When a coalition of “clerics, leftists, students, nationalists and secular intellectuals” launched the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they were united less by a shared vision than “a shared rejection” of the Shah’s rule, said Reza Aslan in The New York Times. And as Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati observe in “Stolen Revolution”, “egalitarian ideals and immense hopes” were snuffed out as “the religious regime hunted, expelled and jailed its former allies”.

That is the story of this “quietly devastating” book, which charts Iran’s transformation over the past half century into a “mafia state”. The authors tell it through the lives of six Iranians, including a revolutionary ideologue, a tech entrepreneur, and two women at the forefront of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

“The result is one of the most perceptive books on modern Iran in years, capturing not only the machinery of repression, but the fragile forms of hope that survive beneath it.”

Once in power, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, swiftly “abandoned his revolutionary promises”, said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. All talk of prosperity ended (our saints “gave up their lives for Islam, not for economics”, he intoned). Conservative dress codes were enforced, and a new military police force – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – was entrusted with preserving the revolution.

While the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) marked a more liberal, “reformist era”, the hardliners regained control when he left office and have ruled the country ever since.

“Stolen Revolution” is both an “unwavering account of the regime’s absurdities” and a “meticulously researched primer on modern Iran”.

Parts of it will “move some readers to tears”, said Justin Marozzi in The Times. The authors describe the fates of Kosar Eftekhari and Rozhin Yousefzadeh, who joined the “protests that erupted after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini”, a young woman arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. “Eftekhari had her right eye shot out by a smirking plain-clothes officer”; Yousefzadeh was thrown into the “filthy and dangerous Qarchak women’s prison”.

It was ostensibly in the hope of ending such tyranny that the US and Israel launched their war against the regime. This “blistering” book suggests that, on the contrary, the conflict will only entrench its most hardline elements further – and that it will prove to be “yet another US blunder in the Middle East, [and] one that will cost Iranians, and the rest of us, dearly”.

“Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” said Donald Trump on social media after he announced the signing of an interim peace deal with Iran on Sunday. Under the agreement – which Iran acknowledged included a 60-day negotiating period for a final deal – the president said that following retrieval of mines, there would be a “toll free opening” of the Strait of Hormuz.

But many of the finer details remain “unclear”, said The Guardian. There are questions over the “exact timing of the reopening of the maritime route, who will oversee safe passage and whether any conditions will be applied”.

Financial markets have welcomed the announcement, but further volatility could yet hit people’s pockets.

Have oil prices changed?

The price of oil fell to about $83 (£62) per barrel following Sunday’s announcement, its “lowest since the early days of the war”. Then on Tuesday it dipped below $80. In February, before the first missiles struck Iran, each barrel cost around $73. The price peaked at around $120 at the height of the conflict.

Prices are expected to fall in the wake of a prolonged ceasefire, and there are “real grounds for optimism”, said Politico. Damage to oil-specific infrastructure has been “limited”, meaning it could take “as little as six weeks to resume outflows”.

“So that’s the energy crisis sorted, right?” Not so fast.” A combination of damage to wider infrastructure and the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz has meant roughly 12 million fewer barrels of oil have been produced each day. And they “won’t magically reappear on the market even if the pact holds”.

Will this continue?

The “first big test” of the deal will be whether shipping companies will have enough “confidence” to return the use of the strait to pre-war levels, said The New York Times. If successful, this will free the 250 tankers and 330 cargo ships trapped in the Gulf, according to the BBC, and transport oil around the world. Oil and gas producers in the Gulf nations would then need to re-establish “wells, refineries and other infrastructure”.

Even if all of that were to materialise, European and Asian countries who have historically depended on oil from the region “will face a long wait”. Processing oil takes considerable time. “It is unlikely that the prices of gasoline, diesel and other fuels will return to pre-war levels anytime soon.”

What about inflation?

Despite air fares “surging” and fuel costs “tipping higher”, UK inflation remained at 2.8% in May, said The Independent. This was a “surprise” to economists, who had widely predicted a rise to 3% and “perhaps even beyond” due in part to the war in Iran.

Remaining at this level could imply that the “cost-of-living squeeze will not play out as badly as had been anticipated” earlier this year, even if the “Iran war sent energy costs spiralling”. However, prices are set to rise again later in 2026, leaving savers to make sure their investments are earning an interest rate “well above the rate of inflation”.

What does this mean for consumers?

Food prices in the UK look to be rising more slowly. Should the Strait of Hormuz open freely, fertiliser, which has “soared in costs” and put pressure on farmers, could fall substantially, said the BBC. Jet fuel has already seen a “small fall in price”, with Northwest Europe jet fuel trading at $1,033 (£780) per tonne, compared with $831 pre-conflict and around $1,840 at its peak.

How will businesses be affected?

Beneath the “encouraging headlines” about inflation control, there is a “hidden crisis for businesses”, said The Telegraph. The Iran war triggered one of the largest energy shocks in history, meaning businesses were “swallowing soaring costs to spare shoppers”.

“Input rises” for producers climbed by “8.7% year on year in May”, larger than the 7.9% in April and the highest in more than three years. On the bright side, this means the economy may avoid a dreaded “wage-price spiral”, but conversely lower margins could lead to increased pressure on the employment market.

The internet is awash with jokes about the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which is now riddled with algae.

The Trump administration spent more than $14 million (£10.5 million) draining the pool and painting the bottom “American flag blue” in time for the 250th anniversary of US independence. The president had described the reflecting pool – the scene of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech – as “filthy” and “dirty”, and promised to transform it into something “beautiful”. Instead, residual algae has “proliferated” in warm weather, said The Guardian, turning the pond “Wicked” green.

But beyond the schadenfreude, toxic algae blooms are a worldwide phenomenon that can harm humans and devastate marine life. And as the climate crisis warms the water, the problem is growing.

‘Underwater phantom’

“Algal blooms are a rapid, explosive growth of algae,” said pharmacology researcher Ian Musgrave on The Conversation. Blue-green algae, known as cyanobacteria, naturally occur in inland waters, estuaries and the sea. They often contain multiple species, some of which produce toxins. The “bewildering variety” can cause many effects in humans, from nausea and skin irritation to increased asthma symptoms and even liver failure. Those that don’t produce toxins can “suffocate fish” by damaging the gills and reducing oxygen.

For a year now, a toxic algal bloom in South Australia has had “devastating effects” on wildlife. “At my local beach, walks were a sad parade of dead sea life,” said Musgrave.

Since last March, algae have “flared at hotspots” along the coastline, causing “stinging eyes, coughing, rashes, headaches and breathing difficulties” among surfers, said ABC. One swimmer was hospitalised with severe gastroenteritis. “It was like razor blades in my gut,” he said. “I was rolling around on the floor in the emergency room, coughing and spewing blood.”

Along the “jagged coastline”, it has become “an underwater phantom”, and researchers are “not entirely sure why”, said The New York Times. Beachgoers are “horrified by the dead animals washing ashore”. Since February last year, a crowdsourced platform has recorded more than 100,000 instances of dead sea life. “It was literally just like an underwater bushfire,” said a recreational fisherman.

Recent citizen science data suggests the bloom affected nearly 8,000 square miles. Last October, state agency scientists estimated the algae had impacted about a third of South Australia’s coasts. The psychological effect is enormous: in a survey of South Australians last July, nearly 70% said “they were repeatedly thinking about the bloom”, said researcher Brianna Le Busque, from Adelaide University. Some compared seeing the washed-up marine life to “the death of a loved one”.

‘Visible from space’

Harmful algal blooms stalk shores far beyond Australia. In Southern California last year an “unprecedented, multi-toxin event” killed hundreds of seabirds, sea lions and dolphins, said the Public Policy Institute of California.

Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, the UK’s largest freshwater lake, has also been blighted by blue-green algae for years. This “majestic landscape of water and sky”, the inspiration for Seamus Heaney’s prize-winning poetry, is “choking on recurring toxic algal blooms”, said The Guardian.

The algae feed on high levels of nutrients in the water, mainly from agriculture (farm run-off, fertiliser and livestock waste), as well as “inadequate wastewater treatment”. Global warming has also increased the temperature of the lough, encouraging the abundant blooms. Last year, there were 243 detections of cyanobacteria growths, according to Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs: a record.

In some places, the green sludge – “so widespread it is visible from space”, said The Guardian – forms “patterns and swirls redolent of Gustav Klimt”. But far from picturesque, the blooms “coat the surface, kill wildlife, unleash stenches and make the lake all but unusable”. The impact on wildlife and tourism is “incalculable”.

“Lough Neagh is dying in front of our eyes,” said Claire Hanna, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Images of fish and eels gasping for life on the surface are not just shocking – they are a stark warning of total ecological collapse.”

While Republicans have generally been associated with deregulation since the 1970s and 1980s, President Donald Trump has overseen a stratospheric rise in deregulatory policies during his second term. The White House argues these deregulations are about eliminating the red tape of Washington, but critics are worried about Trump’s rolling back of protections.

‘Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation’ executive order

Just days after Trump took office again, the White House enacted perhaps its most consequential policy regarding deregulation. Trump’s Executive Order 14192, titled “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” established a 10-to-1 rule for federal agencies; it ordered that anytime an agency enacted a “new regulation, it shall identify at least 10 existing regulations to be repealed,” according to the order. The goal of the rule is to “alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people.”

The EO, beyond establishing deregulatory guidelines, “also requires more upfront disclosure of forthcoming rules,” said Forbes. The order led to a slew of actions being taken by federal agencies and also stated that all new regulations should have no cost. This is “effectively impossible to accomplish when issuing any regulation at all, as nearly every regulatory change represents some level of cost to come into compliance,” said the Economic Policy Institute.

Global warming deregulation

Trump has worked to repeal several factors of the country’s standing on climate policy, most notably the repeal of a 2009 finding, which “focused on emissions from motor vehicles but later regulations of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations are based on it as well,” said the Brookings Institution. The repeal removed a “key federal tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving the United States toward a greener economy.”

White House officials say that “overturning the regulation will save more than $1 trillion and will help cut the price of energy and transport,” said BBC News. Environmentalists don’t seem to buy this argument. The deregulation is “going to force Americans to spend more money, around $1.4 trillion in additional fuel costs to power these less efficient and higher polluting vehicles,” Peter Zalzal from the Environmental Defense Fund told BBC News. At least 24 states are suing the Trump administration over the 2009 repeal.

Workplace safety

Throughout its first year back in office, the Trump administration aimed to “rewrite or repeal more than 60 ‘obsolete’ workplace regulations, ranging from minimum wage requirements for home healthcare workers and people with disabilities to standards governing exposure to harmful substances,” said The Associated Press. The changes also applied to workers in other high-risk industries, including those in mines, and would “limit the government’s ability to penalize employers if workers are injured or killed while engaging in inherently risky activities.”

Many labor rights organizations lambasted the move. The deregulation “indicates a readiness to compromise the health and lives of workers, especially Black and brown workers who are overrepresented in the blue-collar industries that would be impacted, in pursuit of corporate profits,” said the Center for Law and Social Policy. Despite the pushback, the government maintains the slashes will “cut regulatory burdens, spur job creation and fuel economic opportunity for American workers and businesses,” said the Department of Labor in a press release.

Commercial fishing

Trump, in another bit of climate-related deregulation, signed a proclamation to restore commercial fishing “within three of America’s marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean, rolling back protections for areas that are considered pristine ocean ecosystems,” said USA Today. The proclamation expanded the legal commercial fishing area to “about half a million square miles in the Pacific,” with the White House saying the move is “aimed at boosting the U.S. fishing industry and lowering seafood prices for consumers.”

The deregulation has many worried about fish health, especially because Trump is also a big promoter of ocean mining. The move also came as the Trump administration shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which involved the “decommissioning of a vast network of ocean floor sensors that collect data on marine ecosystems, ocean currents and global climate data,” said Truthout. The White House is ultimately “ developing the ocean for offshore oil drilling and mining — basically, as a gas station and a garbage dump,” ocean policy expert David Helvarg told Truthout.

Nuclear power

The White House also turned its crosshairs toward some of the alleged red tape around nuclear energy. The Trump administration “overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public,” said NPR. These changes were implemented to “accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs.”

Energy experts cautioned that nuclear deregulation comes with safety risks. The White House is “taking a wrecking ball to the system of nuclear safety and security regulation oversight that has kept the U.S. from having another Three Mile Island accident,” Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told NPR. The nuclear free rein is “yet another example of the Trump administration's push to accelerate nuclear energy, albeit through unconventional methods,” said Reason magazine.

Financial services

Trump has taken aim at the banking industry as a major arm of his deregulatory platform. With Trump’s authority, financial services regulators are “undertaking the biggest overhaul of bank supervision since the 2008 financial crisis,“ said Reuters. These regulators argue that less stringent policies are needed because banks have “become too preoccupied with processes and pursuing minor issues, and should focus on core financial risks.”

The president himself has also “personally complained that banks have hidden behind reputational risk management to deny services to conservatives, claims they deny,” said Reuters. Financial experts say rolling back these regulations has weakened the banking industry’s power to “police problems that do not inherently amount to material financial risks, but which may eventually ⁠lead to problems — such as control lapses, governance or other process issues.”

Governmental powers

All of the deregulations point to a general withering of the federal government. The White House’s “structural deregulation” approach “aims to compromise the capacity of the federal government to fulfill its core functions,” said Lawfare. Within weeks of retaking office, Trump went on a federal deregulation push “more sweeping in scale and scope than what we anticipated and far beyond what the president tried to do in his first term.”

Trump’s “structural deregulation” is “distinct from standard, ‘run-of-the-mill’ deregulation that aims to weaken or rescind certain agency rules or policies but falls short of a wholesale attack on agency capacity,” said Lawfare. Rather, Trump’s agenda includes “regulatory rollbacks that weaken health, safety, financial or labor standards.” Trump’s executive orders have also played a role, most notably Executive Order 14215, which applies the “White House regulatory review process to independent agencies,” said The Regulatory Review, a change that has not historically been implemented.

Summer means it is probably going to be hot where you are. Or at least some version of “warmer than it often is.” With rising temperatures come slipping appetites. You still want to eat, but you want to do so in a different manner. These restaurants across the country specialize, in part, in summer-ready dishes. Bring yourself and your appetite, whatever that happens to look like when the mercury skyrockets.

Handroll Bar Rolling, New York City

It’s all there in the name: This Manhattan restaurant specializes in hand rolls, served from a long bar at which you sit and the rolls are, well, rolled. At Handroll Bar Rolling, choose from a set of 4, 5, 6 or 7 seafood rolls, or 4 or 5 vegan rolls. Should you crave a more bespoke meal, choose from one of the 20 a la carte roll options, such as eel with avocado, blue crab, scallop and shiitake. There is sublime satisfaction in having each step of your meal waved your way, in handheld progression.

Honest Restaurant, Houston

In the proper hands, a chain restaurant is a glorious institution. Honest was born in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the northern Indian state of Gujarat. It has since exploded and landed in oodles of states across the U.S. and its menu reads like a greatest hits compilation from across the subcontinent. This time of year, you likely want chaat, those deliriously snackable nibbles born in Bombay. Whichever you choose — whether its bhel puri with its puffed rice base or dahi puri and its thin, crackling edible cups — the chaat will be a riot of textures, chile heat and sweet chutney lift.

