The novelist Sir Salman Rushdie has been taken off a ventilator and is now able to speak, two days after being repeatedly stabbed. We hear from a friend who defended him in court, and hid him in his home.

Also in the programme: Egypt's health ministry says forty-one people have been killed in a fire in a Coptic church in Giza; and we report from southwest France, where firefighting services are being pushed as never before by the summer wildfires.

(Image: Salman Rushdie at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England / Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)