Europe swelters in another heatwave

0:00Hello, I'm James Kamarasamy. Thank you for downloading the BBC's World Tonight Podcast for Monday 3rd August. It is August and Europe's drying rivers are the latest part of the continent to feel the strain from a summer of rolling heatwaves. We ask whether this is the new normal and consider the impact the heat is having on holidaymakers. A provocative pen runs dry with the death of Rod Liddell, formerly of this parish, latterly a columnist who embraced controversy. We'll speak to his editor at The Spectator for 15 years, Fraser Nelson. Also, why aren't bins being collected in Stockport? The government announces changes to its early prisoner release policy and the 10 ,000 maniac singer Natalie Merchant on why she has turned to nursery rhymes for inspiration.

0:42We are now in August, the height of summer, a summer of record-breaking temperatures, which the Met Office confirmed today has already seen the driest July in England and Wales since records began, and when people across Europe have been seeing red, red patches on their weather maps, red heat alerts on their phones, and in Greece at the moment, red skies just west of Athens.

1:11The Greek headlines tonight dominated by the wildfire that is threatening homes near the town of Megara. Firefighters doing their best to protect households after flames spread through dry vegetation fueled by strong winds. Stelio Friganas is one of the local officials overseeing the operation.

1:31We are in Luba, outside of Megara, and we're trying to stop this fire from passing to Calcani, a region that goes towards the seaside. There's lots of virgin forest there. If it gets there, then we're doomed. Meanwhile, Italy's fourth heat wave of the summer reached its peak today. Temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius in parts of the country and further north in central Europe, rivers flowing through Germany and Hungary. The Rhine, the Danube, are seeing record low levels with an impact on the goods being transported along them, the land that they irrigate and, in some cases, the nuclear plants that they cool.

2:04The BBC's Europe correspondent, Sarah Rainsford, is monitoring the continent-wide chaos. The focus of the wildfires this summer has moved now from France and from Spain to Greece, which, of course, is no stranger to summer fires. Now, they have been pretty bad in recent days because of very high winds, which have been fanning the flames but also making it more difficult for helicopters to drop large amounts of water on the flames and stop them spreading. Now, those winds had fallen back, but again this evening, the flames have flared up again. And in particular, a pretty significant town, Megara, which is to the west of Athens.

2:41There is a fire there which exhausted fire crews now battling to try to stop it from spreading. Here in Italy, we're into the peak of the fourth heat wave to hit this summer, causing red alerts to be applied in almost every big city in the country. So the heat spread right across the country, which is a little unusual. And it is pretty intense. You walk out into the street and it's like walking into a giant hairdryer. It is really quite uncomfortable. And the particular feature of this heat wave is that the temperatures just don't go down at night. The heat, of course, is also contributing to drought.

3:18So there's concerns from farmers here in Italy and in Hungary and Romania. Really big problems now with the water levels there. The water in the mighty Danube River is down 30 percent and that is causing problems for nuclear power plants. So in both Romania and Hungary, it's a struggle to get water from the Danube to cool the reactors. Hungary has closed down its one nuclear power plant altogether and that provides some 50 percent of the electricity in Hungary. So that's a major step they've had to take. In Romania, they're still trying to keep the final reactor open at the nuclear power plant there.

3:53But that is being done with quite extraordinary measures like controlled explosions in the Danube to redirect water to channel it towards the power plant. There's problems with navigating the rivers because the water is so low. And the same goes for the Rhine in Germany, too. Our Europe correspondent, Sarah Rainsford. So are European countries going to have to get used to these record breaking temperatures and the disruption that they're causing? Antonio Navarro is president of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change. He's also a professor in the Environmental Sciences Department of the University of Bologna in Italy.

4:27He told me that his organisation had predicted the current pattern of high temperatures. Climate change is actually changing the habits of the atmosphere and of the entire Earth. It's not showing like, you know, a slow increase, you know, happily chugging along. is going to be a change in the way variations are happening. Basically making this kind of warmer weather more frequent, more intense and longer. And is Europe suffering, if we can say that, particularly badly compared to other regions? Europe is one of the regions where the warming is definitely faster when we compare to the global average.

5:11There are reasons, at least there are ideas for that, that point not only to the direct effect of the greenhouse gases, but also to changes in circulation that are caused ultimately by the same greenhouse gases. So Europe may be in a slightly hot seat, let's say this way, than other places. and in terms of the direction of travel are temperatures going to continue climbing in europe or will they reach a plateau at some point well all our scenarios gives indication that as long as we keep increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide temperature will keep going up so what about doing something about it is europe in a better position than other parts of the world if it's also facing bigger challenges?

