Sixteen years ago, Russell Brand posed a question to the readers of his memoir: “What kind of man was I? Treating women in this way? If this is what I am telling you, can you imagine what’s being left out?” Today, the question looks chilling – and the public has a good idea of its answer, said The Times.

On Monday, the 51-year-old comedian-turned-Christian-influencer was sentenced to ten-and-a-half years in jail, for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others, between 2004 and 2009. A “charismatic, unruly figure” known at the peak of his career for his voracious sexual appetite, Brand had protected his persona with a “cheeky end-of-the-pier veneer”; but during his trial, the evidence of the six women who’d agreed to testify against him made it clear that his ostensible charm could disappear in an instant.

One of the women had, aged 21, been invited to his home where she consented to vaginal sex. In bed, he turned her over, pinned her down, removed his condom and anally raped her – though she told him it hurt, and begged him to stop. When it was over, he ordered her to clean up her “mess” (there was blood and other matter on the sheets), then switched on the TV, and got an assistant to show her out. He stored her number in his phone under “T for tart”.

In plain sight

It is being said that Brand was like Jimmy Savile – a predator hiding in plain sight, said John Sturgis in The Spectator. Yet he was not hiding. In his pomp, he’d revelled in his “swordsman” reputation. The Sun named him “Shagger of the Year” three times.

And he was brazen about his mistreatment of women, said Jessica Barrett in The Independent. In his bestselling memoir of 2007, “My Booky Wook”, he recalled groping girls at school – “every female was a potential target” – and described later altercations in which he’d spat in the face of a lap dancer and smashed the phone of a prostitute. In his standup routines in that era, he “joked” about picking up fans for sex, and about preferring fellatio when the “mascara runs a little” – an echo of the gagging that one witness spoke of in court (he was acquitted of the charge of having dragged her into a toilet and forced her into oral sex).

On his BBC radio show in 2007, Brand rang Savile and agreed to send over his assistant, naked, to give him a massage, said Rosamund Urwin in The Times. On another occasion, he laughed on the show about exposing his penis to a woman. In 2008, he went too far when he and Jonathan Ross rang the actor Andrew Sachs, and left him lewd messages about his granddaughter.

After that, Brand lost his job at the BBC, but he had such a large fanbase that industry bosses in the UK and the US continued to turn a blind eye to the dark rumours about him, and even public warnings. Dannii Minogue had called Brand “a vile predator” who’d not “take no for an answer” back in 2006. In 2023, after criminal allegations were finally revealed by a Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4 investigation, both the BBC and Channel 4 apologised for not addressing earlier complaints about Brand. But at the height of his fame, he’d seemingly been viewed as “the talent”, an asset too valuable to jeopardise.

‘Fake messiah’

Certainly, TV bosses have questions to answer about Brand’s behaviour and the culture that facilitated it, said Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator: many female BBC employees said they’d been too scared to speak up. The allegations revealed this week against David Walliams will raise more.

But Brand had other enablers, including the high-profile left-wing progressives who fêted him when – his Hollywood career having stalled – he reinvented himself as a socialist revolutionary. The Guardian published his writings, and in 2013 he guest edited The New Statesman (and was photographed with its staff as the Jesus figure in a recreation of da Vinci’s “Last Supper”). His political ideas were “daft”, said John Rentoul in The Independent, yet even Labour leader Ed Miliband courted the “fake messiah” in 2015, in an effort to win the youth vote.

In court, Brand’s lawyer, Ian Winter, resorted to age-old tactics to discredit his accusers, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times: he asked why they’d not screamed or fought back, or immediately gone to the police. It’s known that women are often paralysed by shock or fear in such cases. As for not going to the police, both Brand’s history of getting away with it, owing to his A-list status, and the crime statistics, speak to that. Only 1% of rapes that are reported end in a conviction. Why would a woman who had been a fan of her celebrity attacker, or flirted with him, or previously consented to sex with him, expect to be one of the tiny minority whose case gets to court?

It’s a step forward that the jury was not swayed by Winter’s tactics, and accepted that consent can be withdrawn at any time. But the fact is, it still required the press to find other victims and air allegations to embolden a few “heroic” women to come forward, and help bring this rapist to justice.

After chip conglomerate Nvidia was enveloped by a spy scandal rocking its now-former CEO, Jensen Huang, who resigned Thursday, all eyes are on the person allegedly at the center of the probe: Alice Huang. U.S. intelligence believes the woman is a Chinese government asset, and many are concerned given her apparent closeness to Nvidia.

A ‘regular fixture’

Not much is known about Alice Huang’s early life. The 43-year-old Chinese citizen previously “worked as a journalist for Chinese state television before pivoting to a career in finance,” said CNN. She also reportedly has at least “four years of experience in the media and eight in the securities industry.”

For a short period in 2023, Alice Huang reportedly worked in a high-status position for Megaspeed International, a Singaporean computing and data center organization. The company eventually became a “member of an Nvidia partnership program, a status that typically grants priority access to the latest chips,” said The Wall Street Journal. While it’s unclear where she met Jensen Huang, she has become a “regular fixture in Huang’s business circles, appearing at the side of the Nvidia CEO at private and corporate events.” (Despite sharing the same last name, the two are not related.)

‘Drive by Beijing’s top spy agency’

At some point, Alice Huang allegedly began working for the Chinese government and began having an extramarital affair with Jensen Huang. Last spring, a memo circulated within the Trump administration with “intelligence that a Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security,” said The New York Times. She was reportedly recruited by China as part of a “drive by Beijing’s top spy agency to learn more about American AI chips and potentially influence” Nvidia to “push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China.”

