Just hours after Andy Burnham sent the Labour Party faithful “into raptures” with his conference speech, his remarks about the Manchester City financial rule-breaking scandal triggered a “whiplash mood shift”, said The Mill.

The former Manchester mayor told the BBC’s Chris Mason that the club’s UAE owners had been “a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester” and that he would be “really concerned” if they decided to sell up. Burnham’s apparent sympathy for the club’s leadership has become his “biggest self-inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street in July”, said Mason.

‘Mealy-mouthed’ intervention
The prime minister rode the “horse” of “football blokeyness” all the way to Westminster, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian, but now that horse is “threatening to run right over the top of him”. Yes, Burnham benefited hugely politically from Abu Dhabi investment in Manchester, but he needs to “stop thanking the UAE so profusely” for what was nothing more than a “business deal”.

His “mealy-mouthed” intervention on Man City only “muddied the process of upholding” the verdict, said The Times’ chief football correspondent Jonathan Northcroft. Abu Dhabi is reportedly “threatening to cut billions of pounds of UK investment in umbrage” at the Premier League’s decision. It makes you wonder if “outside elements sticking their spoons into football is the path to salvation after all”.

‘Inseparable’ relationship
It “felt revealing” that Burnham’s “first instinct” was to laud the ownership group, rather than empathise with the “masses horrified” by the seemingly systematic breaches of football’s financial rules, said Adam Crafton on The Athletic. City and Abu Dhabi are viewed as “inseparable”, emblematic of a broader UK-UAE relationship that is “considered crucial across security, investment and trade”.

The “hundreds of millions of pounds Abu Dhabi ploughed into the area around” the Man City ground turned “one of the most deprived and desolate quarters of the city” into a thriving economic hub, said Simon Kelner in The i Paper. Burnham clearly felt he was “being true to his sense of fair play in illuminating” those benefits, but in future, it’s best that he “keeps well clear”.

The criminal investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire has reached a “milestone moment”, according to a senior Metropolitan Police officer. More than nine years after the tragedy, the force has asked prosecutors to consider charges including manslaughter, fraud and misconduct in public office against 20 companies and organisations and 54 individuals.

The Crown Prosecution Service has said that charging decisions would be made before the 10th anniversary of the disaster. Here are some of the key events during the long wait for justice.

14 June 2017: the fire
Just before 1am, a fire broke out in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat in the 23-storey tower block in north Kensington, west London. The resulting disaster claimed the lives of 72 people, making it “the deadliest domestic blaze since the Second World War”, said Sky News.

15 June 2017
Then PM Theresa May ordered a full public inquiry into the tragedy.

30 June 2017
Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council leader Nicholas Paget-Brown resigned over “perceived failings” by the council related to the fire.

19 September 2017
The Met announced it was expanding its investigation to “consider corporate manslaughter and gross negligence manslaughter”.

21 May 2018
The inquiry began, with seven days of commemoration hearings dedicated to the dead, starting with the youngest, stillborn Logan Gomes.

September 2018
The government banned the use of combustible cladding on all new residential buildings above 18 metres, including schools and hospitals.

October 2019
The report on Phase 1 of the inquiry was published. It concluded that the tower’s cladding did not comply with building regulations and was the “principal” reason for the rapid and “profoundly shocking” spread of the blaze.

27 January 2022
The inquiry entered Phase 2, focusing on issues around cladding, the tower’s management and the emergency response.

4 September 2024
The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report was published. It concluded that all 72 deaths were “avoidable” and that residents had been “badly failed” by parties “responsible for ensuring the safety of the building and its occupants”.

Lionel Messi is overcome with emotion after ending his Argentina career with a 3-0 victory in last night’s friendly against Benin in Buenos Aires. The 39-year-old scored a penalty and made two assists in his 208th and final game for his national team.

Luis Robayo / AFP / Getty Images

She was a cultural icon who sold more than 200 million records, yet Whitney Houston’s achievements have been “obscured by public interest in her private life”, including the drug addiction that contributed to her death at the age of 48, said Liam Kelly in The Telegraph. All this makes her a “compelling character” for Emily Lordi’s new biography, “Holding Lightning: the Life, Loves and Art of Whitney Houston”.

The version of Houston’s story that has played out in most of the books and documentaries about her since her 2012 death is of the “wholesome choirgirl” whose life was derailed by her marriage to bad-boy singer Bobby Brown in 1992, said The Times’ Victoria Segal. But Lordi, a critic and professor of English at Vanderbilt University, refuses to “reduce Houston’s story to another ‘good girl gone bad’ narrative”, said Priya Elan in The Guardian. Instead, she “presents a pluralistic take” on Houston’s life in which the singer’s “queerness, drug use and eccentricities” are placed “in the wider context of her unique talent and the pressures placed on her to embody Black excellence”.

“Holding Lightning” makes a persuasive case for Houston’s artistic “genius”, said The New York Times culture editor Leah Greenblatt. Although Lordi’s analysis can “tip into academic mode, and she sometimes overreaches”, she “works eloquently to elevate and re-reframe an icon”. At its best, her book allows Houston “the grace of something she longed for and rarely got to be: life-size”.

It’s not just Cornell: rape culture spreads from frat houses to business, politics and even boys’ phones
Deborah Frances-White on The Nerve
US fraternity houses “have long been associated with toxic behaviour” and “sexual assault”, writes “The Guilty Feminist” podcaster Deborah Frances-White. They also open doors “to the corridors of power” – so “if women aren’t safe in a frat house”, they aren’t safe in a courthouse, a boardroom or the White House. And now that “every young man can carry” manosphere content “in his pocket”, the frat house mentality “is on the loose” elsewhere. “It’s down to the decent men” to “step up”.

India’s ‘million mutinies’ are puncturing Modi’s aura of invincibility
Vidya Krishnan on Al Jazeera
India’s young people are “out on the streets”, writes Vidya Krishnan. A “sudden convergence” of “volatile protests” over everything from electoral manipulation to “examination irregularities” has caught PM Narendra Modi “in a pincer movement of domestic unrest”. He no longer has the “combined power of popular legitimacy and institutional control”, and “the giant balloon” of his self-esteem is being “pierced” by “relentless” online ridicule. “History will note” that his regime began to teeter “when ordinary students stopped believing that nothing can be done”.

More Labour voters than Tories go to Waitrose? Drop the focaccia!
Carol Midgley in The Times
Waitrose is the supermarket where you’d “expect to find a man called Hector in mustard corduroy trousers, bellowing” about olive bread, writes Carol Midgley. But a new poll suggests “you’re more likely to find Labour voters” there “than Tory ones”. I’m surprised that’s the place where lefties “stock up on Prunotto Barollo” for their dinner parties. I shop at Tesco, because it’s nearest, but I must try “not to be bitter” and just “accept that I’m a supermarket commoner”.