Epstein case, Tomorrowland festival, Iceland, genetics: the news of the night

United States: The Justice Department fires Maurene Comey, prosecutor in the Epstein case. Sources familiar with the matter announced her departure to several US media outlets on Wednesday. The reason for her dismissal was not disclosed. The daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, Maurene Comey has long been considered a potential target of the Trump administration due to the strained relationship between her father and the Republican president. According to Politico , her dismissal comes as the US government “reportedly opened an investigation” into her father, including James Comey’s role in the probe into Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mauren Comey’s dismissal also comes as Trump faces the most serious division among his loyal supporters since returning to the White House, amid suspicions that his administration is covering up elements of the Epstein case to protect wealthy and powerful figures. The president went on the offensive Wednesday, attacking Republican "idiots" who question his administration's handling of the affair.

Belgium: Tomorrowland festival's main stage destroyed by fire. The fire spread late Wednesday to this gigantic structure, as the major annual event near Antwerp prepares to welcome some 100,000 electronic music-loving festival-goers from around the world starting Friday. There were no injuries, and organizers have decided to go ahead with the event for the time being, it was stated during a press conference. "At first glance, one might think that the organizers should perhaps manage to do without" this stage "by concentrating the sets on the other stages. But that ignores the importance of this main stage for Tomorrowland and especially its fans who can imagine traveling the entire world to admire it for a few hours," Le Soir emphasizes , explaining that the structure represents "the nuclear heart of the event." The figures for the disaster are “staggering,” notes the Belgian daily, which specifies that the fire “decimated in a few minutes 892 m2 of video screens, 1,148 projectors, 230 speakers of unprecedented power, 65 fountains and two waterfalls, 2,120 unique stage elements combining technology and art,” the result of “two years” of work. The Antwerp public prosecutor’s office announced that it had referred the matter to an investigating judge for what appears to be an “unintentional” fire.

A volcano in Iceland erupted for the ninth time since 2023. Live video footage Wednesday showed lava escaping from a fissure in the ground on the Reykjanes Peninsula in the southwest of the country. Residents were urged to stay indoors due to air pollution. “Sulfur dioxide levels reached the red alert threshold in Njarovik around 7 a.m.,” the Iceland Monitor said . “Air pollution hazardous to health.” The fishing village of Grindavik, the closest to the eruption, was evacuated, as was the famous Blue Lagoon. Most of Grindavik's 4,000 residents were already evacuated in late 2023, shortly before the first volcanic eruption in the region. Since then, almost all the houses have been sold to the state, and most of the residents have left. The peninsula's volcanoes had not erupted for eight centuries until March 2021, when a period of increased seismic activity began.

United Kingdom: Eight healthy babies born after being conceived through IVF using DNA from three people. A study eagerly awaited by the scientific community, published Wednesday evening in the New England Journal of Medicine , takes stock of this unprecedented experiment: around twenty women received a “mitochondrial donation” in order to avoid passing on a rare genetic disease to their child. “The procedure involves fertilizing the mother’s egg with the father’s sperm, then transferring the genetic material from the nucleus into a healthy, fertilized donor egg from which the nucleus has been removed,” explains the Guardian . The United Kingdom is a pioneer in the field of mitochondrial donation. It has been authorized there since 2015, which made possible the experiment whose results have just been published. They are, in the opinion of several scientists, very encouraging.