Of the many new products announced by Dyson last year, the PencilVac Fluffycones is the “most innovative”, said Ideal Home. Dubbed the “world’s slimmest vacuum”, it is ultra-light (1.8kg) and “compact”, and “very sleek” – thanks to a 38mm stick handle that houses the dust canister and Dyson’s fastest vacuum motor. It’s simple to use, with a swivelling floorhead that is “extremely manoeuvrable”. Its 55 air watts of suction is far less than most cordless models, but is more than enough for hard floors. And there’s the catch: the PencilVac is designed for hard floors only, so you’ll need another vacuum for carpets.

It might seem like “an unnecessary luxury”, but if you have hard floors, “you’ll actually enjoy using” this “flexible and friendly little cleaner”, said The Guardian. It comes with a free-standing charging dock which acts as a stand, and holds the combi-crevice tool. There are green lights, front and back, which really work to illuminate dust. The “odd name” is fairly self-explanatory: the whole device is squeezed into a 940mm-long pole and the fluffycones in the floorhead rotate in opposite directions to sweep dirt into the path of the central suction wand.

The collection bin is “a really clever piece of engineering”, said T3. The 0.8-litre dust compartment looks “tiny”, but it uses suction to compact dust at the top, which also stops blockages. The “syringe-style emptying system” reduces mess by pushing debris deep into your bin. Battery life is fairly short (up to 30 mins in Eco mode), but you can always fork out for a spare. The PencilVac is “really powerful”, it’s just a shame it can’t be used on carpets, or as a handheld (you can’t shorten the wand). But if you’ve got hard floors, it is “a fantastic option”.

Summer: the season of sunshine, swimming pools, barbecues and a bracingly high electric bill. As temperatures rise and humidity increases, running the air conditioning can become a necessity for some households — and not a cheap one. This year, that bill could get even higher.

The “average seasonal cost for electricity, covering June through September, is projected to be 8.5% higher this year, rising to $778,” said the National Energy Assistance Directors Association in a recent forecast, per The New York Times. Those increases are likely to be felt disproportionately by southern states, with Texas and Oklahoma “expected to see an 11.5% jump to $924,” said the outlet.

While there is not much consumers can do about the primary drivers of these price hikes — namely, “utility grid updates and demand from new data centers that power artificial intelligence, as well as increased use in the summer because of higher temperatures,” said the Times — there are steps people can take to make their bills at least a little more manageable. Here are three.

1. Stay on top of system maintenance

Keeping your air conditioner running as efficiently as possible can go a long way toward better electric bills. Regularly changing air filters is key here, as any blockages can stress the system, causing it to work harder and use more energy.

In general, “air filters should be replaced every two to three months but may require more frequent attention if your air conditioner is used consistently, in a dusty environment or if you have pets in the home,” said Rob Munin of Johnson Controls, a technology and energy company, to Better Homes & Gardens.

2. Minimize sunlight exposure indoors

Just like a “car parked in the sun on a hot day, your home can heat up if you don’t close your blinds while you’re away,” said Matt Malinowski, the building program director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, to CNBC Make It. Before your house starts cooking, look for some easy ways to minimize direct sunlight.

This can include “using indoor plants to create shade, keeping your curtains closed to block out the sunlight during the day and investing in reflective blinds or UV-reflective film for windows,” said CBS News. You might also consider outdoor additions, like “extending roof eaves or adding a trellis or awning to shade windows,” or “planting trees on the south and west sides of your house,” said Better Homes & Gardens.

3. Consider a thermostat upgrade (or adjustment)

You will pay a little bit for a smart thermostat up-front, but over the long run, having one could end up saving you. That is because “smart thermostats can ‘do the work for you’ by programming to turn on and off based on your schedule,” said Piero Caballero, the senior product manager at Johnson Controls, to CNBC Make It.

Of course, you can always adjust the thermostat yourself, especially when you leave the house. “In states with high summer temperatures, the energy directors association recommends keeping your thermostat at 70 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit when people are home and at 78 when the house is empty,” said the Times. Even a slight temperature change can make a difference, given “every degree of increase between those temperatures saves about 3% on your electric bill.”

There’s been a fierce debate over the past two decades about the status of the distant icy world of Pluto after it was contentiously stripped of its planethood and reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Nasa chief Jared Isaacman has indicated that he might revisit the matter but it won’t be an easy decision because scientists are still “worlds apart” on the issue, said The Observer.

Rock and ice

Pluto was discovered on 18 February 1930 by an American astronomer called Clyde Tombaugh. He was using one of the most powerful telescopes of his day at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

For 76 years the “tiny ball of rock and ice” was recognised as the ninth, smallest and most distant planet of the solar system. But in 2006, nine years after Tombaugh died, members of the International Astronomical Union voted on the criteria for a planet.

To qualify, the group decided, an object must orbit the Sun, be nearly round in shape, and be the largest object in its path. Pluto meets the first two conditions but not the third, because it shares its orbit with other icy objects, in a region called the Kuiper Belt. So its status was downgraded to a dwarf planet.

This decision was “controversial” and “not just because it forced schoolchildren” to “learn a new mnemonic for our solar system's major denizens”, said Space. Earth and Jupiter share orbital space with lots of asteroids, “so why was Pluto singled out?” Pluto was “beloved and remains so”, especially in the US, because “it’s the only planet discovered by an American”.

The “most vocal” Pluto advocate has been the planetary scientist Alan Stern. “Science isn’t about voting,” he said in 2016 of the IAU’s decision. “We don’t vote on the theory of relativity. We don’t vote on evolution.”

There was a “significant escalation” in the pro-Pluto campaign in July 2015, when Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft produced the “first-ever up-close imagery” of Pluto, revealing a “stunningly diverse world” with “towering mountains, vast nitrogen-ice glaciers and other jaw-dropping features”, said Space. But the “historic flyby” wasn’t enough to “get Pluto its planethood back”.

Maga echoes

But now, Nasa boss Isaacman has signalled that the US space agency might re-examine the case for Pluto to be given its planet status back. Last month, he told a US Senate committee that he was “very much” wanting to make Pluto a planet again. He added that “some papers” were under way at Nasa to “revisit this discussion”.

With an “echo of Maga”, “make Pluto a planet again” is a phrase that suggests a “nostalgic journey back to a past of certainties”, when “everything was in its right place in the heavens”, said The Observer. But “actually it’s the Plutonists who represent the argument for radical change” and Stern has calculated that there might be as many as 1,000 planets in the solar system.

But first, the best thing that Nasa and other “Pluto advocates” can do is “escalate the discussion”, said Space.

‘Middle of Nowhere’ by Kacey Musgraves

★★★

“To describe Middle of Nowhere with a rustic cliché, Kacey Musgraves is going back to her roots,” said Molly Mary O’Brien in Pitchfork. After years of exploring a pop-country blend, the 37-year-old Texas native has assembled a set of new songs that come across like a survey of the past 50 years of country music. Where 2024’s Deeper Well found the singer-songwriter practicing meditation and consulting star charts, Nowhere gives us “Dry Spell,” a “sultry, funny, and pristinely constructed song about not having had sex in 335 days.” While “Loneliest Girl” and the title track show her getting more comfortable with being on her own, she has packed much of the album with guests, including Miranda Lambert on “Horses and Divorces,” and Willie Nelson on “Uncertain, TX.” Fittingly, Middle of Nowhere has an in-between feeling, like a meal at a nouveau farm-to-table restaurant, said Grant Sharples in Paste. “There’s something for everyone, and the food’s pretty good, but nothing really reinvents the wheel.” While it’s as polished as Golden Hour, Musgraves’ 2018 Album of the Year winner, it “lacks the ingenuity.”

 ‘In Times of Dragons’ by Tori Amos

★★★

On her 18th album, Tori Amos “sounds like she’s rediscovered her fire and purpose,” said Neil Z. Yeung in AllMusic. Yet another “piano-driven epic,” this “devastating” concept album finds the 62-year-old assuming the role of an alter ego on a journey after breaking free of her marriage to a Lizard Demon billionaire. The record opens with “ominous” piano and “pounding martial drums” as Amos, her voice roughened by age, sings about breaking free with the Demon’s goons on her trail. “An instant classic,” that song raises the curtain on more than an hour of “some of the most powerful, wounded, and moving music of her career.” Throughout, “Amos grapples with her legacy through the relationship her heroine has with her long-lost daughter,” a role sung by Amos’ daughter, Natashya Hawley, said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. At the outset, Amos’ alter ego is worried that her experiences might make a monster of her, but by the end “she’s learned to live with her scars, using them as a power source.” That proves “an apt metaphor for Amos’ career and the ways she’s blended the confessional and the mystical to often stunning effect.”

‘Diavola’ by Gabrielle Cavassa

★★★

Balancing tenderness and quiet intensity, Gabrielle Cavassa’s voice “has an unforced spellbinding quality that draws the listener in,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. On her first album for Blue Note, the 31-year-old jazz singer “inhabits each lyric of the song as if it belongs to her.” That’s true even when the lyrics are incredibly familiar, as on the California native’s “slightly swinging” rendition of Billy Eckstine’s “Prisoner of Love” or on “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” which she transforms with a “relaxed, slower-than-molasses tempo” that allows her to wring the essence out of every syllable. Compared with B.J. Thomas’ 1969 hit, Cavassa’s version is sweeter “but more contemplative,” said Will Coviello in NOLA.com. That track also features a gorgeous sax solo by Joshua Redman, who co-produced the album. Redman met Cavassa after his manager saw the award-winning singer perform at a New Orleans wedding. The album’s title track, co-written by Cavassa, is also its centerpiece. In Italian, a diavola is a dangerous, powerful woman, and likely a temptress. Cavassa inhabits the character’s vanity and flaws, turning the song into “a showpiece for her singing.”

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Ayelet Waldman is the author of the best-selling memoir Bad Mother and of the novels Daughter’s Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. In A Perfect Hand, her novel to be published on May 19, a lady’s maid in 19th-century England falls for a valet. Below, Waldman shares her six favorite books about missed opportunities and remorse.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels, though we have been informed sternly by no less a luminary than Nabokov that Mansfield Park is the “greatest,” whatever that means. Though Anne Elliot could be accused of being retiring and easily manipulated, there is an element of steel in her character that I love. Also, the book is about longing and regret, and in looking at this list I see that these are emotions I seem obsessed with. Buy it here.

‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan (2001)

This is also a book about regret, and about shame. It is, like Persuasion, about the need to rewrite history, to expiate one’s mistakes. Buy it here.

‘Old Filth’ by Jane Gardam (2004)

Here’s another favorite, also permeated by regret! The hero (such as he is) looks back on a painful childhood and a life characterized in no small part by disappointment. Though he is a successful barrister and judge, Sir Edward Feathers’ nickname, derived from “Failed In London Try Hong Kong,” sums up his life: This book, though melancholic, is leavened by Gardam’s mordant wit. Buy it here.

‘Shakespeare’s Kitchen’ by Lore Segal (2007)

I’ve seen Shakespeare’s Kitchen described as an academic send-up, a comedy of manners, and it is, but Segal’s collection of interlocked stories is also a book about loneliness, told with subtle (and not so subtle) humor. Buy it here.

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason (2020)

I would not have picked up Sorrow and Bliss but for the recommendation of author Ann Patchett. It is one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about the way we defeat ourselves in love, and about the exhaustion of dealing with mental illness, something I can relate to all too well. Buy it here.

‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

How could a list of books about missed chances and self-defeat be complete without The Remains of the Day? Every time I reread this novel, I find myself in a frustrated (yet delighted) fury about how Stevens was so determined to sabotage any chance of happiness that he couldn’t even allow himself to imagine a future with Miss Kenton. Buy it here.

‘The Rolling Stones: The Biography’ by Bob Spitz

“Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Bob Spitz’s,” said Marc Ballon in the Los Angeles Times. The author, who has previously written doorstop accounts of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, tells the band’s story in full. We get the boys’ early days as a blues cover band, creative highs such as Exile on Main St., valleys such as 1986’s Dirty Work, the drug problems, the breakups, the makeups, and the disastrous 1969 concert at Altamont. Though Spitz “unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor” because he “homes in on telling details that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.” The result is a “magisterial” work worthy of its 700 pages. “For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.”

The tale begins with “one of the great origin stories, ranking up there with Steve Jobs inviting Steve Wozniak over to play with computers,” said David Kirby in The Wall Street Journal. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were the loosest of acquaintances when they ran into each other as 17-year-olds in 1961, Richards struck by Jagger’s armful of records. Thus was born one of rock’s most dynamic duos, soon to be joined by Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Ian Stewart, the last a piano player pushed off the band’s official roster because of his looks. Most would make it through several decades together, though Jones was dismissed from the band he co-founded shortly before his 1969 death, to be replaced by Mick Taylor, then Ronnie Wood. Revisiting their collective story with Spitz’s guidance is like seeing a familiar portrait anew. “The faces are the same, but the light is different, and suddenly you see shadows you never noticed, a new determination in one person’s eyes.”

“There’s a certain swagger in Spitz’s subtitling his chronicle of the band ‘The Biography,’” said Leah Greenblatt in The New York Times. But the author is a credible biographer of record, his takes on the music are “both forensic and poetic,” and “many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.” His account is “diligent to a fault” as he strings together albums, addictions, court battles, and relationship dramas, and after devoting 600 pages to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, he “suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.” But he’s wise enough to position the Jagger-Richards partnership as the story’s central platonic love and enduring source of tension. And his epilogue, which finds the surviving Stones crushing yet another 2024 tour stop, “feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body.”

‘Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare’ by Katrina Manson

“Unpacking global policies on the use of AI by militaries—the potential benefits, pitfalls, and murky ethics—will fill books for decades to come,” said Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist. Katrina Manson’s new book does something simpler. It relates the fascinating story of the development of the Pentagon’s main AI initiative, Project Maven, launched in 2017 to take the work of consolidating and analyzing military intelligence data away from slow, mistake-prone humans and assign the work to AI. But backers of the project always intended to go further by having the AI program choose targets—as it does now—and eventually take them out autonomously. AI weapons need to be managed closely. Manson’s chilling story “suggests the reality is otherwise.”

