles Edamaa, Hatha Ana, Kifak Ent, and more.

On August 17, 2025, the Carthage International Festival paid a heartfelt tribute to Fadhel Jaziri, an iconic figure in Tunisian cinema and theater, who recently passed away.

On August 16, 2025, the 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival came alive with the enchanting voice of Egyptian star May Farouk during a sold-out concert dedicated to the legendary Oum Kalthoum.

On the evening of August 13, 2025, as part of the National Women’s Day celebration, Tunisian artist Sofia Sadok made a grand return to the Carthage stage during the 59th edition of the International Carthage Festival. After a significant absence since 2017, she captivated her Tunisian audience with a performance that reaffirmed her status as an icon of Tunisian music.

For one memorable evening on August 11th, the Carthage International Festival offered its audience a veritable world tour, brilliantly celebrating music, arts, and intercultural dialogue. For the "World Folkloric Ballets" show, ten troupes from the four corners of the globe took to the ancient stage, creating a vibrant fresco of colors, rhythms, and emotions.

On August 9, 2025, Lebanese star Najwa Karam made a triumphant return to the iconic Carthage stage after a long absence. Eagerly awaited by a loyal and passionate audience, her concert, announced as sold out just days after tickets went on sale, lived up to every expectation.

On the evening of August 8, 2025, the ancient amphitheater of Carthage pulsed with the experimental work "Imagine: Your Soul Listens," created by Tunisian artist Karim Thlibi, as part of the 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival.

During the 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival on August 5, 2025, Palestinian artist Saint Levant, whose real name is Marwan Abdelhamid, captivated the Tunisian audience with a vibrant performance driven by his commitment to the Palestinian cause and his unique musical style. A symbol of resistance and an ambassador for the aspirations of a passionate youth, he transformed the Carthage stage into a universal platform for expression.

On August 3, 2025, the 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival came alive with an extraordinary evening featuring the renowned French actress and singer Chantal Goya.

The 59th edition of the Carthage International Festival opened on July 19, 2025, with the performance Men Qaa el Khabia led by maestro Mohamed Garfi, in the presence of the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Amina Srarfi.

Sky World News/ The last summer Olympics, in Tokyo, were the hottest on record.

The Paris games, kicking off next week, could be hotter. With wide boulevards, busy roads and zinc-topped roofs, Paris is a heat island. Daytime high temperatures have routinely topped 30°C in July and August in recent years. Add high humidity and competitions scheduled around midday, and it becomes a potentially dangerous environment for competitors.

The heat risk experienced by athletes is different to that for those of us watching from the sidelines. Exercise produces considerable warmth in the body as a by-product of movement. That heat is dissipated through the skin, which becomes red and flushed. This happens both via radiative losses and, vitally, via sweat, which evaporates to cool us. In summer, the temperature gradient with our surroundings narrows, so radiative cooling declines or stops. If rising temperature, high humidity and a lack of a breeze make it impossible for the body to sweat properly, it can spell big trouble.

This state occurs at a “feels-like” temperature in the mid-30s and above. In these conditions, heat can’t escape the body and continues to build. Initially, breathlessness, fatigue, some cramping, maybe some nausea and light-headedness occur. Dehydration will make any of these symptoms worse.

If cooling interventions aren’t provided, and body temperature doesn’t drop, catastrophic outcomes like fatal heat stroke can follow with just 30 minutes of additional exposure. Several Olympic events last long enough for that to happen.

Earth Environment Protecting forests on the front line of the climate-change battle.

Sky World News/Protecting forests on the front line of the climate-change battle Forests remove about a third of the greenhouse-gas emissions caused by human activities. Credit: Steven Kamenar via Unsplash Forests help counter global warming, but they are also threatened by it. Many tree species struggled this past summer as much of Europe was hit by heat waves and a severe drought—thought to be the worst in 500 years. Even olive trees, known for their ability to resist dry conditions, have suffered.

Spain is the world's leading producer of olive-oil but many Spanish farmers expect their olive-oil harvests this year to decline by as much as 50%. In this context, Horizon researchers are racing to understand more about how trees respond to drought as part of the fight against climate change. Carbon sinks Existing forests already remove about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities. A worldwide afforestation programme could do the same for almost a third of the discharges that remain in the atmosphere. 'If you look at the last 10 years or so, there have been a number of events where severe drought has caused large-scale death of trees in forests.' said Dr. Jaideep Joshi, of the Plant-FATE project, which is studying plant traits to protect forests from climate change. Planting billions of trees is a relatively inexpensive way to tackle the climate crisis, according to a study about the potential for global forest cover to mitigate climate change. But as drought spreads, forests worldwide are at risk.

