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

‘Scourge of hate’

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

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

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

‘Nativists have prevailed’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like an orchestra without a conductor’

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

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

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

‘Free spirits’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Knives are now fully out’

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

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

‘Ice maiden is melting’

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

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

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

‘Big question mark’

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

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

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

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

‘Galvanise support’

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

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

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

The White House press briefing room briefly had a new boss, but Katie Zacharia ended her tenure as President Donald Trump’s press secretary last week after just five days. Questions were instantly raised about former television pundit Zacharia and her qualifications for the position, which has an infamously high turnover rate.

Zacharia’s selection

The 41-year-old Zacharia graduated from Pepperdine University in California and appeared to garner favor with Trump after regular appearances on the conservative network Newsmax. But her eligibility for the role of press secretary became a topic of discussion after her first White House press briefing, in which she spoke for only 14 minutes, read “pro-Trump talking points” and called on three reporters, said CNN. Fox News host Sean Hannity, among other critics, sounded “unimpressed with her performance and her answers.”

Questions also surrounded Zacharia’s murky legal background. Zacharia consistently described herself as a lawyer and did receive a law degree at Pepperdine. But there is “no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state,” journalist Judd Legum said in his Popular Information newsletter. She reportedly lives near Los Angeles but is not listed as an attorney with the State Bar of California. Zacharia later told reporters she took the bar while living in China, but she “couldn’t have practiced law in China because foreigners are forbidden to do so,” said The New Republic.

‘Even shorter than Scaramucci’

After her press conference and botched answers about her professional status, the writing seemed to be on the wall for Zacharia, despite the White House standing behind her. She “delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary,” the Trump administration initially said in a statement.

But five days after she took on the role, several news outlets confirmed that Trump had parted ways with Zacharia. Her time as press secretary is the shortest in U.S. history, and her White House tenure was “even shorter than Anthony Scaramucci’s as White House communications director during Trump’s first term,” said NBC News. Scaramucci was in the role for just 11 days and “his name became a descriptor for public officials whose terms were exceedingly brief.”

Populist parties of the far-right and radical-left are on the rise; Germany’s once booming economy, built on an industrial base that was the envy of Europe, is flatlining; and its government – previously deemed a “grand coalition” – is weakened, said Ulf Poschardt in The Telegraph. Now, in yet another blow to national self-esteem, the ex-head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has been arrested on charges of exploiting state secrets.

Over 12 years from 2010, August Hanning, 80, is alleged to have paid his ex-chief of staff to pass him some 2,000 documents, many classified, and to have sold on the secrets they contained. Germany’s leaky, bureaucratic secret services have long had a credibility problem; what makes this case especially damaging is that the alleged crimes were uncovered only by accident. The evidence was found during a raid on Hanning’s house by police looking into an unrelated matter – his suspected role in the abduction of the children of a German steakhouse heiress from their father.

Warning signs

The intelligence world is full of “scandals and scandalettes”, said Der Spiegel, but this one is in a different class. The papers are said to have contained highly sensitive information, some likely supplied by Germany’s intelligence partners – so the affair could have serious international ramifications at a time when Europe is facing grave security threats.

And the charges include treason. Having set himself up as a security consultant, to boost his €11,000-a-month state pension, Hanning (who denies wrongdoing) took on a host of “dubious” private clients, including Putin-aligned oligarchs; but he is also accused of selling secrets to a foreign intelligence agency. Reports suggest that it was Azerbaijan’s.

With hindsight, there were warning signs, said Constanze Stelzenmüller in the Financial Times. It was well known in Berlin, for instance, that Hanning had lost two-thirds of his pension as a result of his directorship of a Latvian bank that went bankrupt in 2019. Yet his alleged crimes went unnoticed for years. Where was the oversight? This scandal comes as an appalling blow to the BND, and Germany as a whole, at a time of great danger. People love spy stories, but there is nothing amusing, or romantic, about this one.

“Jeffrey Archer, who has died aged 86, was irrepressible,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian – “though not necessarily in a good way.” At various points, he was accused of lying about his background, embellishing his CV, committing plagiarism and fraud and – perhaps worst of all – of being “unpleasant to underlings”. And while some of the allegations were never proved, he was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in jail.

Yet Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare – senior Tory politician, former athlete, bestselling novelist and bon viveur – simply sailed on. Editors continued to adulate him; his books kept selling in their millions; and sports stars, writers and politicians still flocked to the “shepherd’s pie and Krug” parties he hosted in his “sumptuous”, art-filled apartment overlooking the Thames. Archer, it turned out, was what the “Titanic” was supposed to be: “unsinkable”.

Murky beginnings

Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, Archer was doted on by his mother, who worked as a journalist on the local paper and sent him to Wellington School on a scholarship. As an adult, he’d imply that he had been to the grander Wellington College. Bullied for being puny, he threw himself into athletics and bodybuilding, and distinguished himself as a sprinter. He stayed at the school until 18, yet left with just three O levels.

On the basis of a false report that he had three A levels and had studied anatomy at a university in the US, he was then accepted to Oxford. But though he presented himself as an undergraduate at Brasenose, he was actually doing a one-year diploma in education at a teacher training college linked to it.

As a student in Oxford, he arranged fundraising drives for Oxfam, including via the coup of persuading The Beatles to appear at Brasenose. Yet as Michael Crick revealed in his biography, Oxfam was not only troubled by the way he exaggerated the sums he had raised; it also suspected that he was skimming off funds.

In Oxford, Archer met Mary Weeden, a chemistry student who became his wife in 1966. Settling in London, he found work as a fundraiser for the United Nations Association. Its chair, the ex-Tory MP Humphry Berkeley, became convinced that he was embezzling funds. But the UNA hushed it up, and Archer was accepted for the safe Tory seat in Louth, Lincolnshire, which he won at a by-election in 1969.

Pride and perjury

In his writing, Archer was no stylist, but he could tell a “rollicking story”, said The Times. In 1976, his debut novel, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less”, became a bestseller. His novels would go on to sell more than 300 million copies. He also returned to politics: Margaret Thatcher made him deputy Tory chairman in 1985, describing him as “the extrovert’s extrovert”.

Then, in 1986, the Daily Star sensationally accused Archer of having been a client of a sex worker named Monica Coghlan. He sued for libel and, in court, denied ever even meeting Coghlan (though he did admit to asking an intermediary to pay her £2,000 in cash to leave the country). She was vilified as a liar and an extortionist. In summing up, the judge famously highlighted Mary Archer’s testimony: “Remember Mary Archer in the witness box,” he told the jury. “Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?” With such a wife, how could Archer “possibly be in need of cold, unloving rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?” Having presented what seemed to be a solid alibi, Archer won and was awarded £500,000 in damages.

Two years later, Archer was accused of insider dealing over shares he’d bought in Anglia TV just before a takeover bid. His wife sat on the firm’s board. He was cleared of that, but then fell out with a friend who had helped concoct his alibi in the libel case, and was charged with perjury.

Following his release from jail, Archer published his prison diaries, carried on with his charity work and wrote more novels. Mary, who survives him with their sons, remained by his side to the end. Explaining her loyalty, she once said: “I think I would find it a little monochrome, a little grey, to have a sort of a more conventional life with a more conventional husband.”

A new United Nations report is sounding the alarm on another potential risk of our constantly evolving world: technology that could allow governments to “read minds” via brainwave interfaces. While your inner thoughts are mostly safe for now, the U.N. is worried this may not always be the case.

‘Introduces significant risks’

The U.N. believes this type of ‘neurotechnology’ is advancing so quickly that “governments’ ability to access and manipulate people’s brains could one day pose a threat to fundamental human rights,” said The New York Times, which first published the U.N.’s report. Neurotechnology “raises profound human rights challenges when applied to the administration of justice,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in the report, and its “expansion beyond clinical settings into investigative, judicial and correctional contexts introduces significant risks.”

This is not the first time the U.N. has issued warnings about the matter. The organization has been concerned about military applications of neurotechnology, especially “brain-computer interfaces, which translate brain activity into commands that can control devices such as computers or robotic prosthetic limbs,” said Politico. The U.N. fears that if a “brain-computer interface is used inappropriately by the military, it could lead to human rights abuses.”

In 2022, UNESCO also published a report on the ethical issues of neurotechnology. Unlike “many other frontier technologies, neurotechnology can directly access, manipulate and emulate the structure of the brain, which is central to notions of human identity, freedom of thought, autonomy, privacy and well-being,” said UNESCO’s report. Still, this marks the first time the U.N. as a whole is waving such a large red flag.

A ‘number of recommendations’

The U.N. report proposed some solutions to safeguard advancing neurotechnologies. It lists a “number of recommendations, including establishing regulations consistent with international law, recognizing thoughts as ‘highly sensitive personal data’ and requiring explicit consent for the use of neurotechnology in criminal justice settings,” said the Times.

The report also gives “states an opportunity to establish clear rules to regulate the use of neurotechnology, based on human rights,” Jeremy Laurence, a spokesman for the U.N. Human Rights Office, said to the Times. This should be accomplished before the technologies “become routine in investigations, courts and prisons.”

Forget the seven-year itch, said The Telegraph. Heterosexual couples are staying together longer, with divorces happening “a record 13 years after marriage”, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

It might not be “a case of happily ever after” but people are increasingly “turning to couples therapy and forgiving infidelity” in what is a “bleak financial landscape”.

Staying power

The 13-year figure, from 2025, is the “longest average period marriages have lasted before divorce or dissolution” since records began back in 1963 and is up from a “record low” of 8.9 years in 1985, said The Times. Record highs were also recorded in same-sex civil partnerships, with male couples lasting 13.7 years on average, while female couples went their separate ways after 13.6 years.

The broad trend of marriages lasting longer is “not solely a British phenomenon”, said The Guardian. While divorce statistics are collected differently in different countries, data from the Pew Research Center in the US shows the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023. In Germany, the average length of marriage was 14.6 years in 2025, and in the Netherlands it was 14.7.

ONS figures from 2023 show the average age of first-time marriage for opposite-sex couples has reached peak levels in the UK – at 34.8 years for men and 33 years for women. This could help explain why marriages are lasting longer, Jo Edwards, head of family law at Forsters, told The Times. People are making the commitment later in life and in doing so “perhaps invest more in it emotionally”.

‘Nuclear option’

Divorce is now “more accessible than it ever has been”, Lisa Pepper, a divorce lawyer at Osbornes Law, told The Guardian, yet “couples are staying together”. One of the “less romantic reasons” for this is that rising mortgages, rent and childcare costs mean they can’t afford to separate. Instead they are trying things like couples therapy or mediation before going for the “nuclear option” of divorce.

The result, said Rebecca Aston-Jones, a senior associate at Clarke-Willmott, is that some separated couples are stuck in “unhappy or hostile living environments” as they “continue to live under the same roof” so they can share their financial assets and split household bills.

The only age demographic for whom divorce rates are on the rise is the “silver splitters” – those in their fifties and sixties and older. Many of these couples have waited until their “children have flown the nest”, Edwards told The Times, before they start divorce proceedings. Younger Gen X and millennial couples are “less likely to rush into marriage and many are choosing not to marry at all”, said Laura Mortimer, a partner at BP Collins.

Another “fundamental change” that might help to explain the figures is the rise in cohabitation, Brienna Perelli-Harris, a professor of demography at Southampton University, told The Guardian. Marriage may be becoming a more “selective institution”, with over 90% of couples living together before tying the knot. Those who move in together and figure out the relationship doesn’t work can go their separate ways. “Those who stay together and eventually marry are, my research shows, the couples who are happiest.”

Formula 1 will race in Africa for the first time since 1993, with Rwanda landing a 10-year deal to stage the African Grand Prix from the early 2030s.

Both Morocco and South Africa also harboured ambitions to host a Grand Prix on the continent but it was Rwanda that was first to produce a coherent and viable plan. Yet the country is a “political hot potato”, with “question marks” over its human rights record, said The Telegraph. Some critics of the “landmark deal” are already calling F1 organisers “morally tone-deaf”.

‘Expanding markets’

Over the past decade, F1 has “dramatically changed its approach” to its racing calendar and started “to focus on expanding markets” amid a “boom in popularity”, said The Athletic. Three races are now run in the US, and this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix was hosted in Malaysia. With over 100 million fans across Africa – and 60% of fans in key sub-Saharan African markets under the age of 35 – a return to the continent has been on the organisation’s radar “for a number of years”.

The “Rwanda Motodrome” will be a purpose-built “natural road course” 25 miles south of Kigali, near the “under-construction Bugesera international airport”, said Autosport. The track will be a fast-flowing, “17-corner anti-clockwise challenge” with, befitting the country’s reputation as the “Land of a Thousand Hills”, a 645ft change in elevation per lap – almost twice that of the current track with the biggest elevation difference, Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. Plans also include a long back straight followed by a hairpin, to promote overtaking and increase excitement for both drivers and fans.

“There is little doubt that courting international sport is central to promoting Rwanda’s regional and global aspirations,” said The Telegraph. The country has already spent more than £190 million on international standard facilities that include a national sports stadium, a basketball arena, a golf course and a cricket stadium. And the investment has already paid “dividends”. Rwanda has hosted the NBA’s Basketball Africa League since 2021 and, in 2023, it was the stage for the annual Fifa Congress. Last year, it became the first African nation to host cycling’s Road World Championships.

‘Accusations of sportswashing’

“Of more relevance”, though, is “Rwanda’s human rights record and long-held accusations of sportswashing”, said The Independent. Amnesty International has said the vague wording of Rwanda’s laws is “deliberately exploited to violate human rights” and is misused to “criminalise criticism of the government”. Human Rights Watch said political rivals have “no real chance of gaining power”, after de facto leader Paul Kagame was declared to have won a 99% majority in the 2024 general election. Kagame has held power since 1994, when he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to “end the genocide in which approximately 700,000 people were killed over 100 days”.

In the “lavish” ceremony announcing Rwanda’s contract, F1 was “keen to stress” that only money from Rwanda’s development board’s investment plan will be used, with no diversion of state funds. Last month, Rwanda announced a five-year, £3.5 billion strategic plan, aimed at attracting private investment. The project is “certainly one of deep fascination”, but there will be “plenty of boxes to tick and plenty of questions to answer. Doubters will need to be appeased.”

