The career of Ben Stokes has been littered with “extraordinary scenes”, said Ali Martin in The Guardian – and there was a final one last Sunday, on his penultimate day as an England cricketer. At 3.27pm on the fourth day of the third Test against New Zealand, Stokes was “about to start the 11th over of another marathon spell”, when a “ripple of applause” broke out around Trent Bridge.

That morning, the England captain had told his teammates that he’d be retiring from internationals at the end of the Test – and the news had just been made public. Now that the crowd were “in on the secret”, they rose as one to roar their “champion all-rounder” as he hurtled towards the crease. “And then it happened.” Stokes’s delivery found the edge of Zak Foulkes’s bat, and “flew low into the hands of Harry Brook at second slip”.

Final flourish

With his 252nd Test wicket, Stokes had provided one last “I was there moment”, to go with “countless others” throughout his career. As his teammate Joe Root said later: “It was the most Ben Stokes thing you will ever see.”

Later that same day, Stokes “added a final, frantic flourish” to the Bazball era, by promoting himself to open England’s fourth innings, said Nick Hoult in The Daily Telegraph. With his team needing 373 in just under four sessions, he charged down the pitch to his first ball, attempted to reverse sweep his second, and smacked his sixth for six. But his somewhat “reckless” cameo was short-lived – he departed after hitting 30 from 20 balls – and after that England’s hopes faded. They were bowled out the next day for 212, giving New Zealand a 2-1 victory in the series – England’s first defeat in a home three-match series for 14 years.

Magic of Headingley

“The numbers brook no argument,” said Mike Atherton in The Times. Stokes is one of only two all-rounders in history – the other being South Africa’s Jacques Kallis – to have finished his Test career with more than 250 wickets and 7,000 runs. Yet his significance as a cricketer goes beyond statistics. He will be remembered chiefly for his unique ability to shape games – and entire teams – through the sheer force of his personality.

From his match-winning innings in the 2019 World Cup final to the way he galvanised a previously bedraggled England when he first took over as captain, his achievements have been nothing short of remarkable, said Scyld Berry in The Daily Telegraph.

Yet his “legacy will always be” that magical day at Headingley in the 2019 Ashes, when he secured one of England’s most improbable victories by sharing an unbeaten stand of 76 for the final wicket with his “faithful partner Jack Leach”, who contributed just one run. The moment when Stokes “smote” Pat Cummins to the boundary to secure the victory – and then roared, celebrated and hugged his partner – might just be “the moment that gave more people joy than any other in the history of this sport”.

Taylor Swift’s rumoured wedding celebrations kicked off last night at a star-studded New York event with a guest list of around 100 people, ahead of a much larger celebration today which could involve up to 1,000 guests.

Swift marrying NFL star Travis Kelce is “shaping up to be the biggest in showbiz history”, said The Sun, with “secret ‘military’ plans” to make sure it all runs smoothly.

‘Military-grade organisation’

Guests will be “ushered into the venue through an underground car park so they can get in and out without being seen”.

Madison Square Garden has “discreet entrances, a windowless roof and well-practised security arrangements”, so the public and paparazzi, “including drones”, can be “kept at bay”, said The Times.

Keeping their “nuptials almost completely secret” is a “feat” that will have required “military-grade organisation” and probably a “fair amount of legal paperwork”.

But some believe Madison Square Garden could be a red herring to distract attention from the wedding’s real venue. An MSG wedding is seen by some as “too tacky” for the “singer who writes about lakes, countryside, and enchanting fairytales”, said the New York Post. “You cannot convince me” that Taylor Swift isn’t getting married in a chateau in the French countryside, or “maybe even on the coast in Rhode Island”, a fan said on TikTok. But not MSG. “How stupid do you guys think we are.”

Dogs and drones

The logistics of planning a wedding for a celebrity “sound a lot like warfare”, said The Wall Street Journal. Former Navy Seals are “stationed at the door”, German shepherd dogs are “sniffing the perimeter”, radio frequency jammers will be “scrambling the Wi-Fi signal” and drones that “shoot down spying drones” are “locked and loaded”.

“Keeping things under wraps can involve multiple security teams, inner and outer circles of trust” and possibly “fake names and fake venues”. Sometimes guests “won’t know their final destination until they arrive”. They park their car and get put in a shuttle bus to the true location.

Hospitality staff “coming to a secret celebrity wedding site usually have to surrender their mobile and travel in a blacked-out vehicle”, said The Times. Guards are often “very attractive ex-military men in beautiful suits”, said Larry Walshe, a celebrity event designer. For anyone who goes “against the wishes” of the hosts and breaks an NDA, the punishment is that they are “de-friended”.

There’s not just the media and fans to consider. The city the wedding is planned for “might be plunged into a tailspin of resentment” by the prospect of being “invaded” by A-list celebrities and an “entourage” of designers, caterers, security staff and guests, said The Telegraph. Protest posters appeared in Palermo on the eve of Dua Lipa’s wedding to Callum Turner and in Venice last year during the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

And “rogue family members” can be “just as distressing” as fans, paparazzi and locals, said the WSJ. Michelle Rago, a luxury events specialist who has planned weddings for the likes of Brooklyn Beckham, said at one event a serious concern was preventing an ex-wife from crashing the party.

Thomas Tuchel has said that his England men’s football team will follow Gareth Southgate’s penalty shoot-out blueprint at the World Cup. “We are prepared. We have a process, the players have a process,” Tuchel said.

As part of an overhaul of the England team, Southgate decided on his penalty takers “well in advance based on the training, and he strove publicly to take full accountability to take any blame away from his players”, said the BBC.

With the knockout rounds of this summer’s tournament under way, the “spectre” of the penalty shoot-out “hovers over every match”, said CBC. Many in the game are now turning to studies into the psychology, mathematics and history of penalties to try to gain an edge.

England’s ghosts

“Penalty kick studies” have helped the world’s top teams “win more shoot-outs”, said Science News Explores. The psychological pattern that “stands out” is that “as the stakes go up, the chances of scoring go down”. Players are more likely to score from a penalty during a game than in a shoot-out; penalty kicks tend to be less successful towards the end of tournaments; and during shoot-outs, players are most likely to score if a goal means victory – and least likely if failure means defeat.

The received wisdom is that England are poor at taking penalties. Spain and the Netherlands actually have the worst record, losing four World Cup shoot-outs in all. England (with Italy and France) have lost three, only winning their first with a 4-3 victory over Colombia in 2018, when Southgate was in charge.

A 2023 study that reviewed more than 1,700 penalty kicks found that players from England “scored as often as did the players from other nations”.

This finding was backed up by researchers at Bournemouth University who performed a penalty kick experiment with 130 players from English university and regional teams. Each player took five penalties after being divided into three groups. The researchers reminded one group about England’s poor shoot-out history. That group scored fewer goals than the group that didn’t hear that message and also fewer than the groups that were reminded of the past – but were also told that it proved nothing about English players.

Loving the maths

Mathematics can also come into play. After she scored the decisive spot-kick against Sweden at Euro 2025, the England defender Lucy Bronze explained her method. “I watched the goalkeeper, and every single penalty she dived quite early,” she told the BBC. “Statistically it’s risky for the keeper to stand still… So yeah, I love maths.”

According to recent analysis by Opta of the 292 penalties taken in shoot-outs at World Cups from 1982-2022, 14% were aimed low and to the left as the player looks at the goal, and just over 85% of those penalties were converted.

To guarantee scoring in a World Cup shoot-out, the findings suggest aiming anywhere in the top third of the goal. Of the 39 penalties hit high and on target, none has been saved. But this method requires more precision and nerve because it increases the risk of hitting the post or crossbar, or missing the goal completely. The least successful penalties are those that are aimed at medium height at the centre of the goal, the stats suggest.

Delving deeper still, a 2018 study by InStat of more than 100,000 penalty kicks around the world concluded that accuracy should be prioritised over power, and that the penalty taker’s run-up should be more than five steps and at a medium pace. When taking a penalty it’s also advantageous to look at the goalkeeper, not the ball.

A report published in the Journal of Sports Sciences also found the perfect order for a team’s penalty takers in a shoot-out: the five most successful penalty takers should go in reverse order.

Germany’s penalty record at major tournaments had become the “stuff of legend”, said The Guardian. They had won six consecutive shoot-outs in all competitions and their players had scored their last 15 World Cup shoot-out penalties before their shock defeat by Paraguay on Monday. Three Germans missing in one shoot-out proves that anything can happen in this dramatic sporting lottery.

Xenophobia has enveloped South Africa for years, and now a rising tide of anti-migrant views is flooding the country. Amid growing protests, a slew of anti-immigration groups have called for all undocumented migrants to leave South Africa by the end of June. Though there’s no stated plan for what happens after this date, many in the country are concerned.

‘All of them are now under threat’

South Africa is a melting pot of culture, with “Zimbabweans trained as doctors but driving Ubers, Ethiopians running bustling restaurants and Congolese selling colorful wax print fabrics,” said NPR. “All of them are now under threat” as a result of continued pressure from anti-migrant groups. For several months, “anti-immigrant protesters, many brandishing sticks, have been marching through the streets.” Many of them chant “Mabahambe,” a Zulu phrase meaning “they must go.”

The protests have also “sparked attacks against foreigners” throughout South Africa, said The Associated Press. As the violence and attacks continue, several of the most notable anti-immigration groups have “set what they are calling a June 30 deadline for people in the country illegally to leave and the government to take action” against undocumented migrants. The largest of these groups, March for March, is led by a former radio host from the city of Durban.

The June 30 deadline appears to be an arbitrary date, and most of the anti-immigration organizers have “not specified what will happen when it passes,” said NPR. Some of the groups have said they will go on a “national shutdown,” but what this would entail is unclear. As the deadline arrives, some nations have “begun repatriating citizens while criticizing South Africa for what they call a climate of xenophobia,” said the AP.

‘South Africa has long attracted migrants’

The flash point of xenophobia is largely because of the country’s large number of immigrants. As “one of Africa’s richer countries, South Africa has long attracted migrants from elsewhere in Africa seeking a better life,” said the AP. But they still remain a small portion of the total country: South Africa’s most recent census figures from 2022 show there were “2.4 million foreign nationals who had immigrated out of South Africa’s population of 62 million — less than 4% of the population.”

The protestors’ main complaint is that South Africa is “overrun with illegal immigrants who take jobs away from South Africans, ‌use up scarce public services and are responsible for high crime rates,” said Reuters. However, data disputes these claims. For one, every migrant job creates approximately two jobs for native South Africans, according to a 2018 World Bank report. Undocumented migrants are also “highly unlikely to try to use public hospitals or schools, for which they must register, for fear of being found out,” Anthony Kaziboni, a senior researcher at ​the University of Johannesburg’s Center for Social Development in Africa, told Reuters.

Nonetheless, the “current protests are already causing socioeconomic damage,” said Deutsche Welle. And some fear more violence is coming. “They asked me, ‘When are you going to leave the country?’” Kaunga Nyirenda, a Malawian gardener in Johannesburg, said to CNN of the threats he received. “‘If you don’t leave now, you are going to leave in a coffin, because we don’t need anyone after 30th of June.’”

The heatwave that’s broken records across the continent could change how we travel this summer as we face a new normal of sizzling temperatures.

The impact of extreme temperatures on “tourism-reliant” countries could be “huge,” Alejandro Saez Reale, a specialist in heatwaves and their impact at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, told National Geographic.

The parts of the Mediterranean that have recently experienced prolonged heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40C, may become less attractive. Areas that are increasingly affected by wildfires, drought or water shortages could also be hit.

Temperate spots

Travellers might increasingly seek more comfortable temperatures rather than the hottest destinations. They might also place greater value on where weather is more steady and therefore less likely to disrupt their holiday.

This could lead to a rise in the “coolcation” – a term that “neatly summarises” the “emerging trend” for European tourists “seeking out more temperate spots”. A study by the European Travel Commission in 2025 found 81% of Europeans were adjusting their travel habits due to the changing climate, with 15% actively seeking out cooler climates and 14% avoiding destinations prone to extreme heat.

Sustainable holidays, which boast features such as eco-certified accommodation, lower-carbon transport, and activities that support conservation, are also expected to rise in popularity. Forests, lakes, and cooler mountain environments could become more sought after.

Low-lying tropical islands threatened by sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and ski resorts at lower elevations, where shorter and less reliable snow seasons reduce winter tourism, could face a decline in bookings. Resorts are investing “heavily” in artificial snowmaking but the cost is “being passed on to skiers themselves”, said The Independent.

There is also a growing interest in “last-chance tourism”, or visiting places that are changing rapidly due to climate change, such as glaciers or coral reefs, said National Geographic. Ironically, this trend can increase the pressure on the very fragile environments that visitors are so enamoured by.

Finland, Norway, Poland and Iceland are recording double-digit growth in inbound visitors but this doesn’t mean the patterns have shifted entirely: last year, France and Spain were still the most visited countries in the world, with 102 million and 96.8 million visitors respectively, according to UN Tourism. So the “growth rate may have slowed”, but the number of visitors to these warmer countries “is not dropping”.

The Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) said feedback from its members suggests that, “on the whole, people are continuing to travel much as they always have, enjoying Mediterranean destinations during the summer months”, so the “increased interest in slightly cooler destinations remains the exception rather than the norm”.

Ballooning costs

Flying is “one of the hardest activities to clean up” because “technological solutions and efforts to keep disasters from spiralling” mean the cost of a flight is “likely to balloon” if it includes a charge for “making planes greener or sucking carbon pollution back out of the atmosphere”, said Ajit Niranjan, The Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent.

Journeys could become trickier during the hottest months because heatwaves, storms, flooding and wildfires are expected to cause more delays and cancellations for flights, trains, ferries and even road travel. This means that travellers may increasingly avoid the peak summer months in very hot regions, and choose to visit during spring or autumn instead, spreading tourism more evenly throughout the year.

However, this might not mean they escape the issue because heatwaves are “spreading across the calendar”, said National Geographic. In May 2022, Spain endured a heatwave of “extraordinary intensity”, the following year in France, “severe heat” extended into September, and this year, much of the southwestern US was “hit by a March heatwave” with temperatures as high as 43C.

Giorgia Meloni is suffering from a “splitting political headache”, said Hannah Roberts on Politico (Brussels). Italy’s first female PM has enjoyed remarkable success since her election in October 2022. She has kept her Brothers of Italy party dominant in the polls; she has held together her coalition formed with two other right-wing parties – Lega (the League) led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia (the party created by Silvio Berlusconi). Come September, she will be Italy’s longest-serving post-war leader. And she’s achieved all this by skilfully “pushing Italy’s post-fascist Right towards the political mainstream”.

This month, though, a figure has emerged who threatens to undo it all and drag the Right back the other way. Roberto Vannacci, a highly decorated retired general, formally launched a new hard-right, fiercely anti-immigrant party, National Future, in Rome last week.

It is rapidly gaining support: it already has 100,000 registered members; boasts eight MPs after a string of defections from the League and Forza Italia; and is polling at over 5%. Meloni’s headache is whether to keep him at arm’s length or bring him into her political orbit. So far she’s picked the first option, but if Vannacci’s popularity keeps rising in the run-up to next year’s general election, she may have to reconsider.

‘Incandescent’ and ‘disturbing’

Since the fall of Mussolini, Italy has produced a long line of populists, said Antonio Preiti on Linkiesta (Milan). But none has been “more incandescent, more aggressive, more disturbing” than Vannacci, nicknamed “Il Generale” by his legion of fans and hailed as a modern-day Julius Caesar by his colleagues.

The Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran’s controversial demand for “remigration” – the forced deportation of immigrants to their countries of origin – should come as no surprise. This is the man, after all, who made a name for himself in 2023 with his outlandish book “The World Upside Down”, in which he hit out at the “dictatorship of minorities”; claimed that black immigrants could never be Italian; and derided gay people as “not normal”.

That made him hugely popular, and prompted Salvini, the deputy PM, to ask him to join his Lega party to help revive its fortunes. But that gamble “backfired in a spectacular fashion”, said Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. Elected as an MEP for the League in 2024, he proved not a “pliant acolyte” but a thorn in its side. His new party is now wooing Salvini’s supporters.

‘Extremist passions’

The old soldier may have learnt to “move shrewdly” in politics, said Stefano Folli in La Repubblica (Rome), and he sure knows how to grab people’s attention. But can he keep up the momentum? Doubtful, said Lisa Di Giuseppe in Domani (Rome). He’s been conspicuously short on economic and foreign policy ideas, for a start. At his party’s inaugural congress this month, the 57-year-old gave little indication of strategy “beyond resentment, revenge and remigration”.

Vannacci is a man known for “extremist passions masquerading as common sense”, said David Allegranti in Quotidiano Nazionale (Bologna). Such policies as he has are designed to lure disgruntled right-wingers: plans to build more jails and to pay mothers to stay at home to free up jobs that “men can’t find”. His pitch at the conference was abundantly clear. “We represent the rejects and the scum, and we are proud of it,” he told party delegates.

Meloni must “behave like a statesman”, erect a “cordon sanitaire” around National Future, and ostracise this “latest adventurer” in Italian politics, said Mario Lavia on Linkiesta. It may result in her losing office to the centre-left, but for the good of the nation she needs to do it. Vannacci is no Mussolini, it’s true, but given half a chance he’ll corrode democracy with his pro-Russia and anti-EU rhetoric.

But would that isolation strategy actually work, asked Roberto Gressi in Corriere della Sera (Rome). It certainly hasn’t in the case of the National Rally in France or the AfD in Germany, both now trending in the polls. Sad to say there’s no easy way to slay the populist far-right crocodile.

Iran has become a “lose-lose issue” for Donald Trump, which is alienating his entire political base, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. When he attacked Iran, he infuriated the isolationist wing of his coalition, who believed his promise that he’d start “no new wars”. Now, his scramble to end the conflict “is alienating the hawkish sector of his party”, who believe it amounts to a humiliating surrender.

