What was the key factor that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term? If you’d asked him that a couple of years ago, said Virginia Heffernan in The New Republic, his answer would almost certainly have been the cost of living.

“The beautiful but simple word ‘groceries’,” he once rhapsodised. “I won on that word.” Well, we now know the word on which he’ll likely lose: diesel.

Supply disruptions caused by the Iran and Ukraine wars have had a particularly severe impact on diesel prices: they hit a record high of $6.52 a gallon in the US last week, up from an average of $3.63 at the start of 2025. The price hikes “aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate”, such as pickup truck owners, lorry drivers, and farmers in states such as Iowa. By upsetting the “diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him”.

‘Cheap appeal’

To fix this problem, Trump is toying with the idea of banning US diesel exports, said National Review. The policy has “cheap appeal” ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, but it would only bring down prices for a short while, and only in some areas. While America makes more diesel than it consumes, pipeline constraints mean that most of it remains relatively close to refining hubs on the Gulf Coast.

Other areas of the US, such the Northeast and the West Coast, largely rely on diesel imports, so would end up paying even higher prices if the US further reduced global supplies of the fuel. What’s more, if Gulf Coast refineries were unable to export diesel, they’d soon run out of storage space for it and have to slash their output. Result? Not just less diesel, but also a reduced volume of other refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

‘Fake fix’

A diesel export ban wouldn’t help America, agreed Catherine Rampell on The Bulwark. And it would cause major problems for countries that rely on these exports, such as Mexico, the UK and the Netherlands, which trade with the US in other oil-based products, and could well decide to retaliate in some form.

Still, this is the Trump White House we’re talking about – a team of people with “zero policy expertise” and “zero patience”, who care “only about what talking points will get them through the next news cycle, tomorrow’s consequences be damned”. The worse the opinion polls get ahead of the midterms, the more tempted Trump will be to reach for this “fake fix”.

The age of artificial intelligence has ended. Now dawns the age of “super intelligence.” So says President Donald Trump, who this week signed an executive order mandating that the federal government abandon the term “artificial intelligence” for a more maximal adjective. (Other options floated across Trump’s social media included “supreme” and “superior.”) But not everyone supports the shifting labels. As digital intellect continues to develop at breakneck speed, why does what we call it matter?

Capabilities ‘far exceed’ outdated name

The terminology change is Trump’s “latest rebranding move,” said the BBC. It follows the White House’s effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario in Trump’s second term. The “use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake,” said Trump in his address to the United Nations last month. “It’s not fake. It’s actually amazing.”

The capacities of what we call AI “far exceed what was envisioned” when the term “first came into use,” said the White House in Trump’s executive order explaining the change. For those “working in the AI industry,” the term super intelligence means “something slightly different” than casual usage implies, said USA Today. In that context, it describes digital intelligences “smarter and more capable than humans across every imaginable skillset.”

Accordingly, this word change might “suit the major U.S. AI players” eager to “play up their advanced models,” said DW. Developers have “every interest in calling it super, hyper, superior and whatnot intelligence,” said Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, to the outlet. But this is ultimately “just marketing.”

‘Forced rebrand’

It is doubtful that using super intelligence as a general term publicly “will stick,” said Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, to the BBC. The term “exaggerates the current capacities of AI.” Super intelligence as a descriptor “refers to future AI systems,” said Defense One, and “contrasts” with the “weaker forms of AI that exist today.”

Trump is nevertheless “attempting a forced rebrand for an industry he has tightly embraced,” said CNBC. Meanwhile, the public grows “increasingly wary about the rapidly advancing tech.”

As details continue to emerge about the fraternity members who allegedly drugged and gang raped a student at Cornell University in 2024, many hope it could be a reckoning for colleges across the country. The ongoing civil lawsuit may also bring about systemic changes, even as some accuse Cornell of treating the seven defendants too lightly.

‘Safety’ is education’s ‘precondition’

The Cornell chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity house, where the alleged rape took place, has been barred from the school. But a “university’s obligation to the physical safety of its students is not one commitment among several, to be weighed against reputation or litigation exposure,” said the editorial board of The Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell’s student newspaper. Safety on campus is “not adjacent to the educational mission — safety is, in fact, its precondition.” After the allegations emerged, why were “these men allowed to ‘pursue their education in a secure and nourishing environment?’” said the Daily Sun, citing the university’s student conduct code.

The lawsuit also alleges that Cornell offered the accused an “opportunity to mitigate their punishment by writing an essay,” said Rita Omokha at Elle, which prompted widespread backlash. “We need to sit with that for a second because what does an essay actually repair, remedy or restore?” People “have become so accustomed to institutions failing women that we have started to process these failures the way we process bad weather.” But treating “sexual assault as an academic matter — complete with its charts and facts and figures — offers no respite to the victims who have undergone physical and mental abuse,” said The Cornell Daily Sun.

‘Full and thorough criminal investigation’

The case may prompt “universities to reconsider how they measure and communicate campus safety,” said Jeannine Chiang at The Nation. Rape is “not a personal or campus issue,” and “people need to realize this happens at their alma mater even if it’s not Cornell, and that it requires systemic change,” Ray Epstein, an organizer and sexual assault prevention advocate, told the outlet.

Barring the chapter of the frat is “hardly accountability,” said Maggie Young at The Vanderbilt Hustler, Vanderbilt University’s student newspaper. While the ongoing case is currently a civil matter, the “seven men accused in Jane Doe’s case should face a full and thorough criminal investigation, and if the evidence supports criminal charges, they should be charged and prosecuted accordingly.”

It is a bad year for U.S. farmers. President Donald Trump’s trade wars were already taking a toll, but the Iran war compounded problems by raising fuel and fertilizer costs. Rural regions reliably vote Republican, but Democrats hope for a midterm backlash.

‘Farmers voted for this’

The farm crisis that “threatens to wreck the agricultural heart” of Iowa also threatens to “hurt the fortunes” of Hawkeye State GOP candidates, said Axios. Trump’s policies have “caused such severe financial problems” for corn growers that a state Trump won by 13 points in 2024 now has toss-up races for governor and U.S. Senate. Iowa Republicans “should brace for losing everything," said a GOP consultant to the outlet.

“Farmers voted for this,” Kevin D. Williamson said at The Dispatch. U.S. farmers “rely on imports” for “fertilizer, chemicals, machinery” but they also “keep voting roughly two-to-one” for Trump and his trade wars. The pressing issue: “How much pain it is going to take” for them to change course.

Trump has gone to “surprising” lengths to “infuriate his backers,” Matt K. Lewis said at The Washington Sun. Farmers are an “integral part of his coalition.” His tariffs and stalemated war have created the possibility that voters in solidly red “heartland” states such as Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas “will vote blue this year.” It is “difficult to explain” why the president has gone this route.

‘Formula for revolt’

Democrats are trying to “make a play” for the farm vote, said MS NOW. Trump won 69% of rural voters during his last campaign. Now, 57% of those same voters “disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy.”

“The Midwest is a trouble spot” for Republicans in the midterms because of Trump’s tariffs, Rich Lowry said at the National Review. Agricultural exports to China “fell by 66%,” as Beijing “cut its purchases of U.S. farm products in retaliation” for the president’s trade war. Add war-driven increases in fuel and fertilizer prices, and “it’s a formula for a revolt.”

The midterm elections are looming as a milestone in the Iran war. President Donald Trump declined a ceasefire proposal from Tehran last week, reportedly because he expects to restart U.S. attacks after the vote. And Iran’s leaders may be betting that election pressure can force the White House to make concessions.

‘Midterm election problem’

The president expects to start a new round of bombing “after the November midterms,” said The Wall Street Journal. Trump on Friday rejected a proposed ceasefire that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports.

Iranian leaders, however, say they want to make a deal “before Americans head to the polls this November,” said NBC News. “We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said to reporters at last week’s United Nations assembly, per NBC.

It is “highly unusual” for U.S. elections to “affect a war,” David Shribman said at The Globe and Mail. The “only precedent” for electoral considerations influencing war strategy so directly came in 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson halted bombing in North Vietnam “to help his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey,” in the presidential election. Humphrey lost.

Trump has a “midterm election problem” with the war, said Al Jazeera. Voters who were “promised easy victory” appear poised to punish Republicans in November, which affects strategic considerations. Iran “faces no such countdown,” given that it is “ruled by an unelected Supreme Leader.”

‘Potentially endless’ war

If the elections are affecting war strategy, the war is also affecting elections. U.S. voters are “angry” at the president and his party, Stephen Collinson said at CNN. Just 26% of voters “approve of his handling of the war.” Trump’s “odd” strategy is to give them the “opposite of what they want,” as he refuses to “listen to their fears.”

This is “hardly a recipe for success” in elections, said Collinson. A “potentially endless” war against Iran might be a mistake that gets the GOP’s most devoted voters to “finally ditch Trump,” David Wallace-Wells said at The New York Times.

Manchester City face a large fine, a points deduction, a transfer ban, the stripping of titles and trophies and even legal action from other football clubs, after reportedly being found guilty of 114 out of 115 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules.

With the verdict – let alone the punishment – still to be officially confirmed, “the chaos and uncertainty is only going to increase” as “City fans, and the rest of football” speculate about how harsh the penalties might be, said Dale Johnson, the BBC’s football issues correspondent.

‘Rewriting’ football history

Man City have reportedly lodged an appeal but, should that fail, there will be a sanction hearing at which “everything will be on the table” – “even demotion” from the Premier League, said the BBC’s Johnson.

The betting markets are already anticipating “just how heavily the Premier League could come down on the club”, wrote Lawrence Ostlere in The Independent. Despite their current position at top of the league, Man City were, on Saturday, sixth favourites to be relegated to the Championship, “with odds shortening by the minute”.

“There will be questions now” over the future of star players like Erling Haaland and Enzo Fernandez, but also “the people who run the football club”. Majority owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United Group was “directly implicated in the alleged accountancy gymnastics”. Under the new Independent Football Regulator’s “honesty, integrity and financial soundness” rules for owners and directors, Man City’s “entire ownership is at risk” if the Premier League’s charges are upheld.

“If the full weight of football law were to be thrown at them”, a “hefty slice of football history would need rewriting”, said Tim Spiers on The Athletic. Man City won nine domestic trophies between 2009 and 2018 – the years the charges span. If these titles were rescinded, former Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and former Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers would become “Premier League title-winning managers”. That would be “very surreal”.

The idea of Man City having to “hand back silverware” may feel “far-fetched” but there is a “high-profile precedent”: the 2006 Calciopoli scandal in Italy, when one of Juventus’ titles was retrospectively given to Inter. There have also been “numerous cases” of international athletics medals being re-distributed after rule-breaking doping cases came to light.

‘Forever tainted’

“It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Man City supporters,” said The Guardian’s editorial board. It seems likely that “the greatest period in their club’s history” will now be “forever tainted”. Some of the team’s football “during the Abu Dhabi era” has been “sublime, overseen by an inspired coach”, former manager Pep Guardiola. This sour ending is “a reminder that the volume of money now washing about at the top of the game has been bad for its sporting soul”.

It can’t take anything away “from the remarkable football journey we have been on”, said Man City fan and founder of City Xtra, Freddie Pye, in The Telegraph. My club has set new standards in “footballing brilliance”, led by “some of the most talented players ever seen”. That’s what we City fans “will forever cherish”, whatever sanctions are imposed or “a litany of critics argue”.

If the findings are upheld, this “will be about much more than Man City”, said Karren Brady, former vice-chair of West Ham United, in The Sun. It will become about how capable the Premier League is at “standing up to” a big club with a huge legal team, and applying its rules and punishments “fairly”. This legal battle has taken over two years already. “Man City may be the defendant” but “the credibility of the Premier League is in the dock, too”.

What surprised me, watching the documentary, “wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency”, said Mahmoud Mushtaha in +972 Magazine (Tel Aviv). The 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers interviewed for “NAZA”, a new film, coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing “a routine errand”; one likened it to a “video game”.

Their testimonies form the basis of the documentary, whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage”; it is a term used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in each air strike. The film shows that, guided by AI and automated surveillance, thousands of Palestinian civilians were knowingly killed during the war in Gaza.

‘Factory-scale’ killing

The film received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the recent Venice Film Festival, where it won a jury prize. And in Israel, it has whipped up a storm of outrage, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Miki Zohar, the culture minister, accused its directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, of “treason” and called for them to be stripped of their citizenship, a demand endorsed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

“After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening.” It describes “factory-scale”, AI-enabled targeting. Interviewees claim that “20 Naza” – 20 civilians killed for one Hamas member – is the basic benchmark. But to kill one Hamas fighter, one source claims, 500 civilian deaths were approved. (The Israel Defense Forces denies this.) The film shows how indifference to civilian death shades “into deliberate mass killing”.

The allegations warrant serious scrutiny, said Ariel Oseran on i24News (Tel Aviv). But the very fact that the IDF calculates “Naza” figures shows that it assessed, and tried to minimise, civilian fatalities while fighting the war in Gaza. Besides, some of the film’s claims seem very dubious. According to Hamas’ own figures, the largest single strike during the conflict killed 132 people – far below the 500-death figure claimed in the film.

Reality under attack

We need to examine “NAZA” carefully, said The Jerusalem Post. The interviewees speak anonymously; we don’t know their rank or their motivation for speaking out. Their testimony cannot be a “final judgement on Israeli conduct”. And “if ‘NAZA’’s case is flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated in public”. But attacking the filmmakers does not help. “It weakens Israel’s argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test.”

In Israel, the debate is being played out “purely on the basis of emotion”, said Eli W. Kowaz in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). No ministers have even watched the film, as it is yet to be released here. Nor have the public; yet there have been angry protests outside one of the filmmakers’ parents’ homes. It shows “how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war”.

While the world outside has seen reams of coverage of the war – and seems to have largely forgotten that it started with Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 people – Israel’s media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza. Consequently, to many Israelis, the film feels like an attack on their country, and “an attack on their reality”.

President Donald Trump has dominated the GOP for a decade. But that hold may be slipping, as Republicans prepare for an anticipated “blue wave” in the midterm elections driven by his unpopularity. Conservative candidates are starting to break with Trump, and the right’s pundits are rooting them on.

‘Trumpism is exhausted’

Trump has “become a real liability” for GOP candidates, said The Boston Globe. Senate candidates Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Mike Rogers of Michigan called for an end to the war with Iran, as did incumbent Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. (Husted voted Thursday against a measure to withdraw troops, however.) The break “isn’t about just one issue,” either. Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) last week criticized the president’s immigration policy, while Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) called for an investigation into the Russian oligarch who paid for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding reception. There may be nothing “stopping a full-on revolt” against Trump’s brand.

