It was “a predatory move” that reeked of old-school colonialism, said Le Monde (Paris). Last week, in a typically grandiose social media post, Donald Trump announced that the US and Venezuela had struck “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”. It would, he claimed, give America majority control over 65 billion barrels of oil found at 17 sites in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo.

Trump has been demanding this as a prize ever since US forces seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in a dawn raid on Caracas in early January, said Joseph Zeballos-Roig on MS Now (New York). “To the victor belong the spoils, right?” he told a rally in Nevada back in August, boasting how, with Caracas, he wanted to do things “the old-fashioned way”.

By strong-arming interim president Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, into agreeing the deal, he has made Venezuela America’s “51st state in all but name”.

‘Smells pretty unconstitutional’

Venezuelans are horrified, said Luis Manuel Aguana in La Patilla (Caracas). We are a “culturally patriotic and anti-imperialist” people who, like other Latin Americans, loathe “external oppression”. And Rodríguez’s flimsy promise that the deal will generate $209 billion in taxes over the next 25 years hardly makes this bitter pill any easier to swallow. But it is a deal that’s unlikely to hold, said Caracas Chronicles. It “looks, sounds and smells pretty unconstitutional”; any future government is more than likely to abrogate its terms.

Legally speaking, the accord is a “complete monstrosity”, agreed Rafael Quiroz Serrano in Tal Cual (Caracas). A leader with no electoral mandate, Rodríguez lacks the legitimacy to sign away our oil deposits; and under Venezuelan law the state oil company, PDVSA, must have a controlling stake in any oil production projects. Be that as it may, Caracas has been persuaded under the deal to appoint a private company – North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) – to control the 17 oil fields, on the understanding that the Pentagon is given a 35% stake in the business and receives 20% of all output at cost price.

And that’s a real cause for alarm, said Caracas Chronicles. NABEP’s Venezuelan owner, Alejandro Betancourt, is a byword for corruption. He made his fortune building power plants for Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez, and “became synonymous with the vanishing of hundreds of millions of dollars” that Chávez had allocated to fixing Venezuela’s power grid. And he is now being investigated in Spain (where he lives) for alleged money laundering.

‘Wildly optimistic’

Betancourt would anyway have to work miracles for the deal to work out, said Catherine Bosley in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Only 1% of global crude oil is currently produced in Venezuela, despite it having 17% of the world’s reserves. And given the dilapidated state of its oil infrastructure after decades of socialist misrule, that won’t change any time soon. Vast sums of investment are needed. True, Chevron, which already operates in Venezuela, promised to invest $7 billion over the next five years in a separate deal last week. But none of the other oil giants, some of whom lost billions when Chávez booted them out in 2007, are keen to engage.

With good reason, said Keith Johnson in Foreign Policy. Trump’s numbers are “wildly optimistic”. Venezuela’s oil is very heavy and hard to process: only 20 billion barrels are likely to be recoverable from the 17 oil fields. And even that will take years to retrieve, a fact Trump conveniently overlooked when claiming the deal would drive down US energy prices that have spiked as a result of his war in Iran.

The deal’s economic prospects may be in doubt, said The Daily Beast (New York), but the political consequences are already being felt. By shoring up Rodríguez’s undemocratic regime, it has dashed any immediate hope of Venezuela turning to democracy. And it has given the green light to countries such as Russia to “attack and steal from weaker neighbours”.

“Sadly, we’ve become used to far-right protests in recent years,” said Joe Mulhall in The Guardian. There have been angry crowds outside hotels housing asylum seekers across Britain, and Tommy Robinson has led vast “Unite the Kingdom” rallies in central London.

But what we saw in Dover and Portsmouth last weekend “feels different”. At around 7am on Saturday, “hundreds of balaclava-clad men, dressed all in black, began piling out of the backs of vans and blocked roads around Dover port”. Chanting “Stop the boats” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”, they shut down the UK’s biggest ferry port for hours. Then, on Sunday evening, a group of men gathered near a Portsmouth beach to try to prevent lifeboat crews from bringing ashore 140 asylum seekers.

‘Blackshirts reimagined’

“You can see them in the videos,” said Imogen West-Knights in The Independent: arms crossed, hoodies up, “like Oswald Mosley’s Cable Street blackshirts reimagined”. Some waded into the sea to film migrants arriving, before clashing with police. This is Britain today, where thugs can play out their “darkest fantasies of vigilante justice”.

It was unprecedented, said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, but it wasn’t surprising. The British state has abdicated responsibility for policing our borders: it appears either incapable or unwilling to stop the boats, or to swiftly deport these “intruders” from “heaven knows where”. It was only a matter of time before “ordinary people”, acting as volunteer “border wardens”, took matters into their own hands.

These weren’t ordinary citizens, said Kevin Rawlinson in The Guardian. Both protests last weekend were organised by Patriot Platform, a collective of far-right groups led by Daniel Thomas, aka “Danny Tommo”. They’re well-organised and disciplined, and able to mobilise at short notice. Patriot Platform claims to be “devoted to protecting British women and children, and to Christian values” (“Christ is King” is a favoured chant). In reality, many of its members are domestic abusers and violent criminals. “That includes Thomas”, who served time for a botched kidnapping.

‘Chilling and unacceptable’

“Concerns about illegal immigration are widespread, understandable and legitimate,” said The Telegraph. And people have every right to protest. But masked men closing roads and blockading ports is “chilling and unacceptable”. Disturbingly, it seems that anti-migrant protesters are copying the tactics of green radicals such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, targeting infrastructure and “bringing public highways to a standstill”.

It’s a sign that radicals on both Right and Left have given up on democratic politics, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Actually, politicians are listening on this issue: small boat crossings are down by more than 40% this year; yet anti-migrant agitation has only increased. To a growing minority, facts and arguments are no match for “the seductive power of being cast as a fearless crusader for the most important cause of our age”.

This year has been one of “unthinkable” progress for maths, said The Wall Street Journal. But OpenAI’s proof of the Navier-Stokes problem – one of the seven esteemed Millennium Prize Problems accepted as maths’ “deepest and most difficult unresolved questions” – “represents the most significant advance yet”.

The tech company took around three days to find a solution with an internal model that is “significantly more capable” than its most advanced commercial model, said New Scientist. It first used 1,000 AI agents to crack a similar problem, then around 10,000 to complete the task. If a customer wanted to run the same problem, it would cost them “around $15 million” (£11 million).

However, there has been a “dispute” about how the solution was reached. Two human researchers had announced they had “cracked three significant problems” linked to the Navier-Stokes problem, also using OpenAI and Anthropic large language models, which has raised questions over the privacy and integrity of the data integral to the breakthrough.

‘Potentially historic breakthrough’

The “Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem” essentially looks at equations which describe the movement of liquids and gases, said The New York Times. These equations are used to predict the weather and “model the behaviour of ocean currents or the climate as a whole”. The problem challenges whether, theoretically, the “laws of physics would break down under certain extreme conditions”, such that water, for instance, could “spontaneously explode”.

This “potentially historic breakthrough” has been “shadowed by questions over unpublished research by outside mathematicians”, said Axios. New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been using large language models, including OpenAI’s Codex, where information was stored privately. Just hours before OpenAI’s announcement, the pair had published work which was claimed to make a breakthrough in the Navier-Stokes problem. OpenAI denies having seen this work, but admits it had launched the project “after hearing rumours that Anthropic’s models had solved a major maths problem”. The company has also said it would not collect the $1 million (£738,000) prize.

“The result is the latest in a string of shocking mathematical discoveries led by AI in recent months,” said New Scientist. In May, an OpenAI model also “cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős”, while a Claude Fable 5 AI found a “counter-example to the Jacobian conjecture, which had stood for nearly a century”. And just last week, an AI model “formalised Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days”.

‘Reshaping mathematics’

This controversy is important because it “strikes at a core trust question for AI-assisted science”, said Axios. It casts doubt over whether researchers can “safely use frontier labs’ tools to work on unpublished discoveries”. Although Buckmaster and Alpöge have not accused OpenAI of any direct wrongdoing, this episode “taps into a broader push” for companies to keep sensitive data away from the major AI labs.

This advancement also allows OpenAI to “cast its technology in a positive light after a period of alarm” over its safety practices, said The Guardian. In July, during a cybersecurity testing breach, OpenAI admitted its agents hacked into Hugging Face, another tech company. The company may have solved a major problem which has “stumped humans for nearly a century”, but would struggle to quiet “renewed calls for curbs on AI development” and AI “superintelligence”.

For human mathematicians, this result is “sobering”, said the MIT Technology Review. Buckmaster and Alpöge collaborated for almost a year and were unable to achieve only a simplified solution, while private OpenAI models achieved a full solution in a matter of days, at vast cost. If major tech companies keep “striving for more and more impressive mathematical accolades, there might not be any open problems left” for humans to “wrestle with”, which would “dramatically change the field of mathematics”.

Clearly, humans take longer to achieve proofs than AI but, in doing so, they “uncover new mathematical approaches and ideas that might inspire their peers and even birth their own subfields”. Those “benefits disappear” if breakthroughs are kept behind a paywall. OpenAI’s “brute-forced” approach is “indisputably impressive”, but if this is the “future we are headed for, it is unclear how human mathematicians will fit into it”.

College sports were once a bastion of amateur athletics. No more. Players get paid, openly, going to teams that can offer them the biggest paycheck. The lines between college and pro sports have grown fuzzy, and some marginal pro players are even attempting to return to class to keep their careers alive. A fierce backlash has ensued.

LSU: ‘Enraged every stakeholder’

It was once a settled fact that “players who had moved on to pro sports from college could not return to college,” said The Associated Press. Louisiana State University (LSU) is testing that notion, enrolling two athletes, Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, who “spent time in NFL training camps this summer.”

Neither player was on LSU’s roster for Saturday’s season-opening 51-10 victory over Clemson because the Southeastern Conference (SEC) asked a court to “force LSU into following the conference’s rules banning pro athletes.” A judge ruled the duo should be allowed to play under brand-new NCAA rules that allow a fifth year of college eligibility, and the league is appealing. The players are currently in limbo, said the AP. It’s “embarrassing where we are with college football,” Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney said to reporters, per the AP.

First-year LSU Coach Lane Kiffin has “enraged nearly every stakeholder in the sport” with his attempt to bring the pros back to college, said The Wall Street Journal. His recruitment of Wright and Harris sparked “all of college sports’ major conferences” — including the Big Ten, Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference — to quickly adopt policies banning the return of players who attempt to go pro. Athletes who “sign professional contracts” should not “be permitted to return to college competition,” the SEC said in a statement, per the Journal.

Kiffin is pushing to let the athletes regain their eligibility to play at the college level. “They’re either gonna play for you, or they’re gonna play somewhere else around the country,” he said at a press conference.

LSU is not the only organization recruiting former pros. The NCAA has been ordered by courts to “allow professional basketball players to return to college basketball,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said at USA Today. Filling college rosters with “older adults and former professionals” will have the consequence of squeezing younger athletes out of college athletics. The NCAA is backing the “Protect College Sports Act,” which would codify college eligibility standards into federal law.

Amateurism: ‘Fundamentally dishonest’

The LSU saga is highlighting “college sports’ identity crisis,” Jason Lloyd said at The Athletic. University athletes “weren’t paid, they weren’t represented by agents, they couldn’t profit from endorsements” until the last few years. Such amateurism was “fundamentally dishonest” given the billions of dollars generated by college sports. Direct payments and endorsements are now allowed, a recent change. But colleges refuse to call the newly paid athletes “employees.” Doing so would give the players “legal rights, obligations and bargaining power” universities want to avoid. The question that must be answered: “What, exactly, is a college athlete in 2026?”

While the legal battle proceeds, LSU is playing without Wright and Harris — and playing well. Kiffin’s football team led Clemson 31-3 at halftime of Saturday’s game. “Imagine,” Kiffin said to ESPN at halftime, “if we had pro players.” The SEC is not amused. The league on Tuesday scheduled a vote of its college presidents to decide “whether to expel the Tigers from the league,” said ESPN.

Founded in 1440 by King Henry VI, Eton College is a “rarefied bubble of educational privilege” that will have taught the country’s next two kings, said The Telegraph. Prince George will this week follow his father, uncle and 20 British prime ministers by attending the £21,891-per-term boarding school west of London.

Speaking in 2000, Prince William said that he “really enjoyed being able to go about Eton as just another student”, although in his autobiography published in 2023 Prince Harry was critical of his time at the school.

George will be exposed to the same “idiosyncrasies” of the institution, but changing times present new challenges for the young prince.

‘Own language and traditions’

Prince George will be one of “250 apprehensive first years” arriving at the school for their first term, said The Telegraph. In the first few days, George and his classmates will settle into their accommodation and begin learning “Eton’s peculiar geography” and the typical “rhythm of the day”. School days begin with a 10-minute morning chapel service, followed by around seven lessons, and at least two hours of “intense sport”, as well as “EW (extra work)”, Eton’s name for homework.

“Eton has its own language and its own traditions,” said The Sunday Times. Each house has a “dame”, Eton’s version of a matron, who will “regularly pop in for a chat with George and the other F-Blockers”, or first years. He will also be assigned an “‘uncle’” and a “timelord” from among the older boys in his house. The former will explain the intricacies of Eton’s uniform – a “black morning suit with pinstripe trousers” – and mastering the “front studs, back studs and detachable collars”. The latter will help him arrange his schedule and extra-curricular activities, which might include “22-inch calibre rifle shooting on the school range” or “auditioning for a play”.

“The school has so many unique names and phrases that there is an ‘Eton Glossary’ on its website,” said the Daily Express. George will be expected to learn and use the terms “pop” (senior prefects), “dry bobs” (those who play cricket instead of rowing in the summer) and “beaks” (teachers). On day one, new pupils are quizzed on these “unique phrases of the school”, as well as the colours of each of its 25 houses.

Even though Eton is close to Forest Lodge, the Waleses’ eight-bedroom Windsor home, George will be a full boarder, said Hello! This means he will go home “every two or three weeks”, although he will enjoy a room to himself, as “there are no shared rooms at Eton”.

‘Challenge’ for security

For George, going to Eton will be a chance to “find his first tribe away from home”, said The Telegraph. But being a future king does not entitle you to “become a BNOC (big name on campus)” at Eton. “No one cares who your parents are, because almost everybody’s parents are someone.”

However, the young royal differs from his peers in having “greater protection than any heir in modern times”, said The i Paper. The Prince and Princess of Wales have fought for a “tighter approach” to media access than William and Harry experienced at Eton. They were part of a “gentleman’s agreement”, in which photos were traded to the press from a select number of events in exchange for leaving them alone.

While media coverage of the royals has “undergone a sea change since the 90s”, Prince George still faces a “bigger threat” to his privacy and security than his predecessors. The “rise of phone cameras, Meta glasses and other smart spectacles” are a “challenge” for the 24-strong security team at the school. Eton’s facilities are “dotted around the town”, meaning George is likely to encounter tourists who are not subject to the same rules and regulations as the media. “Take a close look at pictures of Prince George released ahead of his first day at Eton. They may be the last we see of him for some time.”

A “touchstone of British factual television”, will come to an end this September, said Radio Times. Two 90-minute episodes of one of the world’s longest-running documentaries will air on ITV in an “epic and moving end to a television landmark”.

Based on a Jesuit maxim – “give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” – 14 seven-year-olds from a variety of backgrounds were interviewed in 1964 about their thoughts and aspirations for the future. But the tenth and final iteration will see a return of many cast members, who have mixed views on the show’s practices.

‘Glimpse of the country’s future’

This “groundbreaking ITV documentary series” has been described as the “Bayeux tapestry of television”, said The Guardian. Over the last six decades, the children’s progress has been “creating a snapshot of Britain’s social history”.

But this instalment will have some “noticeable differences”. Michael Apted, the researcher who found and selected the participants, and interviewed them for each episode, died in 2021. Director Asif Kapadia, who was chosen to replace Apted for his acclaimed Ayrton Senna, Diego Maradona and Amy Winehouse films, has since called this documentary the “most beautiful thing I’ve ever made”.

Two of the subjects have died. Lynn Johnson, who became a librarian in east London, was the first, in 2013. Nick Hitchon, a Yorkshire farmer’s son who became a nuclear scientist, approached the programme wanting to record a final message after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in 2023, just “hours” after his final “heartbreaking” interview.

The documentary was originally intended as a “one-off” for the current affairs show “World in Action”, said The Times. But it intrigued audiences as it “promised the viewer a glimpse of the country’s future”.

The cast’s lives continue to diverge. Tony Walker, a “cheeky-chappy kid” from Bethnal Green, east London, dreamt of becoming a jockey, but turned to cab driving, while Andrew Brackfield claimed to read the Financial Times aged seven, successfully predicted he would attend Cambridge, and is a retired partner of Linklaters. But in a “villain-free series”, Bruce Balden’s “fundamental goodness still shines”. In the first episode he said we should “give most of our money to poor people”, and by “28 Up” was “teaching maths to immigrants in the East End and in 35 Up was teaching in Bangladesh”.

‘Outrageous’ inequality

Over this time period, we have seen the participants “grow up, marry, separate, have careers, suffer illness and depression”, said The Independent.

