A deadly heatwave sweeps western and southern Europe — forty drown in France, schools and hospitals shut in England, and Italy issues its highest health alerts. Britain pays six times the normal price for imported electricity as the heat dome crushes wind output and knocks out gas plants. Poland strips Zelenskyy of its highest state honour, deepening a rift with Ukraine. And a radio system failure halts every train in Germany, sending delays rippling through the continent's busiest rail network.
Host: Forty drowning deaths in France. Thirty-four degrees in Surrey and the Met Office warning of worse to come. Power prices spiking through interconnected grids. And Germany's entire rail network frozen by a radio glitch. This is Europa Daily. Host: A punishing heatwave is bearing down on western and southern Europe simultaneously, and the human cost is mounting fast. In France, forty people have drowned as the country recorded its hottest day on record. Here in the UK, temperatures hit thirty-four point six degrees at Wisley in Surrey, with the Met Office warning they could reach thirty-nine later this week. The UN secretary general said London was, quote, 'cooking.' Schools have closed across southern England and Wales. Hospitals have cancelled patient appointments. Rail services have been cut back because of speed restrictions on the tracks, and hosepipe bans are now in force in parts of the south-east. Across Italy, the health ministry has declared a red heatwave alert — the highest level — in fifteen cities including Milan and Rome, with a sixteenth to be added tomorrow. During a red alert, the advice is to eat light, stay indoors during the hottest hours, and sprinkle yourself with cool water. Parts of Spain have seen overnight temperatures stay above thirty degrees. This is a single high-pressure heat dome producing parallel crises in country after country — infrastructure buckling, health emergencies escalating, and lives being lost, all driven by the same meteorological event. Host: The heatwave is now showing up starkly in electricity prices — and nowhere more so than here. Britain imported power through its European interconnectors at more than six times the normal price on Tuesday, as the high-pressure system killed wind speeds and hammered renewable generation. Multiple gas-fired plants have also gone down with heat-related outages. Meanwhile, millions of people reaching for fans and air-conditioning units have pushed demand sharply higher right across European markets. Britain's grid is physically connected to France, Belgium and the Netherlands through undersea cables. For anyone unfamiliar with the setup, these interconnectors are high-voltage links running along the seabed — and they mean that when supply tightens on one side, the price signal travels instantly to the other. What you're seeing is a real-time demonstration of how deeply integrated European energy infrastructure already is — and how extreme heat stress-tests that integration. Host: To eastern Europe now, where the alliance between Poland and Ukraine — arguably the most consequential bilateral relationship in Europe's response to the war — is fracturing publicly. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Poland's highest state honour. The dispute is rooted in historical grievances over wartime massacres in Volhynia, a subject with deep emotional resonance in Polish politics. The timing is significant: Poland faces an election next year, and the Volhynia issue is being mobilised domestically. Poland has been the logistical backbone of Western military aid to Ukraine and hosts the largest Ukrainian refugee population in Europe. A serious breach between Warsaw and Kyiv carries weight well beyond the bilateral relationship. Host: And finally, Germany's entire railway network came to a halt on Tuesday evening after a failure in the communications system. Passengers were stranded across the country. Deutsche Bahn says the radio issue has been resolved and services have resumed, but regional and suburban operators warned of continued delays into Wednesday morning. Germany sits at the heart of European rail. When Deutsche Bahn stops, cross-border services connecting the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Denmark and the Czech Republic stop with it. Routes like Amsterdam to Berlin, Paris to Frankfurt, and Vienna to Munich all depend on German infrastructure functioning. The outage is a reminder of how much Europe's rail connectivity rests on the reliability of a single national network — and how quickly a technical failure in one country becomes a problem for passengers in half a dozen others. Host: That's Europa Daily. A continent sweating through the same heat dome, wired into the same power grid, and riding the same rails — when they're running. Stay cool, stay informed. We're back tomorrow.