American politics has never had to deal with someone like Elon Musk before, said Andrew Egger on The Bulwark. There are other wealthy donors, of course, but none comparable to the world’s richest man.

Musk lavished about $450 million on Republican campaigns ahead of this week’s midterm elections – more than any single donor has ever spent on a US election cycle. Around $180 million of that went on unsuccessfully trying to stop the Democrat James Talarico winning the Texas Senate race. And Musk wasn’t just writing cheques. On his platform X, where “he has 241 million followers and owns the algorithms that ensure everyone sees his posts”, he relentlessly tweeted attacks on Talarico, calling him a creep who “will vote to take away your children and transition them”.

Musk’s efforts to swing the outcome may have failed, but they raised questions about his degree of influence, and put him in the Democrats’ sights, said Paul Blumenthal on HuffPost. Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, declared: “If you think retribution isn’t on the way, you’re mistaken.”

‘Berserk’ hatred

The Left has “gone nearly berserk” in its hatred of Musk, said Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness. Back in the days when he supported the Democrats (Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and claimed he voted for Joe Biden in 2020), liberals loved him and proudly drove Teslas. But now that he votes Republican, he’s a Nazi who’s out to buy elections. Never mind that the billionaire George Soros and his foundations “have channelled well over half a billion dollars to left-wing candidates and causes in just the last six years alone”.

Democrats are itching to launch investigations into Musk, said Robby Soave in Reason. And some are now even talking of nationalising his companies, including Starlink, claiming that they’re too important to be left under his control. This is a “dangerous” notion. It would unfairly target Musk and send a message to other innovators that they’d better not be too successful or they’ll be punished.

Critics must keep their vengeful feelings in check, agreed Marian L. Tupy on The Dispatch. While Musk should of course be held accountable for any violations of the law or any harms caused by his decisions, opponents shouldn’t turn political disagreement into a reason to “obstruct legitimate enterprise”. Musk can be arrogant, vindictive and rude, but his “failings should be weighed against his contributions to human progress”.

Oligarchy vs. democracy

If Musk stuck to technology, his “capricious, emotionally stunted man-baby” antics might not matter, said David Futrelle in The National. But he’s a political force: apparently willing to switch off Starlink with shocking effects on Ukraine; increasingly sceptical of democracy and willing to leverage his immense wealth to undermine it.

The sums he’s spending to tilt elections are unprecedented, and he seems to believe his wealth puts him above the law. When the tech journalist Kara Swisher predicted in a recent podcast that the Democrats would soon be investigating Musk over his huge government contracts and his leadership of the job-slashing Doge agency, he reacted furiously. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he posted on X. “Sounds like Swisher really wants to go to prison.”

The good news is that Musk’s money couldn’t buy the Texas Senate seat, said Tim Murphy in Mother Jones – in part because Talarico’s campaign “was predicated on the idea that people like Musk would try to buy the seat”. Even so, this is a warning, said Perry Bacon in The New Republic. Democrats must restrict the vast and growing political power of billionaires, including liberal ones. “America can have an oligarchy or a democracy – not both.”

For more than 1,000 years, the Catholic Church has used its just-war theory to create moral guardrails for when nations choose to fight and how their armies conduct themselves in combat. But now, under the guidance of Pope Leo, it’s having second thoughts.

Just cause, just means?

“There is no such thing as a holy war: Only peace is holy,” Leo said last month at a religious conference, per Christopher Hale at Letters from Leo. The pope sparked the ire of President Donald Trump earlier this year by criticizing the U.S. war against Iran. Leo’s continued anti-war messaging shows “he means it,” Hale said. The Church is now reviewing its “outdated” just-war doctrines, a reaction against “every leader who has tried to draft heaven into a bombing campaign.”

The theory says a war is justified only if waged for a “just cause” and with “just means,” said Luis Parrales at The Atlantic. The guidance has influenced instruction at military academies and the development of human-rights laws. But there is a sense the doctrine is “prone to abuse” by national leaders who have twisted and bent its tenets to dubiously assert their chosen conflicts’ morality. The Church’s current task is to create a “successor theory that better addresses the many moral challenges that modern-day wars pose.”

‘Necessary and therefore just’

Just-war theory “fails to adequately train peacemakers,” said Eli McCarthy at the outlet U.S. Catholic. Leaders must “cultivate strategic nonviolent practices” and build institutions that make “sustainable peace” possible. Existing theory only makes wars “more likely to continue.”

