welcome to hardtalk. thank you. the recent indian election, it was a result which nobody really expected. your party, the congress party, did better than the polls had suggested it would. many in your party expressed contentment, evenjoy. and yet you still lost. isn t that the key point? that is true. but i think the expectation from the ruling dispensation, a lot of the popular mainstream media was that the propaganda will suffice and people will give a bigger majority to the ruling party. what really happened was, this was a vote by the people to check what we thought were excesses by the government, and the congress party and our allies together have done remarkably well, compared to last time. if you look at the numbers, the ruling party has 290 odd mps and we have 240 odd. so it s not that much of a gap. but more than that, it shows the robustness of our democracy, and the way people have voted is that issues that are important to the people is what finally matters. sure
this time last year, we were seeing clear signs that ukraine s much heralded summer offensive wasn t doing very well. russia had had plenty of time to prepare its defences and ukraine simply couldn t break through them. the next phase, inevitably, would be a russian spring offensive, after the snow and mud of the winter gave way to firmer ground under the tracks and wheels of the tanks and armoured personnel carriers. ukraine s supporters around the world were nervous. might this be the moment when russia came crashing back, recapturing the ground it had lost and even maybe threatening kyiv, the ukrainian capital? the delays in getting the big us support package through seemed to make things much worse. and yet it hasn t happened. russia has made some gains, admittedly, but there s been no actual breakthrough. the bbc ukraine correspondent, james waterhouse, is back in london briefly, and i asked him for his view of what was happening. after ukraine weathered that initialstor
temperatures as what s called a heat dome is causing the dangerous conditions to expand. in south eastern europe temperatures of a0 degrees celsius have caused power cuts in tourist hotspots like croatia, impacting all sorts such as traffic lights failing. and as you ve just been hearing, in saudi arabia at least 1,301 people died during this year s hajj pilgrimage to mecca the most devastating example of the impact of extreme heat. no surprise, then, that this is changing the way we choose to travel something that is particularly important for those countries who rely on tourism to support their economies. joining me now is andrew holden professor of environment and tourism at goldsmiths university of london. good morning to you. no good morning. so this issue of extreme heat is not new to us. we saw last summer many parts of europe experiencing very high temperatures, wildfires impacting tourism. to what extent are we changing our choices when it comes to where we h