“A disaster.” That was German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s own verdict on his party’s showing in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week, said Klára Odstrcilová on EU Perspectives (Brussels).

The state is one of the five that made up the former East Germany (there are 16 German states in total). And though Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 38% in the first state election held after reunification in 1990, it has been shedding support there ever since. In the previous state election (2021) it won just 13%.

Even so, no one expected that this time the CDU wouldn’t even make 5% – the threshold a party has to cross to gain parliamentary representation. By contrast, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party – which had vowed to bring down energy prices by restoring the supply of Russian gas (the state is home to the terminal of the suspended Nord Stream pipelines) – more than doubled its vote share to 38.2%. So yes, Merz is right: a disaster, indeed.

‘Existential crisis’

Nor was the CDU’s failure confined to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said The Economist. On the very same day as that debacle, the party got thumped in Berlin’s local elections, in this case being humbled by the far-left Die Linke party. And these twin losses themselves came just two weeks after the CDU had suffered a crushing defeat in another east German state, Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD triumphed with 43.8%.

Indeed, Merz has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most unpopular German leader in polling history: his approval rating is just 13%. Yet despite all this, he has vowed to stay on for the sake of Germany’s “democratic future”, and to pursue his economic and welfare reforms with “backbone, steadfastness, and patience”. Brave words, but some of Merz’s own colleagues believe their “zombie chancellor” can’t go on.

That the CDU, which has produced more chancellors than any other party, should now be “plunged into an existential crisis” is all down to Merz, said Hugo Müller-Vogg in Cicero (Berlin). He’s only been in power for 16 months, but over that time the national vote share of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has fallen from 28.5% to around 20%. Merz’s fractious coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats has completely failed on its promises to contain the far-right and reverse economic stagnation.

Twilight phase

Immigration is usually the issue people cite when accounting for the rise of the AfD, said Dalia Marin on Project Syndicate (Prague). But more attention should be paid to a factor every bit as crucial: China. Economic competition from China has upended Germany’s export model of selling cars and high-end machinery, and devastated the advanced manufacturing industry Germans have long relied on for “good jobs and broad-based prosperity”. Average annual growth since 2020 has slumped to just 0.12%.

Nor does this only affect the poorer, former communist eastern states that are the AfD’s heartlands: “western” states such as Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, also feel the pain. In March, the AfD almost doubled its vote share there to 18.8%: it should no longer be seen as just a creature of the east.

Merz himself now seems to have entered “Kanzlerdämmerung” – the twilight of the chancellor, said Zafer Mese in Daily Sabah (Istanbul): his coalition looks marooned. However, no CDU or CSU politician has stepped forward to replace him, so he may cling on for a while yet.

And he has one thing in his favour, said Roland Nelles in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Next year’s five state elections are all in western states, ones where the AfD, despite its recent gains, will struggle to land a knockout blow. The “stabilising effect” this will have could lend the coalition a small window of opportunity in which to kick-start growth through its welfare and pension reforms. They’d better hope it does: if not, more election nights like the ones last week will follow.

Many people are familiar with El Niño’s warming surface temperatures across the Pacific Ocean. Less known is a separate but related oceanographic feature quickly positioning itself as one of, if not the, major disruptive weather events of the season. Dubbed a Kelvin wave, researchers warn this large surge of warm ocean water could lead to intense meteorological destruction during a winter storm season already heightened by a particularly active El Niño.

‘Not like crashing waves at the beach’

Unlike “typical” waves visible across the “surface of the water,” Kelvin waves occur when “bursts of westerly winds push warm water eastward,” said LiveNow from Fox. The eastern push then generates Kelvin waves that “travel beneath the water’s surface along the equator.”

Kelvin waves manifest when ocean trade winds that “usually” move from South America toward Asia “die down or reverse" in El Niño years, said The Guardian, setting off a “massive slow-moving slosh of water.” But Kelvin waves are “not like crashing waves at the beach.”

These waves are “planetary in scale, spanning thousands of miles,” and carry an “untold amount of warm water that slowly moves from the western Pacific, along the equator, towards South, Central and North America,” said The Guardian. Unlike normal shoreline waves, Kelvin waves are a “propagating disturbance” that moves energy through the ocean, “shifting heat, pressure, and sea level” along the way, said the Desert Sun.

Lasting impact

This year’s wave has “added nearly a foot to tides in Southern California,” said The Atlantic. It has also created conditions that “tend to drum up storm activity in the Pacific.”

Potential Kelvin wave damage “depends on the force of the swells and how high tides are,” said The Orange County Register. If the wave is “indeed arriving now” at California’s shoreline, it will dovetail with “6-foot tides” and hurricane conditions “already churning up the ocean’s force.” Though the exact timing of the wave’s impact on coastal California remains uncertain, said The Guardian, researchers predict the wave’s effects will “linger through the winter and into early next year.”

A Tennessee woman, convicted of murder, has survived attempts to execute her by lethal injection. She was rushed to hospital, still breathing, after receiving two doses of pentobarbital.

Christa Pike was scheduled for execution yesterday and, after a late stay was overturned, would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee for more than 200 years. Now the 50-year-old’s botched capital punishment has drawn fresh attention to concerns about the fairness of her murder trial.

‘No precedent’

Early yesterday, Pike’s execution had been briefly paused by a federal appeals court on the grounds that more time was needed to consider her case. But, an hour before the midnight deadline for her execution was due to expire, the US Supreme Court overruled the stay, and prison officials went ahead with the process.

Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for a murder she committed at the age of 18, had asked to be executed by an all-female firing squad, saying that being held down by a group of men would traumatise her. But execution by firing squad is not allowed in Tennessee, so lethal injection was used instead.

After the required syringe of pentobarbital was administered, Pike was given a second dose. Members of the media, who were at the execution as witnesses, described her as “somewhat alert”. They told The New York Times that, at one point, she could be heard singing with her spiritual adviser. Her legal team say she still had a heartbeat after being given the second dose, and had not lost consciousness.

As it became clear that the lethal injection had not worked, the execution was halted and Pike was transferred to hospital. She was apparently snoring loudly as she was taken to the ambulance. Her current condition is unknown, and it remains unclear what her fate will be if she recovers. State governor Bill Lee has suspended all further executions in Tennessee this year, pending an investigation into the incident.

“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.” The Tennessee Department of Correction insisted that it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”.

‘Uniquely compelling’

At her trial in 1995, Pike had confessed to the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Sleemer, “a young woman she viewed as a romantic rival” when they met at a vocational camp for troubled teens, said Al Jazeera. With her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend, Pike lured Slemmer into the woods, where they taunted her, beat her with asphalt rocks and slashed her with a knife.

Pike, who was described by the Daily Mail as a “Satanist killer”, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull after the killing. Shipp said he had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest. Both were convicted of first-degree murder. Shipp, who was 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; Pike, who, at 18, qualified for capital punishment, was sentenced to death.

Since her sentencing, her legal team have uncovered details about her childhood that they say the jury never had the chance to consider. She has a “documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect”, said the BBC. She was physically and sexually abused by several of her mother’s husbands and boyfriends, and described being raped twice, at the age of 11 and 17. Her legal team also presented evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy, impairing Pike’s brain development and her impulse control.