One Republican senator described the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump last week as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”. Texas senator Ted Cruz said Trump must be getting “very poor advice”. Critics are particularly outraged by the potential creation of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the provision a “disaster”, likening it to offering the “Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power”.

Vance under fire

Furious as they are, many Republican hawks are still reluctant to criticise Trump directly, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. So they’re turning their fire instead on the vice-president, J.D. Vance. “Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” raged one unnamed congressman to a Washington correspondent.

The president has done nothing to discourage such talk. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said, half-jokingly, of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” The irony, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, is that Vance opposed starting this war. Now it has fallen to him to sell the peace deal and serve as the fall guy when it goes sour. “You almost have to feel sorry for Vance. Almost.”

Face of peace

“Playing the part of Trump’s surrender monkey” will hurt Vance’s image in the short term, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark, but few Republican voters are likely to remember any of this stuff in two years’ time if petrol prices are back to normal and Iran hasn’t tested a nuclear device. Vance will just be the guy who helped bring an unpopular war to an end.

He has certainly been happy to serve as the face of this peace agreement, said Adam Cancryn on CNN. He asked to play a leading role in the talks, rather than being pushed into it. Vance may get the blame if the deal blows up, but he has no doubt concluded that if the two sides return to an intractable conflict, his hopes of becoming president are probably scuppered in any case.

“There’s arguably been no greater fall from grace in the modern political era than that of Sir Jeffrey Donaldson,” said John Manley in The Irish News. The former Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader was once regarded as the “nice man” of unionism. He was always polite in media appearances, and wore a fish badge on his lapel as a symbol of his Christian faith. But it’s now clear that this virtuous demeanour was “a mask that hid serious crimes”.

This week, he was convicted of abusing two girls over a period of more than 20 years. The jury found him guilty of raping one victim when she was seven or eight, and carrying out multiple other indecent assaults. It concluded that his wife of 39 years, Eleanor Donaldson, had enabled his crimes by failing to act when red flags were raised or when she witnessed abuse herself. She was deemed unfit to stand trial on medical grounds.

‘Sinful nature’

Donaldson’s journey to the top had been a long one, said Mario Ledwith in The Times. Born in 1962, he began his political career working for the MP Enoch Powell and was first elected to Stormont when he was 22. It was around that time, the court heard, that his depravity towards children began.

Years later he wrote a letter to one of his victims, expressing regret for causing her “hurt, pain and distress” and asking forgiveness for his “sinful nature”; he apologised in person to the other victim at a meeting organised by a Christian group in 1997. In court, Donaldson claimed that those apologies referenced not abuse, but unrelated matters.

Closure at last

Even as a victim of sexual abuse myself, I never picked up on Donaldson’s dark side during my time as a politician, said Máiría Cahill in The Irish Times. “He duped everyone.” We can only wonder at the hypocrisy of the man and the sense of entitlement that led him, despite his secret crimes, to seek “such public roles and prominence”.

We should be grateful to the two women for breaking their silence and revealing the truth about Donaldson, said Gail Walker in the Belfast Telegraph. He is scheduled to be sentenced in September, and the judge has warned him to expect a lengthy jail term. Let’s hope that this late arrival of justice brings his victims “some form of closure”.

Reports of President Donald Trump’s total capture of the Republican Party may be premature. Faced with plummeting popularity and whack-a-mole crises, the president has clashed with some of the most powerful members of his own coalition: Senate Republicans.

Whether this conservative revolt becomes a logjam for the White House remains to be seen. As Republicans face midterm headwinds to keep their congressional majorities, is the nascent push for senatorial independence for real, or will Republicans once more adopt the MAGA party line?

‘Relationship appears to be fraying’

Trump has “enjoyed unbending loyalty” from GOP lawmakers for years, said NPR. But the “strength of that relationship appears to be fraying,” particularly as some “departing members feel more uninhibited to push back” and others begin to imagine a post-Trump Washington.

Senators whom Trump had “written off, alienated or even helped defeat” are now opting to support “Senate traditions over his political demands,” said Axios. And the president’s decision this week to cancel the planned signing of bipartisan housing legislation “further inflamed weeks of tumult” that have marked an “increasingly bitter relationship between” him and high-profile Republican senators, said The New York Times. While “lawmakers from both parties were shocked by the president’s decision,” many of them saw Trump’s canceled signing as an effort to “undermine the efforts of his own party to protect its congressional majorities” before the midterms.

Trump’s push for harsh voting restrictions, which he demanded as a prerequisite before signing the housing bill, is “colliding with a newly defiant Republican Senate” and sets up a “multifront battle” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. GOP lawmakers “have been deferential to the president to a point,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R - Texas), to the outlet. But that deference “doesn’t seem to have done any good.” Simply having endorsed Trump’s point of view in the past “doesn’t mean he’s going to support you,” added Cornyn, whose own reelection bid was scuttled by a Trump-backed challenger.

During a closed-door lunch on Wednesday, which Republican senators hoped would “clear the air” between them and Trump, the president instead “vented his frustrations with the senators for more than an hour, leaving them no closer to detente,” said Politico. Trump “said something negative about me,” in an attempt to “bully me from asking a question that I think the American people need to know,” said outgoing Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to the outlet, after reports of an intense argument between him and the president during the meeting. “I’m not going to be bullied.”

Sacrificing principles at the ‘altar of Trump’

Senate Republicans that same day “proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding,” said The New Republic, after both Cassidy and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul bowed to White House pressure and flipped previous votes to kill a resolution limiting Trump’s Iran war powers. The waffling shows conservative lawmakers who “claim to have principles” will “gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.”

It is unclear whether the vote will be “enough to appease Trump,” said The Associated Press. But blocking efforts to restrict the president’s war powers “was a clear signal” to Trump from senators who “still want to placate him.”

“Grand Theft Auto” fans have reacted with “shock and relief” after the announcement that “GTA 6” pre-orders are now open, “all but confirming that the game won’t get delayed once more”, said IGN.

Thirteen years after the release of “Grand Theft Auto 5”, the sequel is finally set to launch on 19 November 2026. It is expected to be one of the biggest releases in entertainment history and is projected to generate $7.6 billion (£5.67 billion) in revenue in its first two months alone.

But the journey has been far from smooth. Fans have now “waited two console generations for a new ‘GTA’”, while developer Rockstar “continually pushed back its next blockbuster’s launch – again, and again”.

Quest for perfection

“GTA 6” was announced in February 2022 and originally scheduled to hit shelves in late 2025, but this was pushed back first to May 2026, then to the current release date, 19 November.

The most recent delay, according to Strauss Zelnick, CEO of game publishers Take-Two Interactive, was due to “limited circumstances where more time was required to polish a title and make sure that it was spectacular”.

For avid fans of the franchise, the reaction to the delay was one of “resignation, frustration, déjà vu”, said the BBC at the time. Rockstar is a “notoriously perfectionist” developer: “Red Dead Redemption 2”, its most recent major release, “is still widely considered a benchmark for open-world video games due to its depth and obsessive attention to detail”.

Alongside broader industry-wide shifts that have made game development “more expensive, more complex”, Rockstar also has to contend with its own hype, with each success “raising ever-higher expectations” for future games.

Speaking in May at the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Zelnick stressed that “Grand Theft Auto” titles have never pushed for yearly releases. “What has driven the gap is the amount of time it takes to do something that is as good as it can possibly be for that intellectual property.”

Union-busting

The long wait and repeated delays may also be connected to with Rockstar’s decision to fire more than 30 staff who were trying to unionise, sparking a legal action against the developer.

The employees, the majority of whom were based at the gaming giant’s Edinburgh HQ, were dismissed in October 2025 for what the company called “gross misconduct”, claiming staff had discussed confidential information, including specific game features from upcoming titles, in a public forum.

The sacked workers dispute this, saying they were part of a secure union-focused Discord channel that existed to allow members to discuss unionising the company and improving working conditions. They also claim they were subject to blacklisting, a “practice in which information about workers engaged in union activity is compiled to facilitate discrimination”, said The Register.

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain called it “the most ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry”. The case was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions in December, and Keir Starmer said ministers would investigate the allegations, describing the situation as “deeply concerning”.

This month, Rockstar lost a legal battle “which means fired unionised workers can continue to bring blacklisting claims against the influential games studio”, said Novara Media. The final employment tribunal trial is set to conclude in mid-October, just a month before “GTA 6” is released.

For years, philosophy graduates have been the “butt of jokes about unemployable degrees”, said Thibault Spirlet in Business Insider. Now, they can earn six-figure salaries as the “world’s most powerful AI companies” try to “shape how machines think and behave”.

High-profile philosophers are already “embedded” in top AI firms. Amanda Askell is resident philosopher at Anthropic, and Iason Gabriel and Henry Shevlin work at Google DeepMind. OpenAI’s Sam Altman also claimed that the company employed “hundreds of moral philosophers” when designing rules for ChatGPT. But there is rising suspicion that there are ulterior motives at play.

‘Arc of redemption’

“Unemployed coders take note,” said The Economist: “there seems to be no shortage of work for philosophers of AI.” There are “thorny problems” in the developing field – “a philosopher’s favourite sort”.

Some “ancient” philosophical considerations are at the core of the contemporary tech industry. The idea of “Socratic ignorance” – that wisdom is an individual realising the extent of what they do not know – is a major principle in AI development used to avoid “sycophancy”.

Deliberating whether a system should follow deontological aims (“strict rules” against “lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end”), or consequentialist ones (which weigh “costs against benefits”) is also a common dilemma for developers.

Philosophy is key to safety practices, too. Implementing the concept of “AI constitutionalism” – where legally or morally authoritative texts are used as a base of “scaffolding” to direct the system – aims to prevent “ominous behaviour” from the models.

Anthropic revealed earlier this year that its Claude constitution included sources as “diverse as Immanuel Kant, Apple’s terms of service and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. This has been nicknamed the company’s “soul doc”.

A rise in demand for philosophers has also coincided with a decline in admissions for computer science students, said Lance Eliot in Forbes. Arguably, computer science has become a “dead-end endeavour”, creating “automation that replaces the humans who made it all possible”. AI programming once held the “promise of big bucks and a stellar career”. This may just be a minor “course correction”, as no doubt degrees that directly relate to AI will remain important, but nonetheless, philosophy is experiencing an “amazing arc of redemption”.

But influence goes both ways and is “not limited to Silicon Valley”, said Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on Observer. Philosophy is impacting tech, but the demands of the AI industry are reshaping the “long-standing” landscape of philosophical thought. Academia is “rapidly adapting” as foundational questions regarding consciousness, morality, minds and computation have taken on a “new urgency”.

Suspicion and ‘ethics-washing’

The two disciplines of computer science and philosophy have “never been quite as entangled” nor as “fraught” as they are now, said Lila Shroff in The Atlantic. In a fundamental sense, the “careful thought” of philosophy is “at odds with the frenetic pace of AI”. In turn, some experts are concerned that “misaligned incentives” will encourage a “rush of low-quality work”.

There is a “degree of suspicion” in the academic world about philosophers migrating to AI firms, said Joel Khalili in Wired. The whole industry poses significant ethical risks. These programmes could be used to “develop new weapons of mass destruction, undermine democracy, or entrench existing social iniquities”.

But the greatest fear is of “ethics-washing”. Hiring philosophers to train systems not only demonstrates to the public that these models are so advanced that they warrant the attention of “serious people”, but also shows that companies are “outwardly performing a commitment to AI safety”.

In a broader sense, there are growing fears that philosophical research is becoming an “extension of the marketing function” of labs. And even if philosophers are given “free rein” in tech companies, ultimately, they are “accountable to investors and shareholders”. Essentially, “if a for-profit AI company signs your pay cheque, might that compromise your research?”

Gone are the days of working a grueling nine-to-five. Employees have started microshifting, a practice that involves completing duties in short, productive bursts. This allows workers to make their own schedules and save time for other obligations and hobbies.

Flexibility in the workplace has become increasingly common and sometimes even expected of hybrid and remote jobs. There may also be some benefits for business in allowing workers a freer schedule.

‘A little bit of autonomy’

Approximately 65% of workers are interested in microshifting, according to an analysis by Owl Labs. The practice, though not labeled at the time, took off during the pandemic at the height of remote work. Covid-19’s “work-from-home requirement demonstrated that employees can work successfully from anywhere, without a boss watching over them all of the time,” said The Wall Street Journal. Now, “flexibility increasingly means giving employees more control over when they work, not just where.”

Microshifting is most common in “industries where flexible work arrangements are already common, such as IT, financial services and professional and technical services,” said the Journal. People with “caregiving responsibilities at home — for children or other relatives — are more likely to try microshifting than noncaregivers.”

Over time, management and leadership have become more “adept at giving a little bit of autonomy,” Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business, said to The Associated Press. Employees have also gained the “motivation and almost the license to ask for this.”

‘It’s good to take breaks’

Microshifting can have benefits for both employers and employees. Breaking the workday into shorter chunks allows employees to “squeeze in some personal business as well,” giving them “more time to relax and enjoy” days off “rather than spend them running errands,” said Moneywise. As a result, they work when they are “most focused and productive,” and “companies get the most” out of time with them. More than half of employees (59%) “schedule personal appointments during typical work hours, and 38% take up to an hour each day for personal time,” said the analysis by Owl Labs.

“From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks,” Rockmann said to the AP. “When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” Microshifting can also improve relationships, allowing more time with friends and family, all while reducing burnout. “Taking walks or attending a child’s school function can be reinvigorating for people who get drained from sitting at a desk or looking at a computer screen,” said the AP.

‘Tremendous amount of discipline’

Microshifting also has its risks. A lack of a clear schedule “can gradually weaken our ability to commit to longer stretches of uninterrupted work,” Aytekin Tank, the founder and CEO of Jotform, said at Forbes. It could also lead to a less collaborative work environment. Employees “have to be more aware of the preferred work hours of colleagues,” and if their microshifts don’t coincide, it “can lead to periods of inactivity that might ultimately slow things down,” said Moneywise.

Without structure, employees may also “fall behind on deadlines and actually wind up working round-the-clock,” said the Journal. Microshifting “requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline,” said Moneywise. If someone is “not a motivated worker (or are someone who is easily distracted), getting things done in those work blocks could be challenging.”

More than 1,000 schools across England and Wales are closing or finishing the day early this week to protect students against extreme heat.

Teachers and pupils are struggling to cope in school buildings never designed for sky-high temperatures fuelled by global warming.

Twelve school days a year could be lost

With the UK experiencing increasingly extreme weather, temperatures in schools have become a “major concern”, said The i Paper.

Modelling by the Met Office and University College London for the Department for Education published last year found some schools may already have one or two days a year when indoor temperatures hit 35C and learning becomes “very difficult”.

But “without the implementation of any adaptation measures, students could potentially lose up to 12 days of learning per year on average, as a result of generally warmer temperatures and not just from extreme heat”.

There is evidence that children struggle to sleep at night when temperatures remain above 20C. So government guidance warns teachers and school leaders to look out for the symptoms of “heat stress”, including discomfort, irritability and signs of dehydration.

“The kids can’t cope,” said Nottingham junior school teacher Radhika Sanghani in The Independent. “One of the kids didn’t sleep well because of the heat, so he was falling asleep at his desk, literally dozing. They’re only seven to nine years old. It’s a lot to expect them to study in that heat. They’re tired, they’re red-faced, they’re finding it all horrendous.”

Extreme heat is already forcing schools to postpone sports days and cancel trips, while some primaries are having to resort to “hot play”, where children are kept indoors because it is simply too hot to go outside.

Air conditioning ‘only real solution’

The problem is that most schools are not built to cope with temperatures that regularly hit 35C.

“Many schools don’t have any ventilation systems other than opening and closing windows,” said Tim Fulford, a teacher and National Education Union health and safety representative. In some of the newer Blair-era private finance initiative (PFI) schools “you can’t even do that”.

Last month, a landmark report from the government’s Climate Change Committee warned the UK is “built for a climate that no longer exists today and will be increasingly distant in years to come”.

Among its many recommendations was a call for air conditioning to be installed in all schools within 25 years.

This is the “only real solution”, said Sanghani, “but they’re never going to fit out all schools with AC. The cost would be astronomical.”

In the meantime, the CCC has said exams should be held at cooler times of the year. It cited research that showed taking a test on a 32C day reduces a pupil’s chance of passing by around 10% compared with a 22C day.

The UK Health Security Agency has gone further, advising that schools should “consider rearranging school start, finish and play times to avoid teaching during very hot conditions”. This happens in countries like France, which have longer summer holidays and have earlier start and finish times on very hot days.

“That would still be an inconvenience for parents to have to find childcare solutions, but it’s the best solution I can think of,” said Sanghani. “I’d personally be very happy to start the teaching day earlier when it’s cooler and head home by the time it gets unbearable.”

As rabid fans pack stadiums for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, some of the tournament’s most contentious issues are not about what the players say or do but what they wear. Several countries have put themselves in the crosshairs of political debates regarding their team jerseys, and in some cases FIFA has been forced to intervene.

Colombia

Colombia’s iconic yellow soccer kit became “embroiled in the country’s bitterly disputed presidential election, sparking debate over whether the yellow shirt should be used at political rallies,” said The Associated Press. Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing presidential candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump, turned the Colombian jersey “into his campaign’s official attire,” said The New York Times, with thousands of de la Espriella’s supporters donning the athletic wear.

Sen. Iván Cepeda, de la Espriella’s leftist opponent, “slammed his rival’s choice of apparel, accusing him of stealing a national symbol,” said the AP. But despite Cepeda’s anger, the sea of yellow jerseys seemingly propelled de la Espriella over the finish line, as he appeared to narrowly defeat Cepeda in the June 21 election, becoming Colombia’s president-elect.

Egypt

Egypt is playing in the World Cup with a major change to their uniforms, as their jerseys are “not bearing the stars commemorating their seven Africa Cup of Nations victories, following a reminder from FIFA,” said ESPN. The Egyptian national team typically wears jerseys emblazoned with the stars to “recognize each of their continental triumphs,” but such a display is not allowed by FIFA.

