the un has been very critical time. the un has been very critical on his stance on torture recently. lamb busting him for that. you can see tillerson is in a very difficult position with the un on one side and trump on the other. you would not wa nt trump on the other. you would not want that. tillerson will be responding to diplomatic pressure from allies, people who will have been saying to him in the last couple of weeks, you have to make some distinction here or people will feel theyjust cannot work for america if the president speaks for america if the president speaks for america on these issues. a word about the daily mail front page. this is not the only paper to cover this. best heart drugs or distractions. a new monthly injection could save thousands of lives. after new look at a health story and you are sceptical that this one does seem to have a lot of substance. a report publicised today in barcelona at a big health conference. looking at what few details i have seen, it is as you say a very big report, four years long, 10,000 patients. each of whom had had a heart attack. apparently

the point is that if you have had a heart attack you are likely to have another within the next 45 years. this drug seems to have cut the risk 01’ this drug seems to have cut the risk or cut the number of heart attacks that patients had significantly. there are two causes of heart attacks, and statins deals with both of them. inflammation and cholesterol. cholesterol you can treat and people know how to treat it but this was those who had some sort of information. certainly look significant. as you said, we are slightly set article about the stories. significant? expensive too. whereas statins across the uk £400 a year, this is estimated to cost a a year. until that price drops, probably not something ordinary patients can access. on that note, time has beaten us. thank you both, thatisit time has beaten us. thank you both, that is it for the papers the south. thank you daisy and tim,

you'll both be back at half 11 for another look at the stories making the news tomorrow. coming up next — meet the author. 0n the cover of sam bourne's latest thriller, to kill the president, it says this: "the unthinkable has happened. "the united states has elected a volatile demagogue as president." well, readers may suspect that they know what's coming, but of course, we don't know who he is. he has no name in the book. just that there's enough danger for some of those around him to have to face a troubling moral dilemma. well, sam bourne is the guardian columnist jonathan freedland. he has long since outed himself as the author. welcome. some of your readers may find the setup in this

novel eerily familiar. does that make it easier or harder to write? well, in some ways harder, because this is meant to be and is avowedly fiction. it's an alternative present. but of course the reader is going to have recent and current events in their mind. so you have to sort of ride that and use that to your advantage, and yet also insert things that will be wholly unfamiliar, so the heroine of the story, the character called maggie costello who has appeared in a couple of earlier sam bourne novels, irish—born, very idealistic, principled woman who worked for the previous president, who was this widely admired figure around the world, and now has held on, working for this much more unpopular president. so she is at the centre of it, she is a wholly fictional character. but the universe around her, i'm aware that people are going to be bringing things to it that they know from the real world. well, you know perfectly well what they're going to bring to it. they're going to say this is donald trump. now, i mean, is it donald trump, or is it not donald trump? so, the president is never named.

he's a fictional creation. and i think that's important, because you wouldn't be able to set all these other hares running. so, you know, for example, at the centre of the story are these two lieutenants to the president, loyal partisans for their party, who find themselves frankly appalled by the man they are serving, and come to the conclusion that he's a menace not only to america but to the world. and those people, the backgrounds they have, in this novel, they're the defence secretary, they're the chief of staff. they don't map onto the real defence secretary, the real chief of staff. so what you're doing is creating this alternative universe, this alternative world. but at the centre of it obviously are going to be things that people will find familiar. we don't want to give away the whole plot, and the central moral dilemma that unfolds as the story goes on. but you can set the scene for us at the beginning, i think, without spoiling it for anyone. yes, so the book opens with the president launching a nuclear strike against north korea. remember i wrote this book many months ago, before any of the current events had happened, but that is a quirk of the timing. he launches a nuclear strike against north korea and china

after a war of words with the north korean leader, and that is narrowly averted really by the ingenious intervention of quite a low—level person who narrowly averts that strike. it's a fascinating moment, because it gets us into the whole question of whether there's a machine that is irrevocable once it starts, or whether it can be stopped. one of the fascinating things of parts of the research i did for this book was about the nuclear authority of the president. it turns out it's the least checked power of all the powers and american president has. an american president has. the right to, or the power to launch a nuclear assault, one that could end civilisation and the human race, there's no restraint. there's no filter on him. once he or she decides to do it, they simply have this aide, this quite low—level military aide who walks around with a briefcase manacled to the wrist which has the nuclear codes in it. he gets the codes from the aide, calls up a number in the pentagon war room, simply confirms his identity using those codes, and then

he can give the order. the defence secretary is not there, the head of the army is not there, the chairman of the joint chiefs is not there. it's up to the president. he's a nuclear monarch with this power, and that is what sets this plot, this story, in motion. but what the plot then explores is whether the military mind and the political mind has the flexibility to say in those circumstances, we must do something. even if it is something morally as difficult and dangerous as the launching of a nuclear strike itself. well, that's right. at the heart of this book, i hope, are a series of these kind of moral dilemmas for the players involved. figures in the white house. the president himself is actually more or less offstage for most of this novel. it's about the people who serve him, and the dilemmas they wrestle with. and there's one right at the very beginning, can you thwart a presidential order? what will it take? but from then on, the even larger dilemma, which confronts the two people who work for him, and which is discovered by our heroine, maggie costello, is that they begin to conclude that the man that they have taken an oath to serve

is a menace to the world. and there they begin to wrestle with, where does your responsibility lie in that situation? as a good patriot, is it your duty to serve the commander—in—chief, or should you, if you really have concluded he's a danger to the world, seek to remove him? and of course they explore the legal avenues first. in a sense, we've been there before in the nixon presidency, because although what was at stake was simply the clinging on to power, it wasn't the possibility of a nuclear strike or anything like that, at least as far as we know. but there was a question raised among some of those around him as to whether his travails and horror of the position he was in had unbalanced him. and if it had, was there anything anyone could do about it? well, it's absolutely right. and i'm glad you mention it, partly because the characters themselves refer to nixon and the so—called madman strategy. this is where he deputed his secretary of state, henry kissinger, to go round the world saying to world leaders, nixon's a bit crazy, you know.