“It is mind-boggling” that her history of abuse and rape was not revealed to the jury, Sandra Babcock, an expert in gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School, told the BBC. Her case is “uniquely compelling, not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness”.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said at the weekend that she had waited decades to see Pike’s death sentence carried out. A victim’s rights group had raised funds for her and her husband to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died,” she said. “I just want Christa down so I can end it.”

The sight of a disabled octogenarian being removed from her home on a stretcher has reignited public anger about Spain’s housing crisis. Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets last weekend, protesting at the eviction of Madrid pensioner María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, and demanding “stronger protection for tenants in the face of a housing shortage and soaring rents”, said the BBC.

‘You are not alone‘

Abascal has lived in her flat in Madrid’s El Retiro neighbourhood for more than 70 years, and was paying rent of around €500 per month when the building was bought by investment company Urbagestión in 2018. The company increased the rent to €2,650 a month, “later reduced to €1,650”, but still well above Abascal’s monthly pension of €1,350, said Euronews.

The company moved to evict her. They had three attempts blocked by the courts, so Abascal‘s successful eviction last week “shocked many”, said CNN. Police used tear gas to clear a path between protesters who had “waited outside her home since the previous night trying to prevent” her removal. Abascal was brought out on a stretcher while the crowd chanted: “You are not alone.” She was taken to hospital, suffering from anxiety and extreme exhaustion.

A few days after her very public eviction came the “welcome news” that Abascal would be able to return to her home. Her lawyers said her landlord has agreed to let her pay a rent “similar to the one she had previously”, under a new eight-year contract. But we need things to improve for everyone, protestor Jacob Patiño told the BBC: “There are lots and lots of other people who are being evicted.”

‘Global symbol‘

Nearly 10,000 people gathered in Madrid in the afternoon after Abascal’s eviction, both to protest at what had happened to her and to express a wider “frustration over the growing difficulties in finding housing”, said CNN. There was also “a huge wave of spontaneous solidarity” protests in Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia.

As Spain’s population continues to grow, “housing construction remains far below the levels recorded before the financial crisis”, said Euronews. The imbalance of supply and demand is “particularly concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres”, where rents have spiralled in recent years.

Under pressure from the widespread protests, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has brought forward a long-delayed housing reform bill. “Crafting legislation” that his minority government could hope to get through the Spanish parliament was “tricky”, said Politico. The draft bill had to be “moderate enough” for the Catalan separatist Junts party, “which is conservative on landowners’ rights”, but not so “lenient” that it would alienate Sánchez’s left-wing allies. As it currently stands, the bill bans evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, limits rent hikes for two years and prohibits investment funds purchasing houses for two years. It now has a month to be approved by parliament.

Abascal’s case has resonated far beyond Spain; she has become a “global symbol for housing activists”, said El Pais. “What is happening here is a signal for all of Europe,” political analyst Federico Tomasone told the paper. “This transcends borders. There are many Maricarmens everywhere.”

Given the significant concerns over the safety of artificial intelligence, the chipmaking behemoth Nvidia has unveiled a new security apparatus that it hopes will stop AI bots from running amok. But many still worry about the implications.

‘Isolation, monitoring and behavior detection’

Known as the Open Agent Safety Platform, Nvidia’s new safety tool is part of an effort to ensure that all AI agents “operate in a zero-trust environment out of the box,” the company said in a press release. AI agents require “isolation, monitoring and behavior detection” to minimize “drift,” or what Nvidia describes as an AI bot performing “actions that depart from the intended task or operating constraints.” The company says Open Agent can “control what AI agents can access in real time and shut them down when they break the rules,” said Bloomberg.

The new software lets users “formally verify an agent has enough authority to do its job and no more” and can “quarantine a suspicious agent in milliseconds,” Nvidia’s Vice President of Enterprise AI Justin Boitano told The Associated Press. Nvidia also believes its new platform could have prevented a “recent incident involving a swarm of OpenAI agents that autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face,” a “high-profile breach that inflamed the safety concerns about AI.” OpenAI has paused development on its models since that incident.

‘Get the company under control’

Issues with AI safety, specifically AI going rogue, have led to a “rare display of unity from the likes of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk in calling for a slowdown in development before AI advances beyond human control,” said The Wall Street Journal, referencing the respective CEOs of brands OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok. These AI executives have “repeatedly called for international regulations to constrain the systems, and some researchers have warned that AI may even present a threat to human life,” said CNN.

But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has downplayed these concerns. If companies like OpenAI “believe their company is out of control, then get the company under control,” Huang told CNN. The same day the safety platform was announced, Nvidia also revealed it would “buy back an additional $150 billion worth of its shares,” said CNN, in addition to $85 billion already in transit, representing the “largest single corporate share repurchase ever.”

An “extraordinary diplomatic row” has erupted between South Korea and Ukraine over the fate of two North Korean prisoners of war, said the Financial Times.

At the UN General Assembly last week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that Ukraine had transferred the men, who were captured while fighting for Russia, to South Korea. Seoul has since demanded an official apology, accusing the Ukrainian president of violating a secrecy agreement about the transfer, which was arranged to ensure the prisoners’ safety from reprisals.

But Kyiv has denied that such a confidentiality agreement existed, creating both an international and domestic drama for President Lee Jae-myung.

The prisoners of war

The two men, who were reportedly wounded and captured in Russia’s Kursk region in early 2025, are among tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine. So far, they are the only known surviving prisoners. One of the men, when he realised he was going to be taken prisoner, “tried to kill himself and he was shocked that fate didn’t let him die”, Zelenskyy added in his speech. “This is how they raise people in the North.”

The two prisoners told local media that they “wanted to be sent to South Korea”, said BBC News. South Korea “legally regards the North as part of its territory”, said The Associated Press. Its policy is to accept and support defectors from North Korea; more than 34,000 have arrived since the end of the Korean War. The majority are female civilians from the “poorer northern regions”; defections by soldiers are “uncommon”.

After negotiations between Seoul and Kyiv, the soldiers reportedly arrived in South Korea via a third country this month. Seoul claims Ukraine requested secrecy to avoid domestic criticism for passing up the opportunity to exchange the North Koreans for Ukrainian prisoners held in Russia. South Korea agreed, President Lee claims, partly to protect the soldiers and their families from reprisals by the North Korean regime.

In North Korea, the families of defectors can face “collective punishment such as internment or forced labour”, said the Financial Times. Ukraine has “done a lot of damage to the welfare of these soldiers and their families”, said Peter Ward at the Sejong Institute. “The South Korean media should probably never have been granted access to them. Ideally, their capture should have been kept permanently secret.”

Diplomatic headache

After Zelenskyy revealed the transfer at the UN, Lee said on X that Ukraine had broken a “non-disclosure agreement”. But Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, denied the accusation, writing on Facebook that “there was no such agreement”.

The row has “prompted questions over why Seoul placed such importance on keeping the transfer quiet”, said The Korean Herald. South Korea might have “wanted to minimise potential friction” with the North, as Seoul hopes to “reopen dialogue” between Washington and Pyongyang.