Cast members have also accused Apted of “pursuing an agenda and have been intermittently unhappy at how they were portrayed”. Throughout you can see a “reluctance to continue to appear on screen warring with a sense of duty – a generational one, perhaps – not to disrupt a historic enterprise”.

Many of the cast stepped back for one or several episodes. One of a “trio of prep-school toffs”, Charles Furnaux left after 21 and became a BBC producer, while Liverpudlian teacher Peter Davies dropped out for three instalments after being “monstered by the right-wing press for calling Margaret Thatcher’s government ‘an incompetent, uncaring bloody shower’”.

Considering the aims and scope of the project, it is “outrageous” that only four girls were chosen alongside 10 boys, cast member Jackie Bassett told The Mirror. Bassett, alongside two friends from the same “working-class east London” primary school, and “solo upper-class Suzy” were the only female representatives on the show.

Bassett famously challenged Apted on camera for “asking the women about marriage and children rather than anything else”. She would later “point blank refuse to speak about certain topics”. “I was not going to talk about something that would affect my family, my children – so I basically just told him no”, said Bassett. “He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.”

Every now and again, a single news story exposes what is “going wrong in modern Britain”, said The Telegraph. The head-on crash that killed two policemen and five joyriders in Middlesbrough in August, and its aftermath, is the latest.

This is “a community beset by brazen criminality”. The five young men were linked to organised crime and had 37 convictions between them. And the horrific crash has been followed by a series of gang-related incidents and acts of destruction. A house was rammed by a car and a man stabbed in suspected tit-for-tat attacks. At a memorial for one of the men, cars were smashed into each other in a field and set alight. In a separate incident, a seven-year-old and her aunt died in an arson attack. Last week, 200 officers from the National Crime Agency and other forces were drafted in to calm tensions.

‘Feral underclass’

“Almost all of the recent crimes have taken place in just one postcode,” said Felix Pope on UnHerd: TS6, a collection of deprived estates in southeast Middlesbrough with what one local politician calls “a feral underclass”. Residents speak of balaclava-clad young men on electric bikes and scooters terrorising the community. One local told The Yorkshire Post: “TS6 has gone mad.”

All this in a town that “once brimmed with pride”, said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Middlesbrough was once ‘Ironopolis’, one of the biggest producers of pig iron in the world.” Teesside shipyards turned out trawlers by the dozen. But after heavy industry went into a long and deep decline in the 1980s, Middlesbrough never recovered. The steelworks closed in 2015; the town is now one of the most deprived places in England – a place where the last two generations of many families have never known paid employment.

Successive governments should have done more to help these people, said Simon Heffer in The Telegraph. Instead, “the white working class has been pushed aside to stew on welfare benefits or in low-esteem jobs” – abandoned by a state whose first duty is to protect them. “No wonder so many of them feel no connection with it.”

‘Potential powder kegs’

Cleveland Police, the local force, is also a victim of neglect, said Leigh Jones in The Independent. Its area now has the highest crime rate outside central London. Yet it is one of the smallest forces in the country, and has been gutted by years of austerity. Had its budget kept up with inflation, it would be at £246 million this financial year; instead, it is just £196 million.

Yet this force is not an outlier, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. Across the country, cash-strapped local constabularies are sitting on “potential powder kegs”, but these forces don’t have the resources to deal with even “modest” manifestations of organised crime, such as county-line drug gangs. Look beyond the police, and the whole criminal justice system – prisons, the courts and probation service – is poorly run, and often in crisis. Middlesbrough’s plight is the sign of a “full-spectrum failure, from nose to tail”.

America’s midterm elections are looming, and are expected to turn on voters’ frustration with the rising cost of living. Hardly the moment, then, for a damaging trade war with Canada, said Rex Huppke in USA Today.

Yet following an acrimonious breakdown of trade talks between the two nations, Donald Trump last week slapped 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, including down jackets, wine, dairy products and hockey sticks. He later threatened to double tariffs on vehicles and car parts, posting on social media: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, who accused US negotiators of effectively declaring war on his country by introducing a raft of unacceptable last-minute demands, promised to retaliate with dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs, starting on 8 September.

Economic pain

Carney isn’t bluffing, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. Canada relies more on exporting goods to the US than the other way round, so its economy is set to lose most from any trade war, but Carney has staked his reputation on standing up to Trump. He reckons Canadians will have more tolerance for economic pain resulting from a trade war they’ll blame on Trump “than Americans will have for rising prices”.

The polls certainly suggest as much, said Andrew Day in The American Conservative. Only a third of Canadians have a favourable view of the US today, down from 54% in 2024; 76% back Carney’s stance. For someone so adept at promoting nationalism at home, Trump has a “curious blindspot” about the impact of stirring such passions abroad.

‘Personal fixation’

He can’t help himself, said Zack Beauchamp on Vox. After all his “jokes” about absorbing Canada as the 51st state, Trump has now signed an order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” to spite the Canadians. The US and Canada have a long history of trade disagreements over issues such as dairy and lumber, but these rows have never blown up into a trade war, “for the simple reason that they simply aren’t that large as a percentage of GDP”.

There don’t appear to be any political, ideological or business interests egging on Trump to get into a fight with Canada. The desire to “vassalise” and control America’s northern neighbour is just the president’s “personal fixation” – one so important to him that he’s apparently willing to pursue it, even at the cost of jeopardising his party’s Senate majority.

In 2024, before the US presidential election, young Africans were asked whether they expected their countries to fare better under Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Across a range of measures, most respondents to the African Youth Survey believed Biden to be the better bet: 42-44%, compared with 23-24% choosing Trump. But in the most recent edition of the survey, nearly two-thirds of the near-5,000 18- to 24-year-old participants said they would benefit from the Trump administration, according to Foreign Policy. That’s despite the president’s foreign aid cuts, dismantling of development programs and “disparaging remarks about the continent”.

“This generation has worked out what much of the Western commentariat still refuses to,” said Ivor Ichikowitz, the survey’s founder. “Diplomacy is about what you can get from the man in the Oval Office, not whether you like him.”

‘Strikes a chord’

Trump has never made a presidential visit to Africa. He has “seldom been polite about the continent”, said The Economist in 2018, “allegedly dismissing Nigerians as hut-dwellers and African states as ‘shitholes’”. Yet “he is more popular in Africa than in any other region”.

Even before Trump entered politics, there was a “large affinity towards him” in Nigeria, the most populous African nation, said The Guardian in 2020. His image as a “bombastic, straight-talking, self-made billionaire made his books a hit” in the country. Portraits of Trump, sometimes depicted in traditional clothing or in the military uniform of Nigerian dictators, are common. His image “strikes a chord”.

“Judging by our own president, it isn’t entirely surprising that a septuagenarian economic nationalist with a born-again vice-president, minimal respect for rule of law and archaic views about women is popular in Nigeria,” said Sa’eed Husaini, a political analyst in Lagos.

Nigerians have a “unique attachment to America”, wrote Africa expert Ebenezer Obadare on the Council on Foreign Relations. Whether in an “individualism that sometimes borders on outright sedition, or a risk-taking that often verges on self-immolation”, Nigerians see in the US an “admirable analogue of their own buccaneering spirit”.

Make Africa Great Again?

In 2025, 79% of Nigerians said they had confidence in Trump “to do the right thing regarding world affairs”, according to a Global Attitudes Survey by the Pew Research Center. That’s 21% higher than the same survey showed in 2017.

Many see Trump as the only president to defend Nigerian Christians; his administration claims they are being persecuted by Islamist groups.

The US went on to strike northern Nigeria, where Islamic State has a foothold, on Christmas Day in 2025, before beginning joint counterterrorism operations with the government this year. In the 2026 Global Attitudes Survey, confidence in him among Nigerian Christians had risen by six percentage points since 2025.

But more broadly, African Christians share commonality with American evangelicals and Trump, said the Council on Foreign Relations: a feeling of “being simultaneously persecuted by secular authority and pressured by a cultural momentum”, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender.

There is “overall African evangelical love for Trump”; he’s viewed as a “defender of family values” and a “symbol of masculinity in an age menaced by a rampant effeminacy”.

Trump’s business acumen is also admired among those who aspire to wealth, said Tendai Marima in Foreign Policy.

The so-called manosphere also has a strong influence in Africa, and Trump is seen as a “positive role model because of his values of manhood”. In South Africa, there is also strong support for Trump among the anti-migrant movement.

“As an African, what resonates with me most about the America First message is not that Africa should become America, but that African countries should also put their own citizens first,” said Freeman Bhengu, a member of anti-migrant group Operation Dudula.

In the Sahel, many see Trump as “ideologically close to their own military governments”, and their “nationalist-sovereign” rhetoric, said Lisa Tschörner, an international affairs researcher. Those countries perceive the US withdrawal of aid as “amounting to non-interference”.

According to the African Youth Survey, 26% of young Africans believe the US aid cuts could actually have a “positive impact”, despite experts’ concerns. As Ichikowitz said, some young Africans associate the withdrawal of aid with the “possibility of greater self-reliance and government accountability”.

His Ali G character is “a cover to laugh at Jamaican culture”, said media-monitoring site NewsCord, as it launched a campaign for cinemas not to show Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film. Returning to the screen after 20 years, Ali G “is a white man pretending to be Jamaican”, so he “smokes weed, is a misogynist, and does nothing meaningful in life”. And while “the world laughs at Ali G”, the “real butt of the joke are Black people”.

‘Fun police’

“Ali G: Who Iz I?” is due for release in October and the trailer features “some of the escapades and pranks” in Baron Cohen’s second feature-length comedy “starring the academically challenged west Staines rude boy character”, said The Guardian. “Sporting new dreadlocks”, Ali G says that in the two decades since we last saw him, “the world went to crap: there was Covid, wars and Ed Sheeran”.

Within days of the trailer’s release, activists responding to NewsCord’s urgings had sent more than 40,000 emails to 15 major cinema chains. “The fun police are already out in force” with their efforts “to cancel the leader of Da West Staines Massif”, said The Telegraph’s culture writer, Liam Kelly. The letters of complaint are “AI-generated” and “tweaked” for each cinema chain but “one thing is consistent: Ali G is beyond the pale”.

It’s the British Board of Film Classification which “ultimately” decides whether a film is “fit to be shown on the UK’s big screens” and “it would be a massive surprise” if this one “were not given a certificate”. So all this outrage is “ludicrous”.

Cinemas are not censors, Phil Clapp of the UK Cinema Association told Variety. “They are there to engage and entertain the widest possible audience”; they are not “arbiters of public taste”.

‘Moribund culture’

“Any sensible person” can “see straight away” that Baron Cohen “does not depict or intend to depict Black men of any description”, said Zimbabwean author Masimba Musodza in The Times of Israel. He’s actually “poking fun at white youth” who have “consumed caricatures” of Black British masculinity in popular culture and “mistaken them for reality”.

There’s something “uncomfortable” in the assumption that “reproducing those stereotypes” in order to ridicule the person reproducing them “constitutes an attack upon Black people themselves”. Besides, “the answer to bad ideas in art” isn’t always censorship; “sometimes, it is simply to watch the bloody thing and understand the joke”.

Baron Cohen himself has acknowledged the censoriousness of today’s culture. “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back”, he said on X.

For others, though, Ali G’s return is less shocking than tedious. It’s “nah, you’re alright thanks” news, said Laura Martin in Esquire. When the vintage comedy character “crashed” Wimbledon fortnight this summer, “claiming to be the tournament’s official weed dealer” and joking that the royal box has nothing to do with the “queen’s punani”, the “three-decade-old gags” had not “aged well”.

The reappearance of the “bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive” is a “disquieting symptom” of a “moribund culture” that’s stifled by the grip of “ultra-progressive cliques” and “the dead hand of Bluesky thinking”, said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. “We just have to go patiently through, however long it takes, and hope that the big film of 2052 is not Ali G in a retirement home.”

In January 2023, suburban US mother Lindsay Clancy sent her husband Patrick to pick up a takeaway. She then killed their three children, aged five, three, and eight months, and tried to take her own life, sustaining serious spinal injuries that left her paralysed from the waist down.

The 36-year-old from Massachusetts, now on trial for murder, does not deny killing her children, but argues she is not guilty of the charges against her because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time. In the months leading up to the tragedy, she had sought help from multiple medical professionals, tried more than a dozen prescription drugs, gone to A&E, checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and twice called a suicide hotline.

Jurors are now into their fourth day of deliberations on the verdict, and the televised trial has “gathered extraordinary – and increasingly uncontrollable – momentum among the public”, said The Times. Observers in the US and beyond have been “transfixed” by the tragedy, with conspiracy theories multiplying online and silent rallies organised in support of Clancy, mainly by women who believe she was failed by America’s maternal healthcare system.

‘Very worst nightmare’

Clancy has become a “something of a feminist symbol” to her supporters, said The Telegraph’s US correspondent, David Millward. Women wearing pink T-shirts saying “Believe”, “She Needed Help”, and “Peace For Lindsay” gathered outside the courthouse. They – and those at “scores of other rallies” – see her as a tragic “example of failing mental-health support for new mothers”.

Many mothers sympathise with Clancy because “she is our very worst nightmare”, said Victoria Smith on UnHerd. She is “a vessel for a kind of collective maternal fear”. Looking at her in the courtroom, we see “the most horrific malfunction of maternal love and feel immense relief that this never happened to us”. Her actions are “not excusable” but “that doesn’t mean she isn’t worthy of our compassion”. This is what happens when “mothers are ignored, when maternal health is trivialised, and when research into female psychiatric disorders is neglected”.

As a mother of four, I’m “perplexed” at the support for Clancy, said Nicole Russell on USA Today. You can be “upset about her unsupportive husband” and “frustrated” that all those drugs “scrambled her body and mind”, but “holding her up as a poster child” for struggling new mums? That’s “a bridge too far”. We have turned into “a society which cherry-picks its response to horrifying events”, viewing them only “through the lens of our own experience”. Compassion for Clancy is one thing but it should not overshadow “the demand for justice” for her three dead children.

If a positive can be drawn from this situation, it’s that a “global spotlight” has been shone on postpartum psychosis, said Olivia Petter in The Independent. The condition, which affects one to two of every 1,000 new mothers, should not be confused with postnatal depression, which is more widely understood and more common, affecting one in every seven new mothers. Postpartum psychosis is “shrouded in stigma”: an “under-researched“ condition that can present with “myriad symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and paranoia”. Clancy’s trial will spark “long-awaited” conversations that should “get more research done” and “ultimately save lives”.

‘True-crime brain’

“There are not enough trigger warnings in the universe to prepare you” to watch this trial, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. It was live-streamed on multiple platforms every day, turning it into “a referendum on motherhood and mental heath”, but also one on conspiracy theories, too. When such a complicated and sensitive case is presented like this, everyone watching suddenly believes they have “cracked the whole thing open, in ways that doctors, investigators, lawyers and Lindsay herself could not”.

And on social media, the conspiratorial and “contrarian consensus has flourished”, said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. “An army of trial-watchers” have pushed the baseless claim that Clancy’s now ex-husband, Patrick – who testified in her defence – was behind the deaths, based on “Zapruder-film analysis of old Instagram posts” and other “wild conjecture”. One account-holder even staged a “speculative re-enactment of the crime scene using Bratz dolls” and then posted it to TikTok.

Given this “epidemic” of “true-crime brain”, the “political and sociocultural moment”, and the “bottomless horror” of the case, it was “inevitable” that this trial would “inspire outlandish counternarratives”. It’s clearer than ever that the “American public distrusts its legal institutions and media outlets” and that creates “a vacuum in which wild conjecture can bloom”.

The sight of a white cloud-like trail streaming behind a plane “set against a bright blue sky creates a romantic image of aviation”, said Aerospace Global News. But their existence “also represents the darker side of flying”.

These innocuous-looking trails “are one of the most urgent yet solvable climate challenges facing aviation today”, said Google, which is taking part in a £5 million trial known as Operation Blue Skies headed by the UK government. Together, they are looking to explore whether tweaking flight paths could address this problem.

Heat trappers

The streams are known as “condensation trails”, or “contrails”, said Google, which is partnering with the government, the Met Office, air traffic control provider NATS and researchers from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

These trails form when aircraft engine emissions encounter extremely cold air found at high altitudes, causing tiny ice particles to develop. They often fade soon after they appear, but very cold and moist atmospheric conditions can allow them to linger and spread. Over time, they may contribute to cloud formation that traps heat that would otherwise radiate away from the Earth.

Contrails are sometimes known as “vapour trails” but they’re different to so-called “chemtrails”, which conspiracy theorists claim are secret chemical or biological agents being sprayed on purpose for weather and population control, or geoengineering projects.

Trails ‘persisted and widened’ 

In 2019, around 40 million scheduled passenger flights took place, adding up to around 38 billion miles of travel, said The Economist. And more than 40% of these flights left contrails behind them for at least part of the journey. Many were “ephemeral”, but in more than 5% of the total distance flown – “comfortably enough for 10 round-trips a day to the Moon” – they “persisted and widened”, becoming cirrus clouds. “In doing so they warm the planet.”