It seems this may have worked. Alice Huang has reportedly helped facilitate at least $7 billion in Nvidia chip sales to China since 2023, according to The Information. The “sudden emergence of Huang’s infidelity has rocked the political class and America’s tech sector,” said The Associated Press, and while Jensen Huang resigned after admitting to a second extramarital affair — with reports of a third affair circulating Thursday — the scandal has created “new concerns” about China’s access to Nvidia.

The late Leonardo Del Vecchio must be “rolling in his grave”, said The Observer.

The Italian businessman turned a “small optical workshop in the Dolomite foothills” into one of Italy’s most storied luxury fashion companies. He then decided to split his EssilorLuxottica empire – which owns Ray-Ban, Oakley and Persol among around 150 brands in total – between his seven children and his widow “in the hope that they would co-operate without the need to name a successor”.

Now, four years after his death, a family feud “is draining patience and payouts”.

Industrial relations

Del Vecchio’s will left a 12.5% stake in the family holding to each of his eight heirs, but his 31-year-old son Leonardo Maria, an “entrepreneur and occasional DJ”, has been attempting to “unpick” the arrangement.

Over the summer, he launched a €10 billion bid to buy a combined 25% stake in holding company Delfin from two of his siblings, giving him a majority 37.5% stake. Valued at roughly €50 billion, Delfin controls around a third of EssilorLuxottica.

Delfin’s voting rules require an 88% supermajority shareholder approval for major decisions, giving any one of the eight heirs veto power. Leonardo Maria’s half-brother, Rocco Basilico, argued that the buyout plan was significant enough to require supermajority approval. He later withdrew his legal challenge, but the bid collapsed after the Delfin board failed to give would-be financial backers the assurances they sought.

Last week, Leonardo Maria returned with an even more audacious €29.6 billion bid to take control of the entire family holding in Delfin. If accepted, the proposed buyout would block a rival approach from Czech arms billionaire Michal Strnad, “while vaulting Leonardo Maria into the dominant position in one of Italy’s most important industrial families”, said Bloomberg.

Seamless transitions

The outcome of the increasingly bitter fight for control of the company “carries weight well beyond the family”, said Euronews. As well as owning a substantial stake in EssilorLuxottica, Delfin also “holds influential positions in some of Italy’s most important financial institutions”, including Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Assicurazioni Generali and UniCredit.

The infighting at Delfin is also a warning to Italy’s legions of family firms facing generational change, Carlo Verdone, head of the industrial association Federitaly, told The Times. “Ten per cent of Italy’s family firms are run by bosses in their seventies, it’s a serious problem.”

While some, such as the Agnelli family, who control car giant Fiat and Juventus football club, have been mired in court cases over inheritances for years, other patriarchs have ensured a seamless transition. Silvio Berlusconi, the late media tycoon and former Italian prime minister, gave his two eldest children a controlling interest in his Fininvest companies, while his remaining offspring received a minority stake that was enough to support them for life.

In the case of the Del Vecchios, however, “an effort to have complete equality – and potentially preserve family peace that way – has not worked”, Bridget Kustin, an economic anthropologist at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, told The Observer. Such disputes “can have extremely small, intimate, private family origins”, such as “a perception of favouritism, a childhood feud”.

The 2026 midterms last week lacked something that has become a hallmark of some in the Republican Party: an effort to sow doubt about election results. The blue tsunami that will send Democrats cruising back into power could be the end of Republicans, including President Donald Trump, stoking claims of fraud.

‘Slowed to a trickle’

In the months leading up to the midterms, some Republicans “spread baseless theories that the vote would be rigged,” and experts had “anticipated a wave of legal challenges from election deniers seeking to contest the results,” said AFP. Some were especially concerned Trump himself would “try to tilt the outcome in his favor — as he did when he tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat.” But none of that occurred, and “evidence-free claims of fraud slowed to a trickle.”

Experts say the size of the blue tsunami made these claims impossible. It was “essentially too big to rig,” a Trump adviser told CNN. Even allies who propped up Trump’s false 2020 claims accepted the Democratic midterm wins. But other factors may be at play. “I don’t know necessarily that margin of victory makes much difference to those who have profited off of the economy of grift around election conspiracies," David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told AFP.

‘Does not mean an end’

Most Republicans did not contest the elections. In the races involving GOP election deniers, almost “all of them lost, and none of them, or the network of activists and groups backing them, have raised any questions about the results,” said Wired. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.), who questioned former President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, lost his reelection bid and “conceded defeat without any reference to election rigging.” Colorado GOP secretary of state candidate James Wiley “made undermining trust in elections a centerpiece of his campaign,” but after he lost, he conceded the race “without questioning the results.”

This “does not mean an end to the administration’s war on alleged voter fraud by noncitizens,” said the Los Angeles Times. And Trump himself, despite initially accepting the results, is still casting doubt. “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” said Trump on Truth Social. “It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

M. John Harrison has supplanted Margaret Atwood to become the oldest winner of the Booker Prize, scooping the prestigious award for “The End of Everything”.

The 81-year-old English author won the £50,000 prize for a post-apocalyptic novel that has divided opinion. The judges’ chair, Mary Beard, called it a “challenging read”.

But while previous Booker winners have dabbled in the tropes of science fiction, Harrison is the first to have “emerged from the bona fide SF world”, said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. It is “a historic win”.

‘A genre-defying writer’

“The End of Everything” is set in “a semi-gentrified seaside art town” on the south coast of England and in a near-future that has seen the arrival of a mysterious race of aliens called the iGhetti, said The Times.

The narrative follows Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber, who fishes a strange creature out of the sea and decides to go on the run with it, along with his elderly aunt, Marnie. The “outlandish developments” of the plot are told in “prose of deadpan precision”, while the “origins, motives and even physical existence” of the iGhetti remain mysterious, as does the nature of the disaster that has caused society to collapse.

