One of the greatest privileges of my craic-riddled culinary career has been to work in the hallowed grounds of Ballymaloe House, said Oisín Davis. It is the epicentre of Irish cuisine, and I’ve been lucky enough to guide hundreds of the world’s best bartenders through its walled gardens to share the simplest of philosophies with them: farm-to-table food and farm-to-glass cocktails. It’s also where I grew to love lemon verbena, a wonderfully perfumed, citrus-tasting herb that adds a deliciously fragrant note to this dessert.

Ingredients (serves 6)

• 12 fresh lemon verbena leaves or 1 tbsp of coarsely chopped fresh rosemary, plus extra to decorate
• 100ml (plus 4 tsp) boiling water
• 300g fresh or frozen blackcurrants (thawed if using frozen)
• 60ml Glendalough Single Grain Double Barrel Finish Irish Whiskey
• 200g caster sugar
• 3 egg whites

For the whipped cream

• 250ml double cream
• 1⁄2 vanilla bean, split in half lengthways and seeds scraped out

Method

• The day before, put the lemon verbena or rosemary needles in a jar with the boiling water. Get the lid on, then once cooled, shake for a few seconds and let it infuse overnight in the fridge.
• Preheat your oven to 110C (230F). Line a large baking sheet with non-stick baking paper.
• Strain the liquid from the lemon verbena or rosemary, then pour into a saucepan on a medium heat. Add the blackcurrants and half of the whiskey. Simmer until the blackcurrants start to break up, then stir in 50g of the sugar until it’s dissolved. You now have a compote but you’re going to need some purée from it, so press 4 tablespoons of the compote through a fine mesh sieve. Discard the pulp in the sieve but set aside both the purée and the compote.
• Put the egg whites in a spotlessly clean, dry bowl and use an electric mixer to whisk to stiff peaks. Add the remaining sugar a little bit at a time, while continuously whisking until the meringue is stiff and glossy. Turn off the mixer, then slowly drizzle in the purée. Fold it through with just one stir to create a marbled look.
• Dollop six equal portions on to the lined sheet, using the back of a spoon to shape them into circles. Bake for 1.5 hours, then set aside to cool completely on a wire rack.
• To serve, whisk the cream, remaining whiskey and vanilla until it forms soft peaks. Dollop on top of each meringue, then add a spoonful of compote and decorate with extra lemon verbena or a rosemary sprig.

Taken from The Irish Whiskey Cookbook: 50 Recipes to Cook, Sip and Savour by Oisín Davis.

Because a handful of authors dominate mainstream horror fiction, it can be easy to miss how rich and diverse literary horror is, including, of course, the work of Stephen King. These four novels combine sharp prose with well-crafted terror.

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by Shirley Jackson (1959)

An enormously influential work of dread, Shirley Jackson’s classic haunted house tale remains one of the rare horror books to receive literary awards. It is “one of the 20th century’s finest horror novels — and maybe the definitive haunted house story,” said Lara Zarum at The New York Times.

‘The Stand’ by Stephen King (1978)

Among Stephen King’s dozens of fiction books, “The Stand” remains his epic masterwork. It is about a flu named Captain Trips that wipes out 99.4% of the world’s population and forces the survivors to choose between the forces of good and evil. King’s “most sweeping horror novel” is also a “kind of inventory of American culture,” said Kirkus Reviews.

‘Come Closer’ by Sara Gran (2003)

Short enough to read in a single sitting, Sara Gran’s chilling story of an architect succumbing to demonic possession will leave readers stunned and unsettled. A “book that could damage the unwary psyche,” its “genius is in making the strange details so commonplace and incidental that ambiguity survives,” said Neil McRobert at Esquire.

‘The Grip of It’ by Jac Jemc (2017)

A troubled young couple moves from the big city and buys a small, haunted house, in a familiar set-up made terrifyingly unsettling by the way the reader is plunged into nonlinearity and fear alongside the characters. In “prose that is poetic and bereft of consolation,” Jemc “unsettles our notions of the boundaries between ourselves, our partners and anything else that may hurt us,” said Ahsan Butt at The Rumpus.

South Asian Americans report facing rhetorical and physical attacks, egged on by right-wing politicians and intellectuals. The latter are debating the so-called Indian question of whether ethnic minorities can truly assimilate into the American community. And the conversation, critics say, has dark echoes.

‘Scourge of hate’

Indian Americans and South Asian migrants have “become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger,” said Vox. People of Indian heritage are not “being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally,” said journalist Zaid Jilani to the outlet. Instead, their growing prominence in business and academic “positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks” have made them a “status threat” to middle-class Americans.

The result is a growing “scourge of anti-Indian American, anti-South Asian hate,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) to The New York Times, after a Hindu temple in Illinois was targeted in an alleged mass shooting plot. Critics point to rhetoric such as that used by Bo French, a Texas Republican who sparked controversy last month when he posted an image of South Asians at a college football game. The “problem” of migration is “now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” said French on X.

Other observers cite “The Indian Question,” a Rufo & Lomez podcast episode recorded in September by conservative commentators Jonathan Keeperman and Christopher Rufo. Many Americans “prefer to live in a homogenous [sic] society,” said Keeperman on X. Critics of Indian migration are pushing back against progressive attempts to “subdue any explicit political effort to maintain a white majority.”

‘Nativists have prevailed’

Talk of an “Indian question” amounts to the “mainstreaming of anti-Indian bigotry,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. A “historical rule of thumb” is that bad things happen when “your social identity is being made the name of a ‘question.’”

“Playing by America’s rules is no longer enough” for Indian immigrants, said Anang Mittal at Firstpost. The United States “told immigrants to come legally on the basis of merit, and Indians did.” But it seems “the nativists have prevailed, for now.”

Antibiotic-resistant shigellosis infections have been spreading in the U.S. Many are sexually transmitted and can affect the most vulnerable communities.

What are the symptoms and transmission methods?

Shigellosis is a gastrointestinal illness caused by a group of bacteria called Shigella. Associated symptoms include acute diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain and fever up to seven days. In most instances, those with shigellosis are able to recover on their own, but patients with more severe cases may require antibiotics and hospitalization.

The primary way shigellosis spreads is through the fecal-oral route, usually from contaminated food and water. However, another transmission method has become increasingly prevalent: There is a “distinct and intensifying sexual transmission of shigellosis,” said a study published in The Lancet. Traditional preventative measures for the disease, like handwashing and food safety, are “not likely” to help with this type of spread.

The infection is most commonly passed between men who sleep with other men. “Many men who have sex with men are unaware of the serious and increasing risk posed by sexually transmitted Shigella,” senior study author Kate Baker said in a statement.

How common is it?

While there is public concern about the spread of the illness, there has not yet been a major outbreak. According to the most recent CDC data, almost 15,000 people have been diagnosed with shigellosis in the U.S. in 2026, and it has been found in 47 states. These numbers are similar to last year’s count. But there has also been a rise in the number of antibiotic-resistant cases.

Among nearly 17,000 Shigella species isolates with resistance data, extensively drug-resistant (XDR) isolates increased between 2011 and 2023, according to an analysis by the CDC. Most U.S. outbreaks “involved drug-susceptible strains and primarily affected children,” but “national surveillance data indicate that most XDR cases occurred among adult men.”

XDR shigellosis is risky for children and disadvantaged populations like the unhoused. The infection has “gone from being relatively treatable with off-the-shelf drugs” to being “close to untreatable over the course of the last decade or so,” said Baker.

With four political factions working together to defeat Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in upcoming elections, there is a real possibility that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may lose power for the first time since the Gaza war began. But this doesn’t necessarily mean conditions in the region will improve for Palestinians.

What did the commentators say?

Israelis consider the Oct. 27 election to be important, but for “Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the stakes are just as high — even though they do not have a vote,” said The New York Times. Netanyahu has long vowed to “prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, and his government has built Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a breakneck pace.” Many Palestinians are “desperate to avoid another four years” of his government.

Still, even a victory that ousts Likud from power “may bring only marginal change for Palestinians suffering record levels of settler violence and mass displacement,” said Al Jazeera. While the opposition coalition of the Yashar party, the Democrats, the Yisrael Beiteinu party and the Together alliance have joined forces against Netanyahu, there is “little daylight between them when it comes to Israel’s foundational policies in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, who could potentially become Israel’s next prime minister, also opposes an independent Palestinian nation. The election is “unlikely to produce a sweeping shift in policies that have hampered a decades-old peace process,” said Reuters. Even if Netanyahu is ousted, the new coalition “effectively repudiates the ‘two-state solution’ that underpinned international peace negotiations for generations.”

What next?

Whether Netanyahu stays or goes, he has left an indelible mark on Israel. The “security doctrine he champions — opposition to a Palestinian state, stifling Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stationing troops in neighboring countries to neutralize perceived threats and the insistence that peace comes from strength, not the other way around — is now utterly mainstream,” said Bloomberg. With no end in sight to the destruction in Gaza, no “matter who wins, there will be no fundamental shift in our policy,” Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., said to Bloomberg. “It may even be a more aggressive policy.”

The UK is facing a greater threat “than we have, certainly for most, if not all, of my lifetime”, Wes Streeting told the BBC.

The defence secretary was referring to the vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, a programming language used in up to 70% of websites. Since then “millions of attacks” have been launched in attempts to exploit the flaw, said The Times, and a “patch” has been rolled out to help sites deal with the issue. The government announced 32 of its services were offline, though there is no indication of a breach.

For many, this episode has highlighted the dependence on, and vulnerability of, internet use. With AI growing ever more powerful – and likely being used by hackers as well as those researchers who found the PHP vulnerabilities – this could be just the beginning of an era of disruption.

What did the commentators say?

In the last few days, the internet has been “tested in a way I have not seen in my – or its – lifetime”, said Andrew Griffin in The Independent. Usually global catastrophes “capture our attention and excite our energy”, whereas the “gradual weakening of things we depend on engenders boredom”. But we need to be aware that AI does threaten the world, just not in a traditional way. It does so in a “way so dull and disengaging that we don’t even realise”.

“The future is here” and our digital infrastructure is “looking very fragile”, said Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian. “The solution is the same one we keep talking about, but rarely actually do anything about.” Large tech companies, who make “billions” from software they are obtaining for free from open-source data, “should contribute properly to maintaining it”. Unless we start “properly valuing those who keep our internet safe”, the internet will break, again.

There have been warnings of this crisis for the “better part of a year”, said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. In the last few weeks, there have been major cyberattacks on “governments, data centres, and hospitals in Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, Bangladesh and Indonesia”.

“Bulking up” IT departments and using passkeys and two-factor authentications are still “important”, but the “most urgent and practical advice being given now is to retreat: prepare to simply go offline”. There is little time now to prepare for the “deluge” of AI-based hacking. In fact, “the dam may have already broken”.

The PHP “patch” does not spell the end of these “dramatic” issues, said an editorial in The Times. “Millions” of websites will still need to be updated, despite the fix, and even then, hackers could use the opportunity to “illuminate their route into systems that may still be sitting unprotected”.

Government preparedness should be an absolute “political priority”. Pilot projects on cyber defence and the AI Safety Institute represent “sensible” first steps, but “more must be done” in the form of public awareness and creating “decisive state emergency levers” in times of crisis. We should not panic, but the coming weeks will “no doubt reveal continuing threats, especially to smaller bodies with less stringent security”.

What next?

“There’s a race on” between attackers and the tech companies who are rolling out the “patch”, said Rowland Manthorpe on Sky News. “The trouble is, this patch doesn’t cover all PHP sites.” Based on data gathered from around 2.6 million services, about 75% don’t run newer versions of PHP, and so it will be “much harder” for them to implement the fixes.

