G7 summit host Emmanuel Macron is pulling out all the stops to show that this week’s gathering of the world’s richest democracies still matters in an age of strongman politics. In one of his last big diplomatic set pieces before his presidential term winds down next year, Macron “will seek to paper over divisions” between Donald Trump and the other six leaders, said Euronews. Top of the agenda will be the Ukraine war, the Strait of Hormuz and developing safer technologies.

What did the commentators say?
The G7 leaders last met in the alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains in June 2003, when the US had invaded Iraq despite “the strident objections of France and Germany”, said The New York Times’ Paris bureau chief Mark Landler. Then-US president George W. Bush “got chilly handshakes” but worked hard with the other leaders “to maintain the veneer of like-minded countries uniting to confront the perils of an unruly world”. Two decades on, it’s the same town but another American war in the Middle East, and any “veneer” of unity has been “stripped away”.

The G7 is a “forum created to solve geopolitical crises”, said Bloomberg’s Europe editor Flavia Krause-Jackson, “but it was excluded from the US-Israeli planning for war” with Iran. And it was ignored by the US in both the diplomacy for and timing of the peace deal, which Trump announced the day before the summit and is due to be signed after it ends.

Although the G7 nations – France, Italy, Germany, the US, the UK, Canada and Japan – collectively account for 45% of global GDP, individually, few of them are among the world’s “biggest or indeed most powerful economies”, said Jonathan Moules in the Financial Times. And Trump would clearly rather play geopolitics with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping than waste time building consensus with those he regards as weak.

What next?
Expectations of what this three-day summit can achieve are “already low”, said Clea Caulcutt on Politico. “Despite all the efforts of the French presidency, the G7 format has lost much of its relevance,” an EU official told the website. The focus is on keeping up appearances, said a European diplomat, and “it will be a success if there is a family photo”.

Another major UK data centre has been given the green light, further cementing the country’s status as Europe’s AI front-runner. The government has approved plans to build the centre on a huge green-belt site in Slough, Berkshire, despite claims it could derail the project to build Heathrow’s third runway.

The developers had appealed after the local council refused to rule on the project, which it said would sit in “one of the most fragile and vulnerable parts of the green belt around London”. Since coming to power, Labour has “repeatedly bypassed local authorities to support data centre developments”, said The Telegraph. Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook said that there was a “continuing and unprecedented demand” for such projects.

How many data centres are there in the UK?
The UK is at the forefront of Europe’s data centre roll-out, hosting 523 out of the continent’s 2,269 data centres as of the end of last year. The UK ranks ahead of Germany (home to 529 centres) and also China (449 centres), “despite its strength as a technology and innovation power”, said Euronews. But all three are dwarfed by the US, which had 5,427 data centres by the end of 2025. The only other countries with more than 300 centres are Canada, France and Australia.

What’s planned for the future?
The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth over the next five years, the BBC reported last summer, when there were an estimated 477. Work on the biggest, a £10 billion data centre near Newcastle for US wealth management firm Blackstone Group, is due to begin in 2031. It will feature “10 giant buildings” covering more than half a million square metres – “the size of several large shopping centres”.

The majority of the centres will be built in London and neighbouring counties, despite “concerns about the huge amount of energy and water” they’ll consume, said the BBC, and the “potential knock-on effect” on domestic energy bills.

How great is the environmental impact?
Officials recently admitted that Britain’s data centre boom could “draw 40% more electricity than thought a few months ago”, said The Times. More than 100 data centres are seeking grid connections for 50 gigawatts of electricity capacity – “more than the whole of Britain’s peak demand on a typical day”. MPs are calling for a “national conversation on the environmental impacts”.

A spectator peeps through her headwear on the first day of Royal Ascot, the most extravagant event in the horse racing calendar. The strict dress code for the five-day meet requires women to wear a hat or headpiece in most of the enclosures.

Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty Images

There’s a “surging interest” in apes, said Euronews. Nature documentaries such as David Attenborough’s “A Gorilla Story”, which revisits a gorilla family that he first filmed in 1978, are inspiring tourists to book gorilla-trekking holidays in Rwanda, Uganda and the Republic of Congo. But tracking these beautiful creatures in their natural habitat isn’t easy: it’s physically strenuous, and permits are strictly limited, to protect the endangered animals.

Rwanda has 14 mountain gorilla families that have been carefully habituated to human observers and “can be visited by up to eight tourists for one hour daily”, said Lizzie Frainier in The Times. I travelled to the foothills of Mount Karisimbi in Volcanoes National Park to meet a family group of 14. Watching a baby gorilla running around in a “ferny glen” and frolicking into the “dense brush” was “magical”. I’ve had my fair share of wildlife experiences as a travel editor, but none compared to this.

This kind of “low-volume, high-value tourism” is pricey: a day’s trek costs more than £1,000, with proceeds going towards anti-poaching initiatives and community development. Accommodation ranges from basic guesthouses to “ultra-luxe boutique hotels”. If you really want to push the boat out, check in at Wilderness Bisate Reserve, which has “epic misty 360-degree views and four palatial suites”.

I trekked through Uganda’s Bwindi National Park, said Olivia Singer in Vogue, and the forest was “alive” with mountain gorillas. During my five-day trip with Abercrombie & Kent, I spotted “two gargantuan silverbacks and a baby”; they meandered around us for an hour as they went “about their business”. It was “the best day of my life”.

Social media ban won’t alter culture that hurts women
Georgia Harrison in The Times
I “welcome” the under-16s social media ban, writes reality TV star and online safety campaigner Georgia Harrison. Someone “shared intimate footage of me without my consent”, so I know “what these platforms can do to a young life”. But the ban won’t “change the content economy waiting” for our children when they turn 16. It won’t “wall off” this digital culture that’s “hurting thousands of women”. “The harder work is building an online world safe for all of us.”

Direct Action Is Now Terrorism
Steven Methven on Novara Media
The sentences of four newly convicted Palestine Action activists “were extended by the judge’s finding of a terror connection behind the criminal damage they did”, writes Steven Methven. “It’s the first time in British history that anyone has been sentenced as a terrorist for damaging property.” The Israeli weapons firm they attacked enables “crimes against humanity”, yet “the space for politically motivated action in this country has been radically diminished”. Power “has been allowed to become unchallengeable”.

Cycling is Right-wing, not Left-wing
Lewis Page in The Telegraph
Cyclists are often characterised as “angry Left-wingers”, writes Lewis Page, but they’re “clearly Right-wing”. In rush-hour traffic, cyclists are “working harder” and “taking more risks” than motorists, who seem to feel a socialist impulse to rein them in “with increased regulations and bureaucracy”. By contrast, many cyclists “evidently have no respect for traffic lights”, which are where “government controls you and often makes you wait”, as former Tory MP John Redwood famously noted. “QED. Cycling is Right-wing.”