Harrison said he “deliberately omitted” as much explanation as possible, said the BBC, so readers feel “the same disorientation as the characters”.

He has been called “the titan of literary science fiction”, but Harrison “dislikes labels like science fiction and fantasy”. He is “a genre-defying writer”, said Wood.

‘Famously overlooked’

Science fiction is “famously overlooked” by the Booker Prize committee, said The Guardian. But although “The End of Everything” is set on Earth, readers can detect “the operatic wonder and alienation of space opera”.

Harrison published his first short story in Science Fantasy magazine in 1966, and became part of the New Wave science fiction literary movement in the 1970s. But from the beginning, he “butted at genre conventions”.

The “most capacious pigeonhole” for his novels is “Weird literature”. It emerged in the 1990s, blending elements of science fiction, fantasy, satire and horror, “often through a politically aware lens”. British novelist Olivia Laing called him “the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf”.

It’s easy to see why Harrison dislikes labels; he’s “spent half a century being dismissed as a sci-fi hack”, said The Telegraph. But this “gem” isn’t quite sci-fi, nor is it a thriller. It’s a “strange and beautiful thing”, one that “speaks to our deepest fears about collective memory and big tech”. It might be “speculative fiction” – but “unless you’re a bookshop, you don’t need to call it anything”.

Harrison’s Booker triumph is a reminder that the notion of “genre fiction” is “a paper tiger”. “Look down on sci-fi” and you’re looking down on J. G. Ballard, Frank Herbert and John Milton.

Licking his wounds after last week’s midterms, market capitalization losses for his companies SpaceX and Tesla, and the announcement of his Cybertruck’s discontinuation, Elon Musk has found his latest venture. The tech billionaire hopes to get a foothold in telecommunications by acquiring one of the U.S.’s most notable mobile phone companies.

Making a ‘play’ for the US market

Musk wants SpaceX to acquire Boost Mobile via a deal with parent company EchoStar, according to The Washington Post. Marketed to low-income customers, Boost is one of the United States’ largest budget-friendly cellular companies, and a deal with SpaceX could result in Musk “gaining access to its network, which it leases from AT&T and T-Mobile,” said the Post. Such access would “allow Musk to make a play for a U.S. wireless market that equity research firm MoffettNathanson estimates is worth $235 billion.”

Musk’s Boost venture comes after he approached AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon about “buying capacity on their networks,” said TechCrunch. All three carriers declined. Together, these companies have about 100 million subscribers, far more than Boost. While the “acquisition would give SpaceX an immediate bump in subscribers,” the “true value of the deal” for the company would be getting “access to terrestrial cellular networks,” or land-based cell communications.

SpaceX was already making moves in this space. Last year, it “acquired wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar” and “recently purchased a portfolio of low-band spectrum licenses,” said The Verge.

‘Unparalleled ground coverage’

Despite Musk’s status as a divisive figure given his exorbitant wealth and unprecedented government access under Trump, some experts say there could be upsides to this deal. A joining of SpaceX and Boost would “combine SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband network with new mobile antennas, fiber connections and other ground infrastructure,” said Bloomberg, possibly bringing about “unparalleled ground coverage that makes wireless dead zones a thing of the past.”

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the deal’s prospects. It would “support Musk’s ambition to turn his business empire into an artificial intelligence powerhouse” by giving him a platform through which to create future tech, said Bloomberg, at a time when anti-AI sentiment has reached a fever pitch. Musk’s “ultimate goal” may not be to “disrupt the well-established and long-entrenched wireless industry” but rather to “create a type of network that will enable future technological breakthroughs.”

Musk may also face challenges in building the network he desires. SpaceX would “likely ​need to invest heavily in ground infrastructure, customer ​service, handset subsidies and promotions — costly areas of the wireless business where the Big Three already ​have extensive operations,” said Reuters.

There is a deep “contradiction” at the heart of the Chinese state, said Han Yong Hong in Lianhe Zaobao (Singapore). “Despite the extraordinary concentration of power at the top,” Xi Jinping, all-powerful general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China for the past 13 years, “has still struggled to secure genuine loyalty” from leading figures in the bureaucracy beneath him.

Earlier this year, he railed against the “performative obedience” of party officials, describing in a caustic speech their many forms of “two-faced” behaviour. Some, he said, loudly proclaim their political loyalty while quietly defying orders; others are opportunists who resort to flattery and deception, but “stand ready to jump ship at any moment”. And it was revealing to find that the focus of last week’s party plenum in Beijing was not economic planning, as is customary – but discipline and loyalty. Behind closed doors, officials were told they will now face even tighter oversight and constraints over the way they carry out their duties, not least through more detailed performance reviews.

Warning to others

The internal machinations of a far-off bureaucracy may not seem significant, said The Indian Express (Noida). But “in a system where the Party effectively subsumes the state”, the way the CCP governs itself can have far-reaching consequences. It will shape how China projects its power abroad, impacting global markets and the strategic calculations of other powers.

The subtext for this latest crackdown, said The Straits Times (Singapore), is that Xi’s long-running purges are not paying off. Millions of CCP members have been dragged into the autocrat’s “anti-corruption” drive in the past few years, and hundreds of senior officials and top generals have disappeared from view. Yet Xi seems anxious to shore up his authority even further.

Xi took out one of his biggest targets just two weeks before the gathering, continued Han Yong Hong. Former Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan, who earned the nickname “roly-poly toy” for his ability to be knocked about by political upheavals without being toppled, was taken from his home by the authorities on 10 October for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”. Huang had stepped down as Chongqing mayor a decade ago, but his intricate network of political connections was clearly considered a threat by Xi. His removal will have served as a “stern warning to others within the political establishment” ahead of the Fifth Plenum.

