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, exactly, 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 non-war 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.”

Every now and again, a single news story exposes what is “going wrong in modern Britain”, said The Telegraph. The head-on crash that killed two policemen and five joyriders in Middlesbrough in August, and its aftermath, is the latest.

This is “a community beset by brazen criminality”. The five young men were linked to organised crime and had 37 convictions between them. And the horrific crash has been followed by a series of gang-related incidents and acts of destruction. A house was rammed by a car and a man stabbed in suspected tit-for-tat attacks. At a memorial for one of the men, cars were smashed into each other in a field and set alight. In a separate incident, a seven-year-old and her aunt died in an arson attack. Last week, 200 officers from the National Crime Agency and other forces were drafted in to calm tensions.

‘Feral underclass’

“Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode,” said Felix Pope on UnHerd: TS6, a collection of deprived estates in southeast Middlesbrough with what one local politician calls “a feral underclass”. Residents speak of balaclava-clad young men on electric bikes and scooters terrorising the community. One local told The Yorkshire Post: “TS6 has gone mad.”

All this in a town that “once brimmed with pride”, said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Middlesbrough was once ‘Ironopolis’, one of the biggest producers of pig iron in the world.” Teesside shipyards turned out trawlers by the dozen. But after heavy industry went into a long and deep decline in the 1980s, Middlesbrough never recovered. The steelworks closed in 2015; the town is now one of the most deprived places in England – a place where the last two generations of many families have never known paid employment.

Successive governments should have done more to help these people, said Simon Heffer in The Telegraph. Instead, “the white working class has been pushed aside to stew on welfare benefits or in low-esteem jobs” – abandoned by a state whose first duty is to protect them. “No wonder so many of them feel no connection with it.”

‘Potential powder kegs’

Cleveland Police, the local force, is also a victim of neglect, said Leigh Jones in The Independent. Its area now has the highest crime rate outside central London. Yet it is one of the smallest forces in the country, and has been gutted by years of austerity. Had its budget kept up with inflation, it would be at £246 million this financial year; instead, it is just £196 million.

Yet this force is not an outlier, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. Across the country, cash-strapped local constabularies are sitting on “potential powder kegs”, but these forces don’t have the resources to deal with even “modest” manifestations of organised crime, such as county-line drug gangs. Look beyond the police, and the whole criminal justice system – prisons, the courts and probation service – is poorly run, and often in crisis. Middlesbrough’s plight is the sign of a “full-spectrum failure, from nose to tail”.

America’s midterm elections are looming, and are expected to turn on voters’ frustration with the rising cost of living. Hardly the moment, then, for a damaging trade war with Canada, said Rex Huppke in USA Today.

Yet following an acrimonious breakdown of trade talks between the two nations, Donald Trump last week slapped 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, including down jackets, wine, dairy products and hockey sticks. He later threatened to double tariffs on vehicles and car parts, posting on social media: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, who accused US negotiators of effectively declaring war on his country by introducing a raft of unacceptable last-minute demands, promised to retaliate with dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs, starting on 8 September.

Economic pain

Carney isn’t bluffing, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. Canada relies more on exporting goods to the US than the other way round, so its economy is set to lose most from any trade war, but Carney has staked his reputation on standing up to Trump. He reckons Canadians will have more tolerance for economic pain resulting from a trade war they’ll blame on Trump “than Americans will have for rising prices”.

The polls certainly suggest as much, said Andrew Day in The American Conservative. Only a third of Canadians have a favourable view of the US today, down from 54% in 2024; 76% back Carney’s stance. For someone so adept at promoting nationalism at home, Trump has a “curious blindspot” about the impact of stirring such passions abroad.

‘Personal fixation’

He can’t help himself, said Zack Beauchamp on Vox. After all his “jokes” about absorbing Canada as the 51st state, Trump has now signed an order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” to spite the Canadians. The US and Canada have a long history of trade disagreements over issues such as dairy and lumber, but these rows have never blown up into a trade war, “for the simple reason that they simply aren’t that large as a percentage of GDP”.

There don’t appear to be any political, ideological or business interests egging on Trump to get into a fight with Canada. The desire to “vassalise” and control America’s northern neighbour is just the president’s “personal fixation” – one so important to him that he’s apparently willing to pursue it, even at the cost of jeopardising his party’s Senate majority.

In 2024, before the US presidential election, young Africans were asked whether they expected their countries to fare better under Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Across a range of measures, most respondents to the African Youth Survey believed Biden to be the better bet: 42-44%, compared with 23-24% choosing Trump. But in the most recent edition of the survey, nearly two-thirds of the near-5,000 18- to 24-year-old participants said they would benefit from the Trump administration, according to Foreign Policy. That’s despite the president’s foreign aid cuts, dismantling of development programs and “disparaging remarks about the continent”.

“This generation has worked out what much of the Western commentariat still refuses to,” said Ivor Ichikowitz, the survey’s founder. “Diplomacy is about what you can get from the man in the Oval Office, not whether you like him.”

‘Strikes a chord’

Trump has never made a presidential visit to Africa. He has “seldom been polite about the continent”, said The Economist in 2018, “allegedly dismissing Nigerians as hut-dwellers and African states as ‘shitholes’”. Yet “he is more popular in Africa than in any other region”.

Even before Trump entered politics, there was a “large affinity towards him” in Nigeria, the most populous African nation, said The Guardian in 2020. His image as a “bombastic, straight-talking, self-made billionaire made his books a hit” in the country. Portraits of Trump, sometimes depicted in traditional clothing or in the military uniform of Nigerian dictators, are common. His image “strikes a chord”.

“Judging by our own president, it isn’t entirely surprising that a septuagenarian economic nationalist with a born-again vice-president, minimal respect for rule of law and archaic views about women is popular in Nigeria,” said Sa’eed Husaini, a political analyst in Lagos.

Nigerians have a “unique attachment to America”, wrote Africa expert Ebenezer Obadare on the Council on Foreign Relations. Whether in an “individualism that sometimes borders on outright sedition, or a risk-taking that often verges on self-immolation”, Nigerians see in the US an “admirable analogue of their own buccaneering spirit”.

Make Africa Great Again?

In 2025, 79% of Nigerians said they had confidence in Trump “to do the right thing regarding world affairs”, according to a Global Attitudes Survey by the Pew Research Center. That’s 21% higher than the same survey showed in 2017.

Many see Trump as the only president to defend Nigerian Christians; his administration claims they are being persecuted by Islamist groups.

The US went on to strike northern Nigeria, where Islamic State has a foothold, on Christmas Day in 2025, before beginning joint counterterrorism operations with the government this year. In the 2026 Global Attitudes Survey, confidence in him among Nigerian Christians had risen by six percentage points since 2025.

But more broadly, African Christians share commonality with American evangelicals and Trump, said the Council on Foreign Relations: a feeling of “being simultaneously persecuted by secular authority and pressured by a cultural momentum”, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender.

There is “overall African evangelical love for Trump”; he’s viewed as a “defender of family values” and a “symbol of masculinity in an age menaced by a rampant effeminacy”.

Trump’s business acumen is also admired among those who aspire to wealth, said Tendai Marima in Foreign Policy.

The so-called manosphere also has a strong influence in Africa, and Trump is seen as a “positive role model because of his values of manhood”. In South Africa, there is also strong support for Trump among the anti-migrant movement.

“As an African, what resonates with me most about the America First message is not that Africa should become America, but that African countries should also put their own citizens first,” said Freeman Bhengu, a member of anti-migrant group Operation Dudula.

In the Sahel, many see Trump as “ideologically close to their own military governments”, and their “nationalist-sovereign” rhetoric, said Lisa Tschörner, an international affairs researcher. Those countries perceive the US withdrawal of aid as “amounting to non-interference”.

According to the African Youth Survey, 26% of young Africans believe the US aid cuts could actually have a “positive impact”, despite experts’ concerns. As Ichikowitz said, some young Africans associate the withdrawal of aid with the “possibility of greater self-reliance and government accountability”.

America is plagued by a housing crisis. One possible solution is manufactured housing, which can be produced quickly and relatively cheaply. A new federal housing law could open the door to the sector’s expansion. To succeed, though, manufactured housing must overcome the stigmas against mobile homes and trailer parks.

Federal law, local codes

Manufactured homes are quietly “filling the suburbs,” said The Washington Post. The dwellings were long looked down on as “low-quality, less-safe housing” that was mostly “limited to trailer parks and rural properties” for decades, but higher-quality models are springing up in the “typical American suburban subdivision.” Cost is a big factor: The average price of a manufactured home is just $90,700, though many structures “can run far more than that.”

Prebuilt housing is the “most efficient, effective way to allow homeownership in the United States,” said Joel Farkas of Fruition Communities, which is planning an 8,000-unit neighborhood in the Denver suburbs, to the Post. The median U.S. single-family home price now runs more than $400,000, and elevated mortgage rates are “suppressing housing turnover, constricting supply and inflating prices,” said the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. Young families are finding that “suitable homes are scarce” as a result.

Sears’ prebuilt home kits in the early 20th century made housing widely available and relatively inexpensive for generations of Americans. A proposed program to “deliver 500,000 high-quality, factory-built homes” across the country would create a “permanently affordable” source of housing that harkens back to those Sears homes, said the Groundwork Collaborative. The housing crisis “will not be solved by half measures.”

The new federal housing law does not go as far as Groundwork’s proposal. But the legislation “aims to slash some of the red tape” that has hindered construction of manufactured and modular housing, said The Wall Street Journal. One provision eliminates a requirement that such structures be built with a permanent steel frame to make the houses easier to move. (Fewer than 5% of mobile homes are ever relocated “from their original placement,” said Axios.) Ending the rule could reduce construction costs for a single unit by up to $10,000, said the Journal.

One obstacle: The feds “can only do so much” in a country where housing policies are largely set at the state and local levels, said the Journal. “Every city, every municipality has a different code,” PTM Partners’ Michael Tillman told the outlet.

‘More support’ needed

Manufactured housing still has its own “affordability problem” even with the red tape stripped out, said Politico. Loans to buy such housing are different from regular mortgages and often feature interest rates “near double digits” that can “lock out many prospective buyers.”

Some members of Congress want “more federal government support” to make factory-built home loans cheaper, said Politico. Those efforts will be needed because the “market is not doing them,” said Scott Olson, the executive director of Community Home Lenders of America, to the outlet.

The sight of a white cloud-like trail streaming behind a plane “set against a bright blue sky creates a romantic image of aviation”, said Aerospace Global News. But their existence “also represents the darker side of flying”.

These innocuous-looking trails “are one of the most urgent yet solvable climate challenges facing aviation today”, said Google, which is taking part in a £5 million trial known as Operation Blue Skies headed by the UK government. Together, they are looking to explore whether tweaking flight paths could address this problem.

Heat trappers

The streams are known as “condensation trails”, or “contrails”, said Google, which is partnering with the government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider NATS and researchers from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

These trails form when aircraft engine emissions encounter extremely cold air found at high altitudes, causing tiny ice particles to develop. They often fade soon after they appear, but very cold and moist atmospheric conditions can allow them to linger and spread. Over time, they may contribute to cloud formation that traps heat that would otherwise radiate away from the Earth.

Contrails are sometimes known as “vapour trails” but they’re different to so-called “chemtrails”, which conspiracy theorists claim are secret chemical or biological agents being sprayed on purpose for weather and population control, or geoengineering projects.

Trails ‘persisted and widened’ 

In 2019, around 40 million scheduled passenger flights took place, adding up to around 38 billion miles of travel, said The Economist. And more than 40% of these flights left contrails behind them for at least part of the journey. Many were “ephemeral”, but in more than 5% of the total distance flown – “comfortably enough for 10 round-trips a day to the Moon” – they “persisted and widened”, becoming cirrus clouds. “In doing so they warm the planet.”

Operation Blue Skies is based on a theory that if scientists, using artificial intelligence, can predict the areas of the atmosphere where contrails are likely to form, jets would be able to avoid them.

The trial will focus on the Shanwick airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which accounts for around 5% of global contrail warming. Using satellite images and flight data to identify where planes have previously produced contrails, and combining these with weather patterns, Google will forecast where the conditions for new contrails are most likely to occur. Air traffic controllers will then direct pilots to avoid those areas.

But far from “dramatically changing” the route of a flight, the aircrafts’ altitude will only change by around 2,000ft. This is the same sort of re-route that occurs already to “avoid turbulence and bad weather” so passengers are “unlikely to notice”, said the BBC.

The data centre question

Testing will take place during evenings and nights in the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, when the volume of air traffic is lower. Approximately 10,000 flights are expected to pass through the airspace during the trial periods.

Changing the altitude of an aircraft “can mean it burns more fuel”, which raises the “obvious question” of whether avoiding contrails “simply” creates additional carbon emissions elsewhere. Paul Hodgson, Google’s technical lead for the operation, said the “CO2 penalty is in the order of less than 1%” and that is outweighed by the climate benefit of preventing a warming contrail.

Questions have been raised over Google’s involvement in the project. It is “one of many big tech companies spending billions on new data centres – the giant, power-hungry banks which power AI” and have serious implications for climate change.

To the surprise of the nation and the delight of the tabloids, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed last week that they were moving back to Britain. Harry and Meghan, who duly flew in on Wednesday, will base themselves in a private property outside London, thought to be in the Cotswolds.

Their children – Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five – are enrolled to start as day pupils at a mixed independent school next month. The Sussexes, who moved to California six years ago, will retain their homes in Montecito and Portugal, and the Duchess will continue to run her lifestyle brand, As Ever, from the UK.

King Charles was informed of their move a few days before the announcement. He was said to be pleased about having the opportunity to see more of his younger son and family. There are no plans for Harry or Meghan to resume their roles as working royals. It is unclear what provisions will be made for their security.