FIFA’s being involved in the stars’ removal marks a shift from normal procedure. Typically, the “accompanying of stars to commemorate historical honors on kits is at the discretion of national teams themselves, with different national federations opting to interpret the guidelines in different ways,” said ESPN. But for the World Cup, FIFA told the Egyptian team that stars may only appear on jerseys to “commemorate victories in the competition itself.”

Haiti

Haiti’s 2026 World Cup outing marked the team’s first appearance in the tournament in 52 years. Though the team was eliminated early, the jerseys generated plenty of buzz. The team was forced to alter their jersey design after FIFA “deemed certain elements to be too political in nature,” said The Guardian. FIFA’s issue was with the “shirt’s right hip, which depicted silhouettes inspired by the Battle of Vertières and the Haitian Revolution.” One of these silhouettes represented Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Many supporters were angry that FIFA forced Haiti to adopt the change. FIFA’s decision is part of an “effort to discredit the Haitian Revolution,” and the “mere implication of Dessalines, standing alongside his fellow revolutionaries, was enough to elicit a backlash,” Julia Gaffield, a history professor at William & Mary College, said at The Conversation. Despite FIFA’s decision, the jersey has “become a fan favorite” and is still sold on the manufacturer’s website.

Mexico

Mexico is one of the three co-hosts at this year’s World Cup, but even hosts can spark drama. The nation’s iconic green jersey “brings back the Aztec calendar design that was popular in the 1990s,” said The Associated Press, but the manner in which the jerseys were made sparked an uproar among some indigenous Mexican artists.

The jerseys were “embroidered by hand by 150 Nahua women high in the mountains of central Mexico, in a tiny town called Naupan,” said The New York Times, but activists have accused the manufacturers of “exploiting the Nahua women while profiting off their image.” There are “murky details behind the Adidas collaboration with the artisans of Naupan,” Luz Valdez, a Mexican activist and influencer, said in a translated TikTok video. The artists were reportedly “not even allowed to use their traditional sewing method.”

Back in 2001, his plan to start a rocket company seemed so misguided, his friends urged him to abandon it.

Last Friday, Elon Musk listed SpaceX on the Nasdaq at an initial valuation of $1.77 trillion. The largest flotation in history, it blasted Musk into the stratosphere as the world’s first trillionaire.

Eye-popping valuation

What makes the flotation doubly extraordinary, said Boris Johnson in The Mail on Sunday, is that it amounted to a punt, a gamble on one man’s vision for the future. In a nutshell, Musk plans to use the $86 billion capital injection to build thousands of huge, fully reusable Starship rockets, which will slash the cost of sending mass into space. These will be used to launch data centres into orbit, so that they can tap into the energy of the Sun to power our ever-growing use of AI, along with thousands more Starlink satellites, to bring reliable internet access to the three billion people who still do not have it.

With the revenue this generates, Musk will build a city on Mars. How exactly this will “butter our parsnips” on Earth, we still do not know; but what a thrilling prospect this is for humankind.

On paper, the flotation makes little sense, said John Rapley on UnHerd. SpaceX has never generated a profit; its eye-popping valuation is based on a price-to-sales ratio of 92 to one – way above the 3.6 to one average in the S&P 500. That the IPO succeeded was due in large part to excitable forecasts by investment banks who stood to make vast sums from it; but it is also the case that many investors have faith in Musk’s ability to make science fiction a reality.

A move to Mars?

His plans are hugely ambitious, said The Economist. They depend on Starship, which is already late; and tech that doesn’t even exist yet. But Musk has defied sceptics before: people said he’d never be able to land rockets for reuse; now his firm does it twice a week. And 10,000 of his Starlink satellites are already beaming internet access to 12 million people – as well as to various arms of the US government.

Of course, some people will hate the idea of doing anything that adds to Musk’s wealth and power, said Will Dunn in The New Statesman. Others, who do not object to his hard-right political interventions, may worry that his commercial vision is crackpot: cities on distant planets sounds exciting, but you have to wonder how many people will want to move from Earth – which has “terrific amenities including a magnetic field and an atmosphere” – to the toxic deserts of Mars.

But most of us will be giving Musk money, like it or not. SpaceX and Tesla are now such a huge presence in the market, there will hardly be a retirement or savings fund that is not invested in them.

“Those who saw the video will not easily forget it,” said Rory Carroll in The Guardian. It showed an assailant sat astride his victim on a street in north Belfast, stabbing him in the face and neck, while shouting in Arabic.

Passers-by intervened to help Stephen Ogilvie, who was badly hurt during the attack last Monday; he lost an eye and suffered other injuries. And “the judicial system was fast”: less than two days later, Hadi Alodid, 30, a Sudanese refugee, was charged with attempted murder.

But long before that, said George Odling in The Times, the footage had spread around the world. Tommy Robinson, who was in Moscow, shared it with his two million followers on X/Twitter barely an hour after the attack, saying it showed an “invader trying to behead a man”. Elon Musk called on people to protest. Anti-immigrant activists in Northern Ireland were quick to latch on, posting meeting points for mass protests, and disseminating “hit lists” of migrants' homes and hostels.

Before nightfall the following day, protesters had closed arterial routes around Belfast, said The Economist. Petrol bombs were then thrown at police; a bus and police vehicles were set on fire; 12 officers were injured. But foreigners were the real targets. Doors were kicked in, cars and homes torched. Ugandan care workers, Indian IT professionals and a Middle Eastern supermarket were attacked, said Sky News. A family with a young child had to be evacuated in an armoured police car as their home went up in flames. In Glengormley, a mob targeted a hotel that housed asylum seekers.

‘Migration back door’

The violence was “disgusting”, said The Times, but the “clichéd condemnation” that followed failed to acknowledge the root cause: immigration. “The general perception is that legal and illegal immigration is out of control, that Britain is a soft touch”, and that millions are being spent on refugees who can pose a real danger to UK citizens. The issue now poses an “explosive” threat to “national stability”.

This case also exposes another huge hole in our borders, said David Frost in The Daily Telegraph. Alodid had travelled to Northern Ireland via Paris and Dublin. It's unclear how he was able to fly to the Republic, without a visa; but once there, because of the Common Travel Area, he was able to enter Northern Ireland without passing through immigration controls. When anyone from any country who can get into Ireland can get into the UK, “we have a migration back door”.

It is “asinine” to accept the far-right claim that these riots were an expression of serious concerns about immigration, said Séamas O'Reilly in The New Statesman. An alleged crime by a single Sudanese man in no way explains or justifies rioters “carrying out a pogrom against every migrant or non-white person” they can find. We would never see attacks on white British people as a legitimate response to murders committed by white Britons. For those of us who always find such justifications dubious, it's revealing to see them deployed in Northern Ireland, “where immigration barely exists”. Only 3% of its population belong to an ethnic minority. Net international migration, from 2001 to 2023, reached just 62,000 people in a country of two million; there are currently about 2,400 refugees.

Disturbing new politics

In fact, the “chilling thing” is how familiar last week's riots felt, said Michael Magee in The Independent. “I wish I could say that this is not the Belfast I grew up in, but loyalist mobs rampaging through the city is nothing new to us.” Most, if not all, of the rioting took place in unionist areas; instead of contested parade routes or flag disputes, the “orchestrated violence” was directed at a new enemy: immigrants and asylum seekers.

The awful thing is that “immigration riots work”, said Max Jeffery in The Spectator. The Roma whose homes were burned in Ballymena in County Antrim last year have not returned. The asylum seekers and immigrants attacked last week will likely move away.

We are seeing a disturbing new politics in Britain, said Jason Okundaye in The Guardian, stoked by the smartphone and social media. The public is now consistently fed a stream of shocking, graphic images – such as the footage of a dying Henry Nowak, or of Stephen Ogilvie being attacked – which previously would have been seen only by investigators or in a courtroom. Politicians of the hard-right exploit these to foment rage and disorder, pushing a narrative of a UK invaded by third-world criminals.

Yet it would be wrong to blame everything on social media, said Janice Turner in The Times. It's hard to ignore the many “vicious, unprovoked” crimes committed by refugees, particularly those fleeing extreme violence – in, for instance, Sudan or Afghanistan. Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, noted last week that refugee rights can conflict with “national security”. Britain needs to grasp this issue, “or get used to riots”.

David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was widely considered to have been Britain’s greatest living artist, said The Daily Telegraph. Instantly recognisable, with his bleached-blond hair, round glasses, impish smile and “ever-smouldering cigarette”, he was for decades a subject of fascination to the world’s media, as Picasso had been a generation earlier. And just as Picasso once commented that he never produced a painting as a work of art – it was all research – Hockney was a man of restless curiosity, who for more than 60 years never stopped the process of experimentation and reinvention.

What drove him was an intense need to understand “the way the world works, how the eye sees it and how the brush sets it down”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “What happens when raindrops strike still water? Or a body breaks the surface of a swimming pool? How do you capture a glass of water, transparency on transparency, or shafts of sunlight on a polished parquet floor?”

He was a superb draughtsman, but there was no medium he would not try in his effort to depict the world as it is seen. He worked in oils, acrylics, watercolours, charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, felt-tips, crayons; he produced etchings and drypoints; and made use Polaroid cameras, Xerox photocopiers, inkjet printers and the iPad. His inspirations ranged from Monet to Chinese scrolls to the Bayeux Tapestry, and he found inspiration in everything California’s epic landscapes to the graffiti in public lavatories.

Accessible superstar

He was fascinated by the mechanics of image-making, said Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic – and, as he put it, “any technology that is about pictures”. In 2001, he published an art historical book in which he laid out his carefully researched but hotly debated theory that the likes of Caravaggio and van Eyck had used devices such as concave mirrors and projecting lenses to achieve realism.

Hockney’s work was not always universally admired by the critics; but his aim, he said, had never been to please a room full of art-world insiders, but to make pictures that were appreciated by a lot of people. And he did. People flocked to his exhibitions; their posters became collectors’ items. In 2018, one of the sun-drenched paintings he produced in California – 1972’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” – became the most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction, at $90 million.

Yet neither his enormous success, nor the glamorous circles in which he moved – in Los Angeles, Paris and London – seemed fundamentally to change him. “The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich,” he said. “I’ve been rich ever since... You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.” He retained a deep-seated seriousness about his work and a ferocious dedication to it; he was not a regular on any party circuit. And he never ceased to be a Yorkshireman (nor did he lose his accent, which he said might have been partly due to his inherited deafness: he started losing his hearing in his 40s).

He was an art-world superstar, who somehow conveyed a sense of being personally accessible. Modest, direct and down to earth, he remained close to his family (he spent every Christmas with his parents until their deaths) and for a period in the latter part of his life, he lived in the seaside town of Bridlington, in east Yorkshire. Over the years, he attained a level of popularity “that has eluded younger British artists”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, “and has more in common with that of David Attenborough” or Queen Elizabeth II.

Grammar school boy

David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth of five children. His mother, Laura, was a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, while his father, Kenneth, who worked as an accounts clerk and also restored prams and bicycles, had been a conscientious objector, and was a militant anti-smoker.

Hockney inherited a propensity for strongly held views, but he famously campaigned for the right of smokers to smoke, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. He loved tobacco, he said. He kept 2,000 cigarettes at home “for emergencies”, and liked to point out that he had outlived four doctors who’d advised him to kick the habit. He held a sign reading “DEATH awaits you all even if you do not smoke” at a Labour Party conference in 2005, and from 2012 he sported a badge saying: “End bossiness soon”.

Hockney grew up during the War, and money was tight, but from the age of three, he drew where he could – even on the kitchen floor. Years later, he said that being gay in that era had not been as hard for him as it might have been, because he had always felt set apart by his talent. To his parents’ delight, he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, but the boys in the top stream were not given much time in the art room, so he determinedly dropped down the divisions. In one science paper, he left the answers blank, and wrote “am no good at science but I can draw” above a sketch of the invigilator.

At 16, he was awarded a grant to attend Bradford School of Art. On his first day, he turned up in a suit, bowler hat and red scarf, but while his dress sense was outlandish, his work ethic was even then decidedly Protestant, said Sam Woodhouse on BBC News: he was at his easel for 12 hours a day. Later, he kept by his bed a sign reading: “GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY”.

Extraordinary talent

He sold his first painting, a portrait of his father, in 1957, for £10. By then, the themes that would preoccupy him were already evident, said The Daily Telegraph: “a cool self-interest, a strong sense of pattern, the contrast between stillness and movement, surface and depth”. He refused to do National Service, and spent two years scrubbing floors as a hospital orderly instead. In 1959, he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where his contemporaries included Allen Jones and R.B. Kitaj.

Figurative art was regarded as over in the early 1960s. Hockney gave the fashionable abstract expressionism a try, but found it unsatisfying. Eventually, he took Kitaj's advice – to paint the things that he loved, that interested him and mattered to him. In his second year at the RCA, he produced “We Two Boys Together Clinging” – the title refers to a Walt Whitman poem. It depicts two blob-like figures locked in an embrace. Numbered codes indicate that they represent the artist and his unrequited crush, Cliff Richard. Homosexual acts would not be decriminalised for another six years, but Hockney did not stay long in the closet. “Never worry about what the neighbours think,” had been his father’s advice.

To graduate, he was required to write a thesis. He refused to comply, stubbornly insisting that he be judged on his art alone. Recognising the extraordinary nature of his talent, the RCA not only made an exception for him, it awarded him a gold medal. He turned up to the ceremony wearing a gold lamé jacket. His sartorial style evolved over the years but was never less than eye-catching. “Yellow galoshes,” exclaimed King Charles delightedly, when he spotted the Crocs that Hockney had paired with a Savile Row checked suit for a lunch at Buckingham Palace in 2022. “Beautifully chosen!”

Out west

A star straight from art school, he was taken on by the dealer John Kasmin, who oversaw his production of “A Rake’s Progress”, a series of etchings inspired by a visit to New York in 1961. He’d relished the energy of the city and its more permissive attitudes, and these semi-abstract etchings depicted the rake cruising in Central Park, dying his hair and drinking in gay bars. Kasmin marketed them at £250 a set. With the proceeds, Hockney flew back to New York in 1963, and then on to Los Angeles. Other artists were drawn to Manhattan, said The Times, but he told interviewers that he found its lines too vertical.

As the plane made its descent, he was struck by the sight of hundreds of swimming pools twinkling blue in the sunshine. “My God,” he recalled thinking. “This place needs its Piranesi... so here I am.” Los Angelinos would later tell him, he said, that they had not really noticed the palm trees until he started painting them. As well as California’s sunlight and blue skies, he embraced its sense of freedom, and its open gay culture. He rented a flat in Santa Monica, and within a few months he had flown his parents out from Bradford to visit him. En route from the airport, his mother gazed out of the window, apparently rapt by these strange surroundings. “I don’t understand it,” she eventually remarked. “Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.”

His first California picture was 1964's “Plastic Tree Plus City Hall”, said The Guardian, which celebrated the flat artificiality of LA, what the critic Robert Hughes called its role as a “glaring, over-lit, antiseptic madhouse”. To paint it, he had swapped his oils for acrylics. Doing away with surface texture, these plastic-based paints were perfect for capturing the bright colours and – “that signifier of a shallow”, more hedonistic world – “the dappled surface of a chlorinated pool”. The same year, he produced “Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool”. It is “poster-like” but – like the artist who painted it – its “frivolity is deceptive”. This is a “polished, late-modernist work”, with an “interplay of surface and depth” that draws “on its maker's knowledge of Matisse and Cézanne”. A voracious reader, Hockney was highly learned.

He followed it up with the pool paintings that remain among his most famous, including “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool”, featuring the tan-lined bottom of Peter Schlesinger, his muse and lover, and 1967’s “A Bigger Splash”. In 1973 that work lent its name to a semi-fictionalised documentary about the artist. Shot over three years, it was focused on Hockney's painful break-up Schlesinger, his partner from 1966. Hockney repeatedly painted his partners, his friends and the other people around him, while refusing most commissions. The art critic Waldemar Januszczak once asked why he had never painted the late Queen. “Because I didn’t know her,” he replied.

Artistic evolution

In the 1970s, he produced a series of double portraits. One was of Christopher Isherwood (an avid collector of his work) and his partner Don Bachardy. “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” shows the fashion designer Ossie Clark, his wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell (Hockney’s muse for several decades), and their cat (actually Blanche), in their flat in Notting Hill. The painting was a wedding present; but the conventions of wedding portraiture are overturned (she stands, he sits) and the portrait hints at the complexities of the couple’s relationship. He also painted his parents. In “My Parents”, his mother sits upright, staring lovingly at her son, her face illuminated by light from an unseen window; his father looks restless, as he sits hunched over a book. There is a space between them. “It is a tender picture about the failure of communication,” said The New York Times, “and the loving acceptance of that.”

The 1980s were a difficult period. As HIV-Aids ravaged LA’s gay community, Hockney saw countless friends and acquaintances fall sick and die. That his hearing was starting to deteriorate left him further isolated. Professionally, he moved away from painting and started to work on his “joiners” – hundreds of photographs (initially Polaroids) that he stitched together in an effort to create images that encompassed multiple viewpoints. He called this new cubism. Later on in the decade, he began experimenting with photocopies, and also distributed his drawings to friends via fax machines. Having produced evocative set and costume designs for “The Rake's Progress” at Glyndebourne in the mid-1970s, he embarked on major projects for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. More intimately, he painted and drew his beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, over and over again.

Meanwhile, he had continued to paint his mother, on his many visits home. She died in 1999, aged 98. A few years later, he left LA and settled in the Edwardian villa overlooking the sea that he had bought for her, in Bridlington. From his studio nearby, he produced a series of monumental paintings of the Wolds landscape. These formed the basis of “A Bigger Picture” – a record-breaking exhibition at the RA in 2012. The following year tragedy struck when his 23-year-old studio assistant, Dominic Elliott, was found dead in his house after a drink and drugs bender. Hockney – who had been asleep at the time – was devastated. Soon after, he moved to Normandy with his partner of two decades, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, where he captured the shifting landscape on an iPad. During the March 2020 lockdown, he sent out a new iPad drawing of yellow daffodils against a grey field, with the message: “Do remember they can’t cancel spring.” He was at heart an optimist, who signed off emails to friends with the words: “Love life.”