MAGA acolytes could once argue that Trump’s agenda is “what Americans voted for in 2024,” Jim Geraghty said at The Washington Post. But polls now suggest that the electorate is “sick and tired of this version of Trump” and that “Trumpism is exhausted.” The mood was especially apparent in Vice President JD Vance’s recent plea to voters to “give us another chance.” That is not a “particularly inspiring rallying cry,” Geraghty said. Republicans have to decide if they still want to be the party of tariffs, enmity toward Canada and mass deportations to remove every “agricultural worker, hotel maid and restaurant busboy.” Vance, if he wants to save his own ambitions, will need to lead the way. “The clock is ticking.”

The GOP under Trump has “blown one of the great opportunities in political history,” Gerard Baker said at The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s election in 2024 was a “real chance to establish a new governing order” favorable to conservatives, and the president could have succeeded by controlling the border, reining in prices and keeping the U.S. out of “costly, ineffective” foreign wars. Trump instead has “widened the deficit,” levied tariffs and set off on a “reckless military adventure” that is damaging the U.S. economy. All due to “hubris, vanity, recklessness” and the GOP’s “abdication of accountability.”

‘Wide open’ GOP future

Polling shows that Trump is “slipping significantly with his own party,” pollster G. Elliott Morris said at Strength in Numbers. His approval rating with Republican and GOP-leaning independent voters remains high at 71%. But that is still an “11-point drop and the lowest we have recorded.” Those GOP defections have helped drive the president’s overall voter approval ratings to new lows.

This could be the beginning of a longer process for the Republican Party. The GOP candidates breaking with one or two Trump policies today “might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow,” Andrew Prokop said at Vox. If Republicans truly start to believe that Trump is a “failure,” then a full-on reassessment could occur. The party’s future “will be wide open.”

“The new business-casual aesthetic has permeated not just politics (where relatability is more important now than gravitas) but all modern professions,” said Joseph Bullmore in The Sunday Times. And the tie, “which has declined steadily in health and relevance over the past decade or more”, appears to be the “victim of changing formalities”.

Feigning maturity

“The tie used to be what the boss wore; the symbol of power”, said Bullmore, but now it’s “almost solely” a gesture of subservience or service: “the graduate at the job interview, feigning at maturity; the doting waiter at the Mayfair members’ club”. Meanwhile, a photo taken at the 2022 G7 summit showed the “collected leaders of the world” with “their collars gaping louchely open, like a parade of ushers come 10pm at a Surrey wedding”.

Sales of ties have decreased by 7.5% year-on-year over the past five years, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. However, the picture is less bleak than it may appear: second-hand clothing platform Depop reported a 42% rise in searches for ties in the six months to February.

“I don’t think ties are completely dead, they’re just having a down moment,” Guy Hills, a fashion photographer and owner of London clothing shop Dashing Tweed, told The Guardian. For a younger generation “more interested in sustainability and proper clothing”, he said, the tie is ripe for a comeback.

Sign of rebellion

Indeed, successive obituaries for the necktie have proved “premature”, said The Art of Manliness: the necktie has “kept on beating the odds”.

A previous generation saw the tie as an “office relic” and traded it in for the freedom of “open collars and elevated loungewear”, but for younger people it has become “a sign of rebellion”, wrote Shane C. Kurup on Country & Town House.

Inspired by the experimental styles of celebrity aficionados like Harry Styles, ties with “regimental stripes, natty foulards and 80s abstract-print silks” are “being worn excessively long, a touch short, layered up, undone, tucked in or backwards”. Dior, Hermès, and Saint Laurent all featured neckties in their Spring 2026 collections.

Menswear “tends to move in cycles” and after “periods of looseness, where comfort becomes the dominant language of getting dressed”, there’s “a pull back toward structure”, wrote Ryan Fidell on the Vintage Tie Shop. After a decade that “leaned hard into casual”, the tie is “interesting again”.

“Strictly Come Dancing” returned on Saturday, bringing “plenty of promising twinkle” and “some inevitable nerves”, said Liz Edwards in The Sunday Times.

In the launch show, celebrity contestants including Dani Dyer and Sarah Storey were partnered up with their professional dancers in a “sequinned spectacle” ahead of the first live performances next week.

This year, the seasonal stalwart has undergone a “‘Doctor Who’-like regeneration”. The accomplished presenting duo of Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman departed after the last series, and have been replaced with seasoned TV host Emma Willis, former “Strictly” dancer Johannes Radebe and comedian Josh Widdicombe. After their debut show, the judges’ scores are in.

‘Played a blinder’

“There’s a lot riding on this new series”, the country’s final link “to a time when joy, sparkle and diversity brought the nation together”, said Emine Saner in The Guardian.

The new trio have nailed a “can’t-quite-believe-we-got-the-gig humility combined with superfan credentials, which is absolutely the right note”. Willis is a “class act” with bags of experience, Widdicombe is at his “best when he’s given the space to gently rib the contestants”, and Radebe’s “air of gentle benevolence” is “genuinely fresh”. “Maybe I just really want it to work”, but overall “the signs are good”.

“‘Strictly’ has played a blinder,” said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. There were fears the departure of Daly and Winkleman from the show “spelled its demise”, but “all it took was one dance” to put us at ease: a “sublimely thrilling, playful opener loaded with details for superfans”. There was much speculation about the new hosts, but frankly, “Pingu could have been presenting and it would still be the slickest programme on television”.

With Willis, we’re in “safe hands”, and Radebe’s experience in the studio makes him look “at home”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. But “schoolboy” Widdicombe “looks out of place alongside this glam duo”, turning it into an “awkward throuple”.

The “fluid” set-up, where the new hosts moved between the dancefloor and what was previously the “Clauditorium”, looked like “musical chairs”, said Frances Taylor in Radio Times. Overall, the trio “weren’t ah-may-zing… but they also weren’t a dis-ah-ster” either. The real test will be next week, when the show is live and there “really will be nowhere to hide”.

‘Worst’ celeb line-up yet

Other revamps are working well, said Edwards in The Sunday Times. There are five new professional dancers and a new way of announcing “celeb-pro” pairings, which gives proceedings a “hint of jeopardy”. Instead of pre-recorded announcements, and pairs walking down the stairs arm in arm, the partners were revealed “via a sort of pass-the-parcel dance routine, or spangly spin the bottle”. It was “chaotic, but it worked”.

Still, there are clouds surrounding the show, including some questioning whether it had become too repetitive and “lost its lustre for celebrity contestants”. Viewing figures have slumped, but even the current audience of around 7.8 million per episode is something that rival programmes would “give their eye teeth for”.

In recent years, the regularity of trying to figure out “who on earth the celebrities are” on “Strictly” is becoming as “steady as a rotating glitterball”, said Taylor in Radio Times. Without a doubt, the “calibre of star signings seems to dip every year” – “if you’ve heard of more than, say, five of the names taking part, give yourself a pat on the back”. Sadly, this line-up “really is the worst yet”.

The show has many flaws: the “D-listers, the judging, the pretence that half of these people haven’t had years of dance experience”, said Singh in The Telegraph. Yet every year millions flock to it and, ratings permitting, we are again set to fall in love with “contestants we hadn’t heard of a month before”.

“The Iran war is metastasising,” said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. Having evolved into a struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict is now threatening another key oil-shipping route.

One of the reasons that global oil prices haven’t risen higher in recent months is that Saudi Arabia has still been able to export large amounts of Gulf oil via the Red Sea instead. But this lifeline is now in peril.

Last week, Houthi rebels in Yemen launched a lightning offensive against Yemeni government forces, seizing control of the country’s entire Red Sea coast, including the towns and islands around the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

On Friday, another militia group aligned with Iran – this one based in Iraq – launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s vital East-West oil pipeline to the coast, forcing its closure. The combined assault pushed oil prices above $110 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia’s ‘nightmare’

Until the middle of last week, the Houthi forces had appeared to be on the back foot, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. But they achieved a sudden breakthrough against divided government factions, reportedly with the help of an AI-generated spoof message that purported to be from a Yemeni government commander and ordered a general troop withdrawal.

It has produced a “nightmare scenario” for Saudi Arabia, which faces a threat to its vital national interests but also knows from “bitter experience” how hard it is to defeat the Houthis in Yemen, having tried and failed to do so for over a decade. Turkey and Pakistan, with whom Riyadh signed a much-vaunted defence pact last month, aren’t rushing to help the Saudis out.

‘Global solution’

Nor is the White House, which already has enough on its plate with Iran and “is increasingly aware of the limits of what it can achieve through military force”, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Yet the US administration is also in a bind. Until the Houthis’ intervention, the oil situation had appeared just about manageable, thanks to Red Sea exports and the US shepherding vessels through Hormuz; oil shipments there are now at roughly a third of pre-war levels. Enough oil was reaching the global market to keep prices safely below the $100 a barrel level.

But supplies of Gulf energy to the West are now looking much more precarious. This is a global crisis requiring a “global solution”, said The Times. President Trump needs to work with China and other consumers of Middle Eastern oil to help stabilise the situation in Yemen and remove the Houthis’ threat to these crucial sea lanes. “Otherwise, the Bab al-Mandeb will continue to live up to its name: the Gate of Tears.”

The Democrats made a very wise decision this spring, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. They were considering whether to host their own midterm convention to steal attention from the one staged by the Republicans in Dallas.

In the end, they opted not to, because they were short on cash and thought it might be “strategically smart to cede the stage to Donald Trump in hopes that he would dig his own political grave”. Boy, did that pay off.

Trump, who has already alienated voters this summer by talking about how great data centres are and how he loves inflation, was on unhinged form in the two-day conference. He boasted that America “controls the Trump Strait”; he demanded that the audience join him in a pledge (“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States...”); he even promised every American a $5,000 bounty if his party wins the midterm elections.

Democrat insiders have long joked that Trump is trying to lose November’s midterms, but some are now seriously wondering whether he has lost his grip on reality.

An ‘incredibly risky’ bet

Republican candidates contesting swing seats in November certainly regard him as a liability, said Ayman Mohyeldin on MS Now. Many of them stayed well away from Dallas, wary of association with a president whose approval rating is down to below 35%. The Republican Party has nevertheless decided that, despite everything, it’s worth making Trump the face of the midterms, because of his unrivalled ability to drive Republican voters to the polls.

It’s an “incredibly risky” bet, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. The Maga base is already “fired up”. It’s among the larger category of traditional Republicans that the GOP has a turnout problem. They need to inspire these people to vote by offering a coherent agenda.

There’s little evidence of that, said The Washington Post. Trump’s wild proposal to pay $5,000 to every adult citizen if the GOP retains control of Congress in November beggared belief. It’s a “desperate gimmick” that betrays a total lack of seriousness about America’s fiscal situation. It would cost more than $1.2 trillion, in a country already saddled with $40 trillion in debt.

The Democrats are in no position to accuse Trump of trying to “trade votes for cash”, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. It’s what they do in every election, albeit in more disguised ways. But this bribe is still a terrible idea, not least because it would stoke inflation. Trump says he’s defending America from the socialists, but if his populism means throwing money at voters, “what need is there of socialism at all”?

Another Trump ‘con’

Trump’s cheques will never arrive, said Steve Benen on MS Now. Congress wouldn’t approve the move, the courts would object, and the money’s not there in any case. It’s just another Trump “con”. He pulled the same trick before the 2018 midterms, when he claimed that he and Congress were preparing a new, “very major” tax cut that would exclusively benefit the middle class. Even White House officials were “mystified” by this declaration, which had no basis in reality.

It’s bad enough that Trump spouts nonsense, said Eric Boehm in Reason Magazine. Worse was the sight of his VP, J.D. Vance, defending the bribe plan and insisting it could be funded through tariffs. Vance is supposed to be the heir apparent to Trump – “the guy with the political and policy chops” to redefine this populist movement for the next generation. Yet he has no problem with the concept of bribing Americans with their own money? “Trumpism is out of ideas, and soon it is likely to be out of power – no matter what ridiculous promises the president makes along the way.”

Over a year after courting controversy with an American Eagle ad, actor Sydney Sweeney is facing another firestorm for a racy campaign in which she appears in various states of undress. Posing for the sports trading app Novig, Sweeney has stirred a debate regarding oversexualization in the world of advertising.

A ‘kick in the face’

Despite not wanting to “give this any more attention,” Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus posted on Instagram that she could not “keep” her “mouth shut” upon seeing the ad, per the Sydney Morning Herald. Sweeney’s ad is not only a “kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” but also to every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is: “teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity,” Titmus wrote. How do we live in a world where “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”

The criticism isn’t about “being jealous or insecure,” it is about this already being a “male-dominated field” where women are “constantly having to prove why we belong,” Marissa Womack, the manager of game day promotions and programming for the minor league baseball team the Harrisburg Senators, said in a TikTok video, per The Hollywood Reporter. The backlash against Sweeney is coming in defense of “having passions and joy working in this industry” since when the “only representation is sexualization,” you see “less and less young women wanting to pursue this!”

The controversy is about “more than one advertisement,” Vivienne Lewis, a clinical psychologist, said at The Conversation. It “raises a bigger issue” about the “attention we give to what women look like” rather than “who they are and what they can do.” Body image includes “our thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward our bodies” and how much “importance we place on appearance when valuing ourselves.” Sports provide a “wonderful opportunity to shift that focus.” This is why the “discussion goes beyond Sweeney” or elite athletes. It isn’t about “criticizing Sweeney’s body or telling women what they should wear.” The more useful question is “why we give appearance so much importance in the first place.”

‘Hardly an unusual strategy’

Not to be a “crazed optimist,” said Marina Hyde at The Guardian, but the great thing about where women’s sport is today is that it “feels a whole lot bigger and stronger and more compelling” than whether Sweeney “did or didn’t get her tits out for a gambling ad.” It would have been “cooler for women’s sport” to simply “not even mention the naked gambling ad at all.” If it felt it had to, maybe “focus on the gambling bit rather than the woman advertising it.” Instinct says “gambling wrecks a lot more lives than Sydney Sweeney.”

We all know “exactly what Sydney Sweeney was doing,” advertising copywriter Paul Burke said at The Spectator. She was “selling a sports betting app.” She did not “pretend that she was an elite athlete.” Neither did she “decry the great talent, strength and sacrifice involved in becoming one.” Athletes “weren’t even mentioned.”

Novig’s decision to cast Sydney Sweeney was a “savvy one,” Burke said. Her “sultry and provocative performance,” building on last year’s “denim-based outrage,” was bound to “appeal to the people most likely to download this app.” This is “hardly an unusual strategy.” To “rage against beautiful people in adverts” is as pointless as “raging against athletic people in the 400 meter hurdles.” As far as Sweeney is concerned, the “voluble minority” who told the world how much they hated the ad “played right into her hands.” The “power of smart, cynical advertising” and a “certain brand of female empowerment” have once again “emerged victorious.”

Artificial intelligence developers are expressing alarm that AI could destroy humanity in the next few years, and industry leaders are calling for a slowdown in its development. Congress, however, seems uncertain about what role it should play in reining in the onrushing technology.

‘Kill all humans!’