Hue Oi, Fountain Valley, California

The menu at this Vietnamese restaurant in Orange County serves the Viet dishes that Americans know best. You’re here, though, for Hue Oi’s Hue dishes from the central region of Vietnam. To skitter among a variety of recipes, order a selection of banh, a genre of savory snacks that includes banh beo chen (tiny saucers of steamed rice cakes topped with ground shrimp and fried shallots) and banh khoai (small crackly crepes stuffed with bean sprouts and two kinds of pork). Because you didn’t really come all this way for egg rolls and pho, did you?

Kokkari Estiatorio, San Francisco

You could order a main course at this nearly 30-year-old restaurant near San Francisco’s downtown. At Kokkari, though, the mezethes (small plates) section is stacked: More than 15 wee dishes cover every craving you might have. Some, like the gigantes (monster-sized white beans with tomato sauce, feta and rivers of olive oil), are evergreen staples. Others are hyper-seasonal, such as kalamboki (roasted corn with feta butter) and aginares souvlaki (artichoke skewers with bell pepper, red onion and a yogurt side). Choose your weapon. Then select another — and on you go.

Kunjip, San Jose, California

When the weather scorches, zero in on numbers 6, 7 and 8 at Kunjip. Saucy, spicy sweet-potato-starch noodles served with cucumber, radish, Korean pear, sesame oil and boiled egg are the base for bibim naeng myun (number 6 with sliced beef) and hwe naeng myun (number 8 with marinated raw skate). Or go light and slurpable with mul naeng myun (number 7), in which those same noodles and accompaniments are set in a light beef broth loaded with ice. Soup can indeed be hot-weather refreshment.

Malagón Mercado y Tapería, Charleston, South Carolina

Tortilla española, jamón serrano, queso de Valdeón — you go to a restaurant in the States that claims to traffic in tapas, and you want the classics. Malagón has them. But this small restaurant, with a Michelin star to boot, also knows how to be free-wheeling. There might be fried rabbit on the menu, or shrimp skewers with guindilla-pepper vinaigrette. A smashing drink menu loaded with vermouth and endless Spanish wines ensures your food will play so very nicely with its accompanying beverages.

SRV, Boston

“Cicchetti” are the Venetian notion of what we often know as tapas in the U.S.: diminutive bites crafted to be eaten alongside a drink or cocktail. SRV serves delightful pasta, salads and mains in a broad Italian idiom. Wander that way, if you must. But begin with the cicchetti. This time of year you might encounter crostini with duck prosciutto, stracciatella and cherry, fried rice balls with pickled green garlic and a lofty puree of whipped salt cod with black bread. After a couple drinks, you may find you have worked your way through every cicchetti available.

Tanta, Chicago

Oh, the zippy luxury of Peruvian fish dishes. Like your raw seafood in chunks? How about the nikkei ceviche with tuna, tamarind leche de tigre and cucumber, scallions, avocado, daikon, sesame seeds? Prefer your fish sliced? Consider the apaltado, with salmon, tapioca cracker, chile oil, cherry tomatoes and choclo (large kernels of starchy field corn). Tanta is beloved in Chicago. Your meal here will reveal why.

Relaxed scientific protocols and standards within the Department of Health and Human Services have led to an increase in clinics offering experimental stem cell treatments to parents of children with severe autism. Despite being technically unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration, parents are shelling out tens of thousands for treatments that claim to improve language and social skills and reduce problem behaviors.

Operating ‘beyond the bounds of FDA approval’

Although there is a lack of FDA approval and little evidence of its efficacy, stem cell treatments for autism are being steadily provided across the country. Children with autism “as young as 18 months old” are getting “unapproved stem cell treatments” at clinics in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, “part of a growing market operating beyond the bounds of FDA approval,” said The Guardian.

The procedure involves sedating a child before administering intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, “commonly derived from human umbilical cords harvested at birth,” said The Guardian. Sometimes the doctors providing the treatment have “no scientific expertise in autism or child development.” Instead, they have “entered the booming stem cell sector,” billing the procedures as “regenerative medicine” for children, “some of whom have severe disabilities.”

As stem cell clinics “multiply across America,” they are “finding an influential ally in the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said The Guardian. Kennedy’s influence could lead to new policy, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist and unofficial watchdog of stem cell clinics, to the outlet. The FDA has not taken action in the last 18 months. This could mean a “big change coming from the FDA very soon, backing off oversight of birth-related stem cells.”

Several clinics prominently cite an early Duke University study involving 25 autistic children that “suggested possible improvements following umbilical cord stem cell infusions,” said Trial Site News. But a “larger and more rigorous follow-up trial” involving 180 children failed to “demonstrate significant improvements in core autism symptoms compared with placebo controls.” Similar results emerged from a “placebo-controlled study conducted by Sutter Health.” This has led researchers to conclude that the “evidence does not currently support routine use of stem cell therapies for autism outside formal clinical research settings.”

Up until now, Americans seeking stem cell therapies for autism have looked abroad to places where they are approved and federally regulated or operating in grey areas. That has fed a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry of “stem cell tourism” in places such as “Mexico and Panama” and “as far afield as Abu Dhabi,” said The Guardian.

But most European countries limit the use of stem cell injections to clinical trials, and they are not an approved treatment for autism. In January, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that stem cell therapy cannot be used as a clinical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, making it clear it is “not only unethical but amounts to medical malpractice,” said Indian network NDTV.

When ‘hope outpaces evidence’

The biggest lesson from this story is “not political,” said Trial Site News. “It is human.” Parents seeking out unapproved stem cell therapies are “not irrational.” Most are “navigating difficult realities” with “limited options and enormous responsibility.” The danger emerges when “hope outpaces evidence.” The appropriate response is “neither unquestioning enthusiasm nor reflexive dismissal” but rather “rigorous clinical research, transparent reporting, long-term safety monitoring and honest communication with families.”

After RFK promised to find a cure for autism last year, some people were “appalled and fearful,” clinical social worker Jennifer Cork said at Psychology Today. However, plenty of families whose children require substantial support were “relieved that someone in a position of power was finally talking about their struggles.” The issue is that these families “don’t need untried, expensive treatments.” They need “affordable therapies, respite care and adequate accommodations that they don’t have to fight for.” They also need Kennedy to “remember that autistic people are human beings, not lab rats.”

Infecting yourself with internal parasites doesn’t sound like the best way to feel better but scientists have “engineered” the genes of hookworms to deliver medicine – and “it’s just crazy enough to work”, said ZME Science.

US researchers have genetically modified hookworms to produce and secrete specific antibodies. This is a “first step” towards creating “living pharmaceutical factories” that can deliver therapeutic proteins “directly inside the host”, they said in their study, published in Nature Communications.

Internal leeches 

The hookworm has “spent millions of years perfecting how to assure long-term survival inside a human host, and how to get molecules out of its body and into ours”, said senior author Makedonka Mitreva, from Washington University in St Louis, on EurekAlert.

They are like an “internal leech”, infecting upwards of 400 million people globally, mostly in tropical regions, said LiveScience. As they latch on to the inner wall of the gut to feed on blood, they release “anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant compounds to prevent the body from flushing them out”.

Scientists have already noted that this “cocktail of compounds” produced naturally by hookworms could help treat some metabolic disorders. But the new study takes things further – by engineering in an extra molecule for the worm to secrete.

Mitreva and her team used CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert into a hookworm egg genome “a gene coding for an antibody known to counteract” the pufferfish poison tetrodotoxin, a lethal, weaponisable neurotoxin with no known commercial antidote. They then infected hamsters with the modified parasites, and samples taken later showed the hamsters had antibodies to tetrodotoxin circulating in their blood.

“It was like the perfect moment,” Mitreva told R&D World. Now “we can start embarking on hookworms being a two-in-one platform” because we’ve shown they “can not only deliver a drug, but produce that drug and deliver it”.

‘Internal allies’ 

The goal now is to use this technology on humans. In the future, we “could see these worms engineered to produce a variety of other medications and excrete them inside the human body”, said LiveScience. They could potentially provide long-term treatments for chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, or even protective treatments for military personnel exposed to chemical or biological threats. Mitreva’s study was, in fact, funded by the US Department of Defense with a view to developing a treatment for tetrodotoxin poisoning.

This is an “exciting” approach that “paves the way for all sorts of injection-free biologic drug delivery”, said ZME Science. It’s “tantalising” to think that “engineered hookworms could one day” be our “internal allies, providing continuous therapeutic benefits while living safely within a human host”.

‘Cry Baby’ by Vince Staples

★★★★

“Cry Baby is a cry for revolution, a challenge to do better,” said Kiana Fitzgerald in Consequence of Sound. A “brash, guitar-led” album from “one of the most adept rappers we have,” the record finds Vince Staples “aiming his ire at the long-established American way.” On the “tense” lead single, “Blackberry Marmalade,” he delivers a “brutal but necessary” repetition of the N-word while juxtaposing the wisdom of his nana with the violence he sees haters inflicting on Black America. Across the ensuing nine tracks, the Southern California native urges people of color to stand up, and while he’s always called out abuses of power, “it’s his genuine care for the future of this nation that makes him such a welcome voice.” The use of guitar, bass, and live drums proves “a compelling artistic shift,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. “Staples and his band pull from various offshoots of guitar-forward music,” suggesting the Black roots of rock in all forms, many of them discernible in the record’s “thwacking drums” and “viscous bass lines.” There may be hope for the nation he describes here. For now, though, “the American dream is just that: a dream.”

‘Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me’ by Kurt Vile

★★★

“As the title of the album makes clear, Kurt Vile is proud of his roots in the City of Brotherly Love,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. So much so that on “You Don’t Know Cuz It’s My Life,” he takes affectionate potshots at two of his heroes, Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen and Ontario’s Neil Young, for contributing to the soundtrack of the 1993 film Philadelphia. Eighteen years into a career of making rootsy indie rock, the War on Drugs co-founder has kept his songwriting fresh “by thinking small, and engaging with what is happening around him.” On this, his 10th solo studio album, “Vile seems less like a confessional songwriter than a cartographer of the mind, mapping the ways that our thoughts can wander from prosaic to profound and back again,” said Stuart Berman in Pitchfork. Think of him as “the world’s drowsiest rapper,” writing songs “steeped in his peculiar POV.” Meanwhile, his countrified guitar licks, often “dripping with melancholy,” convey the subtle heartbreak of his nomadic musician’s life. As “99th Song” and “Rock o’ Stone” reveal, all he wants is to get home and enjoy doughnuts with his wife and daughters.

‘Doctrine of Love’ by Jalen Ngonda

★★★

“Smooth, easy to digest, and impeccably crafted,” Jalen Ngonda’s second album of throwback R&B “looks set to be the perfect accompaniment for summer barbecues,” said Chris Connor in The Line of Best Fit. The lead single, “Anyone in Love,” was a top-20 U.K. hit for the Maryland-born, U.K.-based singer, and this “often exhilarating” collection of new songs “proves he is far from a one-hit wonder.” Compared with his 2023 debut album, it’s “perhaps not as fresh.” But his voice is “once again a delight throughout,” and every song comes across as a “joyous embrace” of his Motown and 1960s rock ’n’ roll influences. With “a knowing ache” in his “slightly scratchy” tenor voice, Ngonda “gives off a moonlighting factory-worker vibe,” said Andy Kellman in AllMusic. But the “sophisticated backing” includes horns, four background singers, and “ample strings.” On “I Can’t Ever Leave You,” Ngonda “switches from belting to crooning in one short line—‘You treat me like a dog does a shoe’—with rare poise and nuance.” And when he sings “You never wanted me” on the album’s closing track, “the emotion is powerful enough to make an empath tremble.”

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James Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man, reckons with the Alex Murdaugh murder case, which the poet, novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer covered for The New Yorker. Below, Lasdun names six great books about terrible happenings.

‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)

Garner’s life-affirming novels are rightly loved, but I have a special regard for her nonfiction account of the case of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his three young sons. Probing, self-searching, drily astute, it’s an extraordinary reckoning with the dark forces that erupt into ordinary lives. Buy it here.

‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)

Manchette drew on pulp and noir to create vehicles for grappling with serious societal issues. The result was a set of riveting political thrillers. Nada, about a group of 1970s radical leftists who plot to kidnap a U.S. ambassador, is his cynical but mind-blowing masterpiece. Buy it here.

‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1990)

In a sense, all of Janet Malcolm’s books are crime stories—needle-sharp forensic examinations of human folly—whether she’s writing about poets or psychologists or actual criminals. This one, a study of the treacherous relationship between a killer and the journalist he took into his confidence, is my favorite. Buy it here.

‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ by George V. Higgins (1970)

If this is the hardest of hard-boiled crime stories, it’s also one of the most unexpectedly moving. Higgins had a Dickensian eye and ear for the world he made his own—Boston’s seedy criminal underworld—and its denizens become tragic figures in his hands, none more so than the aging gun dealer Eddie Coyle. Buy it here.

‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)

I’m not a fan of horror, but this take on a venerable horror trope (I won’t give it away) rises to a Dostoyevskian philosophical brilliance as it entraps its two young innocents in the logic of pure evil. It was made into a very good Dutch film by George Sluizer (who remade it into a bad Hollywood film), but it is the short, utterly unsparing book that has always haunted me. Buy it here.

‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)

The great novels of the master himself tower over just about everything else. I’m inclined to think that this tumultuous passion play, about idealists warped into murderous criminals by their own ideals, is the greatest of them all. Buy it here.

‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett

“Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories?” asked Helen Schulman in The New York Times. Ann Patchett’s “intimate and entertaining” 10th novel “makes the strong case that there is.” The tale begins in high suspense, with 53-year-old Daphne and her husband, Jonathan, seemingly being stalked while visiting New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the stranger trailing them turns out to be Eddie, Daphne’s beloved former stepfather. She hasn’t seen him in over 40 years, and their chance reencounter brings her to tears. As the two reconnect over weeks, then months, fans of Patchett’s past novels will “wait in vain for the terror of Bel Canto or the thrills of State of Wonder,” said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. Instead, Whistler is “that loveliest of summer gifts, a story of reconciliation, of old affections renewed, of a family’s circumference enlarged.”

A novel both “radiantly intelligent” and “emotionally wrenching, Whistler is “the exquisite production of an author working at the height of her powers,” said Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. Patchett’s masterfully constructed story intertwines two timelines. In the present, Eddie, a book editor, charms everyone in Daphne’s circle, including her mom, who divorced him decades earlier. The other story thread reveals the cause of the family split: a car crash in which Eddie was in the driver’s seat and both he and 9-year-old Daphne were nearly killed. The two storylines are “intertwined in a way that builds tension, deepens character, and allows for unexpected discoveries,” including why the novel is named Whistler. And even when the characters grapple with heavy subjects, “Patchett’s touch is light, her humor delightful, her empathy generous and vibrant.” Without a doubt, the book is “a magnificent achievement” and “I think it’s her best novel yet.

To me, Whistler is “top-shelf comfort food, the literary equivalent of pricey ice cream,” said Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. Although “we almost care about these vanilla-bean people,” and almost care about their floral arrangements and champagne brunches, it’s “all so neat” and so untouched by lingering sorrows that it “often reads like a gratitude journal.” But there’s “a sly wit and sagacity” to Patchett’s writing that here has been “honed to perfection,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. As it explores family trauma and life’s transitory nature, Whistler proves “sweet but never sentimental, infinitely wise and suffused with love,” and it’s clear that some of its heft owes to Patchett drawing on events from her own life. “I don’t recommend consuming Whistler in one enormous gulp. I dipped in and out, savoring scenes, reflecting on them, occasionally shedding a tear. In other words, I didn’t want it to end.”