Over the years, Hockney was offered countless honours and turned most down – including a knighthood. He did, however, accept the Order of Merit. It was a personal gift from the then-Queen, and he reasoned that it would be ungracious to reject it. Arguably, the honour he most appreciated came in 2007, said Sam Woodhouse. At a dinner at Tate Britain to mark his 70th birthday, it was announced that the smoke alarms would be turned off for ten minutes at the end, so that Hockney could have a cigarette with his coffee.

The internet is awash with jokes about the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which is now riddled with algae.

The Trump administration spent more than $14 million (£10.5 million) draining the pool and painting the bottom “American flag blue” in time for the 250th anniversary of US independence. The president had described the reflecting pool – the scene of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech – as “filthy” and “dirty”, and promised to transform it into something “beautiful”. Instead, residual algae has “proliferated” in warm weather, said The Guardian, turning the pond “Wicked” green.

Something positive that can be said about the pool’s algal bloom is that it’s harmless. But toxic algae blooms are a worldwide phenomenon that can harm humans and devastate marine life. And as the climate crisis warms the water, the problem is growing.

‘Underwater phantom’

“Algal blooms are a rapid, explosive growth of algae,” said pharmacology researcher Ian Musgrave on The Conversation. Blue-green algae, known as cyanobacteria, naturally occur in inland waters, estuaries and the sea. They often contain multiple species, some of which produce toxins. The “bewildering variety” can cause many effects in humans, from nausea and skin irritation to increased asthma symptoms and even liver failure. Those that don’t produce toxins can “suffocate fish” by damaging the gills and reducing oxygen.

For a year now, a toxic algal bloom in South Australia has had “devastating effects” on wildlife. “At my local beach, walks were a sad parade of dead sea life,” said Musgrave.

Since last March, algae have “flared at hotspots” along the coastline, causing “stinging eyes, coughing, rashes, headaches and breathing difficulties” among surfers, said ABC. One swimmer was hospitalised with severe gastroenteritis. “It was like razor blades in my gut,” he said. “I was rolling around on the floor in the emergency room, coughing and spewing blood.”

Along the “jagged coastline”, it has become “an underwater phantom”, and researchers are “not entirely sure why”, said The New York Times. Beachgoers are “horrified by the dead animals washing ashore”. Since February last year, a crowdsourced platform has recorded more than 100,000 instances of dead sea life. “It was literally just like an underwater bushfire,” said a recreational fisherman.

Recent citizen science data suggests the bloom affected nearly 8,000 square miles. Last October, state agency scientists estimated the algae had impacted about a third of South Australia’s coasts. The psychological effect is enormous: in a survey of South Australians last July, nearly 70% said “they were repeatedly thinking about the bloom”, said researcher Brianna Le Busque, from Adelaide University. Some compared seeing the washed-up marine life to “the death of a loved one”.

‘Visible from space’

Harmful algal blooms stalk shores far beyond Australia. In Southern California last year an “unprecedented, multi-toxin event” killed hundreds of seabirds, sea lions and dolphins, said the Public Policy Institute of California.

Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, the UK’s largest freshwater lake, has also been blighted by blue-green algae for years. This “majestic landscape of water and sky”, the inspiration for Seamus Heaney’s prize-winning poetry, is “choking on recurring toxic algal blooms”, said The Guardian.

The algae feed on high levels of nutrients in the water, mainly from agriculture (farm run-off, fertiliser and livestock waste), as well as “inadequate wastewater treatment”. Global warming has also increased the temperature of the lough, encouraging the abundant blooms. Last year, there were 243 detections of cyanobacteria growths, according to Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs: a record.

In some places, the green sludge – “so widespread it is visible from space”, said The Guardian – forms “patterns and swirls redolent of Gustav Klimt”. But far from picturesque, the blooms “coat the surface, kill wildlife, unleash stenches and make the lake all but unusable”. The impact on wildlife and tourism is “incalculable”.

“Lough Neagh is dying in front of our eyes,” said Claire Hanna, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Images of fish and eels gasping for life on the surface are not just shocking – they are a stark warning of total ecological collapse.”

Two Ukrainian men have been found guilty of plotting arson attacks last year on property relating to Keir Starmer.

The trial of Roman Lavrynovych, 22, Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, and a third man was “strange”, said the BBC, “mainly because the true author of the drama was never revealed”.

But as more details of the case come to light it has revealed a shadowy network of online provocation and misinformation allegedly orchestrated from Russia that constitutes what the PM called “an attack on democracy” itself.

El Money

During the six-week trial at the Old Bailey, jurors heard that the fires at Starmer’s former family home and other related targets were ordered by a Russian-speaking handler on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Going by the pseudonym “El Money”, he directed Lavrynovych to carry out the attacks in exchange for promises of payment in cryptocurrency.

A Financial Times investigation “based on Telegram archives, cryptocurrency wallets, court evidence and interviews with Western officials” established that El Money was “located in Russia and was closely aligned with NoName057(16), a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group that the US has called a Russian ‘state-sanctioned project’”.

But the Russian embassy told the BBC: “We reject any attempt to associate Russia or its foreign ministry with unlawful activities.” It said that Russia poses “no threat to the United Kingdom or its people and harbours no aggressive intentions towards Britain”.

Now the BBC has identified evidence suggesting that El Money, or EL as he was known on Telegram, “is a young Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow”. The broadcaster named him as 23-year-old Evgeny Lyukshin, the son of a senior official.

It concluded that the arson attack was “just one part of an extensive campaign of sabotage, provocation and lies leading all the way to the Russian state”.

Part of this misinformation campaign included a “conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the arsonists were male prostitutes seeking revenge” on the PM, said The i Paper. Research by The i Paper and the Center for Countering Digital Hate charted the false “rent boy” rumour, which first emerged online less than 15 minutes after Lavrynovych was arrested and before it was made public by the police. The rumour spread from a “handful of small X accounts, through a network of far right activists and conspiracy theorists, into Russian media outlets and widespread online circulation”.

The accounts where the claim originated did not appear to be directly part of Russian disinformation networks. But Melanie Smith, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said Russian propagandists continually “monitor the online ecosystem” – particularly the far right in Europe – “trying to figure out which narratives are circulating and which ones of those work to their advantage”.

Russia’s war against the West

While not proven in court, the alleged involvement of Russia “points to a series of incidents in recent years, which, though piecemeal and hard to prove, lay bare how Russia’s intelligence services have moved towards a new kind of attack on the West”, said The Guardian.

“Dozens of people” have been detained across Europe – in Britain, Lithuania, France and Estonia – “accused of being foot soldiers in a new front of Russia’s war against the West”. This “war” includes Moscow-backed campaigns of “sabotage, arson and disinformation against the continent”.

Russian nationalist cyber groups like NoName, linked by the FT to last year’s London arson attacks, “have sought to recruit proxies online to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests, as well as foment disorder across Europe by amplifying far-right and anti-migrant messages”.

Britain, in particular, has become a “soft target” for Russian and other state propaganda because of a failure to educate people on how to deal with information warfare. This leaves it “extraordinarily vulnerable”, security expert Fiona Hill told a recent parliamentary committee.

“As it becomes harder to convince Russians that their own country is on the up, Vladimir Putin is instead presenting the West as not just hostile but in crisis”, said historian Mark Galeotti in The i Paper. The Kremlin “eagerly mines the news for stories it can spin, shade and downright misrepresent to advance these lines”, and Starmer’s misfiring government is “offering ample opportunities”.

As one staffer at the state-controlled Channel One news operation in Moscow said of the UK government: “There’s a combination of belligerence and incompetence there, a self-righteousness and lack of self-awareness that is just too good to pass up.”

Two years ago, it was brat summer. This year, for summer 2026, everyone is wrapping themselves in a new trend: whimsy. From dopamine-spiking decor to more childlike, bright clothes, adults are romanticizing the smallest aspects of their lives and fully running with a lighthearted outlook.

Bring on the ‘childlike joy’

The word whimsy and the vibe associated with it are “having a moment,” thanks to Gen Z and millennials who have “recast the word to characterize a lifestyle that blends playfulness, spontaneity and being present,” said The New York Times. Searches on Etsy for “whimsical jewelry,” “whimsical decor” and “whimsy-related items” were each up by at least 50% from last year.

Shoppers use whimsy as a “form of everyday escapism, seeking out pieces that feel personal, playful and a little unexpected to make everyday life more extraordinary,” said Dayna Isom Johnson, Etsy’s trend expert, to the Times. The craze puts an “emphasis on offline activities” that parallels a “movement by young people who are leaving behind smartphones and screens,” the outlet said.

Being whimsical is about “bringing levity to life when you can,” said Business Insider. The trend is flooded with lively colors and playful accessories.

Whimsy is “easier to recognize than to translate," said NSS Magazine. It is not “just an aesthetic” but a “different way of inhabiting one’s days.” For those who relish it, being whimsical means “reconnecting with what as children seemed natural: to be amazed, to invent, to celebrate even the smallest things.”

Chasing authenticity

Whimsy devotees see it as a “response to compounding anxieties over a series of stressors, including a challenging economy, multiple wars and a volatile presidency,” said the Times. No one can control “what our leaders are doing,” but you can control “what kind of mug you’re going to choose, what cute outfit you’re going to wear and what beautiful thing you can do in your morning,” podcaster Liz Plank said to the Times.

In the age of the internet, millennials and Gen Z face a more intense flood of information than ever before. Whimsy offers an escape from the more performative aspects of social media, Nassir Ghaemi, a psychiatry professor, said to the Times. These online experiences have been “going on now long enough” that Generation Z and millennials have figured out that a “lot of these online interactions are inauthentic.”

With how swiftly the trend cycle swerves, the whimsical moment may not last. Gen Z, in particular, has “grown up in a context in which almost everything can be turned into merchandise,” said NSS Magazine. Many trends are “intercepted, packaged and resold as a product,” as has happened in the past with viral terms such as “girl math, girl dinner or demure.” All were “born for fun” but became “tools for overconsumption.”

Still, when whimsy is “understood in its purest, most spontaneous and curious sense,” said NSS Magazine, then it can be read as an “attempt to withdraw from the pressure of constant consumption, choosing to live with more freedom.” A whimsical life can be a “small form of everyday resistance.”

College graduates have been booing company bosses who mentioned artificial intelligence in graduation ceremonies as “AI anxiety” starts “boiling over into public backlash”, said Business Insider.

The trend is “highlighting a gulf” between older generations who feel the technology “offers new opportunities” and Gen Z, who are “growing increasingly anxious” about what it “means for their future”.

Backlash and resistance

A Gallup survey in April found excitement about AI among Gen Z has fallen from 36% last year to just 22%, while their anger towards the technology has risen by nine points, to 31%. Another survey, carried out by Numerator, found that among Gen Z people who don’t use AI, 57% are not open to adopting it, compared to just 32% of boomers.

“Read that again,” said Fortune – “older Americans are more open to AI than young ones”. It seems that a “surprising segment of the generation that was supposed to lead AI adoption” is actually “leading the resistance to it”. For them, AI was “foisted upon them” by their “parents, big tech CEOs” and Donald Trump.

“Every technology young people have ever loved”, like video games, social media and the internet itself, came to them as “play or transgression”, but AI “arrived as a mandate” from schools and employers. Also, Gen Z prizes “authenticity above almost everything” and AI “attacks” that.

Young people “were sold on the promise that a college education secured a good future”, but now employers are “gutting entry-level positions” in favour of AI, said Denison University student Jack Jackoboice in The Wall Street Journal.

A global survey found that 43% of CEOs plan to reduce junior roles, so young people are “actively being written out of a future” they have “no control over”.

A backlash is taking shape. Some Gen Z workers are “actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives” by feeding sensitive company data into public AI tools and by “intentionally producing low-quality, AI-assisted junk work” to make the technology “look unreliable”, said Vice.

Existential melodrama

But Gallup found that over half of 14- to 29-year-olds say they use AI daily or weekly, and some Gen Z-ers do see an upside in AI.

The “danger” is that “economic anxiety” can “curdle into existential melodrama”, said Ethan Tran, a student at Davidson College, in The Wall Street Journal. “Fear underrates human ingenuity”, so young people shouldn’t “hide from replacement” but “look for opportunities that arise from the transformation”.

The CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta, also gave short shrift to AI anxiety, when graduates at Middle Tennessee State University booed him for saying that AI is rewriting the music industry. He told the hecklers: “You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

Weeks after successfully squaring up to Elon Musk in court, Sam Altman is preparing to challenge his old adversary “on a different plane”, said Bloomberg. Days before SpaceX’s expected debut, his company OpenAI – which kicked off the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 – has “filed confidentially” for an IPO, setting the stage for the third mega-listing this year, after SpaceX and Anthropic.

Despite reportedly missing “certain internal revenue and user-growth targets” and losing several key executives, OpenAI recently raised $122 billion from private investors at an $852 billion valuation. But the details of its IPO plan are being kept deliberately vague. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while.”

In fact, OpenAI’s decision to go public, potentially this autumn, “rests more on the outcome of SpaceX’s IPO ... than on just about anything else”, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. It remains an open question whether there is “enough investor capacity for three giant IPOs, potentially in rapid succession” – particularly as already listed giants are also tapping the market. “Wall Street is rushing to fund the AI bonanza in every conceivable way,” said Sam Goldfarb in The Wall Street Journal. Google parent Alphabet last week raised $85 billion; Meta is also weighing a stock offer.

OpenAI might usefully streamline its sprawling product line-up before listing. Indeed, Altman and co are plotting “the biggest overhaul of ChatGPT” since its launch – aiming for a “superapp” that combines both coding tools and AI agents, said Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times. The move reflects the company’s “growing conviction” that “the future of AI lies not in chatbots that answer questions, but in agents that perform tasks”. As one senior honcho put it: “Chat is dead.”

What the US is trying to do in Kenya reeks of “neo-colonialism”, said The Daily Nation (Nairobi). To protect Americans from the deadly Ebola outbreak that is thought to have already killed at least 91 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Trump administration has decreed that no one with the disease may enter its borders, even if they’re a US citizen. Any American unlucky enough to have contracted the virus in DRC should instead be sent for treatment hundreds of miles away to a specially commissioned Ebola health centre in Kenya.

Cue outrage in Nairobi. “Kenya is NOT America’s biohazard dumping ground,” fumed a spokesman for one of Kenya’s doctors’ unions, echoing widespread fury at the proposal to set up a 50-bed quarantine facility at Kenya’s Laikipia Air Base. And hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base, fearing the disease might spread to their community. They blocked roads and set fire to tyres, and police had to fire tear gas to disperse them.

According to some reports, two people were shot dead. Yet despite the uproar, and a temporary court order blocking the site’s construction, Kenya’s President William Ruto has vowed to press ahead with it.

Potentially ‘catastrophic’

The debacle in Kenya is far from the only mistake the US has made over the Ebola crisis, said The East African (Nairobi). “Epidemics are best fought collectively”, but under Trump the US has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and shut down USAID, scuppering the international response needed to stem the current outbreak, which has now spread to Uganda.

Trump’s decisions have been disastrous, said Craig Spencer in The New York Times. Over the past year, critical surveillance networks in DRC have been dismantled, with the result that US officials only learnt of the first Ebola death a month after it happened, making it inevitable that the outbreak would turn “catastrophic” in scale.

To put this in context, the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, which broke out in Guinea in 2014, went on to kill 11,300 and infect 28,600 others. That outbreak was first detected when there were around 40 to 50 cases; for this one, that number was 400 to 500. And to make matters worse, rapid tests and vaccines do not exist for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola that is behind this latest epidemic.

“We are not getting ahead of this virus. We are running after it,” said Denis Mukwege in Le Monde (Paris). It’s already the third-largest outbreak in history, and could well become the deadliest ever.

Deep mistrust

The challenges facing teams on the ground are immense. For a start, the epicentre of the outbreak is war-torn eastern DRC, where conditions make contact-tracing almost impossible. And as the US has cut aid to the DRC from $1.34 billion in 2024 to just $428 million in 2025, local responders have “far fewer resources” than in any comparable recent crisis.

To add to the crisis, front-line health workers are “deeply” mistrusted by the local population, said The Economist. Look what happened two weeks ago in the small town of Mongbwalu in northern DRC, where a group of young men made four different attacks on the local hospital in a bid to retrieve the body of an Ebola victim for burial. The day before that, townsfolk had torched an isolation unit.

The crucial requirement is for the response to be consolidated under a single actor, just as it was for the 2014 outbreak when the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) took charge, said Anthony Banbury in The Washington Post. Congolese health workers and international NGOs have done an excellent job so far, but the lack of coordination has been a serious hindrance. “It is like going to war with scattered, independent military units, but no central headquarters directing the overall effort.”

In the absence of a body like UNMEER to devise and oversee a strategy for containing the outbreak, this epidemic could “spin out of control”. And then the world would be in real trouble.

Though caffeine remains the world’s most widely consumed drug, some people are turning to a smaller dosage to achieve their morning kick. A slew of lower-caffeine drinks are hitting the market as consumers look for ways to shake the negative effects of caffeine, while still having their daily cup of coffee.

‘Experimenting with a new range of options’

Even as millions of Americans consume mass quantities of caffeinated drinks, some question their caffeine intake. Many started “experimenting with a new range of options beyond the traditional cup of hot java, paying heed to caffeine’s impact on their sleep, mood and energy level,” said Bloomberg. Some people still consume multiple caffeinated drinks per day, but others are “becoming more cognizant of ‘energy management’ in their beverage choices,” Daniel Jhung, the president of the coffee and beverage division of Nestlé USA, told Bloomberg.

Many of the options are changing to accommodate shifting preferences. Younger consumers have begun to “embrace cold, canned beverages over hot coffee,” said Bloomberg. The change is not only evident in “rapid growth of energy drinks but also in less-supercharged options.” Sales of ready-to-drink, low-caffeinated bottles of coffee and tea were “up almost 15% in the 52 weeks ending March 22” of this year, while “sales of coffee beans and cocoa fell nearly 10%,” according to data from market research group Spins cited by Bloomberg.