The row also highlights South Korea’s ambiguous position on Ukraine: South Korea was once one of Russia’s foremost trading partners, and has worked to “deepen trade and diplomatic relations with Russia, which borders North Korea”, said the BBC.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Seoul condemned Moscow and joined Western sanctions against Russia. In July, it announced a $100 million support package for Kyiv. But it has “kept the war at arm’s length”, said The Guardian. It has refused to send much-needed weapons, citing its policy of only providing humanitarian aid, rather than lethal weapons, to active war zones.

The situation has created a headache for Lee, whose government is “keen to improve relations” with North Korea. The row has turned “cautious support for Kyiv into open criticism” of aid.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion attempt against neighboring Ukraine nears its fifth year of region-disrupting violence, a new wave of intelligence reports has raised a frightening prospect: a widening theater of violence, in which Russian hybrid warfare strikes deep European Union territory. With alarm bells ringing over potential Russian offensives — both digital and kinetic — in the coming months, vulnerable European nations must figure out if, and how, to respond.

‘Undermining’ NATO

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed the “rising number” of hybrid incidents in NATO countries as a sign that Russia is “losing the war in Ukraine,” said The Associated Press. But recent incidents, including an “explosive-laden drone at a German airport” and a “strike on a passenger train near the Polish border,” have presaged a “rush of warnings about more chaos to come” across Europe, said The New York Times. “The question is how Europe responds.”

Unlike the “classic thing you think of with NATO” warfare, in which one country’s army “attacks, tries to invade” and “tries to take things,” Russia’s hybrid model is “aimed at undermining our NATO allies without a full-scale invasion,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The goal is to “sow doubt” and “cause NATO countries to back off of support for Ukraine” for fear “there might be a bigger escalation with Russia that we don’t want.”

‘Hardened’ Western rhetoric

Russia’s “shadow war” with Europe “grows bolder by the day,” said the The Kyiv Independent. “No one can say how far the Kremlin is ready to go.” Although “rhetoric in Western capitals has hardened,” material responses so far have “ranged from symbolic ones” targeting Russian “cultural and diplomatic centers” to “fresh sanctions and arms packages for Ukraine,” which Moscow has already “weathered for years.”

Europeans should guard against “overreacting to any sort of hybrid activity,” said current U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker at a recent event in Iowa, per the AP. Russian hybrid attacks aren’t “at a volume that would mean that it’s the beginning” of broader violence. “We haven’t reached that threshold.”

When the former deputy PM Nick Clegg – and his erstwhile Meta colleague Sheryl Sandberg – joined the board of Nscale in March, it looked like something big was in the offing. And so it has proved, said Elias Schisgall in The Wall Street Journal.

The British tech unicorn, which operates a string of AI-ready data centres in the US and Europe and is backed by the deep pockets of Nvidia, has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Founder Josh Payne promises “a fully vertically integrated platform that can deliver computing power to the AI boom at scale”. Nscale has just won a huge contract to supply computing capacity to Anthropic worth $45 billion over six years.

Even so, the mooted $35 billion valuation looks heroic, said FT Alphaville. Six months ago, the company, which reported a $1.02 billion loss in the first-half, was valued at just $14.6 billion. Now it is “a multibillion-dollar bet that investor enthusiasm for computing infrastructure projects will endure”, despite growing calls for an AI slowdown. Spun out of an Australian crypto mining group in 2024, Nscale is relatively untested. Remarkably for the leader of a company of its age and size, Payne, 32, bagged total compensation of £17.2 million last year.

Part of Nscale’s shtick is that “its British roots” are “a competitive advantage in the race to build sovereign AI infrastructure across Europe”, said Saskia Koopman in City A.M. Indeed, it intends to “open its IPO to ordinary British investors” through a UK retail offer. There’s no shortage of “heavyweight names” or “lofty” ambitions in the prospectus, said Ben Martin in The Times. But Nscale will ultimately live or die on its ability to secure “significant multi-year customer contracts”. That means “substantial upfront capital expenditure”.

The hard-right Sweden Democrats (SD) had high hopes of achieving complete “detoxification” in last week’s general elections, said Nicola Quondamatteo in Jacobin (New York).

With its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, the anti-immigrant populist party had started its journey to the mainstream in the 1990s, when it expelled overt hardliners from its ranks and moderated some of its policies. By 2018, it was the third-largest party in the Swedish parliament. But other parties continued to treat the SD as pariahs until 2022, when the party became the second largest, with 73 seats – and a conservative bloc struck the Tidö deal, giving the SD influence over some policy areas in return for it propping up the centre-right minority administration.

Ahead of last week’s election, PM Ulf Kristersson had promised that if the bloc retained power, he’d offer the SD an even bigger prize: places in the cabinet. But Swedish voters had other ideas: they turned away from the SD in droves. With its support down three points, to 17.5%, it lost 11 seats, leaving the right-of- centre bloc with 173 seats in total, three fewer than a centre-left bloc led by Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson.

Incendiary rhetoric

In a sense, the SD has been a victim of its own success, said Håkan Boström in Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg). When it started railing against immigration, the main parties still took pride in Sweden’s reputation as a haven for refugees. But ten years ago, as Sweden and other EU states reeled from the 2015 refugee crisis, parties across the spectrum agreed that the rules had to be tightened. Then, in 2022, the new SD-supported government embarked on reforms to reduce immigration as much as possible without breaching EU law.

In recent years, asylum claims have fallen sharply and, since 2016, net immigration has fallen by two-thirds to about 47,000 a year. As a result, immigration was not the biggest issue for voters this year. Yet the SD chose “Make Sweden Sweden Again” as its campaign slogan, and stepped up its incendiary rhetoric. “Do you miss Mogadishu? Remigration will help you go home” read an ad it splashed on buses around Gothenburg, which has a large Somali diaspora. This repelled moderate swing voters, and mobilised turnout for the centre-left.

Shifting the dial

In an “ominous political landscape”, European progressives will have derived welcome optimism from the result in Sweden, said The Guardian. But the ray of hope it offers is not a bright one. In Sweden, as elsewhere, the far-right’s nativist agenda has been so normalised that the Social Democrats – should they form an administration – are not proposing a very different approach. And the Sweden Democrats will keep stoking divisions from the sidelines. They and their supporters are already blaming their defeat on “imported” Muslim votes. Europe’s social democrats must be courageous in seeking to “shift the dial of political debate” – or the far-right “will continue to set its terms”.

This week, the world heard from an often quiet figure at the center of the Iran-U.S. war: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. While subservient to Iran’s supreme leader, Pezeshkian wields immense power as the head of government, and a fiery speech at the United Nations showed that he has no intention of rolling over for the United States.

Heart surgeon-turned-president

Pezeshkian, 71, was born in the city of Mahabad and completed his military conscription service at the age of 19. During his conscription, he served in “Zabul — one of the most deprived cities in Sistan and Balochestan province, an experience that was said to be his political awakening,” said The Guardian. After returning home, Pezeshkian decided to have a career in medicine and “returned to his hometown to start his medical training.”

