Our European environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan answers your questions on the climate after reporting on the shocking heatwave that continues to scorch its way across Europe, covering everything from the lack of preparation to ways to deal with the heat

Woodworm20 asks: Almost all of the climate “solutions” on offer, so far, have involved yielding complete power over to a handful of billionaires [some] with extreme views and no notion of what life and community is for the other eight billion people. As we are almost certain to resort to the cheapest option of geoengineering our way forward, do you have any practical solutions that don’t involve a global autocracy?

Ajit: Climate action does not require a greater level of corporate capture or autocratic governance than the fossil fuel status quo - and the solutions on offer today already come from a broad range of actors. Autocracies are building wind turbines and solar panels in poor countries, publicly traded companies in democracies are getting state support to capture carbon from cement plants, cities are turning car parking into bike lanes, and individuals are swapping steak for tofu. All of these are important actions in scientific roadmaps to clean the economy by the middle of the century.

Ajit: I don’t think there’s evidence to suggest it’s a root cause, but I have wondered a lot whether it contributes. If you scroll through the social media feeds of far-right leaders in most western European countries, their top topic is migration/crime and the second is typically climate/energy. Yet if you speak to their voters, at least in Germany, where I live, it quickly becomes clear that opposition to climate policy is at most a minor issue.

That paradox is reflected in polling data. How can it be that less than 10% of the public denies the science of climate change, yet far-right parties who do so consistently get more than 20% of the vote? The obvious answer is that people are voting for them for the core issue of migration, not climate. But what is less clear is why these parties spend so much time bashing climate action. There are plausible suggestions that it plays well to fossil fuel lobbies many are linked to. A more convincing theory, I think, is that the far right sees itself as having already won the fight over migration – now it needs new battlegrounds to differentiate itself from mainstream parties.

With bosses at the BBC prioritising social media platforms over radio, things feel apocalyptic at the broadcaster’s flagship news show – especially given the lack of diversity. Is this it?

For Radio 4’s Today programme, last week’s biggest story was off-air: a BBC News edict that the corporation’s correspondents should in future prioritise platforms such as TikTok and Instagram over traditional TV and radio franchises, including Today.

This policy serves to “chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple,” foamed a show insider to the Guardian anonymously. (Although there is a lively media parlour game in guessing which presenter the quote most sounds like.)

His plan for the country is still vague, but there are clues to what he thinks, on topics from inheritance tax to welfare and social care

One week on from Keir Starmer’s resignation, Britain finds itself in a state of both certainty and ambiguity. It is almost guaranteed that Andy Burnham will be prime minister by the end of the summer, bar sudden scandal or meteorite. And yet, whether Burnham gets his expected coronation or not, the infancy of his return to Westminster coupled with the speed of Starmer’s exit timetable has created a remarkable situation: a figure who was not even an MP until a fortnight ago could soon enter Downing Street without anyone knowing what policies he will implement, other than the obligatory buzzword of “change”.

We are watching a political project being conceived in real time, where the nation’s major unions are fighting about who Burnham’s chancellor – and therefore what his economic programme – should be before he has actually been appointed prime minister.

A pop superstar widely perceived as a romantic has in fact mostly written love songs troubled by strife, ghosts and delusion. Ahead of her wedding, we strip away the gossip to see what Swift-as-songwriter has spent 20 years telling us

When she was 19 and already had her second album under her belt, Taylor Swift made a point of telling a would-be beau he was all wrong for her: “I’m not your princess, this ain’t our fairytale … It’s too late for you and your white horse to catch me now,” she sang in her 2008 song White Horse. Then as now, Swift liked a happy ending: she had no qualms rewriting Romeo and Juliet to end with marriage in Love Story, or imagining stealing a boy from his no-good girlfriend in You Belong With Me, both from the same album as White Horse. She just didn’t want a guy to come and rescue her from the messiness of life, like a prince in an early Disney movie whose appearance signals marriage, a happily-ever-after and, effectively, the end of a young girl’s life.