A number of companies are also moving toward this trend. Panera Bread began “rolling out a new line of lightly caffeinated drinks,” said Business Insider, which comes about two years after the company’s discontinued, ultra-caffeinated Charged Lemonade was “linked to two deaths and multiple lawsuits.” While the Charged Lemonade had about 260 milligrams of caffeine, or the equivalent of three Red Bull cans, Panera’s lighter caffeinated drinks “contain about as much caffeine as a can of soda.” There has also been a resurgence in sales of Coca-Cola Zero Zero, which has no sugar or caffeine, said Bloomberg.

‘There are also some concerns about excessive consumption’

Many doctors seem to be happy that caffeine is trending the way it is due to potential health issues. Caffeine can “have positive effects on alertness, cognitive function and athletic function,” but there are also “concerns about excessive consumption and potential health risks,” said the American Medical Association (AMA). “One of the things that people don't realize is, if you think of it as a medicine, then the best way to use it is in small, frequent doses,” Dr. Shannon Kilgore, a neurologist, told the AMA.

Most people, despite the shifting tides, are consuming too much caffeine, which could have negative health effects. About 85% of adults “consume 135 milligrams of caffeine daily in the U.S.,” approximately “equivalent to 12 ounces of coffee, which is the most common source of caffeine for adults,” said the AMA. While drinking up to three cups of coffee per day “can reduce dementia risk and slow cognitive decline,” according to a recent JAMA study, even that would still be over the recommended daily dosage of caffeine.

The shift toward low-caffeine is because “health and wellness trends have persuaded many consumers to scrutinize ingredients more closely, with many trying to cut back on artificial dyes, added sugar, processed food and, in some cases, caffeine,” said Bloomberg. The anxiety of Jeremy Clark, an engineering professor in Montreal, has declined “almost to negligible levels” since he cut back on caffeine, Clark told Bloomberg. “So I think it was worth it.”

Swiss voters will decide this month whether to limit the country’s population to 10 million people. Critics say the anti-immigration measure could upend Switzerland’s economy.

The June 14 referendum has been “likened to a ‘Swiss Brexit,’” said Reuters. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party asserts that migration-driven population growth is “driving up rents and crime,” as well as pushing roads and other local infrastructure “to the limits.” They are selling the measure as a “sustainability initiative.” But opponents from the business community fear the measure would “limit Switzerland’s access to skilled labor and damage relations with the European Union.”

Foreign residents now make up 28% of the population, growing Switzerland’s population from 7.3 million to 9.1 million over the last quarter-century. Some residents are feeling the squeeze. “More and more people are living in the same space," Swiss banker and parliamentarian Thomas Matter said to Reuters.

Dismantling the ‘openness that has made the country rich’

The proposed cap features “two main measures” to curb population growth, said The New Yorker. One would impose “restrictions in the areas of asylum and family reunification” if the population exceeds 9.5 million. The other would terminate the right of European Union citizens to “work, study and live” in Switzerland if the population exceeds 10 million, a target that could arrive as soon as 2033. That would “rupture” Swiss relations with the EU and represent a dramatic shift for a country known as one of the “most cosmopolitan nations in Europe.”

Business leaders say those measures would also damage the Swiss economy. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, employs “5,000 foreign workers from 85 countries” in Zurich, said Seeking Alpha. Pharmaceutical company Roche employs thousands more. The country “cannot meet the need for bright minds on its own,” Roche CEO Severin Schwan said to shareholders earlier this year. The EU is more than a source of workers for Switzerland’s businesses, said Seeking Alpha. It is also the “biggest export destination” for Swiss products, and that business could dry up if the referendum passes.

The measure would “dismantle the openness that has made the country rich,” Joseph de Weck said at The Guardian. Switzerland’s diversified economy “keeps salaries high and income inequality comparatively low.” But there is “resentment that not everyone is getting their fair share of the pie” amid “sky-high rents and increasing urbanization,” said Bloomberg. The country should “put on the brakes before things get out of hand,” said Zurich bike shop owner Roland Meyer to the outlet.

‘Voters don’t like immigrants’

The vote reflects a “broader European trend” of right-wing parties “capitalizing on anxieties surrounding immigration, housing and public services,” said The Independent. That is creating a dilemma for EU governments. Their “rich economies” need workers to create wealth, Alan Beattie said at the Financial Times, “but their voters don’t like immigrants.”

Polling shows that “supporters and opponents are neck and neck,” said SWI, a Swiss news agency, with 52% opposed to the initiative and 45% in support. Swiss voters “vote with their wallet,” retired dentist Jan Kedzior said to Bloomberg. If the measure does pass, said the outlet, lawmakers “may try to water it down later to limit any economic fallout.”

There’s a “noble tradition” of pop stars “putting on extravaganzas” in public toilets, said Ed Potton in The Times. “Never before, though, have we had a WC this full of VIPs.”

Madonna’s new 14-minute short film “Confessions II”, which marks the release of her latest album, features a “full-throttle celebrity perv-rave” in a nightclub loo packed with famous faces from Richard E. Grant to Benedict Cumberbatch. The Queen of Pop has delivered the kind of OTT, “bells-and-whistles music video” that seemed to be “on the way out”.

‘Hide the cocaine!’

In much the same way Madonna’s “Vogue” music video became “shorthand” for “‘pointy tits’” thanks to her pink conical bra, “Confessions II” will be remembered as the “vagina laser video”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. This time, the star must traverse a shadowy forest dodging green laser beams that fire from the dancers’ crotches in a symbol of “life force and unstoppable orgone energy”.

In one of the “clever scenes, Madonna literally morphs” into Julia Garner – the actor who is set to play her in her “long-gestating, self-directed biographical film”, said Joey Nolfi in Entertainment Weekly. She also “leans even more into embracing artists” who have followed her lead, such as Sabrina Carpenter. “The baton isn’t passed as much as it’s entrusted to artists who directly (Garner) and indirectly (Carpenter) walk in Madonna’s light.”

Later, she storms into the club bathroom where Chelsea footballers Cole Palmer and João Pedro “look around in alarm” from the urinal “as you would if the Queen of Pop sashayed past when you were having a wazz”, said Potton in The Times. “Hide the cocaine!” she sings before the camera cuts to Kate Moss flipping her hair in the mirror and dancing in slow-mo. Cumberbatch delivers some “textbook dad dancing”; “cruelly dressed” in a suit, he looks like “a City trader who has stumbled into a cool party and whipped off his tie to try and blend in”.

‘Gloriously over the top’

“Confessions II” is more than just a “flashy, star-studded commercial” for Madonna’s new album, said Nolfi in Entertainment Weekly. “It’s a powerful meditation on her legacy, her future, and how the world sees her as she reaches a new dawn in a storied life that’s largely played out in arenas beyond her control.”

The film will have “generated exactly the response she will have hoped for”, said Dan Wakeford in The Independent. Cameos from the eclectic assortment of celebrities have us “agog, debating who we are most thrilled to see sharing a frame”. But she’s also created a dance floor where “barriers between worlds have come down entirely”. The inclusion of the prestigious actor Cumberbatch is a “deliberate provocation”, telling us “high culture and club culture are the same culture” and it’s “cool to include someone who has no business being there”.

In its first 24 hours the film amassed just 1.2 million views on YouTube, far behind BTS’ “Butter”, which “racked up 108.2 million views on its first day in 2021”, said Potton in The Times. But “impact is not just about YouTube clicks” and various sequences from the dream-like film are sure to be “regurgitated endlessly” on TikTok. “There are signs that the event video could be on its way back.”

Of course, there have been “predictable snarks” about how Madonna should be behaving more appropriately for her 67 years. “Nonsense. Raucous, baffling and gloriously over the top, this film is exactly what she should be doing.”

David Sullivan, billionaire owner of West Ham United, has resigned as the football club’s co-chair to fight accusations by seven women of “sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour”.

A joint investigation by The Times and the BBC’s “Panorama” revealed claims that women were offered spots as “regular girls” in the tabloid newspapers he owned if they agreed to have sex with him. Two women were told that refusing would mean “damaging their future modelling careers”.

Sullivan “made a fortune from selling sex in the pre-internet world of adult magazines, films, telephone chat lines and newspapers filled with topless glamour models and teenage girls”, said the BBC. He was known as the “king of porn”.

In a statement released by West Ham, Sullivan, 77, said he “categorically” denies all the allegations, which he characterised as “decades-old”, “factually incorrect and entirely false”.

“Many inside the game will be taking in the news of Sullivan’s departure,” said The Guardian, “and reflecting on how a pornographer managed to rise as high in the modern game as he did.”

‘Immoral earnings’

Sullivan, who was born in Cardiff and whose father was an RAF officer, grew up in South Wales, Essex and Hertfordshire, before being sent to boarding school aged 11. He was “short and shy” growing up, said The Times, and “experimented” with business from an early age, selling football memorabilia to students. “I stopped being shy when I was 22 and started to earn money,” he later said. “Money gives you confidence.”

After studying economics at Queen Mary College in east London and a short period working in advertising, he began selling “glossy prints” of topless models with university friend Bernard Hardingham. “In one week alone they made £26,000, the equivalent of more than £300,000 today.”

In 1973, their success “caught the attention of the authorities” and both were charged with conspiring to publish and post obscene materials and fined £50, said the BBC.

“By 25, Sullivan was a millionaire, and decided to branch into films,” said The Guardian. “Come Play With Me” was the “first, and most successful”, marketed as the “strongest sex comedy film ever produced and distributed in Britain”.

In 1982 Sullivan was convicted of “living off the immoral earnings of prostitution from massage parlours and jailed for nine months”, though he spent just 71 days in prison following an appeal. He has always maintained his innocence. “One headline at the time read: ‘King Porn is caged at last’,” said The Times. But this conviction “appeared to do little to suppress his ambition”.

Further allegations against Sullivan surfaced in a 1981 undercover investigation by the News of the World. Under the headline “Come to bed if you’re seeking a job”, it alleged that Sullivan had asked a woman for sex in exchange for a job, said The Times. Within 15 minutes of meeting reporter Tina Dalgleish, he allegedly asked: “So are you coming upstairs with me for 10 minutes to see what you can do?”

‘Mainstream’ success

Sullivan then turned to more “mainstream” publishing, founding the Sunday Sport in 1986, and five years later the Daily Sport, said the BBC. They ran a “mixture of bizarre, lurid and salacious stories with a steady diet of topless glamour models on many pages”. There was also a “Countdown to 16” feature, where “partially clothed” schoolgirls were shown before a full topless feature on their 16th birthday. The age limit for when models could legally appear topless was raised to 18 in 2004.

In 1993, Sullivan acquired a majority stake in Birmingham City, which was in administration, for £700,000. In 2010, having sold his Birmingham stake, he bought West Ham, alongside David and Ralph Gold, who ran the Ann Summers sex toys and lingerie empire.

Sullivan resigned as co-chair and director of West Ham on Saturday, saying in his statement that he was stepping down to apply his “full energy and attention on fighting these false allegations”. It has since been revealed that Sullivan has been “banned from having contact” with West Ham’s women’s and youth teams since 2023 due to “safeguarding concerns”, said the BBC.

Sullivan retains a 38.8% stake in West Ham, making him its largest shareholder. With a total net worth of £1.1 billion, together with his family, he is the 149th richest person in the UK, according to the 2026 Sunday Times Rich List.

The horror genre occupies the current Hollywood spotlight, and we have YouTube to thank for a bevy of high-grossing indie films directed by popular former users of the video platform. The runaway success of these box office darlings has industry insiders questioning if this crew represents a new filmmaking era or if it’s a passing phase.

Pipeline from YouTube-to-horror filmmaker

The recently released “Backrooms” is “part of a growing wave of breakout films from fledgling directors” who “honed their instincts on YouTube” rather than “inside the Hollywood ecosystem,” said The New York Times. Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old first-time director, signed a deal with distributor A24 to make the film when he was 17. He joined the ranks of two other creators who have “already turned online followings into surprise box-office hits this year.”

The “YouTuber-to-filmmaker boomlet,” said the Times, began in January when YouTube creator Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier by his fans, self-distributed his horror movie, “Iron Lung.” Though it only cost $3 million to make, it “took in $50 million” in the end. The run of successful YouTube horror directors continued with “Obsession,” a $750,000-budget horror movie directed by Curry Barker. Both Barker’s film and “Backrooms” have surpassed $200 million in earnings each. “It’s not an anomaly,” Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s film school, said to the Times. It is the start of a “gigantic shift.” These are the “cinematic insurgents of our era.”

The YouTube generation has “finally come of age,” horror filmmaker James Wan, who coproduced “Backrooms,” said to Variety. They grew up creating content without money. That spirit has fostered a “new wave of filmmakers and storytellers.” YouTube is the “perfect incubator for emerging voices.”

There is a “whole generation of moviegoers who grew up” with a “very specific taste in horror, the stuff that sits a little outside the mainstream,” Jason Blum, the producer of the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, said to Variety. When one of these filmmakers “makes the jump to a theater, the audience that found them online comes with them.”

Wins with a grain of salt

While they are currently making a splash, these “box office victories come with caveats,” said the Times. All three movies are horror films, the genre that has “long been the most forgiving for first-time filmmakers, in part because horror is relatively cheap to produce.” For some studio executives, “that context is a reason for caution.” The real shift will come when “horror isn’t the only proof of concept.”

With so much emphasis being put on the “YouTube-to-horror movie trend” as the “next frontier of finding talented new voices,” a “difficult, uncomfortable conversation is more necessary than ever,” Slash Film said. Unless you exist as a “cisgender, heterosexual, white man,” the pipeline “doesn’t actually exist.” YouTube is not and has “never been a truly democratized platform,” and we are doing the “next generation of creatives a disservice by pretending it is.”

There are “random people from Discord who are, like, 14-year-olds” who are “not working in the industry at all, but they’re fucking wizards,” Parsons said to The Verge. Still, he refuses to “preach the blind optimism that I hear from a lot of other filmmakers who say, ‘You got a phone; everyone can be a filmmaker now.’”

The best lesson executives could take from the success of Parsons and Barker is “not to throw a zillion dollars at more movies that look just like these,” movie critic Alissa Wilkinson said at The New York Times. It would be to “find more creators like these two” because they’ve “built audiences in an organic way in the places that younger audiences congregate” and to give them “creative freedom to explore what feels right to them.” Remember, too, that “not everything will hit like these two movies.”

The world-renowned Bayeux Tapestry will embark on a “highly secretive journey” to cross the Channel on loan to the British Museum, said ITV News. The artefact, which depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066, has reportedly been insured for “around £800 million” by the UK Treasury during its 10-month stay, which will begin in September.

The 70m embroidery, believed to have been created in the 1070s by English needleworkers, has left Bayeux only twice in 950 years. In 1803, it was displayed in Paris by Napoleon to inspire troops against the British, and during the Second World War it was moved several times to protect it from damage and the Nazi occupation.

The Tapestry is the “single most recognisable and understood object in our history”, former chancellor George Osborne, now chair of the British Museum, told the Financial Times. “The only thing that comes close is Stonehenge, and nobody’s going to be moving that any time soon.”

Dress rehearsals

The announcement of the loan “caused uproar” in France, said The Telegraph. A petition started by La Tribune de l’Art newspaper garnered around 78,000 signatures protesting the move due to the fragile condition of the tapestry. An assessment of the fabric in 2021 found that it contained “24,000 stains, 16,445 creases, almost 10,000 areas of damage and about 30 tears”.

A new “highly detailed” report on the arrangements for the tapestry’s transportation has “eased many concerns”, said Le Monde. “Nothing has been left to chance”, said Delphine Christophe, director general of heritage and architecture in the Ministry of Culture.

British roads – which generate “far more intense and constant vibrations” than their French counterparts – are the main source of concern. As such, teams have tested seven routes, and experts have “mapped every pothole and bump along the route from Bayeux to the British Museum”. Vibrations have now been “reduced by 96%”, said the outlet. This is about the “same level of movement a sculpture experiences on its pedestal in a museum”.

For the journey, the tapestry will be stored in a 1.6 ton “specially built climate-controlled crate” which is “literally suspended in mid-air” to minimise adverse motion. Two “full dress rehearsals” using a replica of identical length and weight have already taken place to practise proper handling of the 900-year-old work. The tapestry itself is currently being stored in a “secret location”.

‘Arduous’ journey

The Bayeux Tapestry is more than an artefact, said Financial Times political editor George Parker. Its arrival on British soil will be “hailed as a symbolic reconciliation of Britain and France after the chaos and bitterness of Brexit”. Ironically, despite depicting violent and bloody conflict between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, the effort to bring the tapestry back to the UK has become a “symbol of Anglo-French co-operation”.

Britain’s journey to displaying the Bayeux Tapestry has been “arduous”, said The Independent. Requests to exhibit it in London have been “rejected several times”, most notably for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and for the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1966. President Emmanuel Macron, however, first “signalled his eagerness for the move” in 2018, although progress was stalled by the Covid pandemic.

Now, the British Museum is “set to hit the jackpot”, said Le Monde. The cost of installing, displaying and protecting the piece, none of which will be covered by France, is “classified and likely enormous”. But considering that the tapestry has attracted around 400,000 visitors in Bayeux, the museum could easily expect to generate at least “€10 million” (£8.6 million) in ticket sales.

This will be the “museum event of the century”, but it may not be the easiest viewing experience, said Apollo Magazine. Time slots for viewing will be “only 40 minutes”, which has caused the art community to “raise an eyebrow”. “With the tapestry being 70m-long, that means each visitor has about 34 seconds to move along the work in 7cm intervals.”

Jared Kushner’s goal to open a luxury resort on Albania’s coast has hit a speed bump. Albanian investigators have begun digging into the private equity firm spearheading the project, the first son-in-law’s Affinity Partners. And mass public protests over the proposed resort are a flashpoint for broader civic frustrations. What began as a “local land dispute on Albania’s southern coast,” said France 24, has now become a forum for “wider grievances” over “corruption, arrogance of power and disgruntlement with the ruling government.”