AI researchers believe that now is “crunch time for humanity,” said Jacob Coxon to Wired. (Coxon recently resigned from a short stint at Anthropic, following several years at OpenAI.) Workers at the big companies building artificial intelligence “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said on X.

Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger agrees. AI really could “kill all humans!” he said on X. And such warnings present AI companies with a “dilemma,” said Axios: “Slow down and risk falling behind, or press ahead and risk losing control.”

Coxon’s high-profile alarm is “part of a wave of warnings about unchecked AI systems,” said Ian Prasad Philbrick at Slate. The trend raises the question of why companies like Anthropic and OpenAI do not stop or slow their work on increasingly complex and capable models.

Some developers have “talked themselves into continuing to work” on AI, believing that their less-conscientious industry colleagues will otherwise have the playing field to themselves, said Philbrick. But that kind of thinking is a “one-way ratchet toward greater AI risk.” Still, the risks might be “overstated.” Voter anger over data centers may also “compel Congress to act” with rules and guardrails.

The warnings “merit a certain skepticism,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. (The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who cofounded the Prometheus AI lab in 2025.) The people working most closely with AI do not have “special knowledge of what machines that do not yet exist will someday become.” And they can’t say how “society will adapt to the challenge.”

But their warnings could spur Congress to overregulate the sector, which may curb the development of a promising new technology. “The dawn of the AI era cries out for humility and patience,” said the Post.

‘Monumental human stupidity’

Coxon’s and Hubinger’s concerns are “unpersuasive,” said Thomas Claburn at The Register. A “Skynet scenario” would “require monumental human stupidity” in the face of AI superintelligence. But new laws should be enacted to “put executives in jail when their models do harm.” If AI models really are that dangerous, society should “hold people accountable for the harm they cause.”

Congress “won’t lead the charge” on regulating AI, said Axios. Guardrails are needed, but “we have got to make sure that we don’t lose our edge in the global competition on this with China,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

President Donald Trump is also hesitant to act. Artificial intelligence is “going to be more good than bad,” he said to reporters, per The Associated Press.

Compared with the likes of BMW (which sold more than 2.5 million cars last year), JLR is a “minnow”, said Steve Fowler in The Independent. It sold just over 352,000 vehicles last year, employing 43,000 people globally, and 34,000 in the UK. But the company, owned by India’s Tata Motors, is a “big fish in a small pond”, creating work for businesses in supply chains up and down Britain. And the “decline of a single species can cause a whole ecosystem to collapse”.

‘Rotten 12 months’

So the news that JLR is cutting 4,000 jobs is worrying, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The firm has had a “rotten 12 months” thanks to Trump’s tariffs, luxury taxes in China, inflation in materials costs and a disastrous cyberattack. But it’s a decent business, making sensible redundancies in the name of competitiveness, and is not facing a “VW-like existential crisis”.

Or not yet, said Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. JLR has not yet recovered from its “preposterous” pink rebrand in 2024. Combined with the cyberattack, a four-year new product drought, and the success of Chery’s Jaecoo 7 (the “Temu Ranger Rover”), the company looks wobbly.

Tom Homan is owed an apology, said Rich Lowry in National Review. When President Trump put his border czar in charge of unwinding Operation Metro Surge – the immigration enforcement drive that caused such controversy in Minneapolis earlier this year – critics on the Right took it as a sign of a climbdown.

Trump, they said, had clearly lost his nerve on his signature issue and was retreating from the ambition to carry out mass deportations. Yet while things have been quieter since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) ended its Minneapolis crackdown, there has been no lull in efforts to deport illegal immigrants.

Homan has avoided militarised raids, relying instead on picking up illegal aliens at routine traffic stops, immigration check-ins and airports. His low-key approach has been highly effective: in August, for the third month in a row, Ice achieved a new record for arrests, detaining almost 51,000 illegal aliens.

Campaign promise

Nobody can accuse Trump of failing to deliver on his campaign promises on immigration, said Daniel J. Flynn in The American Spectator. He pledged to stop “the invasion at our southern border” – and he did. Net migration in 2025 fell to its lowest level since the Great Depression. There are 2.3 million fewer illegal immigrants in the US today than when Trump began his second term.

Given that, as recently as 2024, Americans told pollsters that immigration was their number-one concern, you’d think voters might credit Trump “for more or less solving this vexatious problem”. No such luck. As is often the case in politics, “success engenders not gratitude but complacency”.

Shrinking workforce

Trump’s immigration restrictions may have been successful on his terms, said Stuart Anderson and Mark Regets in The Washington Post, but they’ll cost America in the long run. They’re largely responsible for the fact that Trump is set to be possibly the first ever US president to preside over a reduction in the labour force.

The labour force grew by 6.7 million during Reagan’s first term, and by 8.7 million in his second. Falling birth rates later slowed growth, but thanks to migration, Obama’s terms still added 1.6 and 3.9 million workers, respectively.

In Trump’s second term, by contrast, the workforce has fallen by 1.6 million. Economic growth is hard without a growing supply of workers. “A declining labour supply is new territory for America” – and it will leave everyone worse off.

Guy Ritchie made his name in the 1990s with films set in cartoonish criminal underworlds; but he is himself of posh stock, and owns a shooting estate in Wiltshire. In his Netflix series “The Gentlemen”, he mixes his fantasy vision with his personal history, said Nick Hilton in The Independent.

Ludicrously entertaining

The show stars Theo James as Eddie, aka the 13th Duke of Halstead, who inherited the family seat at the start of series one – and discovered that it was playing host to a cannabis factory run by a crime family (headed by geezer-in-chief Ray Winstone).

Eddie, who recently left the Army and is as hard as nails, gets in on the action and in series two, he extends his criminal empire and forms a transactional alliance with a shady fellow aristocrat (Hugh Bonneville).

Unfolding over eight episodes, this brash gangster romp is ludicrous enough to be entertaining in its own way; but the dialogue and plotting really are unforgivably bad.

Baroque deaths and showdowns

A “caper composed primarily of fists, shouting and men made of fists shouting ‘faaackin’ ’ell’ in tweed” sounds like a composite of everything Ritchie has ever made, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. It is fun, but it lacks the energy that fizzed through his early work.

You feel that Ritchie wants to say something meaningful about Eddie’s moral descent, said Ben Dowell in The Times; but the show is far too in love with carnage and wisecracks to hold on to anything serious. Besides, you don’t come to this unsophisticated series for that. You come for “chases, showdowns and more baroque deaths than you can shake a shooting stick at”.

“Zia Yusuf is a brilliant man, and he’s a genius actually, and he’s an incredible communicator,” Tory defector and Reform member Nadine Dorries told Times Radio recently. But, she added: “I wish he closed down his Twitter account.”

The interview followed a tweet by Reform’s self-styled “shadow home secretary” in response to reports that Somali-born Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of Camden Council, was the favourite to be Labour’s candidate to replace Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Yusuf asked his followers: “Do you understand what’s happening?”, a remark that drew condemnation from across the political spectrum for its apparent racial undertones.

‘Remarkable and rare gifts’

“Even in these polarised times”, it is hard to imagine another politician as “unlikeable”, “rebarbative” and downright “sneery” as Yusuf, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. I can’t help feeling that “every time he appears in the media or tweets a controversial opinion, he shaves another slice off Reform UK’s increasingly fragile poll ratings”.

Take, for example, his decision to call former defence secretary Ben Wallace, a former Scots Guards officer who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a “traitor”. Just for good measure, he then added a poll asking if Wallace should be prosecuted for treason.

That episode earned Yusuf a “ticking off” from Nigel Farage, but “the more one sees and hears from Yusuf, the more obvious it becomes that he is a liability for Reform”, said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator.

The son of Sri Lankan immigrants, Yusuf built a hugely successful business career and is clearly “a man of remarkable and rare gifts”. But he is also “the latest example of the truism that business success is no indicator of political acumen, let alone political success”.

‘Ticking timebomb’

Whether Yusuf is or is not a nice person, “behaving as he does is entirely politically rational”, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. In labelling former Army officers traitors or arguing those not born in Britain shouldn’t be able to stand for Parliament, Yusuf is signalling “an assault on established institutions” and conventions. “The very fact that this alienates people unnecessarily makes his signal – that with him there is no compromise or messing about – more reliable.”

This has also endeared Yusuf to rank-and-file Reform members. A poll conducted in June found that 22% of those asked would opt for him as leader in a contest to replace Farage, ahead of current deputy Richard Tice, party chairman Lee Anderson and Reform’s “shadow chancellor” Robert Jenrick, said the Daily Express.

Politically this makes sense, said UnHerd. Having seemingly failed to absorb and replace the Conservative Party, Reform is “reasserting itself as an unambiguously populist party. All it needs now is an unambiguously populist leader.”

Senior figures within the party are forming what they call an “Anyone but Zia” group to try to prevent him from succeeding Farage, should he step down, said The Observer . “They all know [Yusuf’s] a problem, but he is popular among the grassroots,” one critic told the newspaper. “He’s a slowly ticking timebomb.”

Syria is on the verge of an “economic revolution”, said Ksenia Svetlova in Haaretz. Its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qa’eda militant who led the rebel offensive that overthrew dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, has been struggling to rebuild a nation devastated by almost 14 years of civil war.

One of his biggest coups last year was to persuade the Trump administration to lift the strict economic sanctions imposed on Syria in 2019. But the country was still on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation first made in 1979 in response to Damascus’ support for Iran and its harbouring of Palestinian terrorist groups. So, like Iran, it remained cut off from the international banking system, and large-scale reconstruction proved impossible.

But that all changed last week at the stroke of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pen. Now, at long last, the flow of “dollars, dinars and dirhams” to Syria can begin in earnest. Saudi Arabia has promised to build desalination plants and two airports, and invest in telecommunications projects worth more than $1 billion. Other countries are keen to follow suit. “If everything goes according to plan, Syria will soon become one vast construction site.”

‘Limited progress’

The rehabilitation of Syria into the world order has happened at “remarkable speed”, said Ilan Berman in The Washington Post. And there’s an obvious logic to it. By removing Damascus from its terrorism list, the US has pulled it towards the West and away from Iran and Russia’s orbit. Yet there are dangers to being so hasty: Washington is “basing its bet more on hope than hard evidence”. For all their promises of liberalisation, Sharaa and his government haven’t fully moved on from the past. Jihadist ideology is prevalent in school curriculums, and there has been no more than “limited progress” in removing 5,000 foreign fighters – extremists loyal to the current regime – from the new Syrian army.

Sharaa also won a significant victory last week in his quest to centralise power, said Smadar Perry on Ynet: he has managed to disband the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led militia founded in 2015 to fight Islamic State and create a secular, democratic and federalised Syria. At its height, it controlled at least a quarter of the country, including its major oil fields. Its commander, Mazloum Abdi, has now agreed to let his troops be incorporated into the national army, in what he calls “a genuine transition from battlefields to the fields of construction”. But the truth of it is that Sharaa forced his hand by seizing swathes of the SDF’s territory in a lightning offensive in January. Folding the SDF into the army is going to be a hard ask: and though the president has promised to make Kurdish a national language and to protect Kurdish rights, many Kurds still don’t trust him.

Victor’s justice

Sharaa’s government has also been busy bringing members of the Assad regime to justice, said Chris Doyle in Arab News. In August, nine of its most senior figures, including Assad himself, were sentenced to death for war crimes – verdicts that gave rise to an “outpouring of joy”. However, only Atef Najib, Assad’s cousin, a security chief infamous for his brutality, is likely to face execution, the rest having been tried in absentia.

Nor is this exactly a victory for the rule of law: the accused can hardly be said to have received a fair trial; and no corresponding action has been taken against the perpetrators of last year’s massacres of over 1,400 Alawites, the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs. There’s a strong smell of victor’s justice about it all.

Still, progress is undoubtedly being made and “the psychological importance of the removal of sanctions should not be underestimated”, said The National. We have room to hope that the barriers now being torn down in Syria will be replaced “with bridges, roads and tunnels en route to a more stable, secure and prosperous future”.

“Now is the twilight of Donald Trump’s supremacy,” said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The US is “still the richest and most heavily armed nation on Earth”, and the president – indulged by a “supine” Congress – still has far-reaching powers. Nevertheless, with more than two years of his second term still to run, Trump looks “thwarted and impotent”.

‘Deranged demands’

History will record that the disastrous war against Iran was a “turning point”. But evidence of his policy failures can be seen all around the world. Canada, citing unreasonable last-minute demands from US negotiators, has promised all-out trade war. The Ukraine conflict is as bloody as ever, despite Trump’s promise to end it. Europe, horrified by his indulgence of Vladimir Putin and his “deranged demands” for Greenland, has turned away. In the Middle East, America’s allies are furious that they’re bearing the brunt of Iran’s attacks. And at home, fuel prices are rising, and electoral disaster is looming: November’s midterms are set to flip the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate too, against the Republicans.

In a matter of months, Trump has “burned through decades of accumulated goodwill” across the democratic world, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. “He has created a sense that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend, for it buys its enemies and sells its friends.” Never once has Trump spoken about Putin in the way he talks about Canadians, Danes, South Koreans and other partners.

‘Erratic behaviour’

A couple of years ago, it would have seemed impossible, said The Spectator. Now it’s quite normal for Washington, in its dealings with its allies, to threaten economic coercion, the withdrawal of military support, and even outright annexation. When Russia behaves like this, it is sanctioned. But in the case of the US, we sit back and do nothing.

There are still some who believe that “Trump’s erratic behaviour is part of a cunning plan to discombobulate opponents and get his way”, said Sam Freedman on Substack. The truth, as his lack of success makes clear, is simpler: “this guy is in obvious cognitive decline, ill-informed, and doesn’t know what he’s doing”.

Worse may be to come, said The Economist. Many would be delighted if “a fuming, friendless Mr Trump, so weakened by his own blunders and by plunging approval ratings” were to retreat to the White House to “tinker with plans for his ballroom”. Alas, that is not in his character. He’ll be less a “lame duck”, and more an ageing “silverback gorilla” – lashing out ever more viciously at anyone within his reach. “Now that his dominance is threatened, the world will find him more disruptive than ever.”

President Donald Trump last week announced the United States is obtaining rights to 65 million barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. The agreement was made under the auspices of unelected President Delcy Rodríguez, who owes her position to the January U.S. military operation that snatched her predecessor out of the country. It is the “biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump said in a statement. Critics say the pact is illegal and exploitative.