It’s fair to say that Rwanda will be “far from the only country on the F1 calendar” with questions over its human rights record, said The Telegraph. The sport has also “come under fire” for racing in China, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

And other major sports, including football, have done deals with Rwanda. Arsenal only recently ended a partnership deal with Visit Rwanda “following intense pressure”, not least from fans, over the country’s support of the M23 militia in conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But Aston Villa, Paris St-Germain, Atlético Madrid and Bayern Munich all have ongoing deals, as do US basketball team, LA Clippers, and American football team, LA Rams.

For the past decade, the Republican Party under President Donald Trump has been overtly dedicated to accentuating traditional gender roles. This administration has gone out of its way to celebrate “masculine” virtues including high testosterone levels, strenuous physical fitness regimens and a dedication to male-focused video gaming. In 2024, that strategy seemed to work, with young men helping to propel Trump back into political power. But now, as Republicans stare down a daunting final leg of the 2026 midterm race, polling shows this once-reliable MAGA voting bloc may be decidedly less reliable.

‘Evaporated’ gains and ‘instant ramifications’

Trump may have “won young men outright” in 2024, but a Cygnal poll from September shows Democrats now leading among men between the ages of 18 to 30 by 17 points, said USA Today. Among Republican voters, men under 40 represent the “group that is most at risk” of peeling off, given their “concerns about the economy and prices,” said The Washington Post. This bloc “proved pivotal” to Trump’s 2024 “sweep of some of the same battleground states holding critical elections this year.”

Republicans were previously able to “capitalize on an environment” in which young men felt “either ignored or actively disliked by the Democratic Party,” said the National Review. But the “cultural factors” that pushed men toward the GOP two years ago “may be outweighed by economic factors this time around.”

The GOP’s 2024 inroads among young men have “evaporated” in a shift that could have “instant ramifications this November,” said Politico. While “young men alone likely won’t determine control of Congress,” their “lack of enthusiasm itself” is a “warning sign for Republicans.”

A football-based strategy

The GOP is making a “massive bet on football” as it scrambles for “midterm momentum,” said Axios. The party is “pouring millions into advertising” at NFL and college games in an attempt to “hold onto male voters — football’s core audience.”

Despite these efforts, Democrats “appear to be gaining ground with young men,” said The Hill. The Cygnal poll showed the demographic has a “negative view of the Republican Party overall.” Democrats “fared slightly better,” though the party “still had a net-negative favorability rating among these voters.”

The City of Doncaster council has launched a health and safety investigation at Yorkshire Wildlife Park after a fatality in a big cat enclosure. William Chapman was killed by a Siberian tiger after he “allegedly climbed over a barrier into the animal’s enclosure” on Saturday, said The Times. Before entering the enclosure, he had been “dancing and wearing headphones” and was heard asking other visitors to take a photo of him.

Some are calling for tighter security measures at wildlife parks after recent high-profile incidents, but others argue that it is the changing behaviour of human visitors that poses a more serious threat to their existence.

‘Deeply tragic’

This is the “second serious incident at a UK zoo in just a few months”, said The Guardian. In June, a three-year-old boy was seriously injured in Cambridgeshire, after allegedly being thrown into a crocodile enclosure by a stranger. Police arrested a man in his 30s, but he was released after he was “assessed as not being fit for interview”.

Although this death is “deeply tragic”, there are “millions” of visits to wildlife parks every year, and these incidents are “vanishingly rare”, said Amy Dickman, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Oxford. The “harsh reality”, however, is that it is “virtually impossible for zoos to stop people who are very determined to breach safety measures”.

“Zoos are actually one of the safest places you can visit,” Jo Judge, chief executive of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, told the BBC. They undergo a “huge number” of risk assessments, as well as “full inspections every six years and periodic inspections every three”.

Modern zoos must find a balance between allowing visitors to be close to animals and keep them safe without being too “heavy-handed”, Dr Campbell Murn, a former member of the government’s zoo expert committee, told the broadcaster. There is already “enormous consideration” for visitor safety. “despite the best security systems and enclosures” sometimes “a determined thief will get into somebody’s house or somebody’s car”.

‘Props’ for social media

Safety at zoos is “not always only about keeping animals in, it’s about keeping humans out”, Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation, which campaigns for the abolition of zoos, told the Daily Express. Turning animal habitats into public attractions encourages a “very unnatural relationship with dangerous wild animals”.

Zoo safety has not worsened, nor are animals “somehow more dangerous”: “human behaviour itself has instead become a problem”, said The Telegraph. In 2019, a woman “climbed over a concrete barrier” at a zoo in Arizona “in a bid to take a selfie with a jaguar” before bystanders intervened. And in May, two American tourists were arrested in Japan after allegedly scaling a fence to enter the enclosure of Punch, a “nine-month-old macaque who captured global attention” after becoming emotionally attached to a soft toy. In the face of this human-led change, “zoos may now have to reflect not just on how they are run, but what they are even for”.

It is “unarguable” that phones and social media have altered the relationship between animals and zoo visitors. Where people would once have been “happy to see a photograph” of a famous animal, now they are “desperate to put their own interactions with endangered species” online. Dangerous animals have become “props” for content, and all too often individuals “endanger their lives” for clicks.

A national program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) is meant to help federal workers forgive their student debt after a decade of government service. But staffing shortages and other operational problems have left many of these workers behind.

‘Stuck and unsure’

PSLF, established in 2007, eliminates the “federal student debt of government and nonprofit workers after 10 years, or 120 qualifying monthly payments,” said CNBC. The program was largely successful in the past: About 1.2 million people had their student loans forgiven, according to the Brookings Institution. But new government evaluations are “reducing the number of qualifying payments and pushing those individuals further away from debt cancellation,” said CNBC.

The changes revolve around a Biden administration buyback rule that gives borrowers with deferred payments a “chance to recover lost time” toward paying off their loans, said The Washington Post, because “time spent in forbearance or deferment typically doesn’t count” toward PSLF. “Coding errors” cited by the Trump administration have led to a “backlog of roughly 82,000 applications,” leaving “borrowers stuck and unsure.”

Program ‘already in shambles’

Overall, the student loan repayment system is “more confusing and chaotic during President Donald Trump’s second term,” said The 19th. Experts believe policy shifts like the buyback-rule changes “have broken a student loan system that was already in shambles, leaving nearly 45 million borrowers, disproportionately women, in financial and emotional distress.” At the same time, the White House has promised up to $60,000 in student loan forgiveness for people who join Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“After nearly a year of hearing nothing, I sent all of my documentation to the Student Loan Ombudsman,” Christine Archer, a federal prosecutor in Hendricks County, Indiana, told The New York Times. “The entire packet was returned as ‘undeliverable.’” Archer graduated law school in 2014 and “tried 22 times over the past 20 months to erase her debt,” said the Times. Archer assumes that the government does not keep proper track of her payments, so she keeps her own records at home. “My husband knows that if the house burns down and he has to pick between getting the wedding album or the student loan file, that he should take the student loan file.”

The Prime Minister of Lithuania has called for a firm Nato plan to respond to Russia’s hybrid attacks, “warning that Moscow is willing to test the alliance”, said Politico.

Mindaugas Sinkevičius spoke after the largest airport in Lithuania was forced to close due to a suspected drone, which was thought to have flown into the country from Belarus.

Forced shelter

Fears of drone attacks have risen this year. In September, a drone that violated Lithuanian airspace was shot down over the nation’s territory for the first time, following similar incidents in Latvia and Estonia. Residents in Vilnius were “forced to take shelter” across the capital in May after a drone alert was “triggered”, briefly grounding flights and rail travel, said the BBC.

Lithuania, a “staunch supporter” of Ukraine, shares a large part of its southern and eastern border with Belarus, a “key Russian ally”. Military drone incursions have become increasingly common across Europe since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the incident served as a reminder of the Baltic state’s vulnerability.

Achilles heel

A “tranquil corner” of Lithuania has become a “tinderbox that could help trigger World War III”, said The Sun. It has been called “the most dangerous place on Earth”, said Der Stern. Spanning 40 miles as the crow flies, the Suwalki Gap is a corridor of land, running along the Polish/Lithuanian border, that connects the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to Belarus.

The area has long been viewed as the Achilles heel of Nato’s eastern defences, because of the relative ease with which Russia could seize it by launching a pincer assault between Kaliningrad in the northwest and its client state, Belarus, in the southeast. The creation of such a land bridge would effectively isolate the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), which are all members of Nato, from the EU.

US General Ben Hodges has described the gap as “one of the most volatile points on the world map”, said The Sun. Lithuania has been “holding military drills and rehearsing wartime evacuation plans” and it has allocated almost €5 billion (£4.2 billion) to defence this year – 5.38% of its GDP, “dwarfing the UK spend of just 2.6%”.

A local father of 11, Valtemir Masharipov, told the tabloid that he fears a Russian invasion. “I would perhaps hide in the cellar, but that would be like burying yourself in a coffin if a bombardment came.” Meanwhile, Sinkevičius warned that a Russian victory in Ukraine would probably push Moscow to look for “other directions”.

The term ‘hobbymaxxing’ refers to filling up one’s schedule with as many hobbies as possible. Young people frustrated by the proliferation of AI and sick of screen addiction are investing in more nondigital pastimes, many of which have a nostalgic bent.

It should come as no surprise that a generation increasingly “disenfranchised by AI” and averse to alcohol consumption is hobbymaxxing, said Sadiba Hasan at The New York Times. The newfound focus seems to be on “wholesome, creative and tactile activities.”

Enriching and positive

In 2026, posts on TikTok using #hobbies saw a 15% increase compared to the previous year. There have been “plenty of conversations” about how hobbies can provide much-needed “fulfillment,” said Rainesford Stauffer at Time, but indulging in childhood amusements specifically can help people step back and see “how much” they have “changed.”

While people have often looked for ways to monetize their favorite pastimes, this new approach is not rooted in finances. Bringing something from the “distant past” into your present creates a “very positive experience,” Dan P. McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, said to Time. It involves “integrating your life around something that was once really important to you.”

Unsuccessful attempts at dating have also led to an increase in the “time, energy and disposable income” young people put into their “passions,” said Hasan. Instead of “spending hours swiping and messaging on apps,” they are focusing on having “packed” calendars that make their lives “feel rich, with or without a romantic partner.”

Having a “full life” can ultimately benefit your relationships, dating coach Amy Chan said to the Times. When a person shifts their focus away from finding a partner and works on “establishing independence,” they develop a different outlook on dating. Investing time in hobbies “creates a positive ripple effect” on your romantic life because you no longer come “from a place of scarcity.”

Taking it too far

Despite the rising cost of nonessential services and activities, known widely as ‘funflation,’ there seems to be no slowing down when it comes to hobby purchases, said Sawdah Bhaimiya at CNBC. According to an analysis by Bank of America, there was a 7.9% year-on-year increase in hobby-related spending in August 2026. A much higher number compared to the 3.4% increase related to other purchases.

Indulgent youngsters should, however, be wary of developing a “hobbying obsession,” said Grey Battle at The Washington Post. Taking it “too far” means the activities start to feel like “additional jobs.”

Digitalization has allowed us to optimize any activity through “metrics and digital record-keeping,” while “social media constantly exposes us to other people’s supposedly successful lives,” said cultural sociologist Sarah Pritz to the Post. This has changed our perspective on leisure, and some could begin to view hobbies as a way to improve productivity. Even “relaxation has acquired a purpose: to recover and perform better afterward,” said the Post.

The framed school photo on the mantlepiece is a “familiar fixture of family life”, said The Times, but the annual push to encourage your child to smile nicely for the school photographer may soon be no more.

The school photography industry is “under threat”, and the main culprits are parents using artificial intelligence tools to scrub the watermarks from photographers’ proofs or previews, and print off photographs without paying. Nearly 60% of school photographers say they have “lost commissioned work to AI”, and more than two-thirds have “experienced copyright infringement”, according to the Association of Photographers.

Prices ‘can run up’

The average spend on a single school photo is £25 but, if you want extra copies for relatives, or fall for added extras like turning the picture “into a magnet, keyring or snow globe”, prices “can run up” to £100 or more, said The Guardian.

Parents are increasingly baulking at shelling out for “mundane headshots” when it’s so easy to use AI tools to erase the photographer’s watermark and get the pictures for free, said Futurism. Some are even opting to “fast-track school picture day” altogether by taking their own photos of their children and then “tossing them into ChatGPT, with a prompt” to “make it look like a school picture”. The tool then adds that “milquetoast background” school photographers so favour, and you’re done.

Privacy concerns

The big catch with this approach is that your child’s face “may not survive the edit”, said Gadget Review. Even after “explicitly asking” the chatbot to “preserve” your child’s features, a face “can change during generation”. You may end up with slightly different “eyes, facial proportions, and hairline”.

Uploading your child’s image to an AI chatbot may also “pose a bigger concern”, said USA Today. That image won’t be discarded after you’re done, even if you delete the chat; it will be kept for potential use in training AI to “generate more refined content”. You are “basically seeding your child’s image into a large language model, and who knows how that can be manipulated” in the future, legal expert Daliah Saper told the paper.

And scrubbing watermarks could “end up being far more costly” than paying for the official photo, said US business magazine Fast Company. Doing so is copyright infringement, and photography companies could choose to pursue legal action, hitting parents with fines that could run into hundreds of pounds.

With artificial intelligence permeating nearly every aspect of our lives, therapists are seeing more people expressing anxiety about the technology. And that number is likely to rise exponentially in the coming years.

‘Techistential dread’

Rapid technological advancement can “induce a sense of overarching anxiety,” said therapist Mark Wilkes at Deseret News. Think of it as “techistential dread,” or the “vertigo of wondering if a new advancement will help or hurt, increase opportunities or threaten human thriving.”

For Silicon Valley therapist Candice Thompson, “discussing fears and worries about AI has now become a regular part of her workday,” said The New York Times. During her “clinical lifetime,” she has “never seen an existential threat like this,” said Thompson to the outlet. No one is immune, “even my clients who are not working in tech.”

Fears about AI are becoming increasingly common among therapy clients, as the technology “reshapes the workplace, gobbles up natural resources” and raises concerns about “privacy and security.” For those who “already have a diagnosed disorder,” such as generalized anxiety, the “distress over AI may feel even more intense.”

There is a “parallel” between this and “depression over climate change,” sociologist Sherry Turkle, the author of “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” said to the Times. “You feel that things are ‘deeply amiss.’” But action may feel “futile, so the depression becomes diffuse.”

