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

Tehran on the attack

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

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

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

Deep trouble

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting spirit

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

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

King Kev

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

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

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

United front

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

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

‘Question everything

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

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

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

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

‘Hidden consequences’

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

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

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

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

‘Abandoned prematurely’

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

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

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

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

‘Active but not showy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Protective of each other’

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

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

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

Film fans are embarking on “epic journeys of their own” to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” in one of the “few surviving” Imax 70mm cinemas, said The Guardian.

That’s because it’s the first feature film to be shot entirely on 1570 film – “named for the width of the film stock (70mm) and the 15 perforations on each frame”. It’s “the highest-resolution film format in existence”, so it makes sense for fans to watch the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s masterpiece in his “preferred format”, right?

‘Very exclusive’

But getting your hands on “summer’s hottest ticket” is far from easy, said Mashable. Fans are spending “hundreds of dollars”, travelling thousands of miles, and even planning pregnancies around seeing Nolan’s film in Imax 70mm cinemas: the only format that lets you watch “The Odyssey” with the “fullest image possible”.

Those who opt for other cinemas, with formats like the standard 70mm, or 35mm, will have a “sizeable chunk” of the frame cut off. So some of the “sheer vastness of the landscapes that Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema are capturing” will be lost.

Most cinemas shifted to digital around a decade ago and there are just 41 worldwide that are able to show Imax 1570 film, eight of which are in California. The UK is home to three of them: two in London and one in Manchester. No theatres in Asia, Africa or South America can screen Nolan’s film in his intended format, making it a “very exclusive – and very Western – affair”.

I thought the “buzz” around “The Odyssey” being shot on Imax 1570 cameras was “clever marketing hype”, said Charles Pulliam-Moore on The Verge. But to “get a true sense of the story Nolan is telling” you really do need to watch it in an Imax. Many of the scenes are “perfectly fine” in the 35mm format; however, those that feature the film’s “gargantuan monsters” take on a “different gravity” when displayed in the Imax 70mm’s 1.43:1 ratio.

Nolan has made a film that is “immersive” in a way most modern features aren’t. But the higher ticket price coupled with the fact that the “vast majority” of people will never get to watch his film in the way he intended it has prompted accusations that the director is “anti-art and contributing to the culture of obsessive format purism”.

‘Far more fiddly and expensive’

Shooting on 1570 cameras is no easy task as they’re “notoriously heavy, loud and require frequent reloading”, said The Guardian. During “The Odyssey” shoot the film stock had to be changed “every three minutes” and Nolan worked closely with Imax to create a “soundproofing ‘blimp’ to house the 180kg camera to make it quiet enough for him to record dialogue on 1570 for the first time”. Projecting the finished film is also “far more fiddly and expensive” as a highly trained projectionist needs to be present for the entire screening.

But Nolan’s popularity has risen alongside 1570’s “mini comeback”. The number of cinemas able to project these films has risen from 30 to 41 since the release of “Oppenheimer” in 2023. And it’s not just Nolan who has helped spark interest in the format: several other big-name directors have followed suit including Denis Villeneuve who shot “Dune: Part Three” on Imax cameras.

“There’s certainly more demand,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond told Variety. But adding more 70mm screens isn’t that simple as new Imax film projectors haven’t been made in “about 50 years”. Sources at Imax said many of the parts needed to build them “simply no longer exist”.

Even if Imax does “magically” figure out a way to manufacture more 70mm projectors, there aren’t many cinemas where they could be installed as “exhibitors aren’t building enough auditoriums that are capable of housing its towering 1.43:1 screens because of high construction costs”.

The company remains one of the movie industry’s few “reliable bright spots”, with attendances having “languished” since the pandemic, said Rebecca Rubin in Variety. Buyers have been “circling” and in May it was reportedly in the “early stages of exploring a sale”. For now, Imax is in an “enviable position”.

This is the summer of “cerebral pursuits” in France, with “a big rise” in the sale of “holiday workbooks”, said The Times. With their “cahiers de vacances” – an adult spin-off from school revision guides – grown-ups are “brushing up on” algebra, history and grammar on the beach.

All grown up

Holiday workbooks were originally designed to help schoolchildren to keep up with their studies over the long summer break. But the new adult versions are a real hit: you only have scan bookshop shelves to see “the scale of the phenomenon”, said Aleteia. French adults are using the workbooks not only to “evoke childhood summers” but as an entertaining way to learn something new during the summer holidays.

Last year, over 650,000 holiday workbooks were sold – double the year before – and publishers are reporting even bigger sales this summer, said The Times. Among the most popular ones are “Les Maths en Vacances”, which has readers practising geometry by folding their beach towels, and “Énigmes de l’Histoire” which focuses on historical puzzles, such as the “mysterious fate of Louis XVII”, who disappeared after his parents were beheaded during the French Revolution. “Passeport Adultes Anglais” is all about improving your English – with a “notably challenging” section on making British “herb jelly”. There are also logical reasoning challenges, and police-investigation workbooks with “puzzles to solve” in a “Cluedo”-style format, said Instant.

‘Need to disconnect’

Adults want to buy these books because they allow them to “learn a lot while having fun”, Didier Ferat of workbook publisher Solar told Aleteia. The format is not “intimidating” and you can work through a book “alone or with others”, Carole Strang of leading workbook publisher Éditions Nathan told Instant. There’s a sense of nostalgia at play, too: everyone knows these workbooks from their schooldays. They are associated with a “pretty strong memories” of childhood “summers and holidays”.

They are also physical and “concrete”, allowing you to “move beyond the digital world”, said Ferat. There’s a new “appreciation” for offline activity. The “need to disconnect” from our mobile devices has people shifting to entertainment that requires “a pencil in the hand”.

The desire to disconnect with a nostalgic activity explains the associated boom in “kidult” colouring and sticker books, and an increasing passion for puzzles and crosswords. Dictionary publisher Robert has launched a new series of themed giant crossword books this summer. At a time when the “world of books is suffering”, Robert’s Charles Bimbenet told Instant, “this enthusiasm is welcome”.

Many had written off Marine Le Pen, said Katya Adler on BBC News. They thought the de facto leader of the far-right National Rally (RN) had run out of political road after being convicted in March 2025 of helping to embezzle more than €4 million in EU parliamentary funds, which the RN diverted to pay for its own staff.

And since her punishments include a five-year ban from holding office, it seemed likely that her charismatic 30-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, would have to take her place in the 2027 presidential election.

But Le Pen has a habit of defying the odds. And so it proved last week, when the Court of Appeal confirmed her conviction, but reduced her period of ineligibility to 15 months, allowing her to compete next April.

‘Risky gamble’

There was one large caveat, however: she would have to wear an ankle tag for 12 months as part of her three-year jail sentence, two of which are suspended. This made some doubt that she’d run. But just six hours after the ruling, Le Pen “came out swinging”. In a TV interview, she said yes, she would run for president, and no, she wouldn’t have to wear a tag, at least not until the Court of Cassation has ruled on her final appeal. Ever defiant, she has styled herself as “a phoenix rising from the ashes”.