Operation Blue Skies is based on a theory that if scientists, using artificial intelligence, can predict the areas of the atmosphere where contrails are likely to form, jets would be able to avoid them.

The trial will focus on the Shanwick airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which accounts for around 5% of global contrail warming. Using satellite images and flight data to identify where planes have previously produced contrails, and combining these with weather patterns, Google will forecast where the conditions for new contrails are most likely to occur. Air traffic controllers will then direct pilots to avoid those areas.

But far from “dramatically changing” the route of a flight, the aircrafts’ altitude will only change by around 2,000ft. This is the same sort of re-route that occurs already to “avoid turbulence and bad weather” so passengers are “unlikely to notice”, said the BBC.

The data centre question

Testing will take place during evenings and nights in the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, when the volume of air traffic is lower. Approximately 10,000 flights are expected to pass through the airspace during the trial periods.

Changing the altitude of an aircraft “can mean it burns more fuel”, which raises the “obvious question” of whether avoiding contrails “simply” creates additional carbon emissions elsewhere. Paul Hodgson, Google’s technical lead for the operation, said the “CO2 penalty is in the order of less than 1%” and that is outweighed by the climate benefit of preventing a warming contrail.

Questions have been raised over Google’s involvement in the project. It is “one of many big tech companies spending billions on new data centres – the giant, power-hungry banks which power AI” and have serious implications for climate change.

To the surprise of the nation and the delight of the tabloids, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed last week that they were moving back to Britain. Harry and Meghan, who duly flew in on Wednesday, will base themselves in a private property outside London, thought to be in the Cotswolds.

Their children – Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five – are enrolled to start as day pupils at a mixed independent school next month. The Sussexes, who moved to California six years ago, will retain their homes in Montecito and Portugal, and the Duchess will continue to run her lifestyle brand, As Ever, from the UK.

King Charles was informed of their move a few days before the announcement. He was said to be pleased about having the opportunity to see more of his younger son and family. There are no plans for Harry or Meghan to resume their roles as working royals. It is unclear what provisions will be made for their security.

‘Miserable feud’

News of the Sussexes’ return has “thrown a metaphorical hand grenade into the already fragile House of Windsor”, said The Sunday Times. It raises difficult questions about security arrangements and unresolved family tensions, but it deserves a “guarded welcome”. If Harry is prepared to build bridges with his family and end his “long-running and increasingly ridiculous vendetta against the press”, much good could come of it.

This is an opportunity for a much-needed reconciliation, said The Mail on Sunday. The scandals involving Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have undermined the reputation of the monarchy, and the King, still receiving cancer treatment, needs family support as never before. Polls suggest that the public today has a poor opinion of Harry and Meghan, but that can be changed. It’s easy to forget how unpopular the Princess Royal once was. Now she’s one of the most-liked royals. Overcoming six years of bitterness and recriminations won’t be easy, said the Daily Mirror, but this is a chance for everyone caught in this “miserable feud” to start afresh. “They should seize it.”

Just 15 months ago, Prince Harry claimed that he couldn’t “see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK”, said Michael D. Shear in The New York Times. Now he has suddenly upped sticks. What changed? It’s an odd decision, said James Ball in The i Paper, given that “none of the issues that drove the pair out of the UK six years ago seem to be any better than when they left – and many look worse”. Among the suggested explanations is that Harry wants to be closer to his father, or is just eager to educate his children in the UK.

Life in America may also have lost its allure, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. Beautiful as Montecito is, living in “a gated community of semi-retired celebrities” must get very boring after a while, not to mention very expensive. With their Spotify deal axed and their other ventures failing to gain much traction, Harry and Meghan needed pastures new. I, for one, welcome their return, said Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph. The monarchy is Britain’s “longest-running soap opera” and, let’s be honest, the storylines have been “flagging of late”. The Sussexes will deliver a dose of colour.

Difficult future

Having the couple around again will certainly change the dynamic within the royal family, said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. King Charles, who hosted Harry, Meghan and their children for afternoon tea last month, has decided to give Harry another chance. But whether the bitter rift with William and Catherine can be mended is another matter.

The Waleses will likely give the Sussexes a wide berth, while privately fuming when “eclipsed by each Harry and Meghan news update”, said Tina Brown in The Times. The situation could yet resolve itself peacefully if Meghan returns to acting (there were rumours this week that she had landed a role in Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, “The Gentlemen”), Harry sticks to appearing in jolly photo ops, and they both manage to carefully steer clear of any controversy. The good news for the tabloids, though, is that “that’s never going to happen”.

The Sussexes’ return presents the royal family with many dilemmas, said Hilary Rose in The Times. It was one thing for Prince William to avoid contact with Harry and Meghan while they were based in the US, for instance, but at what point, now they’re back, will his refusal to engage begin “to look petty and vindictive”? What will happen at Christmas? Will the Sussexes be invited to Sandringham and, if so, will they do the walk to church? And what happens if Harry, who served and lost friends in Afghanistan, lets it be known that he’d like to appear at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday?

Some of the world’s most important rivers are drying up. The Colorado River supplies water and electricity to millions of people in the Southwest U.S. but is afflicted by a decadeslong drought, while blistering European heat is taking a toll on the Danube and other key waterways on the continent. And adjusting to these environmental changes will be an upstream battle for governments and communities.

Colorado: ‘Legal and political battles’

Record-low water levels at reservoirs fed by the Colorado River have put the region in “uncharted territory,” Utah State University’s Jack Schmidt said to CNN. Lakes Mead and Powell have been “shrinking for 20 years” because of the toll that climate change and overuse have taken on the river, which supplies water to 40 million people and hydropower electricity to 500,000 households. Big cities like Phoenix and Tucson “have taken steps to prepare” for the crisis, but procuring alternative water supplies “might be less feasible” for Indigenous tribes and small towns along the river.

Dividing the remaining water will require “legal and political battles” that are “not remotely close to being resolved,” said the Arizona Daily Star. Cities, farms and businesses along the Colorado say reducing water use is “more urgent than ever,” but the possible loss of Hoover Dam-produced power supplies could raise electricity costs in the region “to the point of being unaffordable.” One hope: The promise that the “biggest El Niño season on record” might replenish the river.

The crisis adds urgency to a federal proposal to require Arizona, California and Nevada to significantly reduce the amount of water they take from the Colorado, said The Associated Press. That would result in a “lot of potential devastating impacts” to farms and other river users, Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke said to the AP. Nevada this week sued to block the plan, said The Hill.

Europe: Altering the ‘old map of power’

The Danube recently measured “just 9 inches deep” in Budapest, Ben Coates said at The New York Times. Italy’s Po River and the Rhine in Switzerland are also in peril. That has nearly halted the “transport of chemicals, oil products and other goods” in Europe, while also forcing Romania to shut down a river-cooled nuclear power plant. The major rivers have served as “crucibles of the continent’s industrial power,” but the evaporation of those rivers could “alter the old map of Europe’s power and wealth.”

The “growing disruption” to commerce has sparked calls to dig deeper channels in the bottlenecked part of the Rhine, said Radio France Internationale. But experts are warning that making rivers deeper “cannot create more water and could make shortages worse” by disrupting sensitive ecosystems. “That is what we call maladaptation,” hydrologist Thibault Datry said to the outlet.

There is also talk of “reconnecting floodplains, protecting wetlands and restoring peatlands” to help rivers “retain more water and improve resilience” during dry periods, said Deutsche Welle. But those efforts may well be “little more than a drop in a fast-flowing river” without decisive moves to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate climate change.

Spearheaded by “Jolene”, her 1974 hit that has been covered more than 90 times, Dolly Parton’s extraordinary back catalogue has “long taken on a life of its own outside country music”, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian.

Right up until her death this week, Parton “seemed as present in pop music in the mid-2020s as she had been in the late 70s”, having been a notable influence on Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter in particular.

“A world without Dolly doesn’t feel possible, real, or right,” said Taylor Swift on social media following Parton’s death yesterday. She will leave an “everlasting” legacy for younger artists and fans. Beyoncé, who recorded a reimagined version of “Jolene” in 2024, said Parton was the “barometer” and “north star” of the industry.

‘Cocktail of mixed emotions’

“The country music icon amassed countless hits and accolades,” said USA Today, “but few songs have stood the test of time quite like her beloved tune ‘Jolene’”. The song first appeared on Parton’s 13th studio album, of the same name, released in October 1973, and reached No. 1 on the US chart in February 1974. It was inspired when a “red-haired bank clerk flirted” with her late husband, Carl Thomas Dean.

The song has not only become “one of the most renowned songs in country music”, but has also “transcended genre lines”. In 2004, it was No. 217 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and No. 63 on the revised list in 2021. “Jolene” has become a “constant presence throughout pop culture, with multiple generations discovering, covering and falling in love with the tune”.

A large part of the song’s appeal is how “open-ended” and relatable it is, said Annie Zaleski on The Boot. We may know how upset the “inadequate” protagonist is, but “we're not quite sure how her story ends”. Some of the final lyrics – “I had to have this talk with you / My happiness depends on you” – can be interpreted as “breezy, a stern warning shot or downright passive-aggressive”. In just three minutes, Parton digs into a “cocktail of mixed emotions – jealousy, anger, sadness, fright – that to this day captures the complicated dimensions of the human condition”.

Given that ambiguity, what’s curious is how different artists have interpreted the core messages of “Jolene” in recent years, said David Honigmann in the Financial Times. At its heart, the song “walks the line between dignity and desperation”. Tellingly, this has usually led male artists to replay Parton’s “quiet dignity as hysteria”, while women tend to be “more sympathetic”.

In 2018, rapper Stormzy “embarked on a lengthy exegesis” of the song on social media, saying that he wished Parton had “more self-love and confidence or the strength to just leave my man cah it ain’t really Jolene’s fault”. David Rotheray of The Beautiful South wrote in a 2013 blog that it “always sounded to me like a delusional ‘low self-esteem’ song”.

Yet women artists, such as Laura Marling and Strawberry Switchblade, have tended to refrain from judgement, while Parton’s god-daughter Miley Cyrus (Parton was a close friend of her father, Billy Ray Cyrus) has recorded a “splendidly tougher, more assertive version”.

Musical ‘blueprint’ for artists

“Jolene”, as well as other major hits such as “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5”, shows a “skilful musician who knew how to blend the story of lyrics with the drama of music”, said creative arts academic Wendy Hargreaves on The Conversation. Her lyrics are known to tell the story, but, importantly “her music matched it”.

The chords “pound out an appropriately bleak minor key, ascending to higher chords with each dramatic call of the name ‘Jolene’”. Underneath the accompanying vocals, an “intriguing, rapid-fire, finger-picking guitar” maintains an “incessant motion that not only adds tension but draws admiration for skilful playing”.

In a technical sense, “Jolene” also “lends itself to malleability”, said Zaleski on The Boot. For Parton, the song’s simplicity is a “big plus”, with her “proud warble” up front, supported by “genial acoustic guitar augmented by occasional whispers of pedal steel and strings”.

It strikes a perfect balance, at once “galloping” enough to be “effective” as a folk song, but also “skeletal enough” for subsequent artists to use it as a “blueprint or guiding sketch” for their own vision. This is what has made the song “timeless”; “there’s nothing in the production or instrumentation to tie it to a particular era or musical movement”.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham pledged to “bring back hope”. One month on, he told The Times’ Patrick Maguire, that message has already been “replayed back to me a lot” by the public. “What they’re saying is: we need that positivity. Can you keep it going?”

Favourable polling for the new PM suggests that “this country is at least intrigued by the possibility of visiting that place called Hope”, said Maguire. But “hope is one thing”: fulfilment of those hopes “is quite another”.

‘Excessive expectations’

If there’s to be a “new dividing line” in British politics, said Maguire, Burnham would like it to be “hope versus despair, hope versus anger, hope versus learned helplessness” and “all the other stodgy, unappetising staples” served up by his predecessors.

The new PM’s “abstract emphasis” on optimism “sits comfortably” alongside his “concrete focus” on the cost of living, wrote Matthew Barnfield, Department of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

If he can successfully sell voters the idea that “marginal relief” on energy bills and bus fares represents “just the first step on the road to making life more affordable”, they may be able to “look beyond” the gloom of monthly expenses and “start hoping for meaningful improvements” in living standards.

There is a virtuous cycle effect, too, said Barnfield. My research shows that “positive polling”, like that Burnham is currently enjoying, encourages not only existing supporters but also “those who are otherwise low in psychological hope to get on board”. And perception is all-important at the ballot box: “creating the impression that the Labour party is best placed to beat Reform will be essential to winning the next election”.

But beating the drum of hope “also often brings problems” of its own, by creating “excessive expectations”, wrote Andy Beckett in The Guardian. Labour’s optimism underestimates the “complexity of changing Britain” and downplays the “enemies and barriers” a Labour government “always faces”.

‘Hopey, changey thing’

National leaders have often evoked hope during their campaigns and victory speeches, said Philip Johnston in The Telegraph. When Margaret Thatcher first stood on the steps of Downing Street in 1979, she quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi “where there is despair, may we bring hope”. In 1992, Bill Clinton said he still believed in “a place called Hope”, a reference to the name of his hometown in Arkansas.

But the “most prodigious user” of the word was Barack Obama, who had it “emblazoned in capital letters” on campaign posters and titled his memoir “The Audacity of Hope”. The former president was later mocked by Republican Sarah Palin for relying on a fuzzy optimism she called “that hopey, changey thing”.

Hope as a concept has been “almost entirely colonised by the Left”, which creates the “danger that those on the Right will feed this pernicious agenda by overdoing the gloom and catastrophism”. While “fear and alarmism” may “play to a particularly jaundiced political audience”, more broadly such rhetoric is “corrosive and feeds extremism”. If they are to truly convince voters a brighter future is a conservative one, “politicians on the Right need to reclaim the idea of hope”.

Almost 500 people have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires in France this summer as countries across Europe continue to “tackle ferocious blazes”, said The Guardian.

More than a thousand people were forced to flee from a Croatian holiday resort last week, while hundreds more were evacuated from villages in western Germany and southwest France. Stranded holidaymakers were picked up from beaches “threatened by flames” in Greece, and the army rescued “historic relics” in Spain. In Belgium’s Liège province, residents were asked to leave their homes as the biggest fire in the country’s history burned through the High Fens nature reserve.

By 16 August, fire and rescue services in England and Wales had been called to 1,132 wildfires this year, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council – that’s more than the record-breaking 1,017 for the whole of last year.

The recent heatwaves have led to a rise in blazes but how they start and if they are set deliberately then why does this happen, are keenly debated questions.

‘No common picture’

Almost all UK wildfires are started by people, said a 2024 report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. A separate report by the Forestry Commission the previous year found that 97% of all wildfires are “related to some form of human action”, whether “deliberate” or “accidental”.

Nearly nine out of 10 forest fires in France are started by humans and some people “do so deliberately”, with the perpetrators “often difficult to identify”, said Le Monde. Although climate change “fuels the droughts, heatwaves, and winds that turn forests into tinderboxes, it is humans who set them alight”, said Euractiv.

In Portugal, which is known as the EU’s “most flammable country”, arson accounts for around a fifth of wildfires. In France, the authorities have calculated that nine out of 10 fires have a human origin, with 30% started deliberately. But the causes of fires elsewhere in the Mediterranean are “often not established, let alone investigated” so the “lack of reliable data” makes it “harder to design social and policy interventions to prevent fires”.

In Spain, some landowners set fires to move livestock around, and blazes can result from property disputes and acts of revenge. Arson “is not always random destruction”.

Europe may have “built advanced systems to detect wildfires and coordinate emergency response”, said Euronews, but there’s “no common picture of who starts deliberate fires or why”, because arson “remains a fragmented national matter”.

‘Fire is powerful, beautiful’

A man charged with starting a wildfire in Spokane, Washington, this month had planned the crime for weeks and even researched when the weather would be best for igniting it, said police. The suspect said “fire is powerful, beautiful, and that things that go through fire experience a kind of rebirth”, said The Associated Press.

In California, a suspect “spent days obsessing about arson” before heading to a clearing in Pacific Palisades late on New Year’s Eve, where he allegedly started a fire with a lighter, said the Los Angeles Times.

Although firefighters “quickly put out” that fire, investigators believe that the “embers continued to smoulder underground” and reignited to become one of California’s “most devastating” wildfires. It “consumed more than 6,500 structures” and left 12 people dead and billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Just a couple of years ago, Anthropic was an underdog in the AI race. Now the San Francisco start-up, co-founded by CEO Dario Amodei, is preparing to float in October “at a valuation of $2 trillion or more”, said George Hammond in the Financial Times – “a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering”.

Booming demand

Anthropic’s growth has been astonishing even by Silicon Valley standards. Valued at around $965 billion in May, when it eclipsed arch-rival OpenAI for the first time, investors reckon the $2 trillion price tag is justified by booming demand for the Claude maker’s advanced AI models and coding tools – especially from business. Annualised revenue is expected to rise more than ten times this year to around £100-120 billion.

The usual suspects – Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – are working on the listing, said Bloomberg. If it proceeds as scheduled, Anthropic will debut not just before OpenAI, but also before DeepSeek – the Chinese AI firm that has been grabbing increasing market share.