‘Flamingo revolution’

The proposed luxury resort project is slated for construction on the “uninhabited Adriatic island of Sazan” and hundreds of acres of the Vjosa-Narta protected site, a “sensitive coastal wetland area home to flamingos, seals and sea turtle nesting sites,” said Politico. Protesters gathered outside Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office this week “using a pink flamingo as their emblem,” said the BBC.

The symbol “echoes the deployment of a yellow duck” used in Serbian civic protests, but here “reflects the protesters’ very specific concerns” about the project’s environmental impact. “Hence,” said France 24, “why the movement has now been nicknamed Albania’s ‘flamingo revolution.’” Asher Abehsera, Kushner’s “business partner” on the project, claims the development will focus on “responsible stewardship” and “enhancing the environment,” as well as on creating “jobs and value for local communities,” said the BBC.

‘Total lack of transparency’

Initially a local development dispute, the project has spiraled into a “national political crisis,” said the Tirana Times, “triggering mass protests” and calls for Rama’s resignation. In addition to opposition to Kushner’s involvement in the construction, the endeavor has “drawn scrutiny” over “disputed land titles, unclear ownership structures and the involvement of powerful domestic business interests.”

“From start to finish, there has been a total lack of transparency,” said leading Albanian conservationist Aleksander Trajce to The Guardian. “We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits.” If Albanian authorities “remove the bulldozers, remove the fence and restore the habitats to what they were, then we can start talking.”

Prime Minister Rama has hailed the project as a “milestone in the Balkan country’s trajectory from Stalinist state to high-end holiday destination,” The Guardian said. While he has offered to “meet protesters in an attempt to break the logjam,” Rama also “stuck to his guns,” declaring last week that “there is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.”

Broader frustrations

“No longer only about a resort,” the growing protests are now a “vehicle for wider anger” over Albanian civic society, said the Tirana Times. “It’s more or less everything” at the protests, said Albanian Ornithological Society President Taulant Bino to The New York Times. “You find people from the left, people from the right, people from different religious beliefs.”

Now, investigators from Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime anti-corruption office are digging into “controversial changes in the area’s protected status and land ownership in 2024,” said Politico. The office operates “independently of the national judiciary” and is “currently the most trusted institution in the country, according to several independent polls.”

Young people in Britain today risk becoming a “lost generation” owing to job opportunities shrinking, “not growing”, a landmark report warned last week.

Compiled by the former Labour minister Alan Milburn, the report said that almost a million 16- to 24-year-olds (equivalent to one in eight young people) are now “Neets” – not in education, employment or training.

He called this a “catastrophic failure” and said that, without urgent action, the proportion would reach one in six within five years.

‘Getting stickier’

In his 232-page report, Milburn said the rise in Neets could be attributed to factors including rising employment costs (such as increases to the minimum wage); a decline in Saturday jobs; and a 70% increase over a decade in those who are Neet because of ill health, nearly half of whom cite mental health conditions. Ministers said the review had laid bare “the scale of the challenge [...] we need to confront”.

Keir Starmer is often criticised for commissioning “endless reports”, rather than “forging ahead with policies”, said the Financial Times. But Milburn’s review serves a vital purpose, and “deserves to be heeded”.

Britain’s “Neets problem” isn’t new: the proportion has been at 10% or above for 25 years. But it’s “getting stickier”. The UK has three times as many Neets per capita than the Netherlands, and more than any EU country except Romania. Six in ten Neets today have never had a job, up from four in ten in 2005, and 15% have degrees. With data showing that nearly half of young Neets on benefits will not be working 15 years later, this is more than an economic problem; it’s a “moral” issue.

‘Transformative’ implications

“Milburn’s charge list is long,” said The Daily Telegraph. He criticises an education system that fails to prepare students for work, and a welfare system that spends £25 on benefits for the young for every £1 spent on getting them into work. Young people themselves, however, are rightly absolved of blame, said The Independent. Milburn stresses that 84% want to work, but are being let down by a failing system.

Milburn’s report provides “an excoriating overview” of this failing system, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. It identifies huge structural problems – from the 1.6 million “first-rung jobs” that have vanished in the past 20 years, to a more than 40% fall in the number of young people starting apprenticeships since 2016. It gives a voice to those who spend their days firing off job applications to firms that use faceless AI systems to screen CVs, and that don’t even bother to notify rejected candidates. And it outlines how the pandemic led to a surge in truancy levels (which are closely linked to youngsters becoming Neets), and left a generation utterly ill-equipped for the jobs market.

Crucially, it also details how the welfare boom is exacerbating this crisis, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. With the right political will, the report could trigger a total rewiring of the benefits system – continuing the “transformative” tradition of reviews such as the 1942 Beveridge Report, which laid the foundations for the welfare state.

‘Moral crusade’

Milburn deserves credit for dragging welfare back onto the agenda, said Lana Hempsall in The Spectator. But much-needed reform hasn’t been stymied by a prior lack of analysis, but rather by the unwillingness of MPs to grasp the nettle. It’s only a year since the government proposed some “relatively minor” tweaks to the welfare system, only to be forced into a climbdown by its own backbenchers.

Milburn’s “mammoth” report gives the government cover to have another crack at overhauling the system, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. Rooted in data and humanised by the voices of real people, it cleverly frames welfare reform as a “moral crusade” through which Labour can create a better future for the young. Admittedly, it will still be hard to persuade Labour MPs to make cuts, and the Treasury to fund the cost of moving from one system to another. But if Labour doesn’t seize this opportunity to mend a broken system, the party will “deserve to watch as Nigel Farage or the Tories” cut the welfare bill “their way”.

Milburn is due to publish his recommendations in the autumn. As part of a radical restructuring, he is said to be considering the case for an “entirely separate welfare system for young people who have never worked”, reports the FT, with a focus on getting them into jobs. Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is due to join Milburn on a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands next week. The country has similar levels of mental ill health in young people as Britain does, but has much more success at keeping them in work or education.

Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, appeared “for 20 excruciating minutes” at the High Court in Edinburgh on Monday, said Tom Peck in The Times. His earlier guilty plea meant there was little prosecuting to be done. “What we saw, instead, was a High Court edition of ‘Supermarket Sweep’”, as the prosecutor detailed how Murrell had embezzled £400,000 from the SNP over 12 years and spent it on 627 items in total, from £3.60 door fixings to the infamous £124,000 motorhome. How did he get away with it? Because “the Great Expenser” was in charge of the process. “He submitted his expenses to himself, then he signed them off himself.”

The list “makes for dazzling reading”, said Louis Wise in the FT: not just the Jaguar, the Golf, the luxury watches, the £2,000 salt and pepper shakers – but also “no fewer than seven – seven! – vacuum cleaners”. One luxury goods PR described Murrell's splurge as “like a regional sales manager's idea of living large”. But actually it's stranger than that – from the £75 men's “slouch pouch” onesie, to the Xbox, the 108 Covid-era loo rolls, and the posh edition of Hannah Arendt's “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Double life

“She should have known. She must have known. Nobody can get away with it for that long, in secret, in a marriage.” These are some of the accusations levelled at Nicola Sturgeon, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. Except it's not that simple. As she has pointed out, they were both well-paid, and they had no children. None of these items were unaffordable, except perhaps the motorhome, which Murrell parked at his mother's house.

Countless people find their partner has been living a double life. And, as Sturgeon told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, a lot of women “end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives”. She's right to reject that sort of misogyny. “This isn't Sturgeon's fault.” That's a “risible” defence, said Oliver Kamm in The i Paper. The accusations are against her as a politician, not as a wife. She is not the “wronged party”.

Conflicts of interest

When Sturgeon became SNP leader, Alex Salmond advised her that having Murrell as chief executive might create conflicts of interest, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. She chose to ignore this. She allowed three members of the party's finance and audit committee, its treasurer and its auditors to resign, “all complaining they were being prevented from doing their jobs properly”. Through all this, Sturgeon defended the arrangements, and fiercely discouraged further inquiries. “This was grotesque behaviour. It produced one of the worst scandals of modern political history.”

I still have “a smidgen” of sympathy, said Susan Dalgety in The Scotsman: Sturgeon's “legacy has been reduced to jokes about motorhomes”. But only a smidgen. “She failed on every count.” Long after we have stopped laughing at Murrell's purchases, “the stench of government corruption will linger over Scotland”.

The death of a British soldier in Iraq has refocused concerns over the UK’s military presence in the Middle East.

Lance Corporal James Stewart Freeman died in northern Iraq on Sunday during a training exercise, the Defence Secretary John Healey has said. The US has confirmed that the Briton, and an American soldier, died at a US-controlled base in Erbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region near the Iranian border.

The UK’s position on the Iran war is to participate in “defensive action” only. But after Iran began retaliating against US-Israeli strikes, the UK deployed more personnel to the region, bringing the total number to about 1,000.

The heightened risk to British troops

Northern Iraq has been “one of the most dangerous places for British troops” since Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Gulf countries, said The Times. Tehran has been targeting “US strongholds” across the border in Iraq; specialist soldiers stationed in Erbil have “shot down more than 100 kamikaze drones” since the US and Israel started the war. British personnel “have been within a few hundred feet of successful Iranian strikes”. There is a “heightened risk” that Iran or its proxies could “hit coalition bases in the Middle East”.

The US has about “two dozen significant air bases, naval facilities and outposts scattered from Turkey to Oman”, said The Independent. About 50,000 US service personnel are stationed across the Middle East, many in Arab Gulf countries such as Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar and the UAE – “all of which are at risk of Iranian retaliation with short-range weapons”. There are also about 200 British service personnel deployed in Iraq, involved in “training and supporting Iraqi and Kurdish security forces”.

Oman has been a “strategic hub” for the UK since the Royal Navy opened a “joint logistics support base” at Duqm port. The MoD said Duqm gives the UK a “strategically important and permanent maritime base east of Suez, but outside of the Gulf”. The UK also has two Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus: Akrotiri and Dhekelia. A string of drone attacks, presumably by Hezbollah, appeared to target the RAF Akrotiri base in March.

Britain: an unwilling participant?

“The UK’s armed forces have long had a presence across the Middle East,” said Geraint Hughes, military historian at King’s College London, on The Conversation. The UK’s naval support facility, which supports the Royal Navy’s “longstanding maritime security mission” in the Persian Gulf, has been in Bahrain since the 1980s. The base and its 300 personnel were “close to the Iranian missile strike” targeting the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in February. That shows that British military personnel “could potentially be at risk from an Iranian attack, even if indirect”.

Keir Starmer maintains that the UK will not join in “offensive action”, and that military assets are only being used to “support the defence of the Gulf states”. But Iran is “unlikely to acknowledge this distinction between ‘defensive’ operations and more ‘offensive’ ones”. As part of the Five Eyes alliance, Britain also “closely coordinates its eavesdropping operations” with the US.

Fundamentally, said Hughes, the regime in Iran is “profoundly Anglophobic”. It presumes the US and Britain will “always collaborate” – as they have done in the Middle East in the past. Iran may have “assumed British complicity in the launching of Operation Epic Fury”, and may “target the UK’s military assets in the Gulf and beyond”. Whatever Labour’s intentions, the UK “may find itself drawn into a war it had no say in starting”.

Dating apps are “rooted in rejection and judgement” and that’s “not healthy”, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd told Fortune. She had an “epiphany” during a 14-month leave of absence that users are just “hurt people hurting people”, and has vowed to bring “more joy and satisfaction” to her app.

Bumble is now shifting to matching-making driven by AI – and it’s not the only dating app to see this as the solution to increasing dating-app fatigue. But newcomer Breeze is taking another route: switching the focus to in-person experiences by reducing opportunities to chat in app, and sending only a time-specific, limited number of matches.

‘Payment and consequences’

“Breeze is a welcome disruptor in the dating app landscape,” said Isabella Silvers in The Telegraph. Since it launched in Europe in 2020, after winning investment from the Dutch version of “Dragon’s Den”, it has clocked up more than two million downloads. Users join “matching pools” that bring together “like-minded daters”, based on everything from hobbies (“outdoor lovers”) to niche interests (“rat owners/lovers”). To date, the app has arranged more than 737,000 dates, “resulting in 10 babies – that it knows of”.

Users receive a “select number of profiles” at 7pm every day and the key to the app’s success seems to be “payment and consequences”. Once you accept a match, you have to fill out your availability and pay a £9.50 deposit to secure a drinks date (or £4.50 for a “walk and talk”), “before being allowed to make a decision on anyone else”. The chat function for matched users is only opened up four hours before the date – prompting last-minute date confirmations, rather than “meaningless messaging”.

Breeze is “evidently working”, especially in the Netherlands where it’s “the third most popular and fastest-growing” dating app, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “But can it save Britain’s dismal dating scene?” It can certainly save us from “boring convos generated by ChatGPT”, or being stood up or ghosted or “strung out” for weeks with no follow-through. But “what it absolutely can’t save” us from “is ourselves”. It’s ultimately “knackering” to keep “riding the rejection rollercoaster of the dating-app landscape” – and, sometimes, “the best remedy is to give it all a rest”.

‘Charming chatbots’

There is “rampant” dating-app burnout, said Catherine Pearson in The New York Times. As Bumble embraces AI-powered algorithms to re-engage those who “crave an experience that feels less overwhelming and more purposeful”, it’s also removing its swipe feature. It’s hoping to “end superficial, snap judgements” by altering “the dating habits of millions of users who have grown used to vetting partners with the flick of a finger”.

But the AI pivot comes with risk. Integrating AI features “sloppily” could “alienate” dating-app customers, said Tatum Hunter in The Guardian. Some users are already reporting “being plagued by AI paranoia, unsure whether the people they are messaging are real or charming chatbots”. The messaging from the industry is clear: “if we let AI take the wheel, this will all get less depressing”. But can a “smooth, mindless path toward connection” really make dating more joyful?

Evolutionary psychology reminds us that “only a signal that is difficult to fake can carry reliable information about the sender”, said Andrew King on Quillette. A rightward swipe behind a screen “communicates almost nothing about the sincerity of the person making it”. But making an approach in person at a bar or an event carries the potential for “public rejection”, and that cost is a signal of sincerity. These signals “matter” and “cannot be easily digitised”: “the discomfort is the point”.

Nvidia has unveiled a new superchip for personal computers, marking its first entry into the lucrative consumer market.

“This reinvention of the computer is as big a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang said, as he unveiled the RTX Spark chip at the Computex technology show in Taiwan on Monday.

‘Real game-changer’

Selling artificial intelligence chips used in enormous data centres has helped Nvidia become the world’s most valuable company, currently worth more than $5 trillion (£3.7 trillion). “Now it’s looking to put its technology in people’s homes,” said The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle.

The RTX Spark is a “new superchip for the era of personal AI agents – offering a new class of computer that moves from tool to teammate”, Nvidia said on its website.

Expected to be released in the autumn, it will power laptop and desktop computers from Dell, HP, Microsoft, Lenovo and others and is designed to run local AI systems that can sort files and quickly perform tasks.

The move into personal computing fires a “warning shot across the bow” of historic industry leaders such as AMD, Apple and Intel, said TechRadar, which described the move as a “real game-changer”.

Intel, Microsoft’s long-term partner, was once the “undisputed king of PCs”, but its performance has “slipped in key areas like battery life” in recent years, said Mickle. In 2021, Microsoft made it possible to run Windows software with processers from rival providers, creating an opportunity Nvidia has now exploited.

With the RTX Spark, the company will be hoping to move in on the growing market for AI computers that is currently dominated by Apple, which ditched Intel processors for its own hugely popular and powerful M-series chips in 2020.

“Apple more or less owns this market today,” Max Weinbach, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech research firm, told The New York Times. “Nvidia wants to build a laptop ecosystem for Windows that’s an alternative.”

An AI supercomputer in every home

The chip “lies at the heart of Nvidia’s push to embed AI directly into end-user devices, aiming to transform PCs into personal assistants which perform various tasks such as searching email, fixing coding bugs and accelerating generative AI features in software including Adobe Photoshop”, said Aqsa Qaddus Tahir on The News International.

Shohag Hossain, a digital creator, posted on X that the Nvidia-Microsoft partnership had “quietly built the hardware layer that makes AI run locally, privately, instantly, no cloud needed”. The result is your laptop “becomes an AI agent that works offline”, which means “no more sending your data to some server farm”.

“The real competition isn’t Apple vs Windows any more, it's who owns the AI that runs on your device.”

This new superchip could be the first step towards AI supercomputers becoming a common home appliance in the future, in the way that home theatres, large televisions, lawn mowers and dishwashers are not unusual, Huang told the conference in Taiwan.

“I could totally imagine someday there’s an AI supercomputer in your house,” he said. “It’s running all of your agents, it’s running all your assistants, and they’re doing all kinds of things for you all the time.”

It is a familiar refrain of divorcing couples, that there were “three of us” in the marriage, said Gavin Madeley in the Daily Mail. Yet in Peter Murrell and Nicola Sturgeon’s, the third party was one they both loved: the SNP was their shared, all-consuming passion. She was the party’s leader; he was its chief executive. And yet we now know that Murrell was betraying everything they held dear – with the party’s credit card.

Over 12 years from 2010, he stole £400,000 from the SNP, and used the money to buy hundreds of items, from DVD box sets to a £4,000 fountain pen and a brand-new Jaguar.

In court this week, Murrell, 61, admitted embezzlement, and was led away in handcuffs. Sturgeon said she’d known nothing of her estranged husband’s actions, and said that she felt “angry, hurt, sad”.

Disappearing funds

The seeds of his downfall were laid in 2017, said The Scotsman, when Sturgeon asked SNP members to donate to a campaign fund for a second referendum. It raised £667,000, yet in late 2020, an activist spotted that the SNP had only £97,000 on its books.

In March 2021, Sturgeon assured the party’s ruling body that its finances were in order, but three party officials then complained that they’d been denied sight of the accounts, and a prominent indyref2 supporter reported the disappearance of the supposedly ring-fenced funds to the police.