Barring Le Pen from standing would have had “devastating consequences” for French democracy, said Jean-Éric Schoettl in Le Figaro (Paris). True, she has been convicted of wrongdoing, but even so, it should be left to the French people to decide whether they want her as president or not.

The judgment was a tightrope act, said Olivier Beaud in Le Monde (Paris). By reducing Le Pen’s sentence and letting her stand, the court has freed the judiciary from accusations of political meddling. But at the same time – and this is the really important point – it has upheld her conviction for a grave criminal offence.

Le Pen is not out of the woods by any stretch, said Julien Lécuyer in La Voix du Nord (Lille). Her “risky gamble” could backfire. The Court of Cassation has now said that it will rule on her case at some point before the election. If it upholds last week’s verdict, Le Pen could, in theory, be forced to wear an ankle tag on the campaign trail. Such physical proof of her criminality would be a godsend to her rivals.

Wingman Bardella

The RN is currently well ahead in the polls, said The Economist (London), but its path to the Élysée Palace faces pitfalls beyond the legal saga. One is the potential for infighting. Until his mentor’s sudden reprieve, the highly popular Bardella had assumed he was going to be the RN’s presidential candidate. So he has been pushing his own vision of the path the RN should follow, a path which differs from Le Pen’s. Being a more business-friendly politician, he balks at her plan to reduce the pension age for some workers to 60. Such differences will “inevitably strain” their relationship in the coming months, for all that Le Pen insists they are united.

Yet the truth is she cannot win without him, said Clea Caulcutt on Politico (Brussels). In what was “either a stroke of genius or a sign of desperation”, she had him constantly at her side last week. She was “all smiles” at the RN rally in La Flèche; he was “more stone-faced”, as if “adjusting to his new role as wingman”.

Le Pen’s candidacy sheds light on the “true nature” of the RN, said Le Monde. It’s a family concern. A Le Pen has stood in all but one election since 1972, the year her late father Jean-Marie founded what was then called the National Front. And the family retains its tight grip: Le Pen’s niece is her comms director; her brother-in-law is her main adviser.

The only thing different about the party today is Le Pen’s double conviction, which exposes the rot at the heart of it. So much for the RN’s old slogan “Clean hands and head held high”; so much for Le Pen’s 2013 proposal to give lifetime bans to politicians guilty of embezzlement. The RN poses a “serious threat” to France, and its opponents must wake up before it’s too late.

“I’m sorry. but I’m unable to speak.”

Surrounded by concerned medics and supporters in Delhi, 59-year-old Sonam Wangchuk entered the 20th day of his hunger strike, scarcely able to move unaided.

Usually in the headlines for his climate activism, Wangchuk is “adding momentum” to youth-led protests on behalf of Indian students, said The New York Times. Instigated by the “joke” organisation the Cockroach Janta Party, the protest began after India cancelled its national medical college entrance exams following the questions being leaked. They demand “the reform of a soul-destroying education system”, said The Guardian as well as the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

‘Severe starvation’

Wangchuk is “one of India’s best-known public figures outside mainstream politics”, said The Independent. A mechanical engineer from Ladakh – a mountainous region in the Himalayas – he has dedicated decades to educational reform and creating sustainable technologies for mountain communities.

The most famous of his innovations is the “ice stupa”, which acts like an “artificial glacier” that stores water from the winter and is then used during the farming season in the spring. In 2018 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, “often described as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize”. His involvement in this movement has “transformed” a student-led protest into a “national issue, attracting politicians, academics, activists and public figures from across India”.

In his 20 days on hunger strike, Wangchuk has lost close to 9kg “from a body that was spare and lean to begin with”, said The Guardian. Doctors have warned that at this stage of “severe starvation” his body is breaking down fat and muscle, leaving him in a state of “extreme weakness, impaired brain function and electrolyte imbalance”. He is unable to walk to the bathroom 30 metres away without support and “speaks little to conserve energy”. But as crowds chant his name, he still appears “alert” and “calm”.

However, the weather is becoming a “defining feature of the protest”. As temperatures reach 37C, sweat “pours down” the faces of those in attendance, leaving clothes “drenched” and supporters “hot and bothered”. “A useless fan by his mattress does nothing to relieve the suffocating humidity.” Concern for his condition is “mounting”.

‘Defiant yet humorous’

More than 1,800 public figures have signed a statement urging Wangchuk to stop his strike, which he has “firmly rebuffed”, said India Today.

As a “first step” to potentially stopping his hunger strike, Wangchuk is demanding “accountability for the failures” of the education department, including reports that some students had taken their lives after the exam cancellation. He and his supporters have also demanded the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has called the CJP protestors “the B-team of disruptive elements”. Organisers say they have received no formal response from Narendra Modi’s government.

A petition has been filed in the high court that would seek to “take him to a government hospital and force-feed him”, should his condition worsen, said the BBC. The document said the government was treating Wangchuk “like a hardcore criminal, terrorist or traitor to the nation” and was not concerned for his safety. On Thursday, the government responded by informing the Delhi High Court that it would “intervene if his health deteriorated”, said the outlet.

Wangchuk is continuing to strike a “defiant yet humorous note” despite his deteriorating health, said The Times of India. Addressing supporters, he said he would “stay alive by any means until July 20 so that I can march to Parliament with all of you” the date when the next parliamentary session begins. “If our march isn't successful by July 20, I'll come back as a ghost!”

Across the country, people have been up in arms about the increasing ubiquity of AI data centers, but now a proposal to build a massive AI plant just steps from the Nashville Zoo has brought the subject of animal rights into the fray. As people in Nashville propose ways to stop the data center’s construction, the affected zoo animals could present a new wave of backlash against artificial intelligence.

‘Disrupt the environmental conditions’

The proposed data center, built by the Atlanta firm DC BLOX, would be located about 50 yards from the boundary of the Nashville Zoo, officials told NBC News, or just half a football field away. The zoo is “vehemently opposed to having a data center so close to animals” because the “noise could disturb its residents,” Nashville Zoo President and CEO Rick Schwartz said to NBC.

For many, the “focus of the brewing anger is how it might affect the zoo’s most endangered or prized species,” said The New York Times. Much of the concern involves the facility’s clouded leopards, a threatened species that represents one of the “crown jewels of the zoo’s conservation program.” The clouded leopard breeding enclosure would be “about 320 feet from the proposed data center’s property line.”

Officials are “particularly concerned about the potential effect of light and noise from the data center, given that animals are more sensitive than humans,” Dr. Heather Schwartz, who oversees animal health at the Nashville Zoo, told the Times. The noise could “disrupt the environmental conditions critical not only for the clouded leopard breeding program but for the more than 3,000 animals that call the zoo home,” said CNN. The facility has launched a petition to stop the data center, which currently has over 500,000 signatures.

Demanding stronger regulations

Some are worried that a data center near the Nashville Zoo could spark a larger trend, and these data centers “can have real consequences for animals,” said animal news platform The Animal Reader. Such locations near populated areas have “cooling equipment, backup generators and bright security lighting” that “can disturb wildlife, especially nocturnal animals such as bats, owls and insects,” especially in areas with large animal populations.

