Readers discuss the values of bankers, Pizza Hut closures and the importance of Net Zero

Fruits can have a surprising healthy impact on the lungs (Picture: Getty Images)

We’ve all heard that an apple a day keeps the doctor away — well it turns out that might actually be true.

That’s because new research suggests eating …

It is feared that one storm could destroy several of the houses on the road.

Summer 2025 was the hottest on record.

Metro’s foreign correspondent Gergana Krasteva reports from Zimbabwe

The last time I see Madeline Mgwabi, she is peering through the gates of her crumbling home in western Zimbabwe.

The grandmother-of-three is clutching a single orange that our driver had slipped to her – leftover from the hotel breakfast.

The fruit will have to be split four ways – between her and her grandsons – one of them still a toddler – all of whom she is raising on her own in this godforsaken area in the southern part of Matabeleland North province.

Beside her, on a wooden bench, is her eldest grandson, still dressed in his purple and blue school uniform, steadily scooping gooey porridge from a plastic container.

To put food on the table, Madeline fetches firewood and does odd jobs for neighbours in the village of Libeni, in Umguza District, but it is not enough.

Worst drought in century devastates Zimbabwe

Before droughts robbed the region of water, the grandmother used to farm maize and other Zimbabwean staple crops in her now barren garden.

Gesturing at the dried-up shrubs, she tells Metro: ‘I have lived here for 25 years and each year, the droughts hit us worse and worse.

‘Because of the climate, we often do not harvest anything.’

Her face is hollowed by the years of loss, and her palms are calloused by the decade of grinding in Zimbabwe’s artisanal mines.

What Madeline fears is that her grandsons will eventually have to abandon education in favour of mining to earn a living.

The family’s financial struggle resembles the one of millions of people who have been burdened by the decades of macroeconomic instability, political isolation and now, climate change in Zimbabwe.

Driving through Matabeleland North – where agriculture used to be one of the key economic sectors – Metro witnesses the scars of the climate warming cycle, El Niño, firsthand.

Here, the earth appears to have forgotten what rain feels like, despite the determination of Zimbabweans to revive what has been lost.

Alongside the road, cattle search for anything to eat – grass, shrubs, any bit of greenery left in a land that has surrendered.

The SUV rumbles past what the driver tells me was, until 2023, the mighty Shangani River that used to nourish the region; now, it is nothing more than a cracked bed of mud and rocks.

Last year, the Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa declared a national disaster to tackle the prolonged drought crisis.

Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia did so too. Other African nations were also severely affected.

As most households depend on agriculture for food, seven million people in Zimbabwe faced big shortages during the 2024-2025 season, despite improved crops this year.

Boys drop out of school to work in mines

Children have been the most impacted by the droughts – with some opting to drop out of school because their parents cannot provide them with food.

A fifth of all Zimbabwean children aged less than five suffer from chronic malnutrition, with merely 10% of babies aged six to 23 months receiving an adequate minimum diet, according to recent figures.

Hunger is only one part of a vicious cycle that children are trapped in. With households collapsing under the weight of poverty, boys as young as nine leave school to risk their lives in unregulated mines – and girls are married off to provide their parents a brief financial relief.

Girls forced into early marriages for dowry

In Zimbabwe, one girl out of three is already married before turning 18, and more than one out of five has given birth.

Scores of underage brides fall victim to domestic violence and face grave health risks, from early childbearing to HIV.

Although underage marriage is illegal in Zimbabwe and local organisations have been fighting against it, families driven by poverty resort to it.

Lungisani Nyathi knows all too well the dangers his four children face; yet with no steady work and no wages coming in, he feels powerless to shield them.

Gesturing at a makeshift shack, clumsily constructed out of wood and blue tarpaulin, that is his new home, he tells Metro that his wife gave birth just 10 months ago to their baby girl.

‘As a father, I am supposed to provide for my children,’ he shares his fears.

‘If I fail to provide for my daughter when she grows up, I worry that she will have to marry someone very young.

‘It is common for girls to be tied into early marriages due to the financial situation of their families.

‘One day, our baby girl will have to face the same situation. Young girls are so desperate, they go to bars themselves to search for money.’

Lungisani, who volunteers as a security guard for a borehole that supplies water in Village 5, in Bubi District, wishes to relocate his wife and children to another area so that his boys are not tempted to work in the gold mines nearby.

Wherever schools are located near mining fields, boys are sometimes lured into the pit, under the promise of some money.

After working in a gold mine for six months last year, Lungisani knows all too well that this is not the life for a child.

Describing the conditions as ‘very harsh, because workers are not given any protective clothing,’ he adds: ‘Even the dust was choking us.’

Children in mines is a ‘ticking time bomb’

Khumalo Fanta, deputy headteacher at the Amazwimabili Primary School, shares similar fears for her pupils and says that every year, a few children drop out to work in the mines or to be married off.

She tells Metro that boys, not even in their teens, who work as miners, are swiftly swept into a world of alcohol abuse, without parental supervision.