At the center of the veteran reporter’s account stands Maven’s founder, Drew Cukor, said Fred Kaplan in The New York Times. Realizing in 2017 that AI would spread to the battlefield, the Marine intelligence officer vowed to help get the U.S. up to speed with China, which was off to a head start. After Google pulled out of the project when employees protested doing military work, Cukor turned to then-obscure Palantir to get Project Maven off the ground. But he knew that reducing the role of human decision-making in the so-called kill chain would spook Pentagon officials, so while courting them, he kept that part a secret, waiting until Maven proved its value. By 2022, it was being used by Ukraine to hold back Russia. A year later, Israel used it in its attacks on Gaza.

“Manson clearly comes to like Cukor, or at least begrudgingly admire him,” said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker. Maven’s catalyst wanted to reduce the number of war casualties that are caused by errors, which makes it “at least intermittently possible” to root for him as he battles hide-bound bureaucrats and agencies resistant to sharing data with nominal compatriots. But Cukor insists he trusted that Maven would never do more than assist human decision-making, and “Manson repeatedly points out that this was always somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation.” Today, machine-driven carnage isn’t coming; it’s here.

Between inflation and gas prices, the cost of living can feel hard to keep up with. Add the rapidly rising costs of homeownership to the equation, and it is no surprise that some people are falling behind.

In the first quarter of 2026, “U.S. foreclosure filings hit a six-year high,” said The Wall Street Journal, citing property-data provider Attom. The “number of U.S. properties with a foreclosure filing rose to almost 119,000,” a “26% jump from the same period a year earlier.” The culprit? “Fast-rising homeownership costs such as property tax and insurance bills.”

If you are finding yourself in a financial bind or worry one is just one unexpected expense away, here is what to know.

What happens in foreclosure?

Foreclosure is the consequence of not making mortgage payments. After a prolonged period of non-payment, a mortgage lender will repossess, or foreclose, on a home to recoup their losses.

This does not just happen overnight, however, and homeowners will have a heads-up. Before anything happens, the lender will let a borrower know there is a risk of foreclosure, usually after the loan enters default, which occurs after “three to six missed mortgage payments,” said Bankrate. This alert “marks the beginning of the preforeclosure process, but the borrower still has time and options to avoid losing their home,” said Rocket Mortgage.

At this juncture, the borrower and lender can work together to find a solution. But if this does not happen, the process of foreclosure can move forward. In that case, “your lender will file a notice of sale” and “your home will be placed up for auction at a specified time and place,” said Bankrate. After your home is sold, “you’ll generally have a few days to gather your belongings and move to a new residence,” or face eviction.

What are the impacts of foreclosure?

Foreclosure carries some heavy consequences. For one, you will lose your home, which served as collateral, backing the mortgage loan you took out and were unable to repay as promised. “Not only will you lose your place to live, but you’ll also lose the money and effort you put into it,” said Bankrate.

Then there is the effect on your credit. “Like bankruptcy, foreclosure has one of the most serious negative impacts on your credit,” and it will remain on your credit report for seven years, said Experian.

Additionally, “depending on your state’s laws, you may owe money if your home sells at the foreclosure auction for less than you owe,” a gap known as a “deficiency,” said Bankrate. If you are unable to pay any deficiency, “you may be sued, face wage garnishment and more.”

How can you avoid foreclosure?

Thankfully, there are some steps you can take to avoid the nightmare that is foreclosure.

Proactively communicate with your lender. “As soon as you think you’ll have trouble making your monthly payment (or shortly after you fall behind), call your mortgage servicer,” said Nolo. They can walk you through your options before it is too late, whether that is working out a repayment plan or modifying your existing loan.

Get help from a housing counselor. A housing counselor can help you determine what your options are and how to access them. “You can contact a local HUD housing counselor or dial the HOPE hotline at (888) 995-HOPE to connect with a housing expert for 24/7 help,” said Bankrate.

Apply for forbearance. If you fell behind due to a passing financial crisis, a forbearance “offers temporary relief — usually via a payment pause or reduction — to help you get your finances in better shape,” said Yahoo Finance.

Consider a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. “If you can’t catch up on your mortgage payments or don’t qualify for any options to prevent foreclosure, you may want to consider signing a deed instead of foreclosure, where you can hand over the property to the lender voluntarily,” said Rocket Mortgage. This won’t allow you to hold onto your home, but you will “avoid some repercussions of foreclosure.”

As the Trump administration scrambles to control its war with Iran, both countries have turned to an unexpected moderator: Pakistan, which has led multiple rounds of ceasefire negotiations between the two nations. Now, Pakistan is quietly growing its influence in the region while Washington and Tehran circle one another for another round of negotiations.

From ‘kind of a sideshow’ to being in Trump’s ‘favor’

Islamabad’s role as a major player in this conflict, for many observers, has “come as a surprise,” given Pakistan’s “global position, domestic challenges” and “volatile relationship” with the first Trump administration, said the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). But “perhaps it shouldn’t,” the BBC said.

Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir “is in U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor,” with the president asserting that the Pakistani leader knows Iran “better than most.” Pakistan, in its own messaging, has hailed a "brotherly" relationship with neighboring Iran, with the two nations sharing “deep cultural and religious ties,” said the BBC.

Although Pakistan was “kind of a sideshow” during the first Trump administration, it has “really reached out” to both the White House and “Donald Trump personally, as well as his family members, to try to build influence in Washington,” CCGA said. Pakistan’s connections to Saudi Arabia and China have also allowed it to “place itself in a mediator role” with a “greater level of geopolitical clout and influence than we might have expected a couple of years ago.”

Given Pakistan’s reputation for corruption and military authoritarianism, it “would not be an exaggeration” to describe it as a “failed state,” said The Spectator. But simply “being a nuclear power” affords Pakistan a “head start in terms of credibility” by gracing Islamabad with the “nuclear aura that Iran would love to possess.” China, which has played a “background but crucial role” in the peace negotiations, has also had a “longstanding close relationship” with Islamabad, as both nations “enjoy common cause against India.”

Pakistan as a ‘responsible middle power’

“Playing the role of mediator” between the United States and Iran — or “at least message-bearer” — has “been a boon for Islamabad,” Le Monde said. The country has undergone “its authoritarian drift,” in which it “silenced its large Shiite minority during the war and solidarity movements with Iran.”

After having sheltered Osama bin Laden, Pakistan “wants to convince international opinion that it is no longer a breeding ground for terrorism,” said Gilles Boquérat, an associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, to Le Monde. Instead, it is portraying itself as a “responsible middle power, capable of ensuring regional security from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian border.”

But Pakistan’s ties with Iran have earned Islamabad its share of critics during the current war, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.). “I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them,” Graham said during a Senate hearing this week regarding reports that the Pakistani government has aided Iranian forces. “If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate.”

It has generally been the case that younger Americans are more optimistic than their older counterparts about finding jobs. But a recent survey shows that tune has changed in a major way. Perceptions have gotten so bad that the gap between how young Americans and older Americans view the job market is now the widest in the world. There are several reasons why people in their early 20s can’t secure jobs, and AI isn’t the only factor.

What did the commentators say?

In 2025, only “43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job,” said a Gallup survey of 1,000 adults. Compared to the 64% of Americans ages 55 and older who said the same, the 21-point difference is the “largest gap of any country in job market perceptions between younger and older adults.” It’s “rare for younger adults to be significantly less positive about local job conditions than the oldest age group,” especially in developed countries; in “only five other places — China, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Norway — does this pattern hold.”

Many of these younger Americans “have higher education and aren’t yet working full time,” Benedict Vigers, a senior news writer at Gallup, said to Axios. AI definitely plays a part in this less-than-stellar job market, as it is “gutting entry-level roles,” Sam Hiner, the co-founder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, said to the outlet. The “corporate landscape” is also “often heavily reliant on social capital over qualifications,” further contributing to the “pessimism.”

A higher competitive edge among young people is additionally making it harder to secure jobs. “You speak with your peers, and you realize that every single one of us are competing for the same opportunities,” Amelia Sexton, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said to Axios. Gender may weigh in as well, as the “American labor market is tilting away from men,” said The Wall Street Journal. In the past year, nearly all job growth “has come from healthcare and social assistance, a sector with a dearth of men,” and “sectors with heavily male workforces have been losing jobs.”

What next?

It is clear from the data that there is a “generational rift in Americans’ views of economic opportunity,” said The Associated Press. With the midterm elections on the horizon, the split among young and old is “likely to continue fueling generational divides in politics, where younger voters have focused on economic issues such as housing costs and have registered less faith in institutions.”

The greater optimism among older generations also comes from people who “aren’t actually job hunting — they’re retired or already employed, so they judge the market abstractly without personal stakes,” said Entrepreneur magazine. Older Americans are “far more likely to own homes and have savings, insulating them from the housing and cost-of-living shocks driving young workers’ pessimism.”

The negativity felt by young job-seekers is an “incredibly new phenomenon,” Vigers said to the AP. Gallup’s 2025 poll was the first time the organization found younger Americans to be more pessimistic than people in other countries about job prospects, and that trend looks primed to continue. “Has this happened in most other advanced economies? The answer is a resounding no.”

Avoiding crowds while still experiencing the best of a culturally dynamic city is a win-win. At these seven spots, you will have more elbow room to see the sights and more chances to connect with locals and dive into their way of life.

Bisbee, Arizona

This former mining town changed its fortune, reinventing itself to become an artists’ haven. During the early 1900s, when copper, gold, zinc and silver production was booming, Bisbee prospered. By the 1970s, the mines dried up and shuttered.

Artists soon started to arrive and turned Bisbee into a creative community. Its downtown looks “straight out of a storybook,” and is a “wonderfully walkable” area, said Travel and Leisure. There are “alfresco art galleries” throughout Bisbee, and the sounds of “near-constant live music” fill the air.

Chachapoyas, Peru

In the mountains of northern Peru sits Chachapoyas, a city named in honor of the civilization that lived here from 800 BCE to 1470. The Chachapoyas, or “Warriors of the Clouds,” built several important sites in the area, including Kuélap.

This ancient fortress, built around 500 AD, comprises “towering defensive walls, over 420 circular dwellings and panoramic views,” said Time Out. A cable car sweeps visitors to Kuélap in about 20 minutes. After exploring the ruins, head back to Chachapoyas for a relaxing stroll through the historic city center, dating back to the 1500s.

Hue, Vietnam

Ornate palaces, pavilions, statues and royal tombs are waiting to be explored in Hue. This is where Vietnam’s last imperial dynasty lived in “extravagant regal splendor” and built a “citadel, gilded in bronze, enamel and lacquer,” said The Times of London.

Visitors can also receive the royal treatment once it’s dinner time. Restaurants in Hue serve the “1,000-plus dishes of the imperial household,” like banh beo (steamed rice cakes), com hen (clam rice), bun bo Hue (spicy beef noodle soup) and nem lui (lemongrass pork skewers).

Matera, Italy

Known as the City of Stone, Matera offers visitors a glimpse of what life was like in this region 10,000 years ago. Sassi di Matera, a network of cave dwellings carved into limestone, is its centerpiece.

The extraordinary settlement is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and features more than 100 rupestrian churches. The Crypt of Original Sin underwent “painstaking” restoration work and is “sure to take your breath away,” said National Geographic Traveler. Considered the “Sistine Chapel of cave art,” its frescoes are the “best in the region.” Artifacts dating to the Paleolithic era fill the Domenico Ridola Archeological Museum, while the Museum-Workshop of the Peasant Culture reconstructs a cave house, public wine cellar, and blacksmith, cobbler and cabinetmaker studios.

Meknes, Morocco

For a “relaxed slice of authentic Moroccan life,” head to Meknes, said Lonely Planet. It may be calmer here, but there’s plenty to do, starting with a trek to the “buzzy” Place El Hedim to see the Bab Mansour gate and wander the Dar Jamai Museum housed in a 19th century palace.

The Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail, Morocco’s longest-ruling sultan, is a “dazzling” display of mosaic tiles and “ornate” cedarwood, and though non-Muslims can’t enter the tomb, they can “peer through the doorway” and observe two clocks given to the sultan by King Louis XIV. Inside the medina are several souks dedicated to specific wares, like leather goods, carpets and spices.

Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka

More than 800 years ago, when Polonnaruwa was Sri Lanka’s capital, it was a “thriving” religious and commercial center, said Lonely Planet. After a series of invasions and natural disasters, the capital was abandoned, but the “glories of that age” remain.

Polonnaruwa’s archeological “treasures” include hundreds of temples, statues, tombs and stupas in a “compact core.” The sacred Quadrangle, home to many important Buddhist structures, is alone “worth the trip” to Polonnaruwa.

Wroclaw, Poland

The historic city of Wroclaw, spread across 12 islands connected by over 100 bridges, shows off its “cultural credentials” through beautiful design and ample opportunities to attend live performances, said The Times of London. “Gorgeous” Market Square offers examples of colorful gothic, baroque, art nouveau and contemporary architecture, and sharp-eyed visitors will have fun spotting hundreds of small bronze gnomes scattered around the city. Music lovers will appreciate spending an evening at the National Forum of Music, with its renowned acoustics, or attending free, open-air JazzOVO concerts in the courtyard of OVO Wroclaw during summer Fridays.

‘11 hantavirus deaths in Argentina were a warning’

Abraar Karan at The Washington Post

The “recent Andes hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has seized international attention after three passengers died” and the incident is a “warning sign of where the world’s pandemic prevention system still has weaknesses,” says Abraar Karan. While “there is no way to avoid outbreaks, proactive approaches could reduce risk.” More “detailed predeparture screening could help shipboard doctors diagnose sick patients better,” although “this approach is only as foolproof as the people who are reporting their exposures.”

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‘The crisis in Sudan is much worse than what is acknowledged’

Zia Salik at Al Jazeera

In the “streets of Sudan’s capital, the destruction was apocalyptic,” says Zia Salik. The “difficulty in accessing many areas, and the sense that this is a complicated war in a faraway place, means the crisis has not received anywhere near the international attention it needs.” For “many people, the greatest fear now is that the unending war in the west of the country will result in Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, splitting in two.”

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‘What leaders get wrong about the ROI of AI’

Katy George at Time

“If you ask most executives about AI right now, the conversation quickly turns to one question: where is the return?” says Katy George. That is “not because AI isn’t delivering value. It’s because many organizations are still looking for value in the wrong places.” AI’s impact “shows up in greater insight, more predictive power, in-task skill building and the ability to evaluate more scenarios before acting.” But “those gains don’t fit neatly into traditional metrics.”

