Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, July 19th. I'm Nyla Buddha. Here's how we're making you smarter today.

White car prices are driving inflation. Plus retailers turn to facial recognition technology.

But first, today's one big thing. Simultaneous disasters in Europe.

The flood waters in Germany and Belgium have started receding with more than 180 people dead.

It's the worst flooding the region has seen in decades and comes on top of a worsening COVID outbreak throughout Europe.

Here to catch us up on the crises the EU is facing is Axios's world editor, Dave Lawler.

Good morning, Dave. Let's start with the floods. What has the damage been so far?

The scale of the damage is really quite shocking. Some villages look like they've basically been washed away and many of these are kind of recognizable images of German villages.

These timber frame houses along the riverfront the government is talking about an initial package of 300 million euros for relief that's going to rise.

I'm sure so it's so quite serious flooding that is not just in Germany, but as you mentioned has also been in Belgium and the Netherlands as well.

I give flesh flood warnings on my phone all the time. Do these countries not have similar warning systems?

So what we're seeing is that the warning seemed to be quite uneven. Some local governments got ahead of this better than others.

But these are places where they hadn't seen this level of flooding in some cases in over a century.

So maybe it's something you see and you disregard even if you did get the warning.

And then we've seen others that said, look, we didn't really get a proper warning here.

We didn't know that this was going to be a once in a century storm or whatever the case was.

I mean, we did see up to two months worth of rain falling in 24 hours in some cases.

So it really extreme weather event, but you're right that I think that there's some talk now in Germany about getting a better early warning system here.

Meanwhile, COVID cases are skyrocketing across much of Europe as the Delta variant spreads.

How are other countries in the EU handling the recent outbreak? I'm thinking for instance of France, which has put some pretty strict new restrictions in place.

Right. And as I think we discussed on the show before, a lot of countries were now coming out of these restrictions for what they hoped was perhaps the last time.

Now you're seeing countries start to clamp back down in the face of the Delta variant. In France, they've taken quite a novel approach.

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