This has made the zoo a new focus of the political fight against data centers. After the plan was announced, an “unprecedented crowd” showed up to Nashville’s planning commission meeting as “hundreds of residents turned out to oppose data centers,” said The Tennessean. Numerous speakers “urged city leaders to slow the industry’s expansion, adopt stronger regulations and stop a proposed South Nashville data center project next to the zoo that critics say is far larger than originally disclosed.”

The fight is the “latest example of data centers getting pushback in communities nationwide, as neighbors say they don’t want to live near them or object more broadly to the direction of the tech and AI industries,” said NBC. But even amid a “bipartisan push for regulation, as well as lawsuits and opposition to tax breaks,” DC BLOX is not backing down. “We look forward to working with local officials, community members and the Nashville Zoo to minimize local impacts and to assure that there will be no health risks to residents or animals,” the company told NBC.

Florida has executed the oldest prisoner in its history, the latest in a spate of capital punishments against elderly death-row inmates.

Dennis Sochor was 74 when he was pronounced dead on Tuesday. He was convicted of killing Patricia Gifford in 1982, hours after meeting the 18-year-old at a party. The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal without comment, said The Guardian.

Sochor is the second of three Florida inmates over the age of 70 to be executed within five weeks. The executions have drawn attention to the ageing death-row population in the US, as well as Florida’s status as the foremost death penalty state.

A spate of executions

Florida, known as the Sunshine State, is considered “a mecca for senior citizens”, said The Hill. But it has shown “no compunction about carrying out executions of elderly death-row inmates”.

In October last year, Florida executed 72-year-old Samuel Lee Smithers for the 1996 killings of two women. He was the oldest person to be executed in the state since the US reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Last month, Dusty Ray Spencer, just a week younger than Sochor, died by lethal injection. The 74-year-old had been convicted of stabbing his wife to death in 1992.

Florida is also preparing to execute its first octogenarian later this month. Dominick Anthony Occhicone, who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986, turns 81 next month, after his scheduled execution. If his execution goes ahead, he’ll be the second-oldest known inmate put to death in modern US history, after 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in 2018.

Florida has carried out 10 executions this year, more than all other US states combined. Unlike many states, in Florida the state governor has “practically sole discretion” when it comes to deciding whether, and when, the death penalty is applied, said The Associated Press. About half of its 242 death-row inmates have “exhausted their appeals” and could see their death warrant issued at any time. Three of them, not including Occhione, are over 80.

A rapid acceleration

Donald Trump is one of the death penalty’s “most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone” of his agenda, said The New York Times. And “nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida”, thanks to the “unusual concentration of power” in the office of Republican governor Ron DeSantis. In 2025, a record 19 of the 47 executions that took place in the US were in Florida: more than under any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a four-year nationwide moratorium.

DeSantis has “offered little public explanation” for this acceleration, after “years of relative inactivity”. The governor “makes execution decisions behind closed doors”, so there is “no way to know what criteria” he uses. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” said Maria DeLiberato, attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”

But Florida isn’t the only state “killing the old and infirm”, said The Hill. Death rows across the US are “filled with old people”. And more are being executed than in the past. The average age of inmates executed in the US has increased from 36 in 1977 to 52.3 in 2024, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The ageing population also creates new challenges for the penal system, with inmates who have spent decades on death row “sometimes developing medical conditions that can complicate efforts to execute them”, said the AP. Occhicone, the 80-year-old facing execution later this month, has multiple health problems and “needs help getting in and out of the shower”.

Some question “the humanity of administering capital punishment” to prisoners who might soon die naturally. For others, it shows how “lengthy appeals” and reviews designed to prevent an innocent person being executed “can also delay justice”.

If you have ever avoided giving criticism or expressing boundaries in the workplace, you may have been “bubble wrapping.” The phenomenon, in which people cushion their words or actions to protect others’ feelings, is most common among women. And this avoidance of confrontation may be inadvertently hindering upward mobility in the office.

Gendered habit

While anyone can partake in “bubble wrapping,” women are most likely to do it. Women are “often socialized to be ‘the nice one,’ ‘the helpful one’ or the person who keeps everyone together at work,” said Mukti Joy, a leadership coach and well-being strategist, to Her World. “They start confusing being valued with being easy to approve of.” More than half of women “feel pressure to be likeable at work compared with only 36% of men, and this ‘likeability labor’ means women often feel overly responsible for other people’s comfort at work,” Mandy Lehto, an executive coach and leadership expert, said to Stylist.

Examples of bubble wrapping in the workplace include apologizing unnecessarily, softening the delivery of criticism or expectations, or taking on extra tasks instead of communicating limits. Many women feel pressure to avoid confrontation because they are “far more likely to receive feedback that they’re being ‘bossy’ or ‘too direct’ when they communicate in the same way as male colleagues,” Léonie Kennepohl, a female leadership expert and co-founder of the networking platform and recruiting community Female x Finance, said to Forbes. Bubble wrapping “often comes from a good place,” but it “can make communication less effective and is arguably worse than being known as ‘bossy.’”

Harder job

This pressure to be agreeable can hinder career growth. Bubble wrapping “makes women appear less confident in leadership positions,” said Forbes. “The focus feels like it shifts from making the right business decision to protecting everyone else’s feelings,” Kennepohl said. It can “present as a person not having leadership qualities.” Bubble wrapping also “deprives people of the very feedback and challenges they need to become more resilient, capable and successful,” said Forbes.

Women often “become the colleague others vent to, the one who smooths over conflicts, explains someone’s intentions or makes sure everyone else feels comfortable,” said Her World. These added burdens often make jobs more taxing. This emotional labor has “real value because it helps build trust, psychological safety and stronger workplace relationships.” It becomes problematic “when it’s expected from the same people every time.”

Need for courage

Wanting to be kind does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. “Empathy is essential but so are boundaries,” Elaine Choi, an HR Manager, said to Her World. Practicing “carefrontation” or “being clear, honest and direct while remaining respectful and kind” can facilitate necessary conversations “without carrying everyone else’s emotional reactions on your own.” However, purposely putting yourself in uncomfortable situations may also be required at times.

It is important to “build self-trust by showing yourself that you value your own experience as much as other people’s,” Lehto said to Stylist. “You’re not being unkind or unprofessional.” A conscious effort to make yourself heard will likely lead to an “adrenaline surge and an internal wobble,” but “stay in tension anyway.” There is “so much coming at us that is trying to make us complacent, or to look the other way or to not sit in the discomfort,” Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, said to Big Think. “We actually need people to feel and to act with courage in their everyday life.”

There have been few global figures in the modern era as consequential as Donald Trump. Powerful as he may be, though, Trump does not exist in isolation.

Instead, he is part of an elite echelon of elected officials with whom he is obliged to interact in the course of global business. After a decade of cutting deals, upending relations and generally maneuvering himself to the center of the world stage, here are some of the ways Trump has talked about — and to — his international peers.