Lonely princeling

A record 33 members of the CCP’s central committee were purged ahead of last week’s meeting, said Allegra Mendelson in The Telegraph – including Zhang Youxia, Beijing’s highest-ranking general, who was dismissed after a months-long corruption investigation; and a former party secretary from Xinjiang who was removed for “nepotism, bribery and paying for sex”. It left the “largest number of empty chairs” in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People since these plenums began.

These regular party meetings matter a huge amount to a leader like Xi, said James Palmer in Foreign Policy (Washington DC), because his power is almost entirely rooted in the CCP’s formal structures. That marks a sharp contrast with Mao Zedong, who was able to use the strength of his personality cult to bypass the formal structures and attack his enemies – as he did during the Cultural Revolution “when he mobilised the student-led Red Guards against the CCP’s established leaders”.

Xi’s personality cult is only surface level: “unlike Mao, nobody has ever cried singing Xi’s poems”. Nor does he have the personal networks to sustain his influence. Although he is the son of one of the founding fathers of the People’s Republic of China, he has not built close ties to other princelings, “choosing instead to curtail them”. Xi’s power stems almost entirely from his formal position and his ability “to control the CCP’s internal security services”. Without that, his authority would disappear.

Immigrants granted release from ICE custody through court hearings may find themselves back in similar circumstances, as the agency has been rearresting people after a judge let them go. Advocates say this violates their civil rights.

‘Very, very sharp increase’

At least 20 people released from ICE detention following court proceedings in the last year were soon arrested again, according to an investigation by The Guardian. Most of these people were freed through habeas corpus petitions, which let detainees challenge the government’s legal right to imprison them.

There has been a “very, very sharp increase in people who are released on habeas petitions, only to be very rapidly redetained, often in violation of the federal court’s order,” Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told The Guardian. One man, Akram Mahmoud Omar, 77, was released on a habeas corpus petition after suffering a heart attack at an ICE detention camp in Louisiana. But “just 10 days after his release, ICE seized Omar again and tried to whisk the still-recovering man onto a deportation flight,” said The Intercept. He was eventually released again following another court order.

‘Left me in shock’

The people being rearrested can experience lasting trauma. Yader Cortez of St. Cloud, Minnesota, was “on the cusp of securing U.S. residency” only to be “detained again just three minutes after a judge’s order freed him,” said MPR News. “He tells me, ‘You’re being arrested by ICE.’ I ask, ‘Why? The judge is letting me go free, isn’t he?’” Cortez told MPR of the official who rearrested him. “Then he said, ‘The judge doesn’t know what he’s doing. He made a mistake in your case.’”

“I had never experienced anything like that — going from being free to suddenly being imprisoned again,” Cortez added. “It left me in shock.” Lawyers say ICE often keeps people’s property even after they are released. The agency has “withheld government-issued identification documents,” said the ACLU of Washington, D.C., and some immigrants have “lost jobs, risked rearrest when leaving their homes and suffered significant hardship.”

For the creators of award-winning medical drama “The Pitt”, it is “time to trade scrubs for a suit”, said Vulture. US judges have found that the multi-award-winning American show has enough “clear and numerous similarities” to hit 1990s hospital drama “ER” for a court case to proceed.

This only adds fuel to a “high-stakes legal battle” that started before “The Pitt” first aired in the US in 2025, said The Times. The case, brought by the widow of “ER” creator Michael Crichton, will now go to a jury trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Uncredited reboot

"The Pitt” is a “gritty depiction of a fast-paced” A&E department “dealing with a wave of crises”, said The Times, and, right from its debut, it “revived memories of a ground-breaking hospital drama from three decades earlier”. Sherri Crichton maintains it is indeed a rebranded but uncredited reboot of “ER”.

In their 33-page opinion, the judges compared the scripts of each show’s opening episode and found details that “suffice for a prima facie case”. They cited similarities in “plot, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, graphic injury detail and sequence of events”, said the BBC.

But claims against Noah Wyle, actor-producer of “The Pitt”, as well as executive producer John Wells, and showrunner R Scott Gemmill, were dismissed. All three were involved with “ER” – Wyle played Dr John Carter – but the judges found no evidence to suggest that they know they could be breaching Crichton’s contractual rights. They could, however, still be called as witnesses during the trial.

‘Uncoupled’ from ‘ER’

“At the centre of the dispute is a so-called frozen-rights provision” signed between Michael Crichton and Warner Bros. in 1994 before the release of “ER”, said The New York Times. It stipulates that any publishing relating to “ER”, which includes theatrical releases, spin-offs and additional works would be “frozen” until they got his approval. When Crichton – who also wrote “Jurassic Park” and wrote and directed “Westworld” – died in 2008, that control passed to his widow, Sherri.

In August 2024, before “The Pitt” first hit US screens, Sherri Crichton “dragged the yet-to-debut” drama into court in a breach of contract action, said Deadline. There had been prior negotiations between her and Wells about a reboot of “ER” but they “fell apart”, and the creators of “The Pitt” say they only “birthed” their idea for the show after that. They see the lawsuit “as sour grapes and a money grab” by the Crichton estate.

Wyle has “spoken openly” about his new show’s origins, said The Independent. He told Amy Poehler “Good Hang” podcast that he and his team had had a “near-miss” with rebooting “ER”, but had “uncoupled” from that intellectual property.

The trial could come “as early as next summer”, said Deadline, “unless the parties settle”. That isn’t “impossible” but it does seem “unlikely, given all the bitterness and bad blood between the principals”.