‘View From the East Wing: A Memoir’ by Jill Biden

Jill Biden’s best-selling new memoir repeats a very self-serving story, said Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal. Displaying a “mulish unwillingness” to face up to the evidence of her husband’s cognitive decline in 2024, she blames “Democratic elites” for robbing him of the shot he deserved to bounce back from his disastrous June 2024 debate performance and win a second presidential term. She admits he was so off that night that she worried he’d been drugged or was having a stroke. She even reports that she agreed when he afterward whispered to her, “I really f---ed up, didn’t I?” But she insists he remained fully capable of governing, campaigning, and beating a foe she detests, and the result is “a memoir that is at turns delusional, sappy, resentful, and—in a weirdly irresistible way—revelatory of the former first lady’s agitated state of mind.”

“The most charitable interpretation of Jill Biden’s book, particularly the parts dealing with her husband’s aging,” said Jake Tapper in CNN.com, “is that she’s having difficulty accepting what’s been happening to him for years.” Joe’s mental acuity, already visibly declining in 2024, has probably worsened. But she insists that he showed no signs of impairment that summer and that she’d have raised red flags if he had. Those claims are “very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.” And she can argue all she wants that Joe, at any age, would be a better president than our current leader. “But the choice wasn’t Trump vs. Biden. It was Trump vs. which Democrat would be best.”

“View From the East Wing says almost nothing of consequence,” said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Besides filling you in on, say, how many soups were served at a particular state dinner, “it follows all the regular hits for a former first lady’s memoir, reminding you that she’s a good mother and a faithful wife and a dedicated teacher.” But all of its talk about how she and Joe are good people who were doing their best reads like one of those Instagram posts you see from an acquaintance randomly reporting that she and her husband have weathered some storms but are still going strong. “It’s a woman defending her husband to an audience who didn’t ask.”

Mortgage rates that are high, or higher than they have been in recent memory, can be a real blocker for buyers and sellers. It may feel psychologically challenging to buy at a steeper rate than you would have gotten just a few years ago. And for sellers looking to exit one house for another, the same conundrum can apply.

But what if instead of getting a new mortgage, you could simply take over the current homeowner’s existing lower-rate loan? Though not common, this is possible through what is known as an assumable mortgage.

What is an assumable mortgage?

A type of home loan that “transfers the responsibility for the mortgage to a new person without changing the mortgage's terms,” said Experian. This means the seller takes on responsibility for repaying the loan’s remaining balance according to the previously agreed-upon repayment timeline and terms, notably including the existing mortgage rate.

Usually, when someone buys a house, they will apply for and take out a mortgage of their own, with the seller using the proceeds from the sale of the house to pay off the remaining balance on their mortgage. But with an assumable mortgage, “rather than starting over with a new 30-year mortgage at current market rates, the buyer essentially steps into the seller’s loan,” said Kiplinger.

What are the benefits of assuming a mortgage?

The most apparent benefit is the potential to get a loan at a lower rate. “If the seller purchased the home when rates were lower, you can get a better rate on an assumable loan than you’d be able to get on a new one,” said Bankrate. Plus, “when you assume a mortgage, you avoid some usual mortgage closing costs, including an origination fee.” Buyers will also have a shorter loan term, which can lead to savings over time.

On the seller’s side of things, if they have “an assumable mortgage with a relatively low rate, they may be able to draw more interested buyers and a higher sale price,” said Bankrate.

Are there any drawbacks to assumable mortgages?

Perhaps the most obvious caveat is that these mortgages are not very easy to come by. “Only about 6% of listings are eligible, and in most circumstances must either be an FHA, USDA or VA loan,” said Realtor.com. Conventional mortgages, the most common type of mortgage, are generally non-assumable. Further, “unless you’re inheriting an assumable mortgage, you’ll still need to qualify for the loan you want to assume,” said Bankrate.

Even if your loan is eligible and you do qualify, the option is not always worthwhile. For example, it is possible the “loan you’re taking on may not be large enough to cover the home’s current market value, which could leave you responsible for paying the difference,” said U.S. Bank. Alternatively, maybe the seller has built up significant equity in the home, in which case you will need to make a large payment upfront.

There can be downsides for sellers, too. Namely, the seller may “remain legally responsible for the mortgage even after the sale, unless the lender specifically releases them from the obligation,” said U.S. Bank.

The warm weather is finally here. With summer’s arrival comes a slew of concert tours to enjoy as the season’s live performances get underway.

Ariana Grande

Many hope for eternal sunshine throughout summer, and it appears Ariana Grande is one of them. Because the pop superstar has embarked on her “Eternal Sunshine” tour.

The venture, spanning North America and Europe, is in support of the “Wicked” actor’s prior two studio albums, and it may be the last chance to see Grande on a concert stage for a while. “I do know that I’m very excited to do this small tour, but I think it might not happen again for a long, long, long, long time,” Grande said last year on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. (through September)

A$AP Rocky

A$AP Rocky is one of the biggest names in rap and delighted fans when he released his first studio album in nearly eight years. Now he’s back on the road promoting that album with his “Don’t Be Dumb” tour.

The rapper is traversing the U.S. and Europe, and has revealed there is a difficult side of touring. “To go on tour, sometimes you got to quit drinking. You got to quit smoking. You got to get on a routine, get your breath work right,” the artist told Vibe. “There’s a lot of preparation that goes into it.” (through October)

BTS

There is no arguing that BTS is one of the world’s biggest bands, and the K-pop group’s loyal fans can now catch the group on the road during its “Ariang” world tour. The massive events, in support of BTS’ 2026 album of the same name, span seven continents over nearly an entire year and feature a “360-degree, in-the-round stage design — a first for a K-pop stadium tour,” said concert promoter Live Nation. The “immersive setup places the audience at the center of the experience while allowing for increased capacity at every venue.” (through March 2027)

Chris Stapleton

Few headliners have embarked on a concert tour as long as Chris Stapleton’s. The country icon’s “All American Road Show” tour began all the way back in 2017 and is finally coming to an end later this year.

In the time Stapleton has been touring, he’s released four studio albums and has performed at some of the world’s biggest venues, with guest stars including Willie Nelson and Imagine Dragons. Stapleton’s tour wrap-up comes as he “also celebrated the ten-year anniversary of his groundbreaking debut album, ‘Traveller,’ last year” said his website. (through October)

De La Soul

Hip-hop enthusiasts have a chance to see De La Soul live on its ongoing concert tour, with shows on several continents. The opportunity to attend one of these shows will surely be a thrill for fans of the legendary group, whose 1988 debut LP “3 Feet High and Rising” is considered one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever. But De La Soul has also undergone a metamorphosis in recent years, as in “many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: The duties have been reassessed,” and the “focus has shifted,” said NPR. (through October)

Doja Cat

Rapper and singer Doja Cat burst onto the scene more than a decade ago and has since become one of the biggest names in music. Now fans of her fifth LP, “Vie,” can hear her perform the songs live during her “Tour Ma Vie” in support of the 2025 studio album. The concerts, which play on all six inhabited continents, could be the last opportunity for fans to hear Doja Cat, at least for a bit. “I think I want to take three years off. I want to just do whatever,” the singer told Elle. (through December)

Foo Fighters

You can learn to fly across the country with the Foo Fighters during their ongoing “Take Cover” tour in support of the legendary rock band’s 12th LP, “Your Favorite Toy.” Wandering across four continents, the concerts mark a big change for the Foo Fighters: It is the band’s first live-performance series with new drummer Ilan Rubin, who was admittedly nervous about joining. Rubin did his “research, because, obviously, the band’s been around for so long,” the drummer told the Go with Elmo podcast last year, and a “lot of these songs have gone through different iterations over the years.” (through January 2027)

Olivia Dean

British singer Olivia Dean had her breakthrough last year with her second studio album, “The Art of Loving,” propelling her to international fame. So it seems natural for Dean to be making her way through the “The Art of Loving” tour, giving fans their first glimpse of the artist in a concert series.

At the shows, Dean’s followers can “expect a shared experience where everyone comes prepared to sing along and dance, a dose of fashion” and “songs she hasn’t performed live before,” said Elle. Performing live “has always been Dean’s favorite part of her artistry.” (through October)

Raye

If you’re looking for another British superstar, catch Raye when she performs alongside Bruno Mars on his “The Romantic” tour. It makes sense that Raye wouldn’t embark on a headlining tour of her own — because she just got through with one. The singer concluded her “This Tour May Contain New Music” tour earlier this year. But while people may understandably head to Bruno Mars’ concerts to see him perform, Raye is one of several big-name opening acts for Mars that you won’t want to miss. (through December)

Wiz Khalifa

Wiz Khalifa has maintained his status as one of the most well-known names in the rap game, and he’s joined forces with another superstar rapper, MGK. The duo is making their way across three continents on the “Lost Americana” tour.

While the concert series is officially MGK’s tour, Khalifa is billed as a co-headliner. If you can’t get to a live show, you can hear new music on the duo’s “Blog Era Boyz” mixtape, in which Khalifa and MGK “take it back to 2010 with nine tracks that channel the anything-goes spirit of the time,” said Apple Music. (through July)

‘Tech’s private subsea cables are a threat to everyone else’

Elisabeth Braw at the Financial Times

For “decades, the world’s undersea cables have been owned by various companies,” but now U.S. “tech giants are installing their own cables — primarily for their own data traffic,” says Elisabeth Braw. This “risks creating a two-tier system on the seabed and dangerous dependencies on America.” Traditional “cable owners will continue to transport general traffic, while hyperscalers will transport their own.” It’s “like asking locals to look after a road open to all while a few rich citizens operate their own.”

Read more

‘Pope Leo’s visit lays bare Spain’s tangled politics of faith and migration’

Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo at Al Jazeera

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain “exposed the tension between” Spanish politics and the “Church’s own teaching on migrants, war and human dignity,” say Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo. Leo’s “speech to the Spanish parliament” summoned a “Catholic tradition that measured power by its treatment of the vulnerable.” In a “country now convulsed by the politics of immigration, no one could miss what kind of politics that history was meant to indict.”

Read more

‘We are all looksmaxxers’

Renée Graham at The Boston Globe

“Famous or not, we are all, in our own ways, looksmaxxers,” says Renée Graham. The term “originated in the misogynistic bowels of social media, where young men believe that achieving their idea of physical perfection will attract more women.” But “even those who would never consider whacking their jawline or cheekbones with a metal tool still take what measures they deem necessary to look their best” such as “veneers for their teeth, hair transplants and weaves and increasingly available weight loss drugs.”

Read more

‘What the proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. means for Atlanta’

Jennifer Porst and Kate Fortmueller at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Paramount’s “proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery threatens to reverse Atlanta’s fortunes and prominent position in the media and cultural industry,” say Jennifer Porst and Kate Fortmueller. Beyond the “loss of corporate media jobs and the radical alteration of the physical spaces in Georgia,” consolidation “threatens the vibrant production culture and health of soundstages” that Atlanta “has been developing over the past 20 years.” It’s “time to pay more attention to monopolies, protect workers and challenge anti-consumer practices.”

Read more

The war against Iran upended the global economy and sent prices soaring. What happens now that a fragile peace has arrived?

Higher prices will “likely outlast the Iran war,” said The Associated Press. Fuel and food costs will come down slowly, airline tickets will stay pricey, and shipping costs will remain elevated as supply chain kinks are repaired after the Strait of Hormuz is reopened. There is a “good deal of uncertainty about how the reopening will unfold,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, to the AP.

Rebuilding ‘could take years’

The war “permanently altered” the global economy, said Patricia Cohen at The New York Times. Many countries discovered their “profound vulnerability” to shocks from relying on imported oil for energy supply, sparking a long-term “transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.” And China is “poised to benefit most” from that shift.

More broadly, the world economy has been “kicked onto a path of slower growth and higher prices,” said Cohen. Countries and businesses will not “simply pick up where they left off before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.”

President Donald Trump long promised that oil prices would “drop like a rock” after the war ended. But that will be a “difficult promise for Trump to keep,” as the oil industry is experiencing “extraordinary practical challenges” to restoring supply chains disrupted by the war, said David Goldman at CNN. Tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz face a “bottleneck” after Iran mined the passageway, leaving only “two narrow passageways” for safe travel. Gulf States will also need time to restart wells shut off during the war because there was no way to export the oil. Plus, rebuilding oil facilities damaged by attacks “could take years.”

The end of the war may mark a “new era of U.S. inequality,” said Matt Peterson at CNBC. The conflict heightened an “already historic disconnect” between Americans who “share in the affluence” generated by AI-driven stock market gains and “those who can’t.” The second group was forced to dip into its savings to pay for the “energy crunch” caused by the war, exacerbating already simmering economic tensions. The war “didn’t create American inequality, but it hasn’t helped.”

Volatility ‘already baked in’

It “may be too late” for Republicans to benefit from lower gas prices they hope will result from the new peace, said Politico. GOP officials fear that “voter perceptions of a sour economy are already baked in” to the midterm elections outlook.

The problem is that actual relief will take time to arrive. Price volatility is “expected to last beyond the summer months” and into campaign season. Voters are unlikely to “forget about the months and months of high gas prices that added to their pain” when they go to the polls in November, said Democratic pollster John Anzalone to Politico.

Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators delivered a letter to the National Science Foundation urging Acting Director Brian Stone to “reverse course” on a Trump administration plan to dismantle the “vital” Ocean Observatories Initiative. Comprising “over 900 unique deep-sea buoys and other instruments,” the OOI “provides insights into changing ecosystem conditions and extreme weather events,” said the group. The administration’s plan threatens the “safety of our coastal communities” and undermines the U.S.’s “ability to monitor coastal environments, marine currents and extreme weather events.”

What did the commentators say?

The National Science Foundation’s order to remove Initiative equipment from coastal waters off Alaska, North Carolina and Washington came with “no warning and no scientific review” last month, said The Associated Press. The program had been “slated to run another 15 to 20 years.” Pulling back now “reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit,” said Craig McLean, who was the acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump term, to The New York Times. Dismantling the OOI pushes the U.S. “back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

OOI data on “waves, currents, salinity, the soundscape for marine mammals, carbon dioxide levels, alkalinity and more” has been a “godsend to public researchers, hazard planners and private companies alike,” said The Bulwark. The loss, for example, “could well be existential” for North Carolina’s “tourism-dependent Outer Banks economy” and will be “pretty problematic for the rest of us, too.” The change is “pulling the plug on some of the most important science being done,” said retired coastal geologist and East Carolina University teacher Stanley R. Riggs to the outlet.

The plan to shutter the OOI was originally “laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation,” said Oceanographic Magazine. The group’s Project 2025 authors “explicitly targeted the network” for its contributions to climate change research. Dismantling the ocean monitoring system “marks another step” in Trump’s “rollback of science and climate initiatives,” said The Guardian. It also comes amid Trump’s “push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations.”

“Preserving and improving OOI” and oceanographic science overall is “critical to advancing U.S. ocean science,” said the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in a statement. Doing so takes on additional significance as “other countries, including our competitors,” are “increasing their investments in ocean science and advancing their capacities.”

These cuts are “part of a broader retreat from environmental and climate-related science” by this White House, the AP said. Federal law requires congressional notification “at least 30 days in advance of any planned decommissioning of agency-owned facilities.” Instead, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) “learned of the dismantling through news reports.”

“The alarm bells just went off,” said Merkley to the AP. “None of us” were given advance notice.

What next?