‘No simple answers’

For people anxious about AI, there are “no simple answers,” but experts recommend “doing what you can to move the needle in your own life or in public life,” said the Times. The “existential dread” that some express often stems from a “sense of having lost control and any sense of meaning,” said psychologist Yuxin Sun to the Times. It may help to ask: “What are the things I am not going to outsource to AI?”

For therapists, one place to begin is to “distinguish between goals and values,” said Psychology Today. It seems “plausible” that some clients’ “medium-term goals” will be “usurped by machines.” So goals, at least “certain kinds of professional goals,” will arguably “no longer be as central to clients’ self-conceptions as they have traditionally been.”

“A disaster.” That was German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s own verdict on his party’s showing in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week, said Klára Odstrcilová on EU Perspectives (Brussels).

The state is one of the five that made up the former East Germany (there are 16 German states in total). And though Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 38% in the first state election held after reunification in 1990, it has been shedding support there ever since. In the previous state election (2021) it won just 13%.

Even so, no one expected that this time the CDU wouldn’t even make 5% – the threshold a party has to cross to gain parliamentary representation. By contrast, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party – which had vowed to bring down energy prices by restoring the supply of Russian gas (the state is home to the terminal of the suspended Nord Stream pipelines) – more than doubled its vote share to 38.2%. So yes, Merz is right: a disaster, indeed.

‘Existential crisis’

Nor was the CDU’s failure confined to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said The Economist. On the very same day as that debacle, the party got thumped in Berlin’s local elections, in this case being humbled by the far-left Die Linke party. And these twin losses themselves came just two weeks after the CDU had suffered a crushing defeat in another east German state, Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD triumphed with 43.8%.

Indeed, Merz has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most unpopular German leader in polling history: his approval rating is just 13%. Yet despite all this, he has vowed to stay on for the sake of Germany’s “democratic future”, and to pursue his economic and welfare reforms with “backbone, steadfastness, and patience”. Brave words, but some of Merz’s own colleagues believe their “zombie chancellor” can’t go on.

That the CDU, which has produced more chancellors than any other party, should now be “plunged into an existential crisis” is all down to Merz, said Hugo Müller-Vogg in Cicero (Berlin). He’s only been in power for 16 months, but over that time the national vote share of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has fallen from 28.5% to around 20%. Merz’s fractious coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats has completely failed on its promises to contain the far-right and reverse economic stagnation.

Twilight phase

Immigration is usually the issue people cite when accounting for the rise of the AfD, said Dalia Marin on Project Syndicate (Prague). But more attention should be paid to a factor every bit as crucial: China. Economic competition from China has upended Germany’s export model of selling cars and high-end machinery, and devastated the advanced manufacturing industry Germans have long relied on for “good jobs and broad-based prosperity”. Average annual growth since 2020 has slumped to just 0.12%.

Nor does this only affect the poorer, former communist eastern states that are the AfD’s heartlands: “western” states such as Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, also feel the pain. In March, the AfD almost doubled its vote share there to 18.8%: it should no longer be seen as just a creature of the east.

Merz himself now seems to have entered “Kanzlerdämmerung” – the twilight of the chancellor, said Zafer Mese in Daily Sabah (Istanbul): his coalition looks marooned. However, no CDU or CSU politician has stepped forward to replace him, so he may cling on for a while yet.

And he has one thing in his favour, said Roland Nelles in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Next year’s five state elections are all in western states, ones where the AfD, despite its recent gains, will struggle to land a knockout blow. The “stabilising effect” this will have could lend the coalition a small window of opportunity in which to kick-start growth through its welfare and pension reforms. They’d better hope it does: if not, more election nights like the ones last week will follow.

Many people are familiar with El Niño’s warming surface temperatures across the Pacific Ocean. Less known is a separate but related oceanographic feature quickly positioning itself as one of, if not the, major disruptive weather events of the season. Dubbed a Kelvin wave, researchers warn this large surge of warm ocean water could lead to intense meteorological destruction during a winter storm season already heightened by a particularly active El Niño.

‘Not like crashing waves at the beach’

Unlike “typical” waves visible across the “surface of the water,” Kelvin waves occur when “bursts of westerly winds push warm water eastward,” said LiveNow from Fox. The eastern push then generates Kelvin waves that “travel beneath the water’s surface along the equator.”

Kelvin waves manifest when ocean trade winds that “usually” move from South America toward Asia “die down or reverse" in El Niño years, said The Guardian, setting off a “massive slow-moving slosh of water.” But Kelvin waves are “not like crashing waves at the beach.”

These waves are “planetary in scale, spanning thousands of miles,” and carry an “untold amount of warm water that slowly moves from the western Pacific, along the equator, towards South, Central and North America,” said The Guardian. Unlike normal shoreline waves, Kelvin waves are a “propagating disturbance” that moves energy through the ocean, “shifting heat, pressure, and sea level” along the way, said the Desert Sun.

Lasting impact

This year’s wave has “added nearly a foot to tides in Southern California,” said The Atlantic. It has also created conditions that “tend to drum up storm activity in the Pacific.”

Potential Kelvin wave damage “depends on the force of the swells and how high tides are,” said The Orange County Register. If the wave is “indeed arriving now” at California’s shoreline, it will dovetail with “6-foot tides” and hurricane conditions “already churning up the ocean’s force.” Though the exact timing of the wave’s impact on coastal California remains uncertain, said The Guardian, researchers predict the wave’s effects will “linger through the winter and into early next year.”

A Tennessee woman, convicted of murder, has survived attempts to execute her by lethal injection. She was rushed to hospital, still breathing, after receiving two doses of pentobarbital.

Christa Pike was scheduled for execution yesterday and, after a late stay was overturned, would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee for more than 200 years. Now the 50-year-old’s botched capital punishment has drawn fresh attention to concerns about the fairness of her murder trial.

‘No precedent’

Early yesterday, Pike’s execution had been briefly paused by a federal appeals court on the grounds that more time was needed to consider her case. But, an hour before the midnight deadline for her execution was due to expire, the US Supreme Court overruled the stay, and prison officials went ahead with the process.

Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for a murder she committed at the age of 18, had asked to be executed by an all-female firing squad, saying that being held down by a group of men would traumatise her. But execution by firing squad is not allowed in Tennessee, so lethal injection was used instead.

After the required syringe of pentobarbital was administered, Pike was given a second dose. Members of the media, who were at the execution as witnesses, described her as “somewhat alert”. They told The New York Times that, at one point, she could be heard singing with her spiritual adviser. Her legal team say she still had a heartbeat after being given the second dose, and had not lost consciousness.

As it became clear that the lethal injection had not worked, the execution was halted and Pike was transferred to hospital. She was apparently snoring loudly as she was taken to the ambulance. Her current condition is unknown, and it remains unclear what her fate will be if she recovers. State governor Bill Lee has suspended all further executions in Tennessee this year, pending an investigation into the incident.

“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.” The Tennessee Department of Correction insisted that it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”.

‘Uniquely compelling’

At her trial in 1995, Pike had confessed to the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Sleemer, “a young woman she viewed as a romantic rival” when they met at a vocational camp for troubled teens, said Al Jazeera. With her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend, Pike lured Slemmer into the woods, where they taunted her, beat her with asphalt rocks and slashed her with a knife.

Pike, who was described by the Daily Mail as a “Satanist killer”, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull after the killing. Shipp said he had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest. Both were convicted of first-degree murder. Shipp, who was 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; Pike, who, at 18, qualified for capital punishment, was sentenced to death.

Since her sentencing, her legal team have uncovered details about her childhood that they say the jury never had the chance to consider. She has a “documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect”, said the BBC. She was physically and sexually abused by several of her mother’s husbands and boyfriends, and described being raped twice, at the age of 11 and 17. Her legal team also presented evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy, impairing Pike’s brain development and her impulse control.

“It is mind-boggling” that her history of abuse and rape was not revealed to the jury, Sandra Babcock, an expert in gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School, told the BBC. Her case is “uniquely compelling, not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness”.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said at the weekend that she had waited decades to see Pike’s death sentence carried out. A victim’s rights group had raised funds for her and her husband to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died,” she said. “I just want Christa down so I can end it.”

The sight of a disabled octogenarian being removed from her home on a stretcher has reignited public anger about Spain’s housing crisis. Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets last weekend, protesting at the eviction of Madrid pensioner María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, and demanding “stronger protection for tenants in the face of a housing shortage and soaring rents”, said the BBC.

‘You are not alone‘

Abascal has lived in her flat in Madrid’s El Retiro neighbourhood for more than 70 years, and was paying rent of around €500 per month when the building was bought by investment company Urbagestión in 2018. The company increased the rent to €2,650 a month, “later reduced to €1,650”, but still well above Abascal’s monthly pension of €1,350, said Euronews.

The company moved to evict her. They had three attempts blocked by the courts, so Abascal‘s successful eviction last week “shocked many”, said CNN. Police used tear gas to clear a path between protesters who had “waited outside her home since the previous night trying to prevent” her removal. Abascal was brought out on a stretcher while the crowd chanted: “You are not alone.” She was taken to hospital, suffering from anxiety and extreme exhaustion.

A few days after her very public eviction came the “welcome news” that Abascal would be able to return to her home. Her lawyers said her landlord has agreed to let her pay a rent “similar to the one she had previously”, under a new eight-year contract. But we need things to improve for everyone, protestor Jacob Patiño told the BBC: “There are lots and lots of other people who are being evicted.”

‘Global symbol‘

Nearly 10,000 people gathered in Madrid in the afternoon after Abascal’s eviction, both to protest at what had happened to her and to express a wider “frustration over the growing difficulties in finding housing”, said CNN. There was also “a huge wave of spontaneous solidarity” protests in Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia.

As Spain’s population continues to grow, “housing construction remains far below the levels recorded before the financial crisis”, said Euronews. The imbalance of supply and demand is “particularly concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres”, where rents have spiralled in recent years.

Under pressure from the widespread protests, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has brought forward a long-delayed housing reform bill. “Crafting legislation” that his minority government could hope to get through the Spanish parliament was “tricky”, said Politico. The draft bill had to be “moderate enough” for the Catalan separatist Junts party, “which is conservative on landowners’ rights”, but not so “lenient” that it would alienate Sánchez’s left-wing allies. As it currently stands, the bill bans evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, limits rent hikes for two years and prohibits investment funds purchasing houses for two years. It now has a month to be approved by parliament.

Abascal’s case has resonated far beyond Spain; she has become a “global symbol for housing activists”, said El Pais. “What is happening here is a signal for all of Europe,” political analyst Federico Tomasone told the paper. “This transcends borders. There are many Maricarmens everywhere.”

Given the significant concerns over the safety of artificial intelligence, the chipmaking behemoth Nvidia has unveiled a new security apparatus that it hopes will stop AI bots from running amok. But many still worry about the implications.

‘Isolation, monitoring and behavior detection’

Known as the Open Agent Safety Platform, Nvidia’s new safety tool is part of an effort to ensure that all AI agents “operate in a zero-trust environment out of the box,” the company said in a press release. AI agents require “isolation, monitoring and behavior detection” to minimize “drift,” or what Nvidia describes as an AI bot performing “actions that depart from the intended task or operating constraints.” The company says Open Agent can “control what AI agents can access in real time and shut them down when they break the rules,” said Bloomberg.

The new software lets users “formally verify an agent has enough authority to do its job and no more” and can “quarantine a suspicious agent in milliseconds,” Nvidia’s Vice President of Enterprise AI Justin Boitano told The Associated Press. Nvidia also believes its new platform could have prevented a “recent incident involving a swarm of OpenAI agents that autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face,” a “high-profile breach that inflamed the safety concerns about AI.” OpenAI has paused development on its models since that incident.

‘Get the company under control’

Issues with AI safety, specifically AI going rogue, have led to a “rare display of unity from the likes of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk in calling for a slowdown in development before AI advances beyond human control,” said The Wall Street Journal, referencing the respective CEOs of brands OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok. These AI executives have “repeatedly called for international regulations to constrain the systems, and some researchers have warned that AI may even present a threat to human life,” said CNN.

But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has downplayed these concerns. If companies like OpenAI “believe their company is out of control, then get the company under control,” Huang told CNN. The same day the safety platform was announced, Nvidia also revealed it would “buy back an additional $150 billion worth of its shares,” said CNN, in addition to $85 billion already in transit, representing the “largest single corporate share repurchase ever.”

An “extraordinary diplomatic row” has erupted between South Korea and Ukraine over the fate of two North Korean prisoners of war, said the Financial Times.

At the UN General Assembly last week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that Ukraine had transferred the men, who were captured while fighting for Russia, to South Korea. Seoul has since demanded an official apology, accusing the Ukrainian president of violating a secrecy agreement about the transfer, which was arranged to ensure the prisoners’ safety from reprisals.

But Kyiv has denied that such a confidentiality agreement existed, creating both an international and domestic drama for President Lee Jae-myung.

The prisoners of war

The two men, who were reportedly wounded and captured in Russia’s Kursk region in early 2025, are among tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine. So far, they are the only known surviving prisoners. One of the men, when he realised he was going to be taken prisoner, “tried to kill himself and he was shocked that fate didn’t let him die”, Zelenskyy added in his speech. “This is how they raise people in the North.”

The two prisoners told local media that they “wanted to be sent to South Korea”, said BBC News. South Korea “legally regards the North as part of its territory”, said The Associated Press. Its policy is to accept and support defectors from North Korea; more than 34,000 have arrived since the end of the Korean War. The majority are female civilians from the “poorer northern regions”; defections by soldiers are “uncommon”.

After negotiations between Seoul and Kyiv, the soldiers reportedly arrived in South Korea via a third country this month. Seoul claims Ukraine requested secrecy to avoid domestic criticism for passing up the opportunity to exchange the North Koreans for Ukrainian prisoners held in Russia. South Korea agreed, President Lee claims, partly to protect the soldiers and their families from reprisals by the North Korean regime.

In North Korea, the families of defectors can face “collective punishment such as internment or forced labour”, said the Financial Times. Ukraine has “done a lot of damage to the welfare of these soldiers and their families”, said Peter Ward at the Sejong Institute. “The South Korean media should probably never have been granted access to them. Ideally, their capture should have been kept permanently secret.”