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‘States need to come clean on SNAP fraud’

Gov. Larry Rhoden at Newsweek

One “practical example of a resource that should be managed with care is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” says Gov. Larry Rhoden (R-S.D.). Americans “should take great pride that such a program exists, but that should inspire diligence in its oversight.” States with “higher error rates — in the double digits in many cases — warrant attention and accountability to ensure program integrity is upheld nationwide.” The “solution starts with bringing greater transparency to the issue.”

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From Meghan Trainor and Zayn to the Pussycat Dolls, artists are canceling their concert tours because of unsold tickets. This so-called blue dot fever — taking its name from the blue dots that represent available seats in a performance venue’s seating chart — reflects a lack of affordability and the reduced power of nostalgia.

Why are seats not selling?

There are “signs that consumer tolerance for high prices is breaking and a correction is taking place,” said The Times. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the average ticket price “increased from $96.17 in 2019 to $106.07 in 2022, marking the first time it had crossed the $100 threshold,” said Pollstar. The price of concert tickets peaked in 2024 at $135.92. In 2025, the price “dropped 2.4% to $132.62, but it’s still more than either 2022 or 2023.”

Directly after the pandemic, there was “such pent-up demand that it was really easy to tour and everybody was making a lot of money,” said J.R. Lind, a senior writer at Pollstar, to The Times. Now, there’s a “little bit of coming back to earth.” With “inflation and rising fuel costs,” affordability is “going to start affecting concerts.”

“Sky-high ticket prices” are happening because of “three key factors,” said Rolling Stone. “Supply and demand, as reflected in the controversial practice of dynamic pricing, rampant scalping, and one dominant company, Live Nation, controlling every source of revenue, including beer, food, parking and Ticketmaster service fees.”

In addition, touring costs have become high. The national average for regular gas is at $4.56 a gallon, with California at $6.17. Diesel fuel averages $7.49 a gallon in California, which is “critical for the trucks that move staging, lighting and equipment between cities,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “Those costs can quickly change the math for tours that depend on long-haul logistics.”

Are there cultural implications?

Along with the ticket prices, the cultural capital for many artists is dwindling. Artists are “getting booked into rooms too big for where they sit today,” Nathan Green, the CEO and co-founder of New Level Radio, said to Newsweek. Older artists banking on nostalgia are struggling most: Zayn, formerly a member of boy band One Direction, and the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group that was big in the early aughts, both recently canceled their U.S. tours.

In 2024, the “British band Oasis sold out its first North American tour since 2008 within an hour,” and “Coldplay, Hilary Duff and My Chemical Romance are among artists who have seen huge demand for live concerts despite the height of their popularity being two decades ago,” said Newsweek. Still, banking on old glory no longer works for everyone.

“Blue dot fever” disproportionately affects smaller or older artists. “Mega-stars and must-see tours continue to sell, while some arena and stadium runs find that streaming popularity, nostalgia or social media buzz does not always translate into thousands of $100-plus seats,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

The problem could be helped by downsizing. “If the business goes back to booking artists into rooms they can fill, even if it means smaller venues and more nights, the show looks like a show again,” said Green. “The empty seats are a sign to every fan that the hype was bigger than the act.”

What happened

Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported Monday in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking. They were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what

The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting, photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “People were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” researcher Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author, told NPR. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?

The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” study senior author Feifei Bu told The Guardian. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

What happened

Consumer prices last month shot up 3.8% from a year earlier, the biggest year-over-year uptick since May 2023, the U.S. Labor Department reported Tuesday. The heated inflation was driven largely by a 28% year-over-year jump in gasoline prices tied to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran.

Who said what

The latest consumer price index underscored how “daily life in America is getting more expensive,” The New York Times said. Airfares were up 21% from a year ago and food prices rose 3.2%, with coffee prices jumping 19% and tomatoes up 40%. Trump’s tariffs are “still slowly filtering through to some goods,” The Wall Street Journal said, but the war “has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.”

Asked Tuesday if cost-of-living concerns were motivating his dealmaking with Iran, Trump said “not even a little bit.” His only concern is Iran’s nuclear program, he said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

What next?

In a separate report Tuesday, the Labor Department said real average hourly wages fell 0.5% from March to April, meaning “most workers are effectively taking a pay cut even as the White House touts its economic record,” The Washington Post said.

What happened

Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Marty Makary resigned Tuesday after a tumultuous 13 months leading the agency charged with regulating drugs, medical devices, vaccines and much of the U.S. food supply. The White House and Health and Human Services Department “agreed in recent days on the need to replace” him, The Washington Post said. “Marty is a great guy,” President Donald Trump, who posted Makary’s resignation message on social media, told reporters. But “he was having some difficulty.”

Who said what

“In the end,” Makary “had just about run out of allies,” having upset “rare-disease patients, antiabortion groups and some drug-industry leaders,” The Wall Street Journal said. Makary also “drew criticism from public health leaders who viewed him as pandering to anti-vaccine activists,” The New York Times said. But according to his confidantes, he “ultimately left over concerns about the administration’s decision to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes,” a move Trump insisted on but Makary opposed “over concerns that fruity and candy flavors would lure young people to addictive vapes.”

Makary had some “strong ideas” about streamlining the drug review process, Matthew Herper said at Stat News, but he was the FDA’s “worst commissioner” in at least 25 years. He “offended almost everyone involved in FDA issues, which is not easy to do,” National Center for Health Research president Diana Zuckerman told the Times. “But it would still be a disaster if he is replaced by someone who appeals primarily to tobacco companies, anti-abortion activists” and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

What next?

Trump appointed Kyle Diamantas, the FDA’s top food regulator, as acting commissioner.

This week’s question: Wannabe tough guys in Russia are paying plastic surgeons to give them the “cauliflower ears” usually seen on boxers and MMA fighters. If a cosmetic surgeon were to open a clinic in the U.S. where non-pugilist patients can receive such heavyweight scars, what should the business 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 “MMA makeover” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, May 19. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the May 29 issue and at theweek.com/contest by May 22. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

Click or tap here to see the winner of last week's contest: Haunted plumber

Andy Burnham might be the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader, despite his lack of a Westminster seat, but he certainly isn’t the bond market’s favourite.

In fact, gilt traders see the Greater Manchester mayor as the “biggest threat” of all the potential candidates, said the Financial Times. He troubled investors last year when he suggested the country should not be “in hock” to the bond market. Six out of 10 fund managers picked Burnham as the candidate that would “trigger the most negative market reaction”.

Burnham has said his comments on the bond market were misinterpreted, but the political project he espouses and the vision he offers for the country’s future – Manchesterism – remains highly divisive. Critics see it as “mostly vibes and boosterism” that “relies on a bottom-up localism” difficult to scale at a national level, said PoliticsHome. Others see it as our potential economic and political saviour.

What did the commentators say?

Manchesterism is a “horrifically overused phrase” about how my city “does things differently”, said Stephen Topping in the Manchester Evening News. But it’s true. Manchesterism is “‘place-based’ rather than party political”. It involves “public services working closer together, and in partnership with both the private sector and community groups, to ensure the benefits of a stronger economy can be felt by more people”.

The Greater Manchester region has become the UK’s fastest growing economy over the past decade, “at more than double the rate of the national average”. Devolution has been critical: the “trailblazer” deal struck in 2023 has allowed Greater Manchester to “take public control of key services” such as the bus network, which has improved living standards and boosted the local economy. Those who have worked closely with Burnham believe Manchesterism “could work in other parts of the UK”, though it would pose “a radical departure from the UK’s largely centralised economy”.

Burnham’s programme has begun “delivering affordability and economic dynamism” by “regaining public control” of essential services, said Mathew Lawrence, director of progressive think tank Common Wealth, in The New Statesman.

Energy, water, housing, transport and care are “domains of inelastic demand” and “existential need”. So market governance of the supply side “produces rent extraction” and underinvestment. The public “pays twice: through higher bills” and taxes to fund support. But public control of essentials eliminates the privatisation premium. “Rebuilding public provision is not the alternative to fiscal prudence. It is fiscal prudence.”

Manchesterism might be the “buzzword of the day”, but it’s simply people projecting their “pipe dreams” on to Burnham’s “blank canvas of soft-left localism”, said Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph.

“The irony is that 19th-century Manchesterism was more or less the opposite of what the Labour Party now thinks it means.” Manchester was “both the laboratory and the showcase of the Industrial Revolution”, the “citadel of free trade”. It had nothing to do with Burnham’s “municipal socialism”. His proposed solution to Britain’s economic woes is “a muddled melange of municipal meddling, including tax hikes and more borrowing”. What Britain needs is the 19th-century version, which Burnham doesn’t understand.

The vision of Manchesterism Burnham outlined in January is, in practice, an industrial strategy – and there is “nothing new about those”, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic. Economists have long criticised them for “misallocating resources, crowding out private investment, picking losers, and forcing taxpayers to bail out industries that are only kept on life support for political reasons”. How, exactly, can Manchesterism “stop us being in hock to the bond markets” when Manchester City Council is “one of the most indebted in the country”.

What next?

Burnham is planning to reassure the bond market that his possible election to Labour leader would “not trigger a financial meltdown”, said The Telegraph. Sources say he is planning to endorse a pamphlet outlining a framework for Manchesterism, setting out how it could be rolled out across the UK and “the wider economic theory behind his ideas”.

But the uncertain national landscape, in which voters are moving both further left and further right, could make the success of Manchesterism “a challenge for anybody”, Sarah Longlands, chief executive of the Manchester-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies, told Manchester Evening News.

Manchesterism is still in its early stages, yet for all the benefits devolution has brought, Greater Manchester is still “a tale of two cities”, with a great income and opportunities divide exacerbated by the cost of living crisis. “Growth in Greater Manchester has to be for everybody – otherwise, what’s the point?” Longlands said.

Older people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to scams, and the latest target appears to be inheritance tax.

From April 2027, pensions are to be used in inheritance calculations, but criminals are attempting to “exploit people’s concerns” by inventing fake scams claiming a person’s retirement savings can be invested abroad instead, said The Guardian.

The impact of scams is “often emotional as well as financial”, said Age UK. In terms of the financial cost, research by VirginMedia 02 found that over-65s falling victim to such fraud lose £831 on average.

Scammers are often “emotionally manipulating” their victims, said StopThinkFraud, before they steal money or personal data. But you can protect yourself or encourage your family members to be careful by “staying vigilant and always taking a moment to stop, think and check” the source of the information.

‘Grandparent’ scams

One of the “most common scams”, said The Mirror, is where criminals pose as a grandchild or close relative. In instances like these, the scammer claims to have a new number and says they are in trouble, all in the “hope of being sent money”.

A major red flag is that scammers often request to be paid “through gift cards or wire transfers” so victims “have no way to ever recover their money”, said the National Council on Aging. This scam is seen as particularly effective “because it exploits people’s emotions”.

Authorised push payment fraud

Victims can “lose their life savings in a matter of seconds” from authorised push payment (APP) fraud, said Age UK.

This involves scammers pretending to be the police, a government department or your bank and “tricking people into transferring money” to an account under their control.

This type of scam is “more attractive” to criminals because they can “quickly take the money and run”, said FICO.

Romance scams

Romance scams involve fraudsters setting up a fake profile to steal money. Scammers lure in their victims with the promise of a genuine relationship, gaining trust before requesting funds.

Victims aged between 75 and 84 lost £9,054 on average in 2024 from romance scams, said Lloyds Bank, 52% more than all other age groups.

Scammers often target older people, said the Daily Express, who are seen as “less tech savvy and more likely to be keen to forge a new relationship”.

Modelling scams

A “new twist on a well-known scam”, said the BBC, is fake modelling agencies aimed at older people who may be searching for opportunities in retirement, or to branch out with a side hustle.

These “phoney modelling agencies” have been taking cash from “desperate” young people for years, and scammers have “found a new target” – older people.

AI scams

National Trading Standards has warned of a “new and advanced” phone scam that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to clone voices, said Which?.

It appears to be targeting older people, using the “ruse of a ‘lifestyle survey’ cold call”. The survey responses given are used to create “AI-generated voice clones” to then start direct debits “without your knowledge”.

How to protect yourself from scams

Scams can often be “sophisticated” and therefore “difficult to spot”, said the Financial Conduct Authority. But there are “warning signs” to look out for.

You can protect yourself by “treating all unexpected calls, emails and text messages with caution”, and check the FCA register online to see if a firm asking about financial products is regulated.

If you think you have been scammed, “act quickly to help limit the damage”, said MoneyHelper. Contact your bank or card provider “immediately” using their official phone number, and stop any further payments “straight away”.

Those who are targeted can also highlight the matter to Report Fraud.

GPS jamming across the Middle East has exploded since the US and Israel began their war against Iran in February, “plunging both sides into an ‘electronic warfare arms race’”, said The Independent.

“Underlying the dramatic clashes across the region”, forces on all sides are “quietly fighting an invisible war by land, air and sea, distorting tracking information to sow chaos or hide in plain sight”.

‘Electronic warfare arms race’

Jamming of the Global Positioning System (GPS) works by disrupting signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) with electromagnetic noise. “Spoofing” is more sophisticated and involves transmitting fake signals to provide a false location. Both are used to distort drone and missile guidance systems.

Interference “isn’t a new phenomenon”, said CNN. It has been used in modern warfare since the Second World War but has become “a major issue” for shipping and aircraft since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The problem is now “endemic” in regions such as the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and parts of the Middle East, said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, from shipping intelligence firm Windward.

While all sides engage in it, Iran is particularly “prolific” in spoofing. Tehran uses it to “add confusion and disrupt any of the allied intelligence gathering”, said Philip Ingram, an intelligence expert and former British Army colonel.

The tools used by Iran are likely to be domestically produced or made with equipment sourced from Russia or China, Thomas Withington, from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC.

Tracking ‘has stopped telling the truth’

The problem with GPS jamming is that it cannot be contained within precise geographic boundaries and does not discriminate between military and commercial systems.

On the first day of the war alone, electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters, according to a Windward report cited by Inside GNSS.

“The missiles and drones make for good headlines, but they’re a distraction,” said Erik Bethel, from investment firm Mare Liberum, and Windward CEO Ami Daniel in Fortune. The “real story” is that the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes, has “gone dark. Not in some poetic sense, but literally.”

In effect, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) – the network that’s supposed to be the “gold standard” for commercial tracking and is used by ships to avoid one another – “has stopped telling the truth”.