6:03Does it also have, I mean, greater resources, for example, to mitigate what is happening? Well, absolutely. You know, the response to climate change can, basically there are only two strategies. One strategy is mitigation. That, of course, is solving the problem at the root. I mean, just stop putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That's what the big international negotiations are for. The other strategy is adaptation. That means using our science, using what we know, to try to have an idea of what kind of changes can happen also locally because of climate change. And then at that point, one can deploy policy and measures that will try to mitigate the negative effects of the changes.

6:50I don't know, even grab some opportunity. And there are companies buying land in the south of the UK so that they can make champagne. Maybe this can be an opportunity. I don't know. So the climate problem is going to be a marathon. You know, it's going to be with us for a long time. Antonio Navarro, president of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change. Well, at the moment, there are heat-related travel advisories in place for British tourists for several destinations across Europe. So what impact might the weather have on the millions of trips that Britons take to the continent every summer?

7:26Joining me in the studio, who's travelled to be here, especially for us, I'm pleased to say, the Telegraph's travel correspondent, Simon Calder. And Simon, you have been covering summer holidays in Europe, well, everywhere, really, for a long time. But what do you make of this year? Have you seen such a concentration of natural hazards for holidaymakers? No, absolutely not. I mean, as you say, I've been covering the annual getaway since pretty much the dawn of the jet age. But now we are in a situation where the best advice I can give to people is hope for the best, but keep your phone switched on in case there is a sudden order in the early hours to evacuate.

8:05I mean, last week, the wildfires were destroying communities and indeed holiday parks in southwest France. This week, as we were hearing, it's the turn of Megara west of Athens. but also more particularly in terms of tourism, holidaymakers in Kefalonia and Crete. And I actually got to ask the British Red Cross about what they would recommend. And they said, yep, keep your phone switched on, but also have a grab bag ready to go with your passport, with medication, with money, everything you will need if you suddenly need to leave. Oh, and by the way, some decent shoes in case you are getting out with an approaching blaze.

8:50And that's not anybody's idea of a carefree holiday. No, I mean, does that mean that, I mean, people, British tourists, but I've noticed what's going on are actually changing their plans, are reacting? Well, there will always be a cohort of holidaymakers who are never happier than being, for example right now in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt or in Dubai where it's 40 Celsius over 100 Fahrenheit and that will no doubt continue but it's the fourth summer in a row where extreme temperatures plus wildfires have disrupted our holidays in southern Europe and lots of people have basically had enough not least the many holiday makers who are supposed to be on river cruises but are tied up at various points along the Danube waiting for more water and I think if people start to move maybe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic which actually is a much more appropriate place to be in July and August that would be a sensible move I mean we love Spain, France, Italy, Greece but they're actually much more enjoyable in May, in September, October and there's also much less of a risk of wildfires I just spent the weekend up in Denmark, in Jutland on an island where they're getting far more tourists from southern Europe than they ever do normally.

10:09They've noticed a difference there. But I wonder about here, staycations. Are people going to be having holidays in Britain? Is that going to be good for our economy? It would be a huge benefit for the economy. I mean, bear in mind that the tourism deficit, which is the excess of what we spend abroad compared with what foreign visitors spend here, is getting on for£50 billion a year. If we actually decided, no, we're going to go back to the Great British Seaside, that would be a huge social benefit as well for resorts, which are some of the most disadvantaged places in the UK. And they desperately need visitors and investment.

10:48But if you look ahead to the depths of winter, if it's pouring with rain on Boxing Day, the holiday companies will be taking plenty of bookings. But they won't be for Bridlington. They will be for Benidorm. I think you're right. So Simon called as ever. Thank you very much indeed for joining us. Coming up later, if the lid won't shut, we won't collect it. The wheelie bin rule that is prompting fury in Stockport. Why don't you collect the bins more frequently? Then maybe we'd be able to close our lids. Bin men used to carry heavy metal bins with the lids off and physically empty them in the cart.

11:22Health and safety nowadays has gone mad. We'll have that story, not a rubbish one, in a little while. Now the columnist and broadcaster Rod Liddle who was at one point during his BBC career the interim editor of this programme has died at the age of 66 Rod ended his time at the BBC as a fiercely creative editor of the Today programme it's something I experienced at first hand when I was briefly one of his reporters as did the then Today presenter John Humphreys He was an extraordinary journalist a remarkable man an utterly brilliant and bonkers editor you never ever knew what to expect from Rod but by god he's had a brain and he loved the job which makes it all the more bizarre in one sense that he effectively sacked himself from being editor of the today program but that's Rod for you.