‘Tough’ questions

Growing Chinese competition is just one of the “tough investor questions” Anthropic will have to field, said The Wall Street Journal. Others include “tensions with the Trump administration” – which forced it to briefly pull leading models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – and “a growing backlash” against data centres. Additionally, Anthropic faces animus in Silicon Valley, where many CEOs are “nervous about its power over the AI ecosystem”.

The recent sell-off in SpaceX’s shares after an early pop has also “reminded investors of how turbulent moving from private to public markets can be”. Still, for the moment, Anthropic is lifting “Wall Street’s animal spirits”, said Due Diligence in the FT. Come autumn, the street will be buzzing.

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – better known as AOC – preparing to run for the presidency? That is the question being asked in Washington. Last week, the left-wing Democrat revealed on Instagram that she was freezing her eggs to “feel more in control” – which fuelled speculation about her political ambitions. Hours later, she gave an interview in which she refused to rule out making a White House run in 2028.

Youth in revolt

If she does go for the Democrat nomination, said Dace Potas in USA Today, she’ll have every chance of success. The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders proved to be a serious contender a decade ago, and today, the political climate is “even more receptive to his brand of populist anger”. AOC, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is well placed to capitalise on the moment. With strong name recognition and almost 30 million social media followers to help fund her campaign, she’d have a headstart on most of her likely rivals.

What might count against her is her youth, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Were she to win the election, she’d enter the White House at the age of 39, four years younger than the youngest-ever elected president, JFK. On the other hand, AOC may never get a better chance to bid for the top job, so, if she’s keen, she should take it. American history is littered with would-be candidates – Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, Chris Christie – who hesitated and missed their moment. Of course, winning the Democrat nomination would be the easy bit. “The general election would be a different story.”

Woke 2

AOC carries a lot of baggage, said David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner. In the Covid era, she joined in the talk of defunding the police and the clamour to cancel any public figure deemed to have transgressed progressive pieties about race and systemic oppression. Asked last week about some of the more extreme positions she and other left-wingers had taken, she tried to laugh it all off, saying “Woke 1 was crazy”. Granted, everyone should be allowed to change their views “as they learn and grow”, but AOC needs to explain exactly how her thinking has evolved and what her vision of Woke 2 is.

She owes voters more than just an “oops”, agreed Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. Were the tables turned, she wouldn’t let a Republican politician get away with it. If AOC wants to win the trust of American voters, “she’ll have to do better than this”.

“Hi there. I have received your email. I have printed it off. I’m now using it to light flaming cocktails for the entire bar. Best, Lucy.”

That was an ‘amusing’ out-of-office reply from a British Airways holiday advert a couple of years ago, said Country Life, but there is more to the “philosophy” of these emails than just trying to be funny, said The Atlantic. They can be a “rote obligation or an opportunity to make a grand statement about work and life”.

For some, it is a “simple one-line email”, while others use it to “apologise profusely” for being away or “highlight their indignation at being tied to work or the internet in the first place”. Selecting the right tone requires adhering to a hidden etiquette of rules. And needless to say, ”transitioning between vacation and regular obligations can get complicated”.

‘Cry for help’

It can be frustrating to be hit with a “barrage” of out-of-office (OOO) responses to a group email you have sent, said the Financial Times. You may think your colleagues are “lazy good-for-nothings, slacking off while you toil through the long summer”, but their replies can tell you “so much more”.

Someone who says they will be “checking their emails intermittently” is almost certainly on holiday with their in-laws, and “wants to reply to your email within 17 minutes rather than the usual six”. Then there are those who are even more addicted to being permanently on call, claiming to have “no access to internet”. If they do get access, they say they will have smashed their phone, laptop and smartwatch and “thrown them into the ocean”. This is a blatant “cry for help”.

Then there are the jokey ones. “I am currently out of the office, trying to return home after a successful conquest involving a large wooden horse. It may take me some time.” This person has not checked their company policy and will “shortly be unemployed”.

I went through a phase of setting “funny” out of offices, said Sophia Money-Coutts in Country Life. But I “shudder with horror now” thinking about it. “Life’s too short; time is too precious to agonise” over what you write. “Straightforward is the way to go for everyone involved.”

That said, the “aggressive approach” is by far the worst. Some people not only declare they will be away, but that “all emails will be automatically deleted during that period”. How “irritating”. This would make more sense if they were on a sabbatical or maternity leave, but “it’s quite self-important if you’re only hopping to Mallorca for a week”. And setting an OOO saying you’re off for a “mere afternoon”? A “touch pompous”.

Keep it short, said Forbes. “Your OOO is not your Instagram. Skip the mojito emoji and ‘Off to South Beach, baby!’ Nobody wants your travelogue.”

Another big mistake is not fully shutting it off when you’re back. Doing so the night before logging back on is usually best. “Don’t be that person who leaves the OOO on until three people have reminded you to turn it off.”

‘Set expectations’ before you go

There are some clear “dos and don’ts” when it comes to out-of-office messages, said BBC. And getting it wrong can have “more serious consequences than you might think”.

The optimum reply is “polite and concise”, gives a “specific return date” and at least one other point of contact if appropriate, said the etiquette consultancy Debretts . “Virtue signalling” – or going into too much detail about your time off – is another big “no-no”: it can come across as boastful, “smug”, or that you’re “trying too hard”.

It’s not really about the out-of-office message at all, said Stylist. The most effective team members “set expectations before” they go, outlining how “online” they will be, if at all. This stops colleagues of whatever seniority “second-guessing whether they should follow up” or being confused over what “contactable in an emergency” actually means.

Even sharing good news – whether from your desk or on holiday – can be a detrimental form of “presenteeism”. This can throw someone else into work mode, confuse the boundaries you have set or subliminally pressurise others to follow your example.

Most importantly, it is vital to just “trust your team. We all like to think the place will fall apart without us, but this is a damaging view that will only stop you from fully enjoying your time off.” Planning ahead of time and handing things over properly removes most of the need for communicating while on holiday. Many people forget this but “really, most things can wait”.

Melania Trump has not been seen in public since the World Cup final on 19 July. Over the past 30 days, the first lady has skipped a series of high-profile events attended by her husband, including Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. So what is going on?

‘Even lower profile’

At this point in her husband’s second presidential term, Melania has only managed half the number of public appearances she’d clocked up at the same point in his first term, an NBC News analysis shows. She’s “only made 38 public appearances this year”, said The Guardian. And now “she’s been MIA for about a month”.

Her public schedule “nearly vanished” over the summer, said the Daily Beast, dropping to just five public appearances in June and July, “two of which were sporting events”. Melania is “dramatically less active” than other 21st-century first ladies: her 29 speeches since her husband returned to office last year pale in comparison to the 130 Michelle Obama gave over a similar period.

“To be fair,” this isn’t completely “out of character”, said The Guardian. During Donald Trump’s first term, his wife’s “frequent absences sparked various conspiracy theories, including one that she had a body double”. But, this time round, she seems to be “keeping an even lower profile”. Those who think Melania “work-shy” can’t accuse her of being “camera-shy”, though: she starred in a glossy eponymous documentary in January, and a “companion docuseries” is scheduled for release on Amazon Prime this autumn.

Aide ‘speculation’

In Melania’s absence, Trump aide Natalie Harp “has seldom strayed far from the president’s side”, said The Independent. The 35-year-old former One America News Network presenter joined Trump’s staff in 2022 and “reportedly helps manage the president’s Truth Social account”. White House colleagues apparently call her “the human printer” for continuously supplying him with printouts of positive news material. In May, Harp accompanied the president on his state visit to China – “a trip Melania Trump did not attend”.

Harp has written the president “adoring letters”, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan said in their book, “Regime Change”. In one, she wrote: “You are all that matters to me”; in another, she called the president her “Guardian and Protector in this life”.

The “speculation” about Trump’s relationship with Harp “upsets his wife”, said The Telegraph: the president’s “perceived closeness” to his aide is fuelling “unfounded rumours that the pair are having an affair”. There was “furious backlash” this week when Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff said the president “doesn’t want to do his job” and would rather “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie”. A White House spokesman shot back that Harp is “one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team… Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”

Work ‘behind the scenes’

The first lady “prioritises results over appearances”, Melania’s senior adviser told NBC News. On Monday, the White House announced that the first lady had “facilitated the reunification of another child with her family” after “being separated” during the Russian war with Ukraine. “There is nothing more powerful than reuniting a mother with her child after an extended period of time”, Melania was quoted as saying. She is now “focused” on her “next reunification” effort.

“This is a first lady who isn’t troubled by what her critics think,” said NBC’s White House correspondent Monica Alba. Some domestic and overseas travel has been “scaled down” but officials say “that’s because she’s doing a lot of work behind the scenes”. Melania is scheduled to attend a few high-profile events in coming weeks, including September’s UN General Assembly in New York.

Many in the artificial intelligence industry say the most influential person at AI powerhouse Anthropic may not be its CEO, Dario Amodei, but his wife, Camilla “Cami” Clark. Despite Clark having no official job with the company, recent reports indicate that she plays an outsize role as an adviser for Anthropic. She also has previous ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

‘Scant details about Clark online’

Despite her apparently significant role within Anthropic, there are “scant details about Clark online,” and “efforts have been made to remove references to her,” said The Wall Street Journal. Even Anthropic’s own AI chatbot, Claude, cannot provide much intel. It is known that Clark was born in 1979 and “was an entrepreneur and often interacted with the rich and powerful, as well as up-and-comers in Silicon Valley.”

In the early 2010s, Clark started a number of her own businesses, which include a “self-described ‘free luxury porn’ company that catered to women and a ‘social dieting app,’” said Forbes. It was via this porn company, Eddice, that Clark first interacted with Epstein in an attempt to get him to invest in the business. Clark “asked Epstein in a March 2012 email exchange about whether he’d be interested in investing in her and a colleague’s businesses,” though there is “no indication in the Epstein files that the financier made any investment.”

‘The most consequential person’

Clark married Amodei in 2022, and she has quickly become a “key behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic as the company has shot to prominence over the past year,” said The Information. Clark accompanies her husband on global trips in support of Anthropic and has recently been called AI’s “first lady.” Several people “who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the future of AI.”

She “may well be the most consequential person within Anthropic’s orbit who doesn’t have a formal role at the startup,” said The Information. While Amodei himself is more introverted, according to reports, Clark is a “consummate networker” who has become friends with President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka “even as Amodei and Anthropic have at times faced an existential struggle with her father’s administration.” Clark is also a member of a WhatsApp group that “includes other prominent women in the tech industry.”

As the AI sphere continues to grow in influence, many believe that Clark will continue to play a large part. She recently “told people involved in politics that the company sees its mission as protecting America and isn’t as ‘woke’ as its detractors might think it is,” said the Journal. Her friendship with Ivanka Trump means she may have also been used as an intermediary when Anthropic “drew the ire of the Trump administration earlier this year after Amodei refused to drop restrictions on how Claude could be used by the Pentagon.”

Previous business dealings will likely come up; Clark’s “ties to Epstein will be heavily scrutinized as Anthropic heads toward a potentially multi-trillion-dollar IPO,” said Futurism, especially given that Clark has been “steering Amodei’s decisions and helping him liaise with politicians and investors with her charm.” Still, Clark doesn’t have widespread name recognition and has “largely flown under the radar,” said The Information, which is a “stark contrast to some other prominent couples that bask in the social media limelight.”

“It’s pretty worrying, the state of men’s tennis, especially right now,” said British star Jack Draper, announcing his withdrawal from Wimbledon this year due to injury. “The amount of injuries, especially young players.” Draper thinks “the tour and the calendar have to adapt if any of us are gonna achieve some sort of longevity”.

The unrelenting schedule of the ATP Tour has meant Draper’s world ranking has dropped from no. 4 to no. 147, and he faces the prospect of having to qualify for this year’s US Open, where he was a semi-finalist two years ago. He has missed most of the last year with the injury to his serving arm.

Players on both the men’s ATP and women’s WTA tours have long complained of the hectic playing schedule and called for reforms to ease the workload. But calendar alterations are just one of the many challenges players are facing.

Injuries ‘steadily increasing’

“It is difficult to remember a time when each tournament’s build-up was not punctuated” with withdrawals like that of men’s world no. 1 Jannik Sinner from this week’s Cincinnati Open, said The Telegraph.

The calendar is to blame. Of the nine Masters 1000 events – one step below Grand Slams in prestige and usually lasting seven days – seven of them have “expanded to a 12-day format”. And punishments for opting out of the “gruelling” schedule don’t help players. Barring injury, they must play a minimum of eight such tournaments or “have their bonus pool reduced for each subsequent tournament missed”.

Optimists would argue that top players’ absences give opportunities to younger and lower-ranked players, but fans have started to “raise concerns” about their favourites “regularly missing events”. Clearly, the ATP Tour has “its own interests at heart”, attempting to “squeeze out every revenue source possible”.

This has impacted player health. “Survival of the fittest has become an apt metaphor for life on the tennis circuit in recent months,” said The Times. Injuries are “inevitable” in any sporting arena, but at the top level of tennis they are “steadily increasing”. University of Barcelona data from 2024 found that match retirements had increased by at least 25% and 50% on the ATP and WTA Tours respectively since 1999, while the Professional Tennis Players’ Association found that the average distance covered by players on court has increased “by more than 50 per cent since 2015”.

Players must contend with a “lack of recovery time and accumulated stress between matches”. In training, they can record performance “to the nth degree” with trackers and advanced technology, but these are banned in Grand Slam tournaments. However, “the stress of real competition is far greater”

Counterintuitively, players’ improved athleticism is also causing issues, said El Pais. In both men’s and women’s competitions, the physicality has “evolved exponentially compared with two or three decades ago”, meaning players can hit the ball harder, and have better equipment with which to do so. This places even greater strain when on the receiving end, and the rules are not adapting to accommodate this.

‘Highly vulnerable to match-fixing’

Environmental changes are also overlooked too, said the Financial Times. “Extreme heat is affecting tennis tournaments globally”, particularly at the French Open in May, and different organisations follow different rules to combat it. Until this year, the decision to suspend ATP matches due to weather conditions was “at the discretion of tournament supervisors”. Now a new “heat rule” is applied.

In addition to the playing schedule and more common heatwave conditions, tennis is “highly vulnerable to match-fixing”, said The Athletic. Top players may earn “more than $20 million in prize money each season”, but the majority of lower-ranked players “live a hand-to-mouth existence” on tour. “Fixers thrive on this inconsistency.”

The scoring system means players “can be convinced to corrupt matches whilst still winning them”: they can throw the opening set, or a particular service game, before “returning to playing at their best”. In December, French player Quentin Folliot was “suspended for 20 years on fixing charges, while Chinese player Pang Renlong was “barred for 12 years for separate offences”.

Like in other sports, change in tennis “takes time”, said The Independent. But unlike in others, tennis essentially has “seven governing bodies”, with the ATP, WTA, World Tennis and the four historic Grand Slam events all claiming certain jurisdiction. “Getting everyone around the same table is challenging enough”, let alone them agreeing on reforms to the game.

Growth may be slowing, but Russia’s economy is essentially sound. That’s the message Vladimir Putin is keen to purvey; and by way of proof he cites Russia’s incredibly low unemployment rate: just 2.1%. He’s got it back to front, said Alexander Kolyandr in The Spectator.

Far from being a comfort, this figure should cause Putin huge alarm. It underscores the fact that his nation is undergoing its worst labour crisis in decades: it “has run out of workers”. The crisis has its roots in the low birth rates of the 1990s, but the war in Ukraine has “poured fuel on it”.

Woefully inefficient remedies

It certainly has, said the Luxembourg Times. Men are being sent to the front in vast numbers: the target number of contract soldiers to be signed up this year is 409,000. And the high pay they’re being offered as a lure is crippling the economy. In 2022, a contract soldier’s monthly salary was about four times the average Russian wage. It’s now closer to twice the average wage because the defence industry (employment in military production has risen by half a million since 2021), the railways and other big state sectors have all had to hike up wages in an effort to compete. As a result, companies in the civilian sector are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Yet the remedies the Kremlin has pursued to tackle the crisis have been woefully insufficient, said Samuel Bendett and Maria Snegovaya in Foreign Policy. Expanding forced prison labour, a familiar Soviet strategy, is no longer an option as so many convicts have already been sent to the front lines. (The jail population has shrunk from 465,000 in 2021 to 282,000.) So too with the plan to open jobs hitherto deemed too physically taxing or dangerous to women, as their number in Russia’s labour market is remarkably high already.

Economic ‘death zone’

Such measures fail to get to grips with the sheer scale of the problem, said Mathias Brüggmann in Die Tageszeitung (Berlin). Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed or badly wounded. The only solution to Russia’s chronic labour shortage is increased migration.

Yet since March 2024, when Tajik terrorists killed 149 people in an attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, the Kremlin has gone in the opposite direction, imposing harsh new rules on migrants, especially those from the former Soviet states in Central Asia – Russia’s largest immigrant group. Their number has fallen dramatically. Issuing 70,000 Chinese and 34,000 Indians work permits this year hasn’t been nearly enough to plug the gap.