The same thing happened in the region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran and has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But “this is next-level”, said Bockmann. “We can’t over-estimate the huge danger this places to maritime navigation and safety.”

“Without reliable and accurate” navigation systems, ships are “effectively sailing blind”, said The Wall Street Journal.

‘Anti-jam antenna system’

There are various technologies that offer protection against GPS jamming. These can include “automatically detecting jamming or interference and switching to unaffected frequencies”, said the BBC.

UK defence giant Raytheon produces an “anti-jam antenna system” device the size of an ice hockey puck that can be installed on different kinds of vehicles and uses multiple channels to overcome jamming. Other companies have “developed navigation tools that work around GPS’s flaws”.

Alternative navigational tools that do not rely on GPS at all but instead harness quantum technology are also in development “but remain a long way off operational use”, said CNN.

“GNSS is a wonder of the modern world,” said Ramsey Faragher, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Navigation in London. “You can switch it on and within a few seconds, it works out where you are to within a metre and what time it is to within a nanosecond. Unfortunately, the luxurious era of those signals not being messed about with intentionally is over. We need to rapidly catch up.”

If you thought the new series of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster would be “dialling down the raunch, think again”, said Carol Midgley in The Times.

“Buckle up again for a brazen OTT romp through the 1980s posho set of Rutshire, where everyone seems to be rutting everyone else’s spouse before readjusting their bouffant hairdo and having another glass of champagne.”

Corinium boss Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) was “whacked over the head with a gold statuette” at the end of last season, but he’s back to plan “messy revenge” on his former lover Cameron (Nafessa Williams) and his nemesis, Conservative MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). On the surface, the “daft plot” revolves around a “TV franchise war”. Really, though, “Rivals” is about “love and power”. This is a show with “huge heart” that, “despite its deliberate corniness”, is “gloriously uplifting television”.

Series two also sees the “shaggers” preparing for the 1987 general election, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. Can Rupert keep his seat or will the “monstrous tabloid hack” Beattie team up with Lord Tony to “stitch him up like a kipper”? And who will win the battle for the “coveted” Central South West television franchise?

The acting is “superb” – everyone seems to be having the “time of their life” – and the dialogue is “fabulous”, peppered with “twinkling” jokes. “How best to reward such exquisitely knowing escapism? Ten stars? Ten thousand stars? ‘Rivals’ is beyond earthly praise.”

Little change has been made to the “basic formula”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. The “set-piece capers are as lively as ever” and there is even space for “tenderness” in the “simmering” relationship between romance novelist Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) and Freddie (Danny Dyer). But this series feels “a bit more serious”, and some of the storylines about the TV industry “drag a little”. The show is at its best when it “embraces its silly side, and accepts its lot as a jolly old romp”.

I found it enormous “fun”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. “Well written” and “well acted”, with “bucolic horniness” in spades, it’s a “rare treat in today’s television landscape”.

Marine cloud brightening (MCB) is a form of geoengineering in which salt water is fired into the clouds in order to increase their brightness and reflectivity. The method shows promise in helping to curb warming temperatures due to climate change, however there may be unforeseen ecological consequences.

Cloud cover

Injecting sea salt aerosol into the clouds can restrict the “future global-mean surface air temperature and precipitation change,” said a study published in Communications Earth & Environment. In a computer simulation, the scientists salted “four cloudy regions in the eastern Pacific Ocean every year from 2020 to 2100” and found that the injection “compensates well for the global warming induced by anthropogenic aerosol reductions over both land and ocean.” Scientists, in a separate research project in the U.K., are testing the geoengineering process in a three-story “cloud chamber,” with the potential for a real world test in 2028.

MCB enhances the “natural process of cloud formation” similar to the “natural effects of sea spray on cloud properties over the ocean,” said a release about the U.K. project. The sea salt aerosol particles “act as sites for the formation of cloud droplets when the air becomes humid enough, the more particles present, the more cloud droplets form and the more reflective clouds become.” The sea salt then “scatters more sunlight back to space and prevents some solar radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface in that area.” With less light reaching the planet, the temperatures cool.

The process is not perfect. In the simulation, MCB was found to “not fully mitigate the warming in some regions, including Europe, the U.S., northeastern China, central and eastern Siberia and the Arctic,” while it did help in other regions, said the study. This discrepancy is likely because the sea salt injections “would indirectly cause the ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation to speed up,” said Anthropocene magazine.

MCB also affected rainfall. Though the total amount of rain globally remained the same as in 2020 when the simulation began, the distribution varied. The U.S. “would become hotter and drier by the end of the century, while India, Australia, the Amazon and the semi-arid Sahel region of Africa would be cooler and wetter than they are now.”

Silver lining

Real world testing of MCB is still needed despite the study’s findings. “One model cannot settle whether marine cloud brightening could work safely in the real atmosphere over decades,” said Earth.com. Cloud behavior remains difficult to simulate because “droplets, particles, winds and ocean currents interact at many scales.” There is “very limited understanding of whether such approaches are scientifically sound, so it is essential that we understand whether spraying sea water can be performed effectively and what the effects might be,” Hugh Coe, a professor of atmospheric composition at The University of Manchester and the lead of the U.K. project, said in the release.

The focus of the “cloud lab” tests is “to find the ideal ‘Goldilocks’ size for the salt particles, said The Times. “Too large, and they risk soaking up all the moisture before smaller droplets can form. Too small, and they won’t ‘activate’ properly, meaning the cloud won’t brighten enough.” If the tests are successful, MCB could be tested in the real atmosphere as soon as two years from now. Geoengineering is a controversial measure that is “opposed by environmentalists who fear it is an excuse for not cutting the carbon emissions driving climate change,” said The Times. Other experts argue that reducing emissions is not enough.

“Decarbonization is the only sustainable route out of the climate crisis,” Mark Symes, the program director of the U.K.’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which is funding the project, said to The Independent. “However, decarbonization is not happening quickly enough to protect many parts of the world from the worst effects of global heating.”

Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

What happened

European Union foreign ministers Monday agreed to impose sanctions on Israeli settlers over increasing violence against West Bank Palestinians. The sanctions will hit unidentified “Israeli extremist settlers and entities” and “leading Hamas figures,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said.

The proposal, which required unanimous support from the 27 EU nations, was finally adopted after Hungary’s new government lifted former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s veto.

Who said what

“It was high ​time we move from deadlock to delivery,” Kallas said on social media. “Extremisms and ​violence carry consequences.” Israel and Hamas both criticized the sanctions, which were drafted last year amid “rising violence and expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank,” The Washington Post said.

The financial penalties “could have massive implications” for the targeted Israeli organizations — reportedly Regavim, HaShomer Yosh, Amana and Nachala — and their work expanding “settlements and illegal outposts,” The Times of Israel said. But the penalties are “focused more against individuals and groups pushing for the de facto Israeli annexation of the West Bank” than “those involved in violent assaults on Palestinians.”

What next?

The sanctions will take effect “once legal and technical work is complete,” the Post said.

What happened

A Washington, D.C., nonprofit Monday asked a federal court to pause President Donald Trump’s push to paint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue,” arguing the makeover violates federal historical preservation laws.

Trump last month said he’d chosen a “pool guy” who worked on his golf club swimming pools to coat and paint the leaking landmark, predicting it would cost $1.8 million. The Interior Department last week raised the price of the contractor’s no-bid contract to $13.1 million, The New York Times reported Monday.

Who said what

Monday’s filing by the Cultural Landscape Foundation said the project was “part of a pattern” in which Trump rushes to transform historic public sites without seeking required approval. The Reflecting Pool’s neutral colors are a “fundamental” part of the “design intent” to “create a reflective surface” between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the foundation president Charles Birnbaum said in a statement. “A blue-tinted basin is more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”

What next?

Workers Monday “began preliminary surveys and testing” of the proposed site of Trump’s massive Triumphal Arch, The Associated Press said. Like many of Trump’s “contentious” projects to “leave his lasting imprint on Washington,” the arch is being challenged in court.

What happened

President Donald Trump Monday said Iran’s response to the latest U.S. proposal for ending the war was a “piece of garbage” and the “ceasefire is on massive life support.” As the breakdown in negotiations sent oil prices higher, Trump proposed suspending the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax to ameliorate the $1.50-a-gallon jump in gas prices since the war began.

Who said what

“We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time,” until “gas goes down,” Trump told CBS News. Pausing the tax would require approval from Congress, where there is some bipartisan support. But key lawmakers oppose the idea because it would increase the deficit by billions of dollars — or deplete the Highway Trust Fund — and others “mocked the idea as too little, too late,” The New York Times said.

Tehran’s rejected counterproposal sought U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, war reparations and the lifting of international sanctions, according to Iranian state TV. With the two sides so far apart, “world leaders are confronting the prospect of a long-term energy crisis, with potentially grave economic consequences,” the Times said.

What next?

During his trip to China this week, Trump is “expected to push Beijing to help find an offramp to the stalled diplomatic talks,” The Wall Street Journal said. China “has leverage over Tehran but there could be costs attached to any help from Beijing.”

El Niños arrive every few years, inflicting drought, flooding and other climate destruction across the globe. Climate scientists are predicting “potentially the biggest El Niño event since the 1870s” in the coming months, said State University of New York at Albany’s Paul Roundy, per The Washington Post. Rising temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean waters could “shift patterns of droughts, floods, heat, humidity and sea ice across the planet,” said the outlet, as well as create a “higher frequency of heat waves” across much of the United States. Such dramatic shifts could have a “profound impact on human society and human well-being,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to the Post.

El Niños are natural phenomena, but could prove combustible when combined with global warming. The coming El Niño might “lock Earth into a hotter climate” with “lasting changes in heat, rainfall and drought patterns” around the world, said Inside Climate News. Researchers believe the newest cycle “could permanently push” the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming milestone long seen as the threshold for “potentially irreversible climate impacts” likely to affect food production, human health and the global economy.

What did the commentators say?

The world is about to learn “how much climate disruption we can manage at the moment,” David Wallace-Wells said at The New York Times. The biggest recorded El Niño in 1877 produced famine that killed millions of people in Egypt, India and China and elsewhere, often followed by epidemics of “malaria, plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera” that further harmed “famine-weakened populations.” The next El Niño may not “produce nearly as much human suffering as the one of 150 years ago.” But it is “almost certain” to make 2027 the “hottest year on record by some margin.”

“Prepare for bedlam,” Bill McKibben said on The Crucial Years Substack. “We get lots more” fires and floods “when the temperature tilts sharply up” as happens during an El Niño. The coming cycle may offer “final proof that global warming is actually accelerating sickeningly,” coming atop a “higher baseline temperature” produced by the “steady warming of the planet.” The likely weather disasters could set in motion the “next, pivotal chapter of the climate fight.” The ugly truth: “We are ever further into the great overheating.”

What next?

“A lot has changed” since the 1877 El Niño, said The Washington Post. Advances in climate monitoring make the world “much more prepared to deal with the consequences” of massive weather shifts.

It will still be a challenge. “Hotter, drier weather across Asia” could damage crops while farmers on the continent “grapple with fertilizer shortages” caused by the Iran war, said Reuters. El Niño could also “dump more rain ​on Europe and the United States,” affecting U.S. corn and soybean harvests. The uncertainty may prompt farmers to hedge their planting plans. “Why spread expensive fertilizer on a crop that is going to be poor anyway?” said Vitor Pistóia at Australia’s Rabobank to the outlet.

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They always share their delicious homemade breads and baked goods with you, and now it’s time to return the favor. These 11 handy gadgets, tasty ingredients and practical tools will soon be your favorite bakers’ newest kitchen indispensables.

Burlap & Barrel Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice gift bundle

Everything they need for a sweet treat or comforting warm beverage is in this collection. The star is Royal Cinnamon, Burlap & Barrel’s signature spice known for its intense flavor. Bottles of coconut sugar, cinnamon sugar crunch, panela cane sugar, chai base and Nyanza vanilla extract round out the set. ($86, Burlap & Barrel)

Challenger Breadware bread pan

The cast iron Challenger bread pan is beloved for a reason — it makes “incredible” loaves, said Food & Wine. One secret to its success is the “air-tight” lid, which mimics a steam oven and “creates an ideal baking environment.” The preseasoned pan was also designed with easy-to-grip handles for safer transfers into and out of the oven. ($299, Amazon)

Emile Henry French ceramic artisan cherry embossed ruffled pie dish

Raise their pie game with Emile Henry’s elegant ruffled pie dish. It’s made in France from durable Burgundian clay, which slowly and uniformly distributes heat. Pies come out of the oven properly cooked and ready to devour — after they cool, of course. ($70, Williams Sonoma)

Esembly Bowl Caps

These waterproof and machine-washable bowl caps keep dough safe and ingredients fresh. Each set comes with four stretchy caps, and you choose from a variety of patterns, including a colorful poppy print and sweet strawberry motif. Add the Sourdough Set for a starter cap, proofing cover and dual-layered bread bag. (Bowl Caps, $18, Esembly; Sourdough Set, $26, Esembly)

Goldie by Sourhouse sourdough starter warmer

Sourdough starter is at its healthiest and most active when kept between 75 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Goldie by Sourhouse ensures the starter stays in the “Goldilocks Zone.” This “sleek” countertop device lets you know when starter is too cold, too hot or just right, and turns a “scientific aspect of sourdough uncomplicated,” said The Kitchn. The Goldie also comes with a cooling puck to drop the starter’s temperature should it get too high. ($150, Sourhouse)

House of Noa Nama standing mat

Spending hours in the kitchen can be brutal on the knees and feet. The Nama standing mat, made of high density, ergonomic foam, offers relief. It is “supportive” and “hugs” feet, said The Strategist. Choose from a variety of patterns and sizes, starting at 22x36 inches. (starting at $59, House of Noa)

Le Creuset Vancouver pinch bowls

Le Creuset is known for its colorful glazed stoneware, and this collection of six bowls features a rainbow of hues. Use each one to measure and hold ingredients like salt, spices and herbs (up to two ounces), turning a “process as mundane as mise en place into something worthy of a photo shoot,” said The Strategist. The bowls can pull double duty and be used to serve dressings, sauces and dips as well. ($30, Amazon)

Mosser glass cake pedestal

Their cake stunners deserve to be displayed on an equally impressive stand. Mosser’s lovely vintage-inspired glass pedestal comes in three colors — jadeite, light pink and white — and is a statement on its own or when part of a dessert station. (starting at $50, The Vermont Country Store)

Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract set

The three pure vanilla extracts in this collection — Mexican, Tahitian and Madagascar Bourbon — are tasty additions to baked goods, or drizzled lightly on ice cream. The Mexican vanilla has a “deep, earthy flavor,” while the Tahitian boasts a more “floral, aromatic quality,” said Serious Eats. Madagascar Bourbon is creamier, with a rich finish. ($53, Williams Sonoma)

Oxo stainless steel food scale

Whether you’re making bread, cookies or a cake, using a food scale is the “key to baking precision,” said Food & Wine. Measuring by weight is “superior” to measuring by volume, and Oxo’s stainless steel scale offers “accurate” numbers and features an “easy-to-read digital display.” ($65, Amazon)

Paper Farm Press Blueberry Field tin recipe box

Important recipes need a safe storage space, and this tin box is primed for maximum kitchen security. It can hold 250 4x6 inch recipe cards, so there’s room for both new recipes and trusted family favorites. It begs to be showed-off — the tin is covered in a cute blueberry print with gold accents and comes with a starter set of 15 matching recipe cards and coordinating recipe divider tabs. ($36, Paper Farm Press)

‘America’s AI is futuristic. China is just making it work.’