In the long term, AI “could be amazing” for developing cyber defences, but for now it seems the “attackers might have the advantage”. So “we could be in for a bumpy few years”.

In Brazil’s tightly contested presidential election, another contender is back in the spotlight: the outsized role social media plays in its politics.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Meta of using “biased algorithms and AI restrictions“ to favour opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, said The Associated Press. The son of the far-right former president, Jair, won 47% in the first round of the election compared with 45% for the incumbent.

Lula filed a complaint against the US tech company, claiming it had subjected his campaign to “unjustified reductions in reach”. It claimed Meta had artificially inflated accounts and adverts associated with Bolsonaro, a key ally of Donald Trump.

Meta denies wrongdoing, but ahead of the run-off on Sunday, “questions have festered over whether the digital arena has been a level playing field”, said Al Jazeera.

What is Brazil’s social media footprint?

Brazil is one of the world’s biggest markets for social media. The South American nation boasts about 180 million users, said Statista: more than three-quarters of the population. “Brazil is a power machine on the internet,” actress Fernanda Torres told Variety. “We’re heavy, heavy users.”

And with social media “eclipsing traditional advertising”, political ad spending on Meta’s sites has “grown at a breakneck pace”, said Al Jazeera. But critics warn this shift has “put political hopefuls at the mercy of Big Tech corporations and their biases”.

Left-wing actors in Brazil still “lag significantly behind the far right when it comes to digital communication”, said anthropologist Leticia Cesarino. The logic that underpins the attention economy is “structurally beneficial to the kind of alarmistic, simplistic, affect-laden far-right discourse”.

What are the allegations against Meta?

Google and TikTok are not allowing political advertising, which left Meta’s services as “the only large-scale channels for paid digital campaigning”, said The Guardian.

Meta temporarily disabled ads on Lula’s official campaign Facebook page. He was also briefly unable to boost his Instagram posts, while Bolsonaro could. Lula’s lawyers included this in “evidence” that Meta was “actively trying to interfere” in Bolsonaro’s favour.

Ekō, a digital advocacy non-profit coalition, published a report alleging that Meta had favoured Bolsonaro’s campaign. UN rights experts said reports of restrictions on Meta platforms were concerning. “Information, including from Meta employees, suggests that accounts linked to one side of the presidential race were disproportionately curtailed,” the experts said, without specifying which side.

What is Meta’s defence?

Meta called Lula’s allegations “false and unfounded”, said The Guardian, saying there had been “technical incidents” that affected campaigns from “different parts of the political spectrum”. But Meta’s own semi-independent oversight board said it was “concerned by recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts”, citing Brazil’s election, where there had been an “over-enforcement of Meta’s fraud policies” against Lula.

Brazil’s top electoral court ruled that Meta could not “reduce the distribution of political contact, restrict searches or remove posts in a way that creates an imbalance”, said The Associated Press. Meta says it has complied with the court order to treat both election campaigns equally.

“We apply the same rules to all candidates, parties and political viewpoints in Brazil,” Meta told The Guardian. “We do not suppress content to harm one side or give preferential treatment to any side.”

Masked protesters clad all in black have been a feature of protests around the world for decades. But the “Black Bloc” are back in the news this week, accused by the French government of turning peaceful protests into rioting and violence.

Originating among anarchist and radical left activists in West Germany in the 1980s, the Black Bloc are “temporary groups formed for a specific protest” that “operate without hierarchy”, said Canadian professor Francis Dupuis-Déri on The Conversation back in 2017.

Their tactics spread through activist networks in the US and Canada in the 1990s, culminating in the infamous “Battle of Seattle” during the 1999 World Trade Organization summit. Since then they have been prominent in the anti-austerity movements of the 2010s, and recent youth-led protests that have gripped France and other countries in Asia and South America.

‘Like an orchestra without a conductor’

Ideologically identified with “anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist movements, Black Bloc participants eschew political parties and hierarchical organisations”, said the Financial Times.

They “pose a big problem” for both the police and for trade unions, “who do not want chaos to mar their traditional demonstrations” against government policies.

“They are very well co-ordinated, but in a horizontal way,” said Guillaume Farde, from Sciences Po university in Paris. They have no organised leadership, tactics are disseminated via social media or encrypted messaging apps, and gatherings are often impromptu. “It is like an orchestra who knows the music so well that they do not need a conductor.”

‘Free spirits’

The “founding fathers” of the Black Bloc were “autonomist and anarchist activists”, said Le Monde, “but the spectrum has broadened to include more individuals” who “define themselves as free spirits”.

The movement is certainly “difficult to pin down, both politically and socially”, said historian Sylvain Boulouque in Le Monde in 2019. “It forms a heterogeneous ensemble with variegated political traditions.”

France’s domestic intelligence service “partially shares this analysis”, said Le Monde, citing a police source that said: “Behind the black blocs, real ideologists are developing a doctrine and structure that unifies and deploys propaganda.”

Others see this as an attempt by the authorities to make the Black Bloc into something they are not. “Black bloc doesn’t mean anything”, Henri, a 40-year-old who does not define himself as an anarchist, autonomist or extreme leftist, told Le Monde. “Black is just because it’s not distinctive. It’s the best way not to be identified. We’re all in the same boat.”

Find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest news and other global events by putting your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

As a super El Niño intensifies in the Pacific Ocean, coastal beach erosion is devastating Southern California and beyond. But concrete reef structures powered by artificial intelligence could help to combat the environmental crisis. They can help beaches recover and even predict future erosion patterns.

Methodology

Born from a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the company Coastal Assembly uses AI along with satellite and ocean data to “predict coastal erosion patterns and create submerged structures that harness currents to coax the beach back,” said The New York Times. It has placed 54 marine-concrete artificial reef structures near the JW Marriott Maldives Resort & Spa, helping the ocean “build about 90 feet of new beach in six months,” said AccuWeather.

After two years, the beach has now “doubled in size,” and the artificial reef is “filled with new coral and marine life, from fish to sea anemones,” said Fast Company. The usual solution to coastal erosion is to “dredge sand to try to replace what was lost.” But that “works only temporarily, and it harms marine ecosystems.” Coastal Assembly’s method has the “potential to aid communities in adapting to climate change by reducing the time and cost of complex coastline modeling and predicting the areas most vulnerable to erosion,” said the Times.

Challenges

The artificial reefs are custom. It’s not “one-size-fits-all because every beach has a different bathymetry [underwater landscape],” said Coastal Assembly co-founder Skylar Tibbits to Fast Company. It has “different wave conditions” and “complex parameters that make each beach unique.” In addition, the “dynamics of coastal erosion are complex,” said the Times. Sand and sediment are “always eroding and accumulating with seasonal currents,” and rising sea levels can contribute to more coastal loss.

Time will tell if artificial reefs can be a long-term solution. Beaches are “our primary natural defense to backshore erosion and coastal flooding,” said coastal geomorphologist Adam Young to AccuWeather. "Without that sand buffer, waves have less distance to lose energy before reaching roads, homes and bluffs.”

“Massive, ambitious, controversial, and expensive”, Jaguar’s luxury electric GT is here at last, said Top Gear Magazine, and setting a new tone for the marque – “all electric, more luxurious, rarer, bespoke”. The Type 01 is also the “last-chance saloon” for the carmaker. “If this car bombs, Jaguar dies.”

With more than 150 prototypes, and put through its paces from the Arctic to Death Valley, it is the most extensively tested Jaguar. It’s also the most powerful, aerodynamic and patented Jaguar of all time. At two metres wide and 5.2 metres long, it’s got “immense presence”, though its low stance and raked rear do make it look rather like a “cartoon villain getaway car”.

Jaguar has ripped up the rule book with the Type 01, which is built on an all-new platform. It is made from 73% aluminium but still weighs about 2.9 tonnes, said Evo. It is “unapologetically imposing”, with “towering proportions”, yet it only seats four.

With a 120kWh battery, and three e-motors – a 260kW front motor and twin 310kW rear motors – for a combined 1,015bhp, it has a claimed range of 450 miles. It can do 0-62mph in 3.2secs, with a top speed of 150mph, and charges from 10%-80% in just 22 minutes on a fast charger.

The Type 01 sits on massive 23-inch wheels, and the low profile and long bonnet make it look “a bit like a Batmobile”, said T3. Its interior is “gentler”, with a choice of NeoGrain fabric or leather. The driver gets a 24-inch OLED screen, and there’s a smaller 7-inch infotainment screen in the centre.

There’s no rear windscreen, just a digital rear mirror on the dash, which houses a panoramic soundbar. There’s a voice assistant for hands-free operation in 18 languages. Orders are expected to open early next year.

Togo has asked its citizens to contribute texts, recordings and translations to “develop AI models that address the linguistic diversity of the country”, said AI for Developing Countries Forum.

More than just a “regional experiment”, it is a “blueprint for how developing nations can use technology to assert their cultural sovereignty and economic relevance in the digital age”.

Africa has around 2,000 languages but very few are represented comprehensively in AI models, said academics on The Conversation. Failing to be a part of the tech revolution not only “marginalises millions of people” but also “increases the technology divide”.

98% of African languages ‘unsupported’

AI’s inability to handle most African languages comes down to the “gap between the number of real-world speakers and a language’s digital footprint,” said African Business.

According to research published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, across six large language models (LLMs), eight small language models and six specialised small language models, only 41 African languages were represented. Only four – Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans and Malagasy – were “always handled”. “Over 98% of African languages went unsupported.”

According to OpenAI, the number of ChatGPT users in Africa is “growing faster than in any other region, said The Economist. Yet, despite the surge in popularity, even the best LLMs “falter in African languages, typically scoring 10-30 percentage points lower on benchmarking tests than they do in English”. The models mainly struggle with numerous dialects and “code-switching”, which is when speakers use different languages at the same time.

“The root problem is lack of data.” Much of the training for “smaller” languages is taken from Bible verses. High-quality audio fit for speech recognition is also “scarce”, so researchers are “recording how people talk” to build the data supply.

It’s not just a lack of text and speech that is the problem, said the academics on The Conversation, it’s also the infrastructure that supports it. “Basic tools” like dictionaries, terminologies and glossaries are missing. Then there are inadequacies in African language keyboards, fonts, spell-checkers and tokenisers – which “break text into smaller pieces so a language model can understand it”. All of these impact orthographic variation – how the same words are spelled differently across regions – tone marking and “rich dialect diversity”.

‘Global North cultural assumptions’

The texts that dominate LLMs “reflect Global North cultural assumptions, about individualism, competition and about globalisation”, said University World News. By definition, therefore, this is a continuation of the “long history of epistemic marginalisation” of the Global South.

The lack of African languages in LLMs has become a “major concern for the continent’s policymakers and tech leaders”, said Semafor. The World Bank estimates that Africa has only 0.6% of global data-centre capacity, despite having 18% of the world’s population.

Africa’s “main link” to the AI revolution has been through minerals such as cobalt and copper, but the “bigger prize” is through productivity, or being able to harness the end product of AI. Currently, however, there isn’t the infrastructure or energy to achieve this, meaning that AI is “unlikely to add meaningfully to growth”.

African AI companies need to break beyond being “suppliers to the AI revolution or just consumers of finished AI products”. Their continent needs to be the place where the “revolution delivers its biggest gains”.

Building AI models from scratch is “expensive” and uses “limited resources”. By adopting and adapting existing models, the continent’s outputs can evolve more quickly. And Togo’s initiative suggests that the future of AI in Africa “may hinge less on who builds the biggest model than on who makes the technology useful to the most people”.