The National Science Foundation should respect “congressional intent and legal direction,” which is “clearly to maintain the operation of this cost-effective research system,” said the bipartisan Senate group in their letter. Any subsequent efforts to alter oceanographic research should follow a “thorough evaluation of OOI, including engagement with the marine science community and other impacted stakeholders.” The foundation must “cease this expensive, destructive and, crucially, illegal action at once,” a separate group of Democrats said in a letter signed by members of the House Committees on Science, Space, and Technology and Natural Resources.

For scientists who work with the OOI’s shared data, the program’s closure is only part of the frustration. “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it,” said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemistry and oceanography professor at Boston College, to The Guardian. However, the team with that exclusive expertise is “being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.”

Data collection for the OOI is a “huge engineering challenge,” said Palevsky in a separate interview with the Times. Researchers can’t simply leave “notes for the next person who comes in. There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.”

What happened

Federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday said they disrupted a plot to attack last weekend’s UFC cage match at the White House with explosive-laden drones and “snipers,” after an alleged plotter’s mother called local police. FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed on social media that “multiple” arrests had been made in a “multi-state operation.” Hours later, the Justice Department announced five suspects had been arrested in Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri and California.

Who said what

The mother of the Ohio suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, told police that her son had been communicating online with “ex-military and Christian-based” people who “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments,” according to an FBI affidavit. Proper allegedly said the attack on the UFC fight was meant to “jumpstart” a revolution. The charging documents “outlined a plot ambitious in scope” but “left less clear that the conspirators had the means to carry it out,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Secret Service officials are “angry” with Patel for having “prematurely posted” news of the arrests, CNN said. The Secret Service led the “ongoing” investigation “from the beginning,” Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said at a news conference. And to “maintain the integrity” of the investigation, “we chose not to leak it.”

What happened

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota on Tuesday announced charges against 15 people for “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said the defendants were part of two groups aligned with antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist activists targeted under an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.

Who said what

The 15 people are accused of “coordinating Signal chats and rapid-response networks to track federal immigration officers,” said MPR News, but Rosen “turned aside specific questions connected to the alleged conspiracy.” They “quite deliberately got together and planned violence, used violence,” he told reporters. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm is not the measure” of a “serious federal crime.”

The charges come at a “fraught moment for Minnesota federal prosecutors, who have had trouble sustaining many criminal cases” they filed against anti-ICE protesters, The New York Times said. At least a third have been dismissed “for a variety of reasons,” said The Minnesota Star Tribune.

What next?

The indictment is “pretty thin,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said to The Washington Post. “The evidence will prove it all out,” Rosen told reporters.

What happened

Voters in Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma on Tuesday picked nominees for governor and Congress. All three Senate candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump won their Republican primaries. But his pick for Georgia governor, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, lost to billionaire Rick Jackson, and Trump’s gubernatorial choice in Oklahoma placed a close second and will advance to a runoff.

In Washington, D.C., city council member Robert White Jr. won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring 18-term Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George had a large lead in the open mayoral race as of Wednesday morning.

Who said what

In deep-red Oklahoma, Rep. Kevin Hern won the GOP primary to fill the Senate seat vacated by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Rep. Barry Moore won Alabama’s Republican runoff to replace Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R). And in Georgia, Trump-backed Rep. Mike Collins defeated former football coach Derek Dooley in the GOP runoff to face Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) in a pivotal battleground Senate race. Ossoff had “worked quietly for months to undermine” the more moderate Dooley, The New York Times said.

But Jones’ loss was a “major upset” for Trump, Politico said, and proved that “an endless stream of cash” can “overcome the power” of his endorsement. Jackson, a health care tycoon, personally “supplied most of the $100 million-plus that his campaign has spent to persuade Republican primary voters to overlook Trump’s advice,” The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump, who “loves to boast of the win-loss record of his endorsed candidates,” is considering endorsing both Republicans in South Carolina’s June 23 gubernatorial runoff, The Washington Post said.

The upcoming release of the UK’s first weight-loss pill, Wegovy, has been described as “game-changing” by a leading pharmacy provider.

“We’ve already seen record demand ahead of the expected launch”, said James O’Loan, chief executive of Chemist4U. With the majority of people expressing interest in the new obesity treatment not being previous users of weight-loss injections, this indicated that the new pill “could widen access to millions of people across the country”.

How does it work?

Made by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the pill is an oral version of weight-loss medicine Wegovy, containing the same active ingredient, semaglutide.

Where GLP-1 injections “pass directly into the bloodstream, the pill has to first be absorbed through the stomach”. This is possible through “scientific innovation, creating a way of encapsulating semaglutide and shielding it from stomach acid”, said The Telegraph’s health and medical journalist David Cox.

As with injections, the Wegovy pill “mimics the effects of a gut hormone called GLP-1, released after eating, which regulates appetite and signals a feeling of fullness”.

The pill is taken daily, compared to the weekly injection, and comes in different doses which can be steadily increased each month.

How effective is it?

Early tests suggest it has a similar effect to injectable Wegovy. After 64 weeks, adults taking the pill lost an average of 14% to 17% of body weight, with about one in three people losing 20% or more.

Regulatory guidelines from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency state that only people classified as clinically obese, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30, or those who are overweight (BMI of 27-30) with at least one weight-related health condition such as high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, will be eligible to receive the drug.

How much will it cost?

To start with, it will be available in the UK only on prescription privately and not free on the NHS. While exact prices are yet to be set, Robert Bradshaw, a superintendent pharmacist at Oxford Online Pharmacy, told The Telegraph he expects the Wegovy pill to “come in roughly at the same price as the injections”.

“I suspect the pill will be priced somewhere around about £80 to start with, progressing to £130 [for the intermediate dose], and maybe £160 for the top dose.”

With other drug companies developing their own weight-loss pills, however, “competition could also drive down the costs of treatment, as first-generation drugs, or those that offer slightly poorer top-line results, command lower prices”, said The Economist. Some government-funded health systems are likely to make “population-scale deals in the coming years, which could broaden access” further.

Are there any side-effects?

“These are similar whatever the version and related to levels of the drugs in the blood rather than how they are administered,” said Dr Mark Porter in The Times. Common side effects include “nausea and vomiting (slightly more common with the pill version), diarrhoea and/or constipation and abdominal discomfort, but these generally settle once people get used to the medicine”.

The much rarer but more serious side-effects “such as gallbladder problems (stones), inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis) and visual problems (optic neuropathy) probably remain the same as with injectables”.

But with the latest NHS statistics suggesting 66% of all people over 16 in England are overweight, and with obesity rates “continuing to spiral”, doctors are “optimistic that the emergence of GLP-1 tablets can serve as a major boost to public health”, said The Telegraph.

And globally, if generic semaglutide were made available to everyone with obesity and diabetes, it could save between 2.1 million and 3.1 million lives a year, according to one model, said The Economist.

Madonna’s bold 14-minute film to mark her latest album, “Confessions II”, has put music videos back in the spotlight. While the viewing figures are yet to reach the stratospheric heights of years gone by, the buzz generated by her star-studded new film shows the medium is far from dead. Here are seven trailblazing artists who helped revolutionise the genre.

Michael Jackson, Thriller (1982)

“As if it wasn’t enough writing one of the greatest pop songs of all time”, Michael Jackson went one step further by pairing it with “one of the most memorable music videos ever recorded”, said Kelly Murphy and Dale Maplethorpe in Far Out Magazine. Essentially this is an entire “horror movie in its own right”, and, of course, it gave the world an “iconic” dance that won’t ever be forgotten.

A-ha, Take On Me (1985)

Steve Barron’s “thoroughly immersive” music video for A-ha’s “Take on Me” expertly mixes live action with hand-drawn animation, while “seamlessly” bringing in each member of the Norwegian pop trio, said Slant Magazine. The story follows a teenage girl who is “literally drawn into a newspaper comic strip and falls heads over heels for its protagonist”. More than four decades on from its release, it remains “one of the most gripping narrative videos of all time” – and a “testament to the power, proficiency and poignancy of the medium itself”.

George Michael, Freedom! ’90 (1990)

Shunning his “image-driven fame”, George Michael refused to appear in any of the music videos for his album “Listen Without Prejudice”, said Slant Magazine. Instead, for this shoot he brought in a “bevy of top models” to lip-synch to his “pointed” lyrics, including Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. David Fincher directed Michael’s defiant video which was intended to mark the Wham! singer’s “artistic rebirth”; by the final credits his famous black leather jacket and guitar have been “ceremoniously burned and destroyed”.

Madonna, Vogue (1990)

“‘Come on, vogue’ – Madonna commands it, and the world listened,” said Rolling Stone. In her third collaboration with David Fincher, the Queen of Pop turned vogueing – an “outlandish” form of dance that originated in Harlem’s queer, underground ballroom scene – into a “refined form of feminist posturing and a statement of sexual defiance”. Madonna has since been accused of cultural appropriation for the track, but “there’s no denying” her “iconic” video propelled ballroom into the mainstream and inspired “countless queer kids to ‘strike a pose’”.

Gorillaz, On Melancholy Hill (2010)

There are “countless” stand-out Gorillaz music videos but “On Melancholy Hill” is the “most poignant”, said Far Out Magazine. This is a “masterclass” in perfectly capturing a song’s atmosphere; it can mean anything you want whether that be a “rumination on loneliness”, “unrequited love”, or a “general feeling of malaise”. The beautifully animated video sees band member Noodle survive a ship sinking and embark on an underwater adventure in a submarine. There’s no “sense of resolution” which means you’ll be drawn back to the video for “another taste of that weird sense of longing”.

Beyoncé, Formation (2016)

This “surprise-released” video for “Formation” cemented Beyoncé’s status as “one of the most important” artists of all time, said Rolling Stone. In it, she moves between a “plantation-style house, where the black denizens are the masters not the slaves, to the top of a sinking police car”. The star teamed up with director Melina Matsoukas to make the video, taking inspiration from the likes of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou to craft this “striking commentary on significant moments in Black American history”.

Childish Gambino, This is America (2018)

The “gut-punch impact remains no matter how many times” you watch “This is America”, said Rolling Stone. Donald Glover’s “musical alter-ego” Childish Gambino wanders from scene to scene, shimmying his way through “dancing kids, angry cops” and moments of both “social unrest and unfettered black joy”. Bursting with references from “viral dance videos to the 2015 shooting in a Charleston church”, it’s a music video that “launched a thousand think pieces”.

Two Ukrainian men have been found guilty of plotting arson attacks last year on property relating to Keir Starmer.

The trial of Roman Lavrynovych, 22, Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, and a third man was “strange”, said the BBC, “mainly because the true author of the drama was never revealed”.

But as more details of the case come to light it has revealed a shadowy network of online provocation and misinformation allegedly orchestrated from Russia that constitutes what the PM called “an attack on democracy” itself.

El Money

During the six-week trial at the Old Bailey, jurors heard that the fires at Starmer’s former family home and other related targets were ordered by a Russian-speaking handler on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Going by the pseudonym “El Money”, he directed Lavrynovych to carry out the attacks in exchange for promises of payment in cryptocurrency.

A Financial Times investigation “based on Telegram archives, cryptocurrency wallets, court evidence and interviews with Western officials” established that El Money was “located in Russia and was closely aligned with NoName057(16), a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group that the US has called a Russian ‘state-sanctioned project’”.

But the Russian embassy told the BBC: “We reject any attempt to associate Russia or its foreign ministry with unlawful activities.” It said that Russia poses “no threat to the United Kingdom or its people and harbours no aggressive intentions towards Britain”.

Now the BBC has identified evidence suggesting that El Money, or EL as he was known on Telegram, “is a young Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow”. The broadcaster named him as 23-year-old Evgeny Lyukshin, the son of a senior official.

It concluded that the arson attack was “just one part of an extensive campaign of sabotage, provocation and lies leading all the way to the Russian state”.

Part of this misinformation campaign included a “conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the arsonists were male prostitutes seeking revenge” on the PM, said The i Paper. Research by The i Paper and the Center for Countering Digital Hate charted the false “rent boy” rumour, which first emerged online less than 15 minutes after Lavrynovych was arrested and before it was made public by the police. The rumour spread from a “handful of small X accounts, through a network of far right activists and conspiracy theorists, into Russian media outlets and widespread online circulation”.

The accounts where the claim originated did not appear to be directly part of Russian disinformation networks. But Melanie Smith, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said Russian propagandists continually “monitor the online ecosystem” – particularly the far right in Europe – “trying to figure out which narratives are circulating and which ones of those work to their advantage”.

Russia’s war against the West

While not proven in court, the alleged involvement of Russia “points to a series of incidents in recent years, which, though piecemeal and hard to prove, lay bare how Russia’s intelligence services have moved towards a new kind of attack on the West”, said The Guardian.

“Dozens of people” have been detained across Europe – in Britain, Lithuania, France and Estonia – “accused of being foot soldiers in a new front of Russia’s war against the West”. This “war” includes Moscow-backed campaigns of “sabotage, arson and disinformation against the continent”.

Russian nationalist cyber groups like NoName, linked by the FT to last year’s London arson attacks, “have sought to recruit proxies online to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests, as well as foment disorder across Europe by amplifying far-right and anti-migrant messages”.

Britain, in particular, has become a “soft target” for Russian and other state propaganda because of a failure to educate people on how to deal with information warfare. This leaves it “extraordinarily vulnerable”, security expert Fiona Hill told a recent parliamentary committee.

“As it becomes harder to convince Russians that their own country is on the up, Vladimir Putin is instead presenting the West as not just hostile but in crisis”, said historian Mark Galeotti in The i Paper. The Kremlin “eagerly mines the news for stories it can spin, shade and downright misrepresent to advance these lines”, and Starmer’s misfiring government is “offering ample opportunities”.

As one staffer at the state-controlled Channel One news operation in Moscow said of the UK government: “There’s a combination of belligerence and incompetence there, a self-righteousness and lack of self-awareness that is just too good to pass up.”

Artificial intelligence has become part of our daily lives, and many younger users are turning to it for help with managing their money.

Research by Fidelity International found that more than a third of 18- to 34-year-olds use AI when making investment choices.

AI tools are useful for “opening access”, said MoneyWeek, for those who may not understand investing or just want to check financial information. But there are limits on “how good AI is at giving advice”.

Analysis by consumer watchdog Which? found that AI tools can “make mistakes, misread information and even give risky advice”. That means relying on it too much “could prove costly”.

Seek basic financial education

Many people “feel shame” about their lack of money knowledge, said Moneybox’s director of personal finance Brian Byrnes in The Independent. AI can help “remove this barrier” and assist with “translating and explaining complex finance jargon into plain English” without any judgement.

AI can also be useful for “getting a better understanding of financial topics”, said NerdWallet, such as basic information on budgeting, estate planning or insurance.

Don’t rely on AI for tailored financial advice

Despite the access to information, said Byrnes, you should “never rely on these tools for actionable financial or tax advice”.

Analysis by Which? found that AI tools can come up with “glaring errors”, such as getting the ISA allowance wrong, and they may provide “incomplete advice”.

More importantly, AI tools aren’t regulated to give advice, and won’t know your goals, your tax position, your time horizon or how you actually feel about risk. Crucially, “it can’t take responsibility if the guidance is wrong”, unlike a regulated financial adviser, said MoneyWeek.

Double-check information

AI tools can “sound confident even when they’re wrong”, said MoneyHelper, so you should always check information against “trusted sources”.