He eventually pivoted to cardiac health and “became a heart surgeon and served as the head of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences,” said The Associated Press. His middle life was also marked by tragedy, after a 1994 car accident “killed his wife, Fatemeh Majidi, and a daughter.” Pezeshkian eventually became a politician, serving as Iran’s “deputy health minister and later as the health minister under the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.”

In 2024, Pezeshkian ran for president as a moderate with a pledge to “open Iran to the world,” said Deutsche Welle. His campaign focused on “rebuilding trust between the government and the Iranian people, fighting disillusionment after persistent economic woes and political repression.” He won the election in a runoff, and his victory came as a stunning upset against his hardline opponent. While Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains the country’s ultimate authority, Pezeshkian has become a historically significant leader.

‘Never bow our head or bend at the knee’

Since the war in Iran began, Pezeshkian has largely pushed back against what he views to be U.S. aggression. He asserted himself during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly against President Donald Trump, who had personally threatened Iran when he spoke to the body the day before. The country will “never bow our head or bend at the knee,” Pezeshkian said of Iran during his speech. The Iranian president was “defiant in the face of what he called ‘bullying’ by Trump, while saying Tehran is open to negotiations,” said USA Today.

Pezeshkian’s visit to the United Nations in New York City is an “extraordinary appearance,” given that the U.S. and Iran are in a state of war, said USA Today. Just “months after he and other Iranian leaders were targeted by U.S. airstrikes, Pezeshkian — like other world leaders — is traveling through Manhattan with a Secret Service escort.” Pezeshkian has repeatedly accused the U.S. of war crimes and during his speech he “held up a photo of children killed in a U.S. strike on an Iranian primary school at the start of the war.”

While much of the ongoing tension surrounds Iran’s alleged attempts to enrich uranium, Pezeshkian has denied that his country “wanted a nuclear weapon” but “refused limitations on the country’s civilian nuclear program,” said NPR. His conditions for negotiating in the future include the “halting” of “U.S. hostilities, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and the release of Iranian funds.”

Across elite sports, a debate is growing over whether professional sporting bodies should support female athletes in freezing their eggs.

The Royal Spanish Football Federation recently announced an agreement to fund egg freezing and fertility treatments for its players, the first national federation to do so. Under the partnership, valid until 2029, the World Cup winners will “be given more options to pursue motherhood when they feel the time is right”, said ESPN.

It follows similar briefings by the National Women’s Soccer League in the US and Chelsea F.C. Women in the UK, as well as other sporting leagues like the Women's National Basketball Association and Women’s Tennis Association. But experts and athletes have raised concerns about the ethics of employer-offered fertility treatments and whether they truly support athletes during pregnancy and after they become parents.

‘Powerful message’

“Elite athletes have been choosing to freeze their eggs on their own for years,” said El País – when they can “find a gap” in their intense schedules. What’s new is that national teams, leagues and clubs are “beginning to take charge of the process”.

This year, the governing body of European football, Uefa, recommended including fertility and reproductive treatments in employment policies. And this month, Chelsea became the first Women’s Super League club to provide a fund for its squad to freeze their eggs and access fertility services. The fund, understood to be worth at least £189,000, is enough for the entire squad to freeze their eggs at a clinic in London’s Harley Street, said The Observer, “making it the most significant investment into fertility treatment from a women’s sports team in the UK”.

The Spanish federation “understands that you are serving your country against your biological clock, that you cannot stop and cannot be a mother because you need your body to work”, said former Spain captain Alexia Putellas. The footballers who want to become mothers “do not find it easy to fit it in” alongside World Cups.

Fertility services are a huge step forward in giving women more choices, and they send “the powerful message” that champions “should not have to choose between their sport and motherhood”, said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. But “fertility” only goes halfway.

‘Double-edged sword’

Fertility preservation measures are “typically presented as another way to give women in elite sport greater freedom”, said CBC News. But some worry they could inadvertently “perpetuate the attitude that women should wait for retirement” to become mothers.

For many LGBTQ+ athletes, IVF is a necessary part of family planning regardless of timing, said two-time Olympic rower Jill Moffatt. In that sense, funding egg freezing and fertility treatments is a “huge win”. Plus, many athletes likely couldn’t afford expensive fertility treatments. But it’s only a feminist “win” if teams offer support during pregnancy and postpartum, such as maternity leave, breastfeeding facilities and child care options. “Otherwise, it’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she told the news site.

Investing in post-partum training, nutrition specialists, bespoke after-care plans and reintegration programmes is “more inclusive and pioneering than any offer of fertility treatment – and just as important”, said Carson.

Ana Peleteiro-Compaoré Brión, a Spanish Olympic triple jumper, also criticised the Spanish federation's move. “Is this measure intended to make it easier for women to be mothers, or is it intended to make it easier for them not to be while they’re playing?” she posted on Instagram.

When an organisation offers fertility preservation, it brings up the question of whether “the underlying message is that you’re telling your players, ‘Don’t get pregnant while you’re working for us’”, Lamia Zafrani, an athlete gynaecologist, told DW.

The other difficulty is scheduling treatment around training and fixtures. Egg freezing involves multiple appointments, hormone injections and a minor operation. The challenge was highlighted by former England goalkeeper Mary Earps in her book “All In”, who recalled asking an expert: “I’ve got three weeks. Do you think I could fit in an egg-freezing cycle in that time?”

Drugs that are used to stimulate egg production for egg freezing or IVF are also banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, meaning athletes must disclose the medication. “Because there is still some stigma about egg freezing, some female athletes do not want people to know they’re undergoing this procedure,” Margie Davenport, the perinatal research lead for Fifa’s female athlete project, told The Athletic.

Ultimately, “fertility timelines will not change,” said the news site, “but the sport’s infrastructure must.”

The cost of diesel fuel is breaking records, with spillover effects for the cost of groceries and other goods. President Donald Trump is reportedly contemplating a possible solution: a 90-day ban on exports of diesel from U.S. refineries. Experts warn the move could backfire.

‘Most important fuel on the planet’

The idea of an export ban is “quickly gaining traction with more Republicans” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. The United States “produces more fuel than it consumes,” and diesel exports have risen by 31% since the war began. Some officials see a halt to overseas sales as an easy way to ease price pressures. “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on X.

But oil companies are likely to “lose money” if exports are banned, said the Journal. The White House should not create “new restrictions that risk making a difficult situation worse,” American Petroleum Institute’s Mike Sommers said to the outlet. A decision will happen “fast, one way or the other,” Trump said Tuesday to reporters, per the outlet.

Diesel is the “most important fuel on the planet” given that it powers “trucks, trains, tractors and ships at the heart of the modern economy,” said CNN. The Iran war is not the only reason for the price spike: Ukraine has “knocked out a series of refineries in Russia,” and Russia and China have both imposed their own export restrictions.

Experts warn that while an export ban might be “quite effective at lowering prices” in the short term, it would also “jack up gasoline prices, crush U.S. refiners and damage America’s reputation as a reliable energy superpower” over the long run, said CNN. Domestic refiners deprived of overseas markets would “logically pull back on how much crude they process into fuel.” That would ultimately cause domestic fuel costs to “soar,” oil consultant Andy Lipow said to the outlet.