Former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

“President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad.” — April 2018

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney

“The future governor of Canada.” — March 2026

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

“My favorite dictator.” — September 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

“Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” — October 2019

“He’s a hell of a leader.” — October 2019

“Sometimes you get along with the toughest people, like him.” — July 2026

Chinese President Xi Jinping

“We’ve become friends.” — June 2019

“I don’t want to say friend — I don’t want to act foolish, ‘he was my friend’ — but I got along with him great.” — October 2024

“He’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not.” — October 2024

“A friend.” — May 2026

Former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei

“One of the most evil people in history.” — February 2026

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni

“A very successful, very successful politician.” — October 2025

“Do people like her? I can’t imagine. I’m shocked by her. I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.” — April 2026

“It’s her who’s unacceptable.” — April 2026

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel

“Stupid.” — Unknown 2020

“That bitch, Merkel.” — Unknown 2020

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel’s “Warrior Prime Minister.” — June 2026

“Crazy.” — June 2026

“He has no f**king judgement.” — June 2026

Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador

“Juan Trump.” — July 2019

Russian President Vladimir Putin

A “competitor” who is “not an enemy.” — July 2018

“Great guy” and a “terrific person.” — June 2019

A “genius” who is “pretty savvy.” — February 2022

“Absolutely CRAZY!” — May 2025

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin.” — May 2025

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte

A “great leader.” — July 2026

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” — March 2026

Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

“He’s two-faced.” — December 2019

“It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.” — December 2024

North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un

“This maniac sitting here.” — September 2015

“Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” — September 2017

“Obviously a madman.” — September 2017

“I think you will have a tremendous future with your country, a great leader.” — February 2019

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

“His reputation is absolutely sterling.” — September 2019

“Dictator without elections” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.” — February 2025

“I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” — February 2025

A “difficult character.” — July 2026

“President Putin.” — July 2026

Until the 1980s, Old Masters – paintings typically completed before 1850 – “ruled the art world”, said The Economist. But collectors began to see the “centuries-spanning” category as “too old-timey”, instead turning to more modern and Impressionist art in the following decades.

Now, experts are not only witnessing unforeseen rises in sales, but also dramatic changes in the attitudes of collectors and artists alike.

‘Untrammelled by tradition’

Old Masters have had “new life breathed into them”, said The Economist. In 2025, global sales of the paintings reached “$1.2 billion [£895 million], 30% higher than a year earlier”. And it’s younger buyers who are “showing more enthusiasm”.

This year at Sotheby’s, one of the world’s largest auction houses, “around 16% of bidders in Old Masters sales” were “under the age of 40, nearly triple the share from five years ago”.

Several changes have occurred in the last 50 years. For instance, the contemporary art market has shown “signs of volatility”, causing collectors to turn to Old Masters which are more “stable and significantly less expensive”. There is also an element of “scarcity” that makes them more attractive, as higher numbers of the older paintings enter museum collections with each passing year.

However portraits and figurative art are “in vogue” because they are, ultimately, “Instagrammable”. People are drawn to what appears to be a “simpler life (if you ignore the revolutions, plagues and awful dentistry of past eras)”. And they are so used to seeing pictures of people online that observers are “primed to connect to painted ones”.

There’s also “new money in Old Masters,” said Margaret Carrigan on Artnet. There was a longstanding belief that “newly minted millionaires and billionaires could be lured” to the art market via modern, “tech-flavoured” offerings, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but the “pop of the NFT bubble” has seemed to disprove that.

Yet sales suggest they are “still in the game”. During London’s Classics Week, Sotheby’s and Christie’s brought in £76.7 million, a “respectable 9.4% rise on the same auctions last year”. Buyers are now more likely to collect “cross-category”, and there is a “hunger” for works that “feel contemporary, regardless of age”.

“Amid rapid, destabilising technological change, visualising the creation of a new world and meditating on our inescapable mortality seem pretty apropos.”

Works by “household-name” artists such as Canaletto, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, have always been popular, said Emma Crichton-Miller in the Financial Times. What’s more surprising is the “surge in value for images by lesser-known artists”. A new generation of collectors, “untrammelled by tradition” have a new set of criteria: there is a “striking” pattern that desirable paintings are portraits, that can be “admired with little contextual knowledge beyond our shared human nature”. Once seen as the “backwater for scholarly private collectors” this new trend has “encouraged works not seen for decades out into the marketplace”. When auctions come around, “expect surprises”.

‘Embraced’ by artists

In the past, lesser-known artists would imitate bigger names – in effect “art historical name-dropping” to improve the “gravity and market confidence” of their works, said J. Cabelle Ahn on Artnet. Cynics would call evoking Old Masters styles as a form of “reference-baiting”. But one of the main reasons for this “trans-historical escalation” is “technological unease”. Not only do artists fear being eclipsed by AI, but there is a movement to explore “foundational concepts like meaning and originality in the endless sea of information”.

Not only is figurative painting “back in a big way” for collectors, but it is being “embraced” by large numbers of emerging artists “keen to demonstrate their skills”, said Chloe Stead in the Financial Times. This could be guided by materials, and neglected older techniques appearing “new”. Oil paint became popular in the Netherlands in the 12th century, even now, for artists seeking to create realistic images, there is “no better alternative”.

There may be “some merit” to the idea that current “geopolitical and financial instability” has “spooked” collectors to return to what they know, and that artists are capitalising on this movement. But it is worth remembering that “Renaissance art was intended to be accessible and easily readable”. Perhaps this reversion of style by young artists is not influenced by a “retrograde nostalgia”, but by a “desire to connect to audiences outside the confines of the art world”.

At 7.20pm last Friday, after months of increasingly feverish speculation, the jumbo screens outside Madison Square Garden flashed the news: “JUST&T MARRIED”, and the nearby Empire State Building erupted in “something blue” sparkles, said Evan Moffitt in The Observer. Taylor Swift, Miss Americana, had tied the knot with her football-star boyfriend Travis Kelce at a ceremony described as the US’ royal wedding.

In advance of the event, several blocks around Penn Station had been blocked off to cars and pedestrians. The 1,000 guests – who included Tom Hanks, Gigi Hadid, Hugh Grant, Graham Norton, Lena Dunham and Steven Spielberg – rolled up in blacked-out SUVs. Most alighted in specially erected tent tunnels and, to the disappointment of the crowds of Swifties waiting in the 40°C heat, there were no sightings of the happy couple.

Private affair

It’s quite a feat to host a major event in a 22,000-capacity arena in the middle of New York City, on the 4th of July weekend, and keep it entirely private, said Megan Agnew in The Times. Swift’s publicists released a few details: the ceremony was officiated by Adam Sandler; bride and groom wore white Dior.

Beyond that, fans had only leaks and speculation to go on: the Garden had been transformed into “an enchanted garden”, with fake wisteria and white roses and acres of peach fabric; the vibe was “Alice in Wonderland meets The Wizard of Oz”; Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks performed. The cost was estimated at $20 million.

Social media backlash

With an eye on the optics, Swift let it be known that they’d given $26 million to charities – but that didn’t stop the backlash, said Ryan Zickgraf on UnHerd. On social media, even some fans railed against the gaudy excesses of the event, while rumours that leftover cake had been distributed outside it led to Marie Antoinette jibes.

