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LONDON: Three people in the UK have been charged for supporting the banned group Palestine Action.

The trio, two women and a man, were detained on July 5 at a protest in Westminster in London. Twenty-six other people were also arrested.

Jeremy Shippam, 71, Judit Murray, 71, and Fiona Maclean, 53, were charged under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000. They will appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on Sept. 16.

Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK after activists broke into a Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton in England in June this year, causing £7 million ($9.38 million) of damage to two military aircraft.

Support for or membership of a banned group in the UK is a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Despite the ban, the group is challenging its terrorism designation after the High Court ruled on July 30 it should be reviewed.

Around 500 people, meanwhile, are set to attend a demonstration in support of Palestine Action in London on Saturday.

It follows previous demonstrations after the group’s proscription in London, Manchester and several other major UK cities, at which more than 200 people were arrested.

The group Defend Our Juries, which is helping to organize the protest, said attendees would hold placards reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said: “Defend Our Juries has confirmed that 500-plus people have committed to holding ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ signs on Saturday in central London, as part of the Lift the Ban campaign, to end the proscription of Palestine Action.

“Since the threshold for the conditional commitment requirement has been reached, the action will go ahead as planned.”

Dominic Murphy, head of Counter Terrorism Command at the Metropolitan Police, said: “Anyone who displays public support for Palestine Action, a proscribed organisation, is committing an offence under the Terrorism Act and can expect to be arrested and, as these charges show, will be investigated to the full extent of the law.

“These charges relate to three people arrested in central London on 5 July. We are also planning to send case files to the Crown Prosecution Service for the other 26 people arrested on the same day.

“I would strongly advise anyone planning to come to London this weekend to show support for Palestine Action to think about the potential criminal consequences of their actions.”

PARIS: The third-hottest July worldwide ended a string of record-breaking temperatures, but many regions were devastated by extreme weather amplified by global warming, the European climate monitoring service said Thursday.

Heavy rains flooded Pakistan and northern China; Canada, Scotland and Greece struggled to tame wildfires intensified by persistent drought; and many nations in Asia and Scandinavia recorded new average highs for the month.

"Two years after the hottest July on record, the recent streak of global temperature records is over," Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

"But that does not mean climate change has stopped," he said. "We continue to witness the effects of a warming world."

As in June, July showed a slight dip compared to the preceding two years, averaging 1.25 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) era.

2023 and 2024 warmed above that benchmark by more than 1.5C, which is the Paris Agreement target set in 2015 for capping the rise in global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

That deceptively small increase has been enough to make storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather events far more deadly and destructive.

"We continued to witness the effect of a warming world in events such as extreme heatwaves and catastrophic floods in July," Buontempo said.

Last month, temperatures exceeded 50C in the Gulf, Iraq and -- for the first time -- Turkiye, while torrential rains killed hundreds of people in China and Pakistan.

In Spain, more than a thousand deaths were attributed by a public institute to the heat in July, half as many as in the same period in 2024.

The main source of the CO2 driving up temperatures is well known: the burning of oil, coal and gas to generate energy.

"Unless we rapidly stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, we should expect not only new temperature records but also a worsening of impacts," Buontempo said.

Global average temperatures are calculated using billions of satellite and weather readings, both on land and at sea, and the data used by Copernicus extends back to 1940.

Even if July was milder in some places than in previous years, 11 countries experienced their hottest July in at least a half-century, including China, Japan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bhutan, Brunei and Malaysia, according to AFP calculations.

In Europe, Nordic countries saw an unprecedented string of hot days, including more than 20 days above 30C across Finland.

More than half of the land in Europe and along the Mediterranean basin experienced the worst drought conditions in the first three weeks of July since monitoring began in 2012, according to an AFP analysis of data from the European Drought Observatory (EDO).

In contrast, temperatures were below normal in North and South America, India and parts of Australia and Africa, as well as in Antarctica.

Last month was also the third-hottest July on record for sea surface temperatures.

Locally, however, several ocean records for July were broken: in the Norwegian Sea, in parts of the North Sea, in the North Atlantic west of France and Britain.

The extent of Arctic sea ice was 10 percent below average, the second lowest for a July in 47 years of satellite observations, virtually tied with the readings of 2012 and 2021.

Diminishing sea ice is a concern not because it adds to sea levels, but because it replaces the snow and ice that reflect almost all the Sun's energy back into space with deep blue ocean, which absorbs it.

Ninety percent of the excess heat generated by global warming is absorbed by the oceans.

In Antarctica, sea ice extent is the third lowest on record for this month.

"Human activities are causing the world to warm at an unprecedented rate," Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds, told AFP in commenting on the new data.

On top of the human-driven warming, he explained, there are year-to-year changes caused by natural phenomena, such as the El Nino -- a shift in wind patterns across the southern Pacific -- and volcanic activity that helped push global temperatures past the 1.5C threshold over the last two years.

"These variations are now reducing, dropping us back from the record-breaking temperatures," said Forster, who heads a consortium of 60 top scientists that track core changes in Earth's climate system.

"But the reprieve is only temporary," he added. "We can expect the the high records to be broken again in the near future."