Diplomatic headache

After Zelenskyy revealed the transfer at the UN, Lee said on X that Ukraine had broken a “non-disclosure agreement”. But Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, denied the accusation, writing on Facebook that “there was no such agreement”.

The row has “prompted questions over why Seoul placed such importance on keeping the transfer quiet”, said The Korean Herald. South Korea might have “wanted to minimise potential friction” with the North, as Seoul hopes to “reopen dialogue” between Washington and Pyongyang.

The row also highlights South Korea’s ambiguous position on Ukraine: South Korea was once one of Russia’s foremost trading partners, and has worked to “deepen trade and diplomatic relations with Russia, which borders North Korea”, said the BBC.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Seoul condemned Moscow and joined Western sanctions against Russia. In July, it announced a $100 million support package for Kyiv. But it has “kept the war at arm’s length”, said The Guardian. It has refused to send much-needed weapons, citing its policy of only providing humanitarian aid, rather than lethal weapons, to active war zones.

The situation has created a headache for Lee, whose government is “keen to improve relations” with North Korea. The row has turned “cautious support for Kyiv into open criticism” of aid.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion attempt against neighboring Ukraine nears its fifth year of region-disrupting violence, a new wave of intelligence reports has raised a frightening prospect: a widening theater of violence, in which Russian hybrid warfare strikes deep European Union territory. With alarm bells ringing over potential Russian offensives — both digital and kinetic — in the coming months, vulnerable European nations must figure out if, and how, to respond.

‘Undermining’ NATO

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed the “rising number” of hybrid incidents in NATO countries as a sign that Russia is “losing the war in Ukraine,” said The Associated Press. But recent incidents, including an “explosive-laden drone at a German airport” and a “strike on a passenger train near the Polish border,” have presaged a “rush of warnings about more chaos to come” across Europe, said The New York Times. “The question is how Europe responds.”

Unlike the “classic thing you think of with NATO” warfare, in which one country’s army “attacks, tries to invade” and “tries to take things,” Russia’s hybrid model is “aimed at undermining our NATO allies without a full-scale invasion,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The goal is to “sow doubt” and “cause NATO countries to back off of support for Ukraine” for fear “there might be a bigger escalation with Russia that we don’t want.”

‘Hardened’ Western rhetoric

Russia’s “shadow war” with Europe “grows bolder by the day,” said the The Kyiv Independent. “No one can say how far the Kremlin is ready to go.” Although “rhetoric in Western capitals has hardened,” material responses so far have “ranged from symbolic ones” targeting Russian “cultural and diplomatic centers” to “fresh sanctions and arms packages for Ukraine,” which Moscow has already “weathered for years.”

Europeans should guard against “overreacting to any sort of hybrid activity,” said current U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker at a recent event in Iowa, per the AP. Russian hybrid attacks aren’t “at a volume that would mean that it’s the beginning” of broader violence. “We haven’t reached that threshold.”

When the former deputy PM Nick Clegg – and his erstwhile Meta colleague Sheryl Sandberg – joined the board of Nscale in March, it looked like something big was in the offing. And so it has proved, said Elias Schisgall in The Wall Street Journal.

The British tech unicorn, which operates a string of AI-ready data centres in the US and Europe and is backed by the deep pockets of Nvidia, has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Founder Josh Payne promises “a fully vertically integrated platform that can deliver computing power to the AI boom at scale”. Nscale has just won a huge contract to supply computing capacity to Anthropic worth $45 billion over six years.

Even so, the mooted $35 billion valuation looks heroic, said FT Alphaville. Six months ago, the company, which reported a $1.02 billion loss in the first-half, was valued at just $14.6 billion. Now it is “a multibillion-dollar bet that investor enthusiasm for computing infrastructure projects will endure”, despite growing calls for an AI slowdown. Spun out of an Australian crypto mining group in 2024, Nscale is relatively untested. Remarkably for the leader of a company of its age and size, Payne, 32, bagged total compensation of £17.2 million last year.

Part of Nscale’s shtick is that “its British roots” are “a competitive advantage in the race to build sovereign AI infrastructure across Europe”, said Saskia Koopman in City A.M. Indeed, it intends to “open its IPO to ordinary British investors” through a UK retail offer. There’s no shortage of “heavyweight names” or “lofty” ambitions in the prospectus, said Ben Martin in The Times. But Nscale will ultimately live or die on its ability to secure “significant multi-year customer contracts”. That means “substantial upfront capital expenditure”.

The hard-right Sweden Democrats (SD) had high hopes of achieving complete “detoxification” in last week’s general elections, said Nicola Quondamatteo in Jacobin (New York).

With its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, the anti-immigrant populist party had started its journey to the mainstream in the 1990s, when it expelled overt hardliners from its ranks and moderated some of its policies. By 2018, it was the third-largest party in the Swedish parliament. But other parties continued to treat the SD as pariahs until 2022, when the party became the second largest, with 73 seats – and a conservative bloc struck the Tidö deal, giving the SD influence over some policy areas in return for it propping up the centre-right minority administration.

Ahead of last week’s election, PM Ulf Kristersson had promised that if the bloc retained power, he’d offer the SD an even bigger prize: places in the cabinet. But Swedish voters had other ideas: they turned away from the SD in droves. With its support down three points, to 17.5%, it lost 11 seats, leaving the right-of- centre bloc with 173 seats in total, three fewer than a centre-left bloc led by Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson.

Incendiary rhetoric

In a sense, the SD has been a victim of its own success, said Håkan Boström in Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg). When it started railing against immigration, the main parties still took pride in Sweden’s reputation as a haven for refugees. But ten years ago, as Sweden and other EU states reeled from the 2015 refugee crisis, parties across the spectrum agreed that the rules had to be tightened. Then, in 2022, the new SD-supported government embarked on reforms to reduce immigration as much as possible without breaching EU law.

In recent years, asylum claims have fallen sharply and, since 2016, net immigration has fallen by two-thirds to about 47,000 a year. As a result, immigration was not the biggest issue for voters this year. Yet the SD chose “Make Sweden Sweden Again” as its campaign slogan, and stepped up its incendiary rhetoric. “Do you miss Mogadishu? Remigration will help you go home” read an ad it splashed on buses around Gothenburg, which has a large Somali diaspora. This repelled moderate swing voters, and mobilised turnout for the centre-left.

Shifting the dial

In an “ominous political landscape”, European progressives will have derived welcome optimism from the result in Sweden, said The Guardian. But the ray of hope it offers is not a bright one. In Sweden, as elsewhere, the far-right’s nativist agenda has been so normalised that the Social Democrats – should they form an administration – are not proposing a very different approach. And the Sweden Democrats will keep stoking divisions from the sidelines. They and their supporters are already blaming their defeat on “imported” Muslim votes. Europe’s social democrats must be courageous in seeking to “shift the dial of political debate” – or the far-right “will continue to set its terms”.

This week, the world heard from an often quiet figure at the center of the Iran-U.S. war: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. While subservient to Iran’s supreme leader, Pezeshkian wields immense power as the head of government, and a fiery speech at the United Nations showed that he has no intention of rolling over for the United States.

Heart surgeon-turned-president

Pezeshkian, 71, was born in the city of Mahabad and completed his military conscription service at the age of 19. During his conscription, he served in “Zabul — one of the most deprived cities in Sistan and Balochestan province, an experience that was said to be his political awakening,” said The Guardian. After returning home, Pezeshkian decided to have a career in medicine and “returned to his hometown to start his medical training.”

He eventually pivoted to cardiac health and “became a heart surgeon and served as the head of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences,” said The Associated Press. His middle life was also marked by tragedy, after a 1994 car accident “killed his wife, Fatemeh Majidi, and a daughter.” Pezeshkian eventually became a politician, serving as Iran’s “deputy health minister and later as the health minister under the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.”

In 2024, Pezeshkian ran for president as a moderate with a pledge to “open Iran to the world,” said Deutsche Welle. His campaign focused on “rebuilding trust between the government and the Iranian people, fighting disillusionment after persistent economic woes and political repression.” He won the election in a runoff, and his victory came as a stunning upset against his hardline opponent. While Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains the country’s ultimate authority, Pezeshkian has become a historically significant leader.

‘Never bow our head or bend at the knee’

Since the war in Iran began, Pezeshkian has largely pushed back against what he views to be U.S. aggression. He asserted himself during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly against President Donald Trump, who had personally threatened Iran when he spoke to the body the day before. The country will “never bow our head or bend at the knee,” Pezeshkian said of Iran during his speech. The Iranian president was “defiant in the face of what he called ‘bullying’ by Trump, while saying Tehran is open to negotiations,” said USA Today.

Pezeshkian’s visit to the United Nations in New York City is an “extraordinary appearance,” given that the U.S. and Iran are in a state of war, said USA Today. Just “months after he and other Iranian leaders were targeted by U.S. airstrikes, Pezeshkian — like other world leaders — is traveling through Manhattan with a Secret Service escort.” Pezeshkian has repeatedly accused the U.S. of war crimes and during his speech he “held up a photo of children killed in a U.S. strike on an Iranian primary school at the start of the war.”

While much of the ongoing tension surrounds Iran’s alleged attempts to enrich uranium, Pezeshkian has denied that his country “wanted a nuclear weapon” but “refused limitations on the country’s civilian nuclear program,” said NPR. His conditions for negotiating in the future include the “halting” of “U.S. hostilities, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and the release of Iranian funds.”

Across elite sports, a debate is growing over whether professional sporting bodies should support female athletes in freezing their eggs.

The Royal Spanish Football Federation recently announced an agreement to fund egg freezing and fertility treatments for its players, the first national federation to do so. Under the partnership, valid until 2029, the World Cup winners will “be given more options to pursue motherhood when they feel the time is right”, said ESPN.

It follows similar briefings by the National Women’s Soccer League in the US and Chelsea F.C. Women in the UK, as well as other sporting leagues like the Women's National Basketball Association and Women’s Tennis Association. But experts and athletes have raised concerns about the ethics of employer-offered fertility treatments and whether they truly support athletes during pregnancy and after they become parents.

‘Powerful message’

“Elite athletes have been choosing to freeze their eggs on their own for years,” said El País – when they can “find a gap” in their intense schedules. What’s new is that national teams, leagues and clubs are “beginning to take charge of the process”.

This year, the governing body of European football, Uefa, recommended including fertility and reproductive treatments in employment policies. And this month, Chelsea became the first Women’s Super League club to provide a fund for its squad to freeze their eggs and access fertility services. The fund, understood to be worth at least £189,000, is enough for the entire squad to freeze their eggs at a clinic in London’s Harley Street, said The Observer, “making it the most significant investment into fertility treatment from a women’s sports team in the UK”.

The Spanish federation “understands that you are serving your country against your biological clock, that you cannot stop and cannot be a mother because you need your body to work”, said former Spain captain Alexia Putellas. The footballers who want to become mothers “do not find it easy to fit it in” alongside World Cups.

Fertility services are a huge step forward in giving women more choices, and they send “the powerful message” that champions “should not have to choose between their sport and motherhood”, said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. But “fertility” only goes halfway.

‘Double-edged sword’

Fertility preservation measures are “typically presented as another way to give women in elite sport greater freedom”, said CBC News. But some worry they could inadvertently “perpetuate the attitude that women should wait for retirement” to become mothers.

For many LGBTQ+ athletes, IVF is a necessary part of family planning regardless of timing, said two-time Olympic rower Jill Moffatt. In that sense, funding egg freezing and fertility treatments is a “huge win”. Plus, many athletes likely couldn’t afford expensive fertility treatments. But it’s only a feminist “win” if teams offer support during pregnancy and postpartum, such as maternity leave, breastfeeding facilities and child care options. “Otherwise, it’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she told the news site.

Investing in post-partum training, nutrition specialists, bespoke after-care plans and reintegration programmes is “more inclusive and pioneering than any offer of fertility treatment – and just as important”, said Carson.

Ana Peleteiro-Compaoré Brión, a Spanish Olympic triple jumper, also criticised the Spanish federation's move. “Is this measure intended to make it easier for women to be mothers, or is it intended to make it easier for them not to be while they’re playing?” she posted on Instagram.

When an organisation offers fertility preservation, it brings up the question of whether “the underlying message is that you’re telling your players, ‘Don’t get pregnant while you’re working for us’”, Lamia Zafrani, an athlete gynaecologist, told DW.

The other difficulty is scheduling treatment around training and fixtures. Egg freezing involves multiple appointments, hormone injections and a minor operation. The challenge was highlighted by former England goalkeeper Mary Earps in her book “All In”, who recalled asking an expert: “I’ve got three weeks. Do you think I could fit in an egg-freezing cycle in that time?”

Drugs that are used to stimulate egg production for egg freezing or IVF are also banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, meaning athletes must disclose the medication. “Because there is still some stigma about egg freezing, some female athletes do not want people to know they’re undergoing this procedure,” Margie Davenport, the perinatal research lead for Fifa’s female athlete project, told The Athletic.

Ultimately, “fertility timelines will not change,” said the news site, “but the sport’s infrastructure must.”

The cost of diesel fuel is breaking records, with spillover effects for the cost of groceries and other goods. President Donald Trump is reportedly contemplating a possible solution: a 90-day ban on exports of diesel from U.S. refineries. Experts warn the move could backfire.

‘Most important fuel on the planet’

The idea of an export ban is “quickly gaining traction with more Republicans” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. The United States “produces more fuel than it consumes,” and diesel exports have risen by 31% since the war began. Some officials see a halt to overseas sales as an easy way to ease price pressures. “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on X.

But oil companies are likely to “lose money” if exports are banned, said the Journal. The White House should not create “new restrictions that risk making a difficult situation worse,” American Petroleum Institute’s Mike Sommers said to the outlet. A decision will happen “fast, one way or the other,” Trump said Tuesday to reporters, per the outlet.

Diesel is the “most important fuel on the planet” given that it powers “trucks, trains, tractors and ships at the heart of the modern economy,” said CNN. The Iran war is not the only reason for the price spike: Ukraine has “knocked out a series of refineries in Russia,” and Russia and China have both imposed their own export restrictions.

Experts warn that while an export ban might be “quite effective at lowering prices” in the short term, it would also “jack up gasoline prices, crush U.S. refiners and damage America’s reputation as a reliable energy superpower” over the long run, said CNN. Domestic refiners deprived of overseas markets would “logically pull back on how much crude they process into fuel.” That would ultimately cause domestic fuel costs to “soar,” oil consultant Andy Lipow said to the outlet.