With polls looking dire for Republicans ahead of next month’s highly anticipated midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly wasting little time on the most pressing question of this election cycle: Who will take the blame for the likely, if still theoretical, electoral drubbing? Cue the MAGA infighting, as various White House operators and GOP power brokers jockey to avoid, and in some cases direct, the president’s guaranteed post-midterm scapegoating.

‘Knives are now fully out’

Although Trump has “proven largely incapable of getting out of his own way,” he’s “keenly aware of the grumbling within his party” over the GOP’s midterm prospects and has “begun looking for someone else to take the fall,” said Puck. “Currently at the top of the list” is former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who “crafted the party’s midterm strategy.” Days away from a potentially “dire midterm reckoning,” Republicans are “turning their cannons” toward Blair and consulting partner Chris LaCivita, the two men tasked with the “herculean job of maintaining control of Congress,” said Politico.

The hostility toward Blair and LaCivita follows their recent trip to the Balkans to “advise a Russia-friendly regime’s reelection effort” even as GOP prospects “dwindle back home,” said Politico. That excursion “opened the floodgates,” said one source to the outlet. The “knives are now fully out for these two.”

‘Ice maiden is melting’

“These days,” Trump has also been looking to place blame on Susie Wiles, his “once-unassailable White House chief of staff,” for the midterms, said Politico. The president is “musing about replacements for his top aide” while getting “plenty of encouragement from rivals” to Wiles and those settling scores.

Trump’s “ice maiden is melting,” said The New Republic of Wiles. She’s in “some deep sh-t,” said one Trump adviser to Zeteo. At the same time, the president has “tried to pour cold water” on rumors of her fate by “releasing effusively supportive statements” and characteristically condemning the media as “fake news.”

A movie doesn’t have to be set on Halloween to be scary, but it doesn’t hurt. The holiday atmosphere can provide an extra element of suspense when done right, as in these four notable films.

‘Halloween’ (1978)

Horror legend John Carpenter’s lean franchise-launching slasher deftly adds a supernatural aspect to his unkillable knife-wielding mental institution escapee, Michael Myers. The classic puts “viewers through a troubled nightmare of suspense and uncertain dread,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (AMC+)

‘Ginger Snaps’ (2000)

In this Canadian cult classic that doubles as a coming-of-age story, a sardonic goth transforms into a werewolf in the days leading up to Halloween and terrifies her younger sister. The movie, through character-building and atmosphere, “has fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise,” said Dave Kehr at The New York Times. (Peacock)

‘Trick ’r Treat’ (2007)

Arguably the best horror anthology ever, the movie features four intersecting segments centered around a demonic, pumpkin-headed trick-or-treater seeking to avenge sins of the town’s past. It’s a movie that “feels less like it was merely set on the holiday and more like it was built out of everything people love about it,” said Arleigh at Through the Shattered Lens. (HBO Max)

‘Hell House LLC’ (2015)

In this found footage gem, a documentary team seeks the truth about a haunted house massacre by tracking down its sole survivor, who has tapes. With a slow-burn buildup, this “genuinely suspenseful” movie “carefully sets up its scares in a way that actually contributes to the story,” said Luiz H.C. at Bloody Disgusting. (AMC+)

When President Harry S. Truman, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Potsdam in 1945, the goal was for World War II’s victorious leaders to coordinate plans for postwar Europe. Eighty years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed another seismic trilateral meeting — this time between himself, President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, Russia continues its attempted invasion of Ukraine, a country conspicuously left off the invitation list.

What did the commentators say?

Putin is attempting to “capitalize on warming ties” between himself and Trump in the hopes of negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine that “would favor Moscow,” said The Wall Street Journal. But by omitting Ukraine, Putin’s “unprecedented” summit would “send alarm bells ringing in European capitals and beyond.” Coordinating a summit of global superpowers “appeals to Trump’s idealized view of the world” — a vision that would entail powerful leaders carving up territory with Trump “taking his seat, recognized by all, as one of those great powers,” said Slate.

Publicly, Trump has shown interest in Putin’s summit as an opportunity to address atomic weaponry. “I would do it, not so much for Ukraine,” he said to reporters this week, per Bloomberg. “We would have it to talk about denuclearization.” For years, Trump has had an “aspiration to reach a deal” with Russia and China regarding nonproliferation, said Axios. But “so far, Putin and Xi haven’t shown much openness to the idea.”

While the three countries have “overlapping interests,” they lack a “common strategic vision,” said Denis Simon, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to the South China Morning Post. Nuclear weapons offer the “most obvious potential starting point,” yet issues like Ukraine, Taiwan and the “broader international order” would “inevitably enter any conversation” among the trio.

What next?

Chinese officials have “privately welcomed” the potential talks but “have not pushed aggressively for them,” said the Morning Post. There is “no clear understanding yet regarding the meeting itself or its potential agenda,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov to the Journal. Still, all three parties “acknowledge the hypothetical possibility of such a meeting taking place.”

Crossword - Oct. 30, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 30, 2026

Crossword - Oct. 30, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 30, 2026

This week’s question: British army veteran Karl Bushby is nearing the end of his record-breaking 36,000-mile, 28-year walk across four continents—a trek that was slowed by, among other things, being mistaken for a spy in Russia and falling down a cliff in Alaska. If Hollywood were to make a movie about Bushby’s epic hike, what should it be titled?

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Extra-long walk” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, Oct. 27. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the Nov. 6 issue and at theweek.com/contest on Oct. 30. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

Click here to see the results of last week's contest: Smile protest
The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

The deadly missile attack by Houthi rebels on Riyadh’s international airport last week “exposed vulnerabilities in the kingdom’s defences that have heaped pressure on the Saudi royal family”, said The Observer.

Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured in the assault on the heart of Saudi power. “At a stroke, the attack shattered the kingdom’s effort to establish its reputation as a secure global investment hub, backed by world-class sporting events, as it tries to diversify away from a dependence on oil.”

What did the commentators say?

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s bold Saudi Vision 2030 aims to turn the oil-rich country into a hub for tourism, international events and multinational enterprises. Iran’s attacks on US allies in the Gulf had already “dealt a blow” to MBS’ plan, said Agence France-Presse. It “now faces an existential hurdle with unprecedented Houthi attacks, in particular targeting oil infrastructure and airports”.

“I can’t think of another time when the challenge facing MBS was more,” said H.A. Hellyer, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

Houthi attacks have already caused a number of major events to be cancelled, most notably the Future Investment Initiative, nicknamed “Davos in the desert”, which forms the centrepiece of MBS’ diversification drive. Upcoming summits between the EU and Gulf Cooperation Council, the inaugural MIPIM Middle East real estate investment event and the Six Kings Slam tennis exhibition tournament have also been disrupted.

Saudi Arabia’s hosting of football’s Asian Cup in January and February is also now “being questioned”, said Rob Draper in The Guardian. As a result “the kingdom’s position in the sporting landscape looks hugely different from a year ago”.

“For Saudi Arabia’s economic transformation to succeed, it needs to welcome global talent, investment and tourists,” said The Washington Post. But “you can’t do that when people can’t land in your country safely,” said Kristen Smith Diwan, from the Arab Gulf States Institute think tank in Washington.

The events of the past week “highlight the profound dilemma facing MBS, who must juggle immediate security imperatives and long-term economic interests”, said the Post.

What next?

Riyadh’s decision to delay the Future Investment Initiative until 2027 underscores the regime’s “willingness to make difficult decisions – as showcased by an ability to pivot from projects like Neom to sectors like artificial intelligence”, said Bloomberg.

But even before the US’ war against Iran began in February, some international investors and Wall Street firms had begun “questioning whether there was enough money to be made in Saudi Arabia”. Analysts now fear “the fallout from the war will hurt the kingdom’s attractiveness”.

Saudi Arabia’s image as “the premier investment destination within the Gulf has taken a hit”, said Matthew Mullman, from Signum Global Advisors. Firms, he said, could now question the case for building critical infrastructure in the kingdom.

The country “can reduce its exposure through diplomacy and a serious Yemeni political process, but a ceasefire cannot endure if it leaves the country’s power struggle unresolved”, said Amine Ayoub, from the Middle East Forum, on Ynet Global. “Riyadh’s nightmare is not merely the Houthi arsenal” but that “strategic choices helped strengthen an adversary whose consequences continue to outlast the policies that produced them”.

“As Europe struggles to fill its seminaries”, one Indonesian island in the majority-Muslim country has “become one of the world’s leading exporters of missionaries”, said The Economist.

Rugged island

Flores, located in the southeast of the Indonesian archipelago, is one of a handful of islands in the world’s most populous Muslim nation with a Christian majority, with 80% of its two million inhabitants identifying as Roman Catholic.

Catholicism came to Flores in the 16th century, when Portuguese spice traders brought missionaries to the “rugged, mountainous island”, said National Catholic Register. The faith is “deeply rooted” in its culture, and many young men choose to devote their lives to the Church.

Flores is home to multiple seminaries, training thousands of young men in Catholic liturgy, religious doctrine and pastoral care. Through “their early morning prayers, their long days of study, and their shared meals cooked over simple stoves, they carry forward a vocation” that lives on. Boys interested in a future in the priesthood can join the island’s minor seminary system, “which currently has 650 students enrolled at the junior and senior high school level”.

Flores “trains priests who go on to serve” in the United States, Africa, Europe and South America, said France 24. Indonesian priests have “earned a good reputation and are considered fair and tolerant, particularly on LGBT topics”. The Catholic Church considers Flores “indispensable to its future and survival in the region”.

Promised land

That devotion to the priesthood has become “surprisingly important to the future of the Catholic Church”, said The Economist. The numbers tell the tale: there are 1.4 billion Catholics around the world – more than twice as many as in 1970 – but “the number of Catholic priests has remained roughly the same”, at around 400,000.

Over the past half century, the number of trainee priests has “declined sharply” in Europe and North America, as “the prestige of the role has diminished in the face of child-abuse scandals and increasing secularism”. In 2024, there were an estimated 4,150 trainee priests enrolled in seminaries on Flores. “Ireland, by contrast, had just 104.”

The Catholic Church hopes Flores will play a major part in addressing the shortfall. Around 60% of seminarians now come from Africa and Asia, where “Catholicism is growing and the priesthood is still esteemed”. “Catholic enclaves” such as Flores now “produce enough priests not only to serve local dioceses, but also to send them abroad, tending congregations from Angola to Austria”.

The Diocese of Ruteng, described by Vatican News as Indonesia’s “promised land of vocations”, is central to this effort. “Faith is alive here,” Bishop Ciprianus Hormat of Ruteng told the Vatican’s Fides News Agency.

With mortgage rates high and seemingly only getting higher, it makes sense for potential buyers to wonder whether they can lock things in before they get worse. While a 7% interest rate might not be great, it’s still better than a rate of 7.4%.

The good news: “Locks are a common feature of mortgages” to “protect a borrower’s rate during the home-buying process,” said The Wall Street Journal. However, they can “vary in their fees, their conditions and the amount of time they cover.” Here’s what to know.

How can you lock in a mortgage rate?

A rate lock is essentially an “offer by a lender to guarantee the interest rate of your loan for a specified period of time,” said NerdWallet. For the duration of that period, the interest rate your lender had quoted you will not change — even if mortgage rates overall go up.

A rate lock will often last from the initial approval of your mortgage application through closing, though the exact timeline will depend on the specifics of the contract. “Typically, you can lock your rate for at least 30 days and in some cases up to 120 days or longer, depending on the lender and loan type,” said Bankrate.

Are there any downsides to rate locks?