‘Miserable feud’

News of the Sussexes’ return has “thrown a metaphorical hand grenade into the already fragile House of Windsor”, said The Sunday Times. It raises difficult questions about security arrangements and unresolved family tensions, but it deserves a “guarded welcome”. If Harry is prepared to build bridges with his family and end his “long-running and increasingly ridiculous vendetta against the press”, much good could come of it.

This is an opportunity for a much-needed reconciliation, said The Mail on Sunday. The scandals involving Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have undermined the reputation of the monarchy, and the King, still receiving cancer treatment, needs family support as never before. Polls suggest that the public today has a poor opinion of Harry and Meghan, but that can be changed. It’s easy to forget how unpopular the Princess Royal once was. Now she’s one of the most-liked royals. Overcoming six years of bitterness and recriminations won’t be easy, said the Daily Mirror, but this is a chance for everyone caught in this “miserable feud” to start afresh. “They should seize it.”

Just 15 months ago, Prince Harry claimed that he couldn’t “see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK”, said Michael D. Shear in The New York Times. Now he has suddenly upped sticks. What changed? It’s an odd decision, said James Ball in The i Paper, given that “none of the issues that drove the pair out of the UK six years ago seem to be any better than when they left – and many look worse”. Among the suggested explanations is that Harry wants to be closer to his father, or is just eager to educate his children in the UK.

Life in America may also have lost its allure, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. Beautiful as Montecito is, living in “a gated community of semi-retired celebrities” must get very boring after a while, not to mention very expensive. With their Spotify deal axed and their other ventures failing to gain much traction, Harry and Meghan needed pastures new. I, for one, welcome their return, said Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph. The monarchy is Britain’s “longest-running soap opera” and, let’s be honest, the storylines have been “flagging of late”. The Sussexes will deliver a dose of colour.

Difficult future

Having the couple around again will certainly change the dynamic within the royal family, said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. King Charles, who hosted Harry, Meghan and their children for afternoon tea last month, has decided to give Harry another chance. But whether the bitter rift with William and Catherine can be mended is another matter.

The Waleses will likely give the Sussexes a wide berth, while privately fuming when “eclipsed by each Harry and Meghan news update”, said Tina Brown in The Times. The situation could yet resolve itself peacefully if Meghan returns to acting (there were rumours this week that she had landed a role in Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, “The Gentlemen”), Harry sticks to appearing in jolly photo ops, and they both manage to carefully steer clear of any controversy. The good news for the tabloids, though, is that “that’s never going to happen”.

The Sussexes’ return presents the royal family with many dilemmas, said Hilary Rose in The Times. It was one thing for Prince William to avoid contact with Harry and Meghan while they were based in the US, for instance, but at what point, now they’re back, will his refusal to engage begin “to look petty and vindictive”? What will happen at Christmas? Will the Sussexes be invited to Sandringham and, if so, will they do the walk to church? And what happens if Harry, who served and lost friends in Afghanistan, lets it be known that he’d like to appear at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday?

Dating can take a toll on your emotions. Now it is wrecking people’s finances too, as “dateflation” makes standard dating-related expenses inaccessible for many singles. Faced with the economic pressure of inflation, many are turning to “infladating” and going on budget-friendly dates.

Rising costs

Finances impact “nearly every aspect of life, to varying degrees,” said USA Today. Your dating life is “no exception.”

Not only does the “state of the economy impact the kinds of dates people go on,” said USA Today, but it may also “influence who people decide to go out with.” As dating expenses continue to rise, “people become more selective about who they choose to take out.” People use calculations to determine “which dates to go on” and not just “what they’re doing on the date” but “who is worthy of that date,” Damona Hoffman, a dating coach, said to USA Today. You’ll likely “wait to see that there’s some possibility of this relationship going somewhere” before you’re willing to “make a monetary investment in someone.”

On average, Gen Z spends $205 on a date and millennials spend $252, said CNBC, according to BMO Financial Group’s survey of 2,501 U.S. adults. Nearly 47% of singles feel dating isn’t worth the money, while 48% of Gen Z and 40% of millennials say the high costs of dating are an obstacle to reaching their financial goals.

Those who have embraced “infladating” are “being more mindful about spending on dates due to rising costs,” Susan Trombetti, the matchmaker and CEO of Exclusive Matchmaking, said to Vice. Infladating does not mean “investing less energy into your dating life,” said Vice. Rather, it’s “investing less money into it.” Effort goes a “long way with the right person.”

Better than giving up

If infladating worries people, experts note the alternative could be worse. In reality, many people are “struggling in today’s economy” and are “opting out of dating completely because it’s too expensive,” dating coach Amy Chan said to USA Today. She sees it more in her “male clients who feel embarrassed that they cannot take a date out to a nice restaurant.” If the “antidote for that is infladating,” then she is “all for it!”

In any case, singles should be “wary of the person who pulls out all the stops on a first date,” said Chan. People are taught to “read that as romantic,” but this level of intensity “hasn’t been earned by anything real between you.” It’s a “performance,” and often it says “more about how they want to be perceived than how they feel about you.”

This isn’t “just a dating story” but a story about “how our finances and the things that impact them affect every area of our lives,” including “how we pursue relationships,” Michael McAuliffe, the president and founder of Family Credit Management, said to Vice. Basic everyday costs have been “increasing much faster than most people’s paychecks.”

Some of the world’s most important rivers are drying up. The Colorado River supplies water and electricity to millions of people in the Southwest U.S. but is afflicted by a decadeslong drought, while blistering European heat is taking a toll on the Danube and other key waterways on the continent. And adjusting to these environmental changes will be an upstream battle for governments and communities.

Colorado: ‘Legal and political battles’

Record-low water levels at reservoirs fed by the Colorado River have put the region in “uncharted territory,” Utah State University’s Jack Schmidt said to CNN. Lakes Mead and Powell have been “shrinking for 20 years” because of the toll that climate change and overuse have taken on the river, which supplies water to 40 million people and hydropower electricity to 500,000 households. Big cities like Phoenix and Tucson “have taken steps to prepare” for the crisis, but procuring alternative water supplies “might be less feasible” for Indigenous tribes and small towns along the river.

Dividing the remaining water will require “legal and political battles” that are “not remotely close to being resolved,” said the Arizona Daily Star. Cities, farms and businesses along the Colorado say reducing water use is “more urgent than ever,” but the possible loss of Hoover Dam-produced power supplies could raise electricity costs in the region “to the point of being unaffordable.” One hope: The promise that the “biggest El Niño season on record” might replenish the river.

The crisis adds urgency to a federal proposal to require Arizona, California and Nevada to significantly reduce the amount of water they take from the Colorado, said The Associated Press. That would result in a “lot of potential devastating impacts” to farms and other river users, Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke said to the AP. Nevada this week sued to block the plan, said The Hill.

Europe: Altering the ‘old map of power’

The Danube recently measured “just 9 inches deep” in Budapest, Ben Coates said at The New York Times. Italy’s Po River and the Rhine in Switzerland are also in peril. That has nearly halted the “transport of chemicals, oil products and other goods” in Europe, while also forcing Romania to shut down a river-cooled nuclear power plant. The major rivers have served as “crucibles of the continent’s industrial power,” but the evaporation of those rivers could “alter the old map of Europe’s power and wealth.”

The “growing disruption” to commerce has sparked calls to dig deeper channels in the bottlenecked part of the Rhine, said Radio France Internationale. But experts are warning that making rivers deeper “cannot create more water and could make shortages worse” by disrupting sensitive ecosystems. “That is what we call maladaptation,” hydrologist Thibault Datry said to the outlet.

There is also talk of “reconnecting floodplains, protecting wetlands and restoring peatlands” to help rivers “retain more water and improve resilience” during dry periods, said Deutsche Welle. But those efforts may well be “little more than a drop in a fast-flowing river” without decisive moves to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate climate change.

Treasury Department regulators have granted World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked cryptocurrency enterprise, conditional approval to begin operating as a federally chartered trust bank. The status change provides “new powers and federal credibility” to an enterprise in which the Trump family retains a “substantial financial interest,” said Politico. But the prospect of Trump administration officials clearing a regulatory path for the president’s family businesses has many Democrats and ethics groups warning against corruption on a massive scale.

‘Pretty unprecedented’ arrangement

The preliminary approval for the Trump family’s “flagship crypto venture” allows World Liberty to “issue, redeem and safeguard USD1,” the “dollar-backed stablecoin” introduced by the firm last year, said The Wall Street Journal. USD1 is currently “custodied” with financial services provider BitGo, and has a market value of “about $4 billion.”

After relying on BitGo’s third-party services to “provide a stable digital currency,” said ABC News, World Liberty can “cut out the middleman and provide the service directly.” This marks the “first time in U.S. history” that a business “owned by the sitting president’s family has been granted bank status.”

The arrangement is “pretty unprecedented,” said New York University Stern School of Business Professor Austin Campbell to CBS News. There is now an “awkward situation” in which the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) will need to “police World Liberty, which has an affiliation with the president’s family.”

While World Liberty “won’t be able to take deposits or make loans,” said CNN, critics warn this could be a “new wrinkle on the classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.” Moving forward, “corporations and foreign actors” will have a “new way to stealthily curry favor with the White House.”

‘Brazen act of self-dealing’

Although Washington has been “in knots” over the “steady drumbeat of news” regarding Trump’s expanding businesses during his presidency, the World Liberty decision “stood out to many,” said Politico. Critics call the arrangement “one of the clearest examples” of the conflicts of interest federal officials face as they “weigh the wishes of Trump family-backed companies.”

Trump is now the first ever president to “approve, operate and supervise his own bank” in the “most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a statement. “Congress cannot allow it to stand.” To that end, Warren and a group of Democratic Senators have introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act, a bill that would ensure no high-ranking government official or their families can “exploit their positions to own or control a bank, which could serve as a major vehicle for corrupt dealings.” Democrats will “likely probe the OCC’s approval of the World Liberty bank charter” should the party “regain control of Congress” in the coming year, said Politico.

Spearheaded by “Jolene”, her 1974 hit that has been covered more than 90 times, Dolly Parton’s extraordinary back catalogue has “long taken on a life of its own outside country music”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian.

Right up until her death this week, Parton “seemed as present in pop music in the mid-2020s as she had been in the late 70s”, having been a notable influence on Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter in particular.

“A world without Dolly doesn’t feel possible, real, or right,” said Taylor Swift on social media following Parton’s death yesterday. She will leave an “everlasting” legacy for younger artists and fans. Beyoncé, who recorded a reimagined version of “Jolene” in 2024, said Parton was the “barometer” and “north star” of the industry.

‘Cocktail of mixed emotions’

“The country music icon amassed countless hits and accolades,” said USA Today, “but few songs have stood the test of time quite like her beloved tune ‘Jolene’”. The song first appeared on Parton’s 13th studio album, of the same name, released in October 1973, and reached No. 1 on the US chart in February 1974. It was inspired when a “red-haired bank clerk flirted” with her late husband, Carl Thomas Dean.

The song has not only become “one of the most renowned songs in country music”, but has also “transcended genre lines”. In 2004, it was No. 217 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and No. 63 on the revised list in 2021. “Jolene” has become a “constant presence throughout pop culture, with multiple generations discovering, covering and falling in love with the tune”.

A large part of the song’s appeal is how “open-ended” and relatable it is, said Annie Zaleski on The Boot. We may know how upset the “inadequate” protagonist is, but “we're not quite sure how her story ends”. Some of the final lyrics – “I had to have this talk with you / My happiness depends on you” – can be interpreted as “breezy, a stern warning shot or downright passive-aggressive”. In just three minutes, Parton digs into a “cocktail of mixed emotions – jealousy, anger, sadness, fright – that to this day captures the complicated dimensions of the human condition”.

Given that ambiguity, what’s curious is how different artists have interpreted the core messages of “Jolene” in recent years, said David Honigmann in the Financial Times. At its heart, the song “walks the line between dignity and desperation”. Tellingly, this has usually led male artists to replay Parton’s “quiet dignity as hysteria”, while women tend to be “more sympathetic”.

In 2018, rapper Stormzy “embarked on a lengthy exegesis” of the song on social media, saying that he wished Parton had “more self-love and confidence or the strength to just leave my man cah it ain’t really Jolene’s fault”. David Rotheray of The Beautiful South wrote in a 2013 blog that it “always sounded to me like a delusional ‘low self-esteem’ song”.

Yet women artists, such as Laura Marling and Strawberry Switchblade, have tended to refrain from judgement, while Parton’s god-daughter Miley Cyrus (Parton was a close friend of her father, Billy Ray Cyrus) has recorded a “splendidly tougher, more assertive version”.

Musical ‘blueprint’ for artists

“Jolene”, as well as other major hits such as “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5”, shows a “skilful musician who knew how to blend the story of lyrics with the drama of music”, said creative arts academic Wendy Hargreaves on The Conversation. Her lyrics are known to tell the story, but, importantly “her music matched it”.

The chords “pound out an appropriately bleak minor key, ascending to higher chords with each dramatic call of the name ‘Jolene’”. Underneath the accompanying vocals, an “intriguing, rapid-fire, finger-picking guitar” maintains an “incessant motion that not only adds tension but draws admiration for skilful playing”.

In a technical sense, “Jolene” also “lends itself to malleability”, said Zaleski on The Boot. For Parton, the song’s simplicity is a “big plus”, with her “proud warble” up front, supported by “genial acoustic guitar augmented by occasional whispers of pedal steel and strings”.

It strikes a perfect balance, at once “galloping” enough to be “effective” as a folk song, but also “skeletal enough” for subsequent artists to use it as a “blueprint or guiding sketch” for their own vision. This is what has made the song “timeless”; “there’s nothing in the production or instrumentation to tie it to a particular era or musical movement”.