This story has always been an easy one to reject; even Disney was poking fun at it as early as Sleeping Beauty. And like many women of her generation, Swift has had a complicated relationship with all that marriage implies, at least in how she’s written about it. When she met Travis Kelce, the man she is now set to marry, she was fresh from her 2022 album Midnights, in which she made it repeatedly clear she can and will ditch any man, even a perfectly nice one, who stands between her and her ambition. “He wanted a bride / I was making my own name,” she sang on Midnight Rain. In Bejeweled, the tone toward a neglectful “baby boy” is even sassier: “I miss you … but I miss sparkling.” No man is going to end the Taylor Swift story, because there are only two forces that can end the unfolding of that story. One is God; the other is Taylor Swift.

Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?

In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.

Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls “enthusiastic” rock climbing. The eldest son of a Greek management professor and a British documentary maker, Gabriel split his time between teaching and international development work. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John’s College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of “yuppie ethics” and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn’t there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon.

Want to see some old wonders but don’t fancy forking out £33 for 40 minutes with a tapestry? Our critic celebrates the British treasures you can see all year round – from monstrous crypt carvings to the vaulting glory of our cathedrals

There’s a carved stone character grimacing furiously in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and you can see why – a man is sitting on his head, legs apart, holding a fish and bowl in outstretched arms. Other figures perched atop slender stone columns include a creature with a serpent’s tail wrestling a dog-like monstrosity, a gryphon eating a siren, and a (now-detached) carving of a horned devil. All this nefariousness in the depths of England’s holiest shrine.

But then medieval British art is full of wonder, mystery and humour. It is also so abundant that it gets taken for granted. But now, after almost 1,000 years, it is about to have a moment. This week, the rush will begin to get £33 tickets to spend 40 minutes in the company of a medieval British artwork. The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was almost certainly embroidered by Kent women to a commission by Bishop Odo of Bayeux in the 1070s.

The prime minister unveiled his long-awaited defence investment plan on Tuesday after months of delays

Keir Starmer warned his successor not to borrow more to pay for defence as he raided energy, transport and housing projects to pay for a £15bn military spending plan.

The prime minister revealed his long-awaited defence investment plan (Dip) on Tuesday after an 11-month government row that cost him his defence secretary and arguably contributed to his downfall.

Exclusive: Pentagon files suggest some new facilities will store nuclear arsenal, with $163m also earmarked for secretive spy base

More than $4bn (£3bn) is to be spent upgrading the US government’s military and spy bases in the UK, according to official documents that shed light on the UK’s apparent role as a secretive site for American nuclear weapons.

The construction plans include building new bunkers in Suffolk, which will seemingly be used to store nuclear weapons, and modernising facilities to help covert units run secret operations.

Normally safe principality left reeling from apartment blast, which also injured Vadym Iermolaiev’s wife and child

Police in Monaco are searching for a suspected bomber after a Ukrainian-born business tycoon, his wife and their child were injured in an unprecedented attack that has shaken the normally ultra-safe principality.

The Monaco government said a suspect had left a parcel bomb in the lobby of a residential building that exploded shortly before 9pm on Monday, causing what officials described as a “powerful explosion”.

Emily Barley, founder of Maternity Safety Alliance, says recommendation in Amos report will not solve wider cultural problems

The appointment of a national maternity commissioner would be “fundamentally dangerous”, a bereaved mother who founded a maternity safety campaign group has warned.

Emily Barley, whose daughter Beatrice died because of failings at Barnsley hospital in 2022, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the recommendation for a maternity commissioner in England in the Amos review was “not going to do what we need to move maternity safety forwards”.

Maternity triage services – the childbirth equivalent of A&E – need an urgent overhaul, including more staff on duty, so that women’s concerns are acted on more quickly.

Families should get the right to seek a fresh, independent investigation when things go wrong if they are not happy with the hospital’s own inquiry.

The NHS’s “brutal” and “cruel” system of agreeing compensation with harmed and bereaved families should be replaced by a new process in which hospitals admit errors immediately.

The NHS must root out racism and discrimination that is “embedded throughout the maternity and neonatal system”.