Food supply ‘could be disrupted’

More than a quarter of a century ago, her heroic struggle against a utility giant over groundwater contamination became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie. Now, Erin Brockovich has turned her attention to the “rapid and opaque” expansion of artificial intelligence data centres across the United States, said El País.

‘Stubborn and sexy’

“Say the name Erin Brockovich and you think, strong, tough, stubborn and sexy”, her website declares. But she is also much more than that: a “modern-day David who loves a good brawl with today’s Goliaths”.

Brockovich was working as a file clerk at a Los Angeles law firm in 1992 when she uncovered evidence linking a rash of illnesses in the town of Hinkley, California, to high levels of hexavalent chromium found in the drinking water.

Her work ultimately led to more than 600 residents of Hinkley filing a lawsuit against utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric. The $333 million settlement they received was the largest of its kind at the time. Her crusade was immortalised in the Academy Award-winning movie “Erin Brockovich” starring Julia Roberts.

At times denounced as “the environmentalist with cleavage”, she “frequently saw her blonde hair and striking looks turned into weapons against her”, said El País. But she was “raised by parents who instilled in her an extraordinary sense of resilience and self-confidence”. And, in the wake of the movie, she “did not remain just another heroine fashioned by Hollywood’s capitalist, and often patriarchal, storytelling instincts”.

‘Hinkley on steroids’

Brockovich's name has become “synonymous with grassroots activism against powerful institutions”, said Time, and this year, she has “turned her attention to a new target” the AI data centres being built by tech giants like Meta, Google, and Microsoft.

In April, she “put a call-out on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch”, said The Guardian. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied.

She built a “chilling” map of significant AI data centres that are either operational or under construction, plus locations where community members have emailed in concerns. As of June, 33 data centres had been completed and were operational, 68 were under construction, and 41 were proposed. In May, Utah gave approval to a centre twice the size of Manhattan. “This feels like Hinkley on steroids,” Brockovich told the broadsheet.

She says the data centres are being built without proper environmental assessments or community input, and have significant impacts on local resources, particularly water usage. She’s concerned they are being built in a secretive manner, bypassing democratic processes, and causing harm to the environment and local communities. She wants a “case-by-case moratorium” on the approval of new data centres until their impacts can be properly assessed and addressed.

“You’re up against forces that have all the money and all the intelligence and all the bandwidth in the world,” she said. But Brockovich, said The Guardian, “won’t walk away until it’s over”.

Booker Prize judge and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker said it was a “surprise” that four novels written by men have ended up on this year’s shortlist of six – because, “generally speaking, the male-written books weren’t as good as the ones written by women”. The male authors still in the running for the prestigious 2026 literary award are those who are able to “rethink their roles”.

‘Masculine authority in crisis’

This year’s shortlisted authors span a “generational arc”, stretching from 40-year-old Rebecca Perry to the “81-year-old veteran of experimental speculative fiction” M. John Harrison, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Men outnumber women but the “novels’ subject matter” is “more revealing” than any author’s “identity characteristics”. An “overarching theme” emerges: “masculine authority in crisis – and discomfort”. These are tales of fathers, sons and husbands who are “struggling to inhabit the roles, structures and stories that are supposed to contain them”.

Luke Kennard’s brilliantly funny campus novel, “Black Bag”, sees an out-of-work actor paid to lurk inside a “leather suit bag, as status and confidence evaporate”, while Douglas Stuart “examines the weight of male expectation” in “John of John”, a story about a young gay art student who returns to his repressive home in the Hebrides. In “The Disappearers”, Marlon James charts how masculinity is “brutally policed” in a murderous homophobic attack in 1980s Jamaica. And “The End of Everything", Harrison’s “unsettling” post-apocalyptic tale, “tests the masculine survivalist fantasy of practical competence”.

The female authors on the list also turn their lens on male characters: with “domestic precision”, Elizabeth Strout portrays an increasingly isolated husband in “The Things We Never Say”, while in “May We Feed the King”, Perry follows a “reluctant medieval monarch who inherits the ultimate ‘great man’ role without wanting it”.

None of the books fulfill expectations of what a “male” novel is meant to be. Instead, they reject the very things that male protagonists would once have taken “for granted”, from sexual legitimacy and paternal authority to economic security and “mastery of the world”.

‘Are men OK?’

Last year’s winner, David Szalay’s “Flesh”, a rags-to-riches story about a Hungarian man catapulted into the world of the super-wealthy, sparked much debate about “literary fiction’s renewed interest in masculinity”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. This year’s list will only intensify the discussion, “the theme of which might be summed up as: are men OK?”

Some of the writers are “playfully experimental” and I’m glad to see Kennard’s “howlingly funny” book made the cut. His is the “most purely enjoyable” read and contains the “single best scene of any of the novels on the list (if you’ve read it you’ll know the one I’m talking about)”. I found the politics in Strout’s book about a history teacher living through “the second coming” of Donald Trump “too unsubtle”, and Perry and Kennard, “the juniors in the pack”, have “better novels to come”. If “seduced by heft”, the judges might opt for James’ “gruelling saga” but “I suspect it’s the straightforward page-turning jeopardy” of Stuart’s “John of John” that will scoop the top prize.

I’m betting on “British oddball” Harrison, said Lucy Thynne in The Telegraph. This is the first time the octogenarian cult sci-fi writer has got “so much as a look-in” at the Booker, and, if he takes the gong, he’ll be the “oldest winner in its history”. His “stunningly weird vision of the collapse of England” is a “cut above” the other contenders. “I would love it to win”.

As a result of nearly 300,000 U.S.-based Haitians having their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) revoked by the Trump administration in August, many are heading north of the border. But while they look to join a country that has a vibrant Haitian diaspora, fleeing to Canada presents its own challenges.

‘It’s difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing’

Canada’s “asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection,” said The Atlantic, and many have roots in the nation. There are about 100,000 people of Haitian descent living in Canada, according to the country’s 2021 census, a number that likely increased during the last five years. Even before the TPS revocation, Haitians were the largest group of asylum seekers in Canada; in Montreal alone, there are about 80,000 Haitians, “making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group.”

But Haitians “without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum,” so it is “difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada,” said The Atlantic. There have also been changes since the first Trump administration, when a “road from upstate New York to Montreal became a well-known crossing point,” said CNN. Since then, Canadian immigration rules have “changed significantly, and it’s much harder to make asylum claims at Canada’s border.”

This hasn’t stopped numerous people from trying. Haitians “who do apply for asylum are more than likely to be rejected than approved,” but officials say that “U.S. work experience, along with English and French proficiency, could provide qualified applicants with a major advantage in the Canadian job market,” said WLRN. The “transition is facilitated by the cultural similarities between the two North American employment sectors, making employer-supported immigration a feasible path for those losing their status,” Cassandra Fultz, a Canadian immigration consultant, told the outlet.

‘Canada may be part of the answer’

Canada has an “extensive immigration system separate from its refugee protection system,” so for some Haitians, the better question may be not “‘can I claim asylum in Canada?’ but ‘could I qualify to immigrate to Canada?’” said The Haitian Times, an online newspaper for the Haitian diaspora. Canada “may be part of the answer,” but “that doesn’t necessarily mean claiming asylum.”

