Neymar and Brazil arrive in Russia

Brazilian superstar Neymar is reportedly ready to accept a huge pay cut to facilitate a return to his boyhood club Santos and the booter is likely to complete the move soon.

Neymar is currently signed at Saudi Pro League side Al-Hilal, for whom he has played only seven games in a year and a half.

Although he still has six months left in his contract Al Hilal, the Brazilian is reportedly pushing for a return to Brazil.

Earlier this month, Al-Hilal manager Jorge Jesus had revealed that the club won't register the 32-year-old for the second half of the Saudi league, saying the Brazilian can no longer keep up with the level of the club.

"Neymar will not be registered in the team for the championship. He can participate in the Asian Champions League. The Saudi League is one of the best leagues in the world. All Al-Hilal players can play for any club in Europe. Neymar can no longer play at the level we are used to. Things have become difficult for him, unfortunately.

"He is still under contract with Al Hilal and it may be up to him to decide his future. It depends on the administration. I don't know anything about Neymar's future," Jesus told the media on January 16.

Neymar could potentially terminate his contract with Al Hilal or complete a loan move to Santos. The Brazilian could also just wait out the rest of his contract, but multiple media reports suggest that Neymar is eager to complete the move in the winter break.

Brazilian star Neymar is in discussions about leaving his Saudi club Al-Hilal but his financial demands are holding up an agreement, a club source told AFP on Wednesday.

The 32-year-old former Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain forward has had an injury-plagued stay in Saudi Arabia, playing just seven times despite a reported salary of around $104 million a year.

The source, who spoke on condition that he was not identified, said: "Neymar is discussing his departure with Al-Hilal but his high financial demands remain a major obstacle."

Neymar is under contract with the Saudi Pro League club until June.

Reports in Brazil say Santos, the club where Neymar made his name in his now fading career, are in talks for him to return to his homeland but Al-Hilal would prefer a transfer while Neymar wants a loan deal.

Neymar, the subject of what is still the biggest transfer in football history when he joined PSG from Barcelona in 2017 for a fee of 220 million euros ($230 million), joined Al-Hilal in August 2023.

He followed fellow superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema to the lucrative Saudi league.

But two months after his arrival in Riyadh, he ruptured a cruciate ligament in his left knee while playing for Brazil in a 2026 World Cup qualifier, which kept him on the sidelines for a year.

He then suffered a series of hamstring and knee injuries as he tried to return to action for Al-Hilal.

The club's coach Jorge Jesus said recently: "He can no longer play at the level we are used to. Things have become difficult for him, unfortunately."

A return to Brazil would likely be the last chance for a player who is his country's all-time leading scorer with 79 goals in 127 matches.

Neymar will miss at least two weeks' training after suffering a muscle problem in his second game back from long-term injury, his coach at Saudi club Al Hilal said.

The Brazilian superstar lasted just 26 minutes as a second-half substitute before limping off with an apparent right hamstring strain in Monday's 3-0 AFC Champions League Elite win over Esteghlal.

Neymar, 32, who moved from Paris Saint-Germain in a lucrative contract in 2023, was out for more than a year until last month following right knee surgery.

"Neymar, it's not an easy case," said Al Hilal's Portuguese coach Jorge Jesus.

"On the medical level, his knee is healed, but then he will have problems like today, muscle problems because he hasn't played for a long time.

"Now he has a muscle injury. I don't know how long he won't be able to train, two weeks at least," he added.

Al Hilal, the reigning Saudi champions, have not registered Neymar for the current Saudi Pro League season, which began last month.

But the former Barcelona player, with a reported salary of about 100 million euros ($112 million) a year, is listed to play in the AFC Champions League Elite, Asia's biggest club tournament.

"It felt like a cramp, but very strong!" he wrote on Instagram. "I'll do some tests and hope it's nothing more serious.

"It's normal for this to happen after one year, the doctors already warned me, so I have to take care and play more minutes."

Brazil is burning.

From the Amazon rainforest to the Pantanal wetlands, flames have consumed millions of hectares of forest and farmland in recent weeks.

Nearly two-thirds of Latin America's biggest country is under smoke.

While fueled by extreme drought, which the government says serves as "a demonstration of the gravity of climate change," many of the fires were set by "criminals," in the words of environment minister Marina Silva.

