'Firearm officers need to know the law is on their side'

'Armed police need our protection, too'

Daily Mail editorial board

"While British police rightly take pride in being part of a largely unarmed force, specialist gun units are necessary in an increasingly dangerous world," says the Daily Mail's leader article. So the paper welcomes the government's "review of ways to give them added legal protection", arguing that firearm officers "need full confidence that, in all but exceptional cases of malicious intent, the law is firmly on their side".

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'The West is emulating China'

Adrian Pabst in The New Statesman

Joe Biden last week 'repeated the narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of a wider war of Eastern autocracy against Western democracy, opposing liberal freedom to despotic tyranny', writes Adrian Pabst for The New Statesman. 'Yet over the past 30 years, the boundaries have become blurred,' says Pabst. The West has 'taken an authoritarian turn towards state capitalism, bio-medical control and tech totalitarian tendencies in ways which increasingly resemble the autocratic axis of Moscow and Beijing'.

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'The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce narrative has a dark side'

Frankie de la Cretaz on CNN

There is "an obvious narrative appeal" to a potential romance between a popular NFL player and a pop star, writes Frankie de la Cretaz for CNN. But while Taylor Swift's rumoured relationship with Travis Kelce is like "fairy-tale" lyrics from her early songs "come to life", this narrative has a "dark side". The "locker room culture that emerged from sports media about this story was ugly and hammers home the issues of sexism and misogyny" in the world of men’s sports.

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'Eddie Jones deserves no sympathy – but rugby needs Australia to find form'

Daniel Schofield in The Telegraph

Objectively,  Eddie Jones' Australia team "being all but eliminated from the World Cup is very funny", writes Daniel Schofield for The Telegraph. But once the "sadistic delight" and "the laughter dies down, everyone should be extremely concerned for the state of the game Down Under because no country is more central to rugby’s overall economy in the next six years". 

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