Jacob Dreyer at The New York Times

“Many American leaders believe the United States cannot overcome its adversary China unless it beats the country in the AI race,” says Jacob Dreyer. But the “two countries conceptualize AI very differently. Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known,” while China aims to advance a “government-directed strategy” that “treats AI as if it were infrastructure. This includes government-coordinated plans, local subsidies and national computing-power programs to diffuse cheap, capable AI tools into every public service.”

Read more

‘Spencer Pratt and the temptations of populism’

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic

Spencer Pratt, the former reality star candidate for Los Angeles mayor, is a “registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and he has zero experience in government,” says Conor Friedersdorf. “Yet last week he was one of just three candidates to qualify for a televised debate,” which “could hardly have gone better for him.” While current Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman highlighted “each other’s failures to remedy the city’s problems,” Pratt was the “only option onstage for voters seeking change.”

Read more

‘Hantavirus anxiety reveals America never left Covid crisis mode’

Holland Haynie at Newsweek

A “virus outbreak on a cruise ship should not instantly make Americans wonder whether ordinary life is about to unravel again,” says Holland Haynie. However, “social media quickly filled with quarantine imagery, speculation and emotional rehearsal of another global disruption.” Human beings are “remarkably good at adapting to prolonged uncertainty,” but “adaptation has consequences.” Covid “did not simply disrupt American life temporarily. It changed many Americans psychologically in ways we still do not fully acknowledge.”

Read more

‘Trump, Republicans know how they’re hurting LGBTQ+ kids’

Sara Pequeño at USA Today

“The kids aren’t all right,” and the “political landscape created” by Trump is “at least partly to blame,” says Sara Pequeño. According to a 2025 survey from The Trevor Project, “10% of LGBTQ+ youth attempted suicide in the past year, and 36% considered it.” And “90% said recent laws and debates over their existence have caused them stress or anxiety.” The “more you decry something as wrong or evil, the more young people will internalize that to mean that they are wrong or evil.”

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With the Supreme Court set to rule on President Donald Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship, an oft-cited practice is at the center of it all. The practice, called birth tourism, has become commonplace for women who want their kids to have U.S. citizenship. But the Supreme Court may further support the Trump administration’s anti-immigration stance by cracking down on it.

‘Side issue into a main argument’

Birth tourism occurs when pregnant women from other nations “travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth, thereby obtaining citizenship for their babies,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. The practice is regularly mentioned by legal scholars, yet birth tourism is “actually rare, despite the outsized role it’s gained in the debate over citizenship.” There are about 26,000 cases of birth tourism in the U.S. annually, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

While this is just a small fraction of the 3.5 million yearly U.S. births, the White House has “elevated what was once a side issue into a main argument for revocation,” said the Inquirer. It is part of Trump’s “aggressive immigration agenda that includes attempts to restrict birthright citizenship,” said Newsweek. Trump signed an order banning birthright citizenship in 2025, triggering a “series of legal challenges now before the Supreme Court” given that the practice is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration continues to use birth tourism as a primary point of contention when presenting its case to the court. Immigration laws have “spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in oral arguments to the Supreme Court.

‘The scale of the problem is marginal’

Even though the White House has positioned birth tourism as a major factor in why birthright citizenship should be overturned, proponents “say that the scale of the problem is marginal,” said The New York Times. They typically “argue that it can be addressed through regulation and law enforcement without eliminating what has long been considered a central tenet of the United States — equality at birth, regardless of race, religion or the immigration status of the parents.”

Republicans have long used birth tourism as a way to highlight criminal enterprises. In 2019, officials in California “arrested three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth tourism companies and had charged as much as $100,000 to Chinese couples” for a luxury bundle that included “housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci,” said the Times. GOP lawmakers have also “cited birth tourism in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that has looser visa requirements and is closer to China.”

Support for overturning birthright citizenship remains low. Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65%, think citizenship “should be granted to all children born on American soil, no matter the circumstances,” according to a recent AP-NORC survey of 2,596 adults. Republicans are less convinced; only 44% are in favor of birthright citizenship. “It’s fundamental to sovereignty, being able to determine who is a citizen,” said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, to the Times.

CROSSWORD - May 22, 2026

SUDOKU - May 22, 2026

CROSSWORD - May 22, 2026

SUDOKU - May 22, 2026

Keir Starmer swept to power in July 2024 promising “change”, “national renewal” and a “return of politics to public service”. Less than two years later, his premiership is hanging by a thread as more and more of his own MPs and ministers break cover and call for him to go. At least 81 Labour MPs have so far called for the PM to step down and bring his troubled premiership to an untimely end.

Here are five moments that have brought Starmer to the brink.

Winter fuel U-turn

Labour’s honeymoon was short-lived, with the Stockport riots and “Freebie-gate” dominating its first few months in power. But it was the early decision to introduce means-testing to winter fuel payments for older people that proved particularly toxic with voters still unsure about what Starmer and his party stood for.

Long advocated by the Treasury but opposed by successive chancellors for over a decade, it was “one of Labour’s first acts in power and helped ensure voter disillusionment set in early”, said The Times. Starmer, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the wider government have never really recovered.

To make matters worse, rather than quickly reverse course, No. 10 doubled down, for months insisting the move was necessary to get the public finances under control. Only after MPs reported it was coming up again and again on the doorstep and was the first, and only, thing people could cite about Labour’s time in office did Starmer finally decide to U-turn.

National insurance rises

In her first Budget in the autumn of 2024, Reeves was accused of breaking a key election manifesto pledge not to increase taxes on working people. Increasing the employers’ rate of NI was meant to raise £24 billion in a bid to balance the books, but the Office for Budget Responsibility said that the move would lead to job losses, a squeeze on pay and lower growth. While technically not a breach of its tax promise to voters, it increased the financial strain on small businesses and left a sour taste in the mouths of many voters who felt they had been deceived.

Welfare U-turn

While Starmer’s most “serious failing was the absence of rigorous preparation for government”, looking back, the “critical moment” in his premiership was last summer’s U-turn on welfare spending, said The Independent’s political editor, John Rentoul.

While many agreed the welfare budget needed reforming, Reeves’ proposed £5 billion in disability cuts angered many Labour MPs while simultaneously failing to address the structural problems of the benefits system. Facing an embarrassing Commons defeat, the government U-turned again. Not only did this make Starmer look weak and in thrall to his backbenchers, it also forced Reeves to find more taxes to raise in her second Budget, after her first had already unravelled.

While other U-turns and errors were “embarrassing”, the “failure to hold the line on restraining disability spending was fundamental”, said Rentoul. “That was when Starmer’s government lost its way.”

The Mandelson affair

If a series of policy missteps and U-turns conveyed a sense of uncertainty about what Labour in government was actually for, the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, despite his known links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, raised direct questions about Starmer’s judgement.

After Mandelson’s sacking in September 2025 following new emails revealing the true nature of his relationship with Epstein, the decision to push Mandelson’s appointment through despite widespread concerns within the civil service saw Starmer’s government “embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century”, said The Economist.

If Starmer “had a purpose, it was stopping things like this”. Presenting himself as a “politician of process rather than conviction” he sought to differentiate himself from recent predecessors such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The Mandelson affair “reveals that process comes a distant second to political convenience”.

Local elections

All of this came to a head in last week’s local and devolved elections. With Starmer’s personal approval rating tanking and Labour squeezed by Reform UK to the right and the Greens on the left, the party lost scores of seats and councils, as well as control of Wales for the first time in a century.

While the campaign was meant to be about local issues, the elections were in many ways a “referendum” on Starmer and his government, Jonathan Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, told Al Jazeera. Canvassers reported the PM’s popularity coming up again and again on the doorstep.

After months managing to keep his Cabinet and wider party onside and rivals at bay, the aftermath of these elections was always seen as the moment of maximum danger for Starmer – and so it has proved. He has, for now, vowed to fight on, but his time in No. 10 may be entering its final chapter.

Brazil is our “destination of the year”, said Jacqui Gifford in Travel + Leisure. With a restaurant scene that’s “on fire”, beautiful “untamed” landscapes, “spectacular” beaches and, of course, unbeatable carnivals, this is the hottest place to visit in 2026.

Brazil has seen a 37% year-on-year rise in visitors, thanks in part to the launch of its International Tourism Acceleration Program, said The Telegraph. The “goal was simple: to improve the country’s international air connectivity”. It’s now easier to reach Brazil than ever, with new flights from Europe to cities such as Manaus and Recife. And, this year, flights are due to begin between Lisbon and São Luís – “the gateway to the swirling dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park”.

December to March is “peak season” in Brazil, bringing the “heat, summer rains and parties to the streets of Rio de Janeiro for Carnaval” in February or early March, said National Geographic.

If you decide to visit during the southern hemisphere’s spring (September to December), consider a wildlife-focused trip with a visit to the Pantanal – the world’s biggest tropical wetland that’s home to an array of creatures including capybaras, giant river otters and hyacinth macaws. August and September is “peak wild jaguar sighting season” when the big cats gather along the river banks to hunt for caimans.

And if you plan your trip for June (winter in Brazil), the seasonal rainwater lagoons at Lençóis Maranhenses reach their highest levels, ideal for swimming, and the weather is dry and sunny. This is also when humpback whales begin migrating from icy Antarctica to breed in the warmer waters off the coast of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. It’s well worth booking a tour with Projeto Baleia Jubarte.

June to November (dry season) is also the best time of year to visit the Amazon. Consider exploring the dense, tropical rainforest on a river cruise, said Chris Moss in The Telegraph. “As a nature-lover and twitcher, I have marvelled at macaws, kingfishers, hummingbirds and giant otters.” Starting from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, you can sail as far as Iquitos in Peru.

And if a city break is more your thing, spend a few days in São Paulo visiting the bustling city’s stand-out restaurants, bars and galleries. A trip to the “huge indoor market”, Mercado Municipal, is a “must”, said Time Out. The multi-storey “food heaven” is packed with “colourful and lively” stalls selling everything from delicious baked goods to exotic fruits and vegetables. “Be prepared to loosen your belt by a few notches to eat the market’s most famous sandwich: a small baguette packed with a brick-size wedge of mortadella.” Night owls can stay up late at Fabriketa – an “all-night electronic music party in an abandoned factory”.

Fresh off an early morning Eurostar service from London’s St Pancras, I feel excited when my taxi pulls up outside Maison Proust, and I discover its serene location on a tree-lined Parisian backstreet. Getting out of the car I wonder for a moment if I’m at the right place; I can’t see an obvious sign and its plain grey façade looks more like a private mansion than a hotel. As I contemplate getting back in the cab, a young man in an elegant navy suit appears from behind a grand door and welcomes me with a smile.

Inside, it’s a fun surprise to discover the decadent Belle Époque décor that evokes the style of the salons Marcel Proust would once have frequented. Standing in a darkened wood-panelled entry way lined with glass cabinets filled with curiosities, I am instantly transported back in time – and inspired to read some Proust, a great French author I am loath to admit I know very little about.

Sipping a welcome glass of chilled black tea infused with hibiscus and pepper in the cosy guest lounge and bar, I take in my new surroundings. It’s a theatrical mix of dusky blue velvet, distressed mirrors, wood panelling and tasselled lampshades that sets the tone for the rest of the hotel.

Waiting for my keys, I explore the thickly carpeted space and find a circular library, with a celestial ceiling inspired by “The Rotonde du Soleil” at Opéra Garnier, and a secret alcove. It’s the perfect spot for delving into Proust’s epic seven-volume novel, “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la Recherche du Temps Perdu”, I later learn he’s best known for.

Why stay here?

Set on a quiet street in heart of the Marais with its lively village atmosphere, luxurious Maison Proust is the ideal refuge for those who appreciate hotels with character, art, literature and history, and who seek a tranquil weekend escape in the heart of Paris. With its small, cosy spaces, it appeals to couples and solo travellers looking for a discreet base.

The hotel’s 23 compact, individually designed, street-facing rooms are split across six floors, set off curved darkened corridors. Ranging in size from doubles to junior suites, they’re named after Proust’s friends, including writers such as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and Emile Zola and painters such as Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

A peaceful night is guaranteed at Maison Proust, thanks to a combination of triple-glazed windows, blackout curtains, luxurious beds and high-quality linens. Rich colour palettes, sumptuous carpets and opulent fabrics like silk drapes and velvet sofas are décor hallmarks. Lampshades are decorated with pages from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, while bathrooms clad in marble have deep tubs, showers – or both – and luxurious Italian body products made with almond milk and orange blossom.

Before you arrive, it’s worth reserving an hour-long session at the Salon d’Eau, an exclusive Moorish-style relaxation space, with a steam room and a warm 33ft lap pool. Book into Spa La Mer, which offers indulgent treatments like lifting facials and revitalising massages, by appointment only.

Eating and drinking

Although there’s no restaurant at the hotel, breakfast – continental, American or à la carte – is served in the light-flooded glassed-in winter garden decorated with huge portraits of women in Proust’s life.