Food supply ‘could be disrupted’

More than a quarter of a century ago, her heroic struggle against a utility giant over groundwater contamination became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie. Now, Erin Brockovich has turned her attention to the “rapid and opaque” expansion of artificial intelligence data centres across the United States, said El País.

‘Stubborn and sexy’

“Say the name Erin Brockovich and you think, strong, tough, stubborn and sexy”, her website declares. But she is also much more than that: a “modern-day David who loves a good brawl with today’s Goliaths”.

Brockovich was working as a file clerk at a Los Angeles law firm in 1992 when she uncovered evidence linking a rash of illnesses in the town of Hinkley, California, to high levels of hexavalent chromium found in the drinking water.

Her work ultimately led to more than 600 residents of Hinkley filing a lawsuit against utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric. The $333 million settlement they received was the largest of its kind at the time. Her crusade was immortalised in the Academy Award-winning movie “Erin Brockovich” starring Julia Roberts.

At times denounced as “the environmentalist with cleavage”, she “frequently saw her blonde hair and striking looks turned into weapons against her”, said El País. But she was “raised by parents who instilled in her an extraordinary sense of resilience and self-confidence”. And, in the wake of the movie, she “did not remain just another heroine fashioned by Hollywood’s capitalist, and often patriarchal, storytelling instincts”.

‘Hinkley on steroids’

Brockovich's name has become “synonymous with grassroots activism against powerful institutions”, said Time, and this year, she has “turned her attention to a new target” the AI data centres being built by tech giants like Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

In April, she “put a call-out on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch”, said The Guardian. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied.

She built a “chilling” map of significant AI data centres that are either operational or under construction, plus locations where community members have emailed in concerns. As of June, 33 data centres had been completed and were operational, 68 were under construction, and 41 were proposed. In May, Utah gave approval to a centre twice the size of Manhattan. “This feels like Hinkley on steroids,” Brockovich told the broadsheet.

She says the data centres are being built without proper environmental assessments or community input, and have significant impacts on local resources, particularly water usage. She’s concerned they are being built in a secretive manner, bypassing democratic processes, and causing harm to the environment and local communities. She wants a “case-by-case moratorium” on the approval of new data centres until their impacts can be properly assessed and addressed.

“You’re up against forces that have all the money and all the intelligence and all the bandwidth in the world,” she said. But Brockovich, said The Guardian, “won’t walk away until it’s over”.

A K-shaped economy, in which the rich get richer while everybody else falls behind, is showing up at the airport. Airlines in desperate search of profits are expanding roomy first- and business-class seating on flights while economy class continues to get more cramped.

‘Literal experience of class division’

American Airlines is “ripping up existing airplane configurations” to add more business-class seating, said CNBC. Half the airline’s revenues come from the 30% of seats in the high-end category, which is why the more expensive (and more luxurious) seating options are “only going to grow in our fleet,” said American Airlines CEO Robert Isom this week at an industry conference, per the outlet.

American’s newest Boeing 777 aircraft will feature a “monster 70-suite business-class cabin,” said CNBC. “Higher-spending customers” are a “resilient and bright spot” for airlines struggling with rising fuel costs. So the K-shaped economy is “taking flight.”

Budget airlines are joining the rush. JetBlue is revamping its first-class cabins with “redesigned seats, premium amenities and upgraded seatback technology,” said Fox Business. Flyers are “increasingly looking for more premium experiences,” said JetBlue CEO Joanna Geraghty in a statement, per the outlet. Southwest Airlines does not offer a first-class cabin on its flights, but it is building deluxe lounges at four airports — Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu and Nashville — as it transitions from a no-frills carrier “known for free bags and open seating” to an outfit “fighting competitors for bigger spenders,” said The Washington Post.

You should “go fly on an airplane” if you want to understand the K-shaped economy, said Allison Morrow at CNN. Delta Airlines started 2026 with projections of a 20% profit increase “largely on the backs of its ‘premium’ customers.” The industry’s shift to a greater reliance on high-dollar offerings suggests the shift to “more expensive travel isn’t just a fad.”

Economy-class passengers, meanwhile, are getting squeezed. Legroom for standard economy seats has shrunk “from roughly 35 inches in the 1970s to about 31 inches today,” said Simple Flying. Some airlines leave passengers a mere 28 inches of space. The disparity between experiences in the front and back of airliners is the “literal experience of class division" in the U.S., said Morrow.

Economy: ‘Essential for filling aircraft’

Airlines not so long ago “routinely gave first- and business-class seats away in free upgrades” to loyal customers, said ABC News. But those days are done for, given the money that can now be made from selling those tickets.

Revenue from pricier seating has “more than doubled” in the last decade, said Delta CEO Ed Bastian at a March conference, per ABC News. That can help airlines be “resilient through these tougher times.”

Economy passengers are still needed, even if they do not get the same legroom as business-class peers. The back-of-the-plane crowd is “essential for filling aircraft and covering fixed costs” for airlines, said Quartz. These days, though, it is the top-end passengers who “increasingly determine whether a route, and a carrier, makes money.”

Booker Prize judge and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said it was a “surprise” that four novels written by men have ended up on this year’s shortlist of six – because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”. The male authors still in the running for the prestigious 2026 literary award are those who are able to “rethink their roles”.

‘Masculine authority in crisis’

This year’s shortlisted authors span a “generational arc”, stretching from 40-year-old Rebecca Perry to the “81-year-old veteran of experimental speculative fiction” M. John Harrison, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Men outnumber women but the “novels’ subject matter” is “more revealing” than any author’s “identity characteristics”. An “overarching theme” emerges: “masculine authority in crisis – and discomfort”. These are tales of fathers, sons and husbands who are “struggling to inhabit the roles, structures and stories that are supposed to contain them”.

Luke Kennard’s brilliantly funny campus novel, “Black Bag”, sees an out-of-work actor paid to lurk inside a “leather suit bag, as status and confidence evaporate”, while Douglas Stuart “examines the weight of male expectation” in “John of John”, a story about a young gay art student who returns to his repressive home in the Hebrides. In “The Disappearers”, Marlon James charts how masculinity is “brutally policed” in a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Jamaica. And “The End of Everything", Harrison’s “unsettling” post-apocalyptic tale, “tests the masculine survivalist fantasy of practical competence”.

The female authors on the list also turn their lens on male characters: with “domestic precision”, Elizabeth Strout portrays an increasingly isolated husband in “The Things We Never Say”, while in “May We Feed the King”, Perry follows a “reluctant medieval monarch who inherits the ultimate ‘great man’ role without wanting it”.

None of the books fulfill expectations of what a “male” novel is meant to be. Instead, they reject the very things that male protagonists would once have taken “for granted”, from sexual legitimacy and paternal authority to economic security and “mastery of the world”.

‘Are men OK?’

Last year’s winner, David Szalay’s “Flesh”, a rags-to-riches story about a Hungarian man catapulted into the world of the super-wealthy, sparked much debate about “literary fiction’s renewed interest in masculinity”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. This year’s list will only intensify the discussion, “the theme of which might be summed up as: are men OK?”

Some of the writers are “playfully experimental” and I’m glad to see Kennard’s “howlingly funny” book made the cut. His is the “most purely enjoyable” read and contains the “single best scene of any of the novels on the list (if you’ve read it you’ll know the one I’m talking about)”. I found the politics in Strout’s book about a history teacher living through “the second coming” of Donald Trump “too unsubtle”, and Perry and Kennard, “the juniors in the pack”, have “better novels to come”. If “seduced by heft”, the judges might opt for James’ “gruelling saga” but “I suspect it’s the straightforward page-turning jeopardy” of Stuart’s “John of John” that will scoop the top prize.

I’m betting on “British oddball” Harrison, said Lucy Thynne in The Telegraph. This is the first time the octogenarian cult sci-fi writer has got “so much as a look-in” at the Booker, and, if he takes the gong, he’ll be the “oldest winner in its history”. His “stunningly weird vision of the collapse of England” is a “cut above” the other contenders. “I would love it to win”.

As a result of nearly 300,000 U.S.-based Haitians having their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) revoked by the Trump administration in August, many are heading north of the border. But while they look to join a country that has a vibrant Haitian diaspora, fleeing to Canada presents its own challenges.

‘It’s difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing’

Canada’s “asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection,” said The Atlantic, and many have roots in the nation. There are about 100,000 people of Haitian descent living in Canada, according to the country’s 2021 census, a number that likely increased during the last five years. Even before the TPS revocation, Haitians were the largest group of asylum seekers in Canada; in Montreal alone, there are about 80,000 Haitians, “making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group.”

But Haitians “without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum,” so it is “difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada,” said The Atlantic. There have also been changes since the first Trump administration, when a “road from upstate New York to Montreal became a well-known crossing point,” said CNN. Since then, Canadian immigration rules have “changed significantly, and it’s much harder to make asylum claims at Canada’s border.”

This hasn’t stopped numerous people from trying. Haitians “who do apply for asylum are more than likely to be rejected than approved,” but officials say that “U.S. work experience, along with English and French proficiency, could provide qualified applicants with a major advantage in the Canadian job market,” said WLRN. The “transition is facilitated by the cultural similarities between the two North American employment sectors, making employer-supported immigration a feasible path for those losing their status,” Cassandra Fultz, a Canadian immigration consultant, told the outlet.

‘Canada may be part of the answer’

Canada has an “extensive immigration system separate from its refugee protection system,” so for some Haitians, the better question may be not “‘can I claim asylum in Canada?’ but ‘could I qualify to immigrate to Canada?’” said The Haitian Times, an online newspaper for the Haitian diaspora. Canada “may be part of the answer,” but “that doesn’t necessarily mean claiming asylum.”

For many “Haitians fleeing ICE, the only route into Canada is a path through the woods,” said The Atlantic. It can be a risky venture, as Haitians who are denied entry by Canadian border officials are usually “turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and typically transferred to ICE.” Many Haitians are still “willing to risk a dangerous and illegal journey into Canada to avoid returning to their home country,” said USA Today. Notably, the U.S. government says that Haiti is “so dangerous that Americans should not visit,” as it “lacks an effective central government, and criminal gangs largely control the streets.”

Some immigrant rights activists are wary of an influx of Haitians to Canada. “We are not encouraging folks to go to Canada if they know they might be in danger,” Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, said to the CBC, because Canadian immigration might return them to ICE. “I know that Canada has been promoting human rights, human dignity, or whatever, but I know for sure that Canadian immigration has been very hard” for Haitians.

Revenge, for Charles Spencer, is “best served in a primetime television slot with the merest hint of a smirk and, where appropriate, a few tears”, said The Times.

Princess Diana’s brother, the 9th Earl Spencer, sat down with Laura Kuenssberg for a 30-minute interview on the BBC and expanded on a series of controversial allegations set out in his new memoir, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister”.

‘Gaslit by the King’

Perhaps the most shocking claim in the book relates to a comment allegedly made by King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, in 1997 in the days immediately after his wife Diana’s death.

During a heated telephone call discussing the funeral arrangements, and specifically whether Prince William and Prince Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk in the procession, Spencer claims that Charles “hissed” the words “we’ll forget her soon enough”. The earl told Kuenssberg “I’m telling the truth” and described the alleged comment as “monstrous”.

He also alleges that Charles sounded “giddily elated” on the phone shortly after receiving news that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Spencer speculated that this was because the King would now be free to marry Camilla. When Kuenssberg asked him whether he could be certain this was what Charles was thinking, he responded: “I cannot be sure, I’m saying that’s what I assume from his tone was a possibility.”

Buckingham Palace issued a statement on behalf of the King suggesting that “fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”.

The response was “astonishingly provocative and below the belt”, the earl told The Mail on Sunday. “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King,” he said, calling the statement a “rather poor imitation” of the late Queen’s “‘recollections may vary’ quote”.

‘Cancerous’ tabloids

Beyond the headline-grabbing claims, Spencer’s memoir also reveals details of a deeply unhappy marriage. Diana allegedly told a friend in the days before their wedding in 1981 that Charles had told her he was “very happy to marry her” but that he was “not actually in love with her” and she was sure his “heart was elsewhere”.

Spencer also alleges that Charles contributed to Diana’s eating disorder by squeezing her waist soon after their engagement and saying, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” As her doubts grew, the earl claims she went to their father to ask to break off the engagement but he refused, believing it would embarrass the royal family. After the marriage went ahead, Diana allegedly drove to Beachy Head on several occasions “while contemplating ending it all”.

According to Spencer, Diana was also “dreadfully hurt” by the “petty and vindictive” removal of her HRH title following her divorce from Charles. On the day of her funeral, the Queen allegedly offered to restore the title posthumously, but her brother declined the offer, saying it was a “consolation prize”. He says he told Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, “what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.”

He also claims there was a “lack of obvious care” for 12-year-old Harry, who seemed “so very alone in his despair and torment” following his mother’s death, and suggests the prince was “allowed to spin out of control”. When asked by Kuenssberg how he feels about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now, he expressed concerns over their security and the “cancerous influence” that tabloid newspaper articles can have. “It would really be beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.”

Nine years have passed since Malta’s pre-eminent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed by a car bomb near her home, said Jurgen Balzan in Newsbook Malta. The three men who carried out the assassination are now behind bars, and this month, after a tortuous nine-year investigation and a dramatic two-month trial, the man accused of commissioning the murder finally looked set to pay for his alleged crime.

The Maltese millionaire Yorgen Fenech, a close friend of the chief of staff of Malta’s then-prime minister, Joseph Muscat, had admitted, in a police interrogation, that he had given €50,000 to the middleman who’d recruited the killers. So it came as a tremendous shock to the people of Malta that, despite this and other damning bits of evidence, the jury last week acquitted him.

Seismic transformation

What’s happened in Malta is a “hammer blow to justice, press freedom and the EU”, said The Observer. Given that Fenech’s confession was “never seriously rebutted” at the trial, it’s absurd for the jurors to have cleared him of conspiracy to murder, by a margin of eight votes to one. The rule of law in the EU’s smallest member state is “hanging by a thread”.

