Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service, coming to you live from London with me, Sean Lay. Welcome.

Let's go to Europe, first of all, where around the world as the temperature has risen, records have tumbled.

On Monday, New York's Central Park matched a high not recorded there since 1888. The next day,

Russia's hydrometeorological centre warned that temperatures in parts of Siberia will be eight or nine

degrees above the seasonal average. This weekend, western and southern parts of Europe are preparing

for a heat wave beginning much earlier in the summer than in previous years.

Europeans are sweltering under a heat dome, a high-pressure system,

which sits over land and traps hot air like a lid on a pot.

So what's it like in this particular melting pot?

We've asked three people to tell us.

First, Amy Kazmin, correspondent for the Financial Times in Rome,

where temperatures reached 37 degrees on Saturday.

I feel very sorry for the tourists that I know are in this city trying to see things like the Coliseum.

I can only imagine how miserable it must be to have waited a lifetime to come and see the wonders of

Rome and find yourself trying to see these things in this kind of heat.

As for us, my daughter is pressing me to take her on a little excursion to a beach and we're

planning to wait until the late afternoon so that as we're out there, it'll be getting cooler and we'll enjoy

the sea breeze and eat ice cream.

Bastien Roche, a technology professional, sent us this voice note from Paris.

What is quite funny is that we've seen more and more people come to the office because we have

aircon and like in Paris it's not super common to have

an aircon in your flat. Yesterday I was by the sand and I never seen that many people. I think

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