World Notes EUROPE

At last, a few brief showers fell in Britain, France and Spain. Very brief. The spotty precipitation last week was not enough to reverse the effects of the worst drought to stifle the Continent in decades. Intense heat over the past month has only aggravated the drastic water shortages afflicting countries from England to Turkey. While much of northern Europe is largely unaffected, in Spain and Italy, parched grasslands have become playgrounds for arsonists. On the first weekend in August, more than 3,100 acres of woodland near Livorno on the Tuscan coast went up in smoke. Agriculture and tourism / have also been burned. In the olive-growing Puglia region of Italy, farmers face losses of up to $1 billion. Water taps in the hotels of Cagliari, Sardinia, run dry 15 hours a day. Britain and France have imposed stiff restrictions on water use -- and heavy fines on wastrels.

"You have to go back to the '40s to find a comparable situation," says Emmanuel Choisnel at France's national weather institute. "But even then, the needs weren't the same. The demand for water has increased enormously. This is serious."