Just 24 hours after his party’s midterm drubbing, Vice President JD Vance offered a pointed diagnosis of why MAGA lost: frustration over the Iran war. Despite couching his critique with brief genuflections toward Trump, Vance’s lengthy missive about why Republicans lost, shared yesterday on X, has been taken by some as a deliberate schism point between himself and the administration he ostensibly helps lead. With two years left of the Trump White House and a presumptive presidential run of his own after that, Vance seems set on not allowing this week’s losses to limit his political future.

‘Astonishing, if implicit, rebuke’

Vance’s statement represents a “striking acknowledgment” from a sitting vice president that his own administration’s “handling” of the Iran war has “become a political liability for Republicans,” said Politico, even as Trump himself has “defended the approach.” The “blunt assessment” comes as “speculation mounts over his own political future,” said Fox News. Vance’s remarks signify a “shift in his public assessment of the war’s consequences” after “previously defending aspects of the administration’s military campaign.”

While Vance had “expressed some reluctance” in the early days of Trump’s Iran war plans, the vice president ultimately embraced the “spineless sycophantism we’ve come to expect,” said The New Republic. After the Democrats’ seismic midterm performance, however, Vance “promptly threw the president under the bus.” The veep’s “astonishing, if implicit, rebuke” of a president he has backed “consistently and unequivocally for years” suggests the GOP is entering an era of “competing factions” that “more openly jockey for influence,” said HuffPost.

‘Better late than never’

Trump detractors have “delighted in watching the infighting,” said Mediaite. Some Republicans have already embraced Vance’s pivot, including outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a frequent critic of Trump’s foreign policy. “Better late than never,” said Massie, asserting he had been “right about everything” in response to Vance’s post on X.

When asked about whether the Iran war should be blamed for Republicans’ loss in the midterms, Trump “essentially agreed with Vance,” said HuffPost. Vance’s critique is “largely true” because the war “drove the gasoline up a little,” said Trump to reporters, per The Associated Press. However, he added, “if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again.”

With the “atomic bomb” of “Grand Theft Auto 6” arriving on 19 November, few games are “daring to release” this month, said Paul Tassi on Forbes. “But few games are ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’.”

The game, a Nintendo Switch 2 remake of the 1998 Nintendo 64 classic, is out today and it’s “no great surprise” that it’s already racked up a Metacritic score that is “the best of the year by far and one of the best of all time”.

Time will tell whether it can reach the dizzying heights of the original, which holds the record for the best-reviewed game in history with the only 99/100 rating on the critic aggregator site.

‘Groundbreaking’ game

The original “Ocarina of Time” was “one of the most groundbreaking games of its time”, said BBC Newsround. Players take control of the “young hero” Link, who must “explore the fantasy kingdom of Hyrule and stop a villain named Ganondorf from taking control”. Link is helped by Navi, a “glowing fairy” who provides clues along the way.

The first Zelda game made with full 3D graphics, it became an “important step towards modern open-world adventures”, helping developers figure out how “movement, combat and conversations could operate in three dimensions”. One of its most “influential” features was Z-targeting, which allowed players to “lock the camera onto an enemy” or specific object.

While it didn’t invent lock-on targeting or “labyrinthine 3D level design”, the original “Ocarina of Time” was “special” as it was “arguably the first game to do those things really well” as part of a “cohesive, unforgettable experience”, said Alex Perry on Mashable.

‘Dream come true’

It’s always nerve-racking to expose your “jaded adult sensibilities” to a “formative piece of art from your childhood”, said Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. But I couldn’t be happier to report that the “ambitious” remake is a “dream come true”.

Much of the “flow and structure” of the original game remains intact. At its heart, this is still a “clever, challenging game about a lonely boy” trying to save the world. But while the graphics of the original were “fuzzy around the edges” and filled with “evocative but simple colours”, the remake now looks like “very detailed theatre scenery”.

The visuals are “beautiful”, said Perry on Mashable, and there are “snappy and satisfying” new controls, including the “much-talked-about new jump button” that “reduces the likelihood of accidentally launching yourself off a ledge”. However, the new “cartoony” voice acting “took me out of the story at times” and the game felt “a little too easy for adults”.

I found it “almost trivially easy, from beginning to end”, said David Jenkins in Metro, and young Link had a “slightly creepy, mannequin-like appearance at times”. But Nintendo hasn’t changed anything of “substance”; this is a “pitch perfect remake of one of the best video games of all time”.

With open enrollment underway, many people face a stark reality when it comes to healthcare. A slew of insurers are vanishing from marketplaces, most notably the Affordable Care Act exchange. This could leave many without coverage options for 2027.

At least 11 insurers fleeing

The ACA, or Obamacare, is at the center of the insurer pullouts as the insurers “reassess the profitability of their marketplace participation,” said health policy organization KFF. At least 11 insurers have announced plans to leave the ACA marketplace in 2027, including major companies like UnitedHealth, PacificSource and Cigna. The latter, which has more than 350,000 ACA enrollees, will “exit the 11 states in which it currently participates both on- and off-exchange.”

The ACA isn’t the only target. Other insurers believe that “flat Medicare Advantage rates as proposed by the Trump administration” would “likely force them to take a deep look at the benefits they offer,” said industry outlet Fierce Healthcare. The funding changes at a “time of sharply rising medical costs and high utilization of care will impact seniors’ coverage,” Chris Bond, a spokesperson for insurance lobby AHIP, said in a statement per the outlet.