Come early evening, snacks like truffle tarama, burrata with olives, artichoke hearts, smoked salmon, and French cheeses, to name a few, are served when the bar opens. Drinks-wise, a comprehensive menu features several absinthes, 16 gins and 40 whiskys. Cocktails are as rich as the surroundings, like the Albertine, a sweet and punchy concoction laced with cognac and apricot syrup and topped with champagne.

Things to do

If you can drag yourself out of your artfully decorated salon-style room, the excitement of the Marais awaits. Start with a browse around the cluster of upscale boutiques along the Rue Vieille du Temple, before exploring the dizzying choice of restaurants and bars on surrounding streets. Great options include Candelaria, Mesures, and the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the city’s oldest food market.

And it’s a 15-minute stroll to the Musée Carnavalet, whose temporary collection includes the reconstituted bedroom of Marcel Proust, featuring his polished-wood bed draped with a deep blue coverlet, his cane and coat, and the writer’s precious pen.

The verdict

The quiet yet central location in the Marais is a unique combination that promises a fun-filled but relaxing trip to Paris. With its darkened corridors and small decadent spaces, it’s the perfect romantic refuge from the nearby hustle and bustle, that inspires you to want to be creative, and to read more.

Ellie was a guest of Eurostar and Maison Proust.

Restless and armed with social media, unauthorized groups of teenagers across the country have been gathering for so-called teen takeovers. These loud parties can devolve into violence, exasperating community leaders and the police. And while adults worry about how to keep the chaos at bay, teens say the simple solution is to give them more to occupy their time.

What are teen takeovers?

In major cities, large gatherings of teens have “popped up in downtowns, parks and leafy neighborhoods,” said The New York Times. These teen takeovers, typically organized on social media and through word of mouth, can be “noisy, boisterous and at times violent.”

Their impact is often “amplified on television,” especially in “conservative media outfits like Fox News,” said the Times. City leaders and police have also begun paying closer attention. Anxiety over juvenile delinquency is not new. What is novel about this generation is the “role that platforms like Instagram and TikTok play in the speed of organization and the scale of assembly.”

Some of the panic over teen takeovers echoes “worries over ‘wilding’ in the late 1980s and ‘superpredators’ in the 1990s.” There’s a lot of “dog whistling” about these being “Black kids who are gathering together in these large groups, and we should be afraid of them,” Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor who studies adolescent development, said to the Times.

After coordinating on social media, hundreds of teenagers gather in public areas or malls. Sometimes, “fights break out, and some are arrested,” said The Washington Post. Video clips of the meet-ups go viral, while politicians and residents “spar over why young people are behaving this way, and what should be done about it.” Violence aside, many youth are going to takeovers because they “want a space to meet other people their age and have a good time on the weekends.” The takeovers “satisfy a craving for connection in real life, not through screens.”

How are some states responding to the issue?

The popularity of impromptu teen takeovers has “brought back a fierce debate over curfews in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere,” said the Times. Various areas are trying methods to curb the chaos of these adolescent events. In Detroit, Mayor Mary Sheffield invited the organizers of a pair of teen takeovers to her office. Together, they “hashed out ideas like late-night basketball at city recreational centers, new public space developments and a new youth advisory board,” Sheffield said to the Times. The teenagers wanted a “place to get out, be free, have fun and hang out.”

In the nation’s capital, the D.C. Council recently voted 8 to 5 to extend the police chief’s power to declare special 8 p.m. youth curfew zones through 2028 while “adding guardrails to how police can enforce the measure,” said the Post. Mayor Muriel Bowser also promised more youth programming, “responding to calls from lawmakers and community members who say teens don’t have enough to do at night.”

The legislation is not expected to take effect until late summer, as lawmakers failed to reach a consensus on an emergency curfew that would have been put into use immediately. The debate over the curfew has been one of the most divisive on the D.C. Council, with Bowser “pushing lawmakers to act” as “federal scrutiny over the city’s response to teen takeovers hovered over discussions,” said the Post.

In Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, with permission from the police department, the principal of the local high school, school staff members and dozens of parents congregated along the street where a teen takeover was planned. When teens arrived, a “mob of adults was there to greet them and watch them to ensure trouble didn’t get started,” said the Chicago Tribune.

Parent takeovers and similar direct parent involvement could help police quell the danger in other neighborhoods, said Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling to the Tribune. Many young people “don’t necessarily fear the police,” he said. A lot of them would be “more concerned if they saw their parents or their teachers there, who could identify them and what they’re doing.”

Graham Platner is the “brawler” that many Democrats have been longing for, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. The 41-year-old oyster farmer two weeks ago won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary after the dismally polling Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. It was a remarkable victory, considering the “barrage of devastating opposition” aimed his way. Old social media posts were unearthed in which he declared himself a communist, called all cops “bastards,” and blasted rural whites as “racist” and “stupid.” In October, he revealed that, while drunk on leave as a 20-something Marine, he’d inadvertently gotten a Nazi-linked tattoo. His “insurgent campaign appeared doomed.” But Mainers kept packing his town halls. “A natural on the stump,” Platner won over crowds by speaking about the struggles of working people, the futility of the wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for “a Democratic Party with New Deal–scale ambitions.” Maine Democrats understand Platner is a flawed candidate, but also understand that such scrappy fighters might be needed to “upend a system that they believe has failed them.”

Platner won because progressives reward antisemitism, said Philip Klein in National Review. It’s not just his now-covered SS skull-and-bones tattoo. He has sat for a friendly interview with an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, called the U.S.-Israeli relationship “shameful,” and praised the tactics used by Hamas terrorists in a 2014 attack on Israelis. “Any of this would have once been a political death sentence”; now it’s “a ticket to success in the modern Democratic Party.” But the 78-year-old Mills’ “sleepy campaign didn’t offer any compelling alternative” to Platner, said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. The last thing voters wanted after watching President Joe Biden flop in 2024 was a septuagenarian freshman in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should never have pressured Mills into this race. He failed to realize “the imprimatur of the establishment is on the outs”—as are any moral standards for candidates.

Look, Platner isn’t “even close” to my ideal Senate candidate, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November simply because he isn’t Sen. Susan Collins, the self-declared moderate Republican who’s “shown herself to be an undependable check on Trump.” In Senate and House races across the country this year, Democrats and independents will have to decide which they fear more: A Democratic candidate who’s more progressive than they are and who may have a tarnished biography, or two more years of “an unimpeded, full-throttle Trump.” Either way, a “reckoning is at hand.”

The Supreme Court has authorized Republican-run states “to disenfranchise Black voters,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. A 6-3 majority, split along ideological lines, ruled two weeks ago in Louisiana v. Callais that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The decision effectively gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.” Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was steeped in “reactionary color blindness”—pretending to be neutral about race in order to preserve an unjust racial hierarchy. Alito argued that states are only in violation of the VRA if they draw districts to intentionally disadvantage minority voters. If states seek partisan advantage in redistricting, Alito said, that’s constitutional under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling—as if disadvantaging Democrats doesn’t also disadvantage Blacks. In other words, according to Chief Justice John Roberts and his allies, “preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.”

As a result of this “mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach,” said The New York Times in an editorial, red states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi can “slice minority voters into small and powerless slivers,” so long as they claim race isn’t the reason. Once again, the court obviously “acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges”: Its six conservative justices, all nominated by Republicans, “have most likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress.

“The Voting Rights Act was a landmark of American liberty that helped to break Jim Crow,” said The Wall Street Journal, but it’s not 1965 anymore. As Alito noted, “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” This ruling will finally help end Democrats’ “partisan abuse of race to carve up congressional districts.” In the name of preventing the “dilution” of Black votes, Louisiana was compelled to draw up a preposterous majority-minority district that snakes 250 miles across the state. In their dissents, said Jason Willick in The Washington Post, the three liberal justices conflated the right to vote with the “right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner.” Sometimes—say, for Republicans in San Francisco or Democrats in Wyoming—our preferred candidates lose, and we have to “accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway.” In a representative democracy, being “outnumbered” is not the same as being “disenfranchised.”

The reality is that Callais “will be devastating for communities of color,” said Ari Berman in Mother Jones. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans had essentially no representation in Congress, even in Southern states with large Black populations. But with the forceful support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the VRA put an end to decades of “white supremacy and one-party rule” across the South. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in an anguished dissent, the law “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.” She pointed out that the VRA has proved so essential in “bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality” that Congress has reauthorized it five times—including in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0. By rendering the law toothless, the court will likely “trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.” And legal recourse will be all but impossible, said Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times. In theory, states can still be sued if they draw districts to discriminate by race. But as Kagan put it, without “smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive”—a prospect she deemed “almost fanciful”— the law is now moot.

The court’s ruling will trigger an all-out redistricting war, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. “Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering” that states will have no fear of rigging districts to favor the party in power. Louisiana, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has already delayed its primaries so it can redraw its map, while Tennessee’s GOP governor called a special session to discuss doing the same. Republican-controlled Alabama may follow suit. Democrats will respond in kind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Many in the party are “pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year” in California and Virginia. By 2028, both red and blue states may eliminate most or all congressional seats held by the minority party. How is this absurd “gerrymandering tit-for-tat” good for democracy? Will anyone in Congress dare “to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement”? If Americans are sick of this partisan race to the bottom, they should demand it.

How has Mississippi improved?

For years, Southern states with struggling education systems could console themselves: No matter how poorly they were doing, they weren’t as bad as Mississippi. Just 12 years ago, Mississippi ranked 48th in K-12 education, based on metrics like attendance, reading proficiency, and on-time graduation. Now the state is no longer a punch line. It’s up to 16th in K-12 rankings and has achieved particular success in fourth-grade reading comprehension, jumping all the way to the top 10 in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). When adjusting for poverty and other demographic factors, Mississippi actually tops the nation in that category. Crucially, improvements are seen among students at all reading levels, “rather than just among higher achieving or lower achieving students,” says Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the tests. “It’s as if Mississippi had moved a mountain.” And it did this despite spending just $12,000 per student, much less than the national average.

What did it change?

Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, paving the way for implementing the “science of reading” in K-3 classrooms. This multifaceted approach—which involves teaching phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, and text comprehension—gets much of the credit for the state’s turnaround, but it’s just one tenet of the law. Accountability, from both students and schools, is another. Mississippi grades its schools A to F and sends coaches to train teachers in low-performing ones. Students get to see and track their own testing data. “I like it,” one pupil, Johnny, told The New York Times. “If I make a bad grade, but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.” At the end of third grade, those who don’t pass a literacy exam after multiple attempts are automatically held back. That “third-grade gate” has drawn praise as a tough but beneficial rule that’s paying off: a record 77.3% of third graders passed the initial administration last year. Yet it also has its share of critics.

What do they say?

They say Mississippi has stacked its deck. Of course all the fourth graders can read, they say—the kids who couldn’t were kept back in third grade. In 2023, fully 7% of Mississippi third graders, over 2,000 kids, were held back. One study in the statistics journal Significance said Mississippi’s approach amounts to “gaming the system.” Others point out that Mississippi scores didn’t even improve much, it’s just that other states got worse. Still, some research indicates that something real is happening. A Florida State University study found compulsory grade repetition alone can’t explain higher test scores. Mississippi’s literacy gains have also remained consistent across every decile on the NAEP exam. A 90th-percentile score, for instance, leaped from 249 in 2005 to 262 in 2024, and a 10th-percentile score from 157 to 170. Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard, told ChalkBeat that he doesn’t “see any smoking guns or red flags” around Mississippi’s success. That’s why other states are starting to copy it.

What are other states doing?

Across the South, states from Louisiana to Virginia have adopted at least some of Mississippi’s strategies, including teacher-training methods, curriculum reform, and high standards. Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have even copied the third-grade gate approach. Now Louisiana leads the country in recovery from pandemic-related losses in reading, while Alabama takes the crown for math recovery. These states particularly shine when NAEP scores are adjusted for demographics. After considering factors like poverty and race, the Urban Institute think tank determined, Mississippi tops the nation in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math, and it’s fourth in eighth-grade reading. Still, not everyone is satisfied with Mississippi’s middle-school progress.

What happened in middle school?

If you don’t adjust for demographics, Mississippi eighth graders rank a dismal 41st in reading. Things are getting better—between 2013 and 2022, its eighth graders cut their gap with the national average in half—but the pace has been slower than in lower grades. That’s hardly a surprise, since the 2013 law focused specifically on improving early-education literacy. The state hasn’t invested the same time, money, and resources into middle-school reading, the time when literacy instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Critics say Mississippi needs to ensure that older children can read—and that students’ math skills get the same attention as their reading skills.

Is the state planning to do that?

Mississippi is now looking to pass a bill that would expand the 2013 literacy reforms into higher grades. The teachers tend to appreciate the help from literacy coaches, Mississippi education official Tenette Smith says. “We hear from teachers and administrators who say, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know.’” The state also seeks to adopt similar reforms for primary-school mathematics, mandating math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, and placing a cutoff gate for fifth grade so that only students who are ready will move on to sixth-grade algebra classes. Pilot programs are already underway to improve reading comprehension in upper grades. While it’s too soon to tell whether those efforts will pay off longterm, the early test results are promising. The Mississippi miracle is “proof positive that, yes, children in poverty can learn and can succeed,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s former superintendent of education. “As educators, our job is to do whatever it takes.”

What happened

In a display of President Trump’s continued grip on the Republican base, at least five of the seven challengers he backed in last week’s Indiana GOP state Senate primaries ousted incumbents who defied a White House redistricting push. The defeated Republicans, branded “RINOS” (Republicans in name only) by Trump, joined Indiana Democrats last December in voting down a new congressional map designed to give the GOP two additional House seats. An irate Trump called for the holdouts to be primaried, and pro-Trump PACs funded an attack-ad blitz, turning what would typically be low-key races into a $13.5 million battle royale. Among the losers were Travis Holdman, the Indiana Senate’s third most powerful Republican, and Jim Buck, who had held his seat since 1994. “There’s a big message here,” said U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). “It’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

Trump scored another win in neighboring Ohio, where the gubernatorial candidate he endorsed, Vivek Ramaswamy, trounced his primary competitor to set up a showdown with Democratic nominee Amy Acton in November. Democrat Sherrod Brown also secured a chance to return to the Senate after a 2024 loss. He’ll square off with appointed GOP incumbent Jon Husted in a special election to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacated seat through 2028. Ohio has established itself as a red state over the past decade, but early polling suggests both races could be competitive. One Republican operative close to Husted called Brown a “tough out,” adding “we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

What the columnists said

“Indiana’s primaries were a referendum on Trumpism,” said James Briggs in The Indianapolis Star, and “Trumpism prevailed.” The president’s challengers not only won, they did so handily, their margins ranging from 18 to 50 percentage points. You “gotta hand it to him.” Despite “the wreckage of his second term,” Trump remains a genius campaigner, “a singular figure who can make it rain on obscure state legislative elections because they happen to be important to him personally.”

