Why is the Pacific coast burning? After a weekend that saw half a million Oregon residents evacuated and as Donald Trump visits California, why is the West Coast of the United States reliving the nightmare of the 2018 brush fires - or worse, since a record area's been scorched and it's only the start of the dry season.

The back-to-school spike in Covid-19 cases is on, with France, Spain and the UK all fearing an exponential rise in casualties. That's before the next spike when the weather here turns cold and Europe migrates indoors. Can we even bet on a vaccine to make this nightmare go away? Or is time to discuss the simple hard truth the West seems to have rediscovered with this unexpected pandemic: there's no such thing as zero risk. How to manage that risk? What sensible measures to reduce that risk and what does learning to live with the virus actually mean?

From the United Kingdom, home of great drama and great comedy, comes the new season of Brexit. With five weeks to strike a trade deal, the suspense is already building. But critics contend there is nothing funny about the UK government's opening gambit: a bill that of its own admission would "break international law".

For years, Belarus had been branded as Europe's last dictatorship. Now, is it ripe for revolution? Despite a crackdown and claims by longtime strongman Alexander Lukashenko that he won re-election with 80 percent of the vote, protesters in major cities keep coming out. With a neophyte leadership that's now either in exile or in jail, can the opposition sustain the momentum?

How will Covid-19 change India? Amid the steady rise in confirmed cases comes a true test of resilience. We ask about the fight against the unforeseen pandemic both in cities and those all-important rural areas where two thirds of Indians live. It's about lives and livelihoods: what's changed since last March's sudden lockdown, which left day labourers scrambling and an already slowing economy reeling?

No Covid vaccine is going to save the planet from the upheaval to our livelihoods. Even if under a best-case scenario there is a roaring recovery, entire industries will never be the same and the digital acceleration of lockdown means many jobs will never return. To soften the blow, most of the West is printing money and putting it in consumers' pockets, like the US which sent out stimulus checks of $1,200 to every taxpayer over the summer.

It's the first day of what's been billed as a trial for the record: those accused in the January 2015 attacks, which started with a bloodbath at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, while a separate attacker targeted a policewoman and a kosher supermarket. They ended with shootouts that killed the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly and world leaders converging on Paris for a massive "Je suis Charlie" march. So who are the 14 now on trial: minor players or major accomplices? Could the same overlapping networks that jumped between al Qaeda and the IS group back in 2015 strike today?

France's president is returning to Beirut for the second time since last month's warehouse explosion at the port that left at least 188 dead, thousands wounded and an already reeling nation literally shell-shocked. Ahead of Emmanuel Macron's visit, his foreign minister had warned the Lebanese state risked extinction. Despite international pressure and the protests that started at home last year against the unaccountability of the country's sectarian power-sharing system, can the old guard hang on?

Why now? Turkey's president is ordering a return to tradition for what's much more than a tourist attraction, but a monument for the ages: after decades of disputes, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has chosen to reconvert Istanbul's Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque. The move reverses a 1935 decision by the founder of secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. François Picard's panel discusses the political timing at home and abroad where it's not just neighbouring Greece and its Orthodox Christians who are up in arms.

Why has Donald Trump deployed federal agents in camouflage – many unidentified – to the streets of Portland, Oregon? The Department of Homeland Security overruled objections from local authorities, insisting that the forces were there to quell "lawlessness". François Picard's panel argues over the legality and the motives of the US president's move in an election year. How will this deployment of force play with voters in November? Is Trump putting US democracy to the test?