Almost 500 people have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France this summer as countries across Europe continue to “tackle ferocious blazes”, said The Guardian.

More than a thousand people were forced to flee from a Croatian holiday resort last week, while hundreds more were evacuated from villages in western Germany and southwest France. Stranded holidaymakers were picked up from beaches “threatened by flames” in Greece, and the army rescued “historic relics” in Spain. In Belgium’s Liège province, residents were asked to leave their homes as the biggest fire in the country’s history burned through the High Fens nature reserve.

By 16 August, fire and rescue services in England and Wales had been called to 1,132 wildfires this year, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council – that’s more than the record-breaking 1,017 for the whole of last year.

The recent heatwaves have led to a rise in blazes but how they start and if they are set deliberately then why does this happen, are keenly debated questions.

‘No common picture’

Almost all UK wildfires are started by people, said a 2024 report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. A separate report by the Forestry Commission the previous year found that 97% of all wildfires are “related to some form of human action”, whether “deliberate” or “accidental”.

Nearly nine out of 10 forest fires in France are started by humans and some people “do so deliberately”, with the perpetrators “often difficult to identify”, said Le Monde. Although climate change “fuels the droughts, heatwaves, and winds that turn forests into tinderboxes, it is humans who set them alight”, said Euractiv.

In Portugal, which is known as the EU’s “most flammable country”, arson accounts for around a fifth of wildfires. In France, the authorities have calculated that nine out of 10 fires have a human origin, with 30% started deliberately. But the causes of fires elsewhere in the Mediterranean are “often not established, let alone investigated” so the “lack of reliable data” makes it “harder to design social and policy interventions to prevent fires”.

In Spain, some landowners set fires to move livestock around, and blazes can result from property disputes and acts of revenge. Arson “is not always random destruction”.

Europe may have “built advanced systems to detect wildfires and coordinate emergency response”, said Euronews, but there’s “no common picture of who starts deliberate fires or why”, because arson “remains a fragmented national matter”.

‘Fire is powerful, beautiful’

A man charged with starting a wildfire in Spokane, Washington, this month had planned the crime for weeks and even researched when the weather would be best for igniting it, said police. The suspect said “fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth”, said The Associated Press.

In California, a suspect “spent days obsessing about arson” before heading to a clearing in Pacific Palisades late on New Year’s Eve, where he allegedly started a fire with a lighter, said the Los Angeles Times.

Although firefighters “quickly put out” that fire, investigators believe that the “embers continued to smoulder underground” and reignited to become one of California’s “most devastating” wildfires. It “consumed more than 6,500 structures” and left 12 people dead and billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

After spending years building audiences and influencer careers showcasing traditional gender roles, some of the earliest so-called tradwives are now denouncing the category, including those who say they never claimed the label for themselves in the first place. While this could be seen as a shift away from conservative influencers, a new crop of teenage tradwives is already waiting to prove that notion wrong.

Influencers dropping the label

Despite having built much of her more than 12 million followers on TikTok through an “outlandish portrayal of domestic perfection,” model and influencer Nara Smith made waves after she “vehemently disavowed” the tradwife label during a recent interview with the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Jessica Grose said at The New York Times. Viewers of Smith’s content were “stuck in this narrative” about traditional gender roles that she didn’t create on purpose, Smith said on the podcast. They used her as the “poster child for the tradwife movement,” which was “very bizarre.”

She is not the only popular so-called trad wife who has veered clear of the terminology. Earlier this year, Estee Williams, another tradwife influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, announced on TikTok that she would be stepping back from making that kind of content to “focus fully” on her family. In June, Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, who is rumored to be the inspiration behind the popular thriller book “Yesteryear,” admitted that she “steers clear of conversations around tradwives,” said Vanity Fair.

For some, the sudden shift can be tied to tradwives being regarded as MAGA-coded. It is no longer “considered cool” to be “tacitly embracing the Trumpian vision,” Grose said. It is “not cute anymore” to be “spending hours making Skittles from scratch” when so many people “can’t even afford haircuts and toilet paper.” Beyond the “superficial politics” of content like Smith’s, there is evidence that “one-note influencers are having trouble retaining their audience” because what used to “get them brand deals and followers has become stale.”

Next generation is here

The first-gen trad wives’ “renunciation” has had “little impact on their progeny,” who “studied them for years” and “viewed their content as a portrait of a viable future,” said Vanity Fair. Now there is a new cohort of “young — often teenage — married influencers.” They have gone viral in the last few months by “mimicking the content formula perfected by their tradwife forebears.”

The new generation cooks, cleans and “fights disaffected former tradwives” who tell them to “stash emergency money away from their husbands,” said Vanity Fair. These teens, typically between the ages of 17 and 21, “present their life as a balm to generational ennui.” In some ways, they are proof that what felt like an “overhyped, postpandemic symbol of an ascending conservative culture” has become an “enduring content category that nearly guarantees virality,” one now “taken over by ever-younger creators.”

The new wave of “young creators making stay-at-home content” appears more than ready to “accept the homemaker label,” Isabel Bekele said at Dazed. The young women “film themselves performing domestic tasks” and post the same “ragebait-esque provocations” with an attitude that “demonstrates an awareness of how their content might be received.”

The lifestyle choices of “teen tradwives” are “certainly not reflective of the country as a whole,” especially as Gen Z women are still “going to college and entering the workforce at a higher rate than their male counterparts,” said Bekele. Still, the fact that these videos “exist and are gaining traction at all” feels indicative of the “current cultural dissonance in America,” where conversations around “work, gender and labor” have changed in line with “women’s lived realities.”

Nara Smith may not be a tradwife, but that “doesn’t mean that the movement is going anywhere,” said Bekele — whether that’s due to the country’s “shift to the right,” the internet’s “obsession with hate-watching,” the algorithm’s “tendency to reward extreme content” or all of the above. With or without the first-era influencers, “tradwives will continue to exist.” Considering the limited options young women have today, “maybe it isn’t that shocking that this romanticization of the past will still be in our future.”

Just a couple of years ago, Anthropic was an underdog in the AI race. Now the San Francisco start-up, co-founded by CEO Dario Amodei, is preparing to float in October “at a valuation of $2 trillion or more”, said George Hammond in the Financial Times – “a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering”.

Booming demand

Anthropic’s growth has been astonishing even by Silicon Valley standards. Valued at around $965 billion in May, when it eclipsed arch-rival OpenAI for the first time, investors reckon the $2 trillion price tag is justified by booming demand for the Claude maker’s advanced AI models and coding tools – especially from business. Annualised revenue is expected to rise more than ten times this year to around £100-120 billion.

The usual suspects – Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – are working on the listing, said Bloomberg. If it proceeds as scheduled, Anthropic will debut not just before OpenAI, but also before DeepSeek – the Chinese AI firm that has been grabbing increasing market share.

‘Tough’ questions

Growing Chinese competition is just one of the “tough investor questions” Anthropic will have to field, said The Wall Street Journal. Others include “tensions with the Trump administration” – which forced it to briefly pull leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – and “a growing backlash” against data centres. Additionally, Anthropic faces animus in Silicon Valley, where many CEOs are “nervous about its power over the AI ecosystem”.

The recent sell-off in SpaceX’s shares after an early pop has also “reminded investors of how turbulent moving from private to public markets can be”. Still, for the moment, Anthropic is lifting “Wall Street’s animal spirits”, said Due Diligence in the FT. Come autumn, the street will be buzzing.

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – better known as AOC – preparing to run for the presidency? That is the question being asked in Washington. Last week, the left-wing Democrat revealed on Instagram that she was freezing her eggs to “feel more in control” – which fuelled speculation about her political ambitions. Hours later, she gave an interview in which she refused to rule out making a White House run in 2028.

Youth in revolt

If she does go for the Democrat nomination, said Dace Potas in USA Today, she’ll have every chance of success. The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders proved to be a serious contender a decade ago, and today, the political climate is “even more receptive to his brand of populist anger”. AOC, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is well placed to capitalise on the moment. With strong name recognition and almost 30 million social media followers to help fund her campaign, she’d have a headstart on most of her likely rivals.

What might count against her is her youth, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Were she to win the election, she’d enter the White House at the age of 39, four years younger than the youngest-ever elected president, JFK. On the other hand, AOC may never get a better chance to bid for the top job, so, if she’s keen, she should take it. American history is littered with would-be candidates – Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, Chris Christie – who hesitated and missed their moment. Of course, winning the Democrat nomination would be the easy bit. “The general election would be a different story.”

Woke 2

AOC carries a lot of baggage, said David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner. In the Covid era, she joined in the talk of defunding the police and the clamour to cancel any public figure deemed to have transgressed progressive pieties about race and systemic oppression. Asked last week about some of the more extreme positions she and other left-wingers had taken, she tried to laugh it all off, saying “Woke 1 was crazy”. Granted, everyone should be allowed to change their views “as they learn and grow”, but AOC needs to explain exactly how her thinking has evolved and what her vision of Woke 2 is.

She owes voters more than just an “oops”, agreed Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. Were the tables turned, she wouldn’t let a Republican politician get away with it. If AOC wants to win the trust of American voters, “she’ll have to do better than this”.

“Hi there. I have received your email. I have printed it off. I’m now using it to light flaming cocktails for the entire bar. Best, Lucy.”

That was an ‘amusing’ out-of-office reply from a British Airways holiday advert a couple of years ago, said Country Life, but there is more to the “philosophy” of these emails than just trying to be funny, said The Atlantic. They can be a “rote obligation or an opportunity to make a grand statement about work and life”.

For some, it is a “simple one-line email”, while others use it to “apologise profusely” for being away or “highlight their indignation at being tied to work or the internet in the first place”. Selecting the right tone requires adhering to a hidden etiquette of rules. And needless to say, ”transitioning between vacation and regular obligations can get complicated”.

‘Cry for help’

It can be frustrating to be hit with a “barrage” of out-of-office (OOO) responses to a group email you have sent, said the Financial Times. You may think your colleagues are “lazy good-for-nothings, slacking off while you toil through the long summer”, but their replies can tell you “so much more”.

Someone who says they will be “checking their emails intermittently” is almost certainly on holiday with their in-laws, and “wants to reply to your email within 17 minutes rather than the usual six”. Then there are those who are even more addicted to being permanently on call, claiming to have “no access to internet”. If they do get access, they say they will have smashed their phone, laptop and smartwatch and “thrown them into the ocean”. This is a blatant “cry for help”.

Then there are the jokey ones. “I am currently out of the office, trying to return home after a successful conquest involving a large wooden horse. It may take me some time.” This person has not checked their company policy and will “shortly be unemployed”.

I went through a phase of setting “funny” out of offices, said Sophia Money-Coutts in Country Life. But I “shudder with horror now” thinking about it. “Life’s too short; time is too precious to agonise” over what you write. “Straightforward is the way to go for everyone involved.”

That said, the “aggressive approach” is by far the worst. Some people not only declare they will be away, but that “all emails will be automatically deleted during that period”. How “irritating”. This would make more sense if they were on a sabbatical or maternity leave, but “it’s quite self-important if you’re only hopping to Mallorca for a week”. And setting an OOO saying you’re off for a “mere afternoon”? A “touch pompous”.

Keep it short, said Forbes. “Your OOO is not your Instagram. Skip the mojito emoji and ‘Off to South Beach, baby!’ Nobody wants your travelogue.”

Another big mistake is not fully shutting it off when you’re back. Doing so the night before logging back on is usually best. “Don’t be that person who leaves the OOO on until three people have reminded you to turn it off.”

‘Set expectations’ before you go

There are some clear “dos and don’ts” when it comes to out-of-office messages, said BBC. And getting it wrong can have “more serious consequences than you might think”.

The optimum reply is “polite and concise”, gives a “specific return date” and at least one other point of contact if appropriate, said the etiquette consultancy Debretts . “Virtue signalling” – or going into too much detail about your time off – is another big “no-no”: it can come across as boastful, “smug”, or that you’re “trying too hard”.

It’s not really about the out-of-office message at all, said Stylist. The most effective team members “set expectations before” they go, outlining how “online” they will be, if at all. This stops colleagues of whatever seniority “second-guessing whether they should follow up” or being confused over what “contactable in an emergency” actually means.

Even sharing good news – whether from your desk or on holiday – can be a detrimental form of “presenteeism”. This can throw someone else into work mode, confuse the boundaries you have set or subliminally pressurise others to follow your example.

Most importantly, it is vital to just “trust your team. We all like to think the place will fall apart without us, but this is a damaging view that will only stop you from fully enjoying your time off.” Planning ahead of time and handing things over properly removes most of the need for communicating while on holiday. Many people forget this but “really, most things can wait”.

The Federal Communications Commission this month voted to repeal its 39% cap that limits how much of the national television market a single owner can legally own. In doing so, the FCC has supercharged an ongoing debate over media consolidation and monopolies in the Trump era.

Moving forward, the FCC said in a press release, station purchases will be adjudicated “with a granular, case-by-case review.” But concerns over increased monopolization and questions about the commission's authority in this case have some critics crying foul — and predicting a rocky legal road for FCC Chair Brendan Carr.

‘Shift from local to national ownership’

The FCC claims that its 39% ownership cap had “become outdated” and “hindered broadcasters’ ability to compete for viewers and advertising dollars” against digital services that “face no comparable restrictions,” said The Wall Street Journal. Removing the cap will “foster a competitive media market, enhance localism and promote investment in trusted sources,” said the FCC in its release.

But the change is a “big win” for media companies “aligned with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” said CNN. If allowed to stand, removing the cap means “big station group owners” will be able to “buy up more TV stations, furthering a shift from local to national ownership.” Companies including “Nexstar, Fox, CBS parent Paramount and E.W. Scripps” already sit “at or near the 39% ownership limit,” said the Journal. “Industry analysts” have similarly “identified Sinclair and Gray Media as potential acquirers” should the restrictions remain loosened.

