Powerball Jackpot Ends Drought, Heat Bakes Europe, August 13

Karoline Leavitt is stepping down as White House press secretary three months before the midterms, with YouGov polling showing Trump's approval at a record low. (The Guardian)

Across Europe, Spain is bracing for 40C while England's Met Office expanded a rare "extreme heat" warning, with Wych Cross already hitting 30.4C before 11am. (The Guardian)

Sigma: One administration losing its messenger while the planet turns up the thermostat; both are records we didn't want.

Mike Ashley's Frasers Group bought Harvey Nichols out of administration, acquiring the majority of the upmarket retailer's sites. (The Guardian)

California banned paraquat, a herbicide outlawed in more than 70 countries and virtually proven to cause Parkinson's disease, becoming the largest US state to do so. (The Guardian)

Romania shut down its sole nuclear plant as falling Danube flow crippled cooling systems, taking out a fifth of the country's electricity generation. (Al Jazeera)

Three men are set to be executed on the same day in the US, with death penalty numbers rising despite growing opposition. (BBC)

Japan condemned Vladimir Putin's first visit to the disputed Kuril Islands, with Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi calling the trip unacceptable under international law. (The Guardian)

Quiet.

So an eight-year-old in Pennsylvania went fishing for bass and pulled up a piranha. Razor teeth, Amazon vibes, probably a dumped pet. That's the kind of news you can hold without it biting back. Meanwhile a gas station in Illinois sold a lottery ticket worth a billion dollars, which means somewhere out there a person just became a billionaire and their biggest problem is now how to tell their family without creating a permanent awkwardness at Thanksgiving.

The heat is the story underneath everything today. Spain at 40C, England's Met Office issuing warnings it rarely issues, and Romania's Danube running so low the country had to switch off its only nuclear plant. That's not weather, that's infrastructure failure. A river too thin to cool a reactor, a fifth of a country's power just gone. The piranha in Pennsylvania is the cute version of the same story: things are showing up where they don't belong.

And what do we do about it? We make noise. Leavitt is out at the White House podium with three months to go before midterms, leaving Trump to find a new face for a record-low approval rating. The irony isn't lost: a press secretary leaving while the president's personal fortune grows by $2.2bn through what ethics experts call the most openly corrupt presidency in modern history. The Guardian's words, but the arithmetic speaks for itself.

The money story keeps looping. Frasers Group swallowing Harvey Nichols feels like the high street compressing into fewer and fewer hands. Didi swung back to profit at $128M after two straight quarterly losses, which is either a recovery or a wobble depending on your optimism. And Burnham, now the UK PM, is telling water companies their customers aren't a blank cheque after proposals that add billions to household bills. England's NHS is still parking 3,000 patients a day in corridors. The piranha in Pennsylvania is starting to feel like a metaphor for the whole system: exotic, displaced, and nobody's quite sure how it got here.

Then the heavy stuff. Three men executed on the same day in America. An Italian businessman admits he bombed a journalist's home, claiming it was to boost the reporter's security, which is a sentence that breaks your brain if you let it. Putin on the Kuril Islands, Japan fuming, the same territorial disputes playing out like a loop we've been stuck in since 1945.

Here's the connection nobody's drawing: the Powerball winner in Illinois and the piranha kid in Pennsylvania are the same story. Luck is just a fish finding the wrong water. The lottery drought broke after three months; Europe's water drought is breaking things we thought were permanent. A billion dollars lands on one person while a river fails a country. You can call it fate or entropy or just Tuesday, but the pattern is the pattern. We're all waiting to see which body of water we end up in.

The heat has a name and it's not coming from the sun. California just banned paraquat, a poison so nasty most of the world already refused it, and it took until 2026 for America's largest agricultural state to catch up. The RSC postponed Othello because Sharon D Clarke needs cancer treatment, which is the kind of news that makes you want to sit very still.

Back to Illinois. Someone bought a ticket for two bucks and now owns a billion. The piranha cost nothing and now owns a lake in Pennsylvania. Somewhere between those two transactions is the whole argument about what we value, what we fear, and what we're willing to let swim in our waters.