The UK has provisionally broken May temperature records multiple days in a row now, the Met Office said.

On Monday, 25 May, we saw a then-record-breaking 34.8°C in Kew Gardens. By Tuesday, we got an even hotter 35.1°C in the same spot; the previous record was 32.8°C, last recorded in 1944.

These temperatures can be tough on our sleep, our lawns, and, as charity federation The Wildlife Trusts told us, the creatures in our backyards.

That’s why they told us gardeners should offer an “extra hand” this week, as temperatures are expected to stay high

Speaking to HuffPost UK, Becca Smith from The Wildlife Trusts said water is crucial in these unseasonably hot times.

“With rising temperatures being seen across the UK this week and climate change set to bring more heat extremes in the future, every drop of water counts,” she said.

“Giving wildlife an extra hand in your garden, allotment or balcony through small actions can make a big difference.”

You might want to add multiple water sources in your backyard for various animals, too. For instance, bees might fare better in a pebble-filled water saucer that’s not deep enough for them to fall into, while birds might want a full-body splash.

“Whether in a bird bath or small dish, providing regularly refreshed water for birds can help them to keep cool and bathe, but make sure to regularly clean it to prevent the spread of disease,” Smith said.

“Meanwhile, bees and other invertebrates will also benefit from a shallow dish with a few stones in, giving them a safe place to land and drink,” the expert continued.

We’ve written about how to make your own “bee bath” before.

The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWF) said that ponds “support two-thirds of all freshwater species,” adding that some of these, like frogs, can only exist in these environments.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) previously told us that you can make your own wildlife pond using an old washing-up bowl if you don’t have much space.

“If you have a pond, make sure it has an easy entry and exit route so that more wildlife – from hedgehogs to toads – can safely access the water as temperatures rise, too,” Smith told us.

“Elsewhere in the garden, leaving your lawn long and creating shady spots, like a simple log pile, provides vital cool shelters for struggling species. These easy steps can go a long way for wildlife.”

Donald Trump is trying to play it cool with the Iran war by insisting he does not feel any political pressure to hurry up the peace process, experts have said.

The US carried out strikes on Iran overnight, targeting a military site in Bandar Abbas.

Iran claims to have responded by striking a US air base.

The fresh attacks threaten to undermine the fragile ceasefire between the warring countries.

It’s the second time in three days that the US has launched such strikes.

But the US has insisted this is self-defence, while Iran called it a “grave violation of the ceasefire” and vowed not to leave “any act of hostility unanswered”.

The war began when Trump worked with his Israeli allies to bomb Iran at the end of February.

Iran responded by effectively closing the major shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to spike around the world.

This economic impact means Trump has faced intense pressure from international and domestic allies to find an off-ramp for the war.

But he is bizarrely pretending he is not under kind of strain and that it is Iran who needs to make a deal.

As the BBC’s North America editor Sarah Smith told Radio 4′s Today programme: “He wanted to stress that he doesn’t feel under political pressure to hurry this up.”

During a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the president insisted Iran is “negotiating on fumes”.

He insisted the November midterms would not impact his negotiations, adding: “Maybe we have to go back and finish it, may be we don’t.”

Smith said: “He obviously thinks that Iran thinks they can run out the clock here, that Donald Trump has less time than they do to get to a position where the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened, because they think it’s putting so much political pressure on the president.

“He was keen to say that’s not the case, and he will take as long as he needs to to get the deal he wants.

“And the US is making it clear they’re not held back from striking Iranian facilities if they think they pose some kind of threat.”

Kirsten Fontenrose, senior director for the Gulf at the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, also told Today: “Both sides are trying to stay to lines they think will prevent super-escalation.”

She said this was effectively “sabre-rattling with a little bit of active fire”.

Fontenrose said she thinks the negotiations are “stuck” right now.

“There seems to be as many differences about how this war should end within Iran and the US as there are between Iran and the US,” Fontenrose said.

“You’ve got a regime in Tehran which is divided into multiple factions, you’ve got the IRGC opposing any concessions or something even talks with the US.

“You have the diplomats, president, vice-president in Iran arguing in some cases that making concessions could save the regime.

“And in Washington you’ve got the US administration divided into several factions, some saying there should be no deal with Iran, and that military strikes should resume, and others saying the blockade should be allowed to do its job with a slow, sustained squeeze that strangles the regime.”

“The debates that are going on on either side of the negotiating table are just as intense as the talks that are going on between the two sides,” she said.

“It does not look like a deal is close,” she added, despite both countries trying to push their opponent to a negotiation.