One thing to look out for with a rate lock is whether a lender charges a fee for it. “Many lenders offer rate locks for free,” while others do not, and “some only charge when you extend the initial mortgage rate lock period,” said Bankrate.

Fees generally range from “0.5% to 1% of the total loan amount,” said Experian. And even if a rate lock is ostensibly free, the “cost is frequently baked into the loan pricing via a slightly higher interest rate or reduced lender credits,” said the Journal.

Another thing to be aware of is that while locking in your rate can offer peace of mind when mortgage rates are unpredictable or rising, a rate lock can also leave you stuck with a higher rate should rates fall. To cover this scenario, lenders may offer what is known as a float down option, which lets you drop your rate, though often for a fee.

When should you consider a rate lock?

A rate lock can make a lot of sense if there is a good chance rates could go up between when you apply and when you close. Even a slightly higher rate can have a big impact on both monthly payments and the total amount of interest you pay over the life of a loan.

“Consider a $400,000 home financed for 30 years at 7%, with a 20% down payment,” said NerdWallet. “Just a quarter point (0.25%) rise in interest rates will kick your principal-and-interest payments up $54 a month — from $2,129 to $2,183. Over just five years that additional amount will total $3,240.”

In order to reap the potential savings of a rate lock, you have to make sure the rate you’re quoted in the first place is a competitive one — and that it will last as long as you need it to. Before committing, make sure to shop around for a mortgage and consider the overall timeline of your home search.

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A new “Carrie” adaptation is introducing another generation to the storytelling prowess of horror icon Stephen King. Here are the best of the hundreds of novels King fans have devoured for decades.

‘The Shining’ (1977)

Literary critics and fans often say “The Shining” is “one of King’s most important novels” and “with good reason,” said Forbes. The book follows writer Jack Torrance and his family to the haunted Overlook Hotel in the isolated Colorado mountains. “The Shining” is a good read for fans who enjoy “psychological thrillers that merge with horror.” ($20, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Stand’ (1978)

King’s eerie postapocalyptic novel “The Stand,” set in a “world ravaged by a ruthless pandemic,” follows an ensemble of characters across the “new, dangerous country.” The story builds to a “climactic battle between heaven and hell,” said Reader’s Digest. It’s a tale of “spiritual and sinister wonders, all told” with King’s “distinct wit and writing style.” ($22, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger’ (1982)

The seven-book “Dark Tower” series is “King’s truest Tolkien analogue,” said The New York Times. It is an epic in “multiple modes (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, Western)” about a “gunslinger-knight” trying to save the world from “complete destruction by his foe, the Man in Black.” The first volume, “The Gunslinger,” is the shortest and gives you a “tiny taste of how weird and inventive the series gets.” ($29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

‘It’ (1986)

King’s “treatise on everything he’s learned about his dark craft” by that point in his career is “poured into the story of Pennywise,” a fear-eating shapeshifting entity, and the “gaggle of outcast children who choose to fight” the creature, said Esquire. The book’s eccentricity balances perfectly with the “romanticized myth of childhood summers” and the “grain and grit reality” of 1960s Maine. ($25, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

Canada’s largest prairie province will remain part of the country, as voters in Alberta overwhelmingly denied an independence referendum that would have started the province on a path to separation. The ripple effect of the defeated referendum now appears set to echo across Canada.

What did the commentators say?

Most Albertans apparently have no desire to break away. With 93% of the votes reported, nearly 76% of respondents chose to remain part of Canada, according to the preliminary referendum results. The vote “marks a major win for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is facing a trade and political war with the United States amid President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs and repeated suggestions of annexing the country,” said Al Jazeera. While the vote is clear, it may “not spell the end for a movement that has spent decades pushing for greater autonomy from the federal government.”

Many Albertans are “expressing frustration that their views aren’t sufficiently represented by the Liberal government,” said Time. Still, many in the Canadian Parliament have been reluctant to support an independence push because Alberta is an “oil-rich province; mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction made up about a quarter of the province’s GDP in 2025.” Some in the province feel that “central Canada is taking advantage of Alberta; that the central government has, at times, through environmental regulations, for example, hindered the development of the oil resources,” Andrew McDougall, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said to Time.

The vote will also precipitate further questions about whether Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “can maintain control of her party and the province,” said The Globe and Mail. Smith has consistently said she wants Alberta to be part of a “United Canada” but also has a “contentious relationship with the pro-Canada crowd, who have accused her of pandering to separatists.” The vote’s outcome is “unlikely to position Ms. Smith as an ally to the movement.”

What next?

Carney waxed poetic about the referendum’s defeat. Albertans “made a clear choice. They chose unity, to build together and to take care of each other,” the prime minister said on X. The results “mean that Albertans and all Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose.”

Hackers in France recently set their sights on an unusual target: supermarkets. After hundreds of French grocers had their refrigerators hacked and taken offline, many are worried that attacks like these could become commonplace, including in the U.S.

How do hackers go after supermarkets?

In the case of the French hacking, criminals “remotely connected to refrigeration equipment” and “switched on defrost cycles that led to the loss of large quantities of fresh and frozen goods,” said CNN. Most grocery store fridges are connected to online controllers, allowing “maintenance firms to adjust the temperature remotely,” but this also makes the fridges vulnerable to hackers who can disable certain settings.

This isn’t the first instance of a widespread supermarket hack. In 2025, United Natural Foods, which supplies frozen foods to grocers in the U.S. and Canada, said it “discovered a cyberattack that forced it to take its systems offline,” said Al Jazeera. Also last year, conglomerate Ahold Delhaize USA, which owns grocery chains like Food Lion and Stop & Shop, was the “victim of a cyberattack that disrupted operations at more than 2,000 stores.” And British chain Marks & Spencer suffered a 2025 hacking that reportedly cost it $397 million.

How can this be prevented?

Most experts say consumers don’t have to be worried, for now. But it’s a different story for businesses. “Smart appliances connected to the internet will always be vulnerable as hackers seize on security lapses to log in to the systems remotely and trigger malicious features,” cybersecurity analyst Steven Lachance told Al Jazeera. These attacks also highlight “vulnerabilities in global food supplies that can be quickly and dangerously exploited,” said CNET.

To protect businesses, experts typically “recommend changing default passwords, enabling two-factor authentication where ⁠available and regularly ​installing software updates,” said Reuters. The “simplest rule is often the most ​effective: The fewer connected devices you have, the fewer potential entry points exist for attackers.”

Despite precautions, hackings of this nature still remain the “next frontier for sabotage attacks,” Muhammad Yahya Patel, the virtual chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm Huntress, said to Bloomberg. Technology has now been “weaponized against food retail infrastructure,” and the “immediate financial consequences are significant and visible.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is fighting to keep her citizenship. She is under investigation by the Trump administration, whose officials suggest the immigrant lawmaker may not have lawfully become a citizen. Critics say the White House is weaponizing its powers to intimidate one of its fiercest critics in Congress.

‘Creeping totalitarianism’

The administration aims to “ultimately deport” Omar, said The Wall Street Journal. The probe is focused on whether she or her father were truthful in their immigration and naturalization paperwork after leaving Somalia in the 1990s. There is a “process to denaturalize somebody” who has lied on their citizenship paperwork, said Border Czar Tom Homan on Fox News. “If she violated the law, then she will be held accountable."

Omar denies committing fraud. Trump would “love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress,” her office said in a statement to the Journal.

This is a “case of creeping totalitarianism,” said John Ganz at Unpopular Front. Trumpism originated with attacks on former President Barack Obama’s citizenship, grounded in a fundamental belief that “some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate.” And the investigation of Omar is the culmination of an effort to “transform citizenship from an inviolable right into a privilege granted or withdrawn at the sovereign’s discretion.”

Omar would “probably not” be under investigation if she were not in Congress, said David Harsanyi at the Washington Examiner. But she “isn’t above the law, either.” If Omar gained her citizenship through dishonest means, then she “at the very minimum should not be serving in Congress.”

‘No reason to believe it will stop’

The investigation demonstrates how the Trump administration sees citizenship “not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward” that can be taken away, said Emily Tamkin at The Forward. Such power can be easily misused for “silencing political opposition.”

Omar is facing investigation because she has “dared to criticize the president,” said Obama on X. There is “no reason to believe it will stop with her.” The Trump administration’s “transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans.”

Social care was an “afterthought” during the Covid-19 pandemic, and government failures allowed the virus to “spread like wildfire” through care homes.

Those are some of the damning findings in the latest report by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, chaired by Baroness Hallett. It focused on the “devastating” impact of the virus on adult social care in the UK. More than 43,000 people in care homes were recorded to have died with Covid between March 2020 and July 2022. Last year, a senior civil servant told the inquiry it amounted to “generational slaughter”.

Social care was an ‘afterthought’

All four UK governments initially focused on protecting hospitals. Adult social care “appeared to be something of an afterthought”, said the report. The “mantra of ‘protecting the NHS’ sometimes came at the expense of the users and providers of care”.

These failures “created environments in care settings in which the virus could spread like wildfire”.

Hancock’s ‘protective ring’ was false

Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, claimed ministers had “tried to throw a protective ring” around care homes “right from the start” of the pandemic. That claim was “unfounded”, said the inquiry. “Quite the opposite was true.”

“Unfounded is an understatement,” said Sky News. At the start of the pandemic, about 25,000 patients were discharged from hospitals into care homes – most without being tested for Covid – to “free up beds”. They and care home staff then received insufficient protection and guidance, “with devastating consequences”, said the inquiry.

The policy was later ruled unlawful by the High Court. Jean Adamson, speaking on behalf of bereaved families, called Hancock’s claim a “cruel lie”, said Sky News. Hancock isn’t commenting on the report.

Visiting restrictions did ‘immense’ harm

Elderly residents’ suffering was “compounded by draconian visiting restrictions”, said The Times. These caused “incalculable harm”, leaving people to die “abandoned and alone”, without “the comfort or support of their loved ones”, the report said.

Strict visiting limits were necessary at the start of the pandemic to protect people, but the “balance of harms” shifted; they increasingly did more harm than good, Hallett said.

The “profound isolation and sense of abandonment” caused by keeping them in place resulted in “immense emotional harm” to residents. Many whose loved ones died without them now remain “wracked with guilt that they do not deserve to carry”.

‘Desperate measures’ for protective equipment

Unsurprisingly, difficulties getting hold of personal protective equipment (PPE) were “a key theme of this report”, said the BBC.

Hospitals were “prioritised for supplies”, leaving care workers resorting to “some very desperate measures”. There were cases of workers “using festival waterproof ponchos, painters’ overalls and bin bags as makeshift PPE”.

Supply problems were a global issue, the report acknowledged, but better planning would have helped. The lack of PPE for care home staff was “wholly unacceptable”.

Social care was already ‘a concern’

A 2016 simulation exercise testing the UK’s response to a pandemic found the social care sector was a “particular concern”.

But when Covid-19 emerged, recommendations had “not been completed”, said the inquiry, leaving ministers to make decisions “without the information they needed”.

Millions of unpaid, “undervalued” carers were “heavily relied upon” without adequate support. The scale of death and suffering they witnessed was “unlike anything they had seen before”, said the report.

At his election 18 months ago, the then 69-year-old Pope Leo was the youngest man chosen to lead the Catholic church for 40 years. It was “the view in the Vatican and among church leaders” that “he had a long papacy in front of him”, said CNN. But, after his shock cancer diagnosis last week, “that assumption” is “being tested”.