With what little money they make, they often entice young girls with false promises of a better life – pulling them both into the same cycle of poverty they were trying to escape, before their lives have even started.

Khumalo says: ‘A lot of boys would leave school and go work at the mines. It exposes them to elicit behaviour… There is always alcohol near the mines because it sells fast to adolescents.

‘There is no control as parents are simply grateful that money is coming home, but it is dangerous.

‘It is a ticking time bomb. When they come back, they flash their money… and the girls are attracted.

‘Then they are lost in their behaviour because those boys just get drunk, shouting, they do all sorts of things.’

If children go to school at all, the absence of support systems means that they walk several miles on empty stomachs every morning.

Three million children fed every day

Mary’s Meals, a Scottish-based charity, is working to break that cycle by providing daily school meals for children in early education.

The concept is simple. Mary’s Meals provides food for school, but it is the parents – often the mothers of the pupils – who prepare it and serve it up in between classes.

The promise of a warm bowl of porridge a day has become a lifeline, and sometimes the only meal a child will be guaranteed.

Madeline’s eldest grandson, for example, is one of the pupils part of the programme.

She says: ‘There is nothing more important for my grandsons than going to school and having an education. So having porridge at school is so helpful as it reduces the workload for me.’

Dromoland Primary, the Bubi District of Matabeleland North, is one of the schools with which Mary’s Meals has been working with.

Simeleni Mguni, the headmaster since 2020, told Metro that at the end of last year, there were 255 pupils – but this year there are 279 because of the feeding programme.

‘We enroll new learners every week,’ she says beaming with pride, her smile stretching across her round face.

Before the programme was introduced at the beginning of the school term in 2022, four boys and four girls dropped out because their parents could not feed them.

Simeleni says, regretfully: ‘I know some of the left because they needed to find jobs. Almost all the boys – aged between 12 and 14 – went to search for work in the illegal mines.

‘For awhile, they moved from one gold mine to another, in the nearby area. It is not easy work. If they would find any gold they have to sell it for really meagre amounts of money [as it is not from a registered pit].

‘Two years later, they are now back in school because of Mary’s Meals, and passed their exams recently.’

The four girls – aged between 13 and 14 – are also back in the classroom.

Simeleni said they had left because they did not have period products and were ’embarrassed’ to come to school.

By easing hunger, Mary’s Meals reduces the number of children who might otherwise drop out to work or marry, or just stay at home.

Mary’s Meals has been operating in Zimbabwe since 2018, with the help of a grassroots-based NGO, ORAP.

Working in some of the poorest countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, the charity has today announced the grim milestone that it is feeding three million children every day.

Metro travelled to Zimbabwe with the help of Mary’s Meals, a Scottish-based charity feeding children in the country.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

While many traditional wine regions are becoming too hot, rainy Wales is not yet in danger of this.

A new paper raises concerns about how healthy the Atlantic Ocean’s main current is.

‘We know that this tree is a survivor. Is there something special about the genes of this tree?’

An American journalist has opened up about how he survived after falling down a mountain in Norway.

Families became trapped in waist-high seawater after fleeing a wall of flames which hit the Greek coastline.

One person has died, and at least 13 others were injured, including 11 firefighters.

One of the most low-lying countries faces an uncertain future.

Florida is battling record – and deadly – temperatures.

More than a dozen people dead; tens of thousands of others evacuated;and thousands of hectares of land burning – this is the ‘titanic battle’ the Balkans is facing.

Wildfires are currently raging in Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria amid a 44°C heatwave, ongoing droughts and strong winds.

A map from Nasa shows how flames have spread across the region in the last week despite efforts to contain them.

What has become clear is that climate change is accelerating the disaster in a region already on the brink.

Turkey

Wildfires that have engulfed Turkey for weeks are now threatening Bursa, its fourth-largest city, early on Sunday.

More than 3,500 people have been forced to flee their homes in villages to the northeast as more than 1,900 firefighters battled the flames.

The highway linking the city to the capital, Ankara, was shut as surrounding forests burned.

Four people have been killed so far. The death toll rose last night after two firefighters, who were pulled from a water tanker that rolled while heading to a forest inferno, died in hospital. Another firefighter died from a heart attack while on the line of duty.

Their deaths raised Turkey’s wildfire fatalities to 17 since June, including 10 rescue volunteers and forestry workers killed on Wednesday.

Orhan Saribal, an opposition parliamentarian for Bursa, described the site as ‘an apocalypse’.

He added on X: ‘While carrying water to the forest fire between Gürsu and Kestel districts, the water tanker that rolled into a ravine claimed the lives of our three worker brothers.

‘As our lungs burned, this tragedy added a heartache to our pain. I wish mercy for our brothers and condolences to their families, loved ones, and our Bursa.’

Footage revealed an ashen landscape where farms and pine forests had earlier stood.

The rise in wildfires comes as Turkey recorded its highest ever temperature of 50.5°C in the southeastern Sirnak province on Friday.