It’s extraordinary what a seismic transformation this small island nation of 550,000 people has undergone since Malta’s Labour Party came to power in 2013, nine years after the former British colony joined the EU, said Ben Munster on Politico (Brussels). Since then it has achieved an “astonishing economic boom, fuelled by a no-holds-barred drive to court the world’s wealthy”. Between 2013 and 2024, Malta’s stock of foreign direct investment ballooned from €9.6 billion to €460 billion; its GDP increased by 70%. But all that gold has brought with it deep corruption and moral decay.

And that was what made Caruana Galizia’s fearless reporting so essential, said Joanna Demarco on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (Washington DC). She delved, like nobody else, into the “eyebrow-raising schemes” of Muscat, the PM who resigned in 2020 as a result of the political upheaval sparked by her assassination. At the time of her death, she was investigating allegations of high-level state corruption at a power plant run by Electrogas, a firm owned, among others, by the Azerbaijani state energy company Socar and... Yorgen Fenech.

‘Climate of impunity’

Rumours are now rife about the jurors’ verdict, said Malta Today. Was fear the cause of their decision to acquit? Or was it something more noble? Perhaps they just didn’t trust a police investigation that was riddled by leaks, missing evidence and delayed action, and that failed in particular to conduct a proper investigation of the other chief suspect, Keith Schembri, prime minister Muscat’s former chief of staff, whom the defence accused of being the true mastermind.

Don’t you believe it, said Anna Marie Galea in the Times of Malta. Responsibility for this “shit show” lies with “what has always been this country’s greatest downfall: its people”. Despite the mountains of evidence, they still chase after rumour and wild conspiracy theories – “why did Daphne’s son park where he did the night before?” – and display a total absence of logic and considered thought. “If anyone needed any excuse to banish juries in this country”, this is surely it.

But Caruana Galizia “was and remains right” about the real scandal here, said Andrew Borg Cardona on The Shift (Malta). There truly is a “suffocating intimacy” between big business and politics in Malta.

The public inquiry commissioned by Labour in 2021 concluded that the state itself had created “a climate of impunity, generated from the highest levels at the core of the administration” in which her murder became possible. Yet none of the inquiry’s suggested reforms – criminalising the hindrance of investigations, introducing Italian-style anti-mafia laws – have been implemented by today’s Labour government. It just keeps explaining away its own complicity in the scandal “and we, the Great Unwashed, have to grin and bear it”.

Longtime GOP official and current nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner Bo French forced state Republicans into a defensive crouch this week after he published a racist social media post targeting nonwhite students at the University of Texas. While far from French’s first instance of online bigotry, the post garnered heavy pushback from high-profile GOP figures — and conspicuous hesitation to do so from others.

As Texas Republicans brace for what has become a particularly daunting midterm cycle, French’s outburst highlights a deepening schism. Lone Star State conservatives are waffling over how much prejudice the party can — and should — tolerate.

‘Scorched with scorn’

Republicans in Texas were “already fretting about slipping support with voters of color” before French “posted a photo of a crowd of University of Texas football fans, most of them people of color, saying, ‘the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,’” said Politico. French’s comments, which “appeared to target South Asian students,” sent state Republicans “into a frenzy” over the potential “impact the rhetoric could have on GOP candidates up and down the ballot.”

“Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism or look the other way while it becomes normalized?” said outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on X. “This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.” French’s post “has crossed the line” between opposing immigration policy and “demeaning people because of their race or ethnicity,” said Republican State House Speaker Dustin Burrows on the same platform.

Burrows is also leading a “coordinated effort called the ‘One Party, One Mission’ tour” to “unify the Texas Republican ticket,” said South Plains College Associate Professor of Government Drew Landry at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Despite French having been “scorched with scorn” by some of his fellow Republicans, “one must question” Burrows’ campaign and ask whether a candidate like French can “fit within the Speaker’s unity message?” If those who condemned him ultimately vote for him as the Republican candidate, “then their condemnation holds no water.”

‘Anti-Bo is anti-America’

Although a “handful of high-profile Republicans” have called on French to delete his offending posts, the candidate has so far “duly ignored them and instead leaned in,” said HuffPost. French’s latest comments have “exposed a growing divide among Texas Republicans,” said the Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com.

While many GOP figures have condemned the nominee, others “have defended him or declined to criticize him,” said Chron.com. French’s post is “not my message,” said Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in a statement to The New York Times. Abbott, however, did “not explicitly condemn” French’s post, said Times reporter Bayliss Wagner on X. The Texas Oil & Gas Association “unequivocally and without reservation condemns” French’s post, said the group in a statement. But the association “has not withdrawn its endorsement” for French to head the agency that “regulates the Texas oil and gas industry,” said The Texan.

Most of the Republicans denouncing French are “just trying to feign relevancy” ahead of their own electoral losses, said Julie McCarty, an influential Republican activist and CEO of the conservative True Texas Project, per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Anyone anti-Bo is anti-America.”

When French “unleashed a string of inflammatory social media posts” last year, multiple GOP officials called on him to resign as chair of the Tarrant County GOP, said Politico. Republicans today are hesitant to demand the same “because that might mean that there would be a Democrat elected statewide,” said B. Glen Whitley, a Republican former Tarrant County judge, to the outlet. “That’s the bottom line.”

A “polite, posh revolt” has broken out in an Oxfordshire village over plans to turn an old army site into new housing for more than 1,000 asylum seekers, wrote Ella Whelan in The iPaper.

Residents of Piddington voted to become independent from the UK in a symbolic referendum and now the parish has been “approached by hundreds of other villages and towns for advice on replicating their campaign”, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Telegraph.

Grumbling Piddington

It’s “such a quiet, tranquil village” that the most you could ordinarily expect at 7am would be a cyclist “setting off for an early shift, or a milkman on his round”, said Arbuthnot. But when the referendum result was delivered, the atmosphere in Piddington was “nothing short of electric”.

The village’s 350 residents had been invited to cast their ballot in a small box outside the village hall and out of 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, there were 26 no votes, and one spoiled ballot paper.

As the landslide result was announced, residents were “palpably delighted”. The village’s “eccentric and deeply English decision to gun for a figurative ‘split’ from the UK has won it extensive coverage, even from media outlets overseas”.

Piddington had actually been “quietly grumbling for a while” about the plans, wrote Whelan, but now those grumbles are “headline news”, and residents are posing with home-made signs boasting their neighbourhood is “the village that roars”.

“The case of Piddington is fascinating” because residents voted in Calum Miller, a Liberal Democrat candidate, in 2024 and “you don’t vote in a Lib Dem if you’re agnostic on the issue of immigration”. Miller had previously backed calls to make Oxfordshire “a place of sanctuary for those fleeing torture and death”, but he has since written a letter to the government, opposing the new plans.

Piddington is about the “much bigger question of what is at stake with the issue of immigration”. Ten years ago, “even using the I word” could have you labelled racist, but “concerns about cultural tensions, NHS waiting lists and even crime rates are now pretty commonplace across the political spectrum”.

Backlog burden

The government has defended its migration policy after the symbolic referendum. “What I would just gently say to the people of Piddington is we inherited a massive asylum backlog,” Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, told Sky News. The government is “getting that backlog down” but “in the meantime”, it doesn’t think it’s “acceptable for all of the burden” to fall on poorer communities.

But Labour MPs “would do well to study what has happened in Piddington”, said Arbuthnot, because “the anger that has been stirred in even this conspicuously well-to-do and liberal corner of Oxfordshire could augur a broader mood taking hold across the country”.

Andy Burnham has “sold himself as the ‘I hear you’ prime minister", said Whelan, so “will he listen to the Piddington Poll”?

Whether President Donald Trump truly believes he can turn Canada into the 51st state remains as much a question of personal psychology as one of national policy. But it’s clear the president’s increased aggression toward America’s northern neighbor has convinced many in Canada that their national interests lie elsewhere. Despite sharing geographic, cultural and historic ties with the United States, Canadian officials are now turning to other international outlets, like the European Union, in an effort to wean themselves off the U.S.’ turbulent sphere of influence.

Pursuing a ‘unique alliance’ with Europe

With the United States and Canada “embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed to “take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level,” said The Wall Street Journal. The effort is a “bold gambit” by Canada to “rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.” By “accelerating Canada’s pivot to Europe,” Carney is “matchmaking a shotgun marriage to offset the pain of its divorce with America.”

Talks between Canada and the EU have focused on “easing the movement of goods, services and specialized workers in critical sectors, including energy, artificial intelligence, defense and critical minerals,” said The Independent. The two bodies are also exploring “cooperation on subsea cables, cloud storage, data centers, satellite networks and infrastructure to export Canadian energy to Europe.”

“We’re not looking to become a member of the European Union,” said Carney to reporters this past weekend, per The Globe and Mail. “What we are looking for” is a “unique alliance between Canada and the European Union.” EU officials want to work on “opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union,” said EU President Ursula von der Leyen this week in her State of the European Union address. Although “details remain scant and the linkup is not a done deal,” von der Leyen's announcement was “met with a standing ovation from lawmakers,” said The New York Times.

‘Cozying up is a no-brainer’

Talks of Canada actually joining the EU as a full member-state are “more meme than reality,” said Bloomberg. But the apparent “openness to talks on ‘anything other than membership’” has driven “justified enthusiasm among the Ottawa and Brussels crowds.” The “logic of cozying up is a no-brainer” as Canada works to “diversify trade away from its southern border,” and the EU hopes Canada’s “vast reserves of energy and minerals” will help it “carve a middle path between the U.S. and China.”

Carney hopes to “build an alliance of liberal powers” that are “committed to the multilateral order thrown into chaos by Donald Trump,” said the Financial Times. To that end, he intends to “show commitment to European allies” by potentially contributing to the EU-led 90 billion euro Ukraine Support Loan, of which the U.K. is the “only other non-EU country to have participated.”

While it’s unlikely that Canada and the EU will reach a “deeper overarching agreement any time soon,” they are slowly creating a framework for what it “actually means to be a ‘trusted partner’ in the context of economic security,” said Canada EU Trade and Investment Association President Mark Camilleri to the Financial Times. “If Canada and the EU can get this right, it is a model that can be adapted to other like-minded countries such as the U.K., Norway, Japan and Australia.”

In the meantime, said Politico, Canada is set to “make its Eurovision debut in 2027.” The country will “host an EU summit in Montreal” in late October.

Brics has been described as a “motley collection of emerging markets that agree on little and achieve even less”, said the Financial Times, but its leaders signed off on a 45-page statement at the recent summit in India.

The group represents 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade, but many of its members are at odds with their supposed allies, which limits the group’s influence.

What did it agree?

The acronym Bric – which stood for Brazil, Russia, India and China – was first coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at investment bank Goldman Sachs, to describe a group of emerging economies expected to sustain a prolonged period of growth. It has expanded and now includes Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

At last weekend’s India summit, the “historically unruly bloc” agreed a statement “blasting protectionism and economic sanctions and calling for peace in the Gulf”. Brics expressed “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions” in the Middle East around the war in Iran and called for “maximum restraint”. It also encouraged nations to avoid actions that could further aggravate the situation.

The bloc also expressed “firm opposition” to the forced displacement of Palestinians and called for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. It restated its support for a two-state solution, with the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

The Ukraine war is a “source of tension” within the group because Russia is a founding member of Brics, said Al Jazeera. The declaration called for international disputes to be resolved through “dialogue, consultation, and diplomacy”. It was a “generic” statement that didn’t mention Ukraine.

Brics leaders called for “the elimination” of “unlawful” unilateral sanctions that were not authorised by the UN Security Council, saying they “undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter”. This “position is significant for Russia, which has faced extensive Western sanctions”.

On US tariffs, the declaration spoke of the organisation’s worry about the “unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures” that distort trade. It called for cooperation to protect global trade, supply chains, energy flows and maritime security as wars disrupt international commerce.

Brics says it wants a “multipolar” world: a global system where power is spread across several major countries or power blocs instead of being controlled by just one or two. It reiterated its “commitment to strengthening multilateralism and multipolarity”, stating that this could expand opportunities for emerging markets and developing countries to develop “constructive potential and enjoy universally beneficial, inclusive, sustainable and equitable economic globalisation and cooperation”.

What does this mean?

For Iran, the summit was “a chance to show that it does not stand alone amid the US and Israel’s military attacks and economic pressure”, said the BBC. In the face of Washington’s sanctions, Iran “pressed for deeper economic ties” with Brics members, including Malaysia, India and Ethiopia.

This was Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit to India in seven years and, despite “deep mistrust” between the two countries, the weekend was “still a big moment” for China and India. Xi and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi “agreed to strengthen business ties and transport links and address barriers to trade”. So the summit, held in Delhi, showed that Brics can “create space for rivals to talk and manoeuvre outside Western-dominated institutions”.

But “key members and partners of the bloc are at serious loggerheads”, said Stefan Wolff, a University of Birmingham academic, on The Conversation. Iran is “effectively in a state of war” with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while the Saudis and the UAE “have been at odds for years” over Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. So a group “whose sole remaining source of unanimity is opposition to the US and its allies” is “hardly likely to become a pole of a multipolar order”.

A pharmaceutical company claims to have used artificial intelligence to discover a drug that reverses the impacts of aging. Whether or not the medication is truly effective for antiaging purposes remains to be seen, but the finding highlights how the burgeoning technology could make the drug discovery process easier, or at least faster.

Beating the ‘aging clocks’

Last year, Insilico Medicine, a company that “aims to accelerate drug discovery” using artificial intelligence, announced that a clinical trial of one of its drug candidates suggested it could help treat a chronic lung disease, said The New York Times. The disease in question, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF, is sometimes referred to as “Alzheimer’s of the lungs.” Now, new data from the same clinical trial shows an even “more intriguing possibility”: The drug, called rentosertib, could “also slow the aging process.” The company used AI to assist in generating the drug’s molecular structure.

Rentosertib reduces the biological markers of age as measured by six separate “aging clocks,” or AI technology “designed to predict a person’s morbidity and mortality,” according to a new study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. This “elaborate clinical trial” is a milestone in the “widespread effort to improve healthcare” using the same technology that underpins “popular chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney.” Insilico is just “one of many startups, tech giants and academic labs” working to “accelerate drug discovery” and “hone other medical tasks with help from these methods.”

If your biological age is lower, “you are likely to die later,” the AI drug discovery startup’s CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, said in an interview, per Bloomberg. But these are early results, and the drug’s potential long-term health effects in larger groups of people are unknown.