‘Big question mark’

When Cardinal Robert Prevost emerged on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo, he looked “energetic, spoke in a strong voice and had no known history of health issues” – a stark contrast to his predecessor Francis, who died at 88 and “had become increasingly frail during his 12-year papacy”, said Reuters’ Vatican correspondent, Joshua McElwee.

Since taking office, the first US-born pontiff has “emerged as an increasingly influential voice beyond the Church”. In his first, widely praised, encyclical letter, he warned of the risks posed by artificial intelligence, and his criticism of the US war with Iran has drawn the very public ire of Donald Trump. But the expectation of a dynamic papacy “with many foreign trips” and his “stepping into a leading moral role on the global stage” now seems less certain.

For a man of energy and apparently robust health – “he was known to play tennis regularly” – Leo “suddenly faces the same sense of urgency and questions of longevity that had hung over Francis”, said The New York Times’ Rome correspondent, Motoko Rich. The cancer diagnosis poses a “lurching shift” in outlook, casting “uncertainty over his travel schedule, his agenda and his efforts to unite the church. And, in the worst-case scenario, it raises questions about succession that most thought would not have to be addressed for years to come.”

It also places “a big question mark” on the investment many people made in this pontificate, Massimo Faggioli, a theologian at Leo’s alma mater, Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press. They made an “emotional investment, a political investment”, even an investment into his getting the Vatican’s finances into order.

‘Galvanise support’

“Vatican watchers” say Leo’s diagnosis could “have other unintended effects – not all of them negative”, said AP. It could incentivise him “to accelerate his own agenda, which to date has been slow and deliberate”, and it could also “galvanise support for him, bolstering his efforts to unify the fractured Catholic Church”.

Past pontiffs have used their personal vulnerability to shape the Church’s agenda – most notably John Paul II, who narrowly escaped assassination early on in his papacy, and then used his experience of Parkinson’s disease to model his theology of redemptive suffering. “Most significant” for Leo’s ministry is that this cancer diagnosis places him “squarely among the ‘fragile’ and ‘vulnerable’ who have emerged as a central focus of his pontificate” so far.

“There’s something really beautiful in that even the most powerful person in the Church is broken,” Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a US associate professor of theology, told AP. “He’s been so, so eloquent on how our fragility is also a source of our strength.”

Somewhat “miraculously”, Bonnie Garmus managed to make science and feminism “fun” in her bestselling debut novel “Lessons in Chemistry”, said The Boston Globe. In her second book, she is “poised to do the same thing for even more esoteric loves: poetry, fonts and literary publishing”.

The novel follows the life of Batter Gray, a middle-class Californian boy who possesses a “deep love” of poetry, much to his parents’ dismay. After graduating from college, he moves to New York to pursue his passion. “Like so many people coming of age in the city, he rents a terrible apartment, works three crummy jobs, and finally finds a girlfriend.”

Gray seems “destined” to end up at Peck & Peck, a “rarefied, pricey poetry journal”, though he’s the “copy guy”, working in the basement. Down there, “as is not uncommon in literary circles, he finds both mentors and nemeses” as he negotiates his way upwards.

In telling her story, Garmus creates a “Ferris wheel of characters”, like his font designer mother and “chaotic tyrant” of a boss. They and the many plot twists all “snap together delightfully” and make for a “rollicking good story”. If her debut novel “made you love chemistry, this one might just make you fall for poetry. Such is the force of happiness.”

There is a certain “mawkishness” that creeps into “Peck & Peck”, said The Guardian. As in Garmus’ first book, there is a “preternaturally intelligent dog”, added to a fragile love story and a hasty courtroom scene. But it is impossible not to be beguiled by the “freewheeling exuberance of her imagination”, and the “fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count”.

You might not have thought a novel set in the world of poetry could be funny, but “you’d be wrong”, said the Los Angeles Times. “The repartee sparkles” and the “farcical touches lighten the tone”. But it’s inspiring too. Batter, for all his quirks, is “perhaps the best poetry ambassador to have ever graced the pages of a novel”. Readers will be “hard-pressed to resist becoming a poetry stan”.

Above all, this is a “workplace comedy, a New York City coming-of-age story, and a giddy satire wrapped in a sometimes-ungainly bundle”, said Laura Miller on Slate. The Peck & Peck office, home to a whopping 39 editors and crowned with a “spectacular glass dome”, is “pure fantasia”, but Garmus does at times “ladle gooey dollops of sentimentality” into her work.

There is an “almost Wodehousian giddiness” to the book, but Garmus’ satire never comes across as “mean or bitter”. Characters sceptical of poetry and its place in the world are treated as generously as those who love it, because the form “is in truth both boring and transcendent”.

“Peck & Peck” may not reach the heights of “Lessons in Chemistry” but it is a “rare work of popular fiction that has prompted me to look up a William Carlos Williams poem, and I suspect I won’t be the only one on whom it has that particular, and very welcome, effect”.

With much of the world focused on China’s booming tech sector, newly graduated Chinese students are looking outside the box — and the city — for work. Rising unemployment rates and fierce urban job competition have inspired a trend toward farming among young, often university-educated, job seekers.

‘Rural revitalization’

“For decades,” urban life has been a “defining feature of the Chinese economic miracle,” said the Los Angeles Times. But “declining job prospects in the cities” and government efforts to “lift up rural areas” have prompted a shift in recent years.

The change comes as President Xi Jinping has promoted “rural revitalization” as a “cornerstone of his national development policy to mitigate income inequality, stimulate local economies and guarantee the food supply,” said the Los Angeles Times. Local governments are also “jumping on the new farmer trend,” said The New York Times, by offering tax breaks and loans to “entice young people.”

‘This is not tourism’

This spring, sheep farmer Zuo Xiaoyong’s job posting for shepherds in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia “quickly turned into a viral phenomenon,” said NBC News. The post earned “millions of views and hundreds of applications” from a generation “eager to escape the stresses of urban life.” While the monthly salary — roughly $1,200 USD — may be high, “whether you can work long-term and get through the winter is what matters most,” said Zuo to Reuters. “This is not tourism.”

Older generations are “still stuck in the mindset” that agrarian life is “all about breaking your back in the dirt,” said farmer and recent college graduate Wang Hongbo to the Times. But Wang has incorporated drones and AI into his family’s farm in an effort to modernize and economize the work.

Crossword - Oct. 23, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 23, 2026

Crossword - Oct. 16, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 16, 2026

Palo Alto, Calif.

In the Community Center neighborhood is this refreshed, 1973 mid-century modern atrium Eichler home. With the same owner for 53 years, the four-bedroom—plus office—has clerestory windows, its eponymous atrium, a brick fireplace flanked by glass walls, exposed beams, wood-clad walls and ceilings, and an updated kitchen and dining room.

Outside are a patio, mature landscaping, and an attached garage. Stanford University, dining, parks, and shops are a short drive. $4,988,000. Jennifer Buenrostro, Compass, (650) 224-9539

Belgrade, Mont.

This 2023, modern mountain home in the Gallatin Valley about 30 minutes north of Bozeman is set against Evan Reese Creek with mountain views. The great room features hickory hardwood floors, wood ceilings, and a stacked-stone Rumford fireplace, plus a chef's kitchen with a walk-in pantry, walnut cabinets, and a coffee bar.

The more than 33-acre lot has two covered patios and a heated, attached garage. $4,595,000. Charlotte Durham, Big Sky Sotheby's International Realty, (406) 581-8891

Minneapolis

On the National Register of Historic Places, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Usonian Frieda and Henry J. Neils House, a 1951 mid-century modern, stone-clad home overlooking Cedar Lake.

The L-shaped floor plan is anchored by a large fireplace, and the three-bedroom also includes larch paneling, marble stone walls, built-in furniture, and roof-line windows. A new garage is outside, plus patios, a firepit, and water views. $2,495,000. David Stickney and George Stickney, Coldwell Banker Realty, (952) 473-3000

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Built in 1977, this updated, open-plan, California modern-style home in Foothill has four bedrooms. The living room features wide-plank wood floors, tongue-and-groove wood ceilings, a stone fireplace, and a glass wall; the kitchen includes an oversized quartzite island; and a guest suite has a Japanese soaking tub.

The nearly 1-and-a-half-acre lot with ocean and mountain views spans seating areas, gardens, a chicken coop, yard, sheds, and citrus trees. $5,395,000. Cimme Eordanidis, Village Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (805) 722-8480

East Hampton, N.Y.

This 1985 organic-modern home in the Clearwater Beach Association was gut renovated in 2025. The five-bedroom's great room features high ceilings and arched shelf niches, while a second living room has a large conversation pit under a skylight, and the primary suite’s oversized glassed shower includes a built-in bench.

A pool on the half-acre, fenced property is surrounded by yards, a deck, and a heated cabana. $2,650,000. Sotheby's International Realty - East Hampton Brokerage, Yorgos Tsibiridis, (646) 270-4544

Evanston, Ill.

Near Lake Michigan, this updated, 1955, three-bedroom ranch in a Chicago suburb is less than 10 minutes from town. The industrial modern style home includes exposed ducts, a black brick fireplace, dramatic chandeliers, and a kitchen with exposed brick and an eat-in quartz peninsula.

It also has a sunken dining room and primary bedroom with a glass slider to an outdoor space. The set-back lot has a fenced yard and brick patio. $550,000. Bryce Hoffman, Coldwell Banker Realty, (217) 502-4940

Americans keep buying a lot of stuff, even though said stuff is getting more expensive. The spending helps keep the economy afloat amid rising inflation — but at a cost to households digging deeper into debt to stretch their paychecks.

What did the commentators say?

Americans “continue to spend” even though they are “feeling pessimistic about their finances as affordability pressures mount,” said NBC News. Retail sales were up in August, and holiday spending is “projected to hit record levels this year.” The seemingly good numbers flick at a gloomier reality, however. The rise in spending is largely “because people are paying more” for the stuff they routinely buy.

The trend is “particularly remarkable” given the overall “downbeat consumer sentiment,” said The Wall Street Journal. Those dark moods historically “correlated with lower consumer spending,” but that rule of thumb mostly broke since the pandemic. Now economists say bad feelings about the economy are “increasingly decoupled from spending and other economic indicators.” Americans are “spending their financial condition, not their psyche,” said Mark Mathews, the chief economist at the National Retail Federation, to the outlet.

Older consumers are driving the economy, said CNBC. The affordability crisis is for “younger people,” said economist Ed Yardeni to the outlet. Senior Americans have “accumulated an enormous amount of net worth” that has allowed them to keep spending.

What next?

It is not clear the spending can continue much longer. U.S. households are “borrowing more, saving less and watching their paychecks lose purchasing power,” said The Wealth Advisor. Consumer debt is now above $18 trillion, a total which will carry future consequences. Today’s borrowing has the potential to “constrain spending for years, particularly when balances carry high interest rates.”

High prices “haven’t put a dent in U.S. holiday spending,” said The Street. Consumers have already begun Christmas shopping, increasingly relying on “buy now, pay later” options to buy gifts and other seasonal items. September purchases of holiday items “ran well ahead of 2025,” said Bank of America in a statement, per the outlet.

‘Live at Carnegie Hall’ by Cameron Winter

★★★★

While listening to this album’s opening track, “I hear the Great American Songbook compressed into a brilliant point of light,” said Walden Green in Pitchfork. Cameron Winter, the frontman of the rock band Geese, was just 23 when he took the stage at Carnegie Hall last December for a single solo performance in which he put away his guitar to accompany himself alone on a grand piano. The resulting album—and the concert film that’ll soon accompany it—may be exercises in mythmaking, but Winter earns his acclaim here. The more he strips down his sound, “the closer he gets to some platonic ideal of music,” and though his 2024 solo album provided most of his set, the three new tunes are “some of Winter’s very finest.”