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Cynthia Erivo is reflecting on the infamous press tour she and her Wicked co-star Ariana Grande took part in to promote the hit film.

Back in 2024, Wicked’s two lead stars went into full-blown promo mode to help plug the movie musical, which led to a string of viral moments and, indeed, a number of tearful interviews.

Reflecting on the last four years, Cynthia told Variety as part of a new interview: “We were holding on by threads, and we were really trying to take care of each other.”

The British performer noted that she and Ariana made a “really conscious decision” early on in the process of making Wicked to have one another’s backs, but during the promotion of the film, the sincerity of their friendship was called into question once or twice.

“It’s very interesting, watching what people’s perception is versus what the reality actually is,” she recalled of the period she and Ariana were being dissected on social media.

“[There were] lots of psychologists seated at home deciding who we were, what we were going through, what we were doing and why.”

“I think that people didn’t really believe that we were actually friends, but that’s also because people don’t know me very well,” Cynthia added, noting that she and Ariana still text one another most days, even with Wicked behind them.

She added: “ I think sometimes, if I’m honest, people thought I was being myself, even though I was green.”

Towards the end of the interview, Cynthia was also asked if she’d ever consider going back to play Elphaba in a third Wicked movie, admitting that she probably didn’t have enough distance from the first two to really offer an answer.

She did, however, claim that it would “take a lot” for her to return to Oz, and that the project would have to “make sense”.

Back in 2024, Cynthia defended the emotional interviews she and Ariana had given while promoting Wicked.

Pointing out that, at that point, the films had taken up “almost three years of our lives”, she told BuzzFeed UK: “We’re still processing everything – and this tour has been a wonderful opportunity to talk about the experience of making it, and the experiences we had together, and the experience of coming out of it.”

“So, yeah, we’ve definitely been emotional, because we’re still deeply connected to it. And I think we’ll always be connected to these roles, these women that we got to play, who I don’t think have completely left, or will ever leave, because they were such a large part of our lives.”

Read Cynthia Erivo’s full interview with Variety here.

Wes Streeting has joined Andy Burnham in accusing Tony Blair of not acknowledging the inequality in the UK.

The ex-prime minister tore into Labour in a 5,600 word essay this week, saying the current shadow leadership contest is futile until the party reassesses its policies.

His warning came as Greater Manchester mayor Burnham is contesting the Makerfield by-election in the hope he can get a seat in parliament, where he is expected to challenge Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Streeting, who quit as health secretary earlier this month, has made it clear he intends to join any leadership challenge.

But Blair urged the party to resist drifting further leftward, and called out both politicians. He wrote: “Wes Streeting is a huge political talent and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my government.

“But this leadership debate has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it. Like most politicians, they’re anxious to distance themselves from the ‘Westminster bubble’.”

Speaking after Labour’s thrashing in the May elections, Blair said Labour’s declining popularity stems from a lack of “worked-out, coherent plan”, and urged the party to govern from the “radical centre”.

Streeting, often described as a Blairite though he rejects the term, wrote in the Guardian that there was a “striking weakness at the heart of Tony Blair’s intervention”.

He said: “Across thousands of words about technology, geopolitics and political strategy, the defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all.

“Inequality – the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain – is treated as peripheral rather than fundamental.

“But inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause.”

Streeting also pushed back on Blair’s call for the UK to retain close ties with the US, despite the conflict with the Trump administration.

“When US presidents flirt with authoritarian leaders, undermine international law or pursue reckless military adventurism, Britain must have the confidence to act independently.

“We learned at terrible cost in Iraq what happens when loyalty replaces judgement. Britain’s long-term future lies in Europe,” the Labour MP for Ilford North wrote.

He also rejected the suggestion that Labour’s answer comes in longing for the 70s or the 90s.

Meanwhile Burnham told the Observer on Wednesday: “The last 40 years has given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.

“People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore they’ve gone further to the extremes.”

Burnham, known for being on the soft left of the party, tore into Blair’s vision of what the UK should look like.

“He doesn’t mention inequality once,” he said. “If you don’t get how that’s driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on.”

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WASHINGTON — Three months into his “four to five week” war, President Donald Trump appears no closer to solving his purported goal of forcing Iran to give up its highly enriched uranium, a problem he himself created when he withdrew from the nuclear agreement negotiated by predecessor Barack Obama.

“They want very much to make a deal,” Trump said again at a White House Cabinet meeting photo opportunity on Wednesday. “But their navy is gone, as I’ve said a thousand times, their navy is gone, their air force is gone, everything’s gone, and they’re negotiating on fumes. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe we have to go back and finish it.”