12:12John Humphrey's talking about the moment when Rod Little had to make a choice to continue writing newspaper columns or continue as a BBC employee well he plumped for the former and he gained a much bigger profile when he gave up the editor's chair and instead picked up the provocateur's pen. He most recently wrote columns for The Sun and The Sunday Times, deploying his unforgiving wit on some of society's most sensitive subjects in ways that delighted his many fans but often left his critics seething. He certainly left no one indifferent. While Rod wrote for The Spectator for 21 years, for 15 of them, Fraser Nelson was his editor, although, as he told me this evening, not his first.

12:51He was hired by Boris Johnson. When I became editor, he had been writing for quite some time. And when I kind of inherited him, it was obvious pretty early on that this was the magazine's single greatest asset. I would speak to readers trying to find out what we liked and didn't like about the magazine. And the one thing I heard more than all the other points put together was don't tone down Rod. Please let him continue. In this world of kind of self-censorship, in a world of cancel culture, Rod stood joyously, defiantly astride from all of that and that's what the readers wanted me to make sure I didn't put in danger which was getting difficult because this was the beginning of the cancel culture era and Rod ended up pretty much the number one target of those who did want to see people like him put in their place.

13:39Well, how did you manage that then as editor? Well, we'd ended up in court for contempt of court for one of his articles so I kind of set up a kind of a rod unit as it were. This was the time where columnists would be tripped up for some small technical breach some figure which wasn't quite right and so you needed not just the normal legal scanning but you needed people to see his copy through the eyes of critics. The digital era meant publications are read by their non-readers so for the first time ever we had an army of people who didn't like Rod one little bit and were waiting to trip him up, to get him corrected, to get him sent to court, to get him reprimanded in some way or another.

14:22So in the end, we had three people who would go through his articles, making sure there were no hostages to fortune. But the funny thing is, he was incredibly careful. He researched a lot. He was incredibly well read. And he very, very seldom made those mistakes. But we had to protect him because he was the number one target and the paper's most loved columnists. So for both of those reasons, Rod needed a kind of a proper team behind him. But he did offend people by what he wrote. Many people, didn't he? I mean, was there anything that crossed a line for you? Well, no, otherwise I wouldn't have put it in.

14:59Of course, he offended people. But if you want to say anything original now, you're going to have to offend people. But Rod would deliberately go towards the most dangerous subject areas. That's what interested him, the limits of taboos, the limits of what you could say and what you couldn't say. And he wanted to explore areas that the public were interested in, but he felt the main political debate wasn't touching. So he would emphatically go there. It was explosion after explosion with him and he loved it. And he got there before a lot of people on some of the more controversial issues that still resonate in the public debate.

15:34Yeah, I mean, he would write about everything from music, culture, politics, demography. But it was his writing about demography and demographic change that certainly put him in the firing line, making comments which were perhaps controversial, you know, 10 years ago, are far less so now. But what he was fundamentally, above all of the things, is humorous. He was funny. He was a satirist at a time where satire was an endangered species. He got worked up about the BBC quite often, didn't he? He did. The media was one of his main... He loved the BBC. And he also, because he knew his politics inside out, he was able to criticise it, to lampoon it, to have fun with it.

16:16I would get furious letters from the Director-General about what Rod had written about this week or that week. But he'd always be making the defence. He'd be defending the need of foreign correspondents, defending the need to have programmes like Newsnight. When the BBC dumbed down, Rod would go at it absolutely hammer and tongs, asking what the BBC was there for. When the BBC was going too much down in a kind of groupthink way, Rod was there to always point out. It was there to serve the whole country with its divergence of views. And, you know, he would always say this in very emphatic terms because he was the former Today programme editor who had decided to cross the fence.

16:51that hardly ever happens in print journalism, when the greatest writers of our age were somebody who started off as a broadcast journalist not writing a word. Fraser Nelson remembering Rod Liddle, who has died. In a summer when bins of all sorts are in the news, the failure to collect them at hundreds of addresses in Stockport is causing quite a furore. The company which operates the city's bin collection services has enforced a rule not to take any wheelie bin whose lid isn't completely shut. but even a couple of centimetres is reportedly enough to fall foul of the edict. Well, the public response has been pretty furious.