‘Almost certainly unconstitutional’

Venezuela is “becoming the 51st state in all but name,” Joseph Zeballos-Roig said at MS NOW. Trump’s deal would give the U.S. “privileged access” to the country’s oil production and allow the United States to replenish its “dwindling stockpiles” of petroleum depleted by the war with Iran. The agreement will also “temporarily shore up” Rodríguez’s government thanks to an influx of tax revenues. But it looks like “gilded imperialism” and will likely “deepen a disconnect between Venezuelans and hopes for a new government” after the downfall of dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The agreement is “almost certainly unconstitutional” under Venezuelan codes, Elliott Abrams said at The Washington Post. The country’s laws say petroleum resources “are the property of the Republic” and “not transferable” to outside entities. Trump’s deal “hardly meets that criteria.” The scheme also relies on a private company led by Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering and made his fortune “under the corrupt Hugo Chávez and Maduro regimes.” What seems certain: “The deal will fail if democracy ever returns to Venezuela.”

The Venezuela deal has given the U.S. a “strategic victory” over its rivals, Arturo McFields said at The Hill. The country’s oil fields were previously controlled by Russian and Chinese companies, and revenues flowed also to Maduro’s allies in Cuba and Iran. No more. The U.S. is obtaining “energy security” and lower gas prices, while the government in Caracas gets an agreement that “revitalizes its oil industry, creates jobs and fosters prosperity.”

‘Old-school colonialism’

The agreement could be remembered as the “moment Venezuela shut the door on communism,” Yuri Perez said at Fox News. Critics who say the government “lacks legitimacy for long contracts” are right that legitimacy “must be completed at the ballot box.” But the alternative should not be “idle oil fields and an open door to Cuba, China and Russia.” A “future democratic congress” can and should ratify the deal on behalf of Venezuelans.

“The deal smacks of old-school colonialism,” Liam Denning at Bloomberg. And it is unlikely to draw major oil companies back to Venezuela. (Chevron, the only outside oil company that remained, said this week it will double its production there.) The “opaque settlement” possibly puts new elections “further out of reach” and will thus be “inherently brittle.” Rebuilding Venezuela’s oil production and its democracy will be the “work of many years of intense effort.” Trump has instead opted for a “shortcut” that relies on “raw U.S. power.”

Anticipation for Grand Theft Auto VI reached a fever pitch in August when developer Rockstar Games finally released a first look at gameplay. But while the long-awaited project is widely expected to have the biggest premiere in video game history, there is also concern about what it means for the gaming industry’s future. Some say it could be the industry’s coup de grace; others are more optimistic.

Gaming’s ‘time of tumult’

GTA VI is expected to be a slam dunk for Rockstar financially, projected to generate up to $5.2 billion in sales by the end of its first launch week this November, according to gaming analytics firm Newzoo. But the game’s release also “comes at a time of such tumult for the gaming industry as a whole,” as “open-world games are arguably tired and online multiplayer games with $200 million budgets can crash and burn the moment they are launched,” said Troy Farah at Salon.

Part of the problem is that this game is “such a big release that it’s scaring off other studios from releasing their own games around the same time in November” lest they fail because “everyone is spending their cash on Rockstar’s latest,” said Farah. GTA VI’s $80 base game price and $100 ultimate version may “just seem like typical capitalist extraction, but the end result will likely be a narrower industry that squeezes creatives and makes things a lot more miserable for players.”

With the “cost of living crisis that’s eating every last penny of disposable income out of average household budget, it won’t take much to turn a chorus of Champagne corks into a firing squad aimed directly at the games industry’s already-exposed guts,” said Jim Trinca at IGN. The “real issue here is that so much of the games industry finds itself both scared by and dependent on the success of one single project.” Gamers should prepare for the “possibility that GTA VI, rather than being the savior of the video games industry, might trigger its next big crash.”

A ‘halo effect’

Despite some nerves about current trends in the industry, Rockstar hopes its upcoming blockbuster will “retain cultural influence for another decade,” said Christopher Byrd at The New York Times. Many are hoping a strong debut from Grand Theft Auto VI will also “boost the struggling console market, which has seen higher prices due to the rising cost of memory and storage,” said Jenni Reid and Alex Buckmaster at CNBC, though this game is only being released digitally.

Many insiders also hope the game will have a “halo effect for the entire industry,” said Rob Fahey at gaming news outlet GamesIndustry.biz. If it succeeds, GTA VI “will be a rising tide that lifts many other boats around it,” as the effects from the “biggest media launch of the decade being a video game will be very significant.” It could also cement a “reaffirmation of video games’ position on an equal footing with other media in the flow and transfer of styles, influences and ideas.”

Even amid industry falterings, GTA VI is the “type of game that can pull a lot of people back into gaming and even convince them to buy a new console to play it,” Dan DeFrancesco said at Business Insider. But the jury is still out on what the full effect of the release will be. “Big fires burn bright, but they need a lot of oxygen to grow.”

The president may not have had his name on the ballot in South Carolina, but Senator Darline Graham’s narrow win over Rep. Ralph Norman in that state’s GOP Senate primary last week was a major victory for Trump himself. By pulling Graham over the electoral line with massive cash infusions, backroom arm-twisting and MAGA vote-whipping, Trump reestablished himself as an electoral force to reckon with, even as his personal unpopularity threatens the GOP’s midterm prospects. But while Trump reaps the benefits of engineering Graham’s victory, some Republicans worry he’s also sown the seeds of future electoral agita.

Win that ‘defied electoral expectations’

Trump “stuck his neck out” on Graham’s behalf, putting his credibility “on the line” in a state that “twice in the last six months has rejected his preferences,” said The New York Times. Not only did Trump visit Myrtle Beach to “rally supporters,” he “personally called high-level state officials” to “compel them to endorse” his candidate of choice.

The MAGA Inc. super PAC associated with the president’s inner circle, which was “notoriously wary to spend on races this cycle,” also spent “nearly $800,000 on phone calls” for the Graham campaign, said the Times. The president’s pitch to voters was essentially to “treat Graham as an extension of himself,” said Politico.

“What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” said Trump at his Myrtle Beach rally for Graham. “Just say that I’m on the ballot one more time.”

Graham’s win came “not only” thanks to Trump’s endorsement but also the “fact that he was willing to come down and campaign on her behalf,” said Jordan Ragusa, a political science professor at the College of Charleston, to South Carolina’s The State. As for “whether Trump still has the same clout” he previously enjoyed, “I think the answer is undeniably that he still has it.”

As Trump has “done often” since first being elected president, he “defied electoral expectations,” said the Times. South Carolina voters have “signaled that the party’s political identity, and perhaps its fortunes, remain tightly intertwined” with Trump, even as the GOP “begins to imagine what it might look like” after his presidency.

Clamoring for the ‘Darline treatment’

While Trump may have carried Graham over the line, he “lost a lot of support in South Carolina” in the process, said The New Republic. Attendees “booed and jeered at mentions of the president’s name” during Rep. Ralph Norman’s concession speech to Graham in a sign of “palpable aggravation” over Trump’s “unwanted involvement in the contentious Senate runoff.”

“I never understood why he got in this race,” said Norman in his concession speech. Still, he allowed that it was Trump’s “prerogative” to involve himself and that the president’s “policies are good.”

Adding to some Republicans’ frustrations is Trump has not “yet campaigned as hard” for other conservative candidates “looking to stem their party’s expected losses in the midterms,” said WPDE. Trump “hasn’t taken a meaningful step” into the states and races “that will matter in a few short months,” said Politico, despite Republicans in those races “clamoring for him to spend his MAGA Inc. money.”

After seeing how Trump helped Graham, “it’s now or never,” said one GOP consultant to Politico regarding other campaigns seeking the “Darline treatment.” With just months to go before polls close, “it’s put up or shut up time, and it’s really time to start to see if he’s going to get serious.” However, it “just doesn’t seem like there’s any sense of urgency” or understanding that “we are down big in some of these states.”

Trump’s “desire for sycophants” has “hollowed out his party and likely hurt his own cause,” said Bloomberg. Had congressional Republicans “pushed back” and “saved him from his worst instincts,” maybe his “policies might be more popular.” Trump must now instead “broaden his coalition” to convince potential voters who “may not be total MAGA loyalists” to “show up for weak candidates like Graham in November.”

Over 100 days into the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “the response is still struggling to keep pace”, said Liz Cookman in The Independent. It’s estimated that more than 2,500 people have now died, with the death toll accelerating sharply in recent weeks.

It is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, spreading much quicker than the deadliest crisis to date, the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people. To put it in context, that outbreak took a year to reach 2,000 deaths.

Destabilised by conflict

“The situation is bad,” said Devi Sridhar in The Guardian. The mortality rate seems to be nearly 50%. More than half of victims are dying without receiving care. Children make up almost a third of all deaths.

Yet this outbreak isn’t attracting much attention abroad. Compared with the 2014 outbreak, the current silence is “astounding”. That year, Ebola was one of the most Googled terms in the world; this year, “no one wants to hear about infectious diseases”. Things are only going to get worse. A “perfect storm of factors” is making the spread hard to contain. The virus is the Bundibugyo species, for which there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific treatment, although clinical trials are under way.

The location of the outbreak has made it worse, said Matthew Mpoke Bigg in The New York Times. Uganda has succeeded in eliminating an outbreak; but Ituri province in north-eastern Congo is unstable, with ongoing conflict and roaming militias. More than 900,000 people have been displaced, while the region’s gold mines draw workers from a wide area. The virus has now spread to six provinces across the DRC. There are fears that it could spread to South Sudan, and to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, one of Africa’s biggest cities.

Dismantling of USAID

The situation in DRC has been “disastrously compounded” by cuts to Western aid, said The Guardian, above all by the US. The dismantling of USAID has weakened health infrastructure and surveillance capacity, while Washington’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation has also undermined the response. European countries, too, have started to treat international aid as “luxury expenditure”.

The 2014 outbreak laid bare the risk of Ebola spreading in the region and beyond. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, countless pieties were uttered about disease control. Yet here we are again. “Subsequent actions by governments have belied those words” leaving the DRC exposed to an epidemic that could soon spiral “out of control”.

The trade war between the United States and Canada has turned white-hot, and it is not clear when or if the conflict will abate. America’s northern neighbor is hunkering down for extended economic pain, while President Donald Trump argues that Canada has been “ripping off” the U.S. for years. Tariffs are flying in both directions. Will anybody blink?

‘Undiplomatic’ bargaining

Last weekend’s breakdown of U.S.-Canada trade talks is a sign that Trump’s “bulldozer approach” to trade “may be reaching its limits,” said The Washington Post. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations “rather than accept a lengthening list of U.S. demands,” choosing to face new American tariffs on an “array of Canadian products” that includes “hockey sticks and Crown Royal whisky.” (U.S. consumers could also face a surge in toilet paper costs.)

Carney is digging in. Trump’s “undiplomatic style” of bargaining — including frequent references to Canada as a “51st state” — has made once-friendly Canadian public opinion “fiercely anti-American,” said the Post.

Canada is “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social. “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” That proclamation “depends on the meaning of the word ‘need,’” Paul Krugman said on Substack. Canada “dominates” the type of lumber that U.S. contractors prefer for framing houses, and America “imports millions of barrels a day” of Canadian oil. The United States economy is much larger, but an “all-out trade war would create a lot of pain” at home when American voters are “already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.”

Trump’s latest trade conflict “makes no economic or political sense,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. GOP candidates are “already getting pounded” on affordability issues on the campaign trail. The president’s abysmal approval rating is the result of voter perceptions as he wages “blunderbuss wars without a strategy.” Now Trump is providing fresh fuel for those concerns a “mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”

‘United against Donald Trump’

Carney was “right to call Donald Trump’s bluff,” Tony Keller said at The Globe and Mail in Canada. There was widespread fear among Canadians that “Ottawa was about to sign a bad deal” with the United States that would make major concessions to Trump “in return for nothing much.” The good news for Ottawa: U.S. voters “won’t understand why Mr. Trump is so intent on severing our partnership.” Canadian leaders must now “appeal to Americans and American business” for support.

Canada is now “more united against Donald Trump than ever,” Stephen Maher said at the Toronto Star. The Canadian government is preparing aid to assist the country’s hardest-hit businesses. Trump seems equally determined. It is “time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” he said Wednesday to interviewer Glenn Beck, per Reuters. This may be a long fight: Carney “sees little chance” of resuming trade talks until after the U.S. midterm elections in November, said Bloomberg.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said a hiker as Jamie Richardson climbed the final steps to reach the summit of Snowdon. Alongside a friend, he was scaling the mountain to raise funds for a motor neurone disease charity in May, Richardson said he was “getting booed”, and a man “physically tried to stop” him from bypassing the line of people waiting.

This month, Marc Screeton went viral after he posted a video of himself being heckled for queue-jumping. “I haven’t endangered anyone or ‘shoved or barged’ past anyone,” he said. “Imagine queueing on a mountain.”

Hikers have been up in arms over Wales’ 1,085m summit for years, with mixed views over the etiquette of accessing Snowdonia’s best views.

Like ‘insulting Paddington Bear’

Queuing is what Britain is known for doing “better than anyone else”, said travel editor Alice Murphy in Metro. It is part of an “unspoken” social contract, Johann Go, assistant professor of ethics at University College London told the outlet. If you were to jump the queue, you are effectively saying “to hell with them” and “my time is more valuable”.

At Snowdon, also known as Yr Wyddfa, if people just “barged past each other”, there could be serious consequences, etiquette expert Jo Hayes told the paper. “People could potentially fall” or be “crowded in like sardines”, and it would be “unpleasant, and very likely, unsafe”. Some say it should be “different strokes for different folks”, said Murphy. If you are just wanting to touch the top to complete the hike, “fire ahead”, but if you’re “doing it for the ‘gram”, then “get in line”.

Queuing on Snowdon may be “frustratingly long”, said The Guardian, but what do you expect? As one of the “most beautiful parts of the UK”, it is “bound to attract crowds – so people should expect to queue”. This debate has been going on for a “decade and a half”, and recent queue jumpers have added to the outrage. “Skipping a queue is the least British thing of all time. It’s like insulting Paddington Bear.” Blame over-tourism and social media all you like, but “if you want to climb a mountain in 2026, expect to join a line”.

Queues ‘ruining’ the climb

Sorry, this is “Snowdon, not Chessington World of Adventures”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. This episode is an example of “taking docile queueing too far”. “Yes, it’s nice to be polite and wait your turn, blah blah, but what next – waiting in line to enter the sea at Bridlington?” The reason there are so many queues is because “morons tit around at the top” taking their “stupid selfie for their stupid social media post that interests no one”.

Screeton probably “secretly” made his fellow hikers’ day. The only thing Brits enjoy more than “meekly joining the end of a pointless queue” is “bitching about people who disobey that pointless queue”. However, queuing is essential in “supermarkets, cash machines and public lavatories”. Failure to do so is always an “outrageous violation of the social code and a recipe for a fat lip”.

Mountain summits have traditionally been associated with “achievement, community, and endurance”, said Portia Jones on Wales Online. But in recent years they have become “akin to a tourist attraction, subject to queuing rules and hostile public policing”.

Additionally, experts say that in extreme conditions, whether hot or cold, stationary queuing can create “safety concerns”. The practice is “absurd”. The “real achievement” is reaching the summit, not taking a “staged photo”. “If you want to wait in a long line, may I suggest Alton Towers instead of our wild and precious mountains and stop ruining them for the rest of us.”