New York used to welcome billionaires, but rising prices and spiralling rents have fuelled intense resentment about the rich who just get richer. Swift is especially vulnerable to this, because she became a billionaire while presenting herself as “your awkward friend, writing in her diary”. That “parasocial magic becomes harder to sustain once the relatable girl with a guitar is visibly living like a Medici”.

Even though the United States and Iran are embroiled in war, a new lawsuit against the Trump administration is claiming that the two countries’ governments actually began working together last year — and jeopardized Iranian asylum seekers’ lives in the process. The White House has dismissed these claims, but those who filed the lawsuit are not backing down.

‘Confidential information’

The issue first arose in 2025 when the Trump administration “adopted a policy of providing” the Iranian government with “confidential information from the immigration files of Iranians seeking asylum in the United States,” according to the lawsuit filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund (IALDF). Many of the asylum seekers whose information is allegedly being shared are people who “seek refuge in the United States because of the grave dangers they face in Iran,” such as pro-democracy activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Disclosing the confidential information of these asylum seekers “violates federal regulations requiring confidentiality, endangers their family members and acquaintances who may still be residing in Iran, and puts those who are subject to removal to Iran at risk of persecution,” the IALDF said in a statement. The lawsuit is requesting that the court “order the U.S. government to stop sharing asylum-applicant information with the government of Iran.”

The allegations are based on accounts from “detainees who had been called into meetings with Iranian officials who seemed to already possess details from their U.S. immigration files,” Michael Kirkpatrick, a lawyer representing the Iranian fund, told The New York Times. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied any wrongdoing. DHS “provides illegal aliens the opportunity to contact their consular post and facilitates consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and agency policy,“ the department said in a statement.

‘Prohibit the government from sharing information’

The U.S. government is “allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics,” said The Associated Press. But federal regulations generally “prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the individual getting deported applied for asylum.” Congress “made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside,” Ali Rahnama, the interim executive director of the IALDF, told the AP.

And while some may think that the conflict raging in the Middle East would have slowed the information sharing, the lawsuit “alleges that the Trump administration has continued to share confidential information during the current war between the U.S. and Iran,” said ABC News. Though the “in-person meetings reportedly stopped before the war began on Feb. 28,” the lawsuit claims the government continued to “mail or hand deliver document packages” to the Iranian Interests Section, which oversees the nation’s diplomatic duties in the U.S.

Some asylum-seeker data sharing may always occur, such as information on travel documents. What is “different here, though, is they are revealing information from the asylum applications, and that is a very specific category of information that is kept confidential,” Kirkpatrick said to NPR. The U.S. government “shouldn’t even reveal information from which one could infer that somebody had sought asylum.”

Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, became one of the most famous faces in Britain in the 1970s, owing to her roles in two of the most beloved TV comedies of their era.

In “The Good Life”, she was Margo Leadbetter, the haughty, bossy social climber who lives next door to Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal).Elegantly dressed and immaculately coiffed, Margo is horrified when the Goods decide to become self-sufficient and turn their suburban garden into a smallholding. “This sort of thing simply does not go on in Surbiton,” she says, at the sight of their new pigsty. Yet Margo and her more easygoing husband Jerry (Paul Eddington) remain on good terms with their often hapless neighbours.

TV stardom

Margo had been conceived as a supporting role, but her brilliantly delivered putdowns – “Don’t bleed in the sink Jerry, I’ve just cleaned it” – became one of the show’s great highlights, said Gareth Roberts in The Daily Telegraph; and it was Keith’s genius to make Margot a fully rounded personality – a crashing snob, brittle and without humour, but also pragmatic, kindly and sometimes vulnerable.

In “The Good Life”, she was one member of an impressive ensemble cast (of which Kendal is now the only survivor); from 1979, she had the lead role in “To the Manor Born”, as the aristocratic Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, who – following the death of her husband – is forced to sell her ancestral seat, and move into its gatehouse. She initially despises the estate’s new owner, self-made supermarket tycoon Richard DeVere (Peter Bowles), but gradually warms to him. In the series finale in 1981, the pair get married. It was an even bigger hit than “The Good Life”, attracting up to 24 million viewers.

In 1977, Keith sent up her onscreen persona when she appeared, attempting to descend a grand staircase clad in a turban and a long gown, on Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas special. In later life, she was a regular guest on tribute shows to the comedians.

Stage-trained perfectionist

People tended to assume that Keith was herself from a smart background, which she found gratifying. As she put it, she always hoped that audiences would “believe that it’s me up there”. In fact, she grew up in fairly straitened circumstances. Her father, an Army major, walked out soon after her birth in 1940; her mother found work at a hotel in Clacton-on- Sea, running children’s events.

Penny, as she was known, was sent to a convent boarding school aged six. She had always known she wanted to act, and at 16 she enrolled at the Webber Douglas drama school. After a period in rep, she spent three years at the RSC in the early 1960s. In a production of “Julius Caesar”, she was on stage in a background role when Mark Antony asks his countrymen to lend him their ears. Peter Hall was not amused when Keith’s voice was heard crying out: “’Ere you are then, ’ave an ear! ’Ave one of mine!”

In 1974, she starred (with Kendal) in the West End premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s “The Norman Conquests” as the uptight Sarah. It was this that led to her being cast in “The Good Life”, which ran for four series from 1975. From the 1990s, Keith focused mainly on stage work, with roles in everything from “The Importance of Being Earnest” to Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea”. A perfectionist at work, she did not suffer fools, but she loved the theatre, and was notably supportive of young actors.

In 2014, she was made a dame for her services to the arts and her charity work. At home, she said she was happiest in her garden, tending to her runner beans. She married Rodney Timson, a police officer, in 1978. He survives her, with the two sons they adopted a decade later.

Count Binface had been “looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX” when Nigel Farage “dropped the “political bombshell” of his resignation as MP for Clacton-on-Sea, said The Guardian.

Britain’s “hottest new political property” said he was “left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn” and enter the by-election race. With the main parties all vowing to boycott the contest, the 5,900-year-old leader of the Recyclons could well be Farage’s only challenger.

‘Unity candidate’

Count Binface is the alter ego of Jon Harvey, a 46-year-old comedy writer whose credits include “The Thick of It” and “Have I Got News for You”. He first entered politics in 2017 as Lord Buckethead but, following a copyright claim over the character, re-emerged in 2019 as Count Binface.

Since then, he’s taken on prominent politicians at the ballot box, running against Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham. He “earned plaudits” for winning more votes than the far-right Britain First candidate in the 2024 London mayoral election, said The Guardian, although he still lost his deposit.

The “satirical figure” is best known for his “rubbish-can-shaped helmet” and “absurd campaign promises”, said Al Jazeera. His manifestos have included pledges to cut the cost of the 99 ice cream with a Flake to 99p, abolish the House of Lords and rename London Bridge “Phoebe Waller-Bridge”. He has also previously promised to “bring back Ceefax”, “nationalise Adele” and “conscript anyone who plays loud music without headphones on public transport”.