Carr’s “rationale” for the change is to “balance the power between local broadcasters and networks,” said Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democrat and sole “no” vote on removing the rule cap, per NPR. In practice, the FCC is “putting its thumb on the scale” on behalf of “content that this administration likes and against content that it dislikes.” The rule change comes as ABC and Disney have sued the FCC for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights as part of a broader ongoing fight between the broadcaster and the regulator.

‘Serious concerns’

The FCC’s new rule is “already facing legal challenges,” with experts warning of a “real chance the agency loses in court,” said Axios. Some observers, including a surprising array of conservative lawmakers, are skeptical of the FCC’s legal ability to make the changes in the first place.

Despite being a Republican who supports “deregulation and the Trump administration,” my “ultimate loyalty rests with the Constitution, which gives certain prerogatives to Congress,” said former GOP Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who helped set the 39% cap in 2004, at Daily Wire. Chair Carr “cannot defy or modify laws enacted by Congress” and should instead “ask Congress to pass a law giving him authority to do that.” Said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in a statement to Politico, “I’ve raised serious concerns that the commission lacks the authority to carry that out without congressional authorization.”

The 39% ownership cap was enacted by Congress to “protect localism, viewpoint diversity and consumer choice,” said Hunter Wilson, the spokesperson for the American Television Alliance lobbying group, to Variety. The FCC has “ignored Congressional intent” and “opened the door to unchecked ‘Big Broadcast’ consolidation that will drive up costs for viewers and reduce local news programming.”

Many in the artificial intelligence industry say the most influential person at AI powerhouse Anthropic may not be its CEO, Dario Amodei, but his wife, Camilla “Cami” Clark. Despite Clark having no official job with the company, recent reports indicate that she plays an outsize role as an adviser for Anthropic. She also has previous ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

‘Scant details about Clark online’

Despite her apparently significant role within Anthropic, there are “scant details about Clark online,” and “efforts have been made to remove references to her,” said The Wall Street Journal. Even Anthropic’s own AI chatbot, Claude, cannot provide much intel. It is known that Clark was born in 1979 and “was an entrepreneur and often interacted with the rich and powerful, as well as up-and-comers in Silicon Valley.”

In the early 2010s, Clark started a number of her own businesses, which include a “self-described ‘free luxury porn’ company that catered to women and a ‘social dieting app,’” said Forbes. It was via this porn company, Eddice, that Clark first interacted with Epstein in an attempt to get him to invest in the business. Clark “asked Epstein in a March 2012 email exchange about whether he’d be interested in investing in her and a colleague’s businesses,” though there is “no indication in the Epstein files that the financier made any investment.”

‘The most consequential person’

Clark married Amodei in 2022, and she has quickly become a “key behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic as the company has shot to prominence over the past year,” said The Information. Clark accompanies her husband on global trips in support of Anthropic and has recently been called AI’s “first lady.” Several people “who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the future of AI.”

She “may well be the most consequential person within Anthropic’s orbit who doesn’t have a formal role at the startup,” said The Information. While Amodei himself is more introverted, according to reports, Clark is a “consummate networker” who has become friends with President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka “even as Amodei and Anthropic have at times faced an existential struggle with her father’s administration.” Clark is also a member of a WhatsApp group that “includes other prominent women in the tech industry.”

As the AI sphere continues to grow in influence, many believe that Clark will continue to play a large part. She recently “told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn’t as ‘woke’ as its detractors might think it is,” said the Journal. Her friendship with Ivanka Trump means she may have also been used as an intermediary when Anthropic “drew the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year after Amodei refused to drop restrictions on how Claude could be used by the Pentagon.”

Previous business dealings will likely come up; Clark’s “ties to Epstein will be heavily scrutinized as Anthropic heads toward a potentially multi-trillion-dollar IPO,” said Futurism, especially given that Clark has been “steering Amodei’s decisions and helping him liaise with politicians and investors with her charm.” Still, Clark doesn’t have widespread name recognition and has “largely flown under the radar,” said The Information, which is a “stark contrast to some other prominent couples that bask in the social media limelight.”

Economists have argued the U.S. is experiencing a K-shaped economy in which the rich get richer while working Americans increasingly fall behind. Now the Trump administration is pushing back. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is “sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” he said on CNBC this month, insisting that lower-wage workers are seeing improvements under GOP policies.

Is the gap narrowing?

The U.S. wealth gap “appears to be narrowing,” David Goldman and Rachel Siegel said at CNN. Wages and spending for the rich outpace “growth in paychecks and expenses for the poor” in a K-shaped economy, but recent reporting suggests “those lines seem to be getting closer together.” One June report found the gap in spending growth between high- and low-wage earners is the “narrowest it has been in three years.” The remaining disparity is “not getting wider in absolute terms,” PNC economist Brian LeBlanc said to the outlet.

The K-shaped economy was “increasingly reliant” on the spending of wealthy Americans on goods and services, said Axios. That made the U.S. economy vulnerable to a “wealth shock” if the rich were forced to curtail their spending due to a falling stock market or another crisis. But “lower- and middle-income Americans are catching up” and putting U.S. consumer spending “on a more resilient footing.” One indicator: After-tax wages among lower-income workers “rose 5.2% in July from the same period a year ago.”

Analysts believe the “shrinking gap largely reflects an improving labor market” in which “more lower-income households are working and collecting paychecks,” said Axios. That signifies there is not “much there in terms of support for the K-shape narrative,” JPMorgan Chase’s Jeremy Barnum said to investors last month.

There are skeptics. The K-shaped economy “remains firmly intact,” Moody Analytics’ Mark Zandi said in a July post at LinkedIn. Households with incomes above $200,000 “are powering overall spending,” with the top 20% of earners accounting for an “astonishing nearly 60% of personal outlays.” Spending by the bottom 80% of the country, meanwhile, remains “unchanged after inflation.” It is a gap that has “persisted since the pandemic,” and the numbers show “no sign that the trend line will reverse soon.”

‘Slightly softer prongs’

It is “tempting to conclude that the K-shaped recovery is behind us,” former JPMorgan Chase economist Anthony Chan said at The People’s Economist. The U.S. does “seem to be making progress,” but more evidence is necessary to determine that the trends have changed. “We may need more than one calendar quarter of good news to fully eliminate the K-shaped economy designation.”

For now, the U.S. economy might best be described as K-shaped but with “slightly softer prongs,” Juliana Kaplan said at Business Insider. Lower earners are “seeing slightly more stability” even if higher earners are still propelling consumer spending. “Trying to describe the economy with a letter shape might just be alphabet soup.”

“It’s pretty worrying, the state of men’s tennis, especially right now,” said British star Jack Draper, announcing his withdrawal from Wimbledon this year due to injury. “The amount of injuries, especially young players.” Draper thinks “the tour and the calendar have to adapt if any of us are gonna achieve some sort of longevity”.

The unrelenting schedule of the ATP Tour has meant Draper’s world ranking has dropped from no. 4 to no. 147, and he faces the prospect of having to qualify for this year’s US Open, where he was a semi-finalist two years ago. He has missed most of the last year with the injury to his serving arm.

Players on both the men’s ATP and women’s WTA tours have long complained of the hectic playing schedule and called for reforms to ease the workload. But calendar alterations are just one of the many challenges players are facing.

Injuries ‘steadily increasing’

“It is difficult to remember a time when each tournament’s build-up was not punctuated” with withdrawals like that of men’s world no. 1 Jannik Sinner from this week’s Cincinnati Open, said The Telegraph.

The calendar is to blame. Of the nine Masters 1000 events – one step below Grand Slams in prestige and usually lasting seven days – seven of them have “expanded to a 12-day format”. And punishments for opting out of the “gruelling” schedule don’t help players. Barring injury, they must play a minimum of eight such tournaments or “have their bonus pool reduced for each subsequent tournament missed”.

Optimists would argue that top players’ absences give opportunities to younger and lower-ranked players, but fans have started to “raise concerns” about their favourites “regularly missing events”. Clearly, the ATP Tour has “its own interests at heart”, attempting to “squeeze out every revenue source possible”.

This has impacted player health. “Survival of the fittest has become an apt metaphor for life on the tennis circuit in recent months,” said The Times. Injuries are “inevitable” in any sporting arena, but at the top level of tennis they are “steadily increasing”. University of Barcelona data from 2024 found that match retirements had increased by at least 25% and 50% on the ATP and WTA Tours respectively since 1999, while the Professional Tennis Players’ Association found that the average distance covered by players on court has increased “by more than 50 per cent since 2015”.

Players must contend with a “lack of recovery time and accumulated stress between matches”. In training, they can record performance “to the nth degree” with trackers and advanced technology, but these are banned in Grand Slam tournaments. However, “the stress of real competition is far greater”

Counterintuitively, players’ improved athleticism is also causing issues, said El Pais. In both men’s and women’s competitions, the physicality has “evolved exponentially compared with two or three decades ago”, meaning players can hit the ball harder, and have better equipment with which to do so. This places even greater strain when on the receiving end, and the rules are not adapting to accommodate this.

‘Highly vulnerable to match-fixing’

Environmental changes are also overlooked too, said the Financial Times. “Extreme heat is affecting tennis tournaments globally”, particularly at the French Open in May, and different organisations follow different rules to combat it. Until this year, the decision to suspend ATP matches due to weather conditions was “at the discretion of tournament supervisors”. Now a new “heat rule” is applied.

In addition to the playing schedule and more common heatwave conditions, tennis is “highly vulnerable to match-fixing”, said The Athletic. Top players may earn “more than $20 million in prize money each season”, but the majority of lower-ranked players “live a hand-to-mouth existence” on tour. “Fixers thrive on this inconsistency.”

The scoring system means players “can be convinced to corrupt matches whilst still winning them”: they can throw the opening set, or a particular service game, before “returning to playing at their best”. In December, French player Quentin Folliot was “suspended for 20 years on fixing charges, while Chinese player Pang Renlong was “barred for 12 years for separate offences”.

Like in other sports, change in tennis “takes time”, said The Independent. But unlike in others, tennis essentially has “seven governing bodies”, with the ATP, WTA, World Tennis and the four historic Grand Slam events all claiming certain jurisdiction. “Getting everyone around the same table is challenging enough”, let alone them agreeing on reforms to the game.

Growth may be slowing, but Russia’s economy is essentially sound. That’s the message Vladimir Putin is keen to purvey; and by way of proof he cites Russia’s incredibly low unemployment rate: just 2.1%. He’s got it back to front, said Alexander Kolyandr in The Spectator.

Far from being a comfort, this figure should cause Putin huge alarm. It underscores the fact that his nation is undergoing its worst labour crisis in decades: it “has run out of workers”. The crisis has its roots in the low birth rates of the 1990s, but the war in Ukraine has “poured fuel on it”.

Woefully inefficient remedies

It certainly has, said the Luxembourg Times. Men are being sent to the front in vast numbers: the target number of contract soldiers to be signed up this year is 409,000. And the high pay they’re being offered as a lure is crippling the economy. In 2022, a contract soldier’s monthly salary was about four times the average Russian wage. It’s now closer to twice the average wage because the defence industry (employment in military production has risen by half a million since 2021), the railways and other big state sectors have all had to hike up wages in an effort to compete. As a result, companies in the civilian sector are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Yet the remedies the Kremlin has pursued to tackle the crisis have been woefully insufficient, said Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya in Foreign Policy. Expanding forced prison labour, a familiar Soviet strategy, is no longer an option as so many convicts have already been sent to the front lines. (The jail population has shrunk from 465,000 in 2021 to 282,000.) So too with the plan to open jobs hitherto deemed too physically taxing or dangerous to women, as their number in Russia’s labour market is remarkably high already.

Economic ‘death zone’

Such measures fail to get to grips with the sheer scale of the problem, said Mathias Brüggmann in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed or badly wounded. The only solution to Russia’s chronic labour shortage is increased migration.

Yet since March 2024, when Tajik terrorists killed 149 people in an attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the Kremlin has gone in the opposite direction, imposing harsh new rules on migrants, especially those from the former Soviet states in Central Asia – Russia’s largest immigrant group. Their number has fallen dramatically. Issuing 70,000 Chinese and 34,000 Indians work permits this year hasn’t been nearly enough to plug the gap.

In fact, Russia’s economy has now entered “the death zone”, said Alexandra Prokopenko in The Economist. The budget deficit is spiralling out of control; export revenues are falling. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, of institutional collapse, “of damage so severe no post-war policy can repair it”.

“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” said Donald Trump at the weekend, as an impasse over diplomatic discussions and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz continue. By letting economic pressure mount, we are “low-keying it” with Iran, Trump told Axios, and “only semi-negotiating with them”.

In response, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said that whether “lights out or lights on, Iranians showed they are professional chess players”.

With no end to the war in sight, inflation on the rise, fuel rationing and continued threats of strikes, the vast majority of the Iranian population appear not to be players, but pawns.

‘Extensive’ damage

Speaking openly about politics in Iran still “carries obvious risks”, said Nawal Al-Maghafi in The Guardian. Within Iran there is “no single narrative of the war”, with some believing it has “strengthened national unity”, and others saying it has only “deepened repression”. Nonetheless, the country has been “transformed” by the war and, as the conflict carries on, “so does the struggle to shape the legacy it will leave behind”.

Iran is facing “extensive” damage from US attacks, estimated to be “running in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, said Maziar Motamedi in Al Jazeera. But this plays into “decades-old economic structural issues” and being continually “strained by years of Western sanctions and local mismanagement”. During both world wars, the US and Israel “systematically bombed” ports, bridges, roads and other civilian infrastructure, and the country has a long history of internet shutdowns and a “cash-strapped” government.