“Standing in an orderly line is the closest thing we have to a national hobby,” said The Times’ editorial board. But it “has its limits”. Snowdonia (Eryri) National Park Authority’s refusal to intervene – advocating a policy of “self-policing” – is a “refreshing departure from nanny statism”. “Good.” And regardless, there are many other viewing points in the park from which to “admire its majesty”, instead of waiting an hour at the top on a “mindless quest for social media fodder”.

Six years after the term “woke” peaked in the political lexicon amid the George Floyd protests, some on the left have taken to referring to this period of ultra-liberal declarations as “Woke 1.0,” insinuating that the upcoming midterm elections will pave the way for “Woke 2.0” as a backlash against the Trump administration. But not everyone in the Democratic Party seems to agree on how, or even if, “woke” should be used as a campaign tool.

‘We need a strong progressive movement’

The main buzz over “Woke 1.0” came after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) referred to the era in a disparaging way in an interview with ABC News earlier this month, saying, Woke 1.0 “was crazy.” While “many politicians and activists no longer use the rhetoric they did six years ago,” there is “no such thing as ‘Woke 1.0,’ and it would be almost impossible to define such a time, era or set of positions,” said Perry Bacon at The New Republic. This comes even as Ocasio-Cortez herself “implied that Woke 1.0 included her own previous statements on abolishing the police,” said Owen Carry at USA Today.

Ocasio-Cortez’s comments “underscore an important duality,” said Bacon. “We need a strong progressive movement pushing progressive ideas, including some that are essential but not yet popular,” and we also require “progressive politicians focused largely on popular ideas so that they can win elections and power.” The early days of “woke” weren’t “just about the changing language or super far-fetched proposals” like defunding the police or canceling Thanksgiving — the “Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements were much needed reckonings in how America dealt with issues of race and gender.”

It appears the new plan for many Democrats is to “brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better,” said Astead Herndon at Vox. The “broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters.” And it appears many of these viewpoints have remained successful: Minority and women candidates “have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate.”

‘How radioactive they have become’

Not all Democrats are on board with the idea of adapting the term Woke 1.0, as some believe it is too damaging politically. Progressive platforms “have been reshaped by an ideology centered on systemic oppression and the radical policies ostensibly needed to correct it,” said Idrees Kahloon at The Atlantic. Ocasio-Cortez now “declining to defend — and indeed wishing to move past — these positions shows how radioactive they have become.”

Many “ideas that once seemed weighty look flimsy,” and “most members of the party’s elite apparently hope that the ideas from the period will simply recede from public consciousness,” said Kahloon. But “accompanying those movements was an adoption of postures and behaviors that signaled that one was on the right side,” said Nesrine Malik at The Guardian. Given a “chance, the left will waste capital by descending into infighting, radicalism and alienation,” which can be “blamed for what has followed Woke 1.0: the resurgence of Donald Trump.”

It was “hard to articulate exactly” what Woke 1.0 is or, “I suppose, was,” said Luke Winkie at Slate. When people “derisively say” Woke 1.0 now, “what we are gesturing at is the shudderingly visceral feeling of the whole thing — the distinct haughty tang, the way-too-online insularity and, most important, the telos that amounted to little more than inflicting guilt and experiencing guilt.” But the “challenge, for AOC and anyone else dreaming up” Woke 2.0, is to “bring the cause to scale.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that we have reached the singularity, an inflection point at which humankind can no longer keep up with how quickly artificial intelligence improves itself. And he’s not the only tech mogul who thinks so.

A few weeks before Altman, Elon Musk said in an X post that the singularity had arrived, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis claimed in a speech at a company conference in May that humanity was standing at the “foothills of the singularity.” These claims have awoken a chorus of skeptics, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently dismissed discourse around the singularity and AI gaining consciousness as speculative and “made up.”

‘Advancing unusually fast’

A true AI singularity would “force hard choices” about who “controls increasingly autonomous systems, how benefits are distributed, and where human authority must remain final,” said tech executive Robert J. Szczerba at Forbes. The current state of AI “already warrants those questions.” Business owners should know what “their systems can do without supervision today” and what “evidence would show autonomy increasing faster than their controls.”

Altman may be right that a “gentler singularity is already underway,” with AI “steadily reshaping work and research,” said Szczerba. Still, there’s “no evidence that machines have entered a runaway cycle beyond human control.” AI is “advancing unusually fast,” and that “deserves serious attention.” But it does not mean “we have passed a point of no return.”

When it comes to what’s more intelligent — humans or AI — the “question does not compute,” said Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter, professors at the University of Sydney professors, at The Conversation. There’s “no single ladder that humans and machines are climbing.” AI already “vastly exceeds us at some tasks while being “hopeless at others any child can do.” But because the “systems talk like us, we fall for an illusion.”

When we believe that machines are “in the process of catching up with us,” it’s easy to assume a “mind at work when these systems output intelligent-sounding text,” said The Conversation. This is considered “anthropomorphic seduction,” which makes a cybersecurity issue such as the Hugging Face hack “sound like an awakening.” (An autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI technology went rogue last month and hacked the prominent startup’s database of AI models.) In the end, that incident “points to a gross failure of security governance on OpenAI’s behalf,” not an “emerging superintelligence.”

‘Not actually there yet’

It may be impossible to know exactly when we have crossed into the singularity. It’s comparable to falling into a black hole — at some point, whoever falls in will “glide over the hole’s event horizon,” which means they are “henceforth forever separated from the rest of the universe,” said Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who founded the former Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, to Business Insider. Yet from their perspective, “everything still seems the same as before.”

AI is showing the “first stirrings” of recursive self-improvement, but it lacks the capability for continual learning, said Bostrom. Using current AIs is like “working with a brilliant and extremely well-educated recruit,” but it’s “always their first day at the job.”

Altman, as is “often the case, is simply aping Elon,” said scientist Gary Marcus at Substack. The CEOs making these claims shouldn’t be taken seriously because “none of them has actually defined what they mean.”

“No matter how you slice it, we just are not actually there yet,” said Marcus. If we were, we “wouldn’t be once again seeing” the Klarna Effect, which is the “AI hype two-step” in which “employers boast of using AI to reduce headcount only to quietly rehire humans.”

We haven’t reached the “age of abundance that Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk keep insisting is a natural consequence of AI,” said Marcus. Nor have we reached a point where “technological growth accelerates beyond human control.” We can still “perfectly well shut this stuff off if we want to,” and it’s “mainly because of greed that we don’t.”

It’s doubtful there will be a “single magic moment that our descendants think of as the singularity,” said Marcus. If there is, it’s “not one that’s going to happen in this decade.”

A “tectonic shift” has taken place in the geopolitics of the Middle East, said Ilker Sezer in Türkiye Today (Istanbul). On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan formed “the holy grail of military alliances”, with the three Sunni Muslim nations vowing that “an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all”. That clause of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, named after the holy city where the treaty was signed, is the “Islamic equivalent of Nato’s Article 5”.

Three-pronged advantage

Hitherto, Saudi Arabia had been wary of entering into any kind of multilateral pact: it had previously opted for bilateral deals like the one it reached with Pakistan in September, while continuing to rely on the US for its security. But the Iran war, during which Riyadh’s territory has been attacked by both Tehran and its regional proxies, has altered its thinking.

The new alliance has a three-pronged advantage: it will benefit from Saudi Arabia’s financial might; from Turkey’s formidable army (the second largest in Nato) and arms industry; and from Pakistan’s battle-tested military and nuclear arsenal, the only one in the Muslim world. Together, these powerful resources are bound to affect “the strategic calculus of every adversary”.

Still, though highly symbolic, it’s “a thousand leagues away from being a new Nato”, said The Times. There’ll be “no integrated command structure, no joint doctrine, no integrated air defence network and no joint operational commands”. And no budget either. The pact simply provides a framework for closer military and political cooperation: it’s an attempt by the trio to free themselves from their “vassal-like dependence on the American security umbrella”. Such hedging makes sense in an increasingly volatile region in which the US has been unable, or unwilling, to protect its allies.

Washington doesn’t seem overly concerned by the arrangement for now, said Umair Jamal on The Diplomat (Washington DC). It maintains close relations with all of them, and has long been keen for other nations to assume more responsibility in the Middle East. But in the long term, the US could lose leverage as a result of it, “particularly with respect to arms sales, negotiation of military-basing rights and the management of regional crises”. The effect will be all the greater if Egypt, Jordan and some additional Gulf states also jump on board.

‘Third pole’

With US influence receding in the Middle East, Iran and Israel have looked set to exert more control over the region, said Khalid Al-Jaber on Al Jazeera (Doha). That’s where this pact comes in: to counter Iranian and Israeli dominance, Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad seek “to build a third pole” to ensure neither achieves hegemony. And one key step in that direction will be the co-development of Turkish and Pakistani weapons systems, including advanced drones and armoured vehicles, on Saudi soil.

For Israel, this alliance marks a dangerous “turning point”, said Oshrit Birvadker in Israel Hayom (Tel Aviv). Turkey has morphed from an ally into a “major threat to Israel, no less significant than Iran”, while Saudi Arabia has pivoted from its intention to join the Abraham Accords to recognise Israel.

The alliance’s first test could well be in Yemen, said Mohammed Nail Abdulqader on Responsible Statecraft (Washington DC). The Houthis, an Iran-aligned group battling the Riyadh-backed Yemeni government, have recently renewed hostilities with Saudi Arabia following the collapse of a 2022 ceasefire. As part of a maritime blockade against Riyadh, they have fired missiles at a refinery in the Saudi city of Jazan and attacked vessels in the Red Sea.

A major future attack by the Houthis could test the “grey area” that has not been publicly defined by the Mecca accord. If the alliance’s response is weak, the Houthis may become emboldened; if it’s too strong, there’s the risk of a wider conflagration. Carving a middle path between these two extremes will be mightily hard. But that’s the only way to build a “credible deterrence without opening the door to a new war”.

U.S. allies in Asia have long depended on the American military for their defense. But President Donald Trump in recent days has curtailed U.S. participation in joint exercises with South Korea and at the same time ordered the lone American aircraft carrier to depart for the Middle East. The question now is whether the United States remains dedicated to Asian security.

No more ‘pivot to Asia’

The Trump administration “promised a pivot from the Middle East to East Asia,” Matthew Petti said at Reason. The opposite is now happening, with the U.S. commitment in the Pacific “taking a back seat to the U.S. presence in the Middle East.” The war with Iran is “dominating both the long-term planning and day-to-day execution” of foreign policy in the Trump White House. This is not new: Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also promised to redirect attention away from the Middle East and toward China but failed to do so. “The problem is deeper than the hubris of one president.”

Trump’s sudden decision to pull back from the South Korean drills “does not mean the U.S. alliance system in Asia is collapsing,” Retired Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum said in The Korea Times. The abruptness of Trump’s decision — and his linking it to his friendly relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — does however mean that Asian allies will “inevitably begin asking how much they can rely on U.S. commitments during a future crisis.” The answer to that question is vital as China becomes “increasingly assertive” and North Korea begins “cooperating more closely” with Russia. South Korea’s “survival and security are at stake.”

Asia’s ‘indispensable military power’

The stakes of Trump’s apparent pullback are high “not only for U.S. allies, but for the United States, too,” Sheila A. Smith said at the Council on Foreign Relations. A reduction in American fidelity to the Pacific could cause South Korea and Japan to seek nuclear weapons, while also ceding ground to U.S. rivals such as China and Russia. Another factor: Reported shortages of U.S. munitions in Iran have raised questions about whether the U.S. is even capable of “offering protection to its allies in Asia.” But the apparent trend of “deliberately weakening” longstanding American alliances will be “cause for celebration” in Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang.

The United States is Asia’s “indispensable military power,” Craig Singleton said at The Washington Post. The American president’s unpredictability has already forced U.S. allies to begin “assuming greater responsibility for their own security.” Japan has begun its “largest postwar defense buildup” by signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines, India is expanding its military commitments and Taiwan is spending heavily to “harden its military, civil defense and critical infrastructure” against a Chinese invasion. That should fit Trump’s “American First” agenda, but the region still depends on “predictable American commitments and clear crisis planning.”

Mark Walter promised a bright future when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers last year. That future is already passed. Walter flipped the team to new owners this month, netting a reported $2.5 billion profit. Dollar signs have always dominated the big leagues, but sports ownership is increasingly reserved for corporations, private equity and superrich investors. Where does that leave fans?

‘Highly sticky consumer base’

Jerry Buss and his children ran the Lakers as the “NBA’s version of a mom-and-pop shop” for decades before last year’s sale to Walter, Benjamin Wilhelm and Samuel Agini said at the Financial Times. The days when a local businessman would buy and run a team as a sort of community trust are over. Instead, the “shock sale” of the Lakers demonstrates how pro teams are “no longer treated as vanity assets but legitimate investment vehicles.”

The new generation of sports owners look like Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO who now co-owns the Lakers. They are “billionaire financiers” who see professional sports as a business sector “resistant to potential disruption from AI” and have access to “deep pools of capital,” said the Financial Times.

Sports are good business thanks to a “highly sticky consumer base” of die-hard fans and “contractual revenue streams” for broadcast rights that produce massive revenues, MAI Capital Management’s Kurt Nye said to Investment News. Pro teams are thus selling at “prices that would have seemed implausible a decade ago,” said the outlet. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks sold for $9.612 billion in July, while the Chicago Bulls were valued at $6.45 billion when Walmart heir Lukas Walton bought a 10% stake in June. Those sky-high valuations now make franchises “legitimate portfolio planning territory” for the highest-dollar investors.

It can be messy territory. The Buss family announced this week it is selling its remaining minority stake in the Lakers, said The Athletic. But that sale is opposed by Jeanie Buss, who led the franchise in recent years. The “bitter dispute” between Buss and her siblings could end up in court.

Fans ‘pay through the nose’

Team owners are “flush and want to be even flusher,” Mike Lupica said at the New York Daily News. The “sure thing” profits from ownership come in part because owners like Walter and the Knicks’ James Dolan “charge vulgar amounts for ticket prices” for the fans who keep the enterprise going. Many Knicks fans could not afford tickets to Madison Square Garden during the team’s recent championship run. Fans pay “through the nose” while team owners keep winning big money “whether their teams win or not.”

The Lakers sale is “exactly why we need publicly owned sports teams,” Dave Zirin said at The Nation. Team owners have long had “zero regard” for communities where their franchises “have taken root.” But franchises belonged to their communities “spiritually, psychologically, personally” before they became “just another asset” in private equity portfolios. When sports billionaires buy our teams they are “buying our joy.”

Kemi Badenoch is not a fool, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph; nor is she remotely an antisemite. So why did she stick her neck out for Joshua Bonehill-Paine, the former neo-Nazi who’d hoped to stand as a Tory councillor in Somerset?