In fact, Russia’s economy has now entered “the death zone”, said Alexandra Prokopenko in The Economist. The budget deficit is spiralling out of control; export revenues are falling. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, of institutional collapse, “of damage so severe no post-war policy can repair it”.

“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” said Donald Trump at the weekend, as an impasse over diplomatic discussions and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz continue. By letting economic pressure mount, we are “low-keying it” with Iran, Trump told Axios, and “only semi-negotiating with them”.

In response, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said that whether “lights out or lights on, Iranians showed they are professional chess players”.

With no end to the war in sight, inflation on the rise, fuel rationing and continued threats of strikes, the vast majority of the Iranian population appear not to be players, but pawns.

‘Extensive’ damage

Speaking openly about politics in Iran still “carries obvious risks”, said Nawal Al-Maghafi in The Guardian. Within Iran there is “no single narrative of the war”, with some believing it has “strengthened national unity”, and others saying it has only “deepened repression”. Nonetheless, the country has been “transformed” by the war and, as the conflict carries on, “so does the struggle to shape the legacy it will leave behind”.

Iran is facing “extensive” damage from US attacks, estimated to be “running in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, said Maziar Motamedi in Al Jazeera. But this plays into “decades-old economic structural issues” and being continually “strained by years of Western sanctions and local mismanagement”. During both world wars, the US and Israel “systematically bombed” ports, bridges, roads and other civilian infrastructure, and the country has a long history of internet shutdowns and a “cash-strapped” government.

Now, inflation has risen to “nearly 90%” in the last month, with food inflation “hitting 134%”, compared to a year earlier. Following two wars in less than a year, conflict with the US is “showing no signs of abating”.

Many Iranians feel “abandoned” by the West, said Roxana Saberi and Fatemeh Jamalpour in The Times. They believe the US and others have “largely stood by during the recent executions and the January massacre”. The crackdown since January has left Iranians with “widespread trauma” that “spans generations and classes”. The “greatest source of trauma” is the “inaction” of the international community, said head of a survivor charity Azadeh Afsahi. “If these Western countries have democracy, how come they don’t care to see that the Iranian people are suffering?”

Opinion is ‘far from uniform’

There is still a “fervour” among those who support the regime, said Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4. In June, the “streets were full” of people for national celebrations, and children fired foam darts at “targets bearing the faces of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump was by far the most popular face to fire at.” Many are still eager to “express their love of country and their hatred of the enemy”. In many ways, ironically, it “reminds you of the most fired-up Maga supporters in America”.

Yet for others, the “greatest fear” is that “the war will end with the Islamic Republic still in power”, said Kelly J. Shannon on the Atlantic Council. However the conflict ends, the “remnants of the regime” will likely become “further entrenched and even more oppressive”. The massacres after protests in January, and an April order to “speed up executions of political prisoners”, support state television warnings that “any dissidents will be killed”. In the eyes of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian population is the “enemy, and it is willing to use any and all measures to keep them in line”.

Ultimately, “Iranian society is diverse, politically complex, and far from uniform,” said Mahmoud Rasouli on the European Consortium for Political Research. “Citizens hold differing views about domestic reform, foreign relations, economic priorities, and the country’s future.”

Yet this does not translate to political influence. Both Washington and Tehran invoke the interests of the Iranian people, but never do they allow such interests to “directly determine the direction of the conflict”. This creates a “paradox”: the Iranian people are “central” to the language used around the war, but “peripheral” in the “decision-making processes that shape their future”. They are neither “invisible spectators nor the main architects of the conflict”, but the “primary stakeholders in a confrontation largely shaped by others”.

A growing feud between the United States and Brazil has put both nations’ diplomatic corps on high alert, as South America’s largest economy finds itself on the receiving end of a Trumpian diplomatic spat. This month, Washington revoked the visa of Brazilian Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti after Brasilia refused visas for several Trump administration officials whom authorities claimed were planning to denounce the country’s leftist government.

Brazil has said it will not formally accept Trump’s Senate-approved ambassador pick, Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, until after its October election. The country also complained that the United States had named Perez before completing certain diplomatic obligations.

‘Protocol can double as a weapon’

The visa cancellation is the “latest split” between “two governments that have spent the past year oscillating between confrontation and detente,” said The New York Times. But this episode is “very, very unique and severe,” said Brazilian political science professor Carlos Poggio to the outlet. Visa revocations are typically reserved for diplomatic foes, but “Brazil is not a U.S. adversary. It’s actually a major ally.”

“On the surface,” the diplomatic kerfuffle “may seem like tit-for-tat pettiness,” said Puck. “True practitioners of statecraft” understand that “protocol can double as a weapon.” Countries whose diplomatic corps “undergo some of the most rigorous training in the world” are “not naive about the message Washington is sending.”

Voiding Viotti’s visa “is not an isolated incident,” said the office of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a statement to NBC. Rather, it is part of a “deliberate escalation of hostile measures” fueled by “ideological motives that are incompatible with a bilateral partnership that has always been guided by mutual respect.”

Questioning Trump’s ‘confrontational approach’

Some in the Brazilian diplomatic corps have questioned why Trump is “rushing to have an ambassador in Brasilia only months before October’s election,” said The Associated Press — particularly given that the post has been “vacant since Trump returned to the White House” last year. The deepening rift comes as da Silva, a leftist, runs for a fourth term.

His opponent this time is Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, himself a “close Trump ally on the political right” who was convicted of “trying to overturn the results of the last election,” said The Washington Post. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one State Department official decried Washington’s “confrontational approach” to the outlet. “Each time Brasilia portrays itself as standing up to Trump,” said the official, the leftist government’s “standing in the polls only improves.”

“This isn’t just about Brazil,” said Orna Blum, a former senior State Department official who focused on Brazil, to Puck. “It’s part of a pattern.” The Trump administration has aligned itself with “far-right political movements from Germany’s AfD to Marine Le Pen in France, and now with Jair Bolsonaro and his son Flávio in Brazil.” Being seen as “picking sides in another democracy’s elections” under Trump has “cost America credibility with allies around the world.”

Hundreds of thousands of sixth-formers got their A-level results today, but those who plan to continue into higher education face a “ticking timebomb” of higher taxes and debt, said The Guardian.

Students will face trickier financial obstacles and penalties than previous graduates, according to a report from the Intergenerational Foundation.

Higher burden

The cost of paying for a university education has been shifted almost entirely on to current students, found the researchers. The latest student loan package, Plan 5, means young graduates will struggle to save for house deposits or pension contributions, delaying key milestones.

Plan 5 is the repayment system for people who started an undergraduate course or took out an Advanced Learner Loan in England on or after August 2023. It has a lower repayment threshold than previous iterations: for 2026/27, Plan 2’s threshold is £29,385, compared with £25,000 for Plan 5.

The amounts being repaid by today’s graduates in England are more than double those paid under Plan 1, which was in place before 2012, when annual undergraduate tuition fees rose from £3,375 to £9,000. However, Plan 5 has a lower interest rate than Plan 2.

The “burden of student loans has never been higher”, said the author of the report, Toby Whelton. “By stealth” and with “minimal democratic scrutiny”, successive governments have “piled costs on” to young graduates and hoped that “nobody would notice”.

On top of repaying student loans at higher rates than previous generations, today’s graduates face effective tax rates above 50% when their income reaches higher brackets. Meanwhile, they also have to save for retirement while trying to meet these challenging financial demands.

Perfect storm

The report comes as younger generations in the UK already face unique challenges. A perfect storm of economic factors means they have a much harder path to home ownership than that of previous generations. House prices have risen much faster than wages, increasing roughly three to five times faster than average earnings over recent decades.

House deposits have also become harder to build. Where previous generations might have set aside a few months of spare salary, would-be buyers may now need up to years of gross earnings. This has created a renters’ trap: young people need savings to buy a house, but a large proportion of their income goes towards housing while they are trying to save. Meanwhile, the housing shortage has pushed up both prices and rents.

In May, Barratt Redrow, Britain’s largest housebuilder, said a combination of rising interest rates, higher levels of student debt and the squeeze on wages was making it the most challenging time to be a first-time buyer since the financial crisis. This means the “dream of home ownership” is moving “increasingly out of reach for many young people”, said The Guardian.

But Andy Burnham said in July he’s considering giving billions of pounds in tax relief to young people so they can save for a house deposit, according to The Independent. The “major offer” would also include help with rent to buy, said allies.

In her sell-out show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Amanda Knox tells a joke about her daughter’s favourite game called “Momma goes to Italy” in which she grabs the bars of a jungle gym at their local playground and screams, “Let me out! Let me out!”

Knox’s conviction for the murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in 2007, her years spent behind bars in an Italian prison, and her subsequent acquittal 11 years ago, made her famous and infamous around the world.

“Pigeonholed as either a true crime or tragic figure”, her one-woman set “Cartwheel” – named after claims by Italian prosecutors that she had turned cartwheels in a police station shortly after Kercher’s death – is, she said, “me going back to my roots and trying to reclaim who I was before all the bad stuff happened”, said The New York Times.

‘Damned whatever she did’

While it may be a surprise that Knox is trying stand-up at all, it’s “arguably even riskier” to debut such material in Britain, given the “mixed reputation” she has in Kercher’s country of birth, said The New York Times. The 39-year-old mother-of-two’s foray into comedy has “also raised questions about who has the right to tell a story on stage”.

After opening night, the Daily Mail published an article with the headline “Is there anything ‘Foxy Knoxy’ won’t do for attention – or money?” More than 42,000 people have signed a petition calling for the show to be cancelled, and Kercher’s sister Stephanie recently told the BBC she was afraid the event risked “normalising violence against women by making light of such a harrowing event”.

“No one walking out of the theatre could possibly reach that conclusion”, said Tristram Fane Saunders in The Telegraph. If anything, it was “too tasteful”; a “good-faith attempt by a novice performer to use the medium of stand-up comedy to tell her own story inoffensively, to the best of her moderate abilities”.

While some have argued it is a “disgrace that she’s telling it at all – and profiting from it”, classifying “Cartwheel” as comedy may have been her biggest “misstep”, said Brian Logan in The Guardian. Doing so “risks looking insensitive and inaccurately describes the show”, but, “judging by the evidence” and the very public outcry, “Knox would be damned whatever she did”.

‘Source of profound catharsis’

Humour has “always helped people to process terrible events” and “for that reason, great stand-up can sometimes be a source of profound catharsis”, said The Telegraph.

Nowhere is this more true than at the world’s most prestigious performing arts festival, where Fringe comics often draw on dark subjects and distressing personal experiences.

Richard Gadd’s 2019 Festival show about being stalked was turned into the worldwide Netflix phenomenon “Baby Reindeer”, while comedian Edd Hedges’ 2017 Festival debut, “Wonderland”, based on the story of a man who stabbed his mother and her friend 97 times, sparked a hit podcast series.

This year, Australian comedian Frankie McNair has won rave reviews for a set filled with jokes about her own experience of being sexually abused as a child.

“Uproariously funny”, it was a reminder that “there’s no topic inherently off-bounds for comedy”, said The Telegraph: “Knox ought to watch McNair, and take notes.”

Ann Widdecombe, who has died aged 78, enjoyed a level of prominence in public life that was unusual for a politician whose most senior role in government was as a mid-level minister.

That was partly due to her robust opinions on a range of issues, some informed by her Christian faith – which she never shied away from voicing. It also helped that she was instantly recognisable, said The Times, with her pudding-bowl haircut, no-nonsense manner and rasping voice. In a typically forthright appraisal, she said of herself: “I am toothy, dumpy, ugly, overweight and a spinster – what the hell.”

As a politician, her most significant action was arguably sinking Michael Howard’s leadership bid following the party’s defeat in 1997. The pair had feuded at the Home Office, and Widdecombe got her revenge by giving a speech in Parliament in which she tore into her ex-boss’s character and record; her leaked private comment – that there was “something of the night about him” – followed him for years.

Second career

Yet Widdecombe was a kinder, more sensitive person than her uncompromising “carapace” suggested, said The Guardian. This became more apparent when she retired from front-line politics, and embarked on an unexpected second career as a TV personality. On “Strictly Come Dancing”, she gamely allowed herself to be hauled across the dancefloor like a sack of potatoes; she was a runner-up on “Celebrity Big Brother” in 2018; and she appeared in several pantomimes.

The public learnt that “Widdy” had for years acted as a surrogate mother-figure to the children of a local kebab shop owner, said The Daily Telegraph, and that she had spent thousands to get a nephew off drugs. When, in 2009, the Telegraph published its report about MPs’ expenses, she was singled out as one of the “saints” at Westminster, reinforcing the view that whatever else she was, she was not corruptible.

Westminster controversies

Widdecombe was born in 1947. Her father was a civil servant in the Admiralty Office. Although she was Anglican, she was sent to a Catholic boarding school. She read Latin at Birmingham University, and then PPE at Oxford, where she became involved in student politics and had her only boyfriend: Colin Maltby was president of the Oxford Union. On graduating, she worked first for Unilever, and later as a university administrator.

Widdecombe spent years trying to become a Tory MP, applying to scores of constituencies. She stood twice unsuccessfully before finally being elected MP for Maidstone in 1987; she would represent that part of Kent for 23 years. At Westminster, she soon made her mark with the first in a series of aggressive efforts to restrict access to abortion. She also supported capital punishment, and voted against the repeal of Section 28, the law banning the promotion of homosexuality in schools, and civil partnerships. When the Church of England allowed the ordination of women priests, Widdecombe converted to Catholicism.

As prisons minister from 1995, she made waves by seeming to defend the practice of female prisoners being kept in handcuffs during childbirth. In fact, they were only shackled until they went into labour, and after they’d given birth, but the public was not impressed by the distinction and in the media she was dubbed Doris Karloff. Her row with Howard was over his sacking of the director of the Prison Service, Derek Lewis, which she thought unfair. From 1999 to 2001, she was shadow home secretary.

Having insisted that she’d never leave the Tories, she defected to the Brexit Party in 2019 and later joined Reform UK. Since 2010, she had lived in a bungalow at the edge of Dartmoor that she had named Widdecombe’s Rest. She was found dead there in July with serious injuries; police have opened a murder investigation.

With Saudi Arabia ending its funding of LIV Golf after this season, the league is at a crossroads, moving away from its largest controversy while still in need of new financial backing. Now it appears LIV may have found some, announcing last week that it has secured investors to bring it into the 2027 season and beyond. But some major questions about the tour’s future linger.

‘Supporting the path forward’

LIV Golf has an “agreement in place with a lead investor, signed by the investor and approved by the board, to anchor the transaction and play a key role in supporting the path forward for the league’s next era, driven by and for the players,” the tour’s CEO, Scott O’Neil, said in a statement. O’Neil “didn’t identify the investor or how much money will be injected into the league,” said ESPN, though he hopes to “finalize terms in the coming weeks.”

A new backer would mark a significant changing of the guard for LIV Golf, which has been financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund since its 2022 founding. This partnership has elicited backlash, as the fund is “chaired by Mohammed bin Salman — the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the man who a U.S. intelligence report named as responsible for approving the operation that led to the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said CNN. Saudi Arabia has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses.

With bin Salman pulling his funding after 2026, there is “no need to root for LIV’s demise, especially since the moral argument against it — the Saudi backing — is now out of the picture,” said The Athletic. Whoever the new investors are, however, they “won’t remotely approach the fantasy golf funding of Saudi Arabia’s trillion-dollar Public Investment Fund,” meaning the next season of LIV Golf will likely look very different.

‘A talent exodus’

It is a “reality that the Saudi Public Investment Fund invested billions into the league with no return,” and any newer investments “won't stretch as far as the previous financial backing did,” said Bleacher Report. It also remains to be seen how the players themselves will factor into the new-look league, as LIV Golf finds itself looking to bring in fresh golfers for the upcoming season.

LIV Golf “must contend with a talent exodus,” as it has seen “major winners Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed return to the PGA Tour under a program that caps some of their future earning opportunities,” said Sportico. Other big-name golfers “left the league for different reasons.” One of the main question marks is Bryson DeChambeau, the “league’s biggest star” whose expiring contract “looms large over LIV’s future.” Golf industry insiders believe DeChambeau “could command a deal with a total value somewhere between $200 million and $500 million.”

The tour wants to put golfers at the forefront either way, as during the next phase, players “will be majority equity holders in the league,” said Sportico. But “how that structure will play out, especially with the prospect of new investors coming on board, is unclear.” Many are still looking forward to the potential new phase of LIV Golf despite all the current unknowns. If the “league is reduced to a parade of fading 40-somethings who want to play 10 team-centric events a season while bouncing from continent to continent, what’s the harm in that?” said The Athletic. “More golf is better than less golf.”

Harry Potter star Jessie Cave is the latest actor to turn to OnlyFans to supplement her income.

“I’ve earned more, easily, than my entire acting career within one year,” she told The Times. Cave is best known as the Hogwarts student Lavender Brown but has also appeared in shows such as “Trollied” and “Call the Midwife”. She joined the online subscription platform known for its adult content in 2025 after receiving yet another audition rejection.