It is best to view AI as a “well-meaning but sloppy assistant”, said Fidelity International: “eager to please you but potentially happy to take shortcuts”.

Don’t give away sensitive information

There are also data and privacy risks with AI, as your information may be stored, and personal data could be misused, said MoneyHelper. As a result, it is wise to “keep anything sensitive to yourself”, including account details.

You wouldn’t hand over credit card details to a stranger, said Byrnes in The Independent, so “take the same approach when you are thinking about your personal financial information online”.

Anish Kapoor’s first major exhibition was at the Hayward Gallery nearly 30 years ago. But his latest, delivered in an age of “minuscule attention spans”, is filled with so many “tricks and surprises you’re likely to drop your phone mid-text into a black hole”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

Kapoor’s “mind-warping” piece “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” (2022) is one of the standouts – a mountain hanging upside down from the ceiling, painted in “thick slathers of red and black” and dripping “fire or lava that metamorphoses into wet, fresh blood”. It’s a “metaphysical rollercoaster ride of a show, a divine bloodbath”.

His “Plastic Sacrifice” series exposes “horribly surgical-looking”, synthetic PVC skin. “They resemble a serial killer’s trophy art.” Contrary to the “small, dry efforts” of much modern art, Kapoor “soaks the Hayward in the blood and guts of his unfettered imagination”.

With his “brilliantly gross” sculptures of “gory, vile piles of wet guts”, Kapoor’s message is clear, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. “It doesn’t matter how special you think you are, at the end of the day we’re all just meat”.

His paintings using Vantablack – the most light-absorbent pigment on Earth – are not as successful, however. What are meant to be deep, searching abysses are just “black squares and circles”. These may be “pretty heinous”, but, at its best, Kapoor’s art is “universal, enormous, overwhelming and very, very human”.

The newest intriguing installation, “Ha Makom”, finished earlier this year, could be a “film set, a spaceport, or a remote ancient temple”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Inspired by Uluru, the “sacred sandstone monolith” in Australia, it combines the “pristine” precision of his work, with “intense” colour.

In all, the “beautifully presented” show is “zinging”. If there had been any doubt, “Kapoor silences those who characterise his ambitious aesthetic quest, striving for metaphysical effects, as out of step with our ironic and cynical times”.

Hayward Gallery, London SE1, until 18 October

This week’s question: Young people in South Korea who worry they're addicted to shopping apps are using websites that let them browse products and click order, all without making a real purchase. If a U.S. tech firm were to launch such a “dopamine site”—named for the small mental jolt it delivers—for recovering shopaholics, what should it be titled?

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Shopping simulation” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, June 23. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the July 3 issue and at theweek.com/contest on June 26. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Click or tap here to see the winner of last week's contest: Similar Sullivans

If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite sweet treats and savory snacks, that’s by design. The tobacco industry had a heavy hand in the growth of ultraprocessed food in the U.S. And despite no longer being involved, its marketing tricks remain.

A new addiction

Big Tobacco employed its tactics in marketing cigarettes to also market ultraprocessed food, according to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds made a “major entrance into the food industry” when they had “strong cash flows yet experienced growing scrutiny regarding their tobacco products,” said one of the AJPH papers. Investing in food and beverages was an attempt to improve their corporate image, so the team acquired several major brands, including Del Monte Foods, General Foods, Kraft, Nabisco and 7UP.

Tobacco companies “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives” and “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” according to “internal company records,” said NPR. Thus came the rise of added sugars and artificial flavorings in food and beverages. These additives are known to be “hyperpalatable,” activating the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs.

Along with changing the composition of the products, aggressive marketing tactics became the norm. Big Tobacco “applied the same strategies to developing light and reduced food products with the express goal of retaining customers who might otherwise stop consuming some of their products,” said lead paper author Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, to NPR.

The companies “divested from the food system from 2000 to 2007,” said the papers. However, their impact has been long-lasting. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. These foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“Children are really, really vulnerable to this kind of messaging,” said paper author Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to The Washington Post. “The goal is to hook the consumer at the youngest possible age because, as you grow up, they have instilled brand loyalty in you.”

Trying to quit

There have been growing calls for regulating the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg. This definition could be “used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.” The ultimate goal is to implement labeling on the front of packaging that indicates what foods are ultraprocessed. But creating such a definition is not so simple, as it could “inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt.”

While Kennedy may be pushing back against ultraprocessed food, the Trump administration has made “policy changes that could exacerbate the problem,” said The Guardian. The administration also “failed to direct policy changes that could help, like redirecting government corn subsidies toward whole fruits and vegetables.”

But better monitoring could lead to needed changes. Countries might “consider establishing a baseline of ultraprocessed or hyperpalatable food availability in their food environments to monitor food system health,” said the papers. There may also be a “global need to consider regulation of multiple addictive products disseminated by tobacco companies.”

Two years ago, it was brat summer. This year, for summer 2026, everyone is wrapping themselves in a new trend: whimsy. From dopamine-spiking decor to more childlike, bright clothes, adults are romanticizing the smallest aspects of their lives and fully running with a lighthearted outlook.

Bring on the ‘childlike joy’

The word whimsy and the vibe associated with it are “having a moment,” thanks to Gen Z and millennials who have “recast the word to characterize a lifestyle that blends playfulness, spontaneity and being present,” said The New York Times. Searches on Etsy for “whimsical jewelry,” “whimsical decor” and “whimsy-related items” were each up by at least 50% from last year.

Shoppers use whimsy as a “form of everyday escapism, seeking out pieces that feel personal, playful and a little unexpected to make everyday life more extraordinary,” said Dayna Isom Johnson, Etsy’s trend expert, to the Times. The craze puts an “emphasis on offline activities” that parallels a “movement by young people who are leaving behind smartphones and screens,” the outlet said.

Being whimsical is about “bringing levity to life when you can,” said Business Insider. The trend is flooded with lively colors and playful accessories.

Whimsy is “easier to recognize than to translate," said NSS Magazine. It is not “just an aesthetic” but a “different way of inhabiting one’s days.” For those who relish it, being whimsical means “reconnecting with what as children seemed natural: to be amazed, to invent, to celebrate even the smallest things.”

Chasing authenticity

Whimsy devotees see it as a “response to compounding anxieties over a series of stressors, including a challenging economy, multiple wars and a volatile presidency,” said the Times. No one can control “what our leaders are doing,” but you can control “what kind of mug you’re going to choose, what cute outfit you’re going to wear and what beautiful thing you can do in your morning,” podcaster Liz Plank said to the Times.

In the age of the internet, millennials and Gen Z face a more intense flood of information than ever before. Whimsy offers an escape from the more performative aspects of social media, Nassir Ghaemi, a psychiatry professor, said to the Times. These online experiences have been “going on now long enough” that Generation Z and millennials have figured out that a “lot of these online interactions are inauthentic.”

With how swiftly the trend cycle swerves, the whimsical moment may not last. Gen Z, in particular, has “grown up in a context in which almost everything can be turned into merchandise,” said NSS Magazine. Many trends are “intercepted, packaged and resold as a product,” as has happened in the past with viral terms such as “girl math, girl dinner or demure.” All were “born for fun” but became “tools for overconsumption.”

Still, when whimsy is “understood in its purest, most spontaneous and curious sense,” said NSS Magazine, then it can be read as an “attempt to withdraw from the pressure of constant consumption, choosing to live with more freedom.” A whimsical life can be a “small form of everyday resistance.”

“For years, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company operated in secrecy, overshadowed by the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX,” said Karen Weise in The New York Times. Founded in 2000, the venture didn’t put a craft into orbit until January 2025. Over the past 18 months, Blue Origin finally seemed to be gaining momentum, getting closer to reliably launching a gigantic rocket, called New Glenn, that could lift greater payloads and potentially challenge SpaceX’s domination of the sector. But late last month, New Glenn exploded in a fireball during a test, badly damaging its sole launchpad in Florida. “At least one massive steel tower appeared to be essentially gone,” and the hydraulics and fuel systems beneath the $1 billion pad might be irrecoverable. Amazon has about 3,000 satellites it needs to launch to begin commercial operations of its Leo satellite internet service, a potential competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink. The explosion could set Blue Origin, Amazon, and other customers back a year.

One of those customers is NASA, said James B. Meigs in The Wall Street Journal. The agency is “working furiously to get its Artemis program on track to land astronauts on the moon by 2030,” and both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been contracted to develop vehicles that can carry “astronauts from NASA’s Orion capsule down to the lunar surface and back.” Blue Origin is also building a smaller “workhorse” lander called Blue Moon for ferrying humans and cargo. “But right now, the only rocket configured to carry the Blue Moon is Blue Origin’s New Glenn.” So until New Glenn is operational again, “all those plans are on hold.”

The explosion “sets the stage for Elon Musk’s dominance of space,” said Faiz Siddiqui and Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Washington Post. It leaves the U.S. government and other customers “more reliant on SpaceX’s services.” The timing could not be better for Musk and SpaceX, which last week made the largest initial public offering in history. Musk, for his part, shared a motivational message to Bezos and his team on X. “Ad astra per aspera,” he wrote—“through hardships to the stars.”

Musk would know, said Ryan Whitley in National Review. As recently as 2008, “it was not clear SpaceX would even survive as a company given its early failures.” But it persevered, because the company’s strategy “was to learn faster than anybody else in the industry”—by learning from its mistakes. Unlike NASA, which became overzealous in its pursuit of perfection under the motto “failure is not an option,” Musk brought a Silicon Valley ethos to the space industry, where “failure was a necessary feature, not a bug.” Blue Origin is at a similar crossroads. It needs to embrace this moment as a learning opportunity and get back up—quickly.

Marjane Satrapi made revolutionary Iran come alive in stark black-and-white images. The Iranian-born writer, artist, and director was best known worldwide as the creator of Persepolis, the groundbreaking graphic novel describing her childhood experiences of the Islamic fundamentalist 1979 revolution that ripped away women’s rights and led to the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War. Published in four parts, from 2000 to 2003, Persepolis sold millions of copies, and Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation received an Oscar nomination and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Satrapi said her goal was not just to protest the regime but also to humanize a people stereotyped as either terrorists or veiled, silenced women. “If these people scare you, look closer,” she said in 2007. “They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories.”

“Satrapi was a born troublemaker,” said The Nation, just like the rest of her family. Descendants of a prince who became a communist, the Satrapis “opposed both the dictatorship of the shah and the theocracy that was established by the 1979 revolution.” At school, Satrapi “talked back,” wore what she liked, and hoarded tapes of rock music. When she was 14, her parents sent her to boarding school in Vienna for her safety, but she was lonely there, bouncing from dorm to dorm and even living on the streets a few months. After an illness, she returned to Iran, had a brief marriage to a war veteran, and earned a master’s degree in art. It was when she moved to France for further studies in 1994 that she finally “found her artistic voice,” said The Hollywood Reporter, as well as her longtime husband, Swedish actor Mattias Ripa. She followed Persepolis with Chicken With Plums, an illustrated story and film based on a musician relative. She then directed several more movies, including the 2019 Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, starring Rosamund Pike.

Yet her masterwork remained Persepolis, the story of the “gradual suffocation of a society,” said Le Monde (France), and of the lifelong depression that drove her to suicide attempts. Her family said she died “of sadness” a year after Ripa’s death from cancer. In her last book, she explored the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which started in 2022 after a woman arrested for improper hijab died in custody. “Human nature,” she said, “is made for freedom.”

President Donald Trump’s preference for personal loyalty in his subordinates may pose an insurmountable problem for a White House in search of a permanent attorney general. Nominee and acting AG Todd Blanche, the president’s onetime personal lawyer, faces a steep nomination process, as concerns grow over his alleged willingness to subvert the role of attorney general for the president’s political purposes.

Is Blanche’s nomination dead on arrival? Or does Trump still command the senatorial clout to ensure his longtime consigliere survives a bruising nomination fight?

‘Credibility on the line’

Blanche will test whether a “handful of increasingly restive Republican senators” are “prepared to defy Trump on a high-profile nominee,” said The Washington Post. As acting attorney general, Blanche “played a central role in setting up” Trump’s $1.8 billion Department of Justice weaponization reparations fund, a move that “triggered a rare revolt by Senate Republicans” before the courts froze the project entirely.

Blanche would replace former AG Pam Bondi after she was “forced out of the administration following the botched handling of the Epstein files,” said Politico. But during a closed-door congressional interview last month, Bondi told lawmakers that it was Blanche who was “responsible for the Justice Department’s handling of the files.”

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, “just one GOP rebel could stop the whole thing,” said Semafor. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has had “no issue gumming up Trump’s nominees” in the past, said ABC News. Blanche’s odds of a successful nomination “go up immensely” if the controversial weaponization fund is truly dead, Tillis said to reporters last week, per ABC. However, he remains “undecided” at the moment.

Blanche has “told us and the world that we’re not going to do” the fund, and “I believe him,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) to reporters, per Semafor. “He’s put his credibility on the line, and that’s what I expect him to say in a hearing.” Whether Blanche remains as committed as he’s indicated “will obviously impact the story.”

‘Corruption’ and ‘competence’

There are “two stories” playing into Blanche’s nomination, said MS NOW legal analyst Andrew Weissmann to Slate. The first is a “story about corruption” and the “complicity he is willing to engage in for the president.” The second is a “question of competence” about someone who has “made a series of serious missteps.” Given “such an array of things to ask him about, the only question is whether senators will be effective in asking those questions.”

Having voted in lockstep for Bondi during her nomination, “by contrast, Republicans seem noncommittal on Blanche,” said The Independent. In a “healthier political climate,” there would be “dozens” of GOP senators who would “immediately pronounce Blanche unqualified for the job,” said The New York Times. Today, the list of senators who “may have the courage to do so is shorter, yet plenty long enough.”

‘Why Chicagoans should welcome, and care for, the Obama Presidential Center’

Chicago Tribune editorial board

There is an “absurd prejudgment” about the Obama Presidential Center that a “museum celebrating a presidency could not coexist with an institution also focused on offering art, basketball and a plethora of gathering spaces to a community that has suffered from disinvestment,” says the Chicago Tribune editorial board. The museum “will be a major new tourist attraction for Chicago” by “drawing people to a part of the city they likely would not have otherwise visited.”

Read more

‘Trump celebrates while America capitulates’

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic

Trump “announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war,” but the “U.S. has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre — but nonetheless extremely dangerous — adversary,” says Tom Nichols. Trump “failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal and deliver America’s capitulation.”

Read more

‘Trump, Xi overlooked fentanyl in Beijing. It can't happen again.’

Rahul Gupta and Brandon P. Yoder at USA Today

Work “must start now on a key issue that received little attention in May: China’s role in the global fentanyl trade,” say Rahul Gupta and Brandon P. Yoder. The “problem is not that fentanyl was overlooked entirely.” But “based on the public readouts, Xi made only limited commitments to curb the flow of chemicals from Chinese firms that fuel illicit fentanyl production.” Americans “suffering from the opioid epidemic need the Trump administration to take immediate action.”

Read more

‘What the Knicks’ championship means to New York’

Sean Gregory at Time

The New York Knicks’ NBA championship “means everything to New Yorkers because we play this game, hoops, everywhere,” says Sean Gregory. New Yorkers “take the lumps of a sweltering train stranded under the East River, and like these Knicks, come out on the other side.” Fans “love the Knicks, but especially these Knicks,” because “though they’re a big-market team with the second-highest payroll in the NBA, they fight like underdogs.” The Knicks “have formed a true brotherhood.”