Still, this record “might drive a further wedge between the believers and the skeptics,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Winter’s “unusual” singing style is even more conspicuous here; if you can’t get past that, his gifts as a songwriter may escape you. Still, the album is inspiring “precisely because it’s challenging.” It’s fun engaging with music “that needs time to sink in.”

‘She’s the Best’ by Troye Sivan

★★★

“There seems no reason why Troye Sivan should still be a relative cult figure within pop rather than an actual multiplatinum star,” said Alexis Petridis in The ­Guardian. The fourth album from the 31-year-old Aussie native is packed with “very hooky” songs and evidence of his many A-list backers. They include Madonna, who signed off on his cribbing of a past hit for “Party,” a deadpan good-times anthem. But at least Sivan “seems to be using the space he occupies to his advantage, to push and experiment,” and to write lyrics “as unapologetically queer” as they are here.

She’s the Best is “easily his finest collection of songs to date,” said Craig Jenkins in NYMag.com. “On the surface, the album is an ode to women Sivan has called friends, collaborators, and defenders,” but it’s “perhaps more interested in unpacking the invisible strings of lust and yearning that drag Sivan off the couch night after night.” For now, club life answers his worries about failing to find a forever mate, and an array of producers help him connect to today’s “time-travel-pop wave” as he expresses those feelings. The effort leaves him “redefining himself from song to song.”

‘Dedicated to You’ by Branford Marsalis Quartet & Dianne Reeves

★★★

The 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman “will always remain sacred,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. But in Coltrane’s centennial year, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and singer Dianne Reeves have reinterpreted the most revered ballads album in jazz and made it newly stunning. “For so many of us who have grown used to Hartman’s warm baritone over countless listens,” hearing a new vocalist sing the same six standards “can be ear-bending.” But Reeves “wrings every drop of emotion from the title track,” delivers a “flawless interpretation” of “You Are Too Beautiful,” and teams with pianist Joey Calderazzo for an endearing “My One and Only Love.”

Marsalis and his quartet fill out the album with three Coltrane instrumentals, said Chris Pearson in The Times (U.K.). Still, “it’s those vocals that stay with you.” Reeves, to her credit, “becomes very much part of the band, embedded, one of the instruments.” On “Lush Life,” she does so by singing the intro alone, then stopping halfway through for solos from Marsalis and Calderazzo that “echo and expand on her initial vocal, as if they are her thoughts.” It’s an “exceptionally brilliant” take.

Many horror hits are more fascinating or engrossing than terrifying. But these four films manage to create genuinely unnerving atmospheres of dread.

‘The Exorcist’ (1973)

Director William Friedkin’s classic brought demonic terror straight to the heart of the postwar American suburbs with this story of a young girl’s possession. It retains its capacity to unsettle, leaving the “audience subject to devilish, claustrophobic torment,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)

The film that invented the “found footage” trope is also viscerally scary, following a group of students into the woods to investigate a local supernatural legend. Relying on atmosphere instead of flashy special effects, it “set up a convincing everyday reality and furtively sneaked the horror in,” said Steve Rose at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

‘Session 9’ (2001)

A group of workers is sent to clear asbestos from an abandoned mental hospital and slowly succumbs to claustrophobia, paranoia and fear. This “character-driven take on the classic haunted house movie” is “one of the great American horror films of the 21st century,” said Matthew Monagle at Roger Ebert. (AMC+)

‘The Witch’ (2015)

Director Robert Eggers delivers a taut, terrifying period piece with this tale of a 17th-century New England family expelled from their village and stalked by a witch — a movie that also put the then-fledgling studio A24 on the map. Suffused with “quiet, tangible malevolence,” the tale “carefully strips you of modern sensibilities, pulling you into a world without irony or awareness,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Prime Video)

For the first time in years, applications are flowing in to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that controls web addresses, for new top-level domains. These proposed suffixes at the end of URLs will shape the internet’s next era.

What did the applications reveal?

ICANN has received 1,615 applications from 481 applicants so far, according to its Reveal Day announcement earlier this month. It is the “biggest shake-up” of internet addresses in “more than a decade” and could “result in you typing .fart to reach a website,” said The Times. While some domains are “quirky,” others show how “AI companies are seeking to grab domains like .agi, .superintelligence and .chatgpt.”

Ten different companies including Meta and OpenAI applied for the .agent domain, seven for .agi, and six including OpenAI for .asi, “attempting to get in on” Trump’s push to switch from artificial intelligence to super intelligence, said The Verge. OpenAI applied for 15 top-level domains, or TLDs, while Meta filed for 21.

This is the first time ICANN has accepted applications in over a decade. The nonprofit “first sought new top-level domain applicants in 2012,” said Politico, resulting in .app, .web and .pizza. Each application costs $227,000 and is “subject to, among other processes, a community input period that runs from November to March.”

Those awarded a domain “become registries, gaining control over the suffix,” said The Times. They can keep these for themselves or “sell the registrations under it to third parties.”

Who benefits?

The domain applications show that organizations worldwide are “seeking new ways to build trusted online identities, serve their communities and connect with internet users,” said ICANN President and CEO Kurtis Lindqvist in a press release. But not everyone is enthusiastic.

Internet safety expert John Carr, who has attended ICANN meetings for a decade, is critical of the organization’s process. It’s a “conspiracy against the public good,” he said to The Times. Under its rules, ICANN is supposed to check the “real-world identities” of the people buying the domain names, but “they don’t.” These new domains are just “another way for them to make money.”

“Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s marriage was not a marriage of equals,” said Sebastian Smee in The Atlantic. “Pollock was weak and Krasner was strong.” That dynamic comes across in the new joint exhibit at the Met. More importantly, the show “does each artist the honor of representing them at their best” and, by gathering so many of their exhilarating paintings, “makes a powerful case for abstract expressionism as an unassailable peak of 20th-century American visual expression.” It’s plainly “thrilling” to stand before a great Pollock or a great Krasner. And while Pollock’s groundbreaking drip paintings, the ones that made him America’s most famous artist, have lost none of their visceral power, this show “establishes beyond a doubt” that Krasner was both more talented than her hard-drinking, insecure husband and equally as accomplished and original. At Krasner’s peak in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the paintings she produced were better than any made by more celebrated contemporaries. Unfortunately, being Pollock’s wife, then widow, “meant being relegated to second place.”

“Right off the bat, the show opens with a big blast of Krasner,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. A half dozen large collage paintings, all from the mid-1950s, “look like a lineup of ghostly raised arms, but also like a garden grown wild.” One of them, 1955’s powerful Bald Eagle, incorporates scraps of both her husband’s drawings and her own earlier work. “Inevitably, and justifiably,” Pollock’s history-making canvases are presented in a huge gallery at the heart of the exhibition. These are the pictures that “brought a merging of paint, choreography, and gravity to the point of explosion,” prompting Life magazine to canonize Pollock in 1949 as arguably the country’s greatest living artist. But abstract expressionism, “like all radical art impulses,” soon lost its freshness, even for Pollock. He hit a creative block in the ’50s, returned to heavy boozing, and died in 1956 while driving drunk, about a mile from the eastern Long Island home he shared with Krasner. His young mistress survived the crash.

“By any reckoning, ‘Krasner and Pollock’ is one of the most gorgeously designed and ingeniously installed exhibitions in the Met’s history,” said Lucy Ives in Hyperallergic. And there’s little mystery about its subtext: We come seeking insight into how Krasner survived her entanglement with a needy, art-world comet, and how it all affected her art. As it unfolds the story in politely phrased wall text, the show “has all the sweetness of a gossip session with a cherished confidante.” Yet there’s “something breathtaking” about the way it “simultaneously undercuts Pollock and demonstrates why his priceless canvases remain relevant.” Here, amid 48 of his pieces and 74 of hers, his work matters most in the ways it contributed to Krasner’s artistic development. “I’ve never seen an upending quite like this.”

Kate Atkinson is the celebrated author of Life After Life, Case Histories, and 12 other novels set mostly in her native U.K. In her latest, Our Noble Selves, a former POW becomes a murder suspect while helping stage a 1951 festival intended to boost national morale.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871–72)

Essentially, Middlemarch is a historical novel, set in the period 50 years prior to its publication. Eliot’s breadth and ambition and energy in painting a picture of a society in the midst of cataclysmic change is astounding. I also think it’s a very romantic book—not something Eliot is often accused of.

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

It took many years before Vonnegut felt able to give fictional shape to his experiences as a POW in the Dresden firestorm. The time-­ traveling, science-­fiction elements along with Vonnegut’s typical off-­kilter style work against the odds to make this—along with its ­ brother-in-arms, Heller’s Catch-22—one of the most powerful novels about World War II.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

I could have simply picked all six of Austen’s novels, but if I had to choose one, then this final one—a profound exploration of the human heart—would be the one. It is also about the pain of the path not chosen and the absolute powerlessness of women.

‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford (1924–28)

This is cheating perhaps, because it’s actually a tetralogy that follows the fortunes of Christopher Tietjens from before the First World War and into its aftermath. It’s one of those novels—sorry, four novels—that I have trouble describing and am inclined to say, “Just read it.”

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Laurence Sterne (1759–67)

Tristram Shandy is a very funny, digressive novel about a man trying to write his autobiography and failing to get past the first scene. I always remember my English tutor at university introducing it by saying that it was one of the first novels and also one of the first antinovels, although nowadays I think they would probably call it metafiction.

‘Just William’ by Richmal Crompton (1922)

I had a quietly passive only-­childhood, but ­William provided an alternative, escapist universe of naughtiness and high spirits. Even now, I would, if I could, be happy to live in William’s world. And have a dog called Jumble.

With the midterms two weeks away, there’s a good chance Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives, according to polls. And some believe Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will face a battle among fellow GOP members for the role of House minority leader in the new Congress.

‘Delicate dance’

With many seemingly resigned to a midterm loss, Republicans are “jockeying behind the scenes over who could lead their party in the minority,” said Annie Grayer at CNN. One of the top contenders is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is undergoing a “delicate dance” to position himself for the leadership role. Though Jordan has publicly supported Johnson, he may be “laying the groundwork to run for the top leadership spot if they lose the chamber.”

Some GOP members are more likely to “seek a leader who is willing to serve as a check on the Trump administration if Democrats flip the House,” said Sudiksha Kochi at The Hill. “I hear it all the time in the District. We want a check and balance. We don’t want a rubber stamp,” said one GOP lawmaker to the outlet. There will be a “potential push to support someone else as leader besides Johnson if the party suffers major losses in the midterms,” said Kochi.

‘Stay and serve’

Johnson rejects the possibility of a leadership change should the GOP majority fall. In the “unlikely scenario where we lost the majority, I would expect my colleagues would ask me to continue leading this conference, even if we have divided government,” he said to CBS News amid a push for Republican fundraising. “My intention is to stay and serve, and that’s what I have been doing, as best I can.”

Some Republicans have “insisted that Johnson has enough support in the party to continue running the conference even if they lose the majority,” said Mariana Alfaro at The Washington Post. These officials feel it would “not be Johnson but Trump who will be blamed if the party loses the House,” especially given Trump’s “unpopularity and that his policies have led to high prices.”

“It is a shame how many people wouldn’t dream of reading James Marriott’s eloquent, learned, and admirably brief book,” said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street ­ Journal. Reading is dying, as the 33-year-old London Times columnist tells us, so it’s inevitable that most of the public will miss out on the joys of following him as he lays out his concerns. The causes of his worries aren’t new. A 2022 survey found that in the previous 12 months fewer than half of American adults had read a book. A year later, another study found that in an average day only 16% read anything for pleasure. Of course, there’s “a lot more at stake” in this decline than good books being left unread. Marriott, by revisiting ties between the rise of mass literacy and mass democracy, “makes a strong case” that long-form reading is a necessary ingredient to sustaining the kind of rational and probing collective dialogue that has made mass democracy possible.