17:25Our producers have voiced up some of the comments left on Stockport's social media pages. Why don't you collect the bins more frequently? Then maybe we'd be able to close our lids. God forbid you try and recycle more in your bin than the allotted amount. Binmen used to carry heavy metal bins with the lids off and physically empty them in the cart. Health and safety nowadays has gone mad. Ed Barnes is a local democracy reporter with the Manchester Evening News covering Oldham and Stockport. I asked him, first of all, what the scale of the problem was. As of kind of midway through last week, about 900 bins in Stockport hadn't been collected as a result of this change that happened, which basically was a policy that was around before and has been in place for a long time, but it wasn't strictly enforced.

18:14it was kind of left up to bin crews to decide what happened next anyway about two weeks ago now there was an operational decision which basically was that no bin no matter how high you know if it was even just a centimeter above basically that wouldn't get collected which there was no communication about this no one knew so obviously people put their bins out on friday morning thinking it's going to get collected and then they come home to find that it's still there and uh that's i guess left quite a lot of people are what frustrated angry yes yes and then obviously what happened is as it got and went into the next week even though there'd been some noise about this in the areas that had their bins collected on friday obviously more and more people were getting their bins collected and then left and i think naturally if your bin is only slightly over and it means that you're left with your rubbish for another two weeks a lot of people have been angry about that.

19:10It's not a new rule though is it? Why is it being enforced now? So the council have said that it's for safety reasons so that's to do with the way that they put the bins on the back of the lorries. There was an incident a couple of years ago in Stockport where a bin dropped off the back of a lorry and hit a bin man and he was left with quite severely injured as a result of that. While I'm not aware of any particular new incident that seems to prompt this, I think it seems to be brought in to protect the safety of the crews as they do the bin rounds. What is the council saying? I mean, clearly people are expressing their anger, you're reporting on it.

19:52What has the response been from the council? So the first response, I think, for the council has been to say sorry, kind of sorry in the terms of the way that this is being handled you know there was an email that was sent out to councillors which was shared with me where they talked about the issues with the communication because essentially senior councillors and senior council officers weren't aware that this change had happened regular back-to-backed councillors also had no idea so obviously there was no messaging going out from the council to say this change has happened we're now enforcing it you know make sure your bin lid is down so you know a big part of the kind of council's message is is obviously to defend the reason why the decision was made which is you know on the on the safety aspect but at the same time kind of acknowledging the way it was handled and the communication around it and i guess the council i guess the argument apart from the safety is it's not good especially in hot weather to have bins open and um you know all sorts of animals getting in and about and throwing the rubbish around the street and there's certainly been you know a big concern of a lot of the people that i spoke to is what do we do now with our bin which is why i think the council has announced that it's looking to catch up on the the bins that were missed you know you've got parents who've got children wearing nappies what do they do then nappies sitting in a bin for another two weeks you know which obviously is is pretty pretty grim so one of the people that i spoke to the reason why her bin wasn't collected was it wasn't even her fault one of her neighbors had gone and stuck their rubbish bags in her bin overfilling it which meant it wasn't collected and the reason why she you know she was able to point it wasn't her her bags was because it had dog food tins in it and she didn't even have a dog ed barnes local democracy reporter with the manchester evening news and we did contact Stockport Council for a comment but have not yet had a response.

21:50A council spokesperson did tell this to the Manchester Evening News though We're sorry that a reminder issued to crews about applying an existing bin collection policy and keeping them safe at work wasn't communicated to residents in advance. We know how important bin collections are and the frustration this has caused. Thank you for your patience while we put this right. Now we're going to turn to the United States now because as the country gears up for this autumn's midterm elections which will decide whether a donald trump's republican party retains control of the congress or whether the president will find it much harder to get his policies enacted the personal and the political seem to be increasingly colliding in ways that are causing problems for both of the main parties last month democratic candidate in the key senate race of maine suspended his campaign following a series of scandals, including an accusation of a sexual assault by a former partner.

22:42Well, now the Republicans have become embroiled in a family drama in the state of Ohio. It involves allegations of domestic violence, and it's seen a sitting senator call on his ex-son-in-law to step down from Congress. We can speak to Julia Manchester now, White House correspondent for The Hill. Good evening, Julia. Good evening. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you for joining us. Can you first take us through the details of this? We're talking about a representative by the name of Max Miller. Can you just tell us what is happening? That's correct. So Max Miller is a congressman in Ohio representing a relatively competitive House district ahead of the midterms.