Creating ‘discontinuities in care’

This insurer exodus could lead to problems for sick people, especially lower-income Americans. If someone has a “doctor who doesn’t accept the fewer number of options that are available to you, that can be very disruptive, especially if you’re someone who has a chronic illness,” Miranda Yaver, a professor of health policy and management at the University of Pittsburgh, told NBC News. “This is going to create a lot of discontinuities in care and coverage for people.” The changes also mean “constant upheaval, whether it’s the plan pulling out or the subsidies have changed or the doctor network has changed,” insurance broker Jennifer Chumbley Hogue said to the outlet.

Such withdrawals ultimately “reflect a familiar cycle,” said the industry outlet healthinsurance.org. Insurer participation in various markets has long been “cyclical over time, generally increasing when the individual market was healthier and larger and decreasing when it was sicker and smaller.” Decisions on what plans to offer are primarily “driven by insurers’ assessment of profitability and overall market stability.”

While the U.S. Secret Service may be best known for protecting government officials, its latest mission involves investigating workplace violence. And in a nation where this type of violence is commonplace, a new report from the agency hopes to help prevent future incidents

‘Examining 50 incidents of mass violence’

The report, “Preventing Targeted Workplace Violence,” attempts to identify patterns or similar behaviors among perpetrators of workplace attacks. It begins by “examining 50 incidents of mass violence” in which “128 people were injured and 119 were killed,” the report said. Nearly all of the perpetrators, 47 out of the 50, experienced “noteworthy life stressors within five years of their attack,” including personal problems, financial hardships and employment-related issues.

Many of the perpetrators had a criminal history. Among the 16 employees who were actively employed at the place they attacked, over 40% of them had a “history of domestic violence,” and when including all 50 of the studied attacks, that “number goes up to 53%,” Lina Alathari, the head of the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, told ABC News. Many of the attackers also had prior criminal charges, including some who “engaged in violence directed at romantic partners or relatives, prompting victims to seek protective orders or restraining orders,” the report said.

‘Thinking, behavior and circumstances of workplace attackers’

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to “look at how can we prevent targeted workplace violence,” Alathari said to NBC News. “What is the thinking, behavior and circumstances of workplace attackers?” Many workplaces can identify warning signs early and potentially stop a tragedy while also taking additional steps. This includes “empowering those who may be experiencing stalking, harassing, threats from romantic partners or other relatives to feel connected enough to come forward and ask for help.”

The best thing employers can do is not ignore these signs. Do “not wait until a direct threat is made,” former Secret Service agent Michael Matranga said to NewsNation. This doesn’t mean “questioning workers about their private lives” but rather working with HR departments to “build behavioral security into their policies.” If employers “don’t have a healthy workforce, then you end up with these particular types of tragic events.”

One of Britain’s biggest unions has called for a blanket ban on problem airline passengers, after a survey of members revealed the majority of aviation workers had suffered some kind of abuse.

Unite found that 72% of ground staff, including those working as security, ground handlers or customer service agents, and 71% of cabin crew receive verbal abuse at least monthly. Just under a third of ground staff and 42% of cabin crew reported being physically assaulted.

According to the UK Civil Aviation Authority, the number of serious disruptive passenger incidents has more than doubled since the pandemic, with more than 1,000 reported last year.

Booze and bad behaviour

While flight delays, cancellations and baggage issues contribute to disruptive behaviour, by far the biggest factor is alcohol. In the Unite survey, 95% of cabin crew and 55% of ground staff said intoxication was the biggest trigger for abuse.

Being drunk on a plane is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £5,000 and two years’ imprisonment. But earlier this year Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, told The Times the airline was having to divert almost one aircraft a day because of drunken and aggressive behaviour by passengers, and called for morning drinking at airports to be banned. “Until somebody creates an accident that causes a plane to crash and kills hundreds, no government will take this problem seriously and airlines are tearing their hair out,” he said.

Under current data protection rules, airlines are prohibited from sharing passenger details with each other, meaning someone banned from a flight or airline can easily book with another carrier.

However, the Department for Transport set out plans this summer to create a national database of disruptive passengers, which would be co-operatively managed by the government and the airline industry. This would alert airline staff to passengers with a history of abuse, and they could then decide whether to let them fly or not. Repeat offenders could be banned for life from all airlines operating out of the UK.

‘Alarm bells’

The proposal is broadly welcomed by airlines, airport staff and the public, with three-quarters of 5,000 UK adults surveyed by YouGov supporting the database’s creation. However, civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life, said the proposal “should ring alarm bells”.

She told LBC the plan “sets a dangerous precedent of government working with private companies to bar people’s access to transport and services” and warned of the potential for “blacklists in other areas”, asking “who decides who goes on the list, what is the benchmark, and how long would they be on the list for?”

The US has been seeking its own version of a “no-fly” database for years “without success”, said Christopher Elliott, founder of consumer watchdog Elliott Advocacy. The Protection from Abusive Passengers Act would bar passengers fined or convicted for assaulting or intimidating crew or other travellers. Yet despite putting safeguards in place, including linking a listing to a fine or a conviction, and building in an appeal and a process for removing people added in error, the bill has repeatedly failed to be passed by Congress.

After months of fiercely fought campaigns across the country, the 2026 midterms are finally here. Have Democrats convinced voters to send them to Washington as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s MAGA government? While early election data shows Democrats in a strong position to capture one, if not both, chambers of Congress, nothing is set in stone until polls close tomorrow night.

‘Huge chance’ but ‘still not 100%’

A “wave of new polls” could “point to just that” for Democrats, said anchor John Berman on CNN: “a wave.” If polling from The New York Times and Siena bears out on election day, Democrats will “take the Senate with room to spare.”

Data showing Democrats nine points up on Republicans is “important” because that “easily overcomes GOP redistricting,” said CNN’s Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten on “The Enten Scale.” Although Enten placed odds of the Democrats taking the House at more than 90%, he said Democrats have just 72% odds of flipping the Senate — a “huge chance” but “still not 100%.” The GOP’s 29% likelihood of keeping the Senate “ain’t nothing.”

