Our daily flight around the world

🇪🇸🍅 Spain’s annual “Tomatina” food fight was held yesterday. The festival was initially inspired by a 1945 food fight between local children in the eastern town of Buñol, a prolific tomato-producing region. Workers on trucks tipped ~120 tons of overripe tomatoes into the town’s main street for some 15,000 participants to throw at each other, in an event that’s widely considered the largest food fight in the world.

🇬🇷🔥 An ongoing wildfire in northern Greece is now Europe’s largest recorded blaze this century. Over the past 12 days, the fire near Greece’s border with Turkey has burned more than 312 square miles – an area slightly larger than New York City – and killed at least 21 people. Hundreds of firefighters from Greece and other EU nations are currently battling the blaze, which has destroyed a large portion of a Greek national forest as well as housing and farmland.

🇪🇺 The EU’s Digital Services Act has gone live. The new law, which took effect last Friday, places a range of restrictions on 19 “very large” online platforms, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, TikTok, Pinterest, and Wikipedia. These include requirements to 1) prevent or remove posts with illegal content; 2) give users the choice to opt out of personalized algorithms; 3) share online data with authorities and researchers; and 4) eliminate the use of targeted advertising based on personal details like politics or ethnicity. Violators will be fined up to 6% of their global revenue, with repeat offenders facing a potential suspension from operating in the EU.