What happened
Piers Morgan is pressing ahead with legal action against Earl Spencer despite the author apologising for a factual error in his controversial memoir about his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales. Morgan has instructed lawyers to demand that “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister” be withdrawn from sale and called on Spencer to pulp the remaining copies. The dispute centres on Spencer’s claim that Morgan was responsible for publishing photographs of Diana that were secretly taken at a gym in 1993. However, Morgan was not editor of the Daily Mirror when the images were published, having only joined the newspaper in 1995.

Who said what
Morgan said Spencer’s account contained “fabricated inaccuracies” and questioned why readers should trust the rest of the book if he could get such a basic fact about Morgan wrong. Spencer acknowledged that his assumption was incorrect and apologised, pointing out that “as a historian, accuracy is important”. He nevertheless stood by his account of Morgan’s reaction when Spencer called to tell him he was not welcome at Diana’s funeral.

What next?
Morgan is “determined to hold Earl Charles Spencer legally accountable”, said Nama Winston on Media Week. The broadcaster said his lawyers were pursuing both Spencer and the book’s publisher, Penguin, seeking to have the disputed claims removed and damages paid to the King’s Trust.

What happened
Scientists have pinpointed why the meningitis B outbreak in Kent in March – which killed two and saw nine others admitted to hospital – was so dangerous. In total 21 people were diagnosed in just a week in an outbreak linked to “a Canterbury nightclub popular with students”, said Sky News.

A process called horizontal gene transfer meant that strains of the disease absorbed genetic material from bacteria found naturally in people’s throats, which changed how the strain interacted with human cells and made it “very effective at causing severe illness”, added Sky News.

Who said what
“This investigation shows just how quickly and dramatically these bacteria can change,” said Dr Charlene Rodrigues, consultant in Pathogen Genomics at the UK Health Security Agency. Although events like this are rare – and on this occasion were compounded by the social environment – she warned experts and authorities not to “take their eye off the ball”.

What next?
A one-off menB vaccination programme has since been launched to protect young people heading to university. And in July the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended that 15-year-olds should also be offered the jab.

“If a left-wing candidate can win in New York, then there’s no reason it can’t happen in Berlin.” A year on from her comment after Zohran Mamdani’s victory, Elif Eralp looks likely to be elected as mayor of the German capital. She would be the first Turkish-origin person to hold the post, and the first candidate from left-wing party Die Linke to become mayor since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But Die Linke finishing as the best-placed party (with 25.7% of the vote) does not guarantee that Eralp will become mayor, according to The Berliner. The new state parliament has to elect the governing mayor and, with only 47 seats out of the 158, Die Linke will need to form a coalition. The centre-right CDU refuses to engage with it, but a joint government with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party could be a “realistic” outcome.

Eralp has become the “new face of radical left-wing parties asserting themselves in major cities around the world”, said Le Monde. Her “historic win” is all the more impressive considering she inherited a party “marred by internal divisions”. Now it is “one of the most dynamic forces in German politics”.

Die Linke, which emerged from the communist Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has undergone a “striking generational shift” in the past three years, said the Financial Times.  And its popularity is only growing. In recent months the party has drawn “a tidal wave of new supporters, doubling its membership in the space of a year, reaching 123,000 at the end of 2025”.