Now, inflation has risen to “nearly 90%” in the last month, with food inflation “hitting 134%”, compared to a year earlier. Following two wars in less than a year, conflict with the US is “showing no signs of abating”.

Many Iranians feel “abandoned” by the West, said Roxana Saberi and Fatemeh Jamalpour in The Times. They believe the US and others have “largely stood by during the recent executions and the January massacre”. The crackdown since January has left Iranians with “widespread trauma” that “spans generations and classes”. The “greatest source of trauma” is the “inaction” of the international community, said head of a survivor charity Azadeh Afsahi. “If these Western countries have democracy, how come they don’t care to see that the Iranian people are suffering?”

Opinion is ‘far from uniform’

There is still a “fervour” among those who support the regime, said Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4. In June, the “streets were full” of people for national celebrations, and children fired foam darts at “targets bearing the faces of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump was by far the most popular face to fire at.” Many are still eager to “express their love of country and their hatred of the enemy”. In many ways, ironically, it “reminds you of the most fired-up Maga supporters in America”.

Yet for others, the “greatest fear” is that “the war will end with the Islamic Republic still in power”, said Kelly J. Shannon on the Atlantic Council. However the conflict ends, the “remnants of the regime” will likely become “further entrenched and even more oppressive”. The massacres after protests in January, and an April order to “speed up executions of political prisoners”, support state television warnings that “any dissidents will be killed”. In the eyes of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian population is the “enemy, and it is willing to use any and all measures to keep them in line”.

Ultimately, “Iranian society is diverse, politically complex, and far from uniform,” said Mahmoud Rasouli on the European Consortium for Political Research. “Citizens hold differing views about domestic reform, foreign relations, economic priorities, and the country’s future.”

Yet this does not translate to political influence. Both Washington and Tehran invoke the interests of the Iranian people, but never do they allow such interests to “directly determine the direction of the conflict”. This creates a “paradox”: the Iranian people are “central” to the language used around the war, but “peripheral” in the “decision-making processes that shape their future”. They are neither “invisible spectators nor the main architects of the conflict”, but the “primary stakeholders in a confrontation largely shaped by others”.

A growing feud between the United States and Brazil has put both nations’ diplomatic corps on high alert, as South America’s largest economy finds itself on the receiving end of a Trumpian diplomatic spat. This month, Washington revoked the visa of Brazilian Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti after Brasilia refused visas for several Trump administration officials whom authorities claimed were planning to denounce the country’s leftist government.

Brazil has said it will not formally accept Trump’s Senate-approved ambassador pick, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, until after its October election. The country also complained that the United States had named Perez before completing certain diplomatic obligations.

‘Protocol can double as a weapon’

The visa cancellation is the “latest split” between “two governments that have spent the past year oscillating between confrontation and detente,” said The New York Times. But this episode is “very, very unique and severe,” said Brazilian political science professor Carlos Poggio to the outlet. Visa revocations are typically reserved for diplomatic foes, but “Brazil is not a U.S. adversary. It’s actually a major ally.”

“On the surface,” the diplomatic kerfuffle “may seem like tit-for-tat pettiness,” said Puck. “True practitioners of statecraft” understand that “protocol can double as a weapon.” Countries whose diplomatic corps “undergo some of the most rigorous training in the world” are “not naive about the message Washington is sending.”

Voiding Viotti’s visa “is not an isolated incident,” said the office of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a statement to NBC. Rather, it is part of a “deliberate escalation of hostile measures” fueled by “ideological motives that are incompatible with a bilateral partnership that has always been guided by mutual respect.”

Questioning Trump’s ‘confrontational approach’

Some in the Brazilian diplomatic corps have questioned why Trump is “rushing to have an ambassador in Brasilia only months before October’s election,” said The Associated Press — particularly given that the post has been “vacant since Trump returned to the White House” last year. The deepening rift comes as da Silva, a leftist, runs for a fourth term.

His opponent this time is Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, himself a “close Trump ally on the political right” who was convicted of “trying to overturn the results of the last election,” said The Washington Post. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one State Department official decried Washington’s “confrontational approach” to the outlet. “Each time Brasilia portrays itself as standing up to Trump,” said the official, the leftist government’s “standing in the polls only improves.”

“This isn’t just about Brazil,” said Orna Blum, a former senior State Department official who focused on Brazil, to Puck. “It’s part of a pattern.” The Trump administration has aligned itself with “far-right political movements from Germany’s AfD to Marine Le Pen in France, and now with Jair Bolsonaro and his son Flávio in Brazil.” Being seen as “picking sides in another democracy’s elections” under Trump has “cost America credibility with allies around the world.”

Even the relatively staid-seeming Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum hasn’t escaped the mud-slinging that has dominated and defined Donald Trump’s two-term tenure as president. After a high-profile White House clash this month between the former North Dakota governor and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro over the latter’s failure to prosecute bystanders accused of marring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a monument managed by the Interior Department — Burgum finds himself sweating under an uncomfortable national spotlight.

‘Confusion and concern’

“No one’s more involved” in Trump’s monumental “fix-it spree” than Burgum, said Axios. But the reflecting pool scandal has placed the secretary “in a weird spot” that is “overshadowing Burgum’s other projects.” Pirro has “lashed out at Burgum directly” and “blamed him for misleading” Trump about the reflecting pool, said ABC. Burgum not only “pushed the narrative about vandals damaging the blue lining publicly” but “also privately” to the president himself, said The New York Times.

“Just days after his Oval Office screaming match” with Pirro over the pool prosecutions, Interior Department staffers accused Burgum of “fostering a culture of secrecy and dysfunction,” said The Daily Beast. “Morale has tanked” under Burgum’s management, contributing to what officials describe as an “atmosphere of high turnover” with “leadership that ignores staff.” After trusting in Burgum’s “strong executive experience as governor of energy-rich North Dakota,” staffers have seen their hopes “replaced by confusion and concern,” said Politico. The department has now lost “thousands of the staff needed to manage the national park systems and millions of acres of public lands.”

The secretary “appears to combine arrogance” with an “utter lack of curiosity or humility,” longtime Interior official Tony Irish, who left the department last year, told Politico. “I think it shows his disdain for the rank and file.”

Trump’s ‘personal project manager’

Through it all, Burgum “appears to still be in the president’s good graces,” said Axios. He is “settling into life as a central player in Trump’s efforts to remake D.C.” after having moved “to the city — not the suburbs — with his wife.”

The secretary has “held the president’s line” on the Reflecting Pool, said Rob Port at Inforum. “Inside Trump world,” where it’s the “bootlicking that matters,” Burgum, “to his shame, has kept his tongue planted firmly on President Trump’s Oxfords.”

When Burgum is “not saying foolish things about how solar power works,” the secretary’s “principal responsibilities have focused on serving as the president’s ‘personal project manager,’” said Steve Benen at MS NOW. Given the reflecting pool “fiasco,” however, “those efforts have not fared well.”

In light of the difficulties facing the department, “it’s clear” that the Interior would “benefit from a strong and capable inspector general’s office” that can act independently, Benen said. To that end, last week Trump nominated Dennis Kirk to be the Interior’s inspector general. While the name “might not sound familiar,” you may have heard of Kirk’s “earlier work,” as he “co-authored the far-right policy blueprint Project 2025.”

In her sell-out show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Amanda Knox tells a joke about her daughter’s favourite game called “Momma goes to Italy” in which she grabs the bars of a jungle gym at their local playground and screams, “Let me out! Let me out!”

Knox’s conviction for the murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in 2007, her years spent behind bars in an Italian prison, and her subsequent acquittal 11 years ago, made her famous and infamous around the world.

“Pigeonholed as either a true crime or tragic figure”, her one-woman set “Cartwheel” – named after claims by Italian prosecutors that she had turned cartwheels in a police station shortly after Kercher’s death – is, she said, “me going back to my roots and trying to reclaim who I was before all the bad stuff happened”, said The New York Times.

‘Damned whatever she did’

While it may be a surprise that Knox is trying stand-up at all, it’s “arguably even riskier” to debut such material in Britain, given the “mixed reputation” she has in Kercher’s country of birth, said The New York Times. The 39-year-old mother-of-two’s foray into comedy has “also raised questions about who has the right to tell a story on stage”.

After opening night, the Daily Mail published an article with the headline “Is there anything ‘Foxy Knoxy’ won’t do for attention – or money?” More than 42,000 people have signed a petition calling for the show to be cancelled, and Kercher’s sister Stephanie recently told the BBC she was afraid the event risked “normalising violence against women by making light of such a harrowing event”.

“No one walking out of the theatre could possibly reach that conclusion”, said Tristram Fane Saunders in The Telegraph. If anything, it was “too tasteful”; a “good-faith attempt by a novice performer to use the medium of stand-up comedy to tell her own story inoffensively, to the best of her moderate abilities”.

While some have argued it is a “disgrace that she’s telling it at all – and profiting from it”, classifying “Cartwheel” as comedy may have been her biggest “misstep”, said Brian Logan in The Guardian. Doing so “risks looking insensitive and inaccurately describes the show”, but, “judging by the evidence” and the very public outcry, “Knox would be damned whatever she did”.

‘Source of profound catharsis’

Humour has “always helped people to process terrible events” and “for that reason, great stand-up can sometimes be a source of profound catharsis”, said The Telegraph.

Nowhere is this more true than at the world’s most prestigious performing arts festival, where Fringe comics often draw on dark subjects and distressing personal experiences.

Richard Gadd’s 2019 Festival show about being stalked was turned into the worldwide Netflix phenomenon “Baby Reindeer”, while comedian Edd Hedges’ 2017 Festival debut, “Wonderland”, based on the story of a man who stabbed his mother and her friend 97 times, sparked a hit podcast series.

This year, Australian comedian Frankie McNair has won rave reviews for a set filled with jokes about her own experience of being sexually abused as a child.

“Uproariously funny”, it was a reminder that “there’s no topic inherently off-bounds for comedy”, said The Telegraph: “Knox ought to watch McNair, and take notes.”

Ann Widdecombe, who has died aged 78, enjoyed a level of prominence in public life that was unusual for a politician whose most senior role in government was as a mid-level minister.

That was partly due to her robust opinions on a range of issues, some informed by her Christian faith – which she never shied away from voicing. It also helped that she was instantly recognisable, said The Times, with her pudding-bowl haircut, no-nonsense manner and rasping voice. In a typically forthright appraisal, she said of herself: “I am toothy, dumpy, ugly, overweight and a spinster – what the hell.”

As a politician, her most significant action was arguably sinking Michael Howard’s leadership bid following the party’s defeat in 1997. The pair had feuded at the Home Office, and Widdecombe got her revenge by giving a speech in Parliament in which she tore into her ex-boss’s character and record; her leaked private comment – that there was “something of the night about him” – followed him for years.

Second career

Yet Widdecombe was a kinder, more sensitive person than her uncompromising “carapace” suggested, said The Guardian. This became more apparent when she retired from front-line politics, and embarked on an unexpected second career as a TV personality. On “Strictly Come Dancing”, she gamely allowed herself to be hauled across the dancefloor like a sack of potatoes; she was a runner-up on “Celebrity Big Brother” in 2018; and she appeared in several pantomimes.

The public learnt that “Widdy” had for years acted as a surrogate mother-figure to the children of a local kebab shop owner, said The Daily Telegraph, and that she had spent thousands to get a nephew off drugs. When, in 2009, the Telegraph published its report about MPs’ expenses, she was singled out as one of the “saints” at Westminster, reinforcing the view that whatever else she was, she was not corruptible.

Westminster controversies

Widdecombe was born in 1947. Her father was a civil servant in the Admiralty Office. Although she was Anglican, she was sent to a Catholic boarding school. She read Latin at Birmingham University, and then PPE at Oxford, where she became involved in student politics and had her only boyfriend: Colin Maltby was president of the Oxford Union. On graduating, she worked first for Unilever, and later as a university administrator.

Widdecombe spent years trying to become a Tory MP, applying to scores of constituencies. She stood twice unsuccessfully before finally being elected MP for Maidstone in 1987; she would represent that part of Kent for 23 years. At Westminster, she soon made her mark with the first in a series of aggressive efforts to restrict access to abortion. She also supported capital punishment, and voted against the repeal of Section 28, the law banning the promotion of homosexuality in schools, and civil partnerships. When the Church of England allowed the ordination of women priests, Widdecombe converted to Catholicism.

As prisons minister from 1995, she made waves by seeming to defend the practice of female prisoners being kept in handcuffs during childbirth. In fact, they were only shackled until they went into labour, and after they’d given birth, but the public was not impressed by the distinction and in the media she was dubbed Doris Karloff. Her row with Howard was over his sacking of the director of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis, which she thought unfair. From 1999 to 2001, she was shadow home secretary.

Having insisted that she’d never leave the Tories, she defected to the Brexit Party in 2019 and later joined Reform UK. Since 2010, she had lived in a bungalow at the edge of Dartmoor that she had named Widdecombe’s Rest. She was found dead there in July with serious injuries; police have opened a murder investigation.

With Saudi Arabia ending its funding of LIV Golf after this season, the league is at a crossroads, moving away from its largest controversy while still in need of new financial backing. Now it appears LIV may have found some, announcing last week that it has secured investors to bring it into the 2027 season and beyond. But some major questions about the tour’s future linger.

‘Supporting the path forward’

LIV Golf has an “agreement in place with a lead investor, signed by the investor and approved by the board, to anchor the transaction and play a key role in supporting the path forward for the league’s next era, driven by and for the players,” the tour’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, said in a statement. O’Neil “didn’t identify the investor or how much money will be injected into the league,” said ESPN, though he hopes to “finalize terms in the coming weeks.”