23:19He's been serving in that seat since 2023. Now, he is married to Emily Marino. Emily Marino is the daughter of Senator Bernie Marino, who represents the state of Ohio in the United States Senate. Now, the Miller family and the Marino family are both very prominent in Ohio politics and Ohio business. So this is quite a story coming out of that state. And basically what is happening is that you've seen Emily Marino accuse Max Miller of domestic violence in their divorce proceedings. We know that they've been split up since 2024. That's when they filed for divorce. And she's accusing the congressman of throwing scalding hot water on her in the kitchen, for example, shoving her up against the wall and hitting her and even breaking their young daughter's collarbone.

24:14So very serious allegations. And we've seen Bernie Marino call on Max Miller to resign. But so far, I think a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill are waiting for President Trump to give them direction on what to do. President Trump saying that he's always liked Max Miller, but these are allegations and he's leaving this to the families to let them figure it out. But both Max Miller and Bernie Marino are very close. Hello? Yes, sorry. The line is just breaking up. We've lost the line, unfortunately, to Julia Manchester there. The White House correspondent for The Hill, she was telling us about that story in Ohio, allegations of domestic violence, which has involved a sitting Republican congressman and his ex-father-in-law, a Republican senator there.

25:00We'll try and rejoin it if we can later on. But just to remind you of the main headlines so far in the world tonight, river levels have reached record lows across Europe because of poor rainfall and high temperatures across the continent. President Trump says that talks with Iran are happening right now and that they are Tehran's last chance. And Reform UK has insisted that it would be able to use the Navy to return small migrant boats in the Channel to France after Paris said that the scheme would break international law. Now the government has announced that it is changing its prisoner early release scheme to prohibit inmates convicted of rape and other serious sexual offences from getting out of jail early.

25:42Andy Burnham has announced a pause in the scheme when he took office two weeks ago and it's been under review ever since. Well, in a statement that's just been released, The Prime Minister said he would have liked to have gone further, but to do so would put the prison system at risk of collapse. Let's speak to our political correspondent, Harry Farley. So, Harry, just give us a bit more on what the government's saying. What the government is saying tonight in the last couple of minutes is that essentially prisoners who committed rape or serious child sex offences or other grooming offences will be excluded from this early release scheme.

26:16So this was a scheme that was already due to come into place in September. And essentially what it meant was that offenders would be released out of prison earlier than they would have otherwise done in their sentence. And they would serve the rest of that sentence under conditions in the community. And so the changes, if you remember, Andy Burnham said he wanted to pause that scheme. He wanted to review it and to look at it again. Well, this is sort of the outcome of that review. the change is essentially that those a few extra offences so rape serious child sex offences and grooming they will be excluded from the scheme and the scheme itself will be pushed back a month so rather than coming to effect in september it'll come in in october yeah it's one of these issues that's that's been a sort of quite damaging for the for the labour government since they took office and obviously it's been carried over into the burnham era absolutely Absolutely.

27:05Damaging for the Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer, an issue that the previous Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer inherited from the Conservatives. And now Andy Burnham has to carry the can for it. I mean, Andy Burnham was praised for reviewing the scheme. I suppose the criticism now is around where he's drawn the parameters of who will fit into the scheme. He says he wants to he wanted to go further, but couldn't for risk of jeopardising the whole prison system. but what it means is that for example the widow of a policeman PC Harper whose killers were convicted of manslaughter they are still eligible under this early release scheme and his wife, his widow rather Lizzie Harper has issued a statement this evening saying she is bristling with anger that his killers are still eligible for early release.

27:55Harry thank you for that update. Our political correspondent Harry Farley there. Well, let's look at the implications of this announcement. Nick Hardwick is a lecturer of criminal justice at Royal Holloway University, London, and former chief inspector of prisons and joins us live now. Good evening. Good evening. And Nick, you also chaired the parole board for two years. Do you think these changes are going to have an impact on the parole system? No, I don't think that. What I've seen in the announcement is this will only affect prisoners who have fixed length sentences. And generally, those prisoners aren't dealt with by the parole board.

28:35Right. So when you look at this, and we're only just hearing this, what do you see as the main impact? well i think the government had very limited room for maneuver because essentially the prison population is rising almost as quickly as they can build additional places and if they don't do the early release scheme as a whole they'll simply run out of space as they had before and this would be a problem for whichever government was in power so what they're doing here is taking some of the most serious offences, some of which would have been excluded from the early release scheme anyhow, and they're adding to the number of cases that are excluded.