Posting non-explicit “hair content”, including videos of her brushing and braiding her hair while dressed as an elf, a maid or Lavender Brown, Cave said she made £15,000 on her first day and now has a “loyal bunch” of subscribers. “I do predict more people needing to use other platforms to make money when they’re not being an artist,” she said. “Everyone will be paying for everything.”

It is a “dystopian world view”, said the paper’s deputy culture editor Alice Jones, “where every interaction is monetised and, eventually, frankly, pornified”.

Regaining ‘control’

It is a story increasingly common among “Hollywood’s former middle class”, said Melissa Fleur Afshar on Newsweek. From Jaime Pressly to Shannon Elizabeth, some of the “most recognisable stars from the box-set and cable era” who were losing out on work and slipping off the cultural radar are “now migrating to OnlyFans instead”.

It looks like the “sole promise” of the site is “money and continued attention”, but in an acting industry “reeling from high-profile lawsuits and allegations of exploitation”, OnlyFans actually offers these people “control”.

“For decades, Hollywood operated in a way where actors relied heavily on gatekeepers,” said Estelle Keeber, a visibility expert and PR strategist. Paid subscriber platforms give users “direct access” to an audience “without needing permission from an industry middleman”.

‘Butts for Tour Buses’

It is not just actors. Lily Allen’s OnlyFans side gig in 2024, which netted her $10 (£7) a month per subscriber, “added to the long-running conversation around abysmal streaming payouts” for musicians, said Vice. The singer eventually stopped selling videos and pictures of her feet, saying “it wasn’t that fun”.

“Imagine being an artist and having nearly eight million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet,” she told The Standard last year.

The financial structure of streaming platforms means artists are increasingly “having to juggle budgets that resemble household accounts, such as vans against fuel, hotels against sofa-surfing and merchandise against storage fees”, said Paul Oliver, a digital innovation lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, in The Conversation. “One cancelled show can tip a tour from workable to loss-making.”

Kate Nash used OnlyFans to fund the European leg of her 2024 tour after post-Brexit taxes left her in debt and struggling to pay everyone involved, in a campaign she called “Butts for Tour Buses”. Earlier this year, she told the Commons’ Culture Select Committee the only reason it was possible to continue tours “is because I sell pictures of my bum on the internet”.

It has become fashionable of late to declare that the Commonwealth Games no longer matter, and are living on borrowed time. Well, tell that to the good people of Glasgow, said Nik Simon in the Daily Mail. Over 11 days, Scotland’s second city – which stepped in as host after the Australian state of Victoria pulled out in 2023 on grounds of cost – welcomed competitors from 74 nations, who (in the absence of an athletes’ village) were accommodated in hotels across the area.

In return, the 434,000 ticket-holders, plus 200,000 who watched for free at the city’s fan sites, were treated to a spectacular show, said Matthew Henry on BBC Sport. Highlights of the Games, which ended on Sunday, included Scotland’s Josh Kerr storming to victory in the mile race in front of a jubilant home crowd; Wales’ Emma Finucane becoming the first sprint cyclist to win four track gold medals at the same Games; and Jamaica stunning Australia in one of the biggest upsets in netball’s history.

Overall, though, it was the Australians who dominated: spurred on by mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s offer of cash bonuses for podium finishes, the country notched up 171 medals – dwarfing second-placed England’s total of 110.

‘Ozempic’ games

As host city, Glasgow did a sterling job, said Fiona Tomas in The Telegraph: events were “impeccably run”, and the “army of cheery volunteers” kitted out in tartan couldn’t be faulted. But it was hard to escape the feeling that this was the Commonwealth Games “on Ozempic”. As a result of “cost-cutting measures”, only 10 sports were featured, down from 19 in Birmingham four years ago; and with the BBC losing out to TNT Sports on the right to broadcast the Games, TV audiences were miserly.

Worse still, a “deluge of high-profile athletes” – from England’s Keely Hodgkinson to Jamaica’s men’s 100m world champion Oblique Seville – prioritised other competitions and sat out the Games altogether. Attention now turns to the 2030 edition to be held in Ahmedabad, India. They’ll mark the centenary of the Games, and that “might be a good one to end on”.

Stepping stone

I’m not so sure about that, said Rick Broadbent in The Times. The Games may lack the glamour of the Olympics, say, or the World Cup, but that’s the whole point of them. Where else could you watch Idi Amin’s grandson complaining about ill-treatment in the boxing ring, or hear Archie Goodburn, a terminally ill swimmer, being roared on in the pool by a partisan crowd? And it’s a competition, don’t forget, that has long served athletes as a “stepping stone” to greater glories. Of course, it must be financially viable – Glasgow only managed to host the Games so cheaply because Victoria had to pay £190 million in compensation, for pulling out. But assuming that “the price is right”, this is undoubtedly “an event worth saving”.

While promoting his latest blockbuster, filmmaker Christopher Nolan listed scholar Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences. Now, Wilson’s scathing critique of Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic poem has gone viral, inspiring additional backlash from critics and academics alike. Amid the heated controversy over one of the year’s biggest films, there may be a silver lining to the discourse.

Why Wilson trashed Nolan’s adaptation

Wilson’s expertise in the classics is undeniable. She is also no stranger to backlash. In 2017, she became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation “widely celebrated in academia and the literary world” as “comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful” to Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old classic, said The New York Times. Her translation departs from the “masculine framing used by her male predecessors,” a move that has “subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures.”

Before Nolan’s movie premiered, Wilson was “pumped” to see how the epic played out on the big screen, she said on The New York Times’ The Daily podcast. However, after seeing Nolan’s adaptation, Wilson said she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” at The London Review of Books. The film had “nothing convincing to say,” it lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” and the “writing is abysmal,” Wilson added. It was a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” comparable to an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”

Most of the nonwhite actors “play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” Wilson said in her LRB review. She has since expressed regret for this “paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized,” Wilson wrote on social media. She still thinks the film “largely wastes its strong cast,” but she “framed it badly.”

A debate reminiscent of the golden era of critics

One of the most prominent figures to come to Nolan’s defense against Wilson was Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities and a prolific writer who has won a National Book Award. Wilson’s “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said on X. Instead of “disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” Wilson, who has “benefited enormously from Nolan’s film,” speaks in the “crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.” Within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.” One would expect a translator to be “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Wilson used “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, classicist Theo Nash said at Slate. She criticizes Nolan for deviating from the text, “as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.” The close attention that informs her translation is “lacking in her reading of the movie,” and the “idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”

Whether or not you agree with Wilson’s perspective, it’s “always exciting to read a particularly full-throated pan,” said critic Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Even if you don’t believe Wilson did her job as a critic, she has “done her job as a writer,” which is to “be a compelling read who makes her argument unmistakably clear.”

Figuring out “who is punching down here is really interesting,” VanArendonk added. Since Wilson has “academic authority” and is “writing with such vigor,” it is “easy to forget that she has less power” than Nolan, a Hollywood darling. That is also “part of the pleasure of the conversation.” Wilson is not interested in “softening any of it.” Still Nolan’s the one who “walks away unscathed, no question.” Of all the topics we could watch people fight about online, “how someone adapted ‘The Odyssey’ is such a good one.”

“The fact that a drone armed with explosives is here on the grounds of an airport represents a new threat scenario,” said Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt in Leipzig. “We’re talking about a professional hybrid threat situation.”

Dobrindt looked “ashen-faced” as he addressed the media, said Newsweek. Flights were halted after the discovery of a quadcopter armed with explosives in a restricted area near Ukrainian Antonov freight planes. Nato has acknowledged it is aware of the incident.

Security experts and officials are asking a question that was “once unthinkable”: is Germany “de facto at war, or at least engaged in a hybrid war – and with whom?”

Germany becoming ‘primary target’

Leipzig/Halle airport is a Nato and German military logistics hub, and since 2022 has been used by Ukraine to transport military equipment. It is also the base for Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines in Europe, a cargo carrier, and as the drone was found close to a Ukrainian cargo plane, this has “directed suspicion towards Russia”, said The Guardian.

Drone sightings at German airports rose “significantly” in the first half of 2026, said Der Spiegel. According to German Air Navigation Services, 166 drones were spotted at 15 international airports, compared to 101 in the same period last year.

The threat of drone attacks is “becoming increasingly concrete”, said Süddeutsche Zeitung. But bringing them down is notoriously difficult. Drones can be stopped by “jammers, nets, or even by being shot down”, but this is a “delicate task” when they are near residential areas.

Leipzig airport was already equipped with a drone defence system, but a “custom-made” model was seemingly able to bypass it. Germany is becoming the “primary target” in “Russia’s shadow war”, which has the “aim of dissuading it from supporting Ukraine in the short term and weakening it in the long term”.

Germany has “gradually expanded its defensive measures in recent months”, said Euronews. Since October 2025, “under certain conditions”, the federal police have been allowed to shoot down drones. And Dobrindt has called for drones to be “detected, intercepted and, if necessary, shot down more consistently in future”. But the process is complicated, with frequency scanners, cameras and radar systems all required.

Russia trying to ‘sow fear’

“As well as the means and the motive, Moscow does have form” with this kind of attack, said the BBC. Though there is no hard evidence to suggest who is behind it, there is “renewed talk” of hybrid war across Europe. “If Russia was behind this”, its aim was likely to “sow fear”.

The incident raises concerns about foreign interference in upcoming German regional elections, where “far-right politicians have campaigned on fears of escalations with Moscow”, said Politico. Former communist and East German states Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania will hold elections in September. “Pro-Russian sentiment remains strong” and the far-right party AfD “could take power for the first time at the state level”.

When Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history in 2023, he was “lionised by the academic world” and became a “poster boy for the university’s diversity drive”, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph.

Then only 37, he had defied “almost impossible odds” to get there. Raised on a council estate in south London, he was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. He couldn’t speak until he was 11, and did not read or write until 18. Yet he’d managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree, followed by a PhD, and had gone on to forge a remarkable career in academia. Now, though, the sociology professor – who has tendered since his resignation as a fellow at Jesus College – is “the subject of a bitter row over plagiarism that has pitted his peers against each other”.

Long-standing concerns

His critics note that his PhD thesis contains passages that are strikingly similar to those in other academic papers. His defenders say that these were innocent errors, resulting from a lack of formal supervision when he was doing his PhD, and insufficient support for his complex learning disabilities. They say he cited the sources in question in his bibliography, but failed to do so within the text proper.

Concerns about Arday’s work have circulated in academic circles for several years, said Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. But they “exploded into public view” last month, when Nathan Cofnas, a self-defined “race realist” who was sacked from Cambridge in 2024, published a lengthy blogpost about them.

As journalists dug deeper, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail, other aspects of Arday’s “Hollywood-style life story” were also called into question. For instance, doubts were cast about his claim to have raised £5.5 million for charity, including by running an astonishing 600 miles in six days. He has since said it was actually 12 days, and that the £5.5 million was a collective effort.

Fraught topic

“Academic integrity matters,” said Daniella Maison in The Independent. But Arday was officially cleared of plagiarism some years ago. That he is still being pursued over his PhD, and other achievements that are not even related to his job, suggest that legitimate scrutiny has shifted into something more “punitive”.

Yet leading academics told this paper that the scrutiny was “fair” for a professor at Cambridge, said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. This is a fraught business, and the stakes are high for all concerned. The university – which appointed Arday at a time when its own track record on race was being scrutinised in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement – is facing questions about its judgement. As for Arday, he could lose his reputation, and his career.

Saudi Arabia last week announced it had joined American forces in conducting air strikes on Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iran-backed militias accused of attacks on both U.S. and Saudi assets in the region. The Saudi attack came in response ⁠to recent drone attacks targeting oil facilities “launched from Iraqi territory and carried out by Iran-aligned terrorist militias,” said the kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in a statement on X.

The latest assault is a “highly dangerous escalation,” said the PMF, per Al Jazeera. Iran’s Foreign Ministry had also condemned the “aggressive attacks” as a violation of Iraq’s “national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The kingdom ‘does not seek escalation’

After spending months “trying not to get dragged into a regional conflict,” Saudi Arabia “appears hemmed in, facing enemies in three directions” between Iran and its proxies in Iraq and Yemen, said CNN. Saudi Arabia’s strategy of “opening the kingdom up to foreign investment” and making it the “regional economic powerhouse” is “now on life support.” At the same time, embroiling itself in a “broader conflict” would be a “risky and potentially costly option” for Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s strikes, done “in coordination with U.S. Central Command,” mark the country’s “first announced foray” into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, said USA Today. But previous reports from Reuters citing “unnamed Western and Iranian officials” indicated that Saudi Arabia had “launched covert strikes on the Islamic Republic” earlier this year already. These most recent attacks stem from the kingdom’s “legitimate right to defend itself and its capabilities,” said the Saudi Defense Ministry in a statement. Riyadh also reserves the “right to respond at the appropriate time and place.”

While Saudi Arabia “does not seek escalation,” the ministry said, it will “respond to any aggression it faces.” Over the weekend, however, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with President Donald Trump and “expressed concern over his plans for massive new strikes” against Iran, said Axios. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman expressed similar sentiments at a recent meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance, emphasizing “deescalation with Iran” shortly after the joint U.S.-Saudi strikes, said the outlet.

The PMF in particular has “always been a contentious” issue between Iraq, the U.S., and “other neighboring countries” like Iran, said Al Jazeera. The Iraqi group exists as “part of the country’s security force,” reports “directly to the commander-in-chief who is also the prime minister,” and has “at times struck the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and bases across Iraq at will” while refusing government orders.

‘Unpalatable choice’

Unlike previous clandestine entanglements, Riyadh’s “overt involvement” in regional fighting “marks a new turning point in the conflict,” said The Guardian. “There is a feeling” among Saudi leadership that the Iranians are “doing what they are doing because they feel that the Gulf Arab states won’t move up the escalatory ladder,” said H.A. Hellyer, the Royal United Services Institute’s senior associate fellow in Middle East studies, to the outlet. Riyadh wants to “make it clear that assessment is wrong and that if Tehran thinks the Gulf states are easy prey, they are wrong.”

Should Saudi Arabia come under direct Iranian attack, “it could face an unpalatable choice,” said CNN. Either it must “respond directly in a way that would draw it more deeply into war” or risk emboldening a Tehran “regime that many see as more hardline than before the war.”

Record low levels on Europe’s biggest rivers have had such an impact on shipping, energy and tourism that there are real fears about the long-term economic impact of severe heatwaves on the continent.

This week, Germany’s Low-water Information System recorded extremely low levels at 43% of its measuring stations along the 765-mile Rhine, and at 59% of its measuring stations along the Danube, which runs through 10 countries from Germany to the Black Sea. On Friday, the navigable water depth at Kaub, a key chokepoint on the Rhine for shipments heading to southern Germany and Switzerland, dropped to a record low of 25cm. Extreme weather conditions are “leaving Europe’s waterways parched, triggering a series of compounding crises”, said The Guardian.

‘Feeling the pain’

Both Hungary and Romania have had to take special measures to protect nuclear power plants normally cooled by the Danube: Romania has blown up rocks to redirect water to its last working nuclear reactor; Hungary’s prime minister Péter Magyar has announced that the Paks plant, which supplies around half his country’s electricity, will have to close completely, perhaps for weeks. Warning of “an energy crisis situation”, he posted on X that “coordinated steps and restraint will be needed to avoid more severe consequences.”

“Much of mainland Europe is feeling the pain”, said Euractiv. Austria’s run-of-river hydropower plants are generating 30% less electricity than usual, while high river temperatures forced 11% of France’s nuclear-generating capacity offline in the hottest hours of Tuesday.

But “energy is ⁠not the only loser,” said Reuters. With water levels on the Rhine so low at key points, cargo ships can only carry 20% to 30% of their normal load without risk of grounding, pushing up freight costs as more vessels are needed to ship goods.

Current conditions on the Danube are “a pain for tourism”, said The Wall Street Journal. Last week, 186 passengers had to be rescued when the cruise liner hit a sandbank. Several cruise operators have had to cancel voyages altogether.

The dropping water levels have revealed some more enjoyable surprises, too, with Second World War German battleships, and even the remains of an ancient woolly mammoth, emerging into view.

‘Fingerprint of changing climate’

If the heatwave-related disruption does not abate soon, it could challenge the region’s “already stressed economy”, said the WSJ. A 10-month drought in 2018 wiped nearly 0.4% points off German GDP, according to Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates. “The crucial unknown” right now is how long this drought will last.

“The heat dries the soil, empties the rivers and drives up demand for water all at once. That is the fingerprint of a changing climate,” Hannah Cloke, a professor of meteorology and climate science at the University of Reading, told CNN. It will “keep getting worse as long as we burn fossil fuels”.

Europe is experiencing the fastest warming of any continent, and the consequent heatwaves and drought have “exposed the need to ‌reconsider business practices”, said Reuters. These river disruptions will be “a test of how quickly the region can adapt infrastructure built around 20th-century conditions” to a 21st-century climate where “extreme low water” is more likely to be the norm, said Bloomberg.

Disputing credit card charges may be the new way to stick it to corporations. More consumers are engaging in friendly fraud, disputing real charges or purchases in order to get their money back. The trend reflects a distrust in corporations as well as overall economic instability.