Having served time in jail for waging a repulsive campaign of racial hatred against the former Labour MP Luciana Berger, Bonehill-Paine claims to be a reformed character, dedicated to fighting antisemitism.

And perhaps he is – but that didn’t make it appropriate for him to stand for office, especially when he hadn’t even apologised to Berger for what he termed “Operation Filthy Jew Bitch”.

Belief in ‘second chances’?

Yet when his candidacy was being condemned by all sides last week, said Harris, Badenoch defended it; and when he withdrew it, she gave him a role as an adviser on radicalisation instead. The Tory leader is savvy enough to have seen the risk to her reputation. So the only possible explanation for her apparent poor judgement is that she believes in second chances – and has the courage to stick to her principles, even if they make her unpopular.

I don’t buy it, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Her belief in “second chances” was not in evidence in 2024, when it emerged that the Labour minister Louise Haigh had been convicted of fraud a decade ago. We need “conviction politicians”, she said, “not politicians with convictions”.

Yet Haigh’s offence – falsely reporting the theft of a mobile phone – was as nothing compared with Bonehill-Paine’s (who also has a conviction for assault). Unwisely, Badenoch tried to further justify his candidacy by saying he’d only sought a local platform – “looking at parking and sorting out bins” – thus insulting her existing councillors at the same time.

‘Wider concerns’ about strategy

In May, Badenoch impressed many by taking a clear stand against antisemitism, said Kate Maltby in The Observer. Yet last week found her supporting a former neo-Nazi – presumably because she’d decided that the Tories needed his Crewkerne Gazette platform, known for its viral AI videos mocking Labour, to be on its side.

This row has revived “wider concerns” about her entire strategy of tacking to the right, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Only days earlier, Badenoch had warned that ex-centrist MPs – who support net-zero targets, or don’t want the UK to leave the ECHR – won’t be allowed back into the parliamentary party. But while she seeks to win votes from Reform UK, her critics argue that, for an outright majority, the Tories need to win back the seats they’ve lost to the Lib Dems. Time will tell who is right, but for now, the One Nation lot are well and truly out in the cold.

When the young Greek-Cypriot entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched easyJet in 1995, in a bid “to democratise travel”, the no-frills airline operated just two routes, said Angharad Carrick on This is Money.

Since then, it has grown into the UK’s largest airline by passenger numbers – becoming synonymous with cheap holidays across Europe and setting the pace for change in the industry.

But now the orange upstart is being taken private after 26 years on the London Stock Exchange, having agreed a £5.7 billion takeover by the US private equity giant Apollo, “which some analysts believe is something of a cut-price fare in itself”.

Other airlines ‘in the crosshairs’

The words “private equity” might spark fear among easyJet customers, said Carrick, “who have seen other well-loved British brands being taken over and stripped of their assets”. Whether or not these forebodings are realised, it’s the end of an era.

Unlike its rival bidder, fellow US investment firm Castlelake, Apollo has at least obtained the royal consent of Haji-Ioannou, whose backing of the bid was vital to its success, said Ali Lyon in City AM. He described the firm as “one of the most well-resourced and experienced institutional investors in the world” and said he planned to remain an investor.

But, ultimately, it was probably the price that swung the matter: Apollo’s offer is an 81% premium on the airline’s share price prior to takeover speculation. EasyJet now becomes “the first large European carrier to be held in private markets” – assuming Apollo’s formula for persuading EU regulators to nod through the deal works.

It may not be the last, said Hugh Leask on CNBC. This deal could presage a flurry of interest in European budget airlines from private equity buyers, with Jet2 especially “in the crosshairs”.

‘Blow the budget-airline market wide open’

Reports that easyJet will be “loaded” with £3 billion in debt after the takeover are disturbing, said Dominic O’Connell in The Times. Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, has already signalled its disquiet.

Still, Apollo has some experience of airlines, said Peter Campbell in the Financial Times: previous investments include Aeroméxico and Sun Country Airlines, which it listed on Nasdaq in 2021. It has already signalled its intention to take easyJet “upmarket”, with more “business-focused product features on key routes”.

That might suit rivals like Ryanair, but it won’t please cash-conscious travellers. Indeed, this deal could “blow the budget-airline market wide open”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph – as well as fuelling more soul-searching in the City about leading British companies being taken private on the cheap. “It may not be long before we need a FTSE 50, or even a FTSE 30, to reflect how few significant companies are left.”

Resistance is growing against the Flock surveillance cameras used by police departments across the country. Some cities are terminating their contracts with the company. In other cases, individuals are taking matters into their own hands by stealing or vandalizing the devices they say intrude on their privacy. And it all raises the question of how much surveillance is too much.

‘New norm’

Flock’s “original promise” was to provide an AI-driven system that “discourages speeding, hit-and-runs and right turns on red,” said Bloomberg. But its devices, known as automatic license plate readers, also work as a “crime-fighting tool.” The system is now a symbol of “government’s growing obsession with keeping a constant eye on those it exists to serve,” said legal scholar Stephen L. Carter to the outlet.

The Flock mechanism has reportedly been used to “stalk women, hunt down marijuana users, deport immigrants and surveil households,” said Bloomberg. And the anger sparked by those stories has resulted in “dozens of police departments” terminating contracts with the company.

The “fear of Big Brother watching you is not new,” said Sara Pequeño at USA Today. The Flock backlash “doesn’t mean these cameras are disappearing any time soon.” ICE has partnered with AI companies to implement facial recognition programs, stores are “implementing AI surveillance pricing” that uses your shopping habits to determine your grocery bills, Meta sells glasses that can record video, and Ring cameras have made front porches “visible to the whole world.” So “why are we just watching America become a surveillance state”?

Surveillance “puts public safety first,” said Rick Pozniak at The Boston Herald. The system saves police precious time “locating an abducted child or tracking a rapist or recovering a stolen vehicle” and can also help investigators “reconstruct the movements of vehicles involved in serious crimes and accidents.”

The information gathered by such systems should be “governed by strict protocols,” but to entirely reject technology that is “imperative to safety and protection of local residents would be a mistake,” said Pozniak. Police should be provided the “tools they need” alongside rules that offer the “accountability we deserve.”

‘Surveillance-saturated society’

Efforts to ban Flock systems are an “overreaction,” said Charles Fain Lehman at The Atlantic. The U.S. is already a “surveillance-saturated society,” but police cameras can “help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive.” The system can “help police catch criminals” and also theoretically discourages crime by “increasing the certainty” of being arrested when committing an offense. Dumping the cameras “would be foolish.”

The backlash is “becoming a cross-party political issue,” said NewsNation. Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have introduced bills to restrict license plate readers, while Michigan Democrats are trying to stop state departments from cooperating with federal agencies that use the systems. The public expects the government to “protect both their safety and their constitutional rights,” said the Wolverine State Democrats in a letter to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” said Anna Wintour in Vogue, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced that it will celebrate the work of the flamboyant and controversial designer.

The New York exhibition, due to open next spring, “won’t shy away” from “any of the darkness” in his past, she added.

‘Thorny choice’

He was caught making a series of racist and antisemitic comments, so it’s “an astonishing comeback”, wrote Zoe Sottile on CNN. It “resurfaces” the question that has “dogged” artistic and cultural institutions during the “past quarter-century” of reckonings: what do we do with “great artists who do bad things”?

This is a man who “once proclaimed my whole family – and millions like us – should die”, wrote Faran Krentcil in the New York Post. But the exhibit is still “a fine idea” because he has repented, his clothes are “extraordinary” and Jewish “scripture” calls us to “gaze at our former enemy and search for shared humanity”.

High fashion, an “explicit celebration of wealth inequality” has “never been the place to look for lessons on virtue”, wrote Dana Thomas in the New York Times. But his “rehabilitation” and “coronation” is a “terrible idea” because his “infamous antisemitic rants” were “not an aberration”.

In fashion, “addiction, provocation and eccentricity” are “seen as normal” or “necessary”, elements of the creative process, but Galliano’s “comportment” went “way beyond all that”. Not all “great creators” deserve a retrospective, and someone as “incendiary” as Galliano “certainly shouldn’t be the subject of one during his lifetime”.

‘Nostalgia is so now’

But he “apologised often” for his “outburst”, claiming he had suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction, wrote Craig Saueurs on Euronews, and “many Jewish leaders” have “accepted his contrition as genuine”. The Institute consulted the Anti-Defamation League and the Union for Reform Judaism and they “signed off” on the project.

The Met is “tapping into something very current: nostalgia”, wrote Isobel Van Dyke on Dazed. We “look back on the runways of the past” and “moan” that fashion “will never be as good again”. Perhaps it won’t but “either way”, Galliano is “the epitome of fashion’s nostalgia” because he’s a “creative genius”, so there’s “a strong case” for exhibiting his portfolio and “confronting his contributions” to “fashion history”.

Well, is it on or is it off? No one’s quite sure, said Al Jazeera (Doha). Two weeks ago, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a multibillion-dollar deal allowing US companies to build and operate nuclear power plants on Saudi soil over the next 30 years.

But a day later, President Trump added a new condition, via social media: Saudi Arabia must fall in line with the UAE and other Arab nations that have signed the Abraham Accords, and recognise the state of Israel.

‘Reckless’ agreement

And that may prove a deal breaker, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Riyadh had been working towards this landmark pact for almost two decades. Thanks to the savvy of its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who ensured the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would get its share of the billion-dollar nuclear licensing deals at stake, he almost got it over the line.

But now it must surely be in doubt, said Mohamad Elmasry on Middle East Eye. Riyadh has vowed it won’t normalise relations until Israel guarantees Palestinian statehood. And MbS has reportedly told US officials that hostility towards Israel is so great among Saudis in the wake of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, that to sign a normalisation treaty would probably get him assassinated.

It’s obvious why the Saudis still badly want this nuclear deal, said Joseph Cirincione on MS Now (New York). It’s not, as they claim, to diversify their energy profile: that makes no sense for a nation sitting on an ocean of oil and blessed with the ideal wind and solar conditions for generating renewable energy – a far cheaper option.

No, the real reason is to gain atomic weapons to protect itself against its main foe: Iran. MbS has made no secret of his desire to build a bomb, and the deal would be a concrete step in that direction. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, it appears to permit nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil, thus enabling Riyadh to follow the likes of India, Israel and Pakistan in covertly enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.

‘Guiding hand’

Who knows what’ll happen if this “reckless” deal goes ahead, said Mitchell Plitnick on Mondoweiss (New York). The “gold standard” nuclear-power pact that the US signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 required the UAE to forego the ability to enrich uranium, and obliged it to submit to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections: this Saudi deal has no such restrictions.

Which is why it would inevitably trigger a Middle East arms race, said Azriel Bermant in Foreign Policy. If the deal proceeds, Iran would openly seek its own nuclear deterrent, something it has so far officially forsworn. “It beggars belief that the US went to war against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon yet now acts in a way that is an open invitation for Tehran to weaponise.” And in a way that would also pour “proliferation kerosene” on Turkey and Egypt’s “smouldering nuclear ambitions”, said Matthew Kroenig and Henry Sokolski in The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s deal invites disaster.

Actually, the US is doing the right thing, said the Washington Examiner. The hard truth is that the “era of non-proliferation is coming to an end”: Pakistan and North Korea are both testing nuclear weapons. Given that sobering reality, better the US offer “a guiding hand” to the Saudis and oversee their nuclear agenda than let China or Russia fill the void.

Good or bad, the deal matters a lot to the US president, said Sharon Squassoni in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago), so rumours of its death “are premature”. After all, it’s not some “spur-of-the-moment fantasy” cooked up by Trump. The same deal was also being considered under Joe Biden, and then too enrichment was a quid pro quo for recognising Israel.

The Saudis won’t do so, of course, given recent history, but they won’t have to. Although Congress can disapprove the deal once it’s submitted, the present Congress – due to adjourn on 18 December – is much less likely to do so than any freshly elected one. So the Saudis can “call Trump’s bluff by simply sitting back” and waiting for him to succumb to the pressure of the December deadline.

The movies are suddenly thriving. The latest Spider-Man flick is setting records, and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has dominated discourse for weeks. Americans were slow to return to cinemas after the pandemic sent them to streaming, and the cause of moviegoing was not helped by a pair of Hollywood strikes that disrupted the flow of new films to theaters. Now all that has changed. Can the momentum last?

‘Finally releasing more movies’

“Hollywood has got its mojo back,” Thomas Buckley and Lucas Shaw said at Bloomberg. Analysts expect the U.S. box office to “deliver its best performance” since before the pandemic, aided by the release of a “new potential blockbuster” nearly every weekend this summer.

It is too soon to “fully dismiss recent concerns about the future of moviegoing,” Bloomberg said. Films are making more money, but the rate of movie attendance in the United States has “fallen to half what it was 25 years ago.” The number of people heading to the cineplex “has to pick back up” to sustain the revival. For now, though, studio heads finally have a “belief that they can win again,” actor Seth Rogen said to Variety.

The box office surge is happening because “more studios are finally releasing more movies” following the strikes and pandemic, thus “generating more money,” Scott Mendelson said at The Outside Scoop. The studios are doing “an average of 15-20 wide releases per month,” and that is paying off with more tickets sold. Hollywood still faces “countless issues” like the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and the departure of many productions from California to other states and countries, but “I haven’t been this optimistic about the box office since mid-2015.”

It is not just volume. Movies are “kicking boring TV’s ass,” Johnny Oleksinski said at The New York Post. The obituary for the big-screen experience has been “written so many times.” But Hollywood this year has given audiences a “varied offering of box-office hits” including “dramas and comedies, biopics and animated family fare” and much more. There is arguably not as much on TV these days “riling people up or getting them to cancel their evening plans.” Peak TV is a “hazy memory,” and movie theaters are benefitting.

‘Yearning for shared experiences’

A symbol of the decline and rise of movies is the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. The iconic movie theater is “bouncing back from pandemic bankruptcy” said NPR. Sony Pictures and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema are leasing the long-empty theater and plan to reopen it in 2028.

There was a belief that Generation Z would “forever choose small screens over big ones,” Anonymous Content’s Darren Walker said at The New York Times. The success of films like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” that were made by twentysomething directors have “upended conventional wisdom” about the possibility of reaching young audiences, and there seems to be a “profound yearning for shared experiences and connection.” The entertainment industry remains in a “turbulent time of transition and transformation,” but films are serving the role they always did: “We are rediscovering community.”

Andy Burnham has said his radical plans to devolve power away from Westminster will “increase the case” for a written constitution.

The lack of a codified constitution “disempowers” areas that have suffered from deindustrialisation and decades of neglect by central government, said the new PM. A desire for equal standards of living across England’s economically disparate geography must be the “cornerstone” of any constitutional settlement.