Democratic advantages have allowed candidates to play in races Republicans “thought were unreachable,” said Fox News. But “only to the point of making them battlegrounds.”

‘Inherently imprecise’ but usually ‘in the ballpark’

The media “just can’t let go of their obsession with polls” in an election “dominated by ‘horse race’ reporting,” said USA Today. “Breathless updates” about single-point shifts in certain races presume “such statistical noise actually matters.” But while polls are “inherently imprecise” and subject to “many sources of error,” you can trust them to “usually be in the ballpark,” said pollster Nate Cohn at The New York Times.

Early voting impact

Democrats are “flexing their early voting strength,” said The Guardian, having cast 43% of early votes compared to Republicans’ 31%. The “overall picture” of early vote trends “offers few positives for Republicans,” said the Times, affording observers “clues about which subgroups are turning out.” Still, the “impact” of the early votes will ultimately “be known only after polls close.”

“There’s a decency we should expect out of our public officials,” said former President Barack Obama at a recent campaign rally condemning Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s now-infamous attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton. Ramaswamy’s commercial shows there is “no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to.” But while Obama’s comments were directed at Ramaswamy specifically, they come as the GOP grapples with a surging strain of Trumpian malice among arguably less adept candidates — to the chagrin of some within their own party.

‘Ethical degradation of Trumpism’

Ramaswamy’s “may be the most disgusting ad in American political history,” said Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times. But it has opened a “kind of proxy debate on the right” about whether the party should “reclaim some baseline morality” or pursue its “current smashmouth course.” The controversy surrounding the ad affords conservatives space to “reckon with the ethical degradation of Trumpism” without “quite admitting that that’s what they’re doing.” With “no ideas to run on” and minimal accomplishments to tout, GOP candidates “seem to have hatched a plan,” said Rex Huppke at USA Today: “Let’s just be the most wretched versions of ourselves” and “see how things shake out.”

It is “undoubtedly the case” that Trump himself enjoys “some special sauce” that makes him a “formidable general election candidate,” said Jamelle Bouie at the Times. But without candidates who enjoy that innate talent, Republicans are struggling to “mimic Trump’s particular style of politics” as successfully.

GOP ‘litmus test’

Trump is “reminding us on a daily basis that cruelty is the point,” said Charlie Sykes on his To the Contrary podcast. “That seems to be spreading.” In American politics, “bullies” do tend to prosper “for a bit,” said Times columnist David French to Sykes. But they then experience a “serious backlash.”

Ramaswamy’s ad has become a “litmus test” for “how deep” into MAGA’s “post-truth nihilism” someone might sink,” said Rolling Stone. Republican discomfort with Trumpian insolence misses the “greater point” of the “political movement” that led to its creation: The “conservative project’s greatest strength is its moral flexibility.” By that metric, the party’s future is “still firmly in Trump’s hands.”

A murderous 17th-century Dutch mutineer, who inspired the hit TV show The Traitors, could have been the world’s first “corporate psychopath”, a new study has claimed.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was put in charge of around 200 survivors after the Batavia, a merchant vessel run by the Dutch East India Company, ran aground off the west coast of Australia in 1629.

Once senior officers had set off on a longboat to seek help in what is now Jakarta, Cornelisz divided the remaining survivors into factions, playing them off against each. He “quickly installed loyalists on a ruling council, demanded oaths of allegiance and isolated potential opponents”, said Lara Bowman in The Times. Over the next two months “his henchmen drowned, strangled, hacked or bludgeoned to death up to 115 men, women and children”.

Cornelisz justified the killings as a way of conserving food and water supplies but after a rescue ship arrived, he, along with six accomplices, were condemned to death, tortured and hanged.

‘World’s first psychopathic boss’

A new study published in the Asian Journal of Business Ethics has found that Cornelisz displayed all 10 core characteristics associated with psychopathic business leaders. These include “using charm to gain trust, surrounding themselves with loyal supporters, removing potential challengers, creating divisions among rivals, establishing a climate of fear, avoiding responsibility when things go wrong, and pursuing power, money and control above all else”, said The Telegraph.

Dr Clive Boddy, from Anglia Ruskin University, who conducted the research, said that Cornelisz followed the “same playbook we see in toxic workplaces today”. The 30-year-old apothecary turned merchant “removed opponents, rewarded loyalists, created fear, manipulated followers and pursued power at any cost”. This makes him the “world’s first psychopathic boss”, said The Telegraph.

From Cornelisz to The Traitors

The story of Cornelisz and the Batavia may seem an unlikely inspiration for a hit TV show, but for producer Jasper Hoogendoorn the appeal was obvious.

“It’s a story about people who murder each other, backstab each other, betray each other,” he told the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2023. “It’s a horrible story. But it was such a fascinating story and I was thinking it’s also exciting. It’s so exciting to read that story and that’s where the whole idea came to create the show.”

Hoogendoorn said the Dutch TV show “De Verraders” – which means The Traitors and on which the hit UK series is based, was initially going to be called “The Mutineers” and take place on a replica ship, with contestants pushed into the sea when voted out.

That proved too costly for producers, so the decision was made to change the location to a castle, while keeping the idea of a mutiny and rival factions working against each other.

Republicans have dominated Southern politics for more than a generation, but that supremacy is being challenged in this year’s midterms. Democratic candidates are making an unexpectedly strong push for Senate seats in places like South Carolina and Mississippi.

