United Kingdom

The red weather warning issued by the Met Office covers a large part of the region, including Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Northamptonshire, from 09:00 BST on Wednesday until 21:00 on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the red heat health alert issued by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) will cover the whole of the region.

Met Office deputy chief forecaster Mark Sidaway said its red warnings were reserved for the "most severe events", and temperatures were expected to reach nearly 40C.

"The last time the UK recorded temperatures this high was in July 2022, but on this occasion the heat is expected to be accompanied by high humidity," he said.

He added there would be consecutive nights where temperatures did not drop below 20C.

As a candidate for the leadership of his party, Keir Starmer’s pitch to Labour voters was this: keep most of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies but present them with a suit on and a tie done up.

The people behind his campaign to replace Corbyn, which began months before the 2019 election in which the veteran left-winger was dispatched by Boris Johnson, saw Starmer as the best person to deliver this message.

With the backing of Morgan McSweeney, Peter Mandelson, Roger Liddle and other figures on the right wing of the Labour Party, Starmer became leader. He made ten left-wing pledges to the Labour Party members who elected him. All were subsequently abandoned or watered down.

First as Labour leader, then as prime minister, Starmer kept the appearance of managerial, suit and tie professionalism, while abandoning the policies he said he’d carry over from Corbyn, the man he had described as a friend.

“The door is open, and you can leave,” Starmer told left-wingers, who he disparaged as antisemites.

Starmer waged war on our human rights, aided a genocide and has destroyed Labour's credibility – don't let the door hit you on the way out

It is frankly an appalling and frightening scene. Video footage has been circulating on social media of a bare-chested man with a blade on the day he allegedly attacked five people in Edinburgh. “I’m protecting the country,” he is heard shouting in the video.

It reportedly began near a mosque on Friday evening, and the video footage shows him appearing to carry a weapon and battering the door of a pizzeria. The man has been arrested and charged, and counter-terrorism officers have joined Police Scotland’s investigation. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, posted on X that it “appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred” but that is pretty much all he has done. In total, 53 words have gone up on X from the Prime Minister, and the story, which has left the British Muslim community in shock, is barely being covered by the media in any prominent way.

It is a stark difference to what we saw less than two months ago, on April 29, when two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, London. An emergency Cobra meeting was convened that same day and the terror threat level was upgraded. The Prime Minister and King Charles visited the scene. The attack ran across nearly every front page in the country.

By the time Sir Keir delivered his statement from Downing Street, it was not just a tweet but an address: a list of promises — visible police presence, investment in Jewish security to the tune of £25 million — built on a passage of real moral force.

There has been no Cobra meeting. There has been a short post on X from the Prime Minister. As of this weekend, not a single newspaper outside Scotland has carried the Edinburgh attacks on its front page. The government machinery that can move within a few hours has remained largely stationary.

The info on heat stroke and sunburn may also be helpful.

Stay safe out there, everyone!

From north-east Scotland to Romford, London, what do those who spoke to the Guardian during the referendum campaign make of how it all panned out?

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Alexander III discovered that pogroms were a useful tool to deflect anger away from himself and the establishment and protect the old order. Musk and his friends are doing something subtly different: channelling fear of immigrants into rage against the establishment. Unlike the tsar, Musk doesn’t want to preserve the old order. He’s part of a Silicon Valley movement that wants to replace it.

It is useful to be aware of this. But those who want to preserve our imperfect system, where power and sovereignty rest with democratic nation states, not sovereign individuals, would do well to focus less on incendiary tweets. They should look to the real causes of unrest, the gaping chasm of wealth inequality, and figure out how to fix it.

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