he's just crazy enough to do this. which nixon encouraged this strategy, because he believed it would make them fear him more, and therefore accommodate him with peace in vietnam and that kind of thing. but i'm particularly glad you mentioned nixon, partlyjust because it comes from that era of the early ‘70s where not only was nixon and watergate going on, but it spawned the conspiracy political thriller. and, you know, i had no role in this, but one thing i love about this book is the cover. and the cover is absolutely a ‘705—era sort of cover design. it could be day of the jackal or three days of the condor, which were thrillers i grew up with and loved. and the nixon era really incubated an atmosphere where people were ready to believe that the president was somehow a danger, and therefore buy into those kinds of scenarios. some people will think either looking at this book, just looking at the cover, or reading it, that this is a bit rich. you can't bear donald trump, so you've written a book portraying him, albeit through an unnamed president in these pages, as somebody who is about to blow up the world. and they say, come on, if you believe that, write it,

put your name on it and answer questions, rather than suggesting that it can happen. how do you answer that? well, jonathan freedland is denouncing trump regularly in the column i write as a newspaper journalist, i'm sort of commentating on that. this was a different issue that i wanted to wrestle with, which was this question, the what if question. you know, i think all thriller writers will say, the two most useful words are "what if". you take what's going on in the real world, and then you knock it on a stage, and you think, what if this then happened? and the "what if" for me was, what if you served somebody like that, and you yourself, not a hostile guardian journalist, but you yourself, a loyal member of the president's party who had sworn the oath to serve him, you yourself came to the conclusion he was dangerous? that's what i wanted to explore, and i think, you know, the day of the jackal, and i've been very pleased a couple of critics have compared it to that, was about a named president in charles de gaulle. jeffrey archer wrote shall we tell the president?, in which teddy kennedy was imagined in an assassination scenario.

so i think there is a kind of sub—genre that does this. but to me, the reality and this novel are separate. they may be separate, but the key to a novel like this, you mentioned day of the jackal, you mentioned three days of the condor, the key is that the reader has to believe that this is not fantasy, that it could come to this. if they don't believe that, they'd probably give up after five pages. yeah, i think there is something in that. and i think one of the things that's interesting getting the reader reaction so far, and it's not been very long, is this idea that this seems plausible, that the danger, the sort of stakes that are in their mind as a reader, are because they look at the real world, and they think, a scenario not the same as this, not identical to this, is plausible. and i think one of the things that the big surprises that have confronted you and me as journalists this year is they've made all kinds of scenarios that would once have seemed fantastical now seem plausible. and therefore i think it makes readers able to regard a story like this as plausible, because the real world itself

is throwing up fantastical things all the time. jonathan freedland, sam bourne, author of to kill the president, thank you very much. thank you. it's been a fine sunday across much of the british isles, plenty of sunshine. 0ur weather watcher pictures coming in, few with bluer sky than this. this is the picture from cornwall. some cloud scotland, northern ireland rather cloudy. into parts of north—west england and wales as well. for the rest of england and wales, plenty of very warm sunshine. a fine evening. we will see overnight some outbreaks of rain running from west to east across mostly northern scotland. the breeze continues to freshen up. a fair amount of cloud and northern ireland, but clear skies in england and wales. could be one or two mist and fog patches. temperatures lower in rural spots. everyone keeps the fine

weather for monday. not everyone keeps the fine weather for monday. fine weather from the atlantic, england and wales most favoured for the warm sunshine on monday. scotland and northern ireland will take a band of rain through the day, quite windy as well. not much rain into eastern scotland, it will brighten up as it clears. one or two showers in north—west scotland. at 4pm into the afternoon, the rain clearing at this stage. a blustery day, outbreaks of rain, not amounting to much in east scotland but wet for a time in glasgow. rain moving into belfast as well. a bit of cloud ahead. cloudy at times in west england and wales, where as east wales and the rest of england will have long, sunny spells. it will feel even warmer than today. some spots in south—west england could even get to 29 degrees. some spots in south—east england could even get to 29 degrees. everything above 28.3 and it will be the warmest bank holiday in late august on record. keep watching that number.

monday evening, a bit of cloud and rain filtering towards northern england and wales. later in the evening, and on tuesday that band of cloud moves south. hardly any rain left once it gets to the south—east. still quite warm. a breezy day in scotland and northern ireland, sunshine and showers, heavy in western scotland. an area of low pressure moves to england and wales, but friday the high pressure will build back. wednesday we could see some outbreaks of rain affecting mostly parts of england and wales. keep watching for more details. thursday and friday, sunny spells. this is bbc news. i'm julian worricker. "beyond anything experienced." that is the assessment of the us national weather service as thousands of people are rescued from rising floodwaters in texas. we just prayed a lot, praised wejust prayed a lot, praised god, and we are very thankful. a suspected chemical leak affects

at least 50 people in the eastbourne area. police warn residents and visitors to avoid the beaches and stay indoors. some of the victims of yesterday's m1 crash have been named. they include minibus driver cyriacjoseph, who was 52. a change in policy on brexit. labour says britain should stay in the single market and customs