For many “Haitians fleeing ICE, the only route into Canada is a path through the woods,” said The Atlantic. It can be a risky venture, as Haitians who are denied entry by Canadian border officials are usually “turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and typically transferred to ICE.” Many Haitians are still “willing to risk a dangerous and illegal journey into Canada to avoid returning to their home country,” said USA Today. Notably, the U.S. government says that Haiti is “so dangerous that Americans should not visit,” as it “lacks an effective central government, and criminal gangs largely control the streets.”

Some immigrant rights activists are wary of an influx of Haitians to Canada. “We are not encouraging folks to go to Canada if they know they might be in danger,” Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, said to the CBC, because Canadian immigration might return them to ICE. “I know that Canada has been promoting human rights, human dignity, or whatever, but I know for sure that Canadian immigration has been very hard” for Haitians.

Revenge, for Charles Spencer, is “best served in a primetime television slot with the merest hint of a smirk and, where appropriate, a few tears”, said The Times.

Princess Diana’s brother, the 9th Earl Spencer, sat down with Laura Kuenssberg for a 30-minute interview on the BBC and expanded on a series of controversial allegations set out in his new memoir, “Swan Song: Diana, My Sister”.

‘Gaslit by the King’

Perhaps the most shocking claim in the book relates to a comment allegedly made by King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, in 1997 in the days immediately after his wife Diana’s death.

During a heated telephone call discussing the funeral arrangements, and specifically whether Prince William and Prince Harry, then aged 15 and 12, should walk in the procession, Spencer claims that Charles “hissed” the words “we’ll forget her soon enough”. The earl told Kuenssberg “I’m telling the truth” and described the alleged comment as “monstrous”.

He also alleges that Charles sounded “giddily elated” on the phone shortly after receiving news that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Spencer speculated that this was because the King would now be free to marry Camilla. When Kuenssberg asked him whether he could be certain this was what Charles was thinking, he responded: “I cannot be sure, I’m saying that’s what I assume from his tone was a possibility.”

Buckingham Palace issued a statement on behalf of the King suggesting that “fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”.

The response was “astonishingly provocative and below the belt”, the earl told The Mail on Sunday. “It is not every day you wake up to find you’ve been gaslit by the King,” he said, calling the statement a “rather poor imitation” of the late Queen’s “‘recollections may vary’ quote”.

‘Cancerous’ tabloids

Beyond the headline-grabbing claims, Spencer’s memoir also reveals details of a deeply unhappy marriage. Diana allegedly told a friend in the days before their wedding in 1981 that Charles had told her he was “very happy to marry her” but that he was “not actually in love with her” and she was sure his “heart was elsewhere”.

Spencer also alleges that Charles contributed to Diana’s eating disorder by squeezing her waist soon after their engagement and saying, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” As her doubts grew, the earl claims she went to their father to ask to break off the engagement but he refused, believing it would embarrass the royal family. After the marriage went ahead, Diana allegedly drove to Beachy Head on several occasions “while contemplating ending it all”.

According to Spencer, Diana was also “dreadfully hurt” by the “petty and vindictive” removal of her HRH title following her divorce from Charles. On the day of her funeral, the Queen allegedly offered to restore the title posthumously, but her brother declined the offer, saying it was a “consolation prize”. He says he told Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, “what’s the point, Robert? Now? I mean – Diana’s dead.”

He also claims there was a “lack of obvious care” for 12-year-old Harry, who seemed “so very alone in his despair and torment” following his mother’s death, and suggests the prince was “allowed to spin out of control”. When asked by Kuenssberg how he feels about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex now, he expressed concerns over their security and the “cancerous influence” that tabloid newspaper articles can have. “It would really be beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example.”

Nine years have passed since Malta’s pre-eminent investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed by a car bomb near her home, said Jurgen Balzan in Newsbook Malta. The three men who carried out the assassination are now behind bars, and this month, after a tortuous nine-year investigation and a dramatic two-month trial, the man accused of commissioning the murder finally looked set to pay for his alleged crime.

The Maltese millionaire Yorgen Fenech, a close friend of the chief of staff of Malta’s then-prime minister, Joseph Muscat, had admitted, in a police interrogation, that he had given €50,000 to the middleman who’d recruited the killers. So it came as a tremendous shock to the people of Malta that, despite this and other damning bits of evidence, the jury last week acquitted him.

Seismic transformation

What’s happened in Malta is a “hammer blow to justice, press freedom and the EU”, said The Observer. Given that Fenech’s confession was “never seriously rebutted” at the trial, it’s absurd for the jurors to have cleared him of conspiracy to murder, by a margin of eight votes to one. The rule of law in the EU’s smallest member state is “hanging by a thread”.

It’s extraordinary what a seismic transformation this small island nation of 550,000 people has undergone since Malta’s Labour Party came to power in 2013, nine years after the former British colony joined the EU, said Ben Munster on Politico (Brussels). Since then it has achieved an “astonishing economic boom, fuelled by a no-holds-barred drive to court the world’s wealthy”. Between 2013 and 2024, Malta’s stock of foreign direct investment ballooned from €9.6 billion to €460 billion; its GDP increased by 70%. But all that gold has brought with it deep corruption and moral decay.

And that was what made Caruana Galizia’s fearless reporting so essential, said Joanna Demarco on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (Washington DC). She delved, like nobody else, into the “eyebrow-raising schemes” of Muscat, the PM who resigned in 2020 as a result of the political upheaval sparked by her assassination. At the time of her death, she was investigating allegations of high-level state corruption at a power plant run by Electrogas, a firm owned, among others, by the Azerbaijani state energy company Socar and... Yorgen Fenech.

‘Climate of impunity’

Rumours are now rife about the jurors’ verdict, said Malta Today. Was fear the cause of their decision to acquit? Or was it something more noble? Perhaps they just didn’t trust a police investigation that was riddled by leaks, missing evidence and delayed action, and that failed in particular to conduct a proper investigation of the other chief suspect, Keith Schembri, prime minister Muscat’s former chief of staff, whom the defence accused of being the true mastermind.

Don’t you believe it, said Anna Marie Galea in the Times of Malta. Responsibility for this “shit show” lies with “what has always been this country’s greatest downfall: its people”. Despite the mountains of evidence, they still chase after rumour and wild conspiracy theories – “why did Daphne’s son park where he did the night before?” – and display a total absence of logic and considered thought. “If anyone needed any excuse to banish juries in this country”, this is surely it.

But Caruana Galizia “was and remains right” about the real scandal here, said Andrew Borg Cardona on The Shift (Malta). There truly is a “suffocating intimacy” between big business and politics in Malta.

The public inquiry commissioned by Labour in 2021 concluded that the state itself had created “a climate of impunity, generated from the highest levels at the core of the administration” in which her murder became possible. Yet none of the inquiry’s suggested reforms – criminalising the hindrance of investigations, introducing Italian-style anti-mafia laws – have been implemented by today’s Labour government. It just keeps explaining away its own complicity in the scandal “and we, the Great Unwashed, have to grin and bear it”.

A “polite, posh revolt” has broken out in an Oxfordshire village over plans to turn an old army site into new housing for more than 1,000 asylum seekers, wrote Ella Whelan in The iPaper.