They launched Operation Branchform in July. Sturgeon abruptly resigned in February 2023, citing burnout. Murrell stepped down weeks later, in a row about the SNP’s declining membership. A little more than two weeks after that, the police raided their home.

Questions for Sturgeon

What most of us want to know, said Euan McColm in The Spectator, is how Sturgeon failed to spot what was going on under her nose. When goods including a £2,500 salt and pepper grinder and a £3,000 tea set appeared in her home, was she not curious to know where they’d come from? Did she not find it odd that her bald spouse had bought two £350 Dyson hairdryers?

Well, the pair had a joint income of £250,000 and lived modestly, said Alex Massie in The Times. He could have had a large chunk of spare cash. The £124,000 motorhome stands out as a clue even Inspector Clouseau would have spotted, but she insists she never saw it.

Sturgeon will hope the story now blows over, as will her party, said James Walker in The National. First Minister John Swinney – an old friend of Murrell’s – said he had been “gutted” by the case, and noted that the SNP was its victim. But while some voters will see the theft as the work of a bad apple and move on, for others the damage runs deeper; and questions remain as to how it ever happened.

Donald Trump has been much preoccupied by his place in history of late, said Noah Shachtman in The New York Times. It’s one of the reasons he’s ignoring his terrible approval ratings and focusing on his architectural legacy instead.

The way things are going, though, he won’t be remembered for his triumphal arch in Washington DC, or for his Maga philosophy – but for his “greed”.

The extent to which he and his family have enriched themselves since he returned to office is shocking enough: his wealth has more than doubled in 18 months, to about $6.1 billion (£4.5 billion), largely due to cryptodeals. Now, he has crossed a new line by misappropriating money directly from US taxpayers.

Last week, his administration set up a fund of $1.776 billion (£1.31 billion) – a nod to the year of America’s founding – to compensate supposed victims of Biden-era “lawfare”.

The money is expected to be doled out to Trump’s allies – and officials have refused to rule out payments to the rioters convicted of assaulting police in the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol: Enrique Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys, says he is going to ask for $2 million to $5 million (£1.5 million to £3.7 million) from the fund. A legal watchdog has rightly called this fund deal “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history”.

‘Slush-fund boondoggle’

The creation of this “slush-fund boondoggle” stems from a $10 billion (£7.4 billion) lawsuit that Trump brought against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in January over the leak of his tax returns during his first presidency, said National Review.

That leak did violate Trump’s rights (the culprit, a former IRS contractor, was jailed), but there was something deeply wrong about a case in which Trump (as head of an agency – the IRS – that ultimately reports to him) was effectively both plaintiff and defendant. But as the presiding judge seemed poised to throw out the case over this conflict of interest, the administration announced that Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice had agreed an out-of-court settlement. This involved an apology for Trump, and the establishment of the vast “anti-weaponisation” fund – which expires in December 2028, so all the money in it will be handed out by the current administration.

It's frankly “obscene”, said Andrew Egger on The Bulwark. Decisions about who receives money from the fund will be made by a five-member panel largely appointed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer. The president will retain the power to remove its members at will. And there’ll be no transparency: the panel isn’t obliged to disclose “how they’re making disbursement decisions”, or even “who’s getting paid”.

‘Brazen corruption’

But all this is only one half of the scandal, said Matt Ford in The New Republic. As part of the settlement, the US government is now permanently precluded from examining the past tax arrangements of Trump, his sons, and his Trump Organization. So the IRS will have to drop all its many live and pending investigations into the Trump family’s affairs.

Such “brazen corruption” makes the Watergate scandal look “almost quaint”. Even some Republicans have expressed anger about this deal, said Politico, and some of the police officers attacked on 6 June have filed a lawsuit to stop the fund.

This marks a new low in the corrupt practices of Trump’s “pecuniary presidency”, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. It’s stealing from the Treasury, and using your authority, with the support of your allies in the judiciary, to make yourself unaccountable. It goes way beyond Tammany Hall-style graft. “It’s government as protection racket and the president as mob boss” – a role that Trump has now clearly embraced.

Vomiting, diarrhoea, sweating and a swollen face. Not the normal desired effects of a detox, but a kambo ceremony is not a normal detox.

Kambo is a poisonous secretion from an Amazonian tree frog, used by some indigenous people as traditional medicine. Its use as a wellness practice has spread to the US and Europe.

Last weekend it was reported that Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach and cancer survivor from Leicester, had died after taking the frog poison. “He is believed to be the first British victim,” said The Times, but at least six deaths worldwide have been associated with kambo.

The substance is harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog. In the traditional medicine of some indigenous peoples of the Amazon, kambo “is applied to superficial burns on the skin of participants to produce an intense purging effect”, said Martin Williams, research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, on The Conversation.

‘Uncontrolled increase in fatalities’

Self-styled “kambo practitioners” have touted a range of supposed benefits for the purge and detox, including reduced anxiety, boosted energy and relief from chronic pain. Despite the documented side-effects, “the great majority of users of kambo anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects”, said Williams. Several celebrities have reportedly tried kambo, including actor Orlando Bloom, who told GQ that he had tried the treatment several times and claimed it left him with a “feeling of being clearer and wide open”. “You have this sensation of death and you kind of purge your body. But it’s incredible.” He did add, however, that “it was pretty brutal in terms of what it does to the body in the moment”, describing it as “coming out both ends”.

Kambo can also have more severe health consequences, with a paper published last year in Cureus, the online journal, warning of potential long-term issues. According to the scientists, the psychiatric effects were induced by hyperthermia and hyponatraemia, which were “often misinterpreted by participants as ‘astral travel’, instead of being recognised as potentially fatal conditions”. They added: “The widespread availability of kambo on the internet poses another pressing concern, contributing to an uncontrolled increase in fatalities.”

‘Absolute Western arrogance’

Governments around the world have acted to ban the poison. In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market kambo. In Australia, where two deaths after kambo rituals have led to coroner’s inquests, it was listed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2021 as a Schedule 10 poison: a “substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.

Trend’s mother Angie told The Telegraph that she wants the treatment to be banned in the UK following her son’s death: “He was going to cleanse himself, that’s what he said to me. He was very spiritual. He took a lot of vitamins.”

Despite the dangers, the adoption of wellness rituals involving kambo continues to grow worldwide. “A lot of these Western wellness practitioners are exploiting people’s gullibility and exploiting those who are sceptical about Western medicine,” Prof Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at Adelaide University, told The Guardian.

“But the techniques of shamans and healers in Indigenous communities have been used for hundreds of years and they have been trained to safely use these substances for certain, specific situations. To think that we can go into a community or spend a bit of time in another country and then take one of their time-honoured, cultural practices and then just take it for our own use is absolute Western arrogance.”

CBS needed a replacement after controversially canceling “The Late Show” hosted by Stephen Colbert and found a longstanding media name to fill the gap: Byron Allen, a billionaire industry mainstay whose “Comics Unleashed” panel comedy show ran in syndication from 2006 to 2016 and is now running in place of “The Late Show.” But unlike Colbert, Allen, who began his career in standup, has vowed to shy away from political humor.

Comedy roots

Allen, 65, was born in Detroit and eventually moved to Los Angeles with his mother. At a young age, he had an obsession with “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and at 18 became “one of the youngest comedians to perform stand-up on Carson’s show, making his debut on May 17, 1979, a week before graduating high school,” said CNN.

He eventually transitioned from the stage to a behind-the-scenes role and soon “developed a business model that would define his career: producing reality shows and selling them directly to local stations,” said CNN. Allen founded his eponymous company, Allen Media Group, in 1993 and currently “owns over a dozen ABC, CBS and NBC network-affiliate broadcast television stations around the country, 10 24-hour HD television networks and multiple digital streaming platforms,” said USA Today. He also owns The Weather Channel and recently “acquired a ‘majority stake’ in BuzzFeed.”

‘I’m not trying to replace him’

When it was announced in July 2025 that Colbert‘s show would be ending, Allen originally “urged CBS to ‘not put on another show’ if it went through with canceling the cancellation,” instead offering to buy the block of time, said NBC News. Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” ran in syndication from 2006 to 2016 before being slotted in to take over “The Late Show.” Under his deal with CBS, Allen “leases the hour and sells the advertising inventory himself.”

In another departure, Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” focuses “strictly on comedy and roundtable storytelling with no political content,” said NJ.com. Colbert was known for his humor revolving around President Donald Trump (many feel his cancellation was politically motivated, an accusation CBS denies). “I’m not trying to replace Colbert. I don’t think anybody can replace Colbert. I think he’s phenomenal,” Allen said to The Guardian.

There is “nothing like it on TV right now where you have five comedians sitting around with one purpose: making people laugh,” Allen told The Guardian of his show. When Allen “first started doing the show, and I’ve had on over 1,000 comedians, I said, ‘No political humor, nothing racist, nothing sexist, nothing antisemitic, nothing homophobic, just be funny.’” Allen has also claimed that people are okay with not hearing political humor in late-night.

“Would you have interest to look at news that was recorded a month ago or two months ago? That news is long gone,” Allen said to The Guardian. “So why do you want to hear about the political news from eight weeks earlier?” Allen claims that “Comics Unleashed” is already making a profit for CBS (the network cited financial reasons for axing Colbert’s show). Despite the controversy, the late-night slot is an opportunity Allen has long wanted. “If they are looking for a show, my hand is already up,” Allen said in October 2025 to Variety. “Fifty years I have been waiting for this moment.”

A controversy surrounding a prize-winning short story has raised questions over the use of artificial intelligence in fiction.

“The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir was named the winner in the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Prize, but “syntactical tics” alleged to be telltale signs of AI use, as well as “the verdict of an AI detection platform”, have caused an uproar in the literary world, said The Guardian.

Smelling a rat

The judging committee said the winning story was told in “a voice of restraint and quiet authority”, praising Nazir’s language as “sublime” and “precise yet richly evocative”. But soon “literary sleuths smelled a rat,” said LitHub.

“Off a hunch”, Ethan Mollick, a professor who studies AI, ran the story through Pangram, a program that claims to detect AI writing with 99% accuracy; the results came back with “100% red flags”. Writing on Bluesky, Mollick said: “Come on, if you know you know.”

Nazir has denied using AI to write the story, which he says was inspired by childhood memories. Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they were still investigating the allegations. The foundation that awarded the prize said that all entrants were required to confirm that their submission was their own work and not created with AI assistance.

The accusation is “another episode” in an “ongoing, frenetic conversation” about “whether artists and creators are passing off AI-generated work as their own” and whether publishers “will be able to reliably catch them doing it”, said The Guardian.

In April, Hachette pulled a novel called “Shy Girl” by Mia Ballard from bookshops after Pangram said it was 78% AI-generated, and in March, The New York Times cut ties with a freelance journalist after he admitted to having used artificial intelligence to write a book review. Such episodes have “fuelled discourse around the telltale signs of AI writing”, including frequent use of specific words (“delve” being one example), a “profusion of em dashes” and a predilection for “vague, soft intensifiers” such as “quietly powerful” and “deeply transformative”.

Detection industry

The “ideal” expressed by Razmi Farook, director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, who said she places “complete trust in writers”, may not “be enough to stem the tide of AI slop” in “everything from high literature to scientific research”, said Wired.

Some writers have already admitted that they use AI. Steven Rosenbaum acknowledged that his new book “The Future of Truth”, which “grapples with the nature of veracity in the AI age”, itself contains AI-hallucinated quotes. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk “outraged her own fans” by admitting that use of LLMs is “part of her creative process”.

But the “biggest bummer is to come”, said LitHub, because although “winning a literary prize is one small step” for AI, it’s “sure to be catnip for the pushers touting the technology’s creative potential”.

Meanwhile, the row over the Commonwealth Prize and similar controversies have “generated energetic business” for a “new cottage industry” of AI detectors, said The Guardian. Researchers into the efficacy of the models predict that there will be “a continuous technical arms race” between the detectors, AI models and writers adapting their usage of them.

Not long ago he was regarded as virtually Ukraine’s co-president, said Jamie Dettmer on Politico. Now, less than six months after being forced to resign as President Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak finds himself in custody.

He was arrested last Thursday on suspicion of helping to launder $10.5 million (£7.7 million) via the construction of four luxury homes near Kyiv, some of the funds reportedly being part of the proceeds of a $100 million (£77 million) kickback scheme on contracts signed at Energoatom, the state’s atomic energy agency.

A man with outsize influence

Many of Zelenskyy’s allies have already been implicated in the wider case, including his former business partner Timur Mindich, who fled to Israel last year, and the former energy minister German Galushchenko, who was arrested in February while trying to flee the country. But Yermak’s arrest brings the matter to the very heart of the president’s inner circle, fuelling speculation about what Zelenskyy himself “may have known – or ought to have known”.

Yermak’s arrest could prove disastrous for Zelenskyy, said Steve Gutterman on Radio Free Europe (Prague). In voters’ minds, there’s an “inseparable” link between the two men. They met in 2011 when both were working in television, and their close friendship and Yermak’s “outsize influence” as an unelected adviser mean that any stain on him could well “bleed over onto Zelenskyy”. The scandal also puts at risk Kyiv’s bid for fast-track EU membership, as one of Brussels’ key demands has been that Ukraine’s notorious corruption must be curbed.

Room for optimism

Zelenskyy has stayed “tight-lipped” since the Energoatom scandal broke in November, said Kateryna Denisova in The Kyiv Independent, but it may prove harder to downplay things this time round. He hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing himself, but ever since the name Vova (a diminutive for Volodymyr) popped up in a recently leaked audiotape conversation of two corruption suspects discussing a property development outside Kyiv, rumours about him have started to swirl.

Given the ongoing war with Russia, all these allegations feel particularly egregious, said Paul Niland in the Kyiv Post. However, there is room for optimism. The $10.5 million (£7.7 million) mentioned in the Yermak case is a “far cry” from the $10 billion (£7 billion) thought to have been stolen each year from 2010-14 under the former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies have been so determined to win the fight against graft that theft on that sort of scale is no longer possible. And there’s no clearer sign of that than the arrest of someone as powerful as Yermak.

After decades of maintaining steady numbers of American service members at sites across Eastern Europe, the United States has begun quietly shifting where and how it deploys troops along Russia’s doorstep. This month, the Pentagon “abruptly” halted an already underway deployment of some 4,000 soldiers to Poland as “part of a larger troop reduction,” fueled in part by President Donald Trump’s “anger over Europe’s refusal to aid in the war with Iran,” said The Washington Post. Similar reductions and withdrawals have been ordered for other American military assets in the region, and White House figures are defending the moves as part of Trump’s America First ethos.

‘Growing rift’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “last-minute decision” to pause the planned Poland deployment took Pentagon officials and European allies “by surprise,” said Politico. It is the latest instance of an “abrupt personnel move” that has “blindsided both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Pentagon has largely employed the easier process of canceling deployments “as opposed to yanking forces already stationed there,” The Associated Press said. In addition to nixing the planned Polish deployment, Hegseth’s orders also “led to the cancellation of an upcoming deployment to Germany of a battalion trained in firing long-range rockets and missiles.” Hegseth “scrapping plans” for a “long-range fires battalion to be stationed in Europe,” marks a “significant loss for the continent,” said the Post.

The change in troop levels comes as Trump has “repeatedly criticized NATO countries for not participating in the Iran war,” said CNN. Trump has also lashed out at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has said the U.S. is “being ‘humiliated’ by Iran.” The move “reflects a growing rift between the administration and traditional European allies” that has been exacerbated by a “lack of support for the Iran conflict,” the AP said.

‘Overreacting’

Changing the Poland deployment was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision,” said the Pentagon to the Post. However, the military declined to “provide clarification on when the process started and when the order to depart was given,” the outlet said. Pressed on the changes, Vice President JD Vance also downplayed their significance. “We're not talking about pulling every single American troop out ⁠of Europe,” said Vance on ABC News Tuesday. The move merely shifts “some resources around in a way that maximizes ​American security,” and “frankly, a lot of the European media is overreacting to this.”

Polish lawmakers visiting Washington this week “welcomed U.S. statements clarifying” that the troop drawdown was a “temporary measure,” said the Post. Warsaw has also “lobbied to host some of the U.S. troops set to be withdrawn from Germany,” using the argument that “Poland already has the infrastructure needed to accommodate additional American forces,” said Polish broadcaster TVP World.

For now, the White House’s “broader strategy remains unclear,” said Politico. The upcoming German withdrawal is “still in the planning stages.” While it would be a “relatively minor drawdown of the 38,000 U.S. troops in the country,” it also signals to European allies that “they could pay a price for publicly disagreeing with the White House. “

Google has become so synonymous with online search that its name has evolved into a verb in its own right. Now, the company is attempting to “revamp its decades-old business model to fit the era of artificial intelligence”, said CNN. In essence, “Google wants to help you google less”.

‘New era’ for search

Although Google already offers “AI Mode”, it will now integrate the technology across the entire search experience through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Rather than simply typing keywords or short phrases, users will be able to ask conversational questions, share images or voice commands with agentic AI, and even interact through live video.

Instead of generating only the familiar list of blue links, Google Search will give a customised AI-written summary of the topic being researched. This will then open a conversation with AI Mode directly on the main search page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions more naturally.

This marks a “new era for AI search”, according to a Google blog post, bringing “advanced model capabilities” and “new AI features” to Search. The update will allow users to deploy AI agents “just by asking a question”. The company is also introducing a new intelligent, AI-powered search box, which it describes as Google’s “biggest upgrade in over 25 years”.

Crucially, the shift means that search will become more conversational and personalised, reducing the need to click through to web pages. Increasingly, Google will function more like an assistant than a traditional index of third-party information providers.

‘Radical transformation’

For many people, Google’s search box is the “lobby of the internet”, said Time, so this “radical transformation” signals a major shift in how people use the web. It could “disrupt many industries” that rely on search traffic to attract customers, with news publishers and small businesses particularly vulnerable.

The changes will likely “further decimate” referrals from Google to publishers, which have “already been suffering from declining referrals” because of AI Overviews, said TechCrunch. The trend has already “put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse”.