Greece

In neighbouring Greece, 50 fires scorched the suburbs of Athens, forcing the government to evacuate residents over the weekend.

Firefighters were working on five major fronts late Sunday in the area of Peloponnese, west of the capital, as well as on the islands of Evia, Kythera and Crete.

Kythera, a tourist island with 3,600 residents, continued to face ‘worrying’ conditions.

Deputy mayor Giorgos Komninos told the state-run ERT News channel that half of Kythera had been charred.

He said: ‘Houses, beehives, olive trees have been burnt.’

ERT reported that a fire was still burning on the island late Sunday, but in smaller fronts and the situation was improving.

Prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement released on Sunday morning: ‘The state mechanism was called to engage in a titanic battle, simultaneously responding to dozens of wildfires across the country.

‘Today, the situation appears improved, but the fight continues with all available resources.’

Bulgaria

Firefighters battled wildfires at nearly 100 locations across the country on Sunday, with emergency services describing the situation as ‘critical’.

Theodora Vasileva, mayor of one of the devastated villages, Kozarevo, in the southeastern province of Yambol, said this is the first time she had witnessed a disaster of such magnitude.

She added: ‘The rapid notification system helped us a lot – people started calling and gathered in minutes. This is the first time I am seeing this hell; the sunflower crops were all in flames.

‘The elderly, whose homes are everything for them, wept. They were so worried, but everything is under control for now, their houses are preserved.’

Emergency volunteer Zvezdelin Vlaykov stressed that in all his years of firefighting, he has never seen anything like it.

He added: ‘It’s a merciless tragedy.’

This comes as two men were charged with terrorism offences after allegedly deliberately setting fires in the cities of Veliko Turnovo and Sliven.

The Ministry of Interior confirmed that the charges have been escalated from simple arson to crimes under Chapter One of the Criminal Code.

Bulgaria is the most affected country by fires for 2024-2025 in the EU, with more that 38,000 square miles affected.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

‘Yet another way to nickel and dime us.’

Unassuming, icicle-like tubes could help answer mysteries about Earth’s climate.

They are the world’s oldest ice cores, which have just landed in the UK after being drilled from the depths of Antarctica.

While most of Britain is reeling from weeks of back-to-back heatwaves, scientists in Cambridge find out what the rare blocks of ice can reveal about climate change and our home planet.

But to get hold of the ice, they first had to drill for 1.7 miles down the ice sheet at the South Pole.

The giant stick of ice was then cut into more manageable chunks and transported to Europe.

Scientists hope the pieces will reveal why the planet’s climate cycle shifted more than a million years ago, helping to predict Earth’s future response to rising greenhouse gas.

Dr Liz Thomas, from the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, told Reuters: ‘We really are exploring a completely unknown time in our history.

‘We are hoping to unlock all these amazing secrets.’

The new core ice, which was drilled near the Concordia research station in the ‘White Continent,’ beats the previous 800,000-year-old ice, which was drilled in the early 2000s.

Until now, scientists have relied on marine sediments to study the climate cycles. over millions of years.

But ice has a special feature invisible to the naked eye – entrapped bubbles showing the atmospheric conditions, amount of greenhouse gas in the air and chemical evidence of temperatures at the time when they were released.

And to not make the job too easy for the scientists, Antarctica is the only place on Earth where such a long record of the atmosphere is found.

Summer temperatures at the French-Italian Concordia station range from -30°C to -50°C, and can reach a brain-numbing -80°C in winter.

Dr Thomas continued: ‘Our data will yield the first continuous reconstructions of key environmental indicators—including atmospheric temperatures, wind patterns, sea ice extent, and marine productivity—spanning the past 1.5 million years.

‘This unprecedented ice core dataset will provide vital insights into the link between atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate during a previously uncharted period in Earth’s history, offering valuable context for predicting future climate change.’

Other Antarctica mysteries

The world’s largest ice sheet remains shrouded in mystery and intrigue as relatively little is still known about Antarctica.

Geologists believe the continent was once covered in rivers and forests.

Satellite data and radars revealed ridges and valleys, suggesting the icy no man’s land looked very different 34 million years ago.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have their eyes set on Antarctica after Google Map sleuths believe they have found a secret door buried in the mountainside.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Meteorologist Jim Dale warned of the rapid impact of climate change.

There are a few weeks when I’d rather be anywhere but here.

For every social media post filled with thoughts and prayers, the most vulnerable lives will continue to be lost, and our world will carry on burning. 

This is a warning to those who are not taking the impending danger seriously. 

Meteorologist Jim Dale warned of the rapid impact of climate change.

A searing heatwave sweeping Europe has pushed temperatures above 40°C in parts of Italy and Spain.

Some 2,600 miles west of Hawaii and more than 3,000 miles from mainland Australia, the island nation of Tuvalu faces an uncertain future.

This isn’t just about numbers on a page. It’s about peace of mind. 

It might even happen this year.