A new backer would mark a significant changing of the guard for LIV Golf, which has been financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund since its 2022 founding. This partnership has elicited backlash, as the fund is “chaired by Mohammed bin Salman — the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the man who a U.S. intelligence report named as responsible for approving the operation that led to the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said CNN. Saudi Arabia has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses.

With bin Salman pulling his funding after 2026, there is “no need to root for LIV’s demise, especially since the moral argument against it — the Saudi backing — is now out of the picture,” said The Athletic. Whoever the new investors are, however, they “won’t remotely approach the fantasy golf funding of Saudi Arabia’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund,” meaning the next season of LIV Golf will likely look very different.

‘A talent exodus’

It is a “reality that the Saudi Public Investment Fund invested billions into the league with no return,” and any newer investments “won't stretch as far as the previous financial backing did,” said Bleacher Report. It also remains to be seen how the players themselves will factor into the new-look league, as LIV Golf finds itself looking to bring in fresh golfers for the upcoming season.

LIV Golf “must contend with a talent exodus,” as it has seen “major winners Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed return to the PGA Tour under a program that caps some of their future earning opportunities,” said Sportico. Other big-name golfers “left the league for different reasons.” One of the main question marks is Bryson DeChambeau, the “league’s biggest star” whose expiring contract “looms large over LIV’s future.” Golf industry insiders believe DeChambeau “could command a deal with a total value somewhere between $200 million and $500 million.”

The tour wants to put golfers at the forefront either way, as during the next phase, players “will be majority equity holders in the league,” said Sportico. But “how that structure will play out, especially with the prospect of new investors coming on board, is unclear.” Many are still looking forward to the potential new phase of LIV Golf despite all the current unknowns. If the “league is reduced to a parade of fading 40-somethings who want to play 10 team-centric events a season while bouncing from continent to continent, what’s the harm in that?” said The Athletic. “More golf is better than less golf.”

Harry Potter star Jessie Cave is the latest actor to turn to OnlyFans to supplement her income.

“I’ve earned more, easily, than my entire acting career within one year,” she told The Times. Cave is best known as the Hogwarts student Lavender Brown but has also appeared in shows such as “Trollied” and “Call the Midwife”. She joined the online subscription platform known for its adult content in 2025 after receiving yet another audition rejection.

Posting non-explicit “hair content”, including videos of her brushing and braiding her hair while dressed as an elf, a maid or Lavender Brown, Cave said she made £15,000 on her first day and now has a “loyal bunch” of subscribers. “I do predict more people needing to use other platforms to make money when they’re not being an artist,” she said. “Everyone will be paying for everything.”

It is a “dystopian world view”, said the paper’s deputy culture editor Alice Jones, “where every interaction is monetised and, eventually, frankly, pornified”.

Regaining ‘control’

It is a story increasingly common among “Hollywood’s former middle class”, said Melissa Fleur Afshar on Newsweek. From Jaime Pressly to Shannon Elizabeth, some of the “most recognisable stars from the box-set and cable era” who were losing out on work and slipping off the cultural radar are “now migrating to OnlyFans instead”.

It looks like the “sole promise” of the site is “money and continued attention”, but in an acting industry “reeling from high-profile lawsuits and allegations of exploitation”, OnlyFans actually offers these people “control”.

“For decades, Hollywood operated in a way where actors relied heavily on gatekeepers,” said Estelle Keeber, a visibility expert and PR strategist. Paid subscriber platforms give users “direct access” to an audience “without needing permission from an industry middleman”.

‘Butts for Tour Buses’

It is not just actors. Lily Allen’s OnlyFans side gig in 2024, which netted her $10 (£7) a month per subscriber, “added to the long-running conversation around abysmal streaming payouts” for musicians, said Vice. The singer eventually stopped selling videos and pictures of her feet, saying “it wasn’t that fun”.

“Imagine being an artist and having nearly eight million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet,” she told The Standard last year.

The financial structure of streaming platforms means artists are increasingly “having to juggle budgets that resemble household accounts, such as vans against fuel, hotels against sofa-surfing and merchandise against storage fees”, said Paul Oliver, a digital innovation lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, in The Conversation. “One cancelled show can tip a tour from workable to loss-making.”

Kate Nash used OnlyFans to fund the European leg of her 2024 tour after post-Brexit taxes left her in debt and struggling to pay everyone involved, in a campaign she called “Butts for Tour Buses”. Earlier this year, she told the Commons’ Culture Select Committee the only reason it was possible to continue tours “is because I sell pictures of my bum on the internet”.

Since videos of OpenAI’s first brand trip hosting business and tech influencers hit social media timelines, the backlash has been swift. Already facing scrutiny on multiple fronts, the company has likely seen any hope that this move would boost its reputation dashed.

OpenAI misses the mark

The high-end getaway, dubbed OpenAI Summer Camp, was held at Wildflower Farms, a “luxury resort in New York’s Hudson Valley,” where room rates can exceed $2,000 a night, Business Insider said. Creators were treated to an itinerary that included “lessons about OpenAI’s latest tools” and a “session with a beekeeper.”

They also received OpenAI-branded merchandise, including canvas bags and jars of honey. The trip comes as the AI lab faces controversy amid anxiety about “rising energy prices, water use and potential job displacement,” said Business Insider. The weekend’s “pastoral content” swiftly drew criticism across social media. Critics questioned why a company associated with “several energy- and water-intensive data centers” was treating influencers at a “nature-focused resort.”

The comment sections of many of the influencers who attended were flooded with messages questioning their morals. Many cited the “environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the U.S.” and the potential for job loss due to AI integration in the critiques, The Verge said.

After “being in the room with people who work on this product,” creator Grace McCarrick was excited to post content, according to a video she posted from the trip while running a bath. Shocked by the controversy, she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI,” she said on LinkedIn. The trip exposed her to the “shocking AI psychosis running rampant online.” People in the real world “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism.”

As the influencers come under fire, OpenAI maintains that the content creators are an “important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today,” said company spokesperson Drew Pusateri to Fast Company. The lab welcomes “healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent.”

Why one company and not the others

OpenAI is not the “only AI lab that has worked with influencers,” said TechCrunch. Anthropic reportedly held a brand dinner for Claude, and Microsoft hosted a Super Bowl brand trip for influencers, according to tech newsletter Sarah and Kate. But none of the other AI-led trips seem to have “struck as big of a nerve as this OpenAI brand trip.”

There is also “more to the timing of the trip that struck people,” said TechCrunch. OpenAI has plans to make a “$500 billion deal” to build a data center in Ohio at a time when the “socio-ecological impact of AI data centers has taken center stage.” Again, detractors pointed out the irony that “OpenAI held a brand retreat in a luxury resort nestled in nature.” OpenAI also has a “$200 million contract with the Department of Defense,” yet another reason the “brand trip evoked ire.”

For these competitors courting influencers, the “objective is similar,” but the “difference is execution,” said Inc. Anthropic is known for throwing creator events that have been “smaller dinners and pop-ups,” in which Claude “remained the ostensible subject.” OpenAI made the “resort, gifts and coordinated access impossible to miss.”

A creator dinner with Claude does not “give me the same reaction as seeing a luxury resort for an OpenAI ChatGPT weekend,” Meredith Lynch, a creator who covers politics and pop culture, said to Inc. It felt like a “propaganda trip — to take this technology that is getting a lot of pushback and sanitize it through aesthetically beautiful content creation.” The problem is not the existence of an influencer trip but that the format “carries different implications” when used to “build trust in a technology facing criticism over job displacement and data centers’ energy and water use.”

It has become fashionable of late to declare that the Commonwealth Games no longer matter, and are living on borrowed time. Well, tell that to the good people of Glasgow, said Nik Simon in the Daily Mail. Over 11 days, Scotland’s second city – which stepped in as host after the Australian state of Victoria pulled out in 2023 on grounds of cost – welcomed competitors from 74 nations, who (in the absence of an athletes’ village) were accommodated in hotels across the area.

In return, the 434,000 ticket-holders, plus 200,000 who watched for free at the city’s fan sites, were treated to a spectacular show, said Matthew Henry on BBC Sport. Highlights of the Games, which ended on Sunday, included Scotland’s Josh Kerr storming to victory in the mile race in front of a jubilant home crowd; Wales’ Emma Finucane becoming the first sprint cyclist to win four track gold medals at the same Games; and Jamaica stunning Australia in one of the biggest upsets in netball’s history.

Overall, though, it was the Australians who dominated: spurred on by mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s offer of cash bonuses for podium finishes, the country notched up 171 medals – dwarfing second-placed England’s total of 110.

‘Ozempic’ games

As host city, Glasgow did a sterling job, said Fiona Tomas in The Telegraph: events were “impeccably run”, and the “army of cheery volunteers” kitted out in tartan couldn’t be faulted. But it was hard to escape the feeling that this was the Commonwealth Games “on Ozempic”. As a result of “cost-cutting measures”, only 10 sports were featured, down from 19 in Birmingham four years ago; and with the BBC losing out to TNT Sports on the right to broadcast the Games, TV audiences were miserly.

Worse still, a “deluge of high-profile athletes” – from England’s Keely Hodgkinson to Jamaica’s men’s 100m world champion Oblique Seville – prioritised other competitions and sat out the Games altogether. Attention now turns to the 2030 edition to be held in Ahmedabad, India. They’ll mark the centenary of the Games, and that “might be a good one to end on”.

Stepping stone

I’m not so sure about that, said Rick Broadbent in The Times. The Games may lack the glamour of the Olympics, say, or the World Cup, but that’s the whole point of them. Where else could you watch Idi Amin’s grandson complaining about ill-treatment in the boxing ring, or hear Archie Goodburn, a terminally ill swimmer, being roared on in the pool by a partisan crowd? And it’s a competition, don’t forget, that has long served athletes as a “stepping stone” to greater glories. Of course, it must be financially viable – Glasgow only managed to host the Games so cheaply because Victoria had to pay £190 million in compensation, for pulling out. But assuming that “the price is right”, this is undoubtedly “an event worth saving”.

While promoting his latest blockbuster, filmmaker Christopher Nolan listed scholar Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences. Now, Wilson’s scathing critique of Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic poem has gone viral, inspiring additional backlash from critics and academics alike. Amid the heated controversy over one of the year’s biggest films, there may be a silver lining to the discourse.

Why Wilson trashed Nolan’s adaptation

Wilson’s expertise in the classics is undeniable. She is also no stranger to backlash. In 2017, she became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation “widely celebrated in academia and the literary world” as “comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful” to Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old classic, said The New York Times. Her translation departs from the “masculine framing used by her male predecessors,” a move that has “subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures.”

Before Nolan’s movie premiered, Wilson was “pumped” to see how the epic played out on the big screen, she said on The New York Times’ The Daily podcast. However, after seeing Nolan’s adaptation, Wilson said she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” at The London Review of Books. The film had “nothing convincing to say,” it lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” and the “writing is abysmal,” Wilson added. It was a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” comparable to an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”

Most of the nonwhite actors “play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” Wilson said in her LRB review. She has since expressed regret for this “paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized,” Wilson wrote on social media. She still thinks the film “largely wastes its strong cast,” but she “framed it badly.”

A debate reminiscent of the golden era of critics

One of the most prominent figures to come to Nolan’s defense against Wilson was Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities and a prolific writer who has won a National Book Award. Wilson’s “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said on X. Instead of “disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” Wilson, who has “benefited enormously from Nolan’s film,” speaks in the “crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.” Within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.” One would expect a translator to be “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Wilson used “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, classicist Theo Nash said at Slate. She criticizes Nolan for deviating from the text, “as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.” The close attention that informs her translation is “lacking in her reading of the movie,” and the “idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”

Whether or not you agree with Wilson’s perspective, it’s “always exciting to read a particularly full-throated pan,” said critic Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Even if you don’t believe Wilson did her job as a critic, she has “done her job as a writer,” which is to “be a compelling read who makes her argument unmistakably clear.”

Figuring out “who is punching down here is really interesting,” VanArendonk added. Since Wilson has “academic authority” and is “writing with such vigor,” it is “easy to forget that she has less power” than Nolan, a Hollywood darling. That is also “part of the pleasure of the conversation.” Wilson is not interested in “softening any of it.” Still Nolan’s the one who “walks away unscathed, no question.” Of all the topics we could watch people fight about online, “how someone adapted ‘The Odyssey’ is such a good one.”

“The fact that a drone armed with explosives is here on the grounds of an airport represents a new threat scenario,” said Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt in Leipzig. “We’re talking about a professional hybrid threat situation.”

Dobrindt looked “ashen-faced” as he addressed the media, said Newsweek. Flights were halted after the discovery of a quadcopter armed with explosives in a restricted area near Ukrainian Antonov freight planes. Nato has acknowledged it is aware of the incident.

Security experts and officials are asking a question that was “once unthinkable”: is Germany “de facto at war, or at least engaged in a hybrid war – and with whom?”

Germany becoming ‘primary target’

Leipzig/Halle airport is a Nato and German military logistics hub, and since 2022 has been used by Ukraine to transport military equipment. It is also the base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines in Europe, a cargo carrier, and as the drone was found close to a Ukrainian cargo plane, this has “directed suspicion towards Russia”, said The Guardian.

Drone sightings at German airports rose “significantly” in the first half of 2026, said Der Spiegel. According to German Air Navigation Services, 166 drones were spotted at 15 international airports, compared to 101 in the same period last year.

The threat of drone attacks is “becoming increasingly concrete”, said Süddeutsche Zeitung. But bringing them down is notoriously difficult. Drones can be stopped by “jammers, nets, or even by being shot down”, but this is a “delicate task” when they are near residential areas.

Leipzig airport was already equipped with a drone defence system, but a “custom-made” model was seemingly able to bypass it. Germany is becoming the “primary target” in “Russia’s shadow war”, which has the “aim of dissuading it from supporting Ukraine in the short term and weakening it in the long term”.

