Rifts within the Labour Party look set to fracture along new lines, as a Labour MP says she’ll reintroduce the highly controversial assisted dying bill.

Lauren Edwards, MP for Rochester and Strood, has said she will use her second place in the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring forward the same Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill Kim Leadbeater introduced last year. The original bill was narrowly voted through by the House of Commons but fell in April, after running out of time to clear the House of Lords because of the huge number of safeguarding amendments tabled.

“By bringing exactly the same legislation, Edwards is threatening to trigger rarely used” parliamentary powers “to override peers’ objections should they refuse to pass it again”, said the BBC. 

What did the commentators say?
Supporters of assisted dying “insist” the bill only failed because “a handful of peers blocked it”, said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. Yet “blaming a handful of peers for the bill’s demise ignores the concerns that were raised by others before debate even began”. There were numerous worries from across the political spectrum “about the bill’s lack of pre-legislative scrutiny and the absence of detail about how assisted dying would work in practice”.

I support the right to die but not this legislation, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. It only “covers a vanishingly small number of people”, whose needs could really “be met via decent palliative care”. It is designed for a person who has six or less months to live, is of sound mind and wishes to die without pain or uncertainty. But “when I talk to people about” assisted dying, most of those who “want the right” are those who do not want “to spend years in expensive, suspended animation while their dementia costs eat away at everything they’ve worked for”. I fear politicians are “much more squeamish about that aspect of wanting the right to die than the average British person”.

What next?
Some doubt that the bill would even pass the House of Commons this time. If it doesn’t, it would hardly be “a surprise, given that Leadbeater’s legislation passed its Commons Third Reading by just 23 votes”, said The Spectator. “That means only 12 MPs would need to switch from support to opposition for it to fall.”

College leavers are booing company bosses booked to speak at their graduation ceremonies for mentioning artificial intelligence. Young people’s “AI anxiety” is “boiling over into public backlash”, said Business Insider. And it’s “highlighting a gulf” between older generations, who tend to feel the technology “offers new opportunities”, and Gen Z, who are “growing increasingly anxious” about what AI “means for their future”.

Backlash and resistance
Excitement about AI among Gen Z has fallen from 36% to 22% in the past year, according to a recent Gallup survey, while anger towards the technology has risen nine points, to 31%. Another survey, carried out by Numerator, found that among Gen Z people who don’t already use AI, 57% are not open to adopting it, compared to just 32% of Boomers.

“Read that again,” said Fortune. “Older Americans are more open to AI than young ones.” It seems that a “surprising segment of the generation that was supposed to lead AI adoption” is actually “leading the resistance to it”. For them, AI was “foisted upon them” by their “parents, big tech CEOs” and Donald Trump.

Young people were sold “the promise that a college education secured a good future”, but now employers are “gutting entry-level positions” in favour of AI, said Denison University student Jack Jackoboice in The Wall Street Journal. Some Gen Z workers are “actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives” by feeding sensitive company data into public AI tools and by “intentionally producing low-quality, AI-assisted junk work” to make the technology “look unreliable”, said Vice.

‘Existential melodrama’
The “danger” is that “economic anxiety” can “curdle into existential melodrama”, said college student Ethan Tran in The Wall Street Journal. “Fear underrates human ingenuity”; young people shouldn’t “hide from replacement” but “look for opportunities that arise from the transformation”.

AI anxiety also got short shrift from the CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta, when graduates at Middle Tennessee State University booed him for saying that AI is rewriting the music industry. He told the hecklers: “You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

Smoke and flames rise from Kyiv’s Dormition Cathedral, part of the Unesco-listed Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, following a wave of Russian missile and drone strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned “one of Russia’s most serious crimes ​against Christian culture to date”. 

Andriy Dubchak / Frontliner / Getty Images

“Tropical fruit and chilli sauce” is a combination that “works”, said Lucy Knight in The Guardian. The zingy mix of “fricy” (fruity and spicy) flavours has been a staple of South American cuisine for years. Now, it’s being tipped as the food trend of the summer here.

Fricy may sound like a “silly word” but the demand is real, Holly Thomson of online food retailer Sous Chef told the paper. Her company’s website has seen a 19% year-on-year increase in sales of their “hero” fricy product: a Mexican lime, salt and chilli spice blend, called Tajín.

“The hashtag #fricy hasn’t quite gone viral” yet, said the BBC, but there are plenty of social media posts celebrating the flavour combination. The Mexican drink mangonada, a mix of mango with chamoy (a condiment made from pickled, spiced fruit), has already inspired “more than 47,000 TikTok posts”. Spicy fruit bowls containing “fruit such as pineapple and mango, covered in spices like chilli” are also having a moment.

Food trends usually rely on “emotional pull” and “visual appeal”. Just as its “striking purple” hue is responsible for the rise of ube, or purple yam, the “vivid yellows, oranges, reds and browns” of the mangonada make people “curious” to taste it. And once they do, they find the “tangy, spicy, sweet, salty” combination quite memorable, Dominic Vargas, founder of the Mango Twist café in London, told The Guardian.

Rejoining the EU is not the answer Brexit Britain is looking for
Gina Miller in The Independent
We need to grow up about Europe, writes anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller. Brexit’s “not delivering” and in today’s “more dangerous” world, “Britain needs allies”. But “rejoining the EU is not the answer”; it would take too long and cause “renewed division”. I’d back a “Swiss-style settlement in which we have a much closer relationship with the bloc”. Sovereignty “is the capacity to choose what works”, and “we cannot be safe and prosperous by standing outside the reality of our geography”.

The real ‘two-tier’ policing scandal leaving disabled people powerless
Ian Birrell in The i Paper
Kemi Badenoch wants “an end to the duty placed on public bodies” to “fight discrimination”, writes Ian Birrell. Pushing “populist assertions” about “woke mindsets” and “two-tier policing”, the Tory leader dismisses “the need to treat any groups differently to achieve fairness”. But she’s “brazenly” overlooking people with disabilities, who face “routine discrimination” and even “abuse and hatred”. “Treating everybody the same” may be “a fine aspiration”, but “she needs to wake up to the true reality of our society”.

Let me count the ways I love Harry Styles
Robert Crampton in The Times
Harry Styles’ Wembley residency is gathering “momentum”, and while “I can’t fathom” his music, writes Robert Crampton, “I can totally see why he is such a massive star”. I like how he winds up “the barmy American right” with his “glitter and sequins”. I like his “apparently ambivalent sexuality”. And I like his face: “open, pleasant, but with a hint of steel, a hint of geezer” – “timelessly English”. “I sense that, if push came to shove”, Styles “would have my back”.