What happened
Andy Burnham has approved £40 million in funding for Caribbean countries over three years as Britain faces growing demands to acknowledge its historic involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.  The money will support major infrastructure projects including renewable energy schemes.

The prime minister, who is at the Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, is also expected to propose a debt relief initiative to help poorer member states that are struggling with rising borrowing costs. He has indicated that he is willing to discuss a formal British apology for slavery, although he has ruled out direct financial compensation.

Who said what
Burnham said Britain wanted to help usher in a “new era” for the Commonwealth, which represents 56 countries and about a third of the world’s population.

But Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne has backed calls for an apology, arguing that slavery’s consequences remain evident today.

Here is a “memo to King Charles: if the Dutch king can apologise for slavery, why can’t you?” said Raoul de Jong in The Guardian. Kemi Badenoch has warned against an apology, saying it could encourage further demands for financial compensation.

What next?
Britain will establish two Commonwealth task forces for critical minerals and trade, with both expected to report at the next leaders’ summit.

What happened
European supermarkets have been hit by cyberattacks that caused freezers to defrost across dozens of outlets in at least seven countries. It mimics the hack that affected France early last month.

The temperature of freezers reportedly rose to as high as 55C in extreme defrost modes, with millions of euros worth of food having to be thrown away, according to local media. It is thought to have affected at least 60 supermarkets in Belgium, 13 in Ireland, more than a dozen in Sweden and others in Estonia and Luxembourg, said The Times.

Who said what
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre said it was “working with its international partners and industry to fully understand the details of an incident”.

Stephan Moelans, CEO of refrigeration installer Sabcobel, said the interference in Belgium involved the same mechanism as the previous French cyberattack and that the company had been “working very hard to protect our customers’ fridges against this vulnerability”.

What next?
Although it is unclear who was behind the episode, recent hacks have “put ⁠a spotlight on rising anxiety” over Russian hybrid attacks inside European borders, according to Reuters. Moscow has denied any involvement.

Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat has been burnt down in a suspected arson attack and German authorities now have a dilemma: to rebuild it or not?

The Kehlsteinhaus, known in English as the Eagle’s Nest, is perched at 6,000ft (1829 metres) on an Alpine peak. It was built in 1938 to host – and impress – visiting dignitaries. Unlike the vast majority of Nazi monuments, it survived the war and its aftermath, and became a popular landmark and tourist spot – until last month, when an apparently deliberate blaze almost completely destroyed it.

The Eagle’s Nest was part of Obersalzberg, a Bavarian mountainside retreat that also included Hitler’s holiday home the Berghof, with that building having been largely destroyed in the final months of the Second World War and later demolished. After the war the Bavarian state government “wanted to raze Hitler’s favoured hideaway” completely, but “local officials made the case to keep it going, at least in part”, said The Observer.

Now the fire has “reignited difficult questions regarding the future of the mountaintop site”, said Smithsonian Magazine. Debate is raging about “whether, and how, to rebuild at the toxic site for the next generation of visitors, while mitigating the never-quite-banished risk of creating a shrine for neo-Nazis”, said The Guardian. It’s a fraught question, “particularly given the resurgence of the far right in Germany and in Europe more broadly”.

“For many, Germany has become a model for dealing with the legacies of dictatorship, war and genocide,” historian Gerald Steinacher, an expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, told The Christian Science Monitor. But as this debate over the Eagle’s Nest shows, “how best to deal with Nazi buildings and sites remains an ongoing struggle”.