Marriott “might be insufficiently pessimistic,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. Though he’s right that smartphones and the short-form videos they spawn have contributed to reading’s decline, the larger problem is that too many of our fellow citizens have become “pathetically nostalgic for the mental lassitude of pre-literate people.” It was not until the 18th century that large numbers of our forebears began reading widely, but we have them to thank for launching the modern age, and today, as childish thinking spreads, we’re seeing that “reason, tolerance, and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.” Marriott, “like many alarmists,” builds his argument on ­ cherry-picked data, said Chris Ferguson in Reason. He reports that reading scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low in 2024 without mentioning that they’d peaked in 2012, several years after the advent of smartphones. Meanwhile, the supposed link between literacy and healthy democracies is undermined by the highly literate societies that gave birth to the fascist regimes of 20th-­century Germany, Italy, and Japan.

“The New Dark Ages is too ominously titled,” said Michael O’Donnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Throughout the book, Marriott “thoughtfully acknowledges” evidence that reading and reason might not be utterly doomed, though he could have done more to acknowledge that the work many of us do still requires a lot of reading and writing. “Are we courting the same scenario as the Middle Ages, when a select few held the keys to knowledge, to the exclusion of all others? Probably not.” Still, “the thrust of Marriott’s ­argument — there is a decline in reading that is antithetical to the progress of the ­Enlightenment — strikes me as persuasive.”

Anyone shopping for airline tickets these days has likely experienced sticker shock, said Elaine Glusac in The New York Times. Airfares have “spiked,” with tickets now 24% higher on average than last year, the Consumer Price Index estimates, and holiday fares for Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching uncomfortable “new heights.” The question some consumers are asking is, Is the death of Spirit Airlines to blame? Possibly. Aviation analytics company Cirium looked at over 1,120 of the budget airline’s former routes and found that the “fares on more than 90% of those routes” have climbed since Spirit collapsed. “The median fare rose by 25.3%,” suggesting other airlines are feeling less pressure to keep a lid on their prices. “But price rises go beyond Spirit’s network” as well.

Fuel costs are the main factor, said Rio Yamat in the Associated Press. The price of “jet fuel has risen even faster than oil during the war” in Iran, since jet fuel competes with diesel for refinery space. But even if fuel prices suddenly drop, fliers might not see airfare reductions for months. Carriers “typically decide several months in advance how many flights to operate and seats to offer,” and they will try to lock in higher prices for as long as they can. Some blame can also be directed at what’s in your wallet, said Mark Kahan in The New York Times. The U.S. desperately needs more competition in air travel. But the legacy carriers get billions each year from banks that issue their popular reward cards. “These programs function as collateral, giving the biggest airlines access to inexpensive capital that their smaller rivals can’t match.” That is “the biggest barrier to another national carrier emerging” to keep fares in check.

There are still ways to find cheaper flights, said Megan Cerullo in CBS News. Flexibility with dates and times can lead to better deals, but it’s still best to book early. Google Flights recommends buying Thanksgiving flights in October, between 57 and 21 days before departure. For December holidays, look to book “56 days before departure” or around Halloween. Off-peak days are generally less expensive, especially Mondays and Tuesdays. Be careful if you want to ask AI for help, said Webb Wright in Gizmodo. I asked Meta’s new Muse AI agent for help “booking my holiday travel, something I have an annual habit of putting off until the last possible minute.” Bad idea. “I fell into a long and rather disorganized conversation” with my chatbot, which offered me “various flight itineraries” of questionable benefit. It’d be nice if Muse could simply search on Expedia, but AI agents aren’t allowed to access the site. For booking travel, AI “felt less like a seamless assistant than a slow and superfluous middleman.”

‘You Can See Everything’

Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★★

“No two people will draw the same conclusions from this movie. That is part of what makes it a masterpiece,” said Shane O’Neill in The Washington Post. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s unsettling portrait of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes became “the most anticipated documentary of the decade” when an “unnerving” teaser was released last month showing a smiling, unblinking Holmes in extreme close-up staring at Fielder and insisting on her guilelessness. Word spread that shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, she had invited Fielder, the idiosyncratic mastermind behind The Rehearsal, to bring his cameras into her home, and in the resulting three-hour film, “she doesn’t get any less weird or more scrutable.”

Somehow “more shocking, thornier, and revealing than billed,” You Can See Everything “plays like an unraveling of certainty in real time,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Holmes continues to insist she did nothing wrong when she became a billionaire a decade ago by touting a breakthrough medical device that her company couldn’t build, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Yet when she heads to prison halfway through, bidding goodbye to her husband and two children, this already riveting film “truly takes wing.” Bringing in a stand-in for Holmes, Fielder keeps pushing to understand his subject’s apparent detachment from reality, until the movie becomes “an intricate investigation into, among other things, the incomprehensibility of love,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In the end, “it’s not just the film of the year.” It’s also “a documentary that stands shoulder to shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.”

‘Sense and Sensibility’

Directed by Georgia Oakley (PG)

★★★

The new screen adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is “not the lush, buttoned-up period drama of tradition,” said Nikki Baughan in Screen Daily. Director Georgia Oakley, coming off an acclaimed 2022 art house debut, clearly wanted to foreground relatable emotions over Regency-era costumery with her take on Jane Austen’s tale of the cash-strapped Dashwood sisters. “That’s not to say the film doesn’t look gorgeous.” But compared with Ang Lee’s “candy-colored” 1995 version, Oakley’s is “decidedly more grounded” as it once again lets us watch sensible Elinor and free-spirited Marianne pursue husbands after their father’s death lands them in relative financial peril. “For those of us who adore the 1995 film, unfavorable comparisons seem inevitable,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter.

Despite a “more than capable cast,” led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, the new movie has “a low-energy feel” in part because Oakley and her screenwriter “lean so heavily into Elinor and Marianne’s crushing disappointments and the forces holding them back in a period of vast gender inequality.” Fortunately, none of Oakley’s tweaks “dim the roiling passions of the sisters as they approach love from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum,” said Derek Smith in Slant. By focusing on Elinor and Marianne’s bond and how it’s tested by their different outlooks, this Sense and Sensibility “manages the difficult feat of breathing new life into these familiar characters’ interior lives.”

‘Misty Green’

Directed by Chris Rock (R)

★★★

“If Misty Green never comes apart at the seams,” it’s because Rosalind Eleazar “simply won’t let it,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The Slow Horses actress is “never less than great” in the title role of Chris Rock’s new drama about a hot-mess Hollywood has-been who might just land a comeback role nearly 20 years after her peak if she can refrain from sabotaging herself for once. Rock’s “unkempt” script strains to combine a poignant character study with a scalding takedown of L.A.’s dream factory, and its excesses might have tanked the film if Eleazar didn’t hold it all together by “sheer force of will.”

The movie has “nothing insightful” to tell us about Hollywood’s dark corners that we haven’t heard already, said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The despicable side characters “feel a little easy,” starting with a producer, played by Adam Driver, who tempts Misty with drugs and lucrative sex work. Only one industry player comes across as noble—“probably because he’s played by Rock himself.” Fortunately, none of Rock’s misfires matter “once you lock into what Eleazar is doing,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. She brings “nuance, shade, and emotional depth” to every story beat in Misty’s quest for redemption. “Eleazar doesn’t just make the movie work; she is the movie.” The TV veteran has never previously landed such a robust role, and “dear god, does she make the most of it.” She “deserves every accolade and every bit of the spotlight that Misty Green affords her.”

An obscure island in the Indian Ocean has become an unlikely titan in the global online gambling industry. With its lack of corporate taxes and “minimal red tape”, Anjouan has become home to a “thriving industry” of gambling websites tied to the black market, and counts banks, brokers and cryptocurrency exchanges among its virtual residents, said Australia’s ABC News.

But there is “just one problem”: “none of the licences – financial or gambling – are worth the (virtual) paper they are written on”. Meanwhile, the industry continues to draw operators and gamblers from around the world – including Britain – into its ever-expanding orbit.

A widening ‘network’

Traditionally, Anjouan – one of the semi-autonomous islands that make up the Comoros archipelago – was best known for its exports of ylang-ylang oil and vanilla. But it has since “stumbled” into the “dangerous but highly lucrative” industry of underground online gambling, said The Guardian. There are now 1,500 registered gaming licence holders on the books in Anjouan.

This is far from a state-sponsored endeavour to create a low-regulation haven on the island. In fact, it appears to be led by a “small cadre of mostly British businessmen flogging unofficial ‘licences’” to online casinos, as well as banking and cryptocurrency platforms.

Anjouan-licensed gambling platforms have been linked to “serious breaches” including fraud, “theft of personal data” and a lack of payment of winnings, said Le Monde. And those seeking redress will find that “the legal value of licences from this island is highly questionable”.

‘Fighting back’

The whole operation is given a veneer of legitimacy thanks to a global “network” of organisations selling fraudulent gambling licences, which is estimated to be making “tens of millions of dollars a year in fees”, said ABC News. But the island’s authorities claim supposed gambling regulators are “fictitious entities” operating “illegally”, while Anjouan’s supposed financial regulator “lacks both credibility and accountability”.

Licences often “reassure” customers that there has been “some kind of due diligence process” in the operation, keeping their gaming and winnings “safe”, said sporting ethics NGO PlayTheGame. But under the surface, in the “overwhelming majority of cases”, customers find themselves “helpless” should they end up as the victim of fraud. And sadly, this happens “often”.

For its part, the island is “fighting back”: making efforts to rid itself of its increasingly notorious reputation, said The Guardian. The government of the Comoros Union has made a “direct request” to the British government for assistance to unravel the “unauthorised licensing regime” once and for all.

The data center boom has “entered a new, contradictory phase,” said Brian Martucci in Utility Dive. Construction activity on the massive warehouses filled with AI servers “remains robust.” But several billion-dollar projects are facing “a host of challenges,” including worker shortages, a lack of gas turbines, grid constraints, permitting delays, and widespread community opposition. The problems came to a head recently in New Mexico, when Oracle issued an unusual force majeure notice—normally reserved for insurance against “acts of God”—to “protect itself financially from the delay or cancellation” of its so-called Project Jupiter, after state regulators “blocked a gas pipeline proposed to serve it.” Google has also recently had to halt work on two data centers in Finland after a local outcry spurred an environmental review, while a Microsoft project in Michigan “faces an uncertain future amid local permitting delays.” Goldman Sachs estimates only 50% of planned data-center capacity may actually come to fruition in the near term.

That means the AI boom may soon hit a bottleneck, said Asa Fitch in The Wall Street Journal. Tech giants need “lots of data centers and electricity” to fulfill their ambitions, but the “delays are biting.” The amount of electricity demanded by data centers globally in the next two years “is enough to power around 118 million homes.” It’s curious that “chipmakers aren’t yet blaring their sirens” about the capacity squeeze. Possibly, that’s because they can’t even accurately tell “how much is being built”—and how much is being idled.

This “cornucopia of holdups” should be a wake-up call for investors, said Chris Bryant in Bloomberg. AI companies are spending billions “to secure precious supplies of computer memory” from chip makers like Nvidia and AMD. But if they can’t build data centers, they could end up “with too many chips and not enough operable server farms.” Almost half of the U.S. data-center pipeline is being built by first-time developers who have jumped into the gold rush, making big promises they might not deliver. It’s a “high-stakes game of musical chairs,” where losers will be left holding chips “without a seat.”