‘Crisis of trust between citizens and state’

The UK’s current unwritten constitution is made up of a “a vast and contradictory morass of legal statutes, court precedents, codes of conduct, scholarly opinions, treaties, traditions, gentlemen’s agreements and unwritten rules”, said George Monbiot in The Guardian. It is about “as easy to follow as a fishing line washed ashore after months at sea, bundled and ravelled in weed and tar”.

This “allows great scope for interpretation, which ruthless operators readily exploit”. Without a clearly defined constitution, there is nothing to stop a government with a safe majority from turning the UK in a “blatantly authoritarian” state.

Codification would help “redistribute authority”. But it would need to be debated “alongside the wider settlement on electoral reform, a regional second chamber and executive accountability”, said an editorial for The Burnham Programme, which tracks the PM’s plans for “national renewal”.

Constitutional reform is “unlikely to be a hot topic or a big vote winner at the next election”, said Lucy Jolin in the Cambridge University alumni magazine CAM. But while “it might sound very removed from the reality of our lives”, the process of agreeing a new constitution “could, in fact, be a tool to address a very obvious crisis that governments across the world are facing: a crisis of trust between citizens and state”.

‘Virtually nothing is off the table’

Recent crises – from Brexit to the attempted prorogation of Parliament by Boris Johnson to Covid – have put the UK’s constitution into the spotlight. But, “far from being inadequate, irrelevant or even damaging”, it has “performed adequately – if not admirably at times”, said Brian Jones in a 2023 paper for the Institute for Government and Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

If anything, the UK system does a better job of allowing and incorporating change than most written constitutions. These codified systems “either take items off the table or make it more difficult to update constitutions”, whereas “in the UK virtually nothing is off the table”. As such, it is better suited to adapting to “political, legal, economic and cultural change”.

The “flexibility” of the British constitution means Andy Burnham, “having never won a general election and with no mandate or manifesto to call upon, can simply announce a whole series of reforms to devolution in England”, said Lee David Evans, a historian of the Conservative Party, on UnHerd.

If the UK had a written constitution, where the “relationship between devolved and central authority was much more rigid, his recent policy announcements would be much more difficult – perhaps even practically impossible”.

It is hot out there. Summertime heat can take a deadly toll on workers, especially in the era of climate change and frequent heat domes. The Biden administration initiated rules to ensure that U.S. companies provide their employees with breaks to hydrate and recover while laboring in warm temperatures. Now the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are looking to roll back those protections.

‘A matter of life and death’

Heat causes “hundreds of workplace deaths” every year, but the Trump administration is rewriting rules that “mandate breaks and access to water and shade for workers,” said The New York Times. The details of those changes are still unknown, but already the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is “curtailing workplace inspections” that had been designed to “raise awareness of heat-related illnesses.”

A House committee last month also gave approval to a bill that would block the Labor Department “finalizing any worker protections for extreme heat,” said E&E News. The Biden-era rule solves a “problem that doesn’t need solving,” Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.) told the outlet. At least a few workers disagree. “We didn’t sign up for the heat to become as severe as it is,” Trina David, a baggage handler at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said to the Times.

“Trump will cause some of you to die from the heat,” Robert Reich said on Substack. There are countless workers who toil “under the hot sun, or in stifling warehouses or in delivery trucks with no AC,” which can “trigger heat stroke, organ failure and chronic kidney disease.” Those illnesses and deaths “can often be prevented with strong safety standards,” but the Trump administration is “retreating from worker safety.” Workplace heat protections are “literally a matter of life and death.”

The Biden-era rules had a “deep benevolent paternalism” to them, Matthew Kahn said at Environmental and Urban Economics. But workers possess a “degree of choice over where they live and work, what job they take and what shifts they agree to work,” Kahn and Joseph Tracy said in a 2025 paper for the American Enterprise Institute. They can “move or switch firms” if conditions are too onerous. There is “no ‘crisis’” in on-the-job heat injuries that requires a heavy regulatory touch.

‘Can’t afford to stay cool’

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in June signed an executive order “ensuring the safety of municipal workers in the heat,” said E&E News. Workers should not have to “choose between their paycheck and their health,” Mamdani said at the signing ceremony.

For many workers, though, the twin trends of “high temperatures and high inflation” are creating a “crisis that rarely makes headlines,” Sharon Block and Dr. Satchit Balsari said at USA Today. Cash-strapped workers increasingly “can’t afford to stay cool.” Rising prices force them to choose between paying for “food, rent and healthcare” or the electricity needed to “cool off during their off-hours.” The combination of low wages, increased costs and poor protections are forcing workers into “deadly trade-offs.”

Kevin Warsh is new to his job as chair of the Federal Reserve, but he is already making one big change that is reverberating through the financial markets. He is no longer providing forward guidance about how the Fed might react to future U.S. economic developments. Are rate hikes likely to control inflation? Warsh will not say. That leaves financial analysts uncertain how to navigate the economy.

‘Learning to play the ball’

Warsh “just broke one of the Fed’s most powerful habits,” Phil Rosen said at Inc. Fed officials voted to keep interest rates steady last week, but that decision “was the least interesting news of the afternoon.” Instead, Warsh’s decision not to signal what might happen next was the “most important” thing he did. This is a departure from “years of clear and frequent forward guidance” under former chair Jerome Powell. Warsh seems to believe that keeping future plans close to the vest “will force markets to think for themselves rather than waiting to be told which way to swing.” The markets are “learning to play the ball not the referee,” Warsh said to reporters.

That is discomfiting to market players. “No really, what is Kevin Warsh thinking?” Kai Ryssdal and Sean McHenry said at Marketplace. The chairman has signaled “commitment to getting inflation under control,” but the absence of forward guidance means the Fed’s plans for how to do that are “still a little unclear.” Markets understandably want to know “what are the contingency plans? What would it take for the Fed to raise rates?” New Century Advisors’ Claudia Sahm said to the outlet. Warsh’s new strategy potentially “obscures the Fed’s framework for understanding and reacting to economic conditions,” Maria Eloisa Capurro said at Bloomberg.

It is a “good thing” that the “Fed is staying quiet” under Warsh, Benn Steil said at The Washington Post. The Fed’s forward guidance under Powell often relied on “faulty forecasts” that “regularly undershot actual inflation.” That “doesn’t enhance credibility” for the Federal Reserve. “The most useful forecast is no forecast at all.”

A ‘less transparent Fed’

“Silence isn’t golden for a world looking to Kevin Warsh’s Fed,” Nicholas Spiro said at South China Morning Post. Warsh and his allies are correct that the Fed’s “forward guidance often proved counterproductive” under Powell. But a “less transparent Fed” creates “uncertainty in an already messy and unpredictable world.” Warsh has a “credibility problem” in that it is not clear to investors “how willing he is to push for interest rate increases” in the face of inflation. His silence “could be a pretext for ducking hard questions” about Fed policies.

Stocks dropped and bond yields rose following last week’s Fed meeting, said The Wall Street Journal, a sign that Warsh’s silent treatment has not reassured markets he will aggressively confront inflation with higher interest rates. Investors “want to feel comfortable that the Fed knows what it is doing,” Loretta Mester, the former president of the Cleveland Fed, said to the outlet. “Not saying anything” may not be sustainable.

When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010, the UK’s scores in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), which compares education attainment across 38 developed countries, were “at an all-time low”, said The Times. Gove used the data to “argue for urgent reforms” and introduced a new curriculum in England that emphasised core subjects.

Since then, the UK’s 15-year-olds have “climbed global rankings” in literacy and numeracy; they are now ninth among OECD peers for reading (up from 20th) and 11th for maths (up from 22nd). In the most recent Pisa assessment, the UK’s scores were all “above the OECD average”.

But Andy Burnham’s new education secretary, Lucy Powell, has blamed Gove’s school reforms for Britain’s youth worklessness crisis. Powell argues the “over-focus on academic outcomes” has “left too many young people behind”, said Gove in The Times, whereas “the truth is precisely the opposite”. Powell suggests she will overhaul the curriculum to focus on less academic subjects. “In other words: bring back stupid.”

‘Genuine’ success

I’m not saying England’s education system is “perfect,” said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”. The proportion of children getting good GCSEs has “continued to climb”, but grade inflation has remained “relatively low”. England’s school system is a “genuine public policy success of the last 25 years”.

And the improvements “have been seen across the board”, said Amanda Spielman, former chief inspector of Ofsted, in The Spectator: for children who are both less and more academic, for disadvantaged and advantaged. There is “plenty of space” within the curriculum for teenagers to “take up technical and vocational subjects” – we have some excellent courses and qualifications on offer. But there is “nothing wrong” with expecting all pupils to study the core subjects too, “as would be normal in the countries whose technical education systems we look to and admire”.

Many people believed Gove’s “deeply unpopular” reforms were a “big step backwards”, said The Economist. But countries that “pressed on with more fashionable approaches” have seen their scores fall. Experts “downplay the importance of learning crunchy stuff”, but “more tedious methods” appear to “get better results”. The data comparing us to other developed nations gives us “good reason to think that England’s reforms are starting to bear fruit”.

‘Partial’ success

Comparisons with international averages disguise a “decline in national educational attainment”, said The Times. Our actual scores have “hardly risen”. England is outperforming Scotland and Wales, which “took a different approach to reform”, but overall the UK’s latest Pisa figures for science have dropped 14 points compared with 2009. Maths has dropped three, and reading has remained the same.

It’s the declines among OECD peers that have “pushed the UK’s schools up the rankings”. According to the OECD, the pandemic “caused attainment to drop globally”, which reduces the ability of the Pisa scores to “serve as an accurate barometer”.

And ultimately, “success is more than educational attainment”. According to the Education Policy Institute, UK students have “the second lowest average life satisfaction of 15-year-olds across all OECD countries”.

In 2019, PC Andrew Harper was responding to a call about the theft of a quad bike in Berkshire when his foot got caught in the tow strap of the suspects’ car as it sped off. He was dragged for 1.6km, suffering fatal injuries. The three teenagers in the car were later convicted of his manslaughter; the two who were passengers were sentenced to 13 years.

Dangerously close to capacity

After that, said the Daily Mail, Harper’s widow successfully campaigned for the killers of emergency workers to get mandatory life terms; but Harper’s Law doesn't apply retroactively, and last week it emerged that those two men may be released on licence early, under the 2026 Sentencing Act. It allows for all non-violent offenders, and violent ones jailed for less than four years, to be released when they've served 33% of their terms, and for those serving more than four years for violent and sex crimes to be released at the 50% mark. Only a few categories of serious offender are excluded, including those serving life terms.

Countless victims of crimes including rape and child sex abuse have been informed that their attackers are to be freed earlier than anticipated. Inevitably, they are appalled and feel betrayed, said David Shipley in The Spectator. Faced with a public backlash, Andy Burnham has paused the Act’s implementation. But it is not clear what he can do. Prisons in England and Wales have been dangerously close to capacity for years. No sooner had Keir Starmer come to office in 2024 than he was faced with warnings that the system was about to collapse, prompting a controversial early release scheme in which many offenders were let out at the 40% mark.

The system needs total reform

People blamed successive Tory governments for bringing in tougher sentences and raising automatic release thresholds, while failing to increase prison capacity: in 14 years, they added just 500 new places. Labour has pledged to create 14,000 more, but even if they manage that, these prisons won't be ready in time to avert a crisis – hence the new Act, which lowers release thresholds again. It also expands the range of offences they apply to, because releasing only non-violent offenders would not free up enough space.

Ultimately, the system needs total reform, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Owing in part to a “tough on crime” narrative driven by the media, our incarceration rate is higher than any other country in Western Europe. Yet there is no firm evidence that longer sentences deter crimes – let alone in jails rife with drugs but short on opportunities for rehabilitation or treatment for addiction. Countries like Norway have shown that there are cheaper, more effective ways of tackling crime, but will the public accept them? It will take a bold politician to break this cycle.

One company in Austin, Texas, claims to have found a new solution to school shooters: drones. Mithril Defense is currently designing pepper-spraying drones, inspired by the Ukrainian military’s successful drone program, that the company says can respond to an active shooter within seconds. But while some are lauding the idea, others feel that adding this technology into schools might bring more problems than solutions.

‘It gives another set of eyes and ears’

The drone program developed by Mithril, called Campus Guardian Angel, provides an “elite, on-site safety response capability that works alongside school safety teams, confronting any active shooter threat,” the company’s website said. The drones are flown remotely and can reportedly arrive at a shooter’s location in 15 seconds. Upon engaging, the drones will “unload pepper rounds and are capable of hitting the shooter at a speed of up to 70 mph,” said The Independent.

The drones, currently being provided to schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia, are “equipped with non-lethal effects, flown by several of the top drone pilots in the world and are supported by an elite team of former military operators, law enforcement and first responders,” Justin Marston, the founder and CEO of Mithril, told The Independent. These types of responses “matter and save lives during an active shooter situation.”

Law enforcement has lauded the use of these drones. “It gives another set of eyes and ears of the campus that I can't see all the time,” Deputy Trevor Autrey, the school resource officer at Deltona High School in Deltona, Florida, told WPTV West Palm Beach. Non-police officials were similarly enthusiastic. “As principal, I’m really excited about having this enhanced security on our campus,” Deltona High School Principal Dr. Christina Lapnow said to WPTV.

‘I have some really serious reservations’

For all those who support the drone program, others say they may not be as effective as tech enthusiasts hope — and could cause additional safety issues. The drones “might accidentally target a fleeing student instead of a shooter” or “remote pilots, in a split-second decision, might mistake a law enforcement officer for a shooter, especially if teachers initiate a false alarm,” Curtis Lavarello, the head of the advocacy firm School Safety Advocacy Council, said to The Washington Post.

It is “almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Lavarello told the Post. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.” Other experts have argued that “low-tech measures, like simply locking external doors, are just as effective,” said the outlet. If schools “spend significant resources on technologies designed to respond after shooting begins, we have to ask what we’re not investing in instead,” Jaclyn Corin, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, told the Post.

Others connected with that shooting seem to agree. “These drones aren’t patrolling; they just pop up when needed. So that’s part of the problem,” Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas attack, told WPTV. “We need to focus on the prevention piece rather than the reaction piece.” The larger approach “seems to reflect that part of America which says the way to address recurrent school shootings” is “not with stricter gun control laws,” said Moisés Ávila at Barron’s, but “rather with weaponry, such as giving teachers guns.”

“You wait 30 years for a Royal Shakespeare Company appearance from Kenneth Branagh and then two turn up at once,” said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. Having starred as Prospero in “The Tempest” earlier this summer, Branagh is back with an “energetic, charismatic, touching performance” as Lopakhin – the son of a serf who has become a successful businessman – in a new version of “The Cherry Orchard”, adapted by Laura Wade.

‘Broad comedy and pathos’

It’s a “star-studded” production: the cast includes the American film stars Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman. And it looks “beguiling”, said Clive Davis in The Times, with an “elegant set design” that “evokes an outpost of privilege facing extinction”. Unfortunately, the evening veers too wildly between “broad comedy and pathos”, while never quite finding a settled tone – or getting to the heart of the play.