‘Expensive, onerous process’

Friendly fraud involves the use of charge-backs, which are “when a customer goes to their bank, as opposed to the merchant, to dispute a charge,” said NerdWallet. “When the customer requests their money back, the bank contacts the business’s payment processor.”

Then the “bank verifies whether the charge-back request is legitimate” and reverses the charge if it is, said NerdWallet. Most incorrect charge-backs tend to be honest mistakes as a “cardholder identifies a purchase on their transaction statement as fraudulent and disputes it,” when in reality, “they or someone else in their household may have made the purchase,” said Mastercard.

Transaction disputes have also “traditionally been used to address certain types of crimes committed against consumers,” like if “someone steals your wallet and goes on a shopping spree, or if you put a deposit on a wedding venue that goes out of business before the big day,” said Bloomberg. The credit card issuer “claws the funds back from the offending merchant’s bank, on top of a charge-back penalty fee,” which is an “expensive, onerous process” that “incentivizes merchants to be honest transactors and resolve issues with customers before charge-backs are filed.”

‘Existential threat’

What was once an accidental error or a way to stop theft is now sometimes a tool to obtain free merchandise. Friendly fraud is a “costly form of charge-back abuse in which consumers dispute legitimate credit card transactions to recover their money while keeping the purchased goods or services,” said the technology publication Tekedia. Though the phenomenon is not new, it is becoming more common. There were “158 million transaction disputes in 2025, an increase of 29% from 2021, significantly outpacing general growth in card transactions,” said Bloomberg.

The trend takes an economic toll. The “volume of disputes has become so cumbersome that more retailers are farming out the whole process of investigating and defending against fraud claims to third-party vendors that specialize in helping them hold on to more of consumers’ money,” said Bloomberg. Increased levels of chargebacks can also affect prices. “Large retailers fold the cost of lost revenue, lost product and lost labor that fraudulent charge-backs create into the prices everyone pays.” But “for small merchants those losses quickly become an existential threat to their ability to continue operating.”

‘Retaliate against retailers’

The rise of friendly fraud is directly tied to growing distrust of companies and corporations. Friendly fraud is a “way to retaliate against retailers over poor customer service, delayed deliveries, strict return policies or dissatisfaction with purchases,” said Tekedia. People may not even be aware they are committing fraud, as many small value disputes are approved quickly and without much investigation. There are “people that feel like, oh, this is just sticking it to the man, so to speak,” Jim Mortensen, a strategic adviser in the fraud and anti-money-laundering practice at the research firm Datos Insights, said to Bloomberg.

Economic circumstances also contribute to the rise of stealing and fraud. “One thing in the last two to three years has been that the cost of living in most developed markets has put quite a significant squeeze on consumers, particularly younger consumers on lower income,” a senior research analyst at Juniper Research who focuses on digital payments told Bloomberg. While engaging in friendly fraud sounds intriguing, it is “unethical and, in some jurisdictions, may constitute fraud,” said Tekedia. “Repeated abuse can result in account closures, damaged relationships with financial institutions and even legal consequences.”

Almost three in 10 Britons now use AI chatbots to get health advice. And UK medical-policy experts are concerned that this could create confusion, undermine trust in GPs and other healthcare workers, and make it more difficult to take an informed decision about your health.

The warning, from The Academy of Medical Sciences, comes as Open AI rolls out ChatGPT Health in the US. It allows users to “securely connect” their medical records and wellness apps to “ground conversations” in their own health information, so that the bot can “take a more active role” in their health.

ChatGPT Health is not yet available in the UK but, with more than 300 million people worldwide regularly directing their health-related questions to ChatGPT, it could swiftly become a “democratising force in healthcare”, Tanzeem Choudhury, a health-innovation expert at New York’s Cornell University told CBS News. But there are definite risks and trade-offs. “Used well,” an AI tool such as this can “help direct people to trusted sources”, said Yvonne Doyle, a fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences and former medical director of Public Health England. But it can also mislead “convincingly”.

‘Zero awareness of fallibility’

People have been using the internet to answer their questions for decades, but the “danger” with an AI chatbot is that it responds with “fluent, emotionally convincing paragraphs” and “remembers context”, making it “sound more ‘human’ than many humans”, said Celina Cartoto and Anthony Kelly on RTE. Yet it has “zero awareness of its own fallibility”, always providing an answer, “even when one doesn’t exist”. People need to remember that, though it “speaks like a doctor, listens like a therapist and remembers like a friend”, it is actually “none of them”.

We know that all AI chatbots can “hallucinate” and provide “misleading, inaccurate or even dangerous” information, said CBS News. Open AI has been careful to state that ChatGPT Health is designed to support, not replace doctors, but it has not responded to questions about whether it is “equipped to recognise when to advise a user to seek help from a medical professional”. It seems that “onus is on the user”.

Even before the rollout of the Health feature, there were indications that users could become dangerously reliant on ChatGPT for medical advice. Last month, a 55-year-old US pastor sued OpenAI, claiming its bot “brought him to the brink of death”, by “repeatedly and insistently” misdiagnosing his symptoms of near-fatal pulmonary embolism, said the BBC. An OpenAI spokesperson told CBS News that “ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment”.

AI can be a “useful educational tool” for health information, said Leana Wen, an emergency doctor in the US, and a clinical associate professor at George Washington University, told CNN. It can “explain medical terminology” and “compare treatment options at a high level”, helping “people prepare questions” for their doctor and be “more engaged” in their care. But “it has important limitations” and “should not replace clinical judgement” by a medically qualified human.

Privacy concerns

There is also the question of privacy. How risky is it to share so much of your individual medical information with an AI tool, such as ChatGPT Health? Open AI has said that Health has “enhanced privacy” and encryption, and that conversations used in the Health tab won’t flow into non-Health chats. But it’s no accident that Health has not yet been rolled out in the UK, or the EU, where data protection and digital privacy laws are stricter than in the US.

“If you are providing data directly to a technology company that is not providing any healthcare services, then it is buyer beware,” Bradley Malin, a biomedical informatics expert, told Time. OpenAI says it will protect your data but “what exactly does that mean”?

It all comes down to whether or not “you trust OpenAI to keep to its word”, Robert Wachter, a medic who has written extensively about AI and healthcare, told the magazine. OpenAI does have “really strong corporate interest in not screwing this up”. Its brand is “dependent” on the user “feeling comfortable” in sharing their information, and any sort of data breach would end that trust.

The end of doctors?

The increasing use of AI programmes for health queries is becoming “existentially threatening” for medics, Jonathan Chen, a doctor at Stanford University Medical Center, told The New York Times. What is our purpose going to be now? Should we “get out of the way and let a computer take over”?

Not for a while yet, Lee Schwamm, associate dean for digital strategy and transformation at Yale School of Medicine, told the paper. And that’s because chatbots can’t yet think critically enough about the health information people are providing – and more importantly, not providing – them with. AI is “really good at matching patterns and making predictions”. But it can only do so “based on the data that it is given about the patient. It has no way to extract” what may be crucial further information itself.

Besides, patients still need a human connection. If you’re going to be told you have a serious health issue, or even how much longer you have to live, “you want to look someone in the eye”.

Who would be an investor in South Korea right now? “Despair and frustration” spread again on Wednesday as the chip-heavy Kospi index “cratered” during another “hectic session” that triggered a second successive official circuit-breaker, reported Bloomberg.

The catalyst was disappointing earnings from local semiconductor giant SK Hynix but, given “already jittery sentiment” around the AI boom, it could almost have been anything. The oncebooming Kospi has now lost more than 33% of its value in a month.

‘Demand destruction’

“The chips are down,” said Bryce Elder in the FT – especially in the red-hot memory sector. Some have pinned the “chip dip”, which has also hit Wall Street with force, on the IPO of Chinese challenger CXMT; others on reports that a stateowned Chinese company is beginning mass production of “immersion deep-ultra lithography machines” – advanced chip manufacturing tools over which the West (especially the Dutch giant ASML) currently enjoys a monopoly. Still, the more obvious concern is “demand destruction”, in what has always been a volatile and highly cyclical sector. Voracious demand from America’s big AI hyperscalers has sent chip prices sky-high. “All that’s needed to wreck 2027 sales expectations is for this cycle to turn from virtuous to vicious. Plus ça change…”

Could China do for chips what it has already done for cars? That’s the fear on the Nasdaq, said Eliot Brown in The Wall Street Journal. As Elon Musk recently told The Economist, Chinese manufacturers are “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem”. Chinese companies have been restricted from buying the cutting-edge machines – which is why they are “a step behind the US in advanced chipmaking”.

‘Nvidia - the central bank of the AI economy’

Yet what’s particularly concerning about the plummeting shares of chipmakers, said DealBook in The New York Times, is that the rout coincides with a broader crisis of confidence on Wall Street about AI-related corporate debt and “circular” financial arrangements. That was rammed home when it emerged that chip giant Nvidia – increasingly “the central bank of the AI economy” – is brokering a $250bn guarantee for OpenAI’s immense Ohio campus. “Throughout history, almost every generational infrastructure leap has relied on hardware titans to co-sign their buyers’ credit.”

But this has also led to devastating “debt crashes”. The chief winner of the current turmoil is Apple, said the FT. It has reclaimed its crown as the world’s most valuable company, with a $5trn valuation, because it is seen as a relative “haven”. The same is true of the FTSE 100, which has hit an all-time high as an “anti-tech” index. Swings and roundabouts.

Have we already lost control of AI, asked Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. On 11 July, an entirely new kind of hacking attack was launched at Hugging Face, an online platform that houses a library of AI code and datasets. The attack, which clearly used AI agents, “advanced at frightening speed and scale”, executing tens of thousands of actions so as to break into the company’s system.

‘Considerable skill and persistence’

Hugging Face managed to neutralise it, and alerted the authorities. Days later, the company behind the attack “raised its hand”: OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, admitted that one of its tests had gone badly wrong. OpenAI had set up a “sandbox” – a supposedly safe area of its network, entirely disconnected from the internet – and ordered two cutting-edge AI models to perform a series of cybersecurity tests. The models decided to break out of the sandbox, escape onto the internet and hack into the place they knew they would find the answers: Hugging Face’s servers.

Media outlets described the AI as “going rogue”, said Jamie Bartlett in The Observer. But, in fact, these models merely single-mindedly performed the task they’d been given. The models reasoned that the most effective strategy was to cheat, and they did so with “considerable skill and persistence”. This is nothing new. Leading models have deceived users, attempted blackmail, and even tried to copy themselves in order to complete their tasks.

‘The genie is out of the bottle’

Some sceptical observers have suggested that this story might be a publicity stunt: that it benefits OpenAI to suggest that its products have stunning powers. But the truth is that these companies really don’t know how to build AI systems safely – and yet they “continue to rush ahead building ever-more powerful models”. It was fortunate that Hugging Face, a New York tech firm valued at $4.5bn, had a highly proficient cybersecurity team, said The Economist. “Things might have turned out much worse for a less well-resourced outfit.”

This is not necessarily a doomsday scenario, said John Thickstun in The Guardian. AI is very good at hacking; but such powers can also be used to make IT systems more secure. Ironically, Hugging Face had to rely on a free Chinese AI model to thwart this attack – because OpenAI and US rivals jealously guard their own. At any rate, “the genie is out of the bottle”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent: we must learn how to manage AI. Every technology developed by mankind has been double-edged, and AI is no different. “A radically different world is not necessarily anything to be frightened of – but, even if it were, it’s coming at us anyway.”

China is not beating the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race, at least not yet. But the country’s AI products are cheaper and good enough that a number of American AI users are shifting away from homegrown products. Enter a Silicon Valley panic. The U.S. government may take action, and a new Chinese model — Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — may be the trip wire.

‘Something good enough’

Kimi K3 can “allegedly beat some of the best systems built by U.S. companies at a fraction of the cost,” said The Verge. It is the latest in a series of cheap Chinese-made “open-weight” AI models that “anyone can download, inspect, modify and run on their own infrastructure,” said Microsoft. This presents a different approach from closed-source “proprietary platforms” like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT; the Chinese method challenges the conventional wisdom that “leading-edge AI requires heavy spending on data centers and the advanced chips” used by U.S. companies, said CNN.

The Chinese open-weight models are “increasingly almost as good as closed systems made by leading U.S. companies,” which is why a “growing number of Americans” are moving to the Chinese systems, said The Associated Press. Kimi K3 “just seems snappier” than Anthropic’s Claude Fable chatbot, Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian said to the outlet. Other Chinese open-weight models lack the “overall, full-range capabilities” of the products made by American companies, said the AP. But AI users “just don’t need” expensive U.S.-made AI products, technology executive Curt Meinhold told the outlet. “We need something good enough.”

‘Full AI communism’

Some American AI executives are “sounding the alarm” about the rise of open-weight models, said The Wall Street Journal. The Chinese models represent “full AI communism,” in which governments provide artificial intelligence as “digital public infrastructure” rather than a “market product,” OpenAI’s Dean Ball said on X. The White House may soon decide to “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models” as a result.

Others disagree. Restricting access to open-weight models “wouldn’t stop their proliferation — but would weaken U.S. startups” that use the technology, a coalition of 200 smaller tech companies argued last week in a letter to administration officials, per Politico. Regulation would be “great for Anthropic. We’re all going to have to spend money on Anthropic,” Suhail Doshi, the founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle, said to the outlet.

The White House is “showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models,” said Axios. Administration officials last year considered an executive order mandating that U.S. firms could “only host Chinese models if they could guarantee security and take liability if it were breached.” The ascendance of Kimi K3 is “reigniting” those old regulatory efforts. An example: The White House this week banned Chinese-made “humanoid and quadruped robots” to “protect the U.S. AI build-out,” said Reuters.

Three British superhero actors have spoken out against the proposed merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery and urged the culture secretary to block the deal.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong, both of whom appear in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange” films, and Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in the “X-Men series”, have written in The Guardian warning the Paramount-Warner Bros. tie-up “threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public”.

The $110 billion (£83 billion) deal is being led by Paramount CEO David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and close ally of Donald Trump. It would create one of the world’s most powerful media empires, bringing together HBO, CNN, TNT Sports, Channel 5, Paramount+, as well as the DC Universe, Harry Potter, “Game of Thrones” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises.

‘Minded to intervene’

Among a host of issues, Cumberbatch, Cumming and Wong cite concerns over the livelihoods of British film and TV crews, independent film financing, and the consolidation of news publications. “The UK is being threatened by a media merger that would harm our workers, our culture and the public – but we can stop it,” they say.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has said she is “minded to intervene” in the deal on public interest grounds. “I am conscious that the proposed acquisition is global in nature. In reaching this decision, my focus has been, and will remain, on the UK public interest and the range of services available to UK audiences,” she said in a letter to the current and proposed owners of Warner Bros. Discovery.

While Paramount has said it remains “confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues”, were the UK government to issue a public interest intervention notice it would trigger further scrutiny from media regulator Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority.

Depending on her decision, Nandy “could end up upsetting or possibly ingratiating virtually all the major US studios, streamers and tech giants”, not to mention the Trump administration, which is strongly backing the deal, said Deadline. This makes her “one of the most consequential culture secretaries in recent memory… in America that is.”

‘Bad for everyone’ except billionaires

The call for the British government to intervene comes after 12 American states, led by California, sued to try to block the merger, warning it would raise prices, shrink the number of films made and fall foul of strict anti-trust laws.

Last week a US district judge temporarily paused the merger to consider the lawsuit. This prompted Paramount to agree not to close the deal until June 2027 or five days after the court issues a ruling on the case, whichever is earlier.

For Paramount, the delay “may prove costly”, said The Hollywood Reporter. The merger agreement says Warner’s shareholders are owed roughly $650 million per quarter, or $6.9 million per day, if the deal is not completed by 30 September.

More than 1,000 leading industry professionals from US film and TV signed an open letter in April warning of the impact of “media consolidation” that prioritises “the interests of a small group of powerful stakeholders over the broader public good”.

Mark Ruffalo, one of the actors leading the campaign against the merger, said it “will mean less films, less TV, less creativity, less of everything from the people who make the decisions. This merger is bad for everyone except the billionaire class.”

If the “gossip in publishing circles” has any merit, novelist Rachel Cusk has turned her eye to Natalie Portman for her latest book, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Telegraph. The actor isn’t named in “Life of M”. But the similarities between the character “M” and Portman are “so glaring they become hard to ignore” – and the portrayal is far from complimentary.

An unflattering portrait

“Life of M”, which is published next month, is about a film star who allows an unnamed writer to chronicle her life. There are “certainly points of correspondence” between Portman and M in the novel, said John Self in The Times. M “played a ballerina” in a movie and is a “model for a major brand”; Portman starred in “Black Swan” and her face is splashed across billboards as the long-time ambassador for Miss Dior.

Cusk’s character was also a child actor whose first film included sexual scenes that “originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character”. Portman’s debut in “Leon” in 1994 saw her mother step in to insist scenes with her daughter and an older co-star were removed from the film.