The clinical trial included just 42 patients who had a chronic lung disease. While longevity enthusiasts have “long embraced the repurposing of existing medications” to delay aging, efforts to develop “novel antiaging drugs” have often “ended in failure,” said Bloomberg. With the advent of GLP-1 treatments, however, whose benefits appear to extend well beyond weight loss and diabetes, “major pharmaceutical players are increasingly showing interest in the field.”

‘Not replacing scientific intuition’

The results of this study are the first to show “very clearly” that “predicted biological age can be reduced,” Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard Medical School professor who helped build one of the aging clocks, said to the Times. Still, the study is far from conclusive, Gladyshev acknowledges, citing the small sample size and the unreliability of aging clocks. Most notably, Insilico’s drug has “not yet been tested in healthy patients,” said the Times. Because the company conducted its clinical trial solely with IPF patients, the results may be specific to this condition.

The idea of “reducing aging certainly sounds good” and has become the “obsession of some tech bro-types,” but the “actual utility of aging clocks is up for debate,” said Gizmodo. More recent models focus on proteomics, or “measuring blood proteins,” which a 2024 study found could be used to determine if a person had a higher risk of age-related diseases. While some researchers believe that these “catch-all measurements” could be useful, there’s still a “long way to go before they become truly meaningful markers.” There isn’t yet a measurement that “serves as a universally accepted ‘age’ indicator,” and some doctors have warned that “leaning on these metrics could lead to pursuing the wrong interventions.”

AI is not “replacing scientific intuition,” and it is “unlikely to do so anytime soon,” said Forbes. What it can do is “make the costly, time-consuming R&D work” of preparing for clinical trials “more efficient.” For the drug discovery field, that means the “computer screen is becoming nearly as essential as the lab bench.” That shift is “familiar across industries” as “digital tools increasingly become part of the craft rather than merely an add-on.”

Learning to drive used to be a rite of passage for teenagers, but now one in five young Brits say they haven’t even considered learning. No wonder, said The Telegraph: it’s “Britain’s biggest rip off”, and booking a test has become a complete “nightmare”, too.

‘Driving divide’

The average learner pays for more than 18.5 hours of driving lessons by the time they take their test – which costs a minimum of £777, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. The price of a theory test is £23, the practical test sets you back £62, and half of British learners have to retake the test at least once.

All this means the average cost of passing a test in 2026 is at least £924, according to a study from Confused.com. Nearly one in five young people in Britain – 19% – have not even considered learning to drive because of the expense, according to a poll by the price comparison website. A separate study, by car insurer Prima, found that 70% of British adults who do not hold a full driving licence believe learning to drive is unaffordable. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that figure climbed to 76% .

This has created a “driving divide”, which means that getting a licence is now “frequently the preserve” of young people “privileged enough to have parents who can cover the cost”, said Coffey.

Robot cars

For those able to afford lessons, waiting times have risen so “astronomically” that it takes between five and six months to book a practical driving test, said The Telegraph. The average wait was around five weeks in February 2020, before the Covid pandemic caused a backlog that has yet to be resolved.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency had set a target of shrinking the average waiting time to seven weeks by the end of 2025. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander pushed the target back to summer 2026, but has since admitted even that would not be met. And even once the licence has been secured, new drivers can expect to pay an average of £1,241 to get insured.

There are cultural shifts at play, too. “Perhaps the simplest explanation is that many young people just don’t need to drive,” said Lucy Reade in The New World. Compared to previous generations, Gen Z are “concerned about climate change” and “nutty about public transport”, which is easy for many of them to access given the “massive urban migration” of young people towards cities. And now there’s the spectre of self-driving taxis on the horizon. “For a generation already less likely to learn to drive, the prospect of simply summoning a robot car to do it for us may prove irresistible.”

It has been more than six months since the first barrage of American missiles struck Iranian targets in what has become the defining foreign policy crisis of the second Trump administration. Less defining, however, is the language the White House has used to describe what is taking place between the United States and Islamic Republic.

While President Donald Trump himself often refers to the violence in bombastic terms, other members of his administration have conspicuously avoided calling the ongoing exchanges of missiles part of a larger “war.” Instead, they opt to downplay the conflict’s duration and severity for domestic audiences.

‘It’s small potatoes for us’

Vice President JD Vance argued this month that the “current hostilities shouldn’t even be called a ‘war’” since “‘active combat operations’ ended months ago,” said CNN. Vance’s claim came “despite three consecutive days” in which the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire. “I can understand what he’s saying,” said Trump during an Oval Office press scrum following Vance’s comments. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.”

From the start of the war, Americans have been “getting conflicting messages from the Trump administration and congressional leaders” about what to call the violence, said FactCheck in March. Given that Congress hasn’t officially declared it as such, “if political leaders were to say that this is a war, they would also be acknowledging that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War project, to the outlet.

“Because we haven’t officially declared war, my kids and I aren’t eligible for some benefits,” said Air Force widow Libby Klinner in a recent social media post highlighting the paradox of a nonwar war, per the Military Times. Air Force officials have since launched an “audit on our benefits to ensure that we receive all we are entitled to,” said Klinner in a subsequent message.

White House officials have “downplayed the scale of the conflict” in the “apparent hope that it will recede from the headlines” since hostilities have “already lasted far longer than the president’s initial predictions of victory within a few weeks,” said The Atlantic. Still, with “no end to the hostilities in sight,” the Navy is “staying on a war footing indefinitely.”

‘Just playing to his base’

Trump has “contradicted himself and his own Cabinet in the same week — and sometimes, the same day” in his assessments of the conflict, said the Los Angeles Times. The evolving language is part of an effort to “control the narrative of the Iran war.”

Trump’s more bellicose rhetoric, like when he personally and repeatedly refers to the Iran “war,” is being used in part to “save face for the quagmire he has put himself and Republicans in” ahead of the midterms, said Khaled Elgindy, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to The New York Times. The president’s wartime language is “just playing to his base, whether it’s true or not.” It lacks “much of a strategy beyond trying to wish things into existence by sheer force of words.”

A menu promising a “glistening digital cheesesteak or an eerily geometrical” turkey sandwich “evokes little more than horror in those who behold it”, said the New Yorker. So why are so many restaurants relying on generative AI to create their promotional materials and are these images straying towards false advertising?

‘Nauseating, nightmarish’

Images of food dishes were once “a thing to be drooled over”, highlighting the “sensual, the luscious, the beautiful”, but now a “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon”. These fake images “mock life itself”.

The menus might also mock the customers, Adaeze Onejeme, an ad sales worker in Los Angeles, told CNN. “It’s like you don’t even know what you’re going to get” when the actual food arrives, so “at that point, is it false advertising”?

The “phenomenon” is seen around the world, said the broadcaster. In Tokyo, sandwiches are advertised with an image in which they seem to be “made of cobwebs”, in Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara “looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh”, and in Berlin, there is a “plastic-looking quiche with holes or a penne pasta made from rubber”.

‘Low quality, laziness’

These menu images can signify qualities people generally don’t want to associate with food, such as “low quality, laziness or, well, slop”. Some of them are “alienlike catastrophes”.

There’s “an innateness” to how real food looks that “you can feel in your bones”, Emily Hawkes, a professional food photographer, told USA Today. So when you see AI food images “there’s something wrong, and you might not be able to put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it”.

There’s a reason why we can't look away from the pictures, said psychologist Stephanie Sarkis: our brain gets stuck between “approach and avoidance” as it tries to make sense of an image that looks almost real but is clearly fake.

Running a restaurant in 2026 is challenging because of “rising costs and uneven customer traffic”, said CNN. So “as they look to save money wherever possible”, a growing number of restaurant owners are using AI to “assist with marketing”.

But if food photography is “cost-prohibitive” for an establishment, there are “other avenues to explore” rather than turning to generative AI, Hawkes told USA Today. She suggests contacting student photographers and offering a free meal in exchange for content, or consulting YouTube tutorials for a DIY approach.

It was “a predatory move” that reeked of old-school colonialism, said Le Monde (Paris). Last week, in a typically grandiose social media post, Donald Trump announced that the US and Venezuela had struck “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”. It would, he claimed, give America majority control over 65 billion barrels of oil found at 17 sites in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo.

Trump has been demanding this as a prize ever since US forces seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in a dawn raid on Caracas in early January, said Joseph Zeballos-Roig on MS Now (New York). “To the victor belong the spoils, right?” he told a rally in Nevada back in August, boasting how, with Caracas, he wanted to do things “the old-fashioned way”.

By strong-arming interim president Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, into agreeing the deal, he has made Venezuela America’s “51st state in all but name”.

‘Smells pretty unconstitutional’

Venezuelans are horrified, said Luis Manuel Aguana in La Patilla (Caracas). We are a “culturally patriotic and anti-imperialist” people who, like other Latin Americans, loathe “external oppression”. And Rodríguez’s flimsy promise that the deal will generate $209 billion in taxes over the next 25 years hardly makes this bitter pill any easier to swallow. But it is a deal that’s unlikely to hold, said Caracas Chronicles. It “looks, sounds and smells pretty unconstitutional”; any future government is more than likely to abrogate its terms.

Legally speaking, the accord is a “complete monstrosity”, agreed Rafael Quiroz Serrano in Tal Cual (Caracas). A leader with no electoral mandate, Rodríguez lacks the legitimacy to sign away our oil deposits; and under Venezuelan law the state oil company, PDVSA, must have a controlling stake in any oil production projects. Be that as it may, Caracas has been persuaded under the deal to appoint a private company – North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) – to control the 17 oil fields, on the understanding that the Pentagon is given a 35% stake in the business and receives 20% of all output at cost price.

And that’s a real cause for alarm, said Caracas Chronicles. NABEP’s Venezuelan owner, Alejandro Betancourt, is a byword for corruption. He made his fortune building power plants for Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez, and “became synonymous with the vanishing of hundreds of millions of dollars” that Chávez had allocated to fixing Venezuela’s power grid. And he is now being investigated in Spain (where he lives) for alleged money laundering.

‘Wildly optimistic’

Betancourt would anyway have to work miracles for the deal to work out, said Catherine Bosley in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Only 1% of global crude oil is currently produced in Venezuela, despite it having 17% of the world’s reserves. And given the dilapidated state of its oil infrastructure after decades of socialist misrule, that won’t change any time soon. Vast sums of investment are needed. True, Chevron, which already operates in Venezuela, promised to invest $7 billion over the next five years in a separate deal last week. But none of the other oil giants, some of whom lost billions when Chávez booted them out in 2007, are keen to engage.

With good reason, said Keith Johnson in Foreign Policy. Trump’s numbers are “wildly optimistic”. Venezuela’s oil is very heavy and hard to process: only 20 billion barrels are likely to be recoverable from the 17 oil fields. And even that will take years to retrieve, a fact Trump conveniently overlooked when claiming the deal would drive down US energy prices that have spiked as a result of his war in Iran.

The deal’s economic prospects may be in doubt, said The Daily Beast (New York), but the political consequences are already being felt. By shoring up Rodríguez’s undemocratic regime, it has dashed any immediate hope of Venezuela turning to democracy. And it has given the green light to countries such as Russia to “attack and steal from weaker neighbours”.

“Sadly, we’ve become used to far-right protests in recent years,” said Joe Mulhall in The Guardian. There have been angry crowds outside hotels housing asylum seekers across Britain, and Tommy Robinson has led vast “Unite the Kingdom” rallies in central London.

But what we saw in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend “feels different”. At around 7am on Saturday, “hundreds of balaclava-clad men, dressed all in black, began piling out of the backs of vans and blocked roads around Dover port”. Chanting “Stop the boats” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”, they shut down the UK’s biggest ferry port for hours. Then, on Sunday evening, a group of men gathered near a Portsmouth beach to try to prevent lifeboat crews from bringing ashore 140 asylum seekers.

‘Blackshirts reimagined’

“You can see them in the videos,” said Imogen West-Knights in The Independent: arms crossed, hoodies up, “like Oswald Mosley’s Cable Street blackshirts reimagined”. Some waded into the sea to film migrants arriving, before clashing with police. This is Britain today, where thugs can play out their “darkest fantasies of vigilante justice”.

It was unprecedented, said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, but it wasn’t surprising. The British state has abdicated responsibility for policing our borders: it appears either incapable or unwilling to stop the boats, or to swiftly deport these “intruders” from “heaven knows where”. It was only a matter of time before “ordinary people”, acting as volunteer “border wardens”, took matters into their own hands.

These weren’t ordinary citizens, said Kevin Rawlinson in The Guardian. Both protests last weekend were organised by Patriot Platform, a collective of far-right groups led by Daniel Thomas, aka “Danny Tommo”. They’re well-organised and disciplined, and able to mobilise at short notice. Patriot Platform claims to be “devoted to protecting British women and children, and to Christian values” (“Christ is King” is a favoured chant). In reality, many of its members are domestic abusers and violent criminals. “That includes Thomas”, who served time for a botched kidnapping.

‘Chilling and unacceptable’

“Concerns about illegal immigration are widespread, understandable and legitimate,” said The Telegraph. And people have every right to protest. But masked men closing roads and blockading ports is “chilling and unacceptable”. Disturbingly, it seems that anti-migrant protesters are copying the tactics of green radicals such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, targeting infrastructure and “bringing public highways to a standstill”.

It’s a sign that radicals on both Right and Left have given up on democratic politics, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Actually, politicians are listening on this issue: small boat crossings are down by more than 40% this year; yet anti-migrant agitation has only increased. To a growing minority, facts and arguments are no match for “the seductive power of being cast as a fearless crusader for the most important cause of our age”.

While U.S. homicide rates have been plummeting, especially in the last year, one type of murder has been steadily increasing: domestic-violence-related killings. And many are worried the rise could be part of a larger trend of domestic violence.

‘Make national headlines’

There is no singular database for tracking domestic violence killings, but records from individual cities and states show a near-universal rise. In Chicago, homicides dropped by nearly half between 2021 and 2025, but domestic-violence-related deaths in 2025 rose by 15%, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. In Kansas City, Missouri, overall homicides have fallen since 2023, but 2025 marked the “city’s second deadliest year for domestic violence since 2014,” said Jackson County, Missouri, officials in a press release.

