Keir Starmer’s announcement that the UK will introduce mandatory digital IDs for all citizens has triggered questions about their use, effectiveness and threat to privacy. Amid fierce debate about the plans, the government has promised to take the “best aspects of the digital identification systems that are already up and running around the world”.

Which countries have digital IDs?
The EU is aiming to roll out Digital Identity (eID) Wallets for all citizens of the bloc by the end of 2026, but many European countries already use national electronic ID systems. Beyond the continent, countries including Australia, India, Canada, Japan, Nigeria, China and South Korea all offer ways for their citizens to verify their identity and access services digitally.

How are they used?
The e-Estonia platform, “by far the most highly developed national ID-card system in the world”, contains legal photo ID and provides access to all of Estonia’s government services, said Sky News. In Denmark, “life online is almost impossible without MitID”, said The Guardian. Introduced in 2023, the app is needed to pay taxes, book a health appointment or apply for college.

Poland’s mObywatel allows people to check points on their driving licence, look up local air quality or change their polling station, among other things. Ukraine’s DIIA app is used by the majority of citizens to access more than 70 online services, as well as to track drone attacks.

What are the concerns?
Cyberattackers have targeted e-Estonia on multiple occasions over the past two decades. In 2021, a hacker obtained around 300,000 document photos “through a security vulnerability in the state portal”, the country’s government said.

Other objections centre on fears that data could be “amalgamated, searched and analysed to monitor, track and profile people”, said The Guardian’s technology editor Robert Booth. In India, mass collection of data from 1.3 billion citizens for the Aadhaar ID platform has “horrified” civil libertarians, said The New York Times. Enrolment is now “mandatory for hundreds of public services and many private ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts”. “You almost feel like life is going to stop without an Aadhaar,” one woman told the newspaper.

“Sure, cigarettes are bad for you but they make you look good.” That’s the sentiment driving smoking’s recent surge in popularity, said The New York Times. Modern culture has re-romanticised the cigarette in films and TV shows such as “Materialists” and “The Bear”. And celebrities are “embracing cigarettes” too, said Kate Ng in the Daily Mail, with stars including Sabrina Carpenter, Paul Mescal and Charli XCX regularly pictured with a cigarette in hand.

Nostalgia for ‘bygone’ hedonism
For the first time in two decades, smoking rates have increased in some parts of England, particularly among young people. “Stick around long enough and everything comes back into fashion,” said Flora Watkins in The Spectator –  “even the main cause of premature death and preventable illness in the UK”. Maybe it’s a symptom of “Gen Z’s nostalgia for the 1990s”, a rebellion against authoritarianism, or simply “the realisation that vaping is naff and nasty”.

Smoking is “a portable icebreaker”, the perfect “ritual” to smooth social interactions, said Liz Hoggard in The Telegraph. Indulging in the habit gives young people a “ready-made micro-community” in which to explore a “bygone era of hedonism”.

Do it ‘while you can’
Anti-smoking “zealots” may blame the resurgence on the government being “too soft” on smoking and not banning it completely, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic. But it’s actually more about the fears and “hysteria over vaping” and the “astonishing rate” at which the black market for tobacco has grown in response to government tax rises. There’s also the “forbidden fruit” aspect: if the new legislation means we’re sliding into prohibition, “you might as well do it legally while you can”.

“Cool and dangerous are more alike than they are different,” said The Atlantic. It is the responsibility of regulators to “figure out how to kill the allure of smoking”. If not, the cycle of rejection and embrace of the cigarette will continue to plague us “ad infinitum”.

Protesters in the city of Antsiranana call for the resignation of Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina. At least 22 people have been killed during a week of anti-government rallies and strikes triggered by power cuts and water shortages across the island nation.

FITA / AFP / Getty Images

Anthony Lau’s “searing and starkly stripped-back” new staging of “Lord of the Flies” at the Chichester Festival Theatre brings William Golding’s modern classic to “thrilling life”, said Gareth Carr on WhatsOnStage. The tale about a group of boys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash has been a staple of the school curriculum for decades but remains “timely, disturbing and brilliantly insightful”.

Illuminated by the “harsh fluorescence" of Matt Daw’s lighting, Georgia Lowe’s “brutally sparse but incredibly effective designs” create the “unforgiving wasteland” for Golding’s characters to “disintegrate into animalistic savages”.

Lau’s “spare and powerful” revival of Nigel Williams’ adaptation encourages us to “reflect afresh upon how quickly the everyday can take a plunge into the darkness”, said Fiona Mountford in The Telegraph. The bare stage is supported by a “wonderfully ominous surround-sound design” from Giles Thomas.

From smoke and flashing lights to “litres of stage gore”, it’s a “hyper-busy” production, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “But rather than cutting to the emotional core of the story”, said Dave Fargnoli in The Stage, “all this abstraction has a distancing effect, and the overall result feels messy”.

Yet the production is anchored by an “extraordinary” cast, said Carr on WhatsOnStage. Sheyi Cole is “quietly commanding as the natural-born leader Ralph”, while Alfie Jallow is “equally engaging” as Piggy, injecting the “well-meaning conscience of the group” with a “poignant light-heartedness”. In all, it’s an “uncompromising and fearless” staging that confirms Golding’s landmark work of literature is still as “unpleasantly relevant” today.

Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
If you “want to know how Prime Minister Farage would pan out”, writes Aditya Chakrabortty, an “excellent test case is unfolding” in Argentina. Under the rule of hard-right “poster boy” Javier Milei, “one of Nigel’s heroes”, the country has “gone into freefall”: “investors have yanked billions” out of the economy and “the peso has dropped like a stone”. And the response of his  “international throng of cheerleaders”? Farage and “all the rest” are keeping “a red-faced silence”.

Black hole stars challenge our idea of the universe
Anjana Ahuja in the Financial Times
Little “scarlet blobs” scattered across deep space have “defied explanation” since they were first spotted in 2022, writes space physicist Anjana Ahuja. But now astronomers have “a plausible scenario”: they are not stars but “supermassive” black holes “wrapped in dense hydrogen gas” that emit radiation “that looks much like starlight”. This raises new questions about the “cosmic dawn”: “did stars and galaxies give rise to black holes, or was it the other way around”?

The vanishing of the aspirational lower-middle class
John Hardy in The Critic
Commentary about class often focuses on working-class tropes – “chip shops, miner grandfathers, and holidays in Whitby”– while the “extinction” of the “respectable lower middle classes” has “gone almost entirely unremarked”, writes John Hardy. “A distinctly British caste” with “Marks & Spencer blazers”, “net curtains” and trimmed lawns, their belief in civic duty once “glued together ordinary life”. But then their notions of respectability “curdled into shorthand for provincial small-mindedness” and this demographic “all but disappeared”.