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Emmanuel Macron has home-field advantage during the ongoing G7 summit in the resort town of Évian-les-Bains, and the French president wants the involved countries to help him deal with Chinese trade, which he feels is unbalanced. Though China isn’t a G7 member, it has an advantage of its own given its power in the global trade market. So Macron may have to perform a delicate balancing act.

What did the commentators say?

The French president largely expects the G7 nations to “converge on the need to tackle a flood of subsidized Chinese exports that is disrupting global markets,” said Politico. But it is becoming increasingly clear that “credible action is one deliverable he won’t be able to land.” Macron is pushing for Europe and the U.S. to come together for a solution, but meetings are “unlikely to deliver answers to the problem.”

The problem is two-pronged: Beijing is “curling its lip” at Macron, while Europe and the U.S. are “diverging on how to contain China’s $1.2 trillion trade surplus,” said Politico. Macron wants the EU to present a unified front on China, and Europe has “made strides on its China policy since the Covid-19 pandemic” but “still struggles to align internally,” said The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. And the “squeeze is tightening from both directions.”

France and Macron’s ultimate goal during the summit is to “make the reduction of global imbalances and inequalities the priority and position the G7 as a space for dialogue among the major advanced industrialized democracies,” said the Chicago Council. Macron also believes that talks between China and France “signal a ‘new willingness’ by China, the U.S. and Europe to coordinate economic approaches,” said Bloomberg.

The American factor also looms large, as President Donald Trump appears to be “ready to use the G7 stage to berate allies for what he views as inadequate support,” said the Council on Foreign Relations. With this in mind, Macron’s “challenge may be less about advancing his personal initiatives than managing the summit itself.” He may find himself “confronting two sets of competing summit agendas: the one it planned and the one that geopolitical events — and Trump — have created.”

What next?

The Évian-les-Bains summit will be Macron’s last; his term as French president expires in 2027, and he is ineligible to run again. The United States is hosting the next G7 summit, meaning Macron “will seek to keep the flame alive as he passes the torch to the United States,” said the Council on Foreign Relations. China, meanwhile, maintains that it is ready and willing to engage in economic cooperation with the EU, even as these discussions come “against the backdrop of talks in Europe over possible new restrictions to counter China’s export surge,” said Bloomberg.

“All countries should uphold openness and cooperation, take an objective view of the comparative advantages of different countries, foster a free and facilitative trading environment and practice true multilateralism,” Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing said during a conference call with France, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua. He also “called for prioritizing development, improving global governance and promoting inclusive growth of the world economy.”

Apple introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007. That was the same year that birth rates around the world began to decline. And the two developments may be related.

“If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs,” Brandon Vigliarolo said at The Register. Two new studies suggest smartphones are responsible for the baby bust. One study found the iPhone “caused as much as half of the fertility decline” from 2007 to 2011, said The New York Times. A second study of 128 countries found that teen pregnancies declined “once smartphones became a mass phenomenon.” It may be that people “began to socialize more on their phones and less in person,” or it could be that the technology “made pornography more accessible.”

Experts suggested caution is needed. Smartphones are just one “example of the kinds of social influences” that may have reduced fertility, said Wellesley College’s Phillip B. Levine to the Times.

‘Awkward, antisocial puppies’

Phones have “turned us into awkward, antisocial puppies who can’t handle eye contact,” said Lauren Veldhuizen at the National Review. The rise of smartphone technology has thus created a world in which “fewer people date and fewer babies are born.” Some might see the decline of teen pregnancies, in particular, as a positive development. But that would be true only if the decline were the result of an “increasing respect for the purpose of sex within the confines of marriage” instead of our increasing “inability to speak to one another.”

The media has glommed onto the new studies because of a collective mood of “total paranoia and doom about smartphones,” said Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. The biggest plunges in the 2007-2011 study were among 15- to 24-year-old females, suggesting more girls and women are “avoiding unintended pregnancy at young ages.” The study’s time frame might also simply reflect the impact of the Great Recession. The research should be greeted “with some skepticism.”

Smartphones “short-circuit the deep-seated human need to have your kids keep you company,” said Noah Smith at Noahpinion. We are choosing to “forsake each other’s company to stare eternally into a black mirror.”

‘No easy fix’

Maybe smartphones first tarnished dating, but AI “might finish the job,” said Eric Levitz at Vox. Streaming and social media have helped us isolate from each other, yet online platforms could not discuss “your career anxieties, favorite Civil War battle or debilitating fear of iguanas.” Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and other artificial intelligence chatbots can. “Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.”

There is “no easy fix here,” said Axios. Politicians have proposed “baby bonuses, tax credits or better child care and parental leave policies” to solve the fertility crisis, all to no avail. “Perhaps the solution is that everyone toss their phones into the sea.”

What happened

Fox Corp. said Monday it was buying streaming and smart-TV company Roku for $22 billion, its first major acquisition since chief executive Lachlan Murdoch cemented control of his family’s media empire last year. The deal will give Fox, with its news and live sports content, a foothold in the more than 100 million households that use Roku’s platform.

Who said what

The cash-and-stock deal “would make the Murdoch media empire a formidable contender in the streaming wars,” positioning Fox to “reach customers who are abandoning traditional TV,” The New York Times said. Specifically, it would transform the company into a “major player in free, ad-supported streaming,” The Washington Post said, combining Fox-owned Tubi with Roku’s own “free-to-stream, ad-supported offering.”

Fox’s “bigger play here is advertising revenue, something all the major streamers are now jockeying for,” Forrester research director Mike Proulx said in a statement. “If this deal closes, Fox will control more of what viewers watch, how they discover it and how it gets monetized.”

What next?

Fox and Roku said their merger, expected to close in the first half of 2027, would create the “third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.”

What happened

Hungary’s parliament on Monday approved a constitutional amendment barring prime ministers from serving more than eight years in office. The amendment, which passed 135 to 50, was “written to apply retroactively,” effectively blocking former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from returning to power, Politico said.

Who said what

The amendment, pushed through by Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, also “paves the way for the dissolution” of tools created by Orbán to consolidate his power, Reuters said, including a Sovereignty Protection Office that “stigmatized opposition figures and journalists” and public trust foundations that transferred valuable “state assets” to Orbán’s political party and allies. The legislation was part of Magyar’s promised “crusade for ‘regime change’” after 16 straight years of Orbán rule, Politico said, but would also put a “significant limit on Magyar’s own power, as he vows to restore liberal democracy in Hungary.”

What next?

The bill now goes to President Tamás Sulyok, an Orbán appointee who has refused Magyar’s calls to resign. Sulyok “could attempt to block the measure,” said Ukrainian outlet United24 Media, but Tisza’s two-thirds parliamentary supermajority “has the power to override a veto.”

What happened

Vice President JD Vance said Monday that he and President Donald Trump had “digitally” signed an interim peace agreement with Iran and expected the text of the memorandum of understanding to be released before a ceremonial signing in Geneva on Friday. The potential breakthrough “drew cautious optimism and frustration” in Congress, where “even some Republicans were reluctant to praise a deal whose terms the administration has yet to disclose,” The New York Times said. “If it’s a secret deal, then how can I take it seriously?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said to reporters.

In Israel, people “from across the political spectrum reacted angrily” to news of the deal to end the war that their government launched alongside Trump, The Associated Press said. And they directed their “fury at one man: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Who said what

It’s unclear if Trump’s deal is “one that Netanyahu will stomach — or one he will seek to derail,” The Washington Post said. Politically, he “has every incentive to continue fighting, especially in Lebanon.” For Trump, “this is his decision,” Netanyahu told reporters. For Israel, “the struggle has not ended.”

What next?

“Early signs of bumps ahead” included Netanyahu’s insistence that Israeli forces would remain in Lebanon and Iran saying it “intended to charge ‘fees’ but not ‘tolls’” to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the Times said. But “for all the confusion,” oil prices “tumbled, and Iranians expressed wary optimism that a war that has killed thousands could soon end.”

CROSSWORD - June 26, 2026

SUDOKU - June 26, 2026

CROSSWORD - June 26, 2026

SUDOKU - June 26, 2026

Another major data centre has been given the green light in the UK, further cementing the country’s status as Europe’s AI front-runner. The government has approved a data centre on a huge green-belt site in Slough, Berkshire, despite claims it could derail the project to build Heathrow’s third runway.

The company had appealed after the council refused to rule on the project, which it said would sit in “one of the most fragile and vulnerable parts of the green belt around London”. Since coming to power, Labour has “repeatedly bypassed local authorities to support data centre developments”, said The Telegraph. Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, said that there was a “continuing and unprecedented demand” for such projects.

How many data centres are there in the UK?

The UK is at the forefront of Europe’s data centre roll-out; it hosts 523 out of the continent’s 2,269 data centres as of last year, said Euronews. It is “striking” that China (home to 449 centres), “despite its strength as a technology and innovation power”, ranks behind the UK, as well as Germany (529 centres).

However, all three are dwarfed by the US, which last year boasted 5,427 data centres. The only other countries with more than 300 centres are Canada, France and Australia.

What’s the latest?

A multibillion-pound AI data centre in Wales was jeopardised by “ministerial dithering”, said The Telegraph. British data centre company Era4 said it had secured permission and financing for the project at the former Liberty Steel works in Newport, but that the “project had faced months of delays” because Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, “failed to push through permission for it to access power from a nearby battery plant”.

Era4 said the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology had given “no indication of when a decision would be made or that the project would be approved”. Tom Humphreys, Era4’s chief executive, said the company was looking at sites in Europe as an alternative.

Other tech companies have also “complained of a struggle to build AI infrastructure in Britain”, said the paper. OpenAI recently announced it was pausing work on a data centre in the north of England due to high energy costs.

What’s planned for the future?

The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth over the next five years, said the BBC last year, when there were already an estimated 477. Work on the biggest, a £10 billion data centre near Newcastle for US wealth management firm Blackstone Group, is due to begin in 2031. It will involve “10 giant buildings” covering more than half a million square metres – “the size of several large shopping centres”.

The majority will be built in London and neighbouring counties, despite “concerns about the huge amount of energy and water” they’ll consume, as well as the “potential knock-on effect” on domestic energy bills.

How much environmental impact do they have?

Officials recently admitted that Britain’s data centre boom could “draw 40% more electricity than thought a few months ago”, said The Times. More than 100 data centres are seeking grid connections for 50 gigawatts of electricity capacity – “more than the whole of Britain’s peak demand on a typical day”. MPs are calling for a “national conversation on the environmental impacts”.

“The previous projections were already unfathomable,” said Oliver Hayes, head of policy and campaigns at environmental charity Global Action Plan. Adding 40% on top is absurd.”

There are also concerns about the burning of fossil fuels to meet power demand, potentially jeopardising climate goals. There has been a “marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions”, said The Guardian. More than 100 new UK data centres plan to burn gas, said “some potentially doing so permanently”.

England captain Ben Stokes and bowler Gus Atkinson will not take part in the Test against New Zealand at The Oval, starting on 17 June, after breaking curfew rules in a Chelsea nightclub following their victory at Lord’s, England Cricket announced last week. Sonny Baker and Jordan Cox will make their debuts as their replacements.

At a press conference at The Oval, managing director of England men’s cricket Rob Key “answered the myriad questions over this whole mess with the enthusiasm of someone in a hostage video”, said cricket correspondent Chris Stocks in The i Paper. And as Key was fielding questions “mere metres away from a row of kegs of beer, the irony was lost on nobody”.

Key confirmed that management were considering a ban on alcohol for a national side that has repeatedly faced allegations of booze-fuelled unprofessionalism.

‘Staggering stupidity’

One of Stokes’ strengths as England captain has been his “capacity to show the way”, said Harry Latham-Coyle in The Independent. Given the additional scrutiny around the team’s culture, it is “scarcely believable” that he would allow himself to end up in a boozy altercation at a Chelsea nightclub.

Coming on the heels of reports of excessive drinking at last year’s Ashes, as well as white-ball captain Harry Brook’s run-in with a bouncer in New Zealand, Stokes’ behaviour shows “staggering stupidity”. The leadership team made a vow that things would be different after the Ashes. “That promise has been broken at virtually the earliest opportunity.”

“I find this beyond staggering,” said Matthew Syed in The Times. Stokes’ actions are born out of “utter, crass and unforgivable selfishness”, the symbol of an English side that is neither “trustworthy” nor “mature”. There is something “seriously wrong with the culture” of the England men’s cricket team. For that reason above all, Stokes’ captaincy is “permanently and irredeemably untenable”.

It is “impossible not to feel sympathy” for Stokes, said Emma John in The Guardian. This is a man who recently celebrated his 35th birthday, had just won the first Test of the summer, had 10 days before the next game and has been “teetotal for the best part of a year” in order to manage his heavy workload. England cricket has a “tradition of shooting itself in the foot”, and the instinct to judge him “for the most meaningless of infractions” has felt “perverse”.

‘Lagging behind’

“Heavy drinking sessions are nothing new,” said cricket reporter Elizabeth Ammon in The Times. “Cricket and alcohol have been intrinsically linked since the sport was invented.” Some players believe that “natural talent is a shield”, protecting them from the effects of alcohol, while excessive drinking can also be a response to the “sheer mental toll of long, isolated tours”. But although the modern cricketer is typically more professional than previous generations, the sport is “still lagging behind” its contemporaries.

“The absurd affair captures a simple truth,” said Tim Wigmore, senior cricket writer at The Telegraph. “Cricket is less professional than other leading sports.” Top England cricketers can be earning in excess of £1 million a year – excluding personal sponsorship deals – but this “surge in salaries” does not reflect “comparable advances” in professionalism.

Naturally, the “sheer brutality” of Test cricket – spending “hundreds of days” away from home and 30 hours per game “under spectators’ glare” – demands a “release”. But international cricket has “not merely tolerated alcoholic excess” as a means of escape, but “celebrated it”.

“Does cricket still have a drinking culture?” said The Athletic. “Yes.” But the situation is “complicated and more nuanced than it sometimes appears”. The game is full of “alcohol-related anecdotes”, and social drinking is “deeply entwined” with the sport. Indeed, at the grassroots level, booze is the “lifeblood” of many clubs, with the clubhouse bar “often central to the community”. But admittedly, and “increasingly at the top level, a compromise has to be reached”.

Host Emmanuel Macron is expected to pull out all the stops for this week’s G7 summit to prove that this gathering of the world’s richest democracies still matters in an age of strongman politics.

In one of his last big diplomatic set pieces before his presidential term winds down next year, Macron “will seek to paper over divisions” between Donald Trump and the other six leaders, said Euronews. Top of the agenda will be trying to “forge common positions on how to end the war in Ukraine”, on the resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and on “the development of safer technologies”.

What did the commentators say?

The summit is being held in the alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains. The last time the G7 met here was in June 2003, when the US had invaded Iraq despite “the strident objections of France and Germany”, said Mark Landler, France editor of The New York Times. Then-US president George W. Bush “got chilly handshakes” but he worked hard with the other leaders “to maintain the veneer of like-minded countries uniting to confront the perils of an unruly world”. Two decades later, it’s the same town but another American war in the Middle East, and any “veneer” of unity has been “stripped away”.

The G7 is “a forum created to solve geopolitical crises but it was excluded from the US-Israeli planning for war” with Iran, said Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bloomberg’s Europe editor. And it was ignored by the US in both the diplomacy for and the timing of the peace deal, which Trump announced the day before the summit, with the signing taking place after it ends.