Using AI-based searching could also erode important skills, said Riley MacLeod on internet news site Aftermath. Google Search is “one of the first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information-searching skills”. While “spoon-feeding” users AI summaries and “obscuring or bypassing the source of the information” may seem convenient, it risks depriving people of the opportunity to build the “vital information literacy skills” they “need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world”.

For Google, however, the ambition is far larger: to move “closer” to its long-term goal of developing artificial general intelligence – a “theoretical stage of AI” where technology becomes as intelligent as humans across a broad range of subjects, said CNN. The competition is intense, with OpenAI, Meta and others all “racing to be the first to get there”.

The sound of typing has been the background hum of office work for a century and half. But now it’s all about whispers.

After years of bashing typewriters, then tapping keyboards, desk-bound employees are, in ever-increasing numbers, murmuring to AI dictation apps to send emails, draft reports and write code.

‘Double words per minute’

Voice-to-text software has been around since the 1960s but it was always “clunky” and slow and “never worked quite right”, said employment reporter Jo Constantz on Bloomberg. But now advances in AI have made it “viable”: it can “take the messiness of speech and package it into something more useful”.

Early adopters of AI dictation apps are “drawn inexorably to the promise of ever-greater productivity”. In “voice mode”, you can produce double the words-per-minute than you can when typing.

Dictation is definitely “having a moment”, said Joe Castaldo, business reporter at Canada’s The Globe and Mail. More and more software engineers, in particular, are switching from “pressing keys individually” to “adopting AI-powered speech-to-text apps to verbally issue instructions” to tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code. Eight months ago, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman posted on his LinkedIn platform that he has been “voicepilled”: he’d realised you can “amplify your ability” by “seriously using your voice to interact with technology”.

Start-ups today are like “a high-end call centre – except everyone is chatting with AI”, one venture capitalist told The Wall Street Journal. There is an “etiquette”: “users try to keep their voices low and often wear headphones to block out sound from their dictating neighbours, dialling down the annoyance factor”. But talking to yourself is still “weird, if not a little embarrassing”.

‘Velocity towards voice’

It’s too early to say if and when “the Qwerty keyboard might follow the ticker tape and fax machines into obsolescence” but “the velocity towards voice is accelerating”, Dylan Fox, CEO of San Francisco-based AssemblyAI, told the Los Angeles Times. We’re predicting a 10 to 100-fold “increase in demand for voice, AI applications and interfaces”.

There’s now “a mad dash to dominate any corner of the evolving field”, said Bloomberg’s Constantz. The market for AI voice generators alone is estimated to be worth $7.7 billion (£5.75 billion) this year, rising to $21.8 billion (£16.27 billion) by the end of the decade, according to US consulting firm Grand View Research.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have invested heavily in their voice-to-text products, and dictation app start-ups – many with variations of “whisper” in their name – have experienced remarkable growth over the past year. After all, Superwhisper founder Neil Chudleigh told The Globe and Mail, “we’re talking about replacing every keyboard on the planet”.

Conservatives have long gone after what they perceive as discrimination against whites in hiring and have now found their latest target. The Florida attorney general sent the National Football League investigative subpoenas over alleged civil rights violations in its hiring practices. The issue centers on a longstanding NFL rule, and an investigation by Florida could have wider implications for diversity in sports.

‘Raises more questions’

The escalation began when Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) issued a letter to the NFL earlier this year, alleging that its Rooney Rule violates Florida’s civil rights laws. The rule, in place since 2003, requires all NFL teams to “interview at least two external minority candidates for open head coach, coordinator and general manager jobs,” said Politico. Though his letter led the NFL to alter some of the diversity language on its website, Uthmeier claims the league didn’t go far enough with its changes, resulting in him doubling down with the May 13 subpoenas.

“We appreciate how quickly the NFL changed its website in response to our letter and capitulated on some of their discriminatory hiring quotas,” Uthmeier said on social media. But the NFL’s response “raises more questions about the Rooney Rule, and we look forward to their cooperation with the investigative subpoena.” The subpoenas are Uthmeier’s way of “keeping pressure on the NFL after he previously gave the league a May 1 deadline to scrap the Rooney Rule,” said Politico.

The NFL showed no signs of capitulating. The league’s diversity efforts are “consistent with both Florida and federal law,” NFL General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a responding letter. The Rooney Rule “doesn’t impose any hiring quotas or mandates nor does it even limit who may be interviewed,” and “diversity of the candidate pool, both on the field and off, is also a critical part of the NFL’s success.” The league itself “does not permit the consideration of race, sex or any other legally protected characteristic in any hiring decisions or employment actions.”

‘An existential challenge’

Florida’s subpoenas are “just the latest target of MAGA backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts,” said NPR. While the effectiveness of the Rooney Rule has been “panned by many, including coaches, former coaches, the NFL Players Association and football fans,” continued legal pushes could represent an “existential challenge” to the NFL’s hiring practices.

Legal challenges could also expand to other areas of the NFL beyond the Rooney Rule. Uthmeier’s subpoena targets “many of the NFL’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including a now-discontinued mandate that required teams hire a minority offensive assistant,” as well as the “league’s diversity accelerator program” and a rule related to compensatory draft picks if a “minority assistant coach or executive a team developed is hired away,” said ESPN.

Uthmeier’s threats “echo a broader campaign waged by the Trump administration,” said NPR. They come as the White House and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have “now made tackling discrimination against white people, especially men, a priority.” While there could be implications for the NFL, the effect of the legal challenges could also be seen beyond sports. The head of the EEOC has repeatedly “warned employers that even in the interview selection process, they should not take into consideration a candidate’s race, sex or any other protected characteristic” of the Civil Rights Act.

Birdwatching is the fastest-growing outdoor hobby for Gen Z, according to a study commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The research found a 47% increase in birdwatching across all ages since 2018, but a 1,088% surge among those aged 18 to 24, suggesting around 750,000 Gen Zers are budding ornithologists.

Gen Z “really want to get out into nature” and “improve their physical and mental health”, Poppy Rummery, from RSPB Bempton Cliffs in East Yorkshire, told the BBC. Under a newly announced scheme, 16- to 24-year-olds will be allowed free admission to RSPB reserves to support this growing interest.

‘Daily rhythm of wildlife’

Gone are the days of the activity being classed as a “niche or old-fashioned pastime”, Molly Brown, an RSPB wildlife adviser, told The Guardian. Birdwatching is attracting a “diverse” crowd because it is easy and cheap to get started and has a low barrier to entry – it doesn’t matter “how much or little” you know to begin with. “It’ll inspire you to get outside and discover beautiful green spaces, exercise and generally slow down, which everyone can benefit from.”

Like a lot of other trends, social media has played a part. Birding apps like Merlin Bird ID and many online groups can help you “connect with fellow birders and share tips and sightings”, Kabir Kaul, a 20-year old wildlife campaigner, told The Times. Twitching is not without its “competitive side”, and young birdwatchers are getting into friendly battles to see “who can spot the most species”.

Another benefit for young adopters is that birdwatching could “protect against cognitive decline through later life”, said Science Alert. A Canadian study found that “brain regions linked to attention and perception” appeared denser in scans of “experienced” birdwatchers when compared to those of people who are new to the hobby.

‘Escaping technology’

Birdwatching isn’t the only real-world hobby surging among Gen Z. Younger people are creating a sort of “analogue movement”, said Fortune, although ironically usually with the help of social media.

They are choosing hobbies that can be used as a “means of escaping technology” and help bring out one’s “childlike creativity”. Often termed “grandma hobbies”, they include “pottery, origami and even blacksmithing”. Though lockdown in 2020 was a catalyst, the interest in them has “persisted beyond a pandemic fad”.

Having a hobby is “really important” and we “don’t prioritise them enough”, said Jaime Kurtz, a professor of psychology at James Madison University in Virginia. These activities help “reduce anxiety and stress” and build focus. They give you a “sense of accomplishment” especially when they involve finishing a “challenging” task. That is certainly the case for 22-year-old twitcher Isaiah Scott, who told Fortune that he has racked up sightings of around 800 species so far. “It feels like a video game, but in real life.”

In the early 1950s, thousands of UN troops in Korea fell ill with a mysterious fever, said Chris Smith in The Spectator. Doctors suspected that a virus might be to blame – but it wasn’t until 1978 that a Korean scientist isolated the culprit in a mouse, and named it after a nearby river, the Hantan.

He also showed that hantaviruses, which are carried by rodents, can be inhaled by humans in dust contaminated by droppings or urine. The troops had likely kicked the virus up as they dug foxholes.

Old vs. New World

Since then, numerous strains that can be transmitted to humans have been identified. They divide into two groups: Old World hantaviruses, in Europe and Asia, cause kidney dysfunction and have a mortality rate of 1% to 15%; New World ones, in the Americas, lead to severe lung infections and are fatal in around 40% of cases. It was the latter group that caused the outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius, and specifically the Andes strain, the only hantavirus that – in very rare cases – can pass from human to human.

It is not yet clear how this outbreak started, said Esther Addley in The Guardian, but it is thought that one, or possibly two, passengers were carrying the virus, which has an incubation period of up to 42 days, when they boarded the ship in Argentina on 1 April. A Dutch ornithologist who fell ill on 6 April and died five days later has been identified as “patient zero”. He had spent months travelling in South America with his wife – who died on 26 April. A German woman then died on 2 May. By 10 May, seven others had fallen ill.

No pandemic

This week, 20 British nationals on board flew home to the UK, and were bussed to an isolation facility on the Wirral, said Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Described as healthy, they were assessed for 72 hours and then asked to self-isolate at home for 42 days.

Health officials have stressed that we are not facing a pandemic. The Andes strain does not spread easily: it requires intimate or very close contact. And though many passengers left the ship weeks ago, there have so far been no “third-generation” cases – among people who were not on board. Given the virus’s incubation period, clinicians say that 21 June is the date to watch: if there have been no third-generation cases by then, it means the outbreak has run its course.

Since it swept to power in 2014, little has stood in the way of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

But West Bengal – India's fourth-most populous state – was a rare exception, said Nadim Asrar in Al Jazeera (Doha). Well over 25% of its some 105 million population is Muslim, and for the past 15 years its voters have spurned the Hindu nationalist BJP in favour of the centrist Trinamool Congress (TMC), whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, has sought to appeal to Muslims and Hindus alike.

But all that changed last week, when the BJP won a “stunning” majority of 207 seats in the state's 294-member assembly.

Dislodging ‘Didi’

It's hard to exaggerate just how stunning this victory is, said Sadanand Dhume in The Wall Street Journal. It's a bit like the Democrats winning the governorship of Texas for the first time in a landslide.

The 71-year-old Banerjee is India's fiercest female politician and one of Modi's toughest critics. Her supporters refer to her as “Didi” (older sister), and love her for her disdain of luxury – she wears “simple” saris and flip-flops. But her detractors regard her as a petty despot who has “pandered to fundamentalist Muslims”.

And the BJP was determined to dislodge her, said Robin Jeffrey on Inside Story (Melbourne). West Bengal is a prize they've hungered for. Its capital, Kolkata, was once “the intellectual centre of India” and home to many of the heroic events and figures revered by the BJP. So Modi's people “threw a kitchen full of sinks at Banerjee and her party”.

‘Ferrari and a bicycle’

That they did, said the Deccan Herald (Bengaluru). In the run-up to last month's vote, the election commission – a supposedly independent body often accused of doing the BJP's bidding – stripped more than nine million names, nearly 12% of the total, from the state's electoral register under a process called Special Intensive Revision. The ostensible aim was to remove alleged illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh from the rolls. And at least 2.7 million people, mostly Muslims, were thus excluded from voting.

In dozens of constituencies, the BJP's margin of victory was smaller than the number of voters removed, said Aparna Bhattacharya on The Wire (New Delhi). But, in fairness, the BJP would probably have prevailed in any case. “Didi” had been in power too long: her TMC had grown increasingly unpopular over issues such as high unemployment.

With “Didi” gone, Modi is close to “his dream of an opposition-free India”, said Alex Travelli in The New York Times. The BJP now controls 20 of the 28 state governments, a dominance not seen since Congress Party rule in the 1960s. And as the BJP's income is six times that of its nearest rival, it will be hard for other parties to compete, said Nadim Asrar.

It's “a race between a Ferrari and a bicycle”, as the writer Arundhati Roy once put it. Good for Modi, maybe, but perhaps not so good for India.

Hearing that one football club has spied on another “conjures images of classic, covert espionage”, said the BBC. But, as Middlesbrough have found out, sometimes it’s “not that difficult”.

The English Football League has charged Southampton with spying on their opponents two days before the first leg of the Championship play-off semi-final on Tuesday. Middlesbrough claim the supposed spy was a Southampton analyst observing a training session.

Southampton then beat Middlesbrough in extra-time of the second leg to progress to the play-off final at Wembley, but the Middlesbrough manager, Kim Hellberg, has accused them of trying to cheat in what has become known as “spygate”.

‘Understandably incensed’

Southampton have launched an internal review to “ensure that all facts and context are properly understood” before “conclusions are drawn”, said chief executive Phil Parsons. “Given the intensity of the fixture schedule and the short turnaround between matches, we have requested time to complete that process thoroughly and responsibly.”

But the club have “not tried to fight the accusation that they tried to gain an unfair advantage”, said The Telegraph. They reportedly claimed the analyst was “acting on his own initiative and had not been instructed to travel to Rockliffe Hall hotel, adjacent to Boro’s training ground, to spy on Kim Hellberg and his players”. Middlesbrough, though, were “understandably incensed” after their media team “caught the spy lurking near some bushes with professional surveillance equipment”.

Boro have also “been led to believe by whistleblowers that this is not the first time Southampton have spied on their opponents’ training sessions”.

Cases of spying were “practically unheard of” until 2019, said the BBC, when Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa admitted he had sent a member of staff to spy on “every team they played that season”.

At that time, there was no specific regulation against spying; “bullish” Bielsa “even paid the fine himself”. The EFL then introduced rule 127: “no club shall directly or indirectly observe (or attempt to observe) another club's training session in the period of 72 hours prior to any match”.

That’s what Southampton have been charged with breaching, as well as rule 3.4: clubs must “act towards each other with the utmost good faith”.

But perhaps the “most high-profile case of spying” was during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, when New Zealand’s women’s football team spotted a drone above their training session before their game against Canada. French police found its operator: a member of Canada’s staff.

That it was Canada who “performed such an egregious breach of the rules”, a country “known for its people being polite, respectful, laidback and just terribly nice”, added to “the ironic drama”, said The Athletic.

‘Tainted triumph’

Back in the Championship, “spygate 2.0 has become the biggest crisis in play-off history”, said The Independent. And it risks being “Spygate £200 million”, the potential value of a place in the Premier League, if – as predicted – Southampton beat Hull in the final at Wembley on 23 May. If they do, it will be a “tainted triumph”.

The EFL is in an “impossible position”; Southampton would usually have 14 days to respond to the charges, but the EFL has asked the independent disciplinary commission to fast-track the case, given the time pressure. There are also “logistical issues as well as moral ones”.

The “nuclear option” – expelling Southampton from the play-offs – creates “an almighty mess”. But finding them guilty and fining them would cost far less than the prize for promotion, which isn’t likely to “assuage Middlesbrough”.

Meanwhile, Middlesbrough are in “limbo”, continuing to train in case they have to take Southampton’s place in the play-offs. Southampton or the EFL could also appeal any verdict, but Middlesbrough cannot, although they could pursue legal action.

Some Southampton fans are planning to go to Wembley “dressed as hedges or carrying binoculars”. But for Boro and the EFL “this is no laughing matter”.

As the Trump administration scrambles to control its war with Iran, both countries have turned to an unexpected moderator: Pakistan, which has led multiple rounds of ceasefire negotiations between the two nations. Now, Pakistan is quietly growing its influence in the region while Washington and Tehran circle one another for another round of talks.

From ‘kind of a sideshow’ to being in Trump’s ‘favor’

Islamabad’s role as a major player in this conflict, for many observers, has “come as a surprise,” given Pakistan’s “global position, domestic challenges” and “volatile relationship” with the first Trump administration, said the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). But “perhaps it shouldn’t,” the BBC said.

Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir “is in U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor,” with the president asserting that the Pakistani leader knows Iran “better than most.” Pakistan, in its own messaging, has hailed a “brotherly” relationship with neighboring Iran, with the two nations sharing “deep cultural and religious ties,” said the BBC.

Although Pakistan was “kind of a sideshow” during the first Trump administration, it has “really reached out” to both the White House and “Donald Trump personally, as well as his family members, to try to build influence in Washington,” CCGA said. Pakistan’s connections to Saudi Arabia and China have also allowed it to “place itself in a mediator role” with a “greater level of geopolitical clout and influence than we might have expected a couple of years ago.”

Given Pakistan’s reputation for corruption and military authoritarianism, it “would not be an exaggeration” to describe it as a “failed state,” said The Spectator. But simply “being a nuclear power” affords Pakistan a “head start in terms of credibility” by gracing Islamabad with the “nuclear aura that Iran would love to possess.” China, which has played a “background but crucial role” in the peace negotiations, has also had a “longstanding close relationship” with Islamabad, as both nations “enjoy common cause against India.”

Pakistan as a ‘responsible middle power’

“Playing the role of mediator” between the United States and Iran — or “at least message-bearer” — has “been a boon for Islamabad,” Le Monde said. The country has undergone “its authoritarian drift,” in which it “silenced its large Shiite minority during the war and solidarity movements with Iran.”

After having sheltered Osama bin Laden, Pakistan “wants to convince international opinion that it is no longer a breeding ground for terrorism,” said Gilles Boquérat, an associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, to Le Monde. Instead, it is portraying itself as a “responsible middle power, capable of ensuring regional security from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian border.”

But Pakistan’s ties with Iran have earned Islamabad its share of critics during the current war, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.). “I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them,” Graham said during a Senate hearing this week regarding reports that the Pakistani government has aided Iranian forces. “If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate.”