Cusk has remained “tight-lipped” on the rumours. It’s “handy” to generate a buzz ahead of publication and the novelist has never been shy about putting “whoever she likes into her books”. Her divorce memoir “Aftermath” explored the breakdown of her marriage to her ex-husband in vivid detail, while her “bracingly honest” book about parenting, “A Life’s Work”, was widely criticised for her unflinching portrayal of motherhood. “It has reached the stage, in fact, where an effective modern curse might be ‘May you appear in a Rachel Cusk book’”.

Portman and Cusk both live in Paris, and move in similar circles. The actor is (or was) a fan of Cusk and even interviewed the writer, picking two of her novels to discuss in her Instagram book club. But “no one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk’s work would allow her to write about her”, said Valerie Stivers on UnHerd. Cusk excels at “reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces” – appearing in one of her books is “never going to be flattering”.

“As literary assassinations go, Cusk’s of M is sly and subtle, but it is lethal nonetheless,” said Arbuthnot in The Telegraph. Cusk stresses M is pretty, “humble” and “gracious”, but the “unsettling argument” she carefully builds is that “M is engaged in a constant effort to seem like a believable person”. What is “cruel” about the character is the “impregnable fort of isolation she believes the actress lives within”.

A ‘delicate balancing act’

Cusk is just the latest in a “long line of writers” to cause upset by basing their characters on real people, said Self in The Times. Philip Roth was a “master” at it, first casting a “thinly disguised avatar of his wife”, Claire Bloom, in his 1990 novel “Deception”, before he “twisted the knife”, with another caricature of Bloom, this time as a self-loathing antisemitic Jewish actor in “I Married a Communist”. And Nora Ephron famously wrote about her divorce from the journalist Carl Bernstein in her novel, “Heartburn”, which features a food writer who is seven months pregnant when she discovers her husband’s affair.

Non-writers assume we novelists insert real-life people into our books out of “spite”, said Amanda Craig in The i Paper, but a novel is “what it says on the tin – a work with made-up characters and situations”. My “long-ago ex-boyfriend”, the literary critic David Sexton, thought he had been “unflatteringly depicted” in my novel “A Vicious Circle” and “threatened to sue”. I might use a line of dialogue I’ve heard “uttered by a real-life person” but most writers I know “go through agonies” to make their characters who might “have their roots in reality as remote as possible from the original”.

Creating characters inspired by real people is a “delicate balancing act”, said Marshall Fine on BookTrib. Novelists run the risk of “being accused of writing a roman à clef, in which only the names have been changed to protect the guilty”. The “trick” is to find ways of using real people in creative ways to “inspire characters who are products of your imagination”.

While there is no legal requirement to seek permission from the real person who inspires a work of fiction, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain advises that it is “good practice” to inform subjects of creative writing projects in advance, to get their “blessing” to reduce the risk of future legal action, and to remove any “identifying information”.

For now, Cusk hasn’t addressed the rumours about “Life of M”, and unless the actor speaks out to “correct the record, the truth will never be known – nor can it really matter”, said Stivers on UnHerd. “If the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy – including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.”

“No remnants of Nazi influence remain” at Salzburger Vorstadt 15, the building in the Austrian town of Braunau where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, said The New York Times. The former guesthouse has now been remodelled into a police station, in an estimated £15 million renovation that concludes a “years-long effort” to prevent the site from becoming “an attraction for Nazi sympathisers”.

‘Neutralise’ history

The Austrian government acquired Salzburger Vorstadt 15 from its previous private ownership in 2016. It then remained empty while a commission decided the future of the building, forcing the town to decide whether to “confront or erase this past”, said Katja Hoyer in The Telegraph.

Ultimately, it decided it wanted to “neutralise” history by choosing a new purpose for the building to ensure it would “neither be demolished nor become a memorial”.

As a police station, the building will be seen as a place of “democracy, the rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity”, said Gerhard Karner, the Austrian interior minister. “Our police is the opposite of the darkest times of our history,” he said at the opening ceremony. However, he added, “memory will not disappear”.

While there will be no information plaque at the site, a memorial stone remains at the front of the building. The stone, taken from Austria’s largest Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, bears the inscription: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. The millions of dead remind us.”

‘Concerns on several levels’

Over the years, Braunau residents have become “fed up” with “extremists and drunken revellers” who “posed for pictures” outside the building with the “straight-armed Hitler salute” or laid “roses and wreaths” to mark the dictator’s birthday, said The Guardian.

But choosing what to do with the site was no easy task. Turning it into a museum of Nazi atrocities could “continue to draw right-wing extremists” but demolishing the building would “obfuscate an important chapter of local history”.

It was felt that a police station would “discourage Hitler admirers” from visiting the site, commission member Oliver Rathkolb told Deutsche Welle.

However, in a 2023 poll only 6% of respondents were in support of the police station idea, possibly due to concerns over the role of the Gestapo secret police as “one of the regime’s principal instruments of terror”. Salzburger Vorstadt 15 should have become “a place dedicated to peace, freedom, democracy and tolerance”, said local resident Eveline Doll. Turning it into a police station “raises concerns on several levels”.

But Florian Kotanko, chair of the Contemporary History Society of Braunau, rejected such comparisons. “We live in a democratic state governed by the rule of law” and, so long as officers are “held accountable”, there is “no reason for fundamental distrust of the police”, he said.

Since the US and Israel first attacked Iran on 28 February, President Trump “has claimed more than 30 times that Operation Epic Fury has been successful, is over, or almost is”, said Robin Wright in The New Yorker. None of these predictions have been borne out; “some have bordered on delusional”.

Tehran on the attack

The latest ceasefire, agreed in June, has “functionally collapsed”. In the past fortnight, the US has launched nightly air strikes, renewed the blockade of Iranian ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, and reimposed sanctions. Iran has attacked US and other targets in Jordan, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Three US service personnel were killed last week by a strike on an airbase in Jordan; nearly 100 more have been injured in the latest attacks.

Trump has tried three strategies so far: regime change, a longer campaign of relentless bombardment, and diplomacy. None have worked. In Washington, “there is a growing sense of despair” about the direction of the war.

Iran’s leaders feared that the Memorandum of Understanding agreed in June was just a temporary retreat, said Vali Nasr in the FT – to relieve pressure on the world economy and allow US forces to rearm. There was, in fact, “plenty of evidence to support their suspicions”. More US military assets began to arrive in the area, and the deal’s provisions – on coordinating the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz with Iran, on the need for a ceasefire in Lebanon – were ignored. Tehran’s aim now, in going on the attack, is to show that the US cannot dictate events, and that Iran can withstand whatever military and economic pain is inflicted on it.

Deep trouble

Some strategists think the new US plan could work, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. Its forces are battering Iran’s coast – military installations, bridges, airports, port facilities – to neutralise the Iranian military’s hold on the strait. At the same time, choking off oil exports will plunge the country into deep economic crisis – albeit in months, not weeks.

In the meantime, the collateral damage to the region is escalating, said Ahmed Al Omran in the FT. Kuwait, which is bearing the brunt of Iran’s current attacks, has endured 1,400 missile and drone strikes. Its airport and its oil infrastructure have been attacked, along with the energy grid and the desalination plants that supply 90% of Kuwait’s water. Oil exports have dropped to 20% of pre-war levels.

The US is in deep trouble, and there’s no easy way out, said Will Walldorf in Foreign Policy – short of accepting Iran’s authority over the Strait of Hormuz and its right to enrich uranium. “But that’s the unfortunate consequence of losing a war that should never have [been] started in the first place.”

Superstar is a word that is overused these days, said Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail; but if ever a man was worthy of it, it was Kevin Keegan. Back in the 1970s, the footballer – who died this week aged 75 – was a “riot of colour” in a grey world; and for a few years, said The Times, England’s hopes of becoming a great footballing nation again seemed to rest entirely on his “poodle perm”.

As England captain, his success in elevating the team above mediocrity was only fleeting, but his impact crossed cultural boundaries. Not only was he charismatic and open-hearted, he was one of the first players to fully market his brand, deploying “his ready smile and dimpled chin with charm and professionalism”. He was ubiquitous on cereal boxes; he was a face of Brut on TV, splashing it “all over”; he even released a handful of singles.

Fighting spirit

Keegan wasn’t the first “celebrity footballer”, said Jim White in The Daily Telegraph: George Best had been that a decade earlier. But “King Kev” or “Special K”, as he was known, was not like Best. A clean-cut family man, he had neither Best’s destructive streak nor his natural brilliance. Having grown up “football-mad” in South Yorkshire, the son of a miner, Keegan had trained tirelessly to become a great, and disprove the selectors who’d told him that, with his slight and small frame (he was five foot seven), he’d do better as a jockey.

His energy, tenacity and fighting spirit, which won him the nickname “Mighty Mouse” – and led him into a notorious on-pitch brawl in 1974 – became evident to the wider public in 1976, on the multi-sport TV show “Superstars”. In the cycle event, Keegan fell off his bike and landed very painfully. He was bloodied and bruised, yet he insisted on taking part in the re-run, which he then won. The public adored him for it.

King Kev

On the pitch, he had first achieved stardom at Liverpool in the early 1970s, said The Guardian. He moved to Hamburg in 1977 – where he twice won the Ballon d’Or – and ended his playing career at Newcastle, from 1982, where he achieved the status of a demigod by helping to return the Magpies to the First Division. When he retired – flying off the pitch in a helicopter after a testimonial – fans wept.

Eight years later, he was back as manager. The club was facing relegation to the third tier; under his helm, it was promoted and became one of the most thrilling in the Premier League. And though his final stint at Newcastle was less successful, the fans still loved him. In January, after he revealed that he had terminal cancer, they unfurled a huge banner at St James’ Park reading: “Long Live King Kev – The Messiah”.

For much of its duration, the 23rd edition of the men’s World Cup was “dominated by the exploits of star players”, said Oliver Kay on The Athletic. Yet for all that Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and Jude Bellingham excelled, none could carry his side to glory. Instead, the tournament was deservedly won by the team with the strongest “collective” identity: Spain.

United front

Spain don’t lack for outstanding players, of course – whether their captain Rodri, winner of the Fifa Golden Ball award, or their 19-year-old winger Lamine Yamal – but they are about as far from being a collection of individuals as it’s possible for a football team to be. “That word ‘team’ overrides everything else.”

This was starkly illustrated by Sunday’s final, which ended with Spain beating Argentina 1-0 courtesy of Ferran Torres’s extra-time goal. While Argentina, a side over-reliant on the “genius” of Messi, displayed a “paucity of attacking ambition”, Spain were their usual calm, intelligent, methodical selves. And in footballing terms, it was no contest: Spain dominated possession, and created many chances, while Argentina didn’t manage a single shot in normal time – the first time this has ever happened in a World Cup final.

‘Question everything

Spanish football is underpinned by the philosophy of el entendimiento del juego, which translates as “understanding of the game”, said Tom Allnutt in The Sunday Times. It’s an approach that prizes “decision-making on the field” as much as technical skill. To get them to learn to “think for themselves”, coaches encourage players to “question everything”. They favour drills which require players to “make multiple decisions at speed” – the classic example being the rondo, or “Spain’s piggy in the middle”.

The system particularly excels at producing “ball-playing midfielders” – the likes of Xavi and Iniesta in a previous generation, Rodri and Fabián Ruiz in the current one. Known as pivotes (“pivots”) or volantes (“steering wheels”), such players are often physically slight, but rely on body shape – and quick wits – to keep hold of the ball. As one Premier League scout who works in Spain has observed: “In Spain, players happily give the ball to a marked player... English players are much less comfortable” doing so.

If England ever want to win the World Cup again, then they must strive to do things the Spanish way, said Jason Burt in The Daily Telegraph. “Get the ball, keep the ball, love the ball, move the ball.” That is what the best teams – especially teams in international football – do. “It is not complicated, but it requires a re-education.” Thomas Tuchel – for all his talk of remodelling England – didn’t ultimately deviate from the old flawed system. It’s something he “got wrong and should admit”.

Spring forward, fall back — that old rule of thumb for resetting clocks at the start and end of daylight saving time may soon be a relic of the past, as the House of Representatives last week overwhelmingly supported a bill to make the time change permanent. And President Donald Trump has expressed his support. After all, people like later sunlight hours. But keeping the clock on summer hours could have negative ramifications.

‘Hidden consequences’

Americans are “tired of the biannual time change,” and making daylight saving time permanent is a “commonsense reform that will improve everyday life for millions,” bill sponsor Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) said in a statement, per The Hill. Trump agrees. Passing the bill would be a “very nice WIN for the Republican Party,” he said on Truth Social. But there would be “hidden consequences” to year-round daylight saving, said Axios. Under the reset the “sun won't rise until 8 or 9 a.m. in the winter,” leaving “millions of children” and commuters to start their days “in the dark.”

There would probably be health consequences too. Morning sunlight is “key to maintaining our circadian rhythms” and “overall health,” said The Washington Post. “Circadian misalignment” can cause lost sleep, which in turn is connected to “obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders” and other health challenges. Americans “would be misaligned all year long,” Vanderbilt University’s Beth Malow said to the paper.

The change would disrupt the daily prayer practices of Orthodox Jews, said NPR. Some prayers “can only be said communally” and are often performed “every morning before heading out for work or school.” The change would be a problem for a “synagogue that has had a morning prayer service for 100 years” if it cannot muster enough of the congregation to “show up at the prayer time close to 9 o'clock because they have jobs,” Rabbi A.D. Motzen, national director of government affairs for Agudath Israel of America, said to the outlet. “Some Muslim prayers and religious observances” would also be affected, said Axios.

Airlines “could take up to two years” to adjust their “complex scheduling” to permanent daylight saving, said CBS News. The shift could affect “crew and aircraft positioning” as well as “domestic and international connectivity,” trade group Airlines for America said in a statement. Trucking and railroad companies that are “also timetable dependent” would face challenges as well, said CBS.

‘Abandoned prematurely’

Congress authorized permanent daylight saving in 1973 to save energy during the oil crisis, said The Independent. The project was “abandoned prematurely” amid concerns about “children and criticisms from the construction and agricultural industries.”

Permanent standard time might be a healthier alternative, said Yahoo News. Stanford University researchers determined that sticking to the regular clock all year would result in “300,000 fewer strokes and 2.6 million fewer people with obesity.” People need “more morning light and less evening light” to have a balanced day, Stanford University’s Jamie Zeitzer said to the outlet.

As Andy Burnham steps into his new post at No. 10. Downing Street, his family has inevitably been brought into the limelight alongside him.

Throughout his political career, Burnham has spoken openly about his upbringing and parents, but has been “generally private about his wife and children”, said Kasia Delgado in The i Paper. He has preferred to allow them to “get on with their lives away from the spotlight” – but his latest career move has made this less likely.

‘Active but not showy’

Burnham met his Dutch-born wife, Marie-France van Heel, in 1989 when both were undergraduates at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. They began dating, but took a break when Marie-France “asked him for permission to appear on Cilla Black’s ‘Blind Date’”, said Isaac Bickerstaff in Tatler. She and Burnham married in 2000.

Van Heel, known as Frankie by friends and family, has built up an “illustrious” career as a “marketing maven” and currently sits on the board of directors of Be.EV, a company that “masterminds public charging points for electric vehicles”.

Described by those close to her as “very gentle” and “highly intelligent”, she is “rarely seen in public” but joined Burnham this week at Buckingham Palace for his official swearing-in as prime minister.

In 2010, her sister Claire died of breast cancer, and Van Heel subsequently discovered that she “carried the gene” for the disease, said Jon Craig on Sky News. She decided to have a double mastectomy as a result, and is a donor to Cancer Research UK, “often participating in the charity’s Race for Life”. “Politically active, but not in a public or showy way”, she also sits on the board of Plan International, a charity that supports children around the world.

She and Burnham have three adult children. Jimmy, 26, studied Caribbean and Latin American history at University College London and currently works as an International Policy Officer for the Royal College of Nursing, said The i Paper. Rosie, 24, is a “sales manager at Jägermeister”, and 21-year-old Annie attends Cardiff University, following in her father’s footsteps by pursuing a degree in English literature.

The PM has a close relationship with his children, with whom he shares a love for music. Burnham has mentioned how “his son got him into bands The Strokes and Big Thief”, and regularly attends festivals and concerts with his children.

‘Protective of each other’

Before his move to Downing Street, Burnham lived close to his mother and father in Greater Manchester. Parents Roy and Eileen met while working in Liverpool but raised their three sons in Culcheth, a village near Warrington, Cheshire.

John, the oldest brother, has been chair of the Council of the Sixth Form Colleges Association for the last decade. Youngest brother Nick, born four years after Andy, also went into education, and is currently the principal of Cardinal Newman College in Preston, Lancashire. The brothers are said to be close and “protective of each other”, said Delgado. The “tight” family will “bring him back down to earth” if he gets “too Westminster”.

Their father now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and lives in a care home. But although he is “unaware” of his son’s new position, he has had a lasting influence on his work, said Aine Fox and David Hughes in The Independent. A lifelong Labour supporter, Roy Burnham felt particularly strongly about a “change in the voting system to proportional representation”, a system his son now publicly supports. “It’s a family achievement,” Burnham said of his elevation to No. 10, in an interview with The Times. “Although he doesn’t know it, it still makes me feel that we’ve kind of done something together.”