The truth is that while, collectively, the G7 nations – France, Italy, Germany, the US, the UK, Canada and Japan – might account for 45% of global GDP, individually, few would count as one of the world’s “biggest or indeed most powerful economies”, said Jonathan Moules in the Financial Times. And Trump would clearly rather play geopolitics with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping than waste time building consensus with leaders he views as weak.

For their part, Canada and Europe “no longer view the US as a partner on key issues such as climate change and security”, said Landler in The New York Times. And some even see America as a “threat”, given Trump’s “deepening disdain for Nato” and his repeated pursuit of Greenland. Across the group, there are “diverging opinions” on “how far to pull away from the US” but that’s certainly the direction of movement.

What next?

Expectations of what this three-day summit can achieve are “already low”, said Clea Caulcutt on Politico. “Despite all the efforts of the French presidency, the G7 format has lost much of its relevance,” an EU official told the website.

“They will talk, but I’m not sure anything will come out of it,” said a former French official. And even if it did, “any gains secured could be fleeting” with such a mercurial US president. In the end, it’s really all about keeping up appearances. As one European diplomat put it bluntly: “It will be a success if there is a family photo.”

Really savvy travellers know that second cities are the ones we should all be flocking to: the overlooked ones, the quieter ones, the underestimated ones that have so much to offer.

Brno must be the epitome of this. Bursting with character, beauty and culture, it may be the Czech Republic’s second city, but it’s by no means second rate. In fact, having spent a considerable amount of time here, I would argue that it’s the perfect place to explore Czech culture away from the crowds.

Things to do

I’m always an advocate of just walking around to get to know a place, and here is no exception. Take in the varied architecture, as well as the Vegetable Market, Brno Dragon, Capuchin Monastery, Freedom Square, and bizarre Astronomical Clock as you explore.

The Brno Pass is a convenient way to see as much as you can in the city, and great value too. Use it to visit some of the city’s biggest sights, such as the imposing Cathedral of St Peter and Paul and the Old Town Hall, which dates from 1240.

The pass also gives you entry to Špilberk Castle, probably the most identifiable sight in all of Brno. This 750-year-old castle tops a hill of the same name, and can be seen from most of the city. The complex houses several museums, with art and artefacts explaining the region’s history. The park and walls have wonderful views, so take a seat and relax.

From here you will see just how many spires Brno has; there are dozens of churches. The Church of St James, however, should be on your list. Founded in the 13th century, its angelically white interior feels peaceful and serene but climb up into the roof space and you will find a fascinating light show.

Architecture buffs may also be surprised to learn that Brno is home to one of modernist designer Mies van der Rohe’s masterpieces, the Unesco-listed Villa Tugendhat. Built in 1930 for textile company owners Greta and Fritz Tugendhat, it was a sensation when finished, and still impresses today.

One of the newest attractions are the Water Tanks under Žluty Kopec, a complex of three cisterns built between 1874 and 1917. They are vast, cathedral-like, and truly astonishing examples of industrial engineering. Enjoy the art show and peculiar acoustics.

Subterranean tourism seems to be a big thing here. Head underground to the Labyrinth under the Vegetable Market to learn more about how the city grew. There’s also the Second World War air-raid shelter, 10-Z bunker, and the Ossuary at the church of St James, which is the second largest in Europe after Paris’ Catacombs and houses the remains of 50,000 people.

Get out of the city and head to the Brno Reservoir, a 259-hectare man-made lake that’s just a short hop on the tram away. It’s probably best enjoyed in the summer, when you can swim and take boat trips across to Veveří Castle. Also, check out the nearby Brno Zoo and the Brno Dam, built in the 1930s. On its shore is the Infinit Maximus Resort Spa, home to heated outdoor pools, hot tubs and a sauna complex.

Eating and drinking

At the elegant Pavillon Steak House, in Park Koliště near the National Theatre, service is smooth, and the food is hearty and delicious, yet still refined. The steak selection is a fantastic treat for two.

The Czech Republic has a large Vietnamese population, and the food is some of the best this far west of Hanoi. Try Bonjour Vietnam for a big bowl of aromatic pho, or refreshing summer rolls.

Castellana Trattoria is one of those family Italians that’s become a local favourite. We couldn’t spot another tourist, which has to be a good sign. Expect steaming mounds of pasta, as well as charcuterie boards of hand-sliced prosciutto.

For casual eats go to Bistro Bastardo, a Mexican burrito spot that always had a queue outside, as well as Úvozna, a burger joint near the Water Tanks, or Zaza for puffy sourdough pizzas.

You’ll find a daily menu, a lunch deal that’s usually great value, almost everywhere. At Nepalese restaurant Pokhara we got soup plus a thali of three curries, rice and naan for around £7.

Lokál u Caipla is the place for traditional food and unmissable Czech pilsners, or you can try U Třech Čertů in the city centre. If you’re looking for a drink, head to t’PUUB for craft beers, Café Trojka for student vibes, Super Panda Circus for cocktails, Výčep na Stojáka for its suntrap, Monogram for coffee, and Klára Bára Wine Cafe for wine. The cosy Pivnice U Poutníka and Poslední leč both feel like real locals’ places.

Where to stay

The Grandhotel Brno is a great spot to rest your head. Situated across from both the railway and bus stations, it’s not far to take your bags, and almost everything on this list is walkable. The beds are large and comfy, and the rooms have plenty of space for chilling out after a long day. The breakfast features local delicacies such as poppyseed cake, as well as meats, hot bites and even sparkling wine for those special occasions.

Jaymi McCann was a guest of Go To Brno

There’s a “surging interest” in apes, said Euronews. Nature documentaries like David Attenborough’s “A Gorilla Story”, which revisits the gorilla family he first filmed in 1978, are inspiring tourists to book gorilla-trekking holidays in Rwanda, Uganda and the Republic of Congo.

But tracking these beautiful creatures in their natural habitat isn’t easy: it’s physically strenuous, and permits are strictly limited, to protect the endangered animals.

Rwanda has 14 mountain gorilla families that have been carefully habituated to human observers and “can be visited by up to eight tourists for one hour daily”, said Lizzie Frainier in The Times. I travelled to the foothills of Mount Karisimbi in Volcanoes National Park to meet a family group of 14. Watching a baby gorilla running around in a “ferny glen” and frolicking into the “dense brush” was “magical”. I’ve had my fair share of wildlife experiences as a travel editor but none has compared to this.

This kind of “low-volume, high-value tourism” is pricey: a day’s trek costs over £1,000, with proceeds going towards anti-poaching initiatives and community development. Accommodation ranges from basic guesthouses to “ultra-luxe boutique hotels”. If you really want to push the boat out, check in at Wilderness Bisate Reserve, which has “epic misty 360-degree views and four palatial suites”.

On my trek through Uganda’s Bwindi National Park, the forest suddenly becomes “alive” with mountain gorillas, said Olivia Singer in Vogue. On my five-day trip with Abercrombie & Kent, I spot “two gargantuan silverbacks and a baby”; they “meander around us” for an hour “as they go about their business”. It is, I decide at once, “the best day of my life”.

Each night, we rested our heads in Gorilla Forest Lodge’s “remarkably lovely cabin suites”. Gorgeously decorated with “locally crafted furnishings”, each room features a “bathtub so vast, it could easily accommodate a silverback”.

New video game releases have been scant this year, as developers wait for the Grand Theft Auto VI drop date. But the next few months still have a few gems to eye. This summer, original games reminiscent of classic favorites are being released, along with a remastered collection of Metal Gear Solid entries.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

Square Enix’s latest 2D role-playing game arrives this summer from the teams behind the Octopath Traveler games and Live A Live. Fans of those games might expect The Adventures of Elliot to be “turn-based like its genre compatriots,” but the game will feature “real-time combat” instead, said Polygon. As the eponymous main character, you explore the land of Philabieldia across four time periods to fulfill a 1,000-year mission.

The game is a “throwback to classic Super Nintendo-era action-adventure games,” said PCMag. The Adventures of Elliot is a “faithful homage to the Legend of Zelda games of old.” (June 18; Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S)

D-Topia

Fans of more chill games will likely enjoy the new “gentle-paced,” as described by the publisher, puzzle adventure from Annapurna Interactive. Even with its less tense game style, the premise of D-topia revolves around a shadowy society run by AI that is working to ensure happiness for the greatest number of people.

D-Topia is an “experience that’s laid-back” but with a “dark undercurrent,” said Comics Gaming Magazine. It “not only looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous” but “hooks you with an intriguing premise oozing with intrigue.” Its “blend of cozy charm and subversive darkness” has critics “eager to see more.” (June 18; Nintendo Switch & Switch 2, PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S)

Beast of Reincarnation

Pokémon developer Game Freak is drifting from its usual fare for Beast of Reincarnation, an action role-playing game that’s “closer to a Souls game” with more intense focus on battling enemies than the “monster-collecting series that the developer built its name on,” said Polygon. Players take on the role of a young woman navigating a post-apocalyptic Japan with her dog companion while fighting off monsters.

According to the developer, Beast of Reincarnation isn’t an open-world game but is instead “made up of stages that are larger in scope than, say, those in a Devil May Cry game,” said Kotaku. (Aug. 4; PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S)

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls

Superhero fans can rejoice, as last spring's Invincible VS “isn’t the only tag-team fighter for comic book readers this year,” said Polygon. From the developer behind Dragon Ball FighterZ, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls features classic Marvel heroes like “Spider-Man, Iron Man and Black Panther” with “new anime-inspired designs.”

The game gained attention online “thanks to its art style and the pedigree of its developer,” said Gizmodo. As a “4v4 tag-team fighter,” it is the “very same thing which defined Marvel vs. Capcom,” a beloved classic. PlayStation came to developer Marvel Games with a desire to “bring Marvel back to the forefront of the tag-team fighting genre,” Marvel Games’ senior product development manager Michael Francisco said in a statement. (Aug. 6; PC, PS5)

Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2

Following the release of the first Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection in 2023, volume two arrives this summer. While the first set included the first five Metal Gear games, this one has Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and Metal Gear: Ghost Babel.

The collection is notable as “it’ll be the first time Metal Gear Solid 4 is made readily available outside of the PlayStation 3,” said Polygon. Master Collection Vol. 2 will include “bonus content in addition to the games.” A few of the additional items: a screenplay book and a digital soundtrack. (Aug. 27; PC, PS5)

Home insurance is must-have protection for what is likely your most valuable asset, and oftentimes mandatory if you have a mortgage. Losing it unexpectedly, whether due to your insurer’s decision not to renew or a sudden cancellation of coverage, is therefore an understandably stressful situation.

The first step in sorting it out is to determine why your insurer has either cancelled or not renewed your policy and what your rights are. From there, it is important to act quickly to avoid gaps in coverage.

Why do insurers not renew or cancel policies?

There are technically two ways insurers can cut off your homeowners insurance: a non-renewal, where the “insurance company decides not to renew your policy when it expires,” and a cancellation, which “can happen during the policy term,” said NerdWallet.

“Within the first 60 days of purchasing a homeowners insurance policy, insurers may be able to cancel it for any reason,” said Experian. After that, the insurer can cancel only for certain reasons. This can include missed premium payments, insurance fraud — such as misleading statements on your application or a failure to disclose certain details about the property — or a decline in your property’s condition that significantly increases the insurance company’s risk.

Non-renewal, meanwhile, “may happen for reasons outside your control,” said Experian, though that is not always the case. For instance, you may lose coverage for making too many claims or simply because your insurer has stopped selling policies in the state, a common occurrence in high-risk areas with frequent wildfires or hurricanes. It could also happen if you get a new pet that is not eligible for coverage under your insurance.

What are your rights after a homeowners insurance cancellation?

While specifics vary from state to state, “generally, most homeowners have the right to receive written notice of a non-renewal,” said NerdWallet. This “must arrive within a specific window of time and include an explanation of why the policy is not being renewed.”

Based on that information, you can determine how to proceed. “If you disagree with the reasoning or you want more details, reach out to the insurance company to learn more” and possibly have them reconsider, said Kiplinger. “If you believe that the decision is unfair, you may choose to contact your state’s insurance department for assistance.”

What should you do if you get dropped by your home insurer?

If you get dropped from your home insurance, you generally have two options: try to get reinstated or find new coverage. In either case, being proactive — whether by making home improvements or mitigating the risk of home damage — can make a difference. For instance, if your policy was dropped because of the condition of your roof, “you may be able to address the issue that caused the policy to be cancelled and get it reinstated,” or at least “help reduce your chance of being denied by a new insurer,” said Bankrate.

And beware what happens if you do not find replacement coverage in time: In this scenario, if you have a mortgage, “your lender may purchase a policy for you and pass the cost onto you.” The bad news there is that “it can cost double what you’d pay for a standard home insurance policy,” said Kiplinger.

With many in the Trump administration pushing an anti-vaccine agenda, declining measles vaccination rates have forced scientists to reinvigorate the hunt for a drug that could fight the virus. While the FDA has not approved any measles drugs yet, researchers seem hopeful that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

Why are researchers revamping the measles drug search?

For a long time, the quest to create a measles drug was essentially dormant, as the virus “had been kept at bay in the United States for more than two decades thanks to a remarkably effective vaccine,” said The New York Times. But in 2025, amid anti-vaccine sentiment from the White House, a “series of outbreaks popped up in unvaccinated communities across the country,” marking the worst year for measles in the U.S. since 1991.

The outbreak led to a “‘very crowded’ hunt for new measles therapeutics that could prevent or treat infections,” said the Times. Currently, if an unvaccinated individual contracts the measles, doctors can “offer ways to manage symptoms, which often include fever, fatigue, cough and a hallmark blotchy rash,” said Science News. But they “can’t fight off the virus itself.”

How far away is an approved measles drug?

There have been several breakthroughs from various scientific groups, and many feel that FDA approval of a measles drug is imminent. At least one antiviral drug, GHP-88310, was recently shown to “help treat measles, croup and other related viral diseases that cause contagious and life-threatening respiratory infections,” said The Independent. The drug is the “most promising inhibitor” of this virus family that causes measles “we have encountered in years of research,” Carolin Lieber, a senior postdoctoral fellow at Georgia State University’s Center for Translational Antiviral Research, said in a statement.

GHP-88310, which is taken orally, could “offer a much-needed option to treat measles in the midst of increasing endemic transmission in the U.S. and throughout the world due to vaccine hesitancy,” said Drug Discovery News. The drug could provide an alternative to the typical measles defense mechanism, ring vaccination, in which “direct and social contacts around an infected person are vaccinated.” But with “increasing vaccine hesitancy in some population groups, ring vaccination is no longer a viable option in some communities.”

The success of the drug doesn’t necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous as a measles treatment, partially due to people’s feelings about the disease. “One of the biggest misunderstandings about measles is that it’s ‘not that bad,’” Kathryn Hastie, a structural virologist at San Diego’s La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said to Science News. The virus instead can “cause a range of complications that can severely impact people’s lives, including pneumonia and blindness.”

Another company, Saravir, is developing its own measles antibody treatment. The medication could be a “potential multi-billion dollar market opportunity,” Dr. Ronald Moss, Saravir’s CEO, told the Times. Moss estimates there are 44 million people in the U.S. and EU who are “uniquely vulnerable to measles,” and if even a small portion of that group is exposed, it’s a “pretty big population that we would want to protect.” Still, the antibody treatment and other measles drugs could be cost-prohibitive. If the “drug makes it through trials,” said the Times, Saravir “expects the infusions to cost roughly $2,500.”

What do the statistics show?