In Europe, 500 000 hectares of forest were wiped out as a result of drought between 1987 and 2016. Joshi led the Horizon-funded Plant-FATE project, which broke new ground when it comes to predicting the impact of drought on trees of all kinds. Tree resilience A major limitation of current models is that they rarely consider trees' ability to adapt to dry conditions and how resilience may differ between species. That leads to inconsistencies when projecting how forests will respond to future climate scenarios. 'That is where the largest uncertainty currently lies,' said Dr. Joshi. 'You have this whole ecosystem of mixed species we have tried to bring this all together in a simple but comprehensive modelling framework.' A model acts as a tool for simulating outcomes and he believes his team's model will be particularly useful when it comes to planning tree-planting programmes.

That's because it can signal the carbon capture and storage potential of different species over the next 50-100 years, when climate conditions will be different to what they are today. 'It could help make the right choices of which species to plant or where to plant them,' said Dr. Joshi. 'It's our model's most promising conservation application.' In their model, the Plant-FATE researchers incorporated trees' ability to adjust to changing climate and looked at a range of timescales. In shorter timeframes of weeks to months, for example, trees exposed to drought may shed their leaves to conserve water (because water evaporates through pores on the surface of leaves) in what's known as a 'false autumn'. New wood But over longer timescales, trees can grow new wood with different properties better suited to dry conditions.

Dr. Joshi and his team also took scale into account. For example, some responses occur in specific parts of a tree as roots and leaves, while others take place at the level of an entire species. Protecting forests on the front line of the climate-change battle Tree mortality in a Western USA conifer forest. Credit: Laura Fernández de Uña, 2020 To test their full model, Dr. Joshi and his colleagues used data from an Amazon rainforest site containing about 400 species in a 5 000 square-metre area. They found that their model's predictions closely matched what happened in real life at the site. It marks the first time that a vegetation model has performed realistically over different timescales while using very few parameters, according to Dr. Joshi, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. 'It gives you the capacity to predict forest performance for unknown conditions,' he said.

'That makes it much more useful to predict the response of global forests to future climate scenarios.' Tall trees While tall trees are often considered to be more vulnerable to dry conditions than shorter ones, much remains to be discovered about why and to what extent a tree's height affects its resistance to drought. Dr. Laura Fernández de Uña leads the Horizon-funded DISTRESS project, which is examining how a tree's ability to transport water changes with height and how that might influence drought responses. She and her colleagues stand to shake up some conventional wisdom in the field. 'We see certain differences between individual trees and also between species types,' said Dr. Fernández de Uña, a post-doctoral fellow at public research centre CREAF in Barcelona, Spain. Unsurprisingly, research confirms that it's harder for water to reach the heights of taller trees.

Even in normal conditions, gravity is a basic impediment. Air bubbles During a drought, it is harder for trees to extract water from dry soil and draw it upwards. This increases the risk of water-transporting conduits sucking in air bubbles, which can block the flow (similar to embolisms in human blood vessels). If any bubbles occur, parts of a tree can be denied water and die. Furthermore, tall trees in a forest are exposed to more heat and wind and less humidity. 'The canopy conditions themselves are drier than for a smaller tree in the understory,' said Dr. Fernández de Uña. 'All this is negative for tall trees during a drought.' Nonetheless, past research indicates that tall trees can adapt to heat and water stress or even cope better than small trees. They are able to expand their water-conducting pipes, for example, to get more flow up their long trunks.

Well rooted In addition, larger trees have more roots that reach greater depths, allowing access to water even when levels in the upper ground are low. They also tend to have thicker trunks, which allow bigger trees to store more carbohydrates and water. For Dr. Fernández de Uña, all this shows that contrary to common assumptions tall trees have a fighting chance when temperatures soar and water becomes scarce for prolonged periods. 'They are able to adapt and overcome their limitations,' she said. 'We need to be more open-minded about how they may respond to drought. If it wasn't worth it to be tall, then trees wouldn't grow tall.'