In his final masterpiece – about the owners of a great Russian estate facing up to their financial ruin – Chekhov uses the metaphor of a doomed cherry orchard to “conjure a society on the cusp of seismic change, and a family splintered by inaction and marooned by personal grief”, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times.

‘Curious lack of urgency’

The orchard’s significance is conveyed through pretty prints of cherry blossom that contrast with the gnarled branches that clamber up the set; and the performances are heightened, “as if many of the characters are acting in their own personal drama”, aware that disaster is looming, yet unable or unwilling to meet the “demands of the moment”. The production is full of insight, and painfully truthful moments, but it fails to mine the play’s “heartbreaking depth”, and its impact is dulled by a “curious lack of urgency”.

Branagh’s Lopakhin is unusually amenable, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. When his class rage erupts, it is “arresting” – but then it melts away. Hunt is surprisingly “featureless” as the landowner Ranyevskaya; Pullman brings “charm and comic charisma” to the part of her brother, but it’s not enough to rescue a tonally soft-edged production that lacks a “magnetic centre to hold you”.

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Until 29 August

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap,” wrote Andy Burnham in The Times. The prime minister’s new government has unveiled “fundamental changes” to England’s curriculum and education system.

From the age of 14, pupils will be able to combine technical subjects like manufacturing and AI with core subjects like maths and English. They will also be able to get experience with local employers, to give them a clearer pathway into work. “For too long, we’ve built a school system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk,” wrote Burnham. But in “the age of AI”, practical and technical skills have “become more valuable than ever”.

‘Westminster will be less involved’

Burnham is “on a mission” to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) – more than one in eight of the UK’s 16- to 24-year-olds: the highest level in more than 12 years. This overhaul “doesn’t actually do anything about Neets, in that it will not be of any benefit to them”, said The Times’ sketch writer Tom Peck. But in theory, it will help “prevent the emergence of the next generation of Neets”.

It also “gives Burnham a chance to distance himself again” from previous politicians, said Politico’s London Playbook. Because “we’ve heard this type of thing a lot over the last few years”. But the difference now, Burnham argues, is that “Westminster will be less involved”; the new routes will be shaped by local mayors, schools and employers.

It’s modelled on his Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc, which he launched as mayor in 2024, said the BBC’s education correspondent Hazel Shearing. The MBacc “may well be scalable”, but “there will be challenges”. Will kids living in deprived areas, without thriving industries, have fewer options?

Neets ‘downstream of economy, not classroom’

I agree that England “has never built a technical education system worthy of the name”, said Joshua Vallance, vice principal of Trinity Academy, Brixton in Schools Week. But should children “begin sacrificing a broad academic education at 14” to get one? “As a Labour member and teacher, I think they should not.”

Telling kids to organise their curriculum around a “presumed occupational destination” means we “narrow their field of possibility before either they or we can know what they might become”. Plus, one of “the beauties of our education system” is “common academic entitlement”: that children at a Brixton academy “have access to the same knowledge as the children at Eton and Harrow”: a “great leveller in society”.

In Burnham’s system, more well-off children at independent or selective schools will still study languages, history and sciences “before deciding what to become”. Poorer children will be “asked to decide first”, with “fewer options”.

England’s education system isn’t perfect, but “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. We’ve climbed international rankings in both literacy and numeracy, and the proportion of kids getting good GCSE results has risen while grade inflation stayed “relatively low”.

Unless John Healey “does something very radical in the Budget”, Burnham’s overhaul has to be “balanced by cuts elsewhere in the schools budget”, which imperils a “genuine public policy success”, but “to no good end”. Because the Neet problem is “not a consequence of our education system”: it’s “rooted in the labour market”.

Kids are “twice as likely to become Neet in the northeast of England than the southwest”, not because schools in the southwest are better at tailoring education to “the needs of local businesses”. The rate of young people who become Neets is “downstream of the strength of their local economies, not the curriculum”.

While New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has backtracked on a pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he enters the city, those in the Big Apple remain split on the idea. Some believe Netanyahu is a war criminal who should be subject to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if he visits the United Nations in Manhattan this September. Others think it is hypocritical to focus only on the Israeli leader.

‘Not welcome in New York City’

Mamdani originally said he was looking into whether officials in New York City could arrest Netanyahu. But while the Israeli prime minister is a “war criminal,” New York City police officers do “not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” Mamdani said in a video on X. “I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.” The federal government should “join the International Criminal Court and execute both this warrant as well as any warrant the International Criminal Court holds.”

These words could inspire New Yorkers to hold “larger demonstrations against Israeli officials and supporters during the U.N. General Assembly,” given that Netanyahu is “one of many foreign officials who have outstanding arrest warrants issued” by the ICC, Elizabeth Kim said at Gothamist. Talk of an arrest also “gave the issue prominence at a time when Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza has led two independent United Nations inquiries and humanitarian groups inside and outside of Israel to accuse him of perpetrating a genocide,” say Sally Goldenberg, Dana Rubinstein and Liam Stack at The New York Times.

Some Palestinian advocacy groups are still pushing for additional action to be taken against Netanyahu by New York City officials. Palestinians “welcomed Mr. Mamdani’s statement,” but “this has never been about one individual,” Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of the pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime, said to the Times. Mamdani also admitted he “sympathized with New Yorkers who were ‘disappointed’ to hear that Mr. Netanyahu would not be arrested,” said Goldenberg, Rubinstein and Stack.

‘A selective approach’

Some feel the idea of arresting Netanyahu is unwarranted. Going after the Israeli prime minister presents a “selective approach to ICC arrest warrants,” said Zvika Klein at The Jerusalem Post. The U.N. General Assembly always “hosts the largest annual gathering of accused war criminals on Earth” who “arrive on diplomatic passports, sweep past the barricades on First Avenue, address the world from the green marble rostrum and fly home.” When the U.S. “decides a foreign leader belongs in a courtroom, it has tools,” but New York City is “not among them.” International law “survives on the belief that it applies to everyone, or it protects no one.”

Others consider a Netanyahu arrest even more risky. Lawmakers may have “advised the mayor that attempting an arrest could have subjected him and his collaborators to criminal liability,” said Paul Mauro at The Wall Street Journal. The law “explicitly states that ‘abducting’ any person who is ‘a foreign official, an internationally protected person or an official guest’ is a federal offense.” So if officials “discussed the logistics of such an operation with the mayor and either he or they took any action directed at making it happen,” they “could all have faced federal charges.”

For months, equity markets have been able to treat higher oil prices, higher government bond yields and vast AI costs “as separate problems arriving on different days”, said Stephen Innes on Investing.com. But Wall Street is now finally on “the collision course it had spent weeks pretending would never happen”.

The catalyst was the Strait of Hormuz, where the standoff between Washington and Tehran entered a dangerous new phase, pushing the price of Brent crude up by more than 10% to $85/barrel, the highest in four weeks. For investors, central bankers and governments, the spectre of an inflation shock that many had hoped was behind us has hoved back into view.

No shelter

“I’m left wondering why the smart money failed to hedge against what was always a highly probable breakdown of this fragile ceasefire,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. “The interim peace deal was clearly resting on a knife’s edge, yet investors chose the comfort of short-term optimism over geopolitical probability. Again.” Iran isn’t the only conflict vexing the oil market, said Javier Blas on Bloomberg. “What matters for Main Street” isn’t the cost of crude, but of petrol, diesel and jet fuel. On that score, the concurrent escalation of the Ukraine War in recent weeks is troubling, given shortages in global refining capacity, in Russia and beyond.

The difficulty investors face is finding shelter from these geopolitical crises, said James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. “In the old investment paradigm, government bonds acted as shock absorbers, with prices rising and yields falling when the economy takes a hit.” But that doesn’t work when shocks are inflationary – particularly “when government debt levels are so high”.

Challenge for Burnham

Bonds have suffered a painful sell-off on both sides of the Atlantic, with prices of benchmark ten-year UK gilts spiking above 5% for the first time since May. Bond yields have broadly tracked oil prices since the start of the Iran conflict, said Mehreen Khan in The Times. And, once again, the UK – highly exposed to global energy and food prices – is vulnerable. Andy Burnham’s economic inheritance as the incoming PM is suddenly looking much more troubling.

“Rising gilt yields eat into the government’s fiscal buffers” by raising the cost of servicing debt, and the unknown identity of the new chancellor is adding to the jitters in debt markets. Some investors are already voting with their feet. Asset manager Rathbones has slashed its gilts holding, as a hedge against potential “fiscal irresponsibility” – out of fear that Burnham “does a Truss”. Given an increasingly fragile fiscal backdrop, more may follow.

“Imagine the ecstasy Democrats felt when they first found Graham Platner,” said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. At last, a man who could help them win back the blue-collar vote: a charismatic, gruff-talking oyster farmer and combat veteran.

They were so excited to think his run for Maine senator might succeed, and deliver their party control of the upper chamber of Congress, that they dismissed a growing list of ugly revelations about him.

A gamble too far

That large Nazi tattoo on his chest? Platner didn’t know the skull motif had SS associations (though he apparently called it his “Totenkopf”). His history of bigoted comments on social media, and sexting of women? He’d been through a “dark period”, but had “grown”. The allegation of physical abuse from a (Republican) ex-girlfriend? Probably politically motivated. But a credible accusation of rape from a (Democratic) former partner finally tipped the balance – and, last week, Platner quit the race.

The Platner affair was a train wreck, said Perry Bacon in The New Republic, but that shouldn’t deter Democrats from seeking unconventional candidates who will make voters give them a second look. The party has to enlist support from outside its core base.

Platner was a gamble too far, but we know from the 2016 and 2024 elections what happens when Democrats run milquetoast candidates with “Republican-lite” policy platforms: they lose. The party needs new blood, said The New York Times. More importantly, though, it needs to define what it would do with power. It needs “a purpose” more than it needs charismatic outsiders.

Selected on ‘vibes’

The Democrats must take more care with recruitment, said Christina Cauterucci on Slate. Platner was enlisted by a political strategist called Daniel Moraff, solely on the basis of “vibes”. He had no track record as an official or an activist. There was minimal vetting. Voters wanted “real human beings”, Moraff insisted, not “vat-grown people”.

Yet the joke is that Platner’s rugged image is itself confected. He comes from an affluent family and attended a fancy prep school; his oyster farm’s main customer is his mother’s upscale restaurant. Genuinely working-class voters weren’t impressed by Platner: he polled poorly among them, and did much better among college-educated voters. This is a cautionary tale about treating “class signifiers” – a dense beard, tattoos and a grimy sweatshirt – as proof “of political merit”.

This should be a golden age for the WNBA. The Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark helped push the league to new heights of popularity, and players are making more money than ever. But controversies are plaguing the league, Clark has become an unwilling symbol of racial polarization and GOP members of Congress are entering the fray.

‘Losing control of its story’

The House’s Republican Study Committee this month asked the WNBA to “investigate the on-court treatment” of Clark, said The Hill. The popular player has been “hip-checked, poked in the eye and struck in the throat” by other players in game action that has gone “far beyond routine physical play,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) said in a letter to league officials following a controversial flagrant foul on Clark by the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas.

It was the latest in a series of conservative complaints that “many WNBA players, particularly Black players,” are hostile to Clark, Bobby Burack said at Fox News. Clark has resisted being cast as an avatar in the culture wars. “People should not be using my name to push those agendas,” she said to reporters in 2024, per ESPN.

The WNBA is “losing control of its own story” to “right-wing grifters” who have taken hold of the narrative surrounding its most popular player, said Seerat Sohi at The Ringer. The league has become “fertile ground for these types of shenanigans” because it surged into popularity at the same moment the country became “embroiled in a cultural, political and legal fight over the role of women in society.” The players are “primarily Black, openly queer, politically outspoken” which makes them the “antithesis” of the “modern conservative project.” The people using the league to advance that agenda “understand the league’s power as a symbolic vehicle” better than the WNBA’s own leaders do.

‘Political football’

“This isn’t fun,” said Candace Buckner at The Athletic. Clark’s ascendance was supposed to be “magic” for sports fans “watching, celebrating and obsessing over women’s sports.” Clark instead is having the “least fun of all,” plagued by injuries and at the center of “rage bait” controversies like the Thomas foul. The “justifiable anger” over the incident sparked “racial attacks” and death threats against Thomas, set off a new round of controversy over WNBA officiating and even prompted commentary from President Donald Trump. It’s all a lot for basketball fans who “just want a little fun.”

It is “incredibly unfair” that Clark has become a “bit of a political football,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday at the Game Plan Summit, per ESPN. (The NBA founded and still owns a large stake in its sister league.) Clark is a “young woman who's trying to improve her game." The upside is that Clark has helped “significantly increase” the league’s popularity, said the outlet. The downside is that “race, officiating and politics” are dominating the conversation.

“Westminster is reeling” from the news that, it seems, Ann Widdecombe was murdered, said Tim Shipman in The Spectator. “At this stage it is the done thing to urge people not to jump to conclusions” – but “the leaping has already begun”. Nigel Farage declared on Saturday that it was “premeditated murder”; Reform UK clearly believes she was targeted because she was its migration spokesperson.

Targeted attack

Devon and Cornwall Police had declared on Sunday that there was “nothing to suggest” the killing was “politically motivated”. On Monday, though, there was an about-turn. Counterterrorism police took over the investigation; a 28-year-old man, who had reportedly driven 300 miles from his home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, to her village on Dartmoor on the day she died, was arrested. The crime was described as a “targeted attack”, perhaps linked to extremism. If the police don’t know what happened, said The Daily Telegraph, it’d “be better for them to say so”. Official speculation and obfuscation only fuels “mischief”.

Once again, MPs found themselves considering the question of their own safety, said Chris Mason on BBC News. The veteran Tory Sir Bernard Jenkin, recalling the deaths of Jo Cox and David Amess, claimed that as a member of Parliament “you are more likely to meet a violent death than a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces or a member of the British police forces”. MPs need to remain both “accessible and safe”. This, today, is a massive task. Farage believes the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, which is responsible for MPs’ security, has not taken his own safety seriously enough. And Widdecombe’s death suggests that not only the 650 sitting MPs, but also former members, may need help

‘Parasocial fixations’

Her death is shocking, “not just for its brutality”, said Mary Harrington on UnHerd. It’s shocking because it highlights “how much better, kinder and more trusting a country Widdecombe believed Britain to be, than the place we actually live in”. She was a traditional “British battleaxe”: a staunch conservative who never shied away from controversy, but was open, warm and courteous to those with whom she disagreed.

Britain, sadly, has grown “more fractured, skint, alienated and online” than the world she grew up in. “Parasocial fixations” on public figures are more and more common; harassment, and serious violence, often result. This baleful trend seems to have pursued Widdecombe to her home in a sleepy Dartmoor village – the last place on Earth, you’d imagine, “something so horrifying might happen”.