For the Clacton election, Binface said he will “be a unity candidate”, pledging to “build at least one affordable house”. He said his main appeal this time round is that he’s “not Nigel Farage”.

‘Electoral shock’

Harvey has been “inundated” with emails and messages from Binface activists “offering to knock on doors and deliver leaflets on his behalf”, said The Guardian. His campaign “could yet emerge as an electoral shock” comparable to when Hartlepool United’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, was elected as mayor of the northern town.

Indeed, odds on him winning have been “tumbling”. Oddschecker, which provides betting odds from some of the UK’s most popular bookmakers, said odds on the parody candidate winning had been slashed from 5/1 to 7/2.

For the man, “or rather the alien”, the “question of whether he might even win is one that he is reluctant to countenance”. He said: “It’s earliest days yet and there is a long old road to go, but if in the unlikely event that the humans of Clacton prefer me to old Nige, then I will do my very best to represent them.”

If he does win, on some sort of “Boaty McBoatface”-style jokey protest vote, he “would have to remove that striking silver headpiece”, said The Independent. MPs can’t wear headgear when they are addressing the House of Commons, and there’s also “ye olde restriction” that also bans them from wearing suits of armour in the chamber, which “rules out his intergalactic threads too”.

Nasa has launched a spacecraft to catch a falling telescope, an unprecedented mission that could pave the way for similar future rescues.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory telescope, known simply as Swift and launched in 2004, detects some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe. Its name comes from its ability to point at a new target in the solar system in a matter of minutes, compared to other space telescopes such as Hubble, which can take up to two days to focus on a target.

Because of its success spotting distant gamma-ray bursts, Swift’s mission has been repeatedly extended. But now it is sinking faster than expected due to recent solar storms and is at risk of crashing back to Earth in a matter of months unless something is done to change its orbit.

‘Mind-bogglingly short’ turnaround

To carry out the mission Nasa has turned to Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. Swift has no engines of its own and was not built with docking hardware, so Katalyst engineered a “custom capture mechanism” that will use three guided robotic arms “to latch onto a structural feature without disturbing Swift’s instruments”, said Astronomy.

Having successfully launched last week, Katalyst’s Link spacecraft is now carrying out a series of navigation and propulsion systems checks before approaching Swift. It will survey the telescope to determine the best point of contact, and eventually capture and lift the observatory, which is about the size of a small car, back into its correct altitude.

The capture itself will be “especially tricky because Swift was never meant to be touched again once it reached orbit”. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee told Aerospace America that it has been made even more complicated because “nobody took a picture of the backside of Swift before it launched”.

Katalyst was awarded the contract only last September, a “mind-bogglingly short” turnaround time, said Space. If it succeeds in saving Swift, the company will have done something unprecedented: “reboosting an ailing space telescope using a spacecraft developed in less than a year to rescue a target that was meant to be left in space on its own forever”.

‘A spacecraft worth saving’

At a cost of $30 million, the mission to save “a nearly 22-year-old space telescope, well past its prime” seems, “on paper” at least, not great value for money, said Space. But “Swift, it turns out, is still worth it, according to Nasa”.

“We didn’t want to set the precedent that anything that comes out of orbit has to be boosted, because it is part of our space ecosystem to have things deorbit frequently,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Nasa’s astrophysics division director, in June. But Swift is “not just any spacecraft” and has a unique ability to “quickly pivot across the night sky to find things that go boom in the night”.

“In short,” said BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh, “there is nothing like Swift, and Nasa deemed that it was a spacecraft worth saving.”

Such an “ambitious” mission “has never been carried out before” and “a lot will have to go right if it is to succeed”. If it does, however, “attention will turn to whether the next rescue mission could be to save the even more famous Hubble Space Telescope”.

For the first time since consolidating power to rule the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas will disband its Government Emergency Committee that has coordinated day-to-day life across the territory, according to the Palestinian militant group. This clears a path for the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), known as a technocratic committee, to assume control as part of President Donald Trump and his Board of Peace’s plan for the beleaguered region. But by playing coy about next steps, Hamas has given observers and critics plenty of reasons to be suspicious about this latest development.

‘Caretaker framework’

The governmental dissolution “marks a significant political shift” by Hamas, said Al Jazeera. But while the militant group has “repeatedly said it is prepared to step aside from day-to-day governance” of Gaza, the “question of its disarmament remains unresolved.”

The decision to dismantle the governing authority was made to “remove any pretexts for the occupation, which continues its aggression and war of extermination,” said Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem to AFP, per Le Monde. Hamas seeks the “swift entry” of the technocratic committee and “affirms its readiness to hand over governmental responsibilities to the committee to ensure its success.” The committee, in turn, is “fully prepared to assume its national responsibilities as soon as the necessary resources and capabilities are available,” said NCAG Chief Commissioner Ali Shaath on X.

For Hamas, the move is designed to transform the group’s “existing governing structure” into a “caretaker framework,” said The Times of Israel. Hamas officials claim that “technical and professional staff” will “remain in place” after the governmental dissolution to “maintain continuity in service to civilians in Gaza,” said The Jerusalem Post.

Unsurprisingly, Israel has rejected that characterization. The dissolution of a Hamas government wherein “all of the Hamas members stay in their positions” is a “spin that has no significance,” said one Israeli official to The Associated Press.

‘Actions, not promises’

Any assessment of Hamas’ plan will be “guided by actions, not promises, to meet the critical needs of the people of Gaza,” said the Trump-led Board of Peace on X. The “core principle” of eventually turning over full control of Gaza to the technocratic committee “remains one authority, one law and one weapon,” which in turn means “consolidation of all weapons under the control of the NCAG as provided for in the Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803.”

The change “does not concern its military wing,” about which mediators are “still negotiating,” said Haaretz. Israel, meanwhile, is “not allowing members of the technocratic committee, who are currently in Cairo, to enter the territory.” Israel has “ruled out allowing Hamas to rule” the embattled Gaza Strip following the yearslong war between the two groups, said Al Jazeera. Israel “also rejected a direct takeover” by the Palestinian Authority, which controls the occupied West Bank, “at this stage.”

After more than four years of war between Russia and Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a rare admission that the conflict has caused his country a problem. In this case, it is a significant fuel shortage driven by Ukrainian drone strikes that is exacerbating economic strain across Russia, and the issue may not be abated any time soon.

‘Certain deficit’

Putin has very rarely acknowledged that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to challenges. But his country is now facing a “certain deficit” of fuel, the Russian president said in an interview with state television. Russians are “well aware that problems for ⁠drivers and for businesses persist,” Putin also told his senior officials of the petroleum industry, according to Al Jazeera. “Unfortunately, there are still queues at petrol stations too.”

The shortage largely stems from Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. Russia must “reduce to a minimum the impact of terrorist attacks on our civilian targets and infrastructure,” Putin told his senior officials. Ukraine has “stepped up attacks on Russian energy facilities in recent months, hitting Russia’s crude oil,” said Al Jazeera. The attacks have led to significant fuel deficits. The “amount of crude oil Russia processed into fuel in June was down 25% from a year ago, to 3.95 million barrels per day — the lowest level in over two decades,” said Gary Peach, an oil markets analyst at Energy Intelligence, to The Associated Press.