Wednesday’s remarks came just four days after Trump claimed an agreement had been “largely negotiated” and that “final aspects and details of the deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly.” While Trump and Iranian leadership both are unreliable narrators, reporting indicated Iran would only agree to “talks” about handing over its uranium.

Trump has repeatedly declared that the goal of the now 88-day-old war, which he began without consulting Congress or America’s traditional allies, is to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and there’s little indication Iran plans on giving ground on its HEU stockpile. What he neglects to mention is that Iran created every ounce of that material only after Trump tore up Obama’s Iran agreement.

Ever since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the agreement was known, was signed in 2015 after two years of negotiations, Trump has falsely claimed that it actually gave Iran the permission and means to build nuclear weapons. He repeated that lie Wednesday: “It was the path for Iran to have a nuclear weapon very quickly. Years ago, they would have had a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, Obama’s agreement strictly limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and introduced an intrusive system of outside inspectors to monitor.

Iran’s leaders, who were eager for sanctions relief provided in return, were honoring the enrichment prohibition, something Trump’s first-term administration freely admitted. Trump, nonetheless, scrapped the agreement in 2018.

“The State Department and intelligence community had repeatedly confirmed that Iran was complying with the terms of the JCPOA when Trump unilaterally withdrew from it,” said Ned Price, a former CIA officer and a State Department official under former President Joe Biden.

Trump has claimed ever since he pulled out of the JCPOA that Iran wanted to make a “deal” with him. As he ran for reelection in 2020, he said repeatedly that Iran wanted one badly but was waiting for the start of his second term.

Then, as he ran to regain the White House after his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt failed, he claimed that he would strike a deal with Iran quickly after returning to office.

Instead, Trump attacked Iran twice, first in June 2025, and then on Feb. 28 — both times as productive negotiations were supposedly underway.

Now, almost three months into a war that has damaged the global and US economies, has spiked oil and gas prices, has increased inflation, and has left 13 Americans and at least 1,500 Iranians dead, Trump continues to claim that Iran badly wants “a deal,” even as its leaders appear to stall and drag things out.

“There’s a tendency, especially when it comes to the Middle East, to be dismissive of American diplomacy and to assume that most problems require the use of military force. Many critics of the JCPOA were under the misimpression that the Iranian nuclear challenge would melt away once we struck its nuclear sites,” Price said. “Trump’s decision to test that proposition has proven that this was always pure folly and, ironically, underlined the enduring advantage of a diplomatic resolution.”

Robert Kagan, a top State Department official in Ronald Reagan’s administration and now a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said Trump’s repeated false claims that a deal was close only serve to hide the truth of the war, noting Iran engaged US forces on Monday.

“The fact that the Iranians felt emboldened to target American ships shows they are not afraid of a resumption of war because they know Trump has no good military options and that he wants out,” he said. “The war was over in March. The US lost. Everything since then has been aimed at covering this up.”

He said the worst outcome of the war will be Iran’s newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz and one-fifth of the world’s oil traffic.

“Iran was deterred from closing the strait by fear it would invite this kind of attack which could pose a threat to the regime’s very existence,” he said. “Now they have proven they can survive an extended bombing campaign and still do unacceptable damage to the region, including control of the strait. Having driven Iran to prove this, we are now living in that world and there can be no return to the status quo ante.”

As for the enriched uranium, Iran can win on that point, as well, said John Bolton, one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers and a longtime advocate for attacking Iran to change its regime.

“Iran is playing for time. Trump is still desperate for a way to claim victory. Most importantly, there’s no real deal, just an extension of the cease fire and opening the strait,” he said. “Iran wins by kicking the nuclear issue down the road.”

President Donald Trump bragged that if Iran doesn’t give the US what it wants amid negotiations for a potential agreement to end hostilities — then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is going to “finish ’em off.”

Trump made the remark during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday after a reporter asked him to describe where the talks with Iran are at in football terms, asking him, “What yard line would you be on?”

Opting to skip the football analogies, the president responded, “They are starting to give us the things that they have to give us, and if they do, that’s great. And if they won’t, then the man on my left is gonna finish ’em off.”

Trump was referring to Hegseth, who was seated on his left.

“Is there a time frame in your mind?” the reporter followed up.

Noting that it “happens quickly,” Trump said, “The problem is, every time I mention a time frame — for instance … we’ve been doing this for a few months. Vietnam lasted 19 years. Korea lasted eight years. Afghanistan lasted many years. They were all many, many years. And we’re into it for a few months.”

