What happened
Andy Burnham has ordered a review of plans to release thousands of prisoners early from September after concerns that offenders convicted of serious crimes – including the killers of PC Andrew Harper – could qualify.

The move follows criticism from Harper’s family, which said the proposed releases undermined the tougher sentencing principles established by Harper’s Law. The policy, introduced under the previous government to help relieve severe prison overcrowding, would allow some inmates to leave custody sooner than under existing rules.

Who said what
The new prime minister said he wanted to ensure that “everything has been looked at” before the next wave of releases takes place.

But prison reform organisations have warned that abandoning the early release scheme could trigger a capacity crisis in the nation’s jails. Andrea Coomber, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the prison system was “on the verge of collapsing under its own weight”.

Burnham has “stirred up a political row”, said Rajeev Syal and Alexandra Topping in The Guardian. The “early release crisis has engulfed Labour”, said Danny Shaw and Charles Hymas in The Telegraph. “What started as an emergency response to overcrowded prisons has given Andy Burnham a major headache in his first days as PM.”

What next?
The government will reassess the policy with Justice Secretary Alex Norris before September’s planned releases.

What happened
The chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant in South Korea could be sentenced to jail time for using ants as a topping for sorbet.

Ants are not among the 10 insect species approved for human consumption under the country’s laws. The celebrity chef, “whose identity has been withheld, but who reportedly appeared on a Netflix cooking reality competition”, according to The Times, could spend up to a year in prison over the dessert dish.

Who said what
Prosecutors put the total number of individual ants served at roughly 49,000 and health authorities said the restaurant had used ants that “contained up to 55 times more heavy metals than typical edible insects”, according to a report in The Chosun Daily. Heavy metals are dangerous in larger quantities, particularly for pregnant women and children.

It was “reportedly explained to prosecutors that the restaurant’s chef had used ants to add acidity to dishes while working in the US and Europe”, said The Guardian. The chef had then not realised that doing so was illegal in South Korea.

What next?
Prosecutors are also seeking a 20 million won (£10,000) fine for the restaurant. The court will deliver its verdict on 2 September.

A new underwater research facility is making waves. Deep, a British ocean engineering company, has installed a subsea human habitat more than 18 metres below the surface in the Tennessee Reef, part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Called Vanguard, the habitat allows for four aquanauts to live in a dry environment underwater for five days without needing to resurface. And it is just the first of a proposed network of underwater facilities by the company.

Deep’s Vanguard is “providing extended access to the ocean for research, conservation and training”, said the company’s website. The facility is the “first open-ocean human habitat built, tested and deployed in the United States in four decades”, said Vice. Deep hopes to enable permanent underwater living by as soon as next year.

Living underwater exploits a “strange loophole in human biology”, added Vice. “It’s like you have been scuba diving for a really long time and your tissues and blood get saturated with nitrogen, the inert gas that you are breathing,” Dawn Kernagis, the director of scientific research at Deep, told Science Alert. “Essentially, once you are saturated, you could stay down there for weeks, months at a time.”

The goal of Vanguard is to allow scientists to conduct marine science research, mainly related to “coral reef restoration, long-term monitoring, climate impact studies, human performance research and training for extreme environments”, said Deep in a statement. And the deployment of the Vanguard habitat within the marine sanctuary “creates additional opportunities for marine science and builds on research infrastructure”.