Here is what we know about Brazil's "fire pandemic," as Supreme Court judge Flavio Dino has described the state of affairs.

What is the extent?

According to data collected by satellites of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), a total of 188,623 fires have been identified in Brazil since the beginning of the year.

The total number for last year was 189,926.

The month of September 2024 has been the worst so far, with 61,572 fires recorded in 17 days compared to 46,498 for the whole of September 2023.

The number of blazes in the Amazon this month are already much higher than in 2019, when destruction of the world's largest tropical rain forest sparked an international outcry that placed then president Jair Bolsonaro on the back foot.

The figures for 2024 are still far from the record of 393,915 fires recorded in 2007 -- more than a third in September that year alone.

But this time, "fires are burning in several regions of the country at the same time, which makes the problem more complex to manage," said Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM).

What are the causes?

Brazil has been experiencing a prolonged drought since June 2023, according to Suely Araujo, public policy coordinator for Brazil's Climate Observatory -- a collective of non-governmental organizations.

Whatever rain did fall was "less than expected," resulting in dry conditions that can turn the slightest spark into a blaze.

"Climate change is at play, coupled with the El Nino phenomenon," said Araujo.

Alencar said most of the fires were deliberately set, most commonly by farmers clearing land.

Farmers can obtain government permission for such burning, but the practice has been temporarily banned because the fires can easily get out of control under current conditions.

However, "it is probably the law that is least respected in Brazil," Alencar told AFP.

Another culprit is the massive and influential agro-industry sector, which Alencar says has been found to deliberately set fire to public forests to clear land for farmers.

A third cause is more difficult to pinpoint: individual arsonists whose only motive is to "sow chaos," according to federal police chief Humberto Freire.

What is the outlook?

INPE researcher Karla Longo said that if the fire starters are not stopped, the blazes "will continue until it rains."

The drought that has Brazil in its grips is likely to last until October, she added.

"The rainy season is supposed to start in the second half of October... but it may be delayed due to extreme dryness and low atmospheric humidity," added Ricardo de Camargo, a professor of meteorology at the University of Sao Paulo (USP).

Leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to combat climate change and pledged to stop illegal deforestation of the Amazon by 2030, conceded on Tuesday that Brazil was "not 100 percent prepared" to deal with the latest wave of fires as he announced $94 million for the response.

"The authorities should do more, at all levels," said Araujo, who led the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, a federal agency, from 2016 to 2019.

She called for closer coordination between ministries, as well as between national and state governments.

Freire has called for tougher penalties for "environmental crimes."

Russian fans danced in the streets of Kaliningrad on the Baltic and kissed strangers in Vladivostok in the Far East after their team defied all expectations to reach the World Cup quarter-finals.

In the Black Sea resort of Sochi, thousands of fans with Russian flags draped around their shoulders watched a giant screen transfixed and cars in central Moscow honked from dusk till dawn.

A mixture of disbelief and jubilation is gripping the host nation after their team pulled off one of the biggest World Cup upsets in recent memory, sending 2010 champions Spain packing after a penalty shootout decided their last-16 tie.

"It's great. Unbelievable. We are champions," 27-year old Muscovite Anna Glazkova said after Sunday's match. We believe we will now be in the final with Brazil."

The penalty shootout turned goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev into a national hero after a backs-to-the-wall performance in which they had just over a quarter of possession.

"What is there to hide, we were hoping for penalties," Akinfeev admitted to reporters.

It is the type of honesty that is endearing this rag-tag team of journeymen to a nation unused to celebrating its football team.

Russia is at heart an ice hockey country in which the beautiful game is played -- but not necessarily very well.

The chant often filling Russian stadiums during matches is "shai-bu!" -- the word for "hockey puck" -- a teasing reminder to the footballers that their hockey counterparts know how to score.

But the roar of the 80,000-crowd packed into Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium -- the same word echoing in bars and metro stations and shouted in Komsomolsk-on-Amur 6,000 kilometres (3,800 miles) to the east -- was "Ro-ssi-ya!" over and over again.

"Hurray!" Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev tweeted from the International Space Station after watching the match streamed live on a floating laptop.

"I always knew we could do it," a shaman from Siberia told the national Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.