Residents of Piddington voted to become independent from the UK in a symbolic referendum and now the parish has been “approached by hundreds of other villages and towns for advice on replicating their campaign”, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Telegraph.

Grumbling Piddington

It’s “such a quiet, tranquil village” that the most you could ordinarily expect at 7am would be a cyclist “setting off for an early shift, or a milkman on his round”, said Arbuthnot. But when the referendum result was delivered, the atmosphere in Piddington was “nothing short of electric”.

The village’s 350 residents had been invited to cast their ballot in a small box outside the village hall and out of 312 votes cast, 285 voted to leave, there were 26 no votes, and one spoiled ballot paper.

As the landslide result was announced, residents were “palpably delighted”. The village’s “eccentric and deeply English decision to gun for a figurative ‘split’ from the UK has won it extensive coverage, even from media outlets overseas”.

Piddington had actually been “quietly grumbling for a while” about the plans, wrote Whelan, but now those grumbles are “headline news”, and residents are posing with home-made signs boasting their neighbourhood is “the village that roars”.

“The case of Piddington is fascinating” because residents voted in Calum Miller, a Liberal Democrat candidate, in 2024 and “you don’t vote in a Lib Dem if you’re agnostic on the issue of immigration”. Miller had previously backed calls to make Oxfordshire “a place of sanctuary for those fleeing torture and death”, but he has since written a letter to the government, opposing the new plans.

Piddington is about the “much bigger question of what is at stake with the issue of immigration”. Ten years ago, “even using the I word” could have you labelled racist, but “concerns about cultural tensions, NHS waiting lists and even crime rates are now pretty commonplace across the political spectrum”.

Backlog burden

The government has defended its migration policy after the symbolic referendum. “What I would just gently say to the people of Piddington is we inherited a massive asylum backlog,” Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, told Sky News. The government is “getting that backlog down” but “in the meantime”, it doesn’t think it’s “acceptable for all of the burden” to fall on poorer communities.

But Labour MPs “would do well to study what has happened in Piddington”, said Arbuthnot, because “the anger that has been stirred in even this conspicuously well-to-do and liberal corner of Oxfordshire could augur a broader mood taking hold across the country”.

Andy Burnham has “sold himself as the ‘I hear you’ prime minister", said Whelan, so “will he listen to the Piddington Poll”?

Whether President Donald Trump truly believes he can turn Canada into the 51st state remains as much a question of personal psychology as one of national policy. But it’s clear the president’s increased aggression toward America’s northern neighbor has convinced many in Canada that their national interests lie elsewhere. Despite sharing geographic, cultural and historic ties with the United States, Canadian officials are now turning to other international outlets, like the European Union, in an effort to wean themselves off the U.S.’ turbulent sphere of influence.

Pursuing a ‘unique alliance’ with Europe

With the United States and Canada “embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed to “take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level,” said The Wall Street Journal. The effort is a “bold gambit” by Canada to “rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.” By “accelerating Canada’s pivot to Europe,” Carney is “matchmaking a shotgun marriage to offset the pain of its divorce with America.”

Talks between Canada and the EU have focused on “easing the movement of goods, services and specialized workers in critical sectors, including energy, artificial intelligence, defense and critical minerals,” said The Independent. The two bodies are also exploring “cooperation on subsea cables, cloud storage, data centers, satellite networks and infrastructure to export Canadian energy to Europe.”

“We’re not looking to become a member of the European Union,” said Carney to reporters this past weekend, per The Globe and Mail. “What we are looking for” is a “unique alliance between Canada and the European Union.” EU officials want to work on “opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union,” said EU President Ursula von der Leyen this week in her State of the European Union address. Although “details remain scant and the linkup is not a done deal,” von der Leyen's announcement was “met with a standing ovation from lawmakers,” said The New York Times.

‘Cozying up is a no-brainer’

Talks of Canada actually joining the EU as a full member-state are “more meme than reality,” said Bloomberg. But the apparent “openness to talks on ‘anything other than membership’” has driven “justified enthusiasm among the Ottawa and Brussels crowds.” The “logic of cozying up is a no-brainer” as Canada works to “diversify trade away from its southern border,” and the EU hopes Canada’s “vast reserves of energy and minerals” will help it “carve a middle path between the U.S. and China.”

Carney hopes to “build an alliance of liberal powers” that are “committed to the multilateral order thrown into chaos by Donald Trump,” said the Financial Times. To that end, he intends to “show commitment to European allies” by potentially contributing to the EU-led 90 billion euro Ukraine Support Loan, of which the U.K. is the “only other non-EU country to have participated.”

While it’s unlikely that Canada and the EU will reach a “deeper overarching agreement any time soon,” they are slowly creating a framework for what it “actually means to be a ‘trusted partner’ in the context of economic security,” said Canada EU Trade and Investment Association President Mark Camilleri to the Financial Times. “If Canada and the EU can get this right, it is a model that can be adapted to other like-minded countries such as the U.K., Norway, Japan and Australia.”

In the meantime, said Politico, Canada is set to “make its Eurovision debut in 2027.” The country will “host an EU summit in Montreal” in late October.

Brics has been described as a “motley collection of emerging markets that agree on little and achieve even less”, said the Financial Times, but its leaders signed off on a 45-page statement at the recent summit in India.

The group represents 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade, but many of its members are at odds with their supposed allies, which limits the group’s influence.

What did it agree?

The acronym Bric – which stood for Brazil, Russia, India and China – was first coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at investment bank Goldman Sachs, to describe a group of emerging economies expected to sustain a prolonged period of growth. It has expanded and now includes Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

At last weekend’s India summit, the “historically unruly bloc” agreed a statement “blasting protectionism and economic sanctions and calling for peace in the Gulf”. Brics expressed “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions” in the Middle East around the war in Iran and called for “maximum restraint”. It also encouraged nations to avoid actions that could further aggravate the situation.

The bloc also expressed “firm opposition” to the forced displacement of Palestinians and called for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. It restated its support for a two-state solution, with the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

The Ukraine war is a “source of tension” within the group because Russia is a founding member of Brics, said Al Jazeera. The declaration called for international disputes to be resolved through “dialogue, consultation, and diplomacy”. It was a “generic” statement that didn’t mention Ukraine.

Brics leaders called for “the elimination” of “unlawful” unilateral sanctions that were not authorised by the UN Security Council, saying they “undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter”. This “position is significant for Russia, which has faced extensive Western sanctions”.

On US tariffs, the declaration spoke of the organisation’s worry about the “unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures” that distort trade. It called for cooperation to protect global trade, supply chains, energy flows and maritime security as wars disrupt international commerce.

Brics says it wants a “multipolar” world: a global system where power is spread across several major countries or power blocs instead of being controlled by just one or two. It reiterated its “commitment to strengthening multilateralism and multipolarity”, stating that this could expand opportunities for emerging markets and developing countries to develop “constructive potential and enjoy universally beneficial, inclusive, sustainable and equitable economic globalisation and cooperation”.

What does this mean?