These results “carry implications well beyond Indianapolis,” said Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis in MS.now. Other Republican-controlled states are “facing similar redistricting pressure” from the White House, and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana all seem good bets to redraw their maps. Now any GOP state legislators on the gerrymandering fence “have a fresh example” of what awaits them should they cross Trump.

Democrats also have reason to celebrate, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. Their candidate won a Michigan state Senate seat by 20 points in a working-class district, continuing “a trend of notable Democratic overperformance.” The Republican elections were about “loyalty to Trump,” whose popularity is sinking. Recent polling pegs his approval rating at around 37%. A GOP that’s completely in thrall to him might actually “increase the likelihood of voters turning to Democratic candidates” in the midterms.

What happened

U.S. policy on Iran whipsawed last week, with President Trump telling Tehran to accept a peace deal or face a new wave of bombing, soon after he’d hailed “great progress” in talks and halted a military operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump had announced that, in a “humanitarian gesture,” the U.S. would guide merchant ships through the strait, a key oil export route that has been effectively shuttered by Iran since the start of the nine-week-old war. Any interference with “Project Freedom” would be met “forcefully,” Trump said. But as U.S. warships escorted two commercial vessels through the strait, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones. None of the ships were damaged, and U.S. attack helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iranian strikes hit a major oil hub in the United Arab Emirates and at least two commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. Trump declined to say Iran had violated a four-week ceasefire, calling the clash a “mini war.” A day later he paused Project Freedom, citing movement toward a “complete and final” agreement with Tehran.

Trump’s U-turn came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded” and that the war’s objectives had been achieved, despite Iran’s continuing choke hold on the strait and the lack of any deal over its nuclear program. Axios reported that U.S. officials believe they are nearing an agreement with Tehran on a one-page “memorandum of understanding” to end the war and set the stage for detailed negotiations. The war will end “assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to,” Trump posted online, “which is, perhaps, a big assumption.” If they don’t, he said, bombing will resume, “at a much higher level and intensity.”

What the columnists said

Both sides are working with mediators to craft a 14-point “framework,” said Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. The working version calls for Iran to begin opening the strait and the U.S. to wind down its blockade of Iranian ports during 30 days of talks. Iran is said to be willing to discuss a possible halt to uranium enrichment and the removal of some of its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium to a third country—but not the U.S. Divisions within Iran’s leadership could prove a roadblock, said Barak Ravid in Axios. Given the challenge of uniting disparate factions, some U.S. officials are “skeptical that even an initial deal will be reached.”

Project Freedom had two objectives, said Chas Danner in New York. One was to pressure Iran to fully open the strait and free 1,600 commercial ships stuck in the Persian Gulf, which failed miserably. The other was “a cynical attempt to rebrand the war,” which became illegal once it hit 60 days without congressional authorization. The administration wants the public to believe the offensive has ended and that the U.S. is now engaged in an entirely different “defensive” operation to open the strait.

The administration can say whatever it wants, but that “does not make it true,” said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. The war is not over. And its objectives have not been met. Trump cited five at the outset, including regime change and ensuring Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” Only one goal, disabling Iran’s navy, has been achieved. But the war has become a “political crisis,” and the White House is anxious to put it “in the rearview mirror.”

Americans can see the cost of this war everywhere, said Scott Waldman and Ben Lefebvre in Politico. Gas hit an average of $4.54 a gallon this week, up $1.56 since fighting began in February, and diesel hit $5.67, up $1.91. The spike in diesel, which powers trucks and trains, “in turn is expected to drive up prices for everything from groceries to postage.” Trump’s disapproval rating is climbing as well, hitting a record 62% in a new poll, said Scott Clement and Dan Balz in The Washington Post. Americans disapprove of his handling of the war by 66% to 33%, and his approval rating on the economy has dropped to 34%.

“There are now only two outcomes to the conflict,” said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. With Iran not about to cave, Trump can resume hostilities. But that seems unlikely, and “no amount of bombing” will change the fact that Iran has gained control of the strait and the ability to “paralyze the global economy.” The alternative is a settlement that will leave the “empowered” Iranian regime intact and “a blustering American president humiliated.” Operation Epic Fury is now looking more like “Operation Colossal Blunder.”

‘We’re thinking about mental health diagnoses all wrong’

Awais Aftab at The New York Times

For “decades, the public conversation about mental health has been routed through the categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM,” says Awais Aftab. These “have been convenient for professional communication, insurance billing and conducting clinical trials, but they have given the false impression that each mental disorder is a relatively distinct problem with clear boundaries.” They “can capture something useful and inform treatment options, but none of them do justice” to the “nature of mental illness.”

Read more

‘What Jews can learn from the pope’

Kenneth Seeskin at the Chicago Tribune

Pope Leo XIV is a “distinguished proponent of peace, human dignity and concern for disadvantaged people,” says Kenneth Seeskin. While “there is no one in Judaism who speaks with the authority of a pope, as people of God, Jews also face the question of how to make sense of an ancient and not always consistent tradition.” The “Jewish community is deeply divided over Israel’s actions in Gaza,” and “Jews must ask the same questions of their religion.”

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‘Here comes the slop’

Heather Schwedel at Slate

Many “photos of wedding dresses” have “either been designed or enhanced by AI,” says Heather Schwedel. If “you’re shopping for a wedding dress in 2026, you’re almost guaranteed to encounter at least a little slop.” As AI’s “popularity with everyday consumers has grown over the past few years, it’s taken hold in seemingly every medium,” and “even knitters are having to learn to separate real patterns from the AI-generated ones. Of course wedding dresses aren’t immune.”

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‘Rethinking transitional justice in Bosnia’

Jared O. Bell at Foreign Policy

The U.S. and EU “have treated constitutional reform and war crimes accountability as the primary metrics of progress in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says Jared O. Bell. If Bosnia “has not unified its narratives of the past or produced visibly contrite leaders, Western logic goes, then it has ‘failed.’” But Bosnia’s “most consequential peace process” is “unfolding in factories, logistics hubs, municipal utilities and cross-entity supply chains — in the daily economic life that keeps the country running.”

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Most standard-size cookbooks showcase between 100 and 150 recipes. In 2008, the author and cooking teacher Raghavan Iyer said “pshaw” and published his magnum opus, “660 Curries.”

“To us Indians, a curry is a sauce-based dish,” said Iyer, meaning “curry” as employed in Western instances like all-purpose “curry powder” is a term so general as to lose all significance. Curry instead is both the alpha and the omega. It’s both a saucy dish across the subcontinent and a hyper-regional way of preparing said saucy dishes.

Name your cooking weapon

Pick a base, and you are nearly guaranteed at least one recipe for it in “660 Curries.” More often, you will be bombarded with an array of options.

Consider the legume. Yellow split peas, horse gram, chickpeas, brown lentils and moth beans — Iyer assembles an armada of more than 15 different types of legumes for the Legume Curries chapter. The hits are present, including a faultless recipe for the restaurant icon, dal makhani, with its whole black lentils opulent with Punjabi garam masala, yogurt and heavy cream.

A behemoth is forever going to do the absolute most, so lesser-known regional specialties are everywhere across the book. Toovar dal (split yellow pigeon peas) is softened in a bath of unripe green mango, green bell pepper and coconut milk in a dish from the southwestern state of Kerala. Stressing the omnipresent influence of the Portuguese colonizers, chorizo cooks with red kidney beans and black-eyed peas in a spunky chile-vinegar tomato sauce in a Goan adaptation of Brazilian feijoada. Here and in the book’s other chapters on vegetables, seafood, poultry and eggs, meat, and paneer, curry is no catch-all. It slips, shifts and adapts.

To the curry-sphere and beyond

Iyer cheated a touch with the book’s title because some chapters exist outside of the sauce world. The opening chapter, Spice Blends and Paste, provides a constellation of building blocks and endless masalas with seven types of garam masala alone.

The final chapter, Curry Cohorts, dabbles in a touch of everything: rice preparations, including a Maharashtrian-style fried rice with peanuts and curry leaves; all manner of breads, such as poori, roti and naan; and even a mango cheesecake and saffron-licked green tea. “660 Curries” is an imposing endeavor. And, oh, how the book’s recipes work.

Iyer died, too young, at 61 in 2023. He was an admired teacher and an indefatigable researcher. And almost 20 years later, “660 Curries” remains as essential as it was when it first appeared. Scratch that. “660 Curries” is all the more pertinent now. The world needed time to embrace its sweeping, detailed grandeur.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Vladimir Putin has led the Russian Federation as one of the most successful authoritarians on Earth. But more than four years after launching an all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president synonymous with Moscow’s kleptocratic rule finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Russia is now roiled by rumors of organized unrest with months to go before parliamentary elections, while Putin himself faces allegations of extreme isolation and a weakening grip on power.

What did the commentators say?

There is a sense of “mounting unease within the Kremlin” as it grapples with domestic and economic problems plus “increasing signs of dissent and setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine,” said CNN, citing a report from a European intelligence agency. The Kremlin has “dramatically increased” Putin’s security, even installing surveillance systems “in the homes of close staffers” in measures “prompted by a wave of assassinations of top Russian military figures and fears of a coup.” Putin is “increasingly concerned” about an alleged “plot by members of the Russian political elite to topple him, or even assassinate him with drones,” said The Times. The president and his family have “stopped visiting their luxury residences” and Putin is spending “weeks at a time in bunkers.”

The report focuses on “growing internal tensions” between Putin and former Defense Minister and current Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, said the Kyiv Post. Considered a “potential coup risk” for his “continued influence within the military leadership,” Shoigu has not “personally” been linked with hard evidence to “any wrongdoing.” The arrest this past March of one of Shoigu’s deputies was “presented in the report” as a “sign of weakening informal protections among the elite” that has contributed to the tensions.

Putin’s slipping power is “not only about falling approval ratings,” said The Economist. Russia’s future is “no longer discussed” in terms of what Putin “will decide” but as “something that will unfold independently of him — and possibly already without him.” This waning authority comes from a “confluence” of factors, including rising wartime costs and a “growing demand for rules among elites who have been forced back into Russia, along with their capital.” Shifting geopolitical winds and the collapse of Russia’s previous “social contract,” in which the state “stayed out of people’s private lives while citizens stayed out of politics,” have created a “situation which in chess is known as a Zugzwang: when every move worsens the position.”

This isn’t to say that “revolution is imminent” or that the 73-year-old Putin “will be sidelined soon,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, the “change in mood is remarkable” compared to “just last December,” when Russia was “buoyed by hopes” of a Moscow-friendly, Trump-negotiated ceasefire with Ukraine.

Changes in national mood notwithstanding, the “sudden spate” of coup-oriented reporting stemming from the “conveniently anonymous ‘European intelligence agency’” looks “suspiciously more like a psyop meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite than a serious assessment,” said The Spectator. Europe has a “desperate appetite” for a “deus ex machina, for some miraculous end to the Ukraine war,” and a coup to oust Putin “certainly fits the bill.” Still, this would “hardly be the first time” intelligence services “succumbed to the temptation to provide their masters with what they want, not need, to hear.”

What next?

For the time being, Moscow “understands that there could be serious discontent ahead” and has accordingly “decided to allow low-level discontent to manifest itself,” said former Putin adviser Marat Gelman at the Journal. As things stand, Putin has “enough resources to crush any civil revolt.”

“In Russia, they say that things don’t happen fast, but when they happen, they happen fast,” former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said to the Journal. While he “wouldn’t have said it a year or two ago,” civic revolt is “possible now.”

What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday presided over the “most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years,” Reuters said. Afterward, he told reporters he thought the Ukraine war was “coming to an end.” President Donald Trump last week said Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed to exchange 1,000 war prisoners and pause the fighting through Monday to mark the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Who said what

Russia’s “markedly pared down” Victory Day parade “went forward amid veiled threats from Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe said. Zelenskyy “issued a mocking statement” beforehand “saying he was authorizing the Kremlin parade to be held” free from attacks. If Putin’s parade was “subdued” because he “feared a long-range Ukrainian drone strike” in Red Square. This is “one more sign that the tide may be turning against Russia after four long years of death,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial.

What next?

Russia’s Ukraine offensive “has slowed to a crawl” and its “challenges on the battlefield complicate the narrative of imminent victory” Putin is “selling” Trump to convince him Kyiv needs to cede land in U.S. peace talks, The New York Times said. At its current rate, Moscow would need “more than three decades to seize full control of the Donbas.”

What happened

The Dutch cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak docked off Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday so passengers could be evacuated to their home countries. They included all 17 American passengers from the MV Hondius, one of whom tested positive for the virus Sunday while another developed mild symptoms, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said. One of five French passengers also tested positive after showing symptoms on the flight home, the French government said. Three passengers have died since April 11 and at least five others have fallen ill with hantavirus symptoms.

Who said what

Hantavirus is a rare and deadly virus usually spread by inhaling rodent droppings, but the Andes strain found in the infected passengers can spread through close human contact, the World Health Organization said. “This is not another Covid,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “And the risk to the public is low.”

What next?

The U.S. passengers are arriving in Omaha on Monday morning, where most will be monitored at the specialized National Quarantine Unit while the one who tested positive will be transferred to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, HHS said.

What happened

Democrats scrambled over the weekend to respond to setbacks in the national redistricting fight, most recently the Virginia Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision last week to nullify the state’s voter-approved congressional map. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and other House Democrats “vented anger at their defeat” in Virginia during a private discussion on Saturday, The New York Times said, with “some party leaders discussing an audacious and possibly far-fetched idea” to restore the map, designed to flip four Republican seats.

Who said what

“Just two weeks ago, Democrats had fought to a draw” in the mid-decade gerrymander race started by President Donald Trump and Texas Republicans, The Washington Post said. Now, between the Virginia decision and the expected loss of several additional seats in the South following the U.S. Supreme Court’s neutering of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are “confronting the reality that Trump succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage.”

What next?