“Why assume the data center has reached its final physical form?” asked Todd G. Buchholz in The Washington Post. Historically, as technology has advanced, it’s gotten smaller. In 1946, a computer “took up the size of a house”; now it “fits in the palm of one’s hand.” Likewise, we can safely assume that the land, electricity, and equipment needed to produce a unit of intelligence will keep dropping. “That’s why communities should welcome new investment but insist that developers pay the costs of power, water, and grid upgrades.” The benefits from the technology will last for years, but the size of the physical footprint will not.

Ukrainians are “gearing up for the worst-case scenario”, said Finbarr Toesland in The i Paper. In the face of an “emboldened Russia”, this winter is expected to be the “most brutal since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in February 2022”.

Stunned by Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of an “energy ceasefire” that would favour Russia, and apparent plans for “peace talks” without Ukraine present, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is struggling to win back US favour. But he needs ways to help Kyiv make it through winter months where temperatures can drop as low as -20C.

What did the commentators say?

“Trump’s efforts on the part of Russia” are “the act of an enemy”, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley. He has “strangled” Kyiv’s intelligence systems and “crippled weapons on the battlefield”. That’s an “act of sabotage”, and “Europe’s leaders must stand up and say so”.

This “sorry episode” shows “just how dependent Ukraine still is on the US”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. For all the “strong words” of Europe’s leaders, “there remains a gulf” between their “rhetoric and the reality” of their support. Iris2, the EU’s version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network won’t even be operational before 2030, and the Americans are still the only ones who can offer “ballistic-missile defence”. Europe must step up its provision of hardware, or “Kyiv’s security will remain hostage to Mr Trump, who has shown repeatedly that he cannot be relied upon”.

Britain and Europe have already reached their “limit” of what they can deliver, said Dimitar Bechev, a foreign-policy analyst at Carnegie Europe, in Al Jazeera. Its €90 billion loan of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine now looks like it “might be exhausted well before the end of 2027”, and any attempt to find additional funding could “open a can of worms” in both EU budget negotiations and upcoming elections in member states like France, Spain, Italy and Poland. But the EU and the UK have nevertheless “replaced the US” as the “de facto guarantors” of Ukraine’s survival. Joining the EU – or, at least becoming a closely integrated partner like Norway – is the “best-case scenario for Kyiv in the long run”.

Zelenskyy may have to “consider a temporary, if unwelcome, change of tactics” to relieve the “terminal stress” on his relationship with Trump, said The Times’ editorial board. And two US senators have suggested “a useful compromise”: if Ukraine pledges to stop attacks on Russian energy assets, SpaceX’s Starshield coverage could be “extended to roughly 200 miles inside Russia” to “help Kyiv take out some of the launchers firing at civilians all over Ukraine”.

What next?

To “reduce the impact of Russian missile and drone attacks” on Kyiv’s small number of combined heat-and-power plants, Ukraine “needs to decentralise” such “critical infrastructure”, Olena Pavlenko of Ukrainian energy think-tank DiXi Group told Toesland in The i Paper, but this is not a “short-term solution”.

More urgently, Ukraine must find a way to halt Russia’s “devastating air onslaught”, said The Times. It needs “proper air defences – and fast”, even if that means halting strikes on Russian refineries in return for Patriot missiles. Trump “may not be minded to provide these weapons” but he is under “growing pressure” from the US Congress, where even members of his own party have “expressed disquiet at the so-called energy deal” with Putin. A strategic pause in strikes may help to “prevent further Trump hostility to Kyiv”, which would be a “welcome” contribution to Ukraine’s cause.

Rising flight and hotel costs, combined with “stubbornly finite” annual leave, means most holidaymakers can take “one or two big trips” in a year, said Sarah Rappaport on Bloomberg. So a “growing cohort” of time-poor travellers are treating their holidays as an “investment” in themselves. The desire to “come home with more than Instagram shots as souvenirs” has given rise to “purposeful travel”: the skillcation.

From ‘fly and flop’ to ‘skilliday’

According to recent research by Mastercard, nearly half of Europeans plan to learn a new skill on their summer holiday – and over half of 18- to 34-year-olds have already planned a skill-based trip this year.

More than half of the 27,000 holidaymakers from 28 European countries surveyed said skill-based trips felt more meaningful than traditional holidays, especially when curated by locals. One in three (37%) booked a trip this year specifically to learn a skill, with a new language topping the list. The “era of the ‘fly and flop’” is “giving way to the ‘skilliday’”.

Tourists are looking for experiences that “create muscle memories”, said Mastercard economist Natalia Lechmanova. From “winemaking and woodworking” to pottery and painting, consumers are “opening their wallets” for a taste of local culture, and a “lesson that lasts long after they’ve arrived home”. Skill-based travel also “tends to draw people beyond the crowded hotspots”, into smaller towns and lower seasons, reducing the impact of overtourism.

These trips tend to cost more than conventional holidays, but the pay-off is high. People often see “longer-lasting positive effects on psychological well-being” than when taking holidays focused on “sun, sea and partying”, psychology professor Andrew Stevenson told Bloomberg. Spending time learning a new skill gives you the added “feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment”.

Over the years, “I’ve clumsily thrown myself into swing dancing lessons in Italy, free-diving sessions in French Polynesia, and Spanish intensives in Ecuador”, said Julia Eskins in Vogue. “I came home from each one feeling a little more capable than when I arrived.”

A trip like this has a “purpose”; said Alex Ledsom in Forbes; the traveller is looking for more than “just a break”. The goal is to fill time with “experiences that teach, reconnect and transform”. Those going on skillcations usually opt to learn something that’s unavailable to them at home, with tactile crafts like “Peruvian weaving or Japanese pottery-making” becoming increasingly popular activities. People are more interested in learning about “heritage, expertise, traditions and customs” than ever before.

That has led to one of the “fastest-growing segments” in the tourism industry, said Lindsay Cohn in W Magazine. Hotels everywhere are “ramping up” their activity programs to offer the chance to develop “new experiential abilities”, and it’s not limited to crafts.

Diving is a popular option for travellers who wish to “explore azure reefs and haunting shipwrecks”. For instance, you can get your Padi certification during a stay at the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives. As for those interested in a “culinary journey”, Grand Hotel Fasano beside Italy’s Lake Garda takes guests on a tour of a nearby village to get involved in “preparing traditional regional recipes, paired with Garda-style spritz aperitifs, homemade lemon verbena liqueur, and local wine”.

Go into a British bookshop and you may notice “a glaring stock gap”, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “Star novelist” Sally Rooney, whose bestsellers include “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, has announced that her books will no longer be sold in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action.

The Irish novelist had pledged to donate royalties from her books to the direct-action protest group, despite the fact that the UK has, controversially, proscribed it as a terrorist organisation. Rooney said last week that her publisher, Faber & Faber, had therefore decided it could no longer sell her work in the UK because doing so could “constitute a serious criminal offence”. For fans and bookshop owners, the news “hit like a gut punch”.

‘Affront to decency’

Rooney has shown courage in choosing “the thorniest path possible for this cause”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Authors can “write essays and sign letters” in support of Palestinian people, musicians can shout about it on stage, but that doesn’t “entail actively breaking the terrorism laws”. It’s Rooney’s support for this specific group that’s “effectively both barred” and “banned” her work from the UK and cost her "innumerable” sales and opportunities.

For her “more excitable” home-grown fans, it’s a case of “perfidious Albion strikes again”, said Eilis O'Hanlon in the Irish Independent. Fellow Irish novelist Colm Tóibín said Britain had gone “insane”, and the whole issue is “an absolute affront to decency” and freedom of speech. But I think that framing is “ridiculous”. Even if “the fiendish Brits” wanted to prosecute one of its “most illustrious” publishers for paying one of its authors what she is owed, Rooney is an Irish citizen living in Ireland, and thus not subject to UK terror laws. Her personal freedom of speech and right to protest are not at any risk. And Faber can keep publishing and promoting her in other countries, including her native Ireland.

‘Attention-seeking self-aggrandisement’

Despite “the uproar”, this isn’t “massively risky” for either Rooney or Faber, said Camilla Long in The Times. How many of her “whopping 6 million” worldwide book sales will she forgo? Her books “remain in libraries” and in any bookshops where they were already stocked. This isn’t a “book ban”; it’s a millionaire’s “self-imposed withdrawing of one’s further sales”.

This is “attention-seeking self-aggrandisement”, said Lionel Shriver in The Telegraph. Thanks to lucrative TV adaptations of her novels, Rooney can “easily live without further British royalties” and continue to “shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops” (or fund their cause via multiple legal outfits). Faber, on the other hand, was caught “between a rock and a hard place”.

I’m “no fan” of Palestine Action; some of its members have “committed a campaign of criminal damage”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. But Rooney and Faber have pushed the “simultaneous intolerance and vagueness of the UK government’s position” on the group onto “the front tables at Waterstones”. Supporters of Palestine Action are “being bundled into paddy-wagons for wearing T-shirts”. Will a UK citizen now face arrest for saying “I support Sally Rooney” or “carrying a ‘Normal People’ tote bag”? The problem isn’t Rooney’s speech, free or otherwise; it’s Britain’s “inconsistent attempt to police the border between legitimate protest and criminal thuggery”. What a “fine mess” we’re in.

Israeli police have arrested 10 suspects in the occupied West Bank following attacks by Jewish settlers over the weekend in which a US journalist and European diplomats were among those injured.

Masked settlers beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine as she covered an olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah. The following day, settlers attacked diplomats from Belgium, France and Poland, as well as representatives of the Catholic Church, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh.

Why is the harvest so significant for Palestinians?

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the olive sector for at least part of their income. Every autumn, thousands of families harvest olives that have sustained communities for generations. To many olive-growing communities, the harvest represents not just livelihoods, but cultural identity, family heritage and attachment to the land.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture estimates that olive oil production will reach approximately 21,000 tonnes this year, around a quarter of which would be surplus to domestic need and could be exported, said Palestinian News Network. But that yield is reliant on farmers being able to access and harvest their groves.

Settler attacks during this year’s olive harvest season have already surpassed the total for 2025. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented 199 olive-harvest-related settler attacks in the West Bank this season. These incidents resulted in one death, 124 injuries and damage to more than 2,500 trees and saplings.

Why is the season vulnerable to violence?

These attacks in the West Bank “are not new”, said Al Jazeera. Every year, “Israeli settlers and hardline groups use the olive harvest period to assert control over valuable agricultural lands”, including by “stealing crops, or building illegal settlement outposts and roads on private Palestinian property”.

This annual ritual of “assaulting farmers, burning or uprooting trees and stealing crops”, is “making it increasingly dangerous for Palestinians to reach and remain on their own land”, Ahmed Najar, a Palestinian political analyst and playwright, told the outlet.

The attacks are also designed to “deter international campaigners from accompanying Palestinian farmers, standing with them against settler violence and documenting the atrocities being committed”, he said. “The objective is not only to dispossess Palestinians, but to ensure that their dispossession happens without witnesses.”

What is being done?

The EU has condemned Israeli settler attacks, with a spokesperson for its diplomatic service saying it expects “full accountability as well as effective measures to prevent continued acts of violence and violent harassment against Palestinians, including during the ongoing olive harvest season”.

The Israeli military has condemned Saturday’s attack on the EU diplomats and said it has opened an investigation into the incident. However, “despite the international condemnation”, the office of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “questioned the video evidence and testimony” from what it calls “alleged” attacks, said the BBC.