While Ukraine has been utilizing drones for a while, what makes the current onslaught different is that Ukraine has “clearly scaled up the quantity of their drones and the quality of their drones,” Christina Harward, an expert at the Institute for the Study of War, said to Deutsche Welle. Ukraine has “improved the range of their drones and, for the past couple of months, they’ve also been undertaking an effort to identify and destroy Russian air defense systems.”

‘The situation is not very good’

The fuel shortages have led to social and financial unrest in many parts of Russia. The “lines are growing at Russian gas stations — and so is the frustration and uncertainty” as the deficits drag on and oil prices go up, said the AP. “I think the situation is not very good,” one motorist waiting in line told the outlet. Numerous cities have rationed fuel, with “hourslong queues of cars snaking beside roads.”

These struggles have been highlighted across social media, with one post reportedly showing farmers “struggling to afford fuel for harvest, while another describes a farmer having to drive his combine harvester to a regular gas station after he was not allowed to fill a can,” said Reuters. Some Russian drivers have also started to “crowdsource maps and trade tips about which stations have fuel and shorter lines,” and “online searches for ‘how to siphon fuel’ rose to more than ⁠9,300” in June from just 697 a month earlier.

And it doesn’t appear the crisis is going anywhere, as “half of Russia’s 83 regions are now reporting shortages,” said the Center for European Policy Analysis. For now, Russia has “enough fuel for the army, key industries, and agriculture — but everywhere else the choice is between paying more and waiting longer.” A Gallup survey found that “60% of Russians interviewed between March and May said their local economic conditions are getting worse.”

Nigel Farage has said he will resign as an MP to fight a by-election in his constituency of Clacton that he says will be a “chance to stick two fingers up to the establishment”.

Farage's decision comes amid a row over his finances, after The Sunday Times reported he had not declared benefits, including staff and security, received from his long-time adviser George Cottrell.

Known as “Posh George”, the 32-year-old “babyfaced British aristocrat and former US federal inmate”, holds no official role in Reform UK, but he has been “Farage’s closest adviser for more than a decade and travels with him in Westminster and around the country”, said The Sunday Times. Farage denies that the benefits he received from Cottrell required registration under the rules governing MPs.

“In a party with little fondness for strictures, Reform UK insiders maintain that there is one rule,” said UnHerd’s Rob Lownie. “Don’t ask what Posh George does.”

‘Family soap empire’

George Swinfen Cottrell was born into the heart of the British establishment.

His father, Mark Cottrell, went to school with Prince Andrew. His mother, the Honourable Fiona Watson, daughter of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton and heir to a “family soap empire”, is a former girlfriend of King Charles. His uncle is Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, a hereditary peer, former Conservative chief whip and treasurer, and later Ukip politician.

Having been expelled from school due to a reported gambling addiction, Cottrell became a “fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair”, said The Times. According to a 2017 Telegraph profile, he worked in offshore banking before being made Ukip’s head of fundraising in 2015 at the age of just 22.

Inner circle member but no official position

Just to be clear, said The Independent's political editor David Maddox, Cottrell is “not some fringe figure or mere acquaintance in Farage’s political life” but “one of the tightest members of the Reform leader’s inner circle”.

He was by Farage's side on the day of the Brexit referendum in June 2016, but only a month later was arrested in the US as he and Farage prepared to fly back to the UK after the Republican National Convention. Caught agreeing to launder drug money in an undercover FBI sting operation, Cottrell faced 20 years in jail, but he struck a plea deal in which he admitted guilt to a wire fraud charge and served just eight months.

In the years since, he dated reality TV star Georgia Toffolo and moved to Montenegro. It was here that he became a key player in Tether.bet, an online cryptocurrency bookmaker and casino, part-owned by Christopher Harborne, the billionaire who gave Farage a £5 million gift in early 2024. He also co-authored a book “How to Launder Money”.

And he has remained close to Farage and the various iterations of the political party that eventually became Reform UK.

He “holds no official position” and “is not employed by the party”, yet he has become one of Farage’s “closest political confidants”, said Politics UK. Farage has previously described Cottrell as being “like a son”, with him calling Nigel “daddy“.

‘As fatal as Mandelson was for Starmer’

Until the Sunday Times expose, we knew little about the exact relationship between Farage and Cottrell, said George Wright on the BBC. Now, “the aristocrat is at the centre of the latest controversy” surrounding the Reform UK leader’s murky personal finances.

The Sunday Times says Cottrell provided Farage with a series of benefits in kind, including security, made up of elite former soldiers and drivers, staff to “transform” his social media presence, and accommodation, including the use of a five-storey house near Buckingham Palace.

Farage is now facing scrutiny for failing to declare any of this when he became an MP, except for £9,523.60 – the estimated costs of flights for him and a staff member to travel to a conference in Belgium.

Opinions are split over how much this could harm Farage in the long-term, but “with Reform on the slide and other questions” about his personal finances, Cottrell’s “presence in his inner circle could prove as fatal as Mandelson was for Starmer and Pincher was for Johnson”, said Maddox.

Sky’s £1.6 billion acquisition of ITV is yet another sign of the “seismic consolidation” taking place between media companies trying to compete with the major streaming platforms, said Deadline.

“This is a defining moment for British media,” Sky CEO Dana Strong said on Sky News. We are combining “two of the UK’s most loved and trusted brands” and committing to “remain a public service broadcaster at the heart of British life”.

But with its public service broadcast contract set to expire in 2034, and no guarantee this will continue, ITV’s deal could change the complexion of British commercial broadcasting.

‘Territory of hypotheticals’

Sky, and its US owners Comcast, will now have access to the 21 million households reached by ITV, as well as a greater share of advertising spend at a time when broadcasters are “facing an uncertain future”, said the Financial Times. Of the £1.6 billion acquisition, around £1.2 billion will be paid up front in cash, and Sky will pay an additional £200 million subject to advertising targets being hit in 2027.

ITV’s “thriving production arm”, ITV Studios, will not be part of the Sky deal, said Deadline. It will become its own publicly listed company and “benefit from the transaction” by acquiring Sky’s Love Productions, the studio that produces “The Great British Bake Off”, in a £200 million side-deal. ITV Studios will also receive £2.1 billion in additional funding from Sky, meaning there will be “certainty” that “hit series” such as “Love Island” and “Coronation Street” won’t move behind a paywall.

However, there are concerns whether ITV Studios will win as much business from ITV. It has “consistently landed a significant number of total commissions” in recent years, “much to the chagrin of independent players”. But in the hands of Sky and its “swashbuckling growth” mindset, deconsolidation may have made the landscape a “more level playing field” for rival studios.

Sky and ITV are required by law to continue free-to-air service until at least 2034. Sky will also have to commission a proportion of programmes made outside London, and honour the contract for ITN’s news bulletins for ITV until 2031.