If the Republicans maintain their current net gain of about a dozen seats, Democrats “could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around 4 percentage points,” Nate Cohn said at the Times. That “structural advantage wouldn’t be enough to make the Republicans favorites,” but it “gives them a real shot” at winning. And if the court rulings help Republicans keep the House despite “badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

From galaxies far, far away to apocalypse-ravaged wastelands and underground bunkers, these chilling dystopian TV shows transport us to another world – while amplifying our darkest, real-life fears. These are some of the best.

Paradise

Series two of “Paradise” is “better than ever”, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. With its “smart interwoven plotting” and “standout lead performances”, this dystopian political thriller might just be your “new favourite show”. Set in what appears to be an idyllic American town, the first instalment introduces Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown). “Cracks in the seemingly perfect community” begin to show when the president is murdered and Collins is framed. The first episode of series two “answers long-held questions while raising even more”, introducing interesting new characters while weaving in flashbacks to deepen backstories. As the new series “unfolds, the secrets deep below the surface grow darker” and the “tension ratchets to new levels at each revelation”. It’s a must watch.
Disney+

The Testaments

“Brace yourselves,” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian: Margaret Atwood’s sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, published in 2019, “has come for us”. Set in the totalitarian regime of Gilead a few years after the TV series ended, “The Testaments” is focused not on the “handmaids” – who provide children to powerful men – but on the daughters of the elite, who are groomed from birth to become wives. The structure of the series departs radically from that of the book, but the show is so “consumingly brilliant” that I reckon even purists will forgive this, said Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times. Chase Infiniti plays Agnes MacKenzie, the adopted daughter of a high-ranking commander, who attends an elite school run by the fearsome Aunt Lydia (a returning Ann Dowd). There, she meets Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Canadian who has come to Gilead voluntarily. At the school, “lucky” girls who get their period are paired off with much older men in a social process in which the “tea parties, balls and fripperies of Jane Austen” are mixed with Orwellian totalitarianism. It’s a “deeply uneasy combination”, but it makes for “spectacular television”.
Disney +

Westworld

The fourth season of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s “knotty sci-fi thriller” proved “far more gripping” than the third instalment, said Richard Lawson in GQ. Set in Westworld, a futuristic Wild West-themed amusement park where sophisticated robots cater to the demands of wealthy guests, the final season feels like a cross between an “elegant” “Terminator” movie and “Bladerunner”. As ever it looks “mind-bogglingly expensive” (“all gleaming buildings and haunted desert”), and the excellent cast are back in “peak snarling, purring, quipping form”.
Amazon Prime

Andor

The second season of this “Star Wars” spin-off is “as thrilling as ever”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Exploring the events that lead up to the 2016 film, “Rogue One”, the action follows thief-turned-rebel-spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). Like everything in the franchise, the series is about an “underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space”. But writer Tony Gilroy swaps the “magic and myth” for the realities of the “anti-fascist struggle”. This is “Star Wars” for grown-ups.
Disney+

The Walking Dead

One of the most “successful” dystopian TV series ever made, “The Walking Dead” follows a group of survivors during a zombie apocalypse, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. It’s an “epic, sprawling” show that takes you on a “rollercoaster ride through a dystopian America”, where staying alive hinges on the relationships forged, and even the smallest mistake can have fatal consequences.
Now

The Last of Us

Based on the 2013 video game, this “superb” post-apocalyptic drama combines “epic” action with “breathtaking emotional swerves”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Season one saw hardened survivor Joel (Pedro Pascal) and teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) trek through a desolate America overrun by “fungus-ridden” infected creatures to deliver the uniquely immune Ellie to a group of rebels who believed she may hold the key to a cure that could “save all of humanity”. Things didn’t go to plan and the second instalment picks up five years later when the pair are “uneasily getting on with life” in Jackson, Wyoming. Expect “gobsmacking set pieces” including a battle scene to “rival ‘Game of Thrones’”, and “reliably forceful” performances from Pascal and Ramsey. In all, season two takes everything that was good about the first series and “cranks it up to the absolute maximum”.
Apple TV+

Silo

The first season of “Silo” laid out some “captivating foundations”, said Nicola Austin in Empire. Based on the best-selling trilogy of novels by Hugh Howey, it “charted the aftermath of an apocalyptic event” that saw thousands of people forced underground to live in a giant bunker known as the silo. No one knows who built it or why, but they do know one thing: the outside world is toxic and leaving will result in almost certain death. Season two picks up after the “doozy of a cliffhanger” at the end of the first instalment, and “turns the temperature up on this pressure-cooker of a dystopia”.
Apple TV+

Severance

Following a “fantastically stylish, clever, trippy and compelling” first series, “Severance” is back on the small screen, and somehow it’s even better than before, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. The first instalment follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), an employee at the sinister Lumon Industries corporation, who has opted into the severance procedure to have his non-work memories separated from his work memories, giving him an “innie” and “outie” life. In the second season, “mysteries and revelations, clues and new enigmas are rolled out in perfect syncopation, getting wilder and weirder” as the show goes on.
Apple TV+

Fallout

The “bouncy, eye-popping energy” of this “post-apocalyptic action-comedy” makes for “perfect bingeing”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Based on the video game of the same name, “Fallout” is set in the year 2296, two centuries after the “downfall of humanity”, in a postwar America “devastated by a nuclear conflagration”. Wealthy survivors have taken refuge in subterranean Vaults but they are eventually forced to emerge into the “Californian wasteland”: a “hellscape, teeming with zombie-like mutants”. Delivering the “perfect payload of OTT action and childish humour”, it makes for a surprisingly “fun” watch.
Amazon Prime

Restrictions on high-risk uses of artificial intelligence in the EU will be delayed by more than a year under a deal struck by its legislators.

The deal “marks a notable rollback” in the bloc’s “digital rulebook after years of Brussels proudly marketing itself as the world’s tech cop”, said The Register.

What is changing?

The EU’s AI Act came into force in August 2024 after “years of talks”. But as part of a “phased rollout”, the rules governing high-risk uses were only “set to kick in this August”, said Politico.

Instead, the bloc has “hit the regulatory equivalent of ‘snooze for 16 months’”, said The Register. “The headline change pushes back enforcement of rules covering systems” in areas such as biometrics, critical infrastructure, education, employment, migration, and border control until December 2027.

For products like lifts and toys, compliance deadlines for their AI systems are “stretching” further – to August 2028. Meanwhile, smaller companies get “more breathing room”. The EU hopes it will “avoid duplication between sectoral and AI rules”, it said in a press release.

EU officials insist the delay is “about timing, not watering down the law”. They claim the rules are “moving faster than the standards needed to support them” and that companies currently “lack the guidance and technical tools required for compliance”.

Is this a win for Big Tech?

The change of heart is a “big win” for tech firms and industry groups that have been lobbying the EU to “soften” the AI Act, said The Register. As recently as last week, bosses from companies including ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP, Siemens and Mistral AI “publicly warned that Europe risked over-regulating itself out of the global AI race”.

The new deal, which marks the “first significant rollback” of rules in the digital sphere, came after the EU faced pressure from the US over its tech laws. There were also “warnings” from its own industry and governments that “strict restrictions had put the bloc at a disadvantage in a global AI race”, said Politico.

“Only a couple of countries around the world” followed the EU’s lead on restrictions, so the bloc “faced criticism” for “cracking down on AI too early”, despite “civil society” saying that “rules are needed to protect people from the potential harms of the emerging technology”.

Arba Kokalari, a Swedish MEP on the internal market committee, insisted that the EU is “not weakening any safety rules”, but rather “clarifying the rules for companies in Europe”.

What is staying the same?

Some aspects of the AI Act will keep to their original schedule. Bans on unacceptable-risk AI have applied since February 2025, according to the European Commission. The transparency obligations under Article 50, including disclosure for chatbot interactions, will come into force from 2 August.

The European Parliament and Council also agreed to ban AI systems that create child sexual abuse material or that depict identifiable people in sexually explicit content without consent. Companies have until the end of this year to comply.

“Is it a red wine, or a white?” said The Economist. “It is both.”

Trendy “blouge” wines have started popping up in bars around the world. A mix of white (blanc) and red (rouge) grapes, the resulting tipple is “light and refreshing, like a white, but with the structure and depth of a red”.

Mixing red and white like this is “not a new idea”. Winemakers have long been making champagnes from different coloured grapes. But recently producers have been “breaking new ground” with a growing number of “fresher” blouge wines often with “playful names to emphasise their novelty and expand their appeal”.

While rosé is made from red grapes alone with limited skin contact, and orange wines are made from white grapes in the style of a red with extended contact with the skins, blouge wines are a hybrid made by co-fermenting both red and white grapes. They are targeted at “younger, more adventurous” consumers keen to try something new.

Combining grape varieties gives producers more “flexibility” in the face of climate change. Hotter weather can lead to red grapes accumulating sugar faster, while the “ripening of skins and seeds can lag behind, causing a mismatch”. By adding white grapes to the mix, acidity is boosted while the high alcohol level found in ripe red grapes is diluted.

The pretty colours “tempt the Instagram lens”, said The Telegraph, luring “aperitivo-hour drinkers” on the lookout for wines with the “appeal of a light cocktail; often fruity and chilled, perhaps with a vestige of florality and a tinge of either astringency or sweetness”.

BoogieWoogie from Aubert et Mathieu is due to arrive in the UK this month, said The Guardian. A “light and juicy blend of red and white grenache grapes”, this is the “perfect match for tapas, pizza and picnics”.

Or try Domaine Lucas Madonia: The Blouge 2024, a “high-quality, natural” wine that uses grapes grown at a vineyard nestled on a “steep mountainside in the Swiss Alps of Valais”. Best enjoyed “cold on a sunny day after work”, the “fruity, aromatic blend” of chasselas white and gamay red grapes has a “clean, lively finish” with hints of “juicy strawberries and raspberries”.

When it comes to hotel room views, it doesn’t get much better than having your own private wildlife show. That’s exactly what you get at Chester Zoo, where the new safari-style Giraffe View lodges let you stay overnight overlooking the sandy enclosure where the male giraffes live.

“That’s Meru,” our friendly concierge tells us as we drop off our bags in our room. Beyond the glass, across a small rocky strip of water, the zoo’s eldest giraffe is craning his impossibly long, elegant neck up to a hanging basket of foliage and methodically stripping the branches of their bark. Below him, a smaller, paler giraffe – (Stanley, we soon find out) – prods his shoulder, demanding attention. It’s a mesmerising sight.

Cosy lodges with stellar views

The Reserve only opened last year, but the entire experience already feels like a well-oiled machine. We didn’t arrive until check-in, but wished we had got there earlier when we realised just how much there was to see. As well as an overnight stay in a luxury lodge, the After Hours package includes a two-day zoo pass. Guests get early access on both days from 9am (an hour earlier than the general public) to the Heart of Africa zone – a sprawling 22-acre habitat designed to mimic African grasslands. It’s home to more than 50 animal species, including zebras, rhinos, vultures, antelopes, and, of course, giraffes.

On arrival, we were given wristbands giving us exclusive access to The Reserve, and were whisked straight out on to the terrace overlooking the lakeside lodges for our welcome drinks. We opted for the Kenyan-inspired dawa cocktail: a refreshing – and surprisingly strong! – blend of vodka, lime, honey and sugar syrup. Despite being April in Cheshire, sitting out on the bright, sunny terrace, it really did feel like we were on safari (or what I would imagine it’s like, as a safari novice).

The lodges themselves are comfortable and modern, decorated in calming shades of oatmeal with plenty of natural wood and pretty rattan wall hangings. But the real draw is the views: floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors open out on to your own private balcony where you can watch the giraffes amble around the paddock. Perfect for families, a cute stuffed toy giraffe is also waiting on the bed.

An after-hours tour to remember

It’s easy for hours to slip by while you sit and watch the giraffes but we managed to tear ourselves away from our lodge for the after-hours tour. Every member of staff we met at Chester Zoo was warm, friendly and, above all, passionate about what they do. Ranger Ben was no exception. Together with another couple staying at The Reserve, we set off to explore the Heart of Africa zone – stopping off at the various enclosures to learn about the animals and their quirks.

We pass the female giraffes (Tula, we learn, is a “diva”, while Kanzee is the “adventurous” one), and stop to look at the inquisitive yellow mongooses, Cinnamon and Saffron. Perhaps most memorable of all are the aardvarks; they’re nocturnal so they’re still sleeping when we visit at dusk but peering into their cave we manage to catch a glimpse of their strange pink feet with shovel-like claws dangling in the air.

Next, we head into the Hidden Savannah – an indoor space where a colony of naked mole-rats are huddled together sleeping. We can’t spot the African bullfrog at first but soon find he’s blending in beneath a log, staying completely still as he lays in wait for his prey. There’s just time to stop off for a talk with another ranger, Ewan, who shows us the “enrichment” puzzles and feeders used to engage the lions and monkeys, and tells us about Chester Zoo’s biggest conservation projects, including work supporting the monitoring of giant anteaters in Brazil.

Back at The Reserve that evening, there’s a range of activities for guests. We opted for the Pangolin Talk, where Ben told us about the zoo’s research tracking critically endangered giant pangolins in southwest Uganda. (Ewan reappeared too, with a slightly unnerving giant pangolin puppet.) The only snag was our evening meal, which, after the incredible day we’d had, was disappointing and didn’t live up to the quality of the rest of our stay.

Skipping the crowds with early access

Thankfully, breakfast was much better, with a selection of pastries, fresh fruit and cooked traditional classics. Determined to make the most of the early access this time, we set out at 9am to explore the rest of the zoo. This felt really special: many of the animals we hadn’t been able to see the night before were just waking up and we could get to the best viewing spots before the crowds arrived.

Chester Zoo was recently voted the best zoo in the UK and it’s easy to see why. Spanning 130 acres, the sprawling site is home to some of the biggest habitats in Europe and with so much more space the animals looked happier and more relaxed than those in the old Victorian cages in London. It’s also a non-profit carrying out some incredible conservation work around the world, teaming up with local partners to support crucial research projects everywhere from Mexico to Madagascar.

There is so much to see and you really will need to get there early to have any hope of getting around the entire zoo. But the memory that will stay with me the longest is waking up, drawing back the curtains, and seeing two majestic giraffes amble right past the window. It’s an experience that will be difficult to top without getting on a plane to explore the countries and wildlife in Africa.

Irenie was a guest at The Reserve at Chester Zoo, chesterzoo.org