Germany has “gradually expanded its defensive measures in recent months”, said Euronews. Since October 2025, “under certain conditions”, the federal police have been allowed to shoot down drones. And Dobrindt has called for drones to be “detected, intercepted and, if necessary, shot down more consistently in future”. But the process is complicated, with frequency scanners, cameras and radar systems all required.

Russia trying to ‘sow fear’

“As well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form” with this kind of attack, said the BBC. Though there is no hard evidence to suggest who is behind it, there is “renewed talk” of hybrid war across Europe. “If Russia was behind this”, its aim was likely to “sow fear”.

The incident raises concerns about foreign interference in upcoming German regional elections, where “far-right politicians have campaigned on fears of escalations with Moscow”, said Politico. Former communist and East German states Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania will hold elections in September. “Pro-Russian sentiment remains strong” and the far-right party AfD “could take power for the first time at the state level”.

When Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history in 2023, he was “lionised by the academic world” and became a “poster boy for the university’s diversity drive”, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph.

Then only 37, he had defied “almost impossible odds” to get there. Raised on a council estate in south London, he was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. He couldn’t speak until he was 11, and did not read or write until 18. Yet he’d managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree, followed by a PhD, and had gone on to forge a remarkable career in academia. Now, though, the sociology professor – who has tendered since his resignation as a fellow at Jesus College – is “the subject of a bitter row over plagiarism that has pitted his peers against each other”.

Long-standing concerns

His critics note that his PhD thesis contains passages that are strikingly similar to those in other academic papers. His defenders say that these were innocent errors, resulting from a lack of formal supervision when he was doing his PhD, and insufficient support for his complex learning disabilities. They say he cited the sources in question in his bibliography, but failed to do so within the text proper.

Concerns about Arday’s work have circulated in academic circles for several years, said Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. But they “exploded into public view” last month, when Nathan Cofnas, a self-defined “race realist” who was sacked from Cambridge in 2024, published a lengthy blogpost about them.

As journalists dug deeper, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail, other aspects of Arday’s “Hollywood-style life story” were also called into question. For instance, doubts were cast about his claim to have raised £5.5 million for charity, including by running an astonishing 600 miles in six days. He has since said it was actually 12 days, and that the £5.5 million was a collective effort.

Fraught topic

“Academic integrity matters,” said Daniella Maison in The Independent. But Arday was officially cleared of plagiarism some years ago. That he is still being pursued over his PhD, and other achievements that are not even related to his job, suggest that legitimate scrutiny has shifted into something more “punitive”.

Yet leading academics told this paper that the scrutiny was “fair” for a professor at Cambridge, said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. This is a fraught business, and the stakes are high for all concerned. The university – which appointed Arday at a time when its own track record on race was being scrutinised in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement – is facing questions about its judgement. As for Arday, he could lose his reputation, and his career.

Saudi Arabia last week announced it had joined American forces in conducting air strikes on Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iran-backed militias accused of attacks on both U.S. and Saudi assets in the region. The Saudi attack came in response ⁠to recent drone attacks targeting oil facilities “launched from Iraqi territory and carried out by Iran-aligned terrorist militias,” said the kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in a statement on X.

The latest assault is a “highly dangerous escalation,” said the PMF, per Al Jazeera. Iran’s Foreign Ministry had also condemned the “aggressive attacks” as a violation of Iraq’s “national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The kingdom ‘does not seek escalation’

After spending months “trying not to get dragged into a regional conflict,” Saudi Arabia “appears hemmed in, facing enemies in three directions” between Iran and its proxies in Iraq and Yemen, said CNN. Saudi Arabia’s strategy of “opening the kingdom up to foreign investment” and making it the “regional economic powerhouse” is “now on life support.” At the same time, embroiling itself in a “broader conflict” would be a “risky and potentially costly option” for Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s strikes, done “in coordination with U.S. Central Command,” mark the country’s “first announced foray” into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, said USA Today. But previous reports from Reuters citing “unnamed Western and Iranian officials” indicated that Saudi Arabia had “launched covert strikes on the Islamic Republic” earlier this year already. These most recent attacks stem from the kingdom’s “legitimate right to defend itself and its capabilities,” said the Saudi Defense Ministry in a statement. Riyadh also reserves the “right to respond at the appropriate time and place.”

While Saudi Arabia “does not seek escalation,” the ministry said, it will “respond to any aggression it faces.” Over the weekend, however, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with President Donald Trump and “expressed concern over his plans for massive new strikes” against Iran, said Axios. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman expressed similar sentiments at a recent meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance, emphasizing “deescalation with Iran” shortly after the joint U.S.-Saudi strikes, said the outlet.

The PMF in particular has “always been a contentious” issue between Iraq, the U.S., and “other neighboring countries” like Iran, said Al Jazeera. The Iraqi group exists as “part of the country’s security force,” reports “directly to the commander-in-chief who is also the prime minister,” and has “at times struck the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and bases across Iraq at will” while refusing government orders.

‘Unpalatable choice’

Unlike previous clandestine entanglements, Riyadh’s “overt involvement” in regional fighting “marks a new turning point in the conflict,” said The Guardian. “There is a feeling” among Saudi leadership that the Iranians are “doing what they are doing because they feel that the Gulf Arab states won’t move up the escalatory ladder,” said H.A. Hellyer, the Royal United Services Institute’s senior associate fellow in Middle East studies, to the outlet. Riyadh wants to “make it clear that assessment is wrong and that if Tehran thinks the Gulf states are easy prey, they are wrong.”

Should Saudi Arabia come under direct Iranian attack, “it could face an unpalatable choice,” said CNN. Either it must “respond directly in a way that would draw it more deeply into war” or risk emboldening a Tehran “regime that many see as more hardline than before the war.”

The Justice Department has dusted off the cobwebs of an inactive deportation court, and the development has some immigration rights activists concerned about the future. The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was established in 1996 but has never heard a case until now, and its usage could eventually become an issue for the Supreme Court.

Lower standards

Trump’s Justice Department is attempting to use the Alien Terrorist Removal Court to deport Nazira Haji Zada, a “legal permanent resident from Afghanistan who is accused of having ISIS sympathies and of assisting her son in a thwarted terror plot that targeted the 2024 election,” said CNN. Zada’s lawyers are “challenging the constitutionality of the deportation tribunal,” saying the court does not follow due process.

The specialized court was created under the Clinton administration to “conduct deportation proceedings for individuals whom the Justice Department classifies as ‘alien terrorists,’” said The Associated Press. It is “comprised of five federal judges from different districts across the country who are appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.” But Zada’s case marks the first time the government has ever brought charges via the Alien Terrorist Removal Court.

Zada has not been formally charged with a crime, and the court allows the U.S. to “attempt to remove noncitizens from the country upon representing them as an alien terrorist under a lower standard than would be required to convict them of a criminal charge,” said NBC News. As far as bringing other cases, the DOJ “will use every tool available to bring alien terrorists to justice and remove them from the United States, including this court,” a Justice Department spokesperson told NBC.

A new battle

While Zada pleads her innocence, the case could “set up months, if not years, of litigation over the court’s constitutionality, a question that could ultimately travel to the Supreme Court,” said CNN. Before Trump, prior presidential administrations “avoided using the court, relying instead on the procedures in normal deportation proceedings for handling classified information.” The law allows Zada to have a “special attorney who can view classified evidence and interrogate it on her behalf.”

Many have scoffed at the facts of Zada’s case, as documents provide a “very limited view of why the government thinks she is a terrorist and why it believes disclosing that evidence would imperil national security,” said CNN. The court’s procedures also let the DOJ withhold this evidence “not just from the public, but from the accused alien terrorist herself.” The DOJ also acknowledged it is required to obtain a “statement of the facts and circumstances” to “establish probable cause that the alien is an alien terrorist,” the department said in a court filing.

For now, it does not seem that the DOJ intends to stop the court’s use, despite constitutional questions. Officials have already “built a website for the institution” and are currently “working on an electronic filing system where people can find relevant court papers,” said NPR. “Congress created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court three decades ago to remove from the United States alien terrorists who never should have been here in the first place,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. The case “makes clear that terrorists have no place in the United States of America.”

Record low levels on Europe’s biggest rivers have had such an impact on shipping, energy and tourism that there are real fears about the long-term economic impact of severe heatwaves on the continent.

This week, Germany’s Low-water Information System recorded extremely low levels at 43% of its measuring stations along the 765-mile Rhine, and at 59% of its measuring stations along the Danube, which runs through 10 countries from Germany to the Black Sea. On Friday, the navigable water depth at Kaub, a key chokepoint on the Rhine for shipments heading to southern Germany and Switzerland, dropped to a record low of 25cm. Extreme weather conditions are “leaving Europe’s waterways parched, triggering a series of compounding crises”, said The Guardian.

‘Feeling the pain’

Both Hungary and Romania have had to take special measures to protect nuclear power plants normally cooled by the Danube: Romania has blown up rocks to redirect water to its last working nuclear reactor; Hungary’s prime minister Péter Magyar has announced that the Paks plant, which supplies around half his country’s electricity, will have to close completely, perhaps for weeks. Warning of “an energy crisis situation”, he posted on X that “coordinated steps and restraint will be needed to avoid more severe consequences.”

“Much of mainland Europe is feeling the pain”, said Euractiv. Austria’s run-of-river hydropower plants are generating 30% less electricity than usual, while high river temperatures forced 11% of France’s nuclear-generating capacity offline in the hottest hours of Tuesday.

But “energy is ⁠not the only loser,” said Reuters. With water levels on the Rhine so low at key points, cargo ships can only carry 20% to 30% of their normal load without risk of grounding, pushing up freight costs as more vessels are needed to ship goods.

Current conditions on the Danube are “a pain for tourism”, said The Wall Street Journal. Last week, 186 passengers had to be rescued when the cruise liner hit a sandbank. Several cruise operators have had to cancel voyages altogether.

The dropping water levels have revealed some more enjoyable surprises, too, with Second World War German battleships, and even the remains of an ancient woolly mammoth, emerging into view.

‘Fingerprint of changing climate’

If the heatwave-related disruption does not abate soon, it could challenge the region’s “already stressed economy”, said the WSJ. A 10-month drought in 2018 wiped nearly 0.4% points off German GDP, according to Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates. “The crucial unknown” right now is how long this drought will last.

“The heat dries the soil, empties the rivers and drives up demand for water all at once. That is the fingerprint of a changing climate,” Hannah Cloke, a professor of meteorology and climate science at the University of Reading, told CNN. It will “keep getting worse as long as we burn fossil fuels”.

Europe is experiencing the fastest warming of any continent, and the consequent heatwaves and drought have “exposed the need to ‌reconsider business practices”, said Reuters. These river disruptions will be “a test of how quickly the region can adapt infrastructure built around 20th-century conditions” to a 21st-century climate where “extreme low water” is more likely to be the norm, said Bloomberg.

The residents of Parsons, Kansas, may soon have atomic power humming in their backyard, as the small town is debating the development of a nuclear reactor. The idea has largely divided the people of Parsons. Some feel the reactor, which would be built a mile underground, could provide a needed environmental boost to the region, while others worry it could affect Kansas’ long history of oil and gas production.

‘Nuclear reactor pilot project’

The idea for the reactor comes from the energy startup Deep Fission as part of an “advanced underground nuclear reactor pilot project in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy,” the company said on its website. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors, the underground Parsons project is an experimental “gravity reactor” that will have “water placed over it to serve as a coolant, reducing the risk of a meltdown,” said KWCH-TV Wichita.

Deep Fission appears to be all-in on moving ahead in Parsons. The company “plans to raise more than $40 million to fund its pilot project in Kansas,” said the Kansas Reflector. Deep Fission also began publicly trading stock with an “initial public offering of 2.5 million shares,” part of an effort to raise the funds needed for Parsons. The company plans to soon begin drilling boreholes for the reactor and “estimates connection to the grid sometime in 2027 or 2028,” said KWCH.

‘I can’t think of a worse idea’

In Parsons, a town of just under 10,000 people, not all residents view the coming nuclear reactor as a positive. Elected officials in Kansas “see a chance to create jobs and lure data centers and manufacturers to a rural patch whose economy has been flatter than the surrounding cornfields,” said The Wall Street Journal, but many local homeowners scoff at the idea. “I put $125,000 into my house, and now a nuclear reactor is coming to town. I can’t think of a worse idea,” Jerel Johnson, who planned to retire in Parsons, told the Journal.

Others worry “about environmental oversight and potential risks to water,” said the Journal, as watchdogs claim the Trump administration is “moving too fast and cutting corners” on nuclear regulation. There have also been questions about why the project’s drillers “are operating under oil-and-gas regulations not nuclear ones.” The reactor “is a nuclear experiment,” local resident Marjorie Reynolds told the Journal. She often “hands out donated patches that say ‘half lives matter’ and ‘remember Chernobyl’” and has started the nonprofit Prairie Dog Alliance to oppose the reactor.

Others noted that a pair of executive orders signed by the White House have “lowered standards for nuclear reactors,” said KWCH. Building the reactor “would set a precedent for risky, rushed projects without any kind of oversight by the public,” Ann Suellentrop of the Prairie Dog Alliance told KWCH. Despite these strong opinions, there are others who feel that the reactor will bring a much-needed industry to Parsons.

"For climate change — and trying to alleviate the issues that we have with climate change, nuclear energy has to be part of that solution,” environmental consultant John Young said to KCUR Kansas City. Officials are also confident that Deep Fission is “trying to interact better with the public and just let them know they’re here to support our town as well as hopefully new energy in the future,” Labette County Commissioner Vince Schibi told KCUR.