For Iran, the summit was “a chance to show that it does not stand alone amid the US and Israel’s military attacks and economic pressure”, said the BBC. In the face of Washington’s sanctions, Iran “pressed for deeper economic ties” with Brics members, including Malaysia, India and Ethiopia.

This was Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit to India in seven years and, despite “deep mistrust” between the two countries, the weekend was “still a big moment” for China and India. Xi and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi “agreed to strengthen business ties and transport links and address barriers to trade”. So the summit, held in Delhi, showed that Brics can “create space for rivals to talk and manoeuvre outside Western-dominated institutions”.

But “key members and partners of the bloc are at serious loggerheads”, said Stefan Wolff, a University of Birmingham academic, on The Conversation. Iran is “effectively in a state of war” with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while the Saudis and the UAE “have been at odds for years” over Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. So a group “whose sole remaining source of unanimity is opposition to the US and its allies” is “hardly likely to become a pole of a multipolar order”.

Learning to drive used to be a rite of passage for teenagers, but now one in five young Brits say they haven’t even considered learning. No wonder, said The Telegraph: it’s “Britain’s biggest rip off”, and booking a test has become a complete “nightmare”, too.

‘Driving divide’

The average learner pays for more than 18.5 hours of driving lessons by the time they take their test – which costs a minimum of £777, said Helen Coffey in The Independent. The price of a theory test is £23, the practical test sets you back £62, and half of British learners have to retake the test at least once.

All this means the average cost of passing a test in 2026 is at least £924, according to a study from Confused.com. Nearly one in five young people in Britain – 19% – have not even considered learning to drive because of the expense, according to a poll by the price comparison website. A separate study, by car insurer Prima, found that 70% of British adults who do not hold a full driving licence believe learning to drive is unaffordable. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that figure climbed to 76% .

This has created a “driving divide”, which means that getting a licence is now “frequently the preserve” of young people “privileged enough to have parents who can cover the cost”, said Coffey.

Robot cars

For those able to afford lessons, waiting times have risen so “astronomically” that it takes between five and six months to book a practical driving test, said The Telegraph. The average wait was around five weeks in February 2020, before the Covid pandemic caused a backlog that has yet to be resolved.

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency had set a target of shrinking the average waiting time to seven weeks by the end of 2025. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander pushed the target back to summer 2026, but has since admitted even that would not be met. And even once the licence has been secured, new drivers can expect to pay an average of £1,241 to get insured.

There are cultural shifts at play, too. “Perhaps the simplest explanation is that many young people just don’t need to drive,” said Lucy Reade in The New World. Compared to previous generations, Gen Z are “concerned about climate change” and “nutty about public transport”, which is easy for many of them to access given the “massive urban migration” of young people towards cities. And now there’s the spectre of self-driving taxis on the horizon. “For a generation already less likely to learn to drive, the prospect of simply summoning a robot car to do it for us may prove irresistible.”

It has been more than six months since the first barrage of American missiles struck Iranian targets in what has become the defining foreign policy crisis of the second Trump administration. Less defining, however, is the language the White House has used to describe what is taking place between the United States and Islamic Republic.

While President Donald Trump himself often refers to the violence in bombastic terms, other members of his administration have conspicuously avoided calling the ongoing exchanges of missiles part of a larger “war.” Instead, they opt to downplay the conflict’s duration and severity for domestic audiences.

‘It’s small potatoes for us’

Vice President JD Vance argued this month that the “current hostilities shouldn’t even be called a ‘war’” since “‘active combat operations’ ended months ago,” said CNN. Vance’s claim came “despite three consecutive days” in which the U.S. and Iran exchanged fire. “I can understand what he’s saying,” said Trump during an Oval Office press scrum following Vance’s comments. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.”

From the start of the war, Americans have been “getting conflicting messages from the Trump administration and congressional leaders” about what to call the violence, said FactCheck in March. Given that Congress hasn’t officially declared it as such, “if political leaders were to say that this is a war, they would also be acknowledging that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War project, to the outlet.

“Because we haven’t officially declared war, my kids and I aren’t eligible for some benefits,” said Air Force widow Libby Klinner in a recent social media post highlighting the paradox of a nonwar war, per the Military Times. Air Force officials have since launched an “audit on our benefits to ensure that we receive all we are entitled to,” said Klinner in a subsequent message.

White House officials have “downplayed the scale of the conflict” in the “apparent hope that it will recede from the headlines” since hostilities have “already lasted far longer than the president’s initial predictions of victory within a few weeks,” said The Atlantic. Still, with “no end to the hostilities in sight,” the Navy is “staying on a war footing indefinitely.”

‘Just playing to his base’

Trump has “contradicted himself and his own Cabinet in the same week — and sometimes, the same day” in his assessments of the conflict, said the Los Angeles Times. The evolving language is part of an effort to “control the narrative of the Iran war.”

Trump’s more bellicose rhetoric, like when he personally and repeatedly refers to the Iran “war,” is being used in part to “save face for the quagmire he has put himself and Republicans in” ahead of the midterms, said Khaled Elgindy, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to The New York Times. The president’s wartime language is “just playing to his base, whether it’s true or not.” It lacks “much of a strategy beyond trying to wish things into existence by sheer force of words.”

A menu promising a “glistening digital cheesesteak or an eerily geometrical” turkey sandwich “evokes little more than horror in those who behold it”, said the New Yorker. So why are so many restaurants relying on generative AI to create their promotional materials and are these images straying towards false advertising?

‘Nauseating, nightmarish’

Images of food dishes were once “a thing to be drooled over”, highlighting the “sensual, the luscious, the beautiful”, but now a “nauseating, nightmarish quality defines AI’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon”. These fake images “mock life itself”.

The menus might also mock the customers, Adaeze Onejeme, an ad sales worker in Los Angeles, told CNN. “It’s like you don’t even know what you’re going to get” when the actual food arrives, so “at that point, is it false advertising”?

The “phenomenon” is seen around the world, said the broadcaster. In Tokyo, sandwiches are advertised with an image in which they seem to be “made of cobwebs”, in Kuala Lumpur, a bowl of spaghetti marinara “looks like perfectly arranged yarn or strings of Play-Doh”, and in Berlin, there is a “plastic-looking quiche with holes or a penne pasta made from rubber”.

‘Low quality, laziness’

These menu images can signify qualities people generally don’t want to associate with food, such as “low quality, laziness or, well, slop”. Some of them are “alienlike catastrophes”.

There’s “an innateness” to how real food looks that “you can feel in your bones”, Emily Hawkes, a professional food photographer, told USA Today. So when you see AI food images “there’s something wrong, and you might not be able to put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it”.

There’s a reason why we can't look away from the pictures, said psychologist Stephanie Sarkis: our brain gets stuck between “approach and avoidance” as it tries to make sense of an image that looks almost real but is clearly fake.

Running a restaurant in 2026 is challenging because of “rising costs and uneven customer traffic”, said CNN. So “as they look to save money wherever possible”, a growing number of restaurant owners are using AI to “assist with marketing”.

But if food photography is “cost-prohibitive” for an establishment, there are “other avenues to explore” rather than turning to generative AI, Hawkes told USA Today. She suggests contacting student photographers and offering a free meal in exchange for content, or consulting YouTube tutorials for a DIY approach.

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.