From Our Own Correspondent

India now has the second highest number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the world, having overtaken Brazil. This is placing huge demands on hospitals and ambulances. The medical services, particularly in smaller cities and rural areas, can find it hard to cope, sometimes leading to what relatives think were preventable deaths, as Yogita Limaye reports. Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is retiring. His politically conservative party will elect his successor on Monday. Mr Abe has taken his observers by surprise more than once. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo looks at the effect of those surprises, and at his legacy. In Poland, some politicians’ hostility to gay rights has become a flash-point in a culture war pitting the religious right against the more liberal-minded. Last month the EU denied funding to six Polish towns which had declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”. Lucy Ash has been to one of them, Tuchow. Wildfires have raged through central and northern Argentina for most of