Disputing credit card charges may be the new way to stick it to corporations. More consumers are engaging in friendly fraud, disputing real charges or purchases in order to get their money back. The trend reflects a distrust in corporations as well as overall economic instability.

‘Expensive, onerous process’

Friendly fraud involves the use of charge-backs, which are “when a customer goes to their bank, as opposed to the merchant, to dispute a charge,” said NerdWallet. “When the customer requests their money back, the bank contacts the business’s payment processor.”

Then the “bank verifies whether the charge-back request is legitimate” and reverses the charge if it is, said NerdWallet. Most incorrect charge-backs tend to be honest mistakes as a “cardholder identifies a purchase on their transaction statement as fraudulent and disputes it,” when in reality, “they or someone else in their household may have made the purchase,” said Mastercard.

Transaction disputes have also “traditionally been used to address certain types of crimes committed against consumers,” like if “someone steals your wallet and goes on a shopping spree, or if you put a deposit on a wedding venue that goes out of business before the big day,” said Bloomberg. The credit card issuer “claws the funds back from the offending merchant’s bank, on top of a charge-back penalty fee,” which is an “expensive, onerous process” that “incentivizes merchants to be honest transactors and resolve issues with customers before charge-backs are filed.”

‘Existential threat’

What was once an accidental error or a way to stop theft is now sometimes a tool to obtain free merchandise. Friendly fraud is a “costly form of charge-back abuse in which consumers dispute legitimate credit card transactions to recover their money while keeping the purchased goods or services,” said the technology publication Tekedia. Though the phenomenon is not new, it is becoming more common. There were “158 million transaction disputes in 2025, an increase of 29% from 2021, significantly outpacing general growth in card transactions,” said Bloomberg.

The trend takes an economic toll. The “volume of disputes has become so cumbersome that more retailers are farming out the whole process of investigating and defending against fraud claims to third-party vendors that specialize in helping them hold on to more of consumers’ money,” said Bloomberg. Increased levels of chargebacks can also affect prices. “Large retailers fold the cost of lost revenue, lost product and lost labor that fraudulent charge-backs create into the prices everyone pays.” But “for small merchants those losses quickly become an existential threat to their ability to continue operating.”

‘Retaliate against retailers’

The rise of friendly fraud is directly tied to growing distrust of companies and corporations. Friendly fraud is a “way to retaliate against retailers over poor customer service, delayed deliveries, strict return policies or dissatisfaction with purchases,” said Tekedia. People may not even be aware they are committing fraud, as many small value disputes are approved quickly and without much investigation. There are “people that feel like, oh, this is just sticking it to the man, so to speak,” Jim Mortensen, a strategic adviser in the fraud and anti-money-laundering practice at the research firm Datos Insights, said to Bloomberg.

Economic circumstances also contribute to the rise of stealing and fraud. “One thing in the last two to three years has been that the cost of living in most developed markets has put quite a significant squeeze on consumers, particularly younger consumers on lower income,” a senior research analyst at Juniper Research who focuses on digital payments told Bloomberg. While engaging in friendly fraud sounds intriguing, it is “unethical and, in some jurisdictions, may constitute fraud,” said Tekedia. “Repeated abuse can result in account closures, damaged relationships with financial institutions and even legal consequences.”

Almost three in 10 Britons now use AI chatbots to get health advice. And UK medical-policy experts are concerned that this could create confusion, undermine trust in GPs and other healthcare workers, and make it more difficult to take an informed decision about your health.

The warning, from The Academy of Medical Sciences, comes as Open AI rolls out ChatGPT Health in the US. It allows users to “securely connect” their medical records and wellness apps to “ground conversations” in their own health information, so that the bot can “take a more active role” in their health.

ChatGPT Health is not yet available in the UK but, with more than 300 million people worldwide regularly directing their health-related questions to ChatGPT, it could swiftly become a “democratising force in healthcare”, Tanzeem Choudhury, a health-innovation expert at New York’s Cornell University told CBS News. But there are definite risks and trade-offs. “Used well,” an AI tool such as this can “help direct people to trusted sources”, said Yvonne Doyle, a fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences and former medical director of Public Health England. But it can also mislead “convincingly”.

‘Zero awareness of fallibility’

People have been using the internet to answer their questions for decades, but the “danger” with an AI chatbot is that it responds with “fluent, emotionally convincing paragraphs” and “remembers context”, making it “sound more ‘human’ than many humans”, said Celina Cartoto and Anthony Kelly on RTE. Yet it has “zero awareness of its own fallibility”, always providing an answer, “even when one doesn’t exist”. People need to remember that, though it “speaks like a doctor, listens like a therapist and remembers like a friend”, it is actually “none of them”.

We know that all AI chatbots can “hallucinate” and provide “misleading, inaccurate or even dangerous” information, said CBS News. Open AI has been careful to state that ChatGPT Health is designed to support, not replace doctors, but it has not responded to questions about whether it is “equipped to recognise when to advise a user to seek help from a medical professional”. It seems that “onus is on the user”.

Even before the rollout of the Health feature, there were indications that users could become dangerously reliant on ChatGPT for medical advice. Last month, a 55-year-old US pastor sued OpenAI, claiming its bot “brought him to the brink of death”, by “repeatedly and insistently” misdiagnosing his symptoms of near-fatal pulmonary embolism, said the BBC. An OpenAI spokesperson told CBS News that “ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment”.

AI can be a “useful educational tool” for health information, said Leana Wen, an emergency doctor in the US, and a clinical associate professor at George Washington University, told CNN. It can “explain medical terminology” and “compare treatment options at a high level”, helping “people prepare questions” for their doctor and be “more engaged” in their care. But “it has important limitations” and “should not replace clinical judgement” by a medically qualified human.

Privacy concerns

There is also the question of privacy. How risky is it to share so much of your individual medical information with an AI tool, such as ChatGPT Health? Open AI has said that Health has “enhanced privacy” and encryption, and that conversations used in the Health tab won’t flow into non-Health chats. But it’s no accident that Health has not yet been rolled out in the UK, or the EU, where data protection and digital privacy laws are stricter than in the US.

“If you are providing data directly to a technology company that is not providing any healthcare services, then it is buyer beware,” Bradley Malin, a biomedical informatics expert, told Time. OpenAI says it will protect your data but “what exactly does that mean”?

It all comes down to whether or not “you trust OpenAI to keep to its word”, Robert Wachter, a medic who has written extensively about AI and healthcare, told the magazine. OpenAI does have “really strong corporate interest in not screwing this up”. Its brand is “dependent” on the user “feeling comfortable” in sharing their information, and any sort of data breach would end that trust.

The end of doctors?

The increasing use of AI programmes for health queries is becoming “existentially threatening” for medics, Jonathan Chen, a doctor at Stanford University Medical Center, told The New York Times. What is our purpose going to be now? Should we “get out of the way and let a computer take over”?

Not for a while yet, Lee Schwamm, associate dean for digital strategy and transformation at Yale School of Medicine, told the paper. And that’s because chatbots can’t yet think critically enough about the health information people are providing – and more importantly, not providing – them with. AI is “really good at matching patterns and making predictions”. But it can only do so “based on the data that it is given about the patient. It has no way to extract” what may be crucial further information itself.

Besides, patients still need a human connection. If you’re going to be told you have a serious health issue, or even how much longer you have to live, “you want to look someone in the eye”.

Who would be an investor in South Korea right now? “Despair and frustration” spread again on Wednesday as the chip-heavy Kospi index “cratered” during another “hectic session” that triggered a second successive official circuit-breaker, reported Bloomberg.

The catalyst was disappointing earnings from local semiconductor giant SK Hynix but, given “already jittery sentiment” around the AI boom, it could almost have been anything. The oncebooming Kospi has now lost more than 33% of its value in a month.

‘Demand destruction’

“The chips are down,” said Bryce Elder in the FT – especially in the red-hot memory sector. Some have pinned the “chip dip”, which has also hit Wall Street with force, on the IPO of Chinese challenger CXMT; others on reports that a stateowned Chinese company is beginning mass production of “immersion deep-ultra lithography machines” – advanced chip manufacturing tools over which the West (especially the Dutch giant ASML) currently enjoys a monopoly. Still, the more obvious concern is “demand destruction”, in what has always been a volatile and highly cyclical sector. Voracious demand from America’s big AI hyperscalers has sent chip prices sky-high. “All that’s needed to wreck 2027 sales expectations is for this cycle to turn from virtuous to vicious. Plus ça change…”

Could China do for chips what it has already done for cars? That’s the fear on the Nasdaq, said Eliot Brown in The Wall Street Journal. As Elon Musk recently told The Economist, Chinese manufacturers are “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem”. Chinese companies have been restricted from buying the cutting-edge machines – which is why they are “a step behind the US in advanced chipmaking”.

‘Nvidia - the central bank of the AI economy’

Yet what’s particularly concerning about the plummeting shares of chipmakers, said DealBook in The New York Times, is that the rout coincides with a broader crisis of confidence on Wall Street about AI-related corporate debt and “circular” financial arrangements. That was rammed home when it emerged that chip giant Nvidia – increasingly “the central bank of the AI economy” – is brokering a $250bn guarantee for OpenAI’s immense Ohio campus. “Throughout history, almost every generational infrastructure leap has relied on hardware titans to co-sign their buyers’ credit.”

But this has also led to devastating “debt crashes”. The chief winner of the current turmoil is Apple, said the FT. It has reclaimed its crown as the world’s most valuable company, with a $5trn valuation, because it is seen as a relative “haven”. The same is true of the FTSE 100, which has hit an all-time high as an “anti-tech” index. Swings and roundabouts.

Have we already lost control of AI, asked Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. On 11 July, an entirely new kind of hacking attack was launched at Hugging Face, an online platform that houses a library of AI code and datasets. The attack, which clearly used AI agents, “advanced at frightening speed and scale”, executing tens of thousands of actions so as to break into the company’s system.

‘Considerable skill and persistence’

Hugging Face managed to neutralise it, and alerted the authorities. Days later, the company behind the attack “raised its hand”: OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, admitted that one of its tests had gone badly wrong. OpenAI had set up a “sandbox” – a supposedly safe area of its network, entirely disconnected from the internet – and ordered two cutting-edge AI models to perform a series of cybersecurity tests. The models decided to break out of the sandbox, escape onto the internet and hack into the place they knew they would find the answers: Hugging Face’s servers.

Media outlets described the AI as “going rogue”, said Jamie Bartlett in The Observer. But, in fact, these models merely single-mindedly performed the task they’d been given. The models reasoned that the most effective strategy was to cheat, and they did so with “considerable skill and persistence”. This is nothing new. Leading models have deceived users, attempted blackmail, and even tried to copy themselves in order to complete their tasks.

‘The genie is out of the bottle’

Some sceptical observers have suggested that this story might be a publicity stunt: that it benefits OpenAI to suggest that its products have stunning powers. But the truth is that these companies really don’t know how to build AI systems safely – and yet they “continue to rush ahead building ever-more powerful models”. It was fortunate that Hugging Face, a New York tech firm valued at $4.5bn, had a highly proficient cybersecurity team, said The Economist. “Things might have turned out much worse for a less well-resourced outfit.”

This is not necessarily a doomsday scenario, said John Thickstun in The Guardian. AI is very good at hacking; but such powers can also be used to make IT systems more secure. Ironically, Hugging Face had to rely on a free Chinese AI model to thwart this attack – because OpenAI and US rivals jealously guard their own. At any rate, “the genie is out of the bottle”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent: we must learn how to manage AI. Every technology developed by mankind has been double-edged, and AI is no different. “A radically different world is not necessarily anything to be frightened of – but, even if it were, it’s coming at us anyway.”

China is not beating the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race, at least not yet. But the country’s AI products are cheaper and good enough that a number of American AI users are shifting away from homegrown products. Enter a Silicon Valley panic. The U.S. government may take action, and a new Chinese model — Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — may be the trip wire.

‘Something good enough’

Kimi K3 can “allegedly beat some of the best systems built by U.S. companies at a fraction of the cost,” said The Verge. It is the latest in a series of cheap Chinese-made “open-weight” AI models that “anyone can download, inspect, modify and run on their own infrastructure,” said Microsoft. This presents a different approach from closed-source “proprietary platforms” like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT; the Chinese method challenges the conventional wisdom that “leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips” used by U.S. companies, said CNN.

The Chinese open-weight models are “increasingly almost as good as closed systems made by leading U.S. companies,” which is why a “growing number of Americans” are moving to the Chinese systems, said The Associated Press. Kimi K3 “just seems snappier” than Anthropic’s Claude Fable chatbot, Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian said to the outlet. Other Chinese open-weight models lack the “overall, full-range capabilities” of the products made by American companies, said the AP. But AI users “just don’t need” expensive U.S.-made AI products, technology executive Curt Meinhold told the outlet. “We need something good enough.”

‘Full AI communism’

Some American AI executives are “sounding the alarm” about the rise of open-weight models, said The Wall Street Journal. The Chinese models represent “full AI communism,” in which governments provide artificial intelligence as “digital public infrastructure” rather than a “market product,” OpenAI’s Dean Ball said on X. The White House may soon decide to “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models” as a result.

Others disagree. Restricting access to open-weight models “wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups” that use the technology, a coalition of 200 smaller tech companies argued last week in a letter to administration officials, per Politico. Regulation would be “great for Anthropic. We’re all going to have to spend money on Anthropic,” Suhail Doshi, the founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle, said to the outlet.

The White House is “showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models,” said Axios. Administration officials last year considered an executive order mandating that U.S. firms could “only host Chinese models if they could guarantee security and take liability if it were breached.” The ascendance of Kimi K3 is “reigniting” those old regulatory efforts. An example: The White House this week banned Chinese-made “humanoid and quadruped robots” to “protect the U.S. AI build-out,” said Reuters.