The explosive growth of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service means he "could end up with more power over the human exchange of information than any previous person has ever enjoyed", said The Atlantic. And with that comes "unprecedented geopolitical leverage for a private citizen".

What is Starlink?
Starlink was launched in 2019, with a stated mission to "connect the globe with reliable and affordable high-speed broadband services". Its progression towards that goal has been rapid, with huge uptake in countries and areas where traditional internet has been patchy or non-existent. The 7,000 or so satellites orbiting Earth as part of Elon Musk's Starlink network make up nearly two-thirds of the entire network of active satellites, with thousands more planned for launch in the coming years.

What's happened since Donald Trump took office?
There have been numerous reports already of Musk using his access to the US president to gain advantages for Starlink. Leading Democrat senators complained in March about reports that Starlink was in line to take over a billion-dollar air traffic control contract from Verizon, said The Independent, although this has yet to happen.
 
Musk's connections to the Trump administration have also reportedly put pressure on countries that have been hesitant in approving licences for Starlink. A ProPublica investigation, for example, found evidence of a "veiled threat" by US officials in The Gambia that infrastructure money would be withheld if Starlink did not secure regulatory approval there.

How is Starlink affecting politics?
There are signs that the "global wall of resistance" to Starlink is beginning to fall apart, said Bloomberg. In Gaza, Starlink was last year able to provide service to a UAE-built hospital, with Israeli approval. Musk is the only internet provider operational in the area.

Ukrainian forces have become reliant on Starlink but they, too, are at the "mercy of the entrepreneur", said Politico: Musk refused, for instance, to switch on the service over Russian-occupied Crimea for a drone attack by Ukraine on Russian ships. Access to Starlink was also reportedly used as a pressure point to get the US-Ukraine minerals deal over the line.

"Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair," said The Spectator, for the semicolon, that "most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks", is all but dead. Use of the semicolon (in lists, or to join two separate clauses into a single sentence) has almost halved since 2000 and, according to research by language service Babbel, many young Brits never use it at all.

Fear of 'using it incorrectly'
It's not that young people are "rejecting" the semicolon outright, said The Telegraph; "rather, they fear using it incorrectly". The mark, designed to introduce "a somewhat longer breath" than a comma into a sentence, has been increasingly abandoned by contemporary writers and is now often misunderstood by Gen Z.

It's far from the first punctuation casualty, said The Indian Express. The pilcrow, a mark used to signify a new paragraph, slipped "into obscurity" a few hundred years ago. And, in modern times, the apostrophe is "under daily siege".

For younger generations, raised on texting and social media, traditional punctuation can sometimes feel "passive-aggressive" or "unnatural", said The Washington Post. Instead, they punctuate messages with emojis, which act as "tone tags" to convey the sender's intent.

'The ChatGPT hyphen'
The semicolon may be endangered but there is one form of punctuation that seems to be flourishing: the em dash. And that's probably down to artificial intelligence.

Sometimes called the long hyphen, the em dash – used to add extra information, in parenthesis – can be seen in early editions of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, said Prospect. But it's now such a feature of chatbot responses, it's become known as "the ChatGPT hyphen".

So, are we influencing artificial intelligence's punctuation, or is it influencing ours? "Online detectives have unfairly pounced" on the em dash as a dead giveaway for copied-and-pasted AI writing, said The Boston Globe, but this punctuation belongs to the people and the "literature it was trained on". Suspicion of the em dash "speaks to our mounting paranoia about automated communication", said Rolling Stone. Ultimately, technology may be shaping our grammar more than we would care to admit.

Robin Ticciati and the London Philharmonic Orchestra are back with an "enthralling 'Parsifal' that is well paced, beautifully balanced and with a palpable feel for Wagner's many-layered, floating clouds of sound", said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times.

In Jetske Mijnssen's new staging, Parsifal (Daniel Johansson, pictured above left) is "less an 'innocent fool' with redemptive qualities than a sort of counsellor who brings about a family reconciliation", said Richard Morrison in The Times. Reimagining Wagner's "most enigmatically mystical opera" as "Chekhov with an orchestra" may inject the production with more psychological credibility but it's "no longer quite what the composer envisaged".

It does provide "some startling new takes" on Wagner's opera, said Nicholas Kenyon in The Telegraph, although on opening night there were "cheers for the music but scattered grumbles at the drama". Still, it's a "gripping evening" that will no doubt spark debate about the "real meaning" of the composer's final work.

Ryan Speedo Green makes a "formidable, menacing" Amfortas, while Audun Iversen is "affecting and well projected" as Klingsor, said Barry Millington in London's The Standard. And there are some "stunning stage tableaux" throughout, like the macabre funeral procession with its "sepulchral undertakers and snowfall".

The outstanding cast is supported by a "gleaming, flowing" performance from Ticciati and the London Philharmonic, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. "Would Wagner have recognised this as his 'Parsifal'? Maybe not. But it's moving on its own terms, and it sounds wonderful."

We think our society is free – it isn't
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper
"People on all sides" of the Israel-Gaza debate are "feeling the hands of the state tightening around them", writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Social-media "censorship" is "getting worse" and "climate change activists are getting atrociously long" prison sentences, too. "Our political thoughts" are being "regulated", while control "is quietly being given" to "the powerful". On VE Day, we "paid homage to those who died so we could be free. But we are not free."

Angela Rayner's soak-the-rich tax plans show what a smart operator she is
John Rentoul in The Independent
"Writing things down is a deliberate act in politics," writes John Rentoul. When Angela Rayner sent her proposals for raising revenue to Rachel Reeves, she knew it was a "mini-manifesto that might be leaked later". Her suggestions for taxing the wealthy are a "carefully calibrated act of rebellion" that wins the deputy PM favour with Labour members and positions her "ahead of where the Chancellor is likely to be in a few months' time".

King's College Cambridge is wrong to cut ties with arms firms
Lara Brown in The Spectator
Campus protests "might look like a waste of time", writes Lara Brown, but, having been "repeatedly targeted by pro-Palestinian activists", King's College, London, has "agreed to cut ties with arms companies". This is a "wholesale surrender" to the demands of the demonstrators who've been "camping out" on the university's front lawn. "We live in uncertain and dangerous times": the "war waging in Europe" should "terrify us". Instead, we are "capitulating to students in tents".