This status does bring some benefits. As a public service broadcaster, Sky could also bid for “‘listed’ crown jewel tournaments” – shown on free-to-air channels – such as the Olympics and the Grand National, said Katie Razzall on the BBC. Sky is also guaranteed a “prominent position” on TV home screens, and in an “ever more competitive world, prominence matters”. But in eight years’ time, the “media landscape may look very different”.

‘Last stand’ against streamers

This long-rumoured deal unites the UK’s two largest commercial broadcasters in an attempt to “bulk up” against the streaming giants, said the FT. The British media industry has experienced a “period of radical change” in the last 20 years, and companies such as YouTube and Netflix pose an “existential threat”.

The agreement also “raises politically sensitive questions” about the American ownership of a major British broadcaster, said The Hollywood Reporter. ITV is a “key part of the country’s cultural landscape”, with obligations to provide national and regional content for the UK.

The deal, which is not likely to be completed until next year, will “inevitably face close scrutiny” from industry regulators, said Forbes. Given its scale, questions around “competition, advertising concentration and media plurality are entirely appropriate”.

But whatever the outcome of the final approvals, the “direction of travel” for the media space is becoming “increasingly clear”. No longer will there be a binary “broadcast versus streaming” battle, but a series of “connected ecosystems that combine premium content, intelligent data and measurable commercial outcomes”. In future, successful media organisations will not just have the largest audiences, but build mutually beneficial, “strategic alliances and partnerships”.

But this deal looks “less like a monopoly and more like a last stand”, said The Drum. For years, the British media market maintained a “stable” competition between its three biggest players: BBC, ITV and Channel 4. But with the arrival of “better-capitalised” generalist streamers like Netflix, YouTube and Disney+, not only was the structure disrupted between the old broadcasters, suddenly “they weren’t even one of the three” leaders. This deal represents a “belated acknowledgement” that there should have been “shared strategy, shared technology platforms” and “shared deal-making many years ago”.

Spain’s socialist PM is “clinging to a punctured life raft”, said Josep Ramoneda in Ara (Barcelona). Pedro Sánchez’s reputation had already taken a battering from the corruption cases brought against his wife and brother. Now the jailing of his former right-hand man for embezzlement and bribery leaves him more “compromised” than ever.

José Luis Ábalos, who was Spain’s transport minister between 2018 and 2021, was last week handed a 24-year sentence for rigging public contracts for face masks and other medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic. His reward for doing so was €10,000 a month, a flat for his mistress and various other kickbacks. The PM has not himself been implicated in the Ábalos case – or in any of the others for that matter – but it all leaves a bad smell and there’s growing pressure on him to resign. Yet Sánchez stubbornly insists he will remain in post until next year’s elections.

The buck stops

Sánchez’s claim he had no idea what Ábalos was up to is downright outrageous, said Neus Tomàs in El Diario (Madrid). Ábalos and his aide Koldo García, who has also been jailed for his role in the scandal, used to sit at the heart of Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). So the PM’s excuse that they were just rogue actors won’t wash: he bears responsibility for crimes committed under his watch.

And don’t forget, Sánchez came to power in 2018 by condemning the then-PM, Mariano Rajoy, for the corruption exposed in the ranks of Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP), and winning a vote of no-confidence against him, said La Razón (Madrid). So he clearly has to resign.

The greatest irony is that the man who delivered the most scathing speech ahead of the vote on the conservative People Party’s corrupt ways was Ábalos himself, said Bruno Pardo Porto on ABC (Madrid). That he has now received the longest jail sentence ever given to a modern Spanish minister shows just what a sham the PSOE’s pledge to clean up Spanish democracy actually has been.

Comeback king

There’s still a slim chance Sánchez could survive, said Jason Horowitz in The New York Times. He has an uncanny ability to outrun scandals – hence his nickname: “the greyhound”. And he was offered an unlikely lifeline last month when a judge ordered his wife, Begoña Gómez, to hand in her passport and stand trial for influence-peddling linked to her job at a university in Madrid.

In his 84-page ruling, the judge likened the government to an “absolutist regime”, opining that the last similar case of such magnitude was in the early 19th century during the reign of Ferdinand VII. This has made it easy for Sánchez’s supporters to dismiss the trial as a “deeply flawed hit job by an obsessed judge”. And that it was the right-wing group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) that filed the cases against his wife and his brother David (who allegedly leveraged his connections to land a job in a city council) adds support to that narrative.

Sánchez is no stranger to epic comebacks, said Irene Lozano in El País (Madrid), so don’t write him off yet. His PSOE rivals removed him as leader in 2016: two years later he had become PM. The fact that he has presided over one of the EU’s faster-growing economies may come to his rescue this time.

Fresh scandal

I’m not so sure, said Guy Hedgecoe on Politico (Brussels). His party is already languishing behind the PP in the polls, and there’s another scandal brewing that could well see him off. It involves his mentor and “ideological soul mate”, the former socialist PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is accused of influence-peddling in connection with the €53 million bailout of the airline Plus Ultra. Prosecutors say he received up to €2 million for pushing the package through.

Sánchez still maintains Zapatero is innocent, but has yet to explain why the bailout of a firm that only has four planes should have been so generous, said The Economist. This kind of behaviour is the reason anti-democratic sentiment is on the rise, and the situation is worsening. “The sooner the country holds an election, the better.”

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

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

Final flourish

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

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

Magic of Headingley

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

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

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

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

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

‘Military-grade organisation’

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

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

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

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

Dogs and drones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

England’s ghosts

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

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

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

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

Loving the maths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘All of them are now under threat’

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

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

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

‘South Africa has long attracted migrants’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temperate spots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballooning costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Incandescent’ and ‘disturbing’

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

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

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

‘Extremist passions’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vance under fire

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

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

Face of peace

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

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

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

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

‘Sinful nature’

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

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

Closure at last

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

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

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

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

‘Relationship appears to be fraying’

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

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

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

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

Sacrificing principles at the ‘altar of Trump’

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

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

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

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

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

Quest for perfection

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

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

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

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

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

Union-busting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Arc of redemption’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspicion and ‘ethics-washing’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A little bit of autonomy’

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

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

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

‘It’s good to take breaks’

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

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

‘Tremendous amount of discipline’

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

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

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

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

Twelve school days a year could be lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air conditioning ‘only real solution’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colombia

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

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

Egypt

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

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

Haiti

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

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

Mexico

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

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

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

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

Eye-popping valuation

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

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

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

A move to Mars?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Migration back door’

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

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

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

Disturbing new politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accessible superstar

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

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

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

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

Grammar school boy

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

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

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

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

Extraordinary talent

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

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

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

Out west

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

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

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

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

Artistic evolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Underwater phantom’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Visible from space’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia’s war against the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring on the ‘childlike joy’

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

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

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

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

Chasing authenticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backlash and resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Existential melodrama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potentially ‘catastrophic’

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

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

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

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

Deep mistrust

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

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

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

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

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

‘Experimenting with a new range of options’

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

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

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

‘There are also some concerns about excessive consumption’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dismantling the ‘openness that has made the country rich’

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

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

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

‘Voters don’t like immigrants’

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

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

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

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

‘Hide the cocaine!’

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

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

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

‘Gloriously over the top’

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

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

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

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