Trump then referenced the American troops who were killed during Operation Epic Fury in Iran and across the broader Middle East.

“We lost 13 souls, 13 great people. [I] met the parents, great people. It’s a terrible thing, but 13. If you look at the war casualties and the deaths and wars for Vietnam and all that, they lost hundreds of thousands of people in numerous of these wars.”

Trump added, “We’re very cognizant of that. We want to lose very few, we want very few to be injured. We’re very careful, but war is war. War is dangerous.”

Elsewhere in the meeting, the president said that he is “not satisfied” yet with the terms of the deal being negotiated with Iran. Claiming that Tehran is “very much intent” on reaching an agreement to end the conflict, he added, “So far, they haven’t gotten there.”

Listen to Trump’s remarks from the Cabinet meeting below (skip to the 1:08:57 mark.)

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This article features expert advice from Dr Bisola Laguda, a paediatric dermatologist and spokesperson for the Skin Health Alliance.

With kids now getting extra protection against chickenpox as part of their routine childhood immunisations, it’s hoped fewer kids will end up struggling with the worst effects of the illness.

That said, kids might still catch it – albeit a milder version – and those who aren’t vaccinated against it (either because they’re too young or their parents opted out) will also be at risk.

But spotting chickenpox can be tricky, especially as the telltale sign is a rash – and other childhood illnesses like impetigo and hand, foot and mouth can look pretty similar.

To try and get some clarity on how to tell it apart from other illnesses, which is important so you know how to treat it (and how long they’ll need off school or childcare), we spoke to Dr Bisola Laguda, a paediatric dermatologist and spokesperson for the Skin Health Alliance.

Chickenpox is a very contagious infection caused by the varicella zoster virus. Data indicates that half of children will contract chickenpox by the age of four, and 90% by the age of 10.

Kids might initially experience flu-like symptoms, such as a high temperature and feeling sick and/or achy, said Dr Laguda.

“When the rash does manifest, it’ll be in the form of small red spots that blister and can become very itchy,” she said.

“These spots can appear in clusters anywhere on the body, but are commonly found on the arms, legs, chest and stomach, as well as the face, scalp and ears.”

It’s worth bearing in mind that new spots can appear around three to five days after the initial rash begins, too.

After a day or two, the blisters begin to burst and dry out, “with the crusting skin naturally falling off within two weeks”.

The dermatologist noted that whilst chickenpox can cause a lot of frustration and upset, children’s symptoms will often resolve themselves naturally.

But if the skin around the blisters becomes hot, red or painful; the blisters themselves get infected; or your child develops other symptoms such as dehydration, chest pain, or difficulty breathing, she said it’s best to contact your GP.

Never give ibuprofen to kids with chickenpox (unless told to by a doctor). Pharmacists can provide antihistamine medicine to try and ease any itching, while paracetamol can help with pain or discomfort.

Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is another unpleasant illness kids tend to pick up in the early years.

The first stage of symptoms typically involves a sore throat, high temperature and not wanting to eat. A few days later, kids develop a raised rash of spots and/or mouth ulcers.

There are some key distinctions that can help parents tell the two viral infections apart, said Dr Laguda.

“Both manifest in rashes, but appear on different areas of the body and have visual discrepancies,” she explained.

“Where chickenpox can appear anywhere, HFMD rash patterns are most commonly found on the palms of the hands, soles of the feet and inside the mouth – though it is true that we are seeing more cases of HFMD around the face and genitalia, so worth keeping an eye on these areas too.

“Also, chickenpox rashes appear as small, itchy blisters, whereas HFMD is usually characterised by flat, red spots.”

The illness usually gets better on its own. If symptoms don’t go after seven to 10 days, speak to your GP.

Impetigo is another contagious illness you probably won’t have heard of until your kids get it (I certainly hadn’t).

The skin infection starts off as red sores or blisters, which can then burst leaving crusty, almost cornflake-like golden brown patches. These can be itchy and/or painful.

Dr Laguda said it’s “important to be able to distinguish chickenpox from impetigo”.

“While impetigo is a bacterial infection and chickenpox is viral, both can cause itchy, blistery rashes. However, where chickenpox rashes are fluid-filled blisters potentially found across the entire body, impetigo appears as yellow-ish, crusty patches around the nose, mouth and limbs.

“It’s worth noting impetigo can develop secondary to chickenpox if blisters become infected after being scratched.”

Treatment typically involves hydrogen peroxide cream or antibiotic cream/tablets, so a trip to the pharmacist or your GP is warranted.