Statewide domestic violence killings are also seeing a surge. In Nebraska, at least 30 people “were killed in domestic abuse incidents last year,” said Nebraska Public Media. Overall, there were “89 domestic abuse deaths recorded in Nebraska between July 2022, when tracking began, and December 2025,” with about 56% of the victims being female. In Massachusetts, there were 31 people killed in domestic violence incidents in 2024, according to a report from the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, marking a 19% increase from the prior year.

Sometimes these domestic violence killings “make national headlines,” said The Guardian. Notable cases this year include a shooting in which “eight children were killed and two women were injured in Shreveport, Louisiana,” or another instance “when several people were murdered in rural Oregon and in Billings, Montana.” Domestic violence deaths remain a “devastating and often fatal reality,” Vilma Uribe, the executive director of Massachusetts’ Governor’s Council to Address Sexual Assault, told GBH News.

‘Impossible to pinpoint a single cause’

Officials and anti-domestic-violence advocates have called for more resources to be pooled into preventing these killings and helping the victims of them. The “number-one need articulated over and over again is housing, and number two is legal support,” Nikhita Ved, the chief programs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told The Guardian. The hotline shows additional evidence of increasing domestic violence; in 2020, it “received nearly 637,000 calls. In 2025, it answered a million,” said The Guardian.

Even in states where overall crime has dropped, like Maine, concerns over domestic violence killings remain. “Very, very frequently, the victim of homicide has told someone in their life, ‘I’m afraid that my partner is going to kill me,’” Francine Stark, the executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, told WGME-TV Portland. Many people “experience abuse and violence and never bring in the criminal system,” which can allow domestic violence crimes to go unpunished.

Though it is “nearly impossible to pinpoint a single cause for stubbornly high rates of domestic violence homicides,” the “resources to prevent such tragedies are well-known,” Ved told The Guardian. But concerns about funding have arisen during the Trump administration, as officials “cut hundreds of millions in grants from research institutions, and domestic violence prevention and response nonprofits that serve people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.” These types of cuts are “always devastating,” said Ved, because “this work, it’s always been underfunded.”

This year has been one of “unthinkable” progress for maths, said The Wall Street Journal. But OpenAI’s proof of the Navier-Stokes problem – one of the seven esteemed Millennium Prize Problems accepted as maths’ “deepest and most difficult unresolved questions” – “represents the most significant advance yet”.

The tech company took around three days to find a solution with an internal model that is “significantly more capable” than its most advanced commercial model, said New Scientist. It first used 1,000 AI agents to crack a similar problem, then around 10,000 to complete the task. If a customer wanted to run the same problem, it would cost them “around $15 million” (£11 million).

However, there has been a “dispute” about how the solution was reached. Two human researchers had announced they had “cracked three significant problems” linked to the Navier-Stokes problem, also using OpenAI and Anthropic large language models, which has raised questions over the privacy and integrity of the data integral to the breakthrough.

‘Potentially historic breakthrough’

The “Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem” essentially looks at equations which describe the movement of liquids and gases, said The New York Times. These equations are used to predict the weather and “model the behaviour of ocean currents or the climate as a whole”. The problem challenges whether, theoretically, the “laws of physics would break down under certain extreme conditions”, such that water, for instance, could “spontaneously explode”.

This “potentially historic breakthrough” has been “shadowed by questions over unpublished research by outside mathematicians”, said Axios. New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been using large language models, including OpenAI’s Codex, where information was stored privately. Just hours before OpenAI’s announcement, the pair had published work which was claimed to make a breakthrough in the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI denies having seen this work, but admits it had launched the project “after hearing rumours that Anthropic’s models had solved a major maths problem”. The company has also said it would not collect the $1 million (£738,000) prize.

“The result is the latest in a string of shocking mathematical discoveries led by AI in recent months,” said New Scientist. In May, an OpenAI model also “cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős”, while a Claude Fable 5 AI found a “counter-example to the Jacobian conjecture, which had stood for nearly a century”. And just last week, an AI model “formalised Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days”.

‘Reshaping mathematics’

This controversy is important because it “strikes at a core trust question for AI-assisted science”, said Axios. It casts doubt over whether researchers can “safely use frontier labs’ tools to work on unpublished discoveries”. Although Buckmaster and Alpöge have not accused OpenAI of any direct wrongdoing, this episode “taps into a broader push” for companies to keep sensitive data away from the major AI labs.

This advancement also allows OpenAI to “cast its technology in a positive light after a period of alarm” over its safety practices, said The Guardian. In July, during a cybersecurity testing breach, OpenAI admitted its agents hacked into Hugging Face, another tech company. The company may have solved a major problem which has “stumped humans for nearly a century”, but would struggle to quiet “renewed calls for curbs on AI development” and AI “superintelligence”.

For human mathematicians, this result is “sobering”, said the MIT Technology Review. Buckmaster and Alpöge collaborated for almost a year and were unable to achieve only a simplified solution, while private OpenAI models achieved a full solution in a matter of days, at vast cost. If major tech companies keep “striving for more and more impressive mathematical accolades, there might not be any open problems left” for humans to “wrestle with”, which would “dramatically change the field of mathematics”.

Clearly, humans take longer to achieve proofs than AI but, in doing so, they “uncover new mathematical approaches and ideas that might inspire their peers and even birth their own subfields”. Those “benefits disappear” if breakthroughs are kept behind a paywall. OpenAI’s “brute-forced” approach is “indisputably impressive”, but if this is the “future we are headed for, it is unclear how human mathematicians will fit into it”.

College sports were once a bastion of amateur athletics. No more. Players get paid, openly, going to teams that can offer them the biggest paycheck. The lines between college and pro sports have grown fuzzy, and some marginal pro players are even attempting to return to class to keep their careers alive. A fierce backlash has ensued.

LSU: ‘Enraged every stakeholder’

It was once a settled fact that “players who had moved on to pro sports from college could not return to college,” said The Associated Press. Louisiana State University (LSU) is testing that notion, enrolling two athletes, Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, who “spent time in NFL training camps this summer.”

Neither player was on LSU’s roster for Saturday’s season-opening 51-10 victory over Clemson because the Southeastern Conference (SEC) asked a court to “force LSU into following the conference’s rules banning pro athletes.” A judge ruled the duo should be allowed to play under brand-new NCAA rules that allow a fifth year of college eligibility, and the league is appealing. The players are currently in limbo, said the AP. It’s “embarrassing where we are with college football,” Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney said to reporters, per the AP.

First-year LSU Coach Lane Kiffin has “enraged nearly every stakeholder in the sport” with his attempt to bring the pros back to college, said The Wall Street Journal. His recruitment of Wright and Harris sparked “all of college sports’ major conferences” — including the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference — to quickly adopt policies banning the return of players who attempt to go pro. Athletes who “sign professional contracts” should not “be permitted to return to college competition,” the SEC said in a statement, per the Journal.

Kiffin is pushing to let the athletes regain their eligibility to play at the college level. “They’re either gonna play for you, or they’re gonna play somewhere else around the country,” he said at a press conference.

LSU is not the only organization recruiting former pros. The NCAA has been ordered by courts to “allow professional basketball players to return to college basketball,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said at USA Today. Filling college rosters with “older adults and former professionals” will have the consequence of squeezing younger athletes out of college athletics. The NCAA is backing the “Protect College Sports Act,” which would codify college eligibility standards into federal law.

Amateurism: ‘Fundamentally dishonest’

The LSU saga is highlighting “college sports’ identity crisis,” Jason Lloyd said at The Athletic. University athletes “weren’t paid, they weren’t represented by agents, they couldn’t profit from endorsements” until the last few years. Such amateurism was “fundamentally dishonest” given the billions of dollars generated by college sports. Direct payments and endorsements are now allowed, a recent change. But colleges refuse to call the newly paid athletes “employees.” Doing so would give the players “legal rights, obligations and bargaining power” universities want to avoid. The question that must be answered: “What, exactly, is a college athlete in 2026?”

While the legal battle proceeds, LSU is playing without Wright and Harris — and playing well. Kiffin’s football team led Clemson 31-3 at halftime of Saturday’s game. “Imagine,” Kiffin said to ESPN at halftime, “if we had pro players.” The SEC is not amused. The league on Tuesday scheduled a vote of its college presidents to decide “whether to expel the Tigers from the league,” said ESPN.

Founded in 1440 by King Henry VI, Eton College is a “rarefied bubble of educational privilege” that will have taught the country’s next two kings, said The Telegraph. Prince George will this week follow his father, uncle and 20 British prime ministers by attending the £21,891-per-term boarding school west of London.

Speaking in 2000, Prince William said that he “really enjoyed being able to go about Eton as just another student”, although in his autobiography published in 2023 Prince Harry was critical of his time at the school.

George will be exposed to the same “idiosyncrasies” of the institution, but changing times present new challenges for the young prince.

‘Own language and traditions’

Prince George will be one of “250 apprehensive first years” arriving at the school for their first term, said The Telegraph. In the first few days, George and his classmates will settle into their accommodation and begin learning “Eton’s peculiar geography” and the typical “rhythm of the day”. School days begin with a 10-minute morning chapel service, followed by around seven lessons, and at least two hours of “intense sport”, as well as “EW (extra work)”, Eton’s name for homework.

“Eton has its own language and its own traditions,” said The Sunday Times. Each house has a “dame”, Eton’s version of a matron, who will “regularly pop in for a chat with George and the other F-Blockers”, or first years. He will also be assigned an “‘uncle’” and a “timelord” from among the older boys in his house. The former will explain the intricacies of Eton’s uniform – a “black morning suit with pinstripe trousers” – and mastering the “front studs, back studs and detachable collars”. The latter will help him arrange his schedule and extra-curricular activities, which might include “22-inch calibre rifle shooting on the school range” or “auditioning for a play”.

“The school has so many unique names and phrases that there is an ‘Eton Glossary’ on its website,” said the Daily Express. George will be expected to learn and use the terms “pop” (senior prefects), “dry bobs” (those who play cricket instead of rowing in the summer) and “beaks” (teachers). On day one, new pupils are quizzed on these “unique phrases of the school”, as well as the colours of each of its 25 houses.

Even though Eton is close to Forest Lodge, the Waleses’ eight-bedroom Windsor home, George will be a full boarder, said Hello! This means he will go home “every two or three weeks”, although he will enjoy a room to himself, as “there are no shared rooms at Eton”.

‘Challenge’ for security

For George, going to Eton will be a chance to “find his first tribe away from home”, said The Telegraph. But being a future king does not entitle you to “become a BNOC (big name on campus)” at Eton. “No one cares who your parents are, because almost everybody’s parents are someone.”

However, the young royal differs from his peers in having “greater protection than any heir in modern times”, said The i Paper. The Prince and Princess of Wales have fought for a “tighter approach” to media access than William and Harry experienced at Eton. They were part of a “gentleman’s agreement”, in which photos were traded to the press from a select number of events in exchange for leaving them alone.

While media coverage of the royals has “undergone a sea change since the 90s”, Prince George still faces a “bigger threat” to his privacy and security than his predecessors. The “rise of phone cameras, Meta glasses and other smart spectacles” are a “challenge” for the 24-strong security team at the school. Eton’s facilities are “dotted around the town”, meaning George is likely to encounter tourists who are not subject to the same rules and regulations as the media. “Take a close look at pictures of Prince George released ahead of his first day at Eton. They may be the last we see of him for some time.”

A “touchstone of British factual television”, will come to an end this September, said Radio Times. Two 90-minute episodes of one of the world’s longest-running documentaries will air on ITV in an “epic and moving end to a television landmark”.

Based on a Jesuit maxim – “give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” – 14 seven-year-olds from a variety of backgrounds were interviewed in 1964 about their thoughts and aspirations for the future. But the tenth and final iteration will see a return of many cast members, who have mixed views on the show’s practices.

‘Glimpse of the country’s future’

This “groundbreaking ITV documentary series” has been described as the “Bayeux tapestry of television”, said The Guardian. Over the last six decades, the children’s progress has been “creating a snapshot of Britain’s social history”.

But this instalment will have some “noticeable differences”. Michael Apted, the researcher who found and selected the participants, and interviewed them for each episode, died in 2021. Director Asif Kapadia, who was chosen to replace Apted for his acclaimed Ayrton Senna, Diego Maradona and Amy Winehouse films, has since called this documentary the “most beautiful thing I’ve ever made”.

Two of the subjects have died. Lynn Johnson, who became a librarian in east London, was the first, in 2013. Nick Hitchon, a Yorkshire farmer’s son who became a nuclear scientist, approached the programme wanting to record a final message after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in 2023, just “hours” after his final “heartbreaking” interview.

The documentary was originally intended as a “one-off” for the current affairs show “World in Action”, said The Times. But it intrigued audiences as it “promised the viewer a glimpse of the country’s future”.

The cast’s lives continue to diverge. Tony Walker, a “cheeky-chappy kid” from Bethnal Green, east London, dreamt of becoming a jockey, but turned to cab driving, while Andrew Brackfield claimed to read the Financial Times aged seven, successfully predicted he would attend Cambridge, and is a retired partner of Linklaters. But in a “villain-free series”, Bruce Balden’s “fundamental goodness still shines”. In the first episode he said we should “give most of our money to poor people”, and by “28 Up” was “teaching maths to immigrants in the East End and in 35 Up was teaching in Bangladesh”.

‘Outrageous’ inequality

Over this time period, we have seen the participants “grow up, marry, separate, have careers, suffer illness and depression”, said The Independent.

Cast members have also accused Apted of “pursuing an agenda and have been intermittently unhappy at how they were portrayed”. Throughout you can see a “reluctance to continue to appear on screen warring with a sense of duty – a generational one, perhaps – not to disrupt a historic enterprise”.

Many of the cast stepped back for one or several episodes. One of a “trio of prep-school toffs”, Charles Furnaux left after 21 and became a BBC producer, while Liverpudlian teacher Peter Davies dropped out for three instalments after being “monstered by the right-wing press for calling Margaret Thatcher’s government ‘an incompetent, uncaring bloody shower’”.

Considering the aims and scope of the project, it is “outrageous” that only four girls were chosen alongside 10 boys, cast member Jackie Bassett told The Mirror. Bassett, alongside two friends from the same “working-class east London” primary school, and “solo upper-class Suzy” were the only female representatives on the show.

Bassett famously challenged Apted on camera for “asking the women about marriage and children rather than anything else”. She would later “point blank refuse to speak about certain topics”. “I was not going to talk about something that would affect my family, my children – so I basically just told him no”, said Bassett. “He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.”