That the U.S. is experiencing the largest and most sustained drop in homicides on record. After spiking sharply at the start of the pandemic, peaking at 6.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2021, the homicide rate started to come down in 2022. Since then, murders have dropped by an average of 16% a year; they fell 21% across 35 large cities from 2024 to 2025, according to the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. Killings declined in cities in blue and red states: Chicago and Baltimore both recorded a 31% drop (to 416 and 133 homicides, respectively), Salt Lake City 27% (to 8), and St. Louis 11% (to 121). If a similar decline is reflected in national data, the homicide rate will drop to 4 per 100,000, the lowest since 1900. Early figures for this year suggest the downward trend is continuing: New York City registered 102 murders from January to May, the lowest number on record for the period and down 21% from the same months in 2025. Such numbers are “absolutely astonishing,” said CCJ president Adam Gelb. “It’s a historic collapse in the homicide rate.” Other violent crimes are also down. From 2019 to 2025, the robbery rate fell 36% in major cities, carjackings 29%, and domestic violence incidents 19%.

What’s driving this drop?

Some of it is a reversal of the pandemic effect. The factors that sent the murder rate soaring 30% in 2020—social disruption, workplace and school closures that put young men on the street, stay-home recommendations that trapped people with abusers— faded as normal life returned. But murders have since dropped well below pre-pandemic levels. The Trump administration has a simple explanation: It says President Trump “turned the tide” by “removing savage criminal illegals” and flooding blue cities with federal agents. Experts give that claim no credibility, noting that murders started dipping years before Trump returned to office. Instead, it seems as though multiple factors are behind the decline, including important shifts in policing.

How has policing changed?

After temporarily retreating from many communities following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police, “cops got back to work,” said former New York Police Department chief Kenneth Corey. They also became “much more focused on gun violence.” Part of that involved zeroing in on the small number of repeat violent offenders responsible for an outsize share of crimes. Advances in DNA technology and the spread of surveillance cameras also helped catch killers. “There’s nowhere in this city where you can walk without being on video,” said Frank Simpson, chief homicide prosecutor in Camden, N.J., which recorded 12 murders last year, down from 67 in 2012. But some experts question the role of law enforcement in the homicide drop, noting murders have fallen as police departments across the nation have lost manpower. Philadelphia, for example, has the fewest officers per capita in 40 years and just posted its lowest annual homicide total—222—since 1966.

What else could explain the decline?

Crime experts and local leaders point to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which then-president Joe Biden signed in March 2021 to combat the pandemic’s impacts. It sent hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments, which in many locales funded community violence intervention (CVI) programs. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett credits his city’s plunging murder rate in large part to Indy Peace, a CVI program that offers support to gunshot victims and their families in the hope of preventing retaliatory shootings. “It saves lives,” said Hogsett. The federal windfall also went to other community investments that may have made a difference: summer jobs programs for teens, after-school programs, community centers, and mental health services. “I think it has gone unrecognized how incredibly effective it was in stabilizing communities,” Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey says of ARPA. Other changes in American habits could also be curbing violence.

What kind of changes? 

A decline in drunkenness—54% of U.S. adults now say they drink alcohol, the lowest in nearly 90 years—has likely helped shrink the number of murders. “You get drunk, you do something stupid,” said Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Experts also nod to the effects of social media—many young people now socialize online rather than in person—the way the 2020–22 homicide spike took potential killers off the street, and even the possible influence of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which may diminish impulsive behaviors. But none of these factors can explain the sheer scale of the murder drop, said crime analyst and former CIA agent Jeff Asher, and neither can changes in poverty or the availability of guns. “We didn’t fix any of those things,” Asher said. “So, what you’re left with is a bunch of explanations, none of which explains all of it.”

How low will the murder rate go?

Experts don’t know that either—and point to two factors that could nudge it back up. One is that the Biden stimulus money is running out, and its effect “will wane substantially this year,” said John Roman, a University of Chicago criminal justice researcher. Then there are the steep cuts to community funding by the Trump administration. As part of its offensive against “DEI and cultural Marxism,” it terminated at least 373 grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs last year, wiping out some $500 million in funding for efforts including CVI programs, victim services, and programs to aid ex-offenders. Some experts call that a tragic miscalculation after such historic gains. “Don’t take our foot off the gas,” said criminal justice researcher Jennifer Doleac. “We do have control over our destiny here.”

In this dark moment, “Scott Pelley is the hero we need,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At a recent all-hands meeting with Nick Bilton, new executive producer of 60 Minutes, the veteran CBS correspondent demanded Bilton explain the “Black Thursday” massacre, in which correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired along with other senior staff. When Bilton claimed ignorance, Pelley took him “to the woodshed.” He accused Bilton and Bari Weiss—the Free Press founder now running CBS News—of trying to “murder” 60 Minutes as a favor to President Trump, who has a long-standing grudge against the show. Not coincidentally, CBS’s billionaire owners, Larry and David Ellison, need Trump’s approval to complete their takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, home of CNN and the Warner movie studio. Bilton swiftly fired Pelley, but failed to silence him. Speaking later to The New York Times, Pelley debunked Weiss’ “ludicrous rationalizations” about revamping 60 Minutes for the digital age. (Viewership climbed 9% last season and online views 190%.) More damning, Pelley claimed that in February Weiss pushed him to impart a Trumpian spin to a report on anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, demanding he make the demonstrators look “more violent,” and inform viewers—falsely—that protester Renée Good was “driving toward” the ICE officer who shot her dead.

I’m sorry, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but no “employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed.” Even one who makes $7 million a year. Before last week’s blowup, Weiss and Bilton invited Pelley to clear the air in private. Pelley refused, preferring to humiliate Bilton before the full staff, which he did in deeply personal terms, mocking Bilton’s “slender” credentials and sneering that he “will never be welcome here.” There’s “something unconsciously fitting” about Pelley’s self-martyrdom, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. In his “hysterical reaction” to Weiss’ changes to 60 Minutes, the 68-year-old Pelley displayed the pomposity and unreflecting, lefty self-righteousness that made those changes necessary.

Pelley’s not the only one getting old, said Chris Cillizza in his Substack newsletter. The average 60 Minutes viewer is now 65. The show’s audience is “literally dying off,” just as broadcast TV itself has entered terminal decline. Bilton tried explaining this during Pelley’s “barrage,” likening broadcast TV to “an ice cube that is melting.” In a prior memo to staff, Bilton claimed to have a “notebook full of ideas” of how 60 Minutes can thrive in a post-broadcast world, said Brian Stelter in CNN.com, and maybe he does. But if he and Weiss bungle the execution of those ideas as badly as they’ve bungled the last two weeks, many staff fear they’ll succeed only in “speeding up the melting process.”

Maybe 60 Minutes will survive in some form, said Rick Wilson in his Substack newsletter. But its days as a beacon of “accountability journalism” effectively ended last year, when Weiss tried to scrap a report on El Salvador’s CECOT prison, then the Trump administration’s preferred destination for migrant deportees. True, David Ellison reached out this week to staff, promising to respect the show’s “editorial independence.” But with an autocrat in the White House, what sane billionaire wants to bankroll the work of asking questions that “make powerful people uncomfortable?” In our 250-year history, 60 Minutes’ “ticking stopwatch was the closest thing American power had to a conscience it could not buy. Until they did.”

‘One city might have just cracked the housing crisis’

Binyamin Appelbaum at The New York Times

Vancouver is the “place that has failed most spectacularly in the basic work of building enough housing,” says Binyamin Appelbaum. But Canada has “returned 10 acres in the middle of Vancouver to the Squamish, the First Nation whose ancestors lived there” and “freed from Vancouver’s rules, the Squamish are providing the city’s residents with a chunk of the housing they so desperately need.” The area “will make a modest dent in Vancouver’s housing crisis,” but is a “rebuke to the surrounding city.”

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‘Ocasio-Cortez appears to be recreating Obama’s multi-racial voter coalition’

Juan Williams at The Hill

Turnout is “key to this year’s midterm fight for control of Congress,” and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is “ringing the bell for people to rush the polls,” says Juan Williams. Ocasio-Cortez “looks to be intent on recreating the energy of the last Democrat to build a multi-racial coalition of Democratic voters,” as she “echoed Barack Obama’s 2004 appeal to Democrats.” The Democratic Party is “listening to a promising Latin beat mixing with the Black gospel thanks to Ocasio-Cortez.”

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‘America’s charitable food system is missing a key ingredient’

Daniel Leckie at Newsweek

Many households have “turned to the charitable food system for assistance,” says Daniel Leckie. But “protein is missing,” and “many families receive diets built primarily around shelf-stable carbohydrates, which are cheaper.” This “should concern us all: As nutrition insecurity deepens, it fuels a parallel crisis in chronic disease.” As the “need for charitable food support grows, the system will have to evolve if it's to provide the nutrient most essential for satiety, muscle development, metabolic stability and healthy aging.”

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‘AI schools like Alpha promise efficiency, but can’t replicate the messy process that helps kids learn’

W. Ian O’Byrne at The Conversation

AI-powered “educational programs like Alpha School, a growing private network of schools, replace much of the school day with adaptive software that adjusts lessons to each student’s pace and abilities,” says W. Ian O’Byrne, the director of the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age. The “pitch is personalized learning” but the “deeper you look at how children learn, the clearer it becomes that this growing brand of alternative schools might remove the discomfort that often comes with learning — taking away what matters most as kids develop.”

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Lawmakers are exploring a new front in the electoral battle between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have zeroed in on the other’s fundraising operations, with Republicans vowing to intensify their existing investigation into Democrats’ ActBlue online platform after Executive Director Regina Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment protections during a Republican-led House hearing last week. In turn, Democrats have increased calls for similar investigations into the GOP’s WinRed platform over allegations of illegal international contributions and fraud.

Foreign funds and ‘profoundly alarming’ allegations

Democrats on the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees last week requested WinRed CEO Ryan Lyk sit for a “transcribed interview” and “preserve documents and communications” about WinRed’s fraud prevention, said Politico. Reports that “foreign nationals have used WinRed to donate money to President Donald Trump’s campaign” are “profoundly alarming,” said New York Rep. Joe Morelle, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Robert Garcia (D-Ca.), in a letter to Lyk.

The letter is the “latest salvo in a long-running battle” between Democrats and Republicans over their respective online fundraising infrastructures, said Politico. Republicans have spent “over a year looking into ActBlue’s process for vetting foreign political contributions,” said Campaigns and Elections. Conservatives “escalated their probe” in April following a “bombshell New York Times report” that ActBlue’s lawyers had “previously warned Wallace-Jones that she may have misled congressional investigators” about ActBlue’s donation vetting practices. That warning “instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue” and was a “key cause of the tumult” at the organization, said The New York Times.

The GOP’s pursuit of ActBlue is not “legitimate oversight,” said Wallace-Jones at The Washington Post. Rather, it is a “coordinated campaign of political retribution,” and last week’s hearing was the “latest assault in that corrupt campaign.” Democrats on the House Administration committee have meanwhile “sought to draw attention” to Ken Paxton, Texas’ Republican attorney general and Senate nominee, whom they claim has ignored questions “about any similar probes of GOP fundraising practices,” said Roll Call.

‘Defrauded, in real time’

“Dozens of political donors” have “begged Paxton’s office in recent years for recourse” against both WinRed and ActBlue, “complaining of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges and nonstop text messages requesting more money,” said the San Antonio Express-News. But Paxton “hasn’t publicly taken action” and “deploys the same aggressive tactics” in his own WinRed fundraising.

By targeting ActBlue with a lawsuit this past spring, Paxton’s “willful blindness has come home to roost,” said Reps. Morelle, Raskin and Garcia in a letter to the attorney general demanding he preserve his WinRed documents. “Dozens of your constituents are being defrauded, in real time.”

Dueling allegations over both platforms are now “putting an otherwise bipartisan effort” for campaign finance reform “at risk,” said NOTUS. With four campaign finance bills “recently approved by the House Administration Committee,” subsequent “bipartisan progress appears strained” as partisan fighting intensifies.

Democrats, meanwhile, have only increased their threats ahead of November’s midterm elections. Congress “has a duty to investigate” cases of alleged fraud and malfeasance, said Rep. Morelle, per Politico. “House Republicans have not taken that duty seriously. But next year, rest assured, committee Democrats will.”

Major League Baseball remains the only North American professional sport without a ceiling on team spending, due in large part to the fearsome power of its players’ union. But owners have declared their intent to impose a salary cap, setting them on a collision course with the players, who remain opposed to joining their capped peers in football, hockey and basketball.

Baseball has enjoyed a resurgence in attendance and interest of late following rule changes like the pitch clock that have noticeably shortened the overall length of games. Hanging over the upcoming negotiations are memories of the disastrous 1994 labor stoppage that canceled the World Series, leading to a yearslong downturn in attendance and enthusiasm. It remains to be seen whether owners are willing to risk baseball’s new era of prosperity by dying on the hill of a salary cap.

Fans crave a cap

The owners are emboldened by polls that show fans want a salary cap. But perhaps the highest-profile booster for the owners’ position is the U.S. president, who has demonstrated a willingness to intervene in pro sports disputes. “If you don’t have a salary cap you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves,” said President Donald Trump on June 5, per The New York Times. Fellow critics of the current structure note that each of the championships of the 2020s have been won by teams with top 15 payrolls. “The correlation between spending and winning is obvious,” said Andy McCullough at The Athletic.

The failure of the sport’s luxury tax system to dissuade richer teams from spending lavishly means that “we need a realistic framework that addresses the fans’ concerns about competitive balance,” said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred per Fox Sports. Those concerns have been heightened by the free-spending habits of teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets, who have hoovered up the most prominent free agents on the market over the past several offseasons using financial loopholes like deferred salary payments. The Dodgers will pay a $169 million luxury tax on their $417.3 million payroll in 2026 alone, more than the total salary spending of 15 out of baseball’s 30 teams.

“Beneath the shameless posturing” of owners, the “gut instincts baseball watchers have about the state of the game” are “relatively legitimate,” said Lex Pryor at The Ringer. Backed by that fan outrage, many owners “are ready to burn the f---ing house down,” said one senior team official to ESPN.

Journalists and players think it’s a smokescreen

Baseball’s labor war pits owners and fans against not just the players but most baseball journalists. The push for a salary cap “drives me crazy,” said The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal on the Foul Territory podcast. The system is “not perfect,” but “does it need a salary cap that could cost us games in 2027 to be rectified? I still believe the answer is no.” Rosenthal and other salary cap critics point out that wild spending is no guarantee of success, and many clubs operating on a shoestring, like the Milwaukee Brewers, have found ways to win consistently.

For others, the salary cap proposal demonstrates pure greed from owners who are all fabulously wealthy yet perennially crying poor. Forget the details of the “gobbledygook-intensive” initial proposal from owners who are “less savvy businessmen than garden-variety landlords in search of that sweet, sweet passive income,” said Ray Ratto at Defector. “MLB owners want a salary cap just because everyone else in their microclass has one” and because it would inflate the value of their franchises.

Baseball has “just as much, if not more, parity than the salary cap leagues,” and pro-cap sentiment is driven by the reality that “deep down in places people don’t talk about at parties, there’s a feeling that the billionaires in business earned their dollars and the players just won the lottery by being good at a kids’ game,” said Matt Snyder at CBS Sports. Indeed, between 2015 and 2024, 14 different teams played in the World Series, as opposed to 10 in the NHL and NFL championships and just 8 in the NBA.