Driven by a ‘backlash’

Democrats’ “stealthy advance into the South” during the midterms “could end up being the story of the year,” said Damian Paletta at The Wall Street Journal. The GOP’s concern can be seen in President Donald Trump’s appearances in states such as South Carolina and Texas to campaign for handpicked candidates like Darline Graham and Ken Paxton, who find themselves in toss-up races. Those are locales that national Republicans usually take for granted. “What. On. Earth. Is. Going. On?”

Republicans may be a victim of their own success. Early voting in Southern states is being driven by a “backlash” against last spring’s Trump-led effort — enabled by April’s Supreme Court decision undermining the Voting Rights Act — to “gerrymander Black voters” into GOP-dominated congressional districts, said Bloomberg.

Florida’s Black voters are casting in-person early ballots in double the numbers they did in 2022. Similar trends have been observed in North Carolina and Georgia. Black voter anger could “fuel a Democratic turnout advantage” that decides races “throughout the South, from North Carolina to Texas,” said Bloomberg.

“America’s new political battleground is the South,” said Carolyn Hugley and Lauren Groh-Wargo at Democracy Docket. The gerrymandering push compelled Democratic organizers to “mobilize quickly” and “force politicians to reconsider what they believed they could get away with.” The fight for “fair representation for Black Americans” is inseparable from efforts to “break the GOP’s stranglehold on the region.”

‘Barely enough’

Some leaders worry Democrats were unprepared for this opportunity. The party “made mistakes in not investing earlier” in races across the South, said Gov. Wes Moore (D-Md.) on ABC’s “This Week.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) agrees. Democrats have done “barely enough” to win the region, he said to MS NOW. The party cannot afford to write off voters south of the Mason-Dixon Line. “As goes the South, so goes the nation.”

Although SpaceX and Tesla may be publicly inseparable from the outsize personality of their CEO, Elon Musk, legally and technically they are separate businesses. But a change might be imminent, as he’s considering a merger of his two kingdoms. The move could consolidate his authority and buttress his megariches.

‘Elon Inc.’

Musk announced last week that the two companies have formed committees to explore creating a conglomerate with dealings in rockets, cars and artificial intelligence, said Axios. “I think it would be a good idea,” he said on an earnings call with reporters, per the outlet. (SpaceX and Tesla are already collaborating on AI chip production.) The joint enterprise would be “massive,” said Axios. The companies currently have a combined capitalization of more than $3.5 trillion.

The SpaceX-Tesla combo would be the “world’s largest ever merger,” said the Financial Times. The combined firm would be a “new type of 21st-century conglomerate” centered around AI and a “leading position in industries ranging from space exploration to robotics.” There has “never been a company like it of any scale,” said analyst Gene Munster to FT.

This would “create a de facto Elon Inc.,” said The New York Times. The alliance has also “raised concerns” from policymakers and critics who believe the world’s richest man has “already amassed too much power.” The merger would give Musk official control “over an increasing slice of the world’s economy,” said Jill Fisch, a business law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to Marketplace.

The Trump factor

The proposal comes at a moment when Musk has “regained access to the White House” after a falling-out with President Donald Trump, said Bloomberg. The advantage is not “guaranteed to last,” though. As such, a push is on to officially announce a deal in the first half of 2027 “so that it closes during this administration” before a “potentially less-accommodating political and financial environment takes hold.”

A would-be power shift may explain Musk’s gargantuan spending on the 2026 midterm election. His giving to GOP candidates has blown “past the $400 million mark as of mid-October,” said CNN.

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

‘Scourge of hate’

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

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

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

‘Nativists have prevailed’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like an orchestra without a conductor’

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

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

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

‘Free spirits’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Knives are now fully out’

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

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

‘Ice maiden is melting’

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

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

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

‘Big question mark’

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

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

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

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

‘Galvanise support’

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

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

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

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

Zacharia’s selection

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

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

‘Even shorter than Scaramucci’

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

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

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

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

Warning signs

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

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

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

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

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

Murky beginnings

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

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

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

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

Pride and perjury

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

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

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

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

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

‘Introduces significant risks’

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

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

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

A ‘number of recommendations’

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

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

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

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

Staying power

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

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

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

‘Nuclear option’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Expanding markets’

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

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

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

‘Accusations of sportswashing’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Evaporated’ gains and ‘instant ramifications’

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

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

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

A football-based strategy

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

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

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

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

‘Deeply tragic’

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

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

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

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

‘Props’ for social media

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

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

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

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

‘Stuck and unsure’

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

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

Program ‘already in shambles’

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

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

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

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

Forced shelter

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

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

Achilles heel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enriching and positive

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

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

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

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

Taking it too far

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

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

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

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

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

Prices ‘can run up’

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

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

Privacy concerns

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

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

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

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

‘Techistential dread’

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

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

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

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

‘No simple answers’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Existential crisis’

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

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

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

Twilight phase

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not like crashing waves at the beach’

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

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

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

Lasting impact

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

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

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

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

‘No precedent’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Uniquely compelling’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You are not alone‘

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

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

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

‘Global symbol‘

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

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

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

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

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

‘Isolation, monitoring and behavior detection’

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

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

‘Get the company under control’

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

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

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

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

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

The prisoners of war

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

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

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

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

Diplomatic headache

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Undermining’ NATO

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

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

‘Hardened’ Western rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incendiary rhetoric

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

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

Shifting the dial

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

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

Heart surgeon-turned-president

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

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

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

‘Never bow our head or bend at the knee’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Powerful message’

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

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

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

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

‘Double-edged sword’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Most important fuel on the planet’

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

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

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

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

Food supply ‘could be disrupted’

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

‘Stubborn and sexy’

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

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

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

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

‘Hinkley on steroids’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Literal experience of class division’

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

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

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

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

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

Economy: ‘Essential for filling aircraft’

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

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

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