Critics suggest that abandoning just-war principles would risk “dangerous passivity in the face of aggression,” said the National Catholic Register. “All wars are bad,” said John Rist, a church historian and philosopher, to the outlet. But sometimes it’s “necessary and therefore just” to fight. This “unhappy truth” must be acknowledged. Because “appeasing the wicked and supposing one needs only to ‘accompany’ them or ‘dialogue’ with them is itself irresponsible.”

“No one seems to want to apologise for the transatlantic slave trade, do they?” said Tom Peck in The Times. The prime minister and King Charles were both in the Caribbean for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua yesterday, a summit dominated every year by growing calls for slavery reparations.

King Charles, the head of the Commonwealth, spoke of the “monstrous injustice” of the trade that forced an estimated 12-15 million enslaved people from Africa, about 4.7 million to the Caribbean, and caused unquantifiable human suffering. It “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow”.

But he “artfully declined” to apologise for Britain’s role. Even Andy Burnham, “one of the great apologisers of his generation”, stopped short. Of course, the problem with apologising is that sorry will “inevitably open the door to what it has always really been about” – reparations.

‘Shouldn’t be liable for historical wrongs’

It’s right and patriotic to have the “difficult conversations” that Commonwealth members have been asking for, said Burnham in The Guardian. That’s why Britain is offering a “structured dialogue” with nations affected by the slave trade.

But I do not believe financial reparations are the “right answer”. British people today shouldn’t be “liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part”.

What about those who profited from the trade? Ghana, “one of the biggest slave-trading countries”, is leading the campaign directed at Britain, which was “not the most guilty” of those countries involved, said historian Robert Tombs in The Telegraph. It’s demanding to be “compensated for its own crimes against humanity”.

Muslim countries were “arguably the cruellest” in exploiting enslaved people; Brazil, France and the US were among the biggest buyers. “If reparations are due, all these should pay them.”

‘Meaningless attempt at appeasing’

But meaningful reparations “cannot be reduced” to the improved debt repayment conditions Burnham proposes, said Verene A. Shepherd, vice-chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, on Al Jazeera. What we, “the descendants now living with the legacies of chattel enslavement and colonial terror”, want is debt cancellation and monetary compensation. We “reject the notion” that a country that profited from slavery should not now be held responsible. “It is time for Britain to apologise and pay its debt.”

Ultimately, sorrow without accountability is a “meaningless attempt at appeasing the ‘natives’”, said Caribbean analyst Kenneth Mohammed in The Guardian.

The Commonwealth “presents itself as an association of equal, independent nations”. If members can’t “secure meaningful engagement from Britain on one of their most consequential historical grievances”, how equal is it? The Caribbean “need not accept neocolonialism and historical amnesia” as the price of partnership.

He’s done it again, said Vera Magalhães in O Globo (Rio de Janeiro). If anyone was capable “of pulling off an unprecedented turnaround against all odds”, it was President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who this week won a historic fourth term in office.

Brazil’s working-class hero suffered a shock defeat in the first round of the presidential election in early October, coming second to Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro (aka “the Trump of the Tropics”), who is currently under house arrest for plotting a coup.

Short-lived celebrations

No other candidate has gone on to win the second round after losing the first. But the Workers’ Party (PT) leader, who was accused of arrogance and of failing to understand the needs of young gig-economy workers, shook up his strategy, said Igor Gielow in Folha de São Paulo. He announced a number of populist measures and mobilised ten million followers via a new WhatsApp channel “Exército do Lula” (“Lula’s Army”). In the end, “the fear of a Bolsonaro returning to power” was enough to mobilise the centre-left voters who had sat out the first round: Lula won Sunday’s vote with almost 52% to 48%; his vote surged from 54 million in the first round to 64 million.

Lula’s celebrations will be short-lived, said Míriam Leitão in O Globo. He governs a country “more divided than at any time during his previous three terms”. Bolsonaro, who is under investigation as part of a money-laundering probe, initially rejected Sunday’s result amid a row over voting hours being extended at the last minute by a supreme court judge who was previously Lula’s lawyer. He later fled to the US.

The chaos was a fitting end to one of the ugliest elections in recent years, said Paulo César de Oliveira in Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro). Not since the 1964-1985 military dictatorship “has there been such a heavy, radicalised political environment”. The deep animosity between the two candidates was on full display during the televised debate held two days before the vote, said Stephen Gibbs in The Times. It “descended into a shouting match”, with Lula calling his hard-right rival “a habitual liar, a thug”. Bolsonaro, for his part, had the word “corrupt” written on his palm to serve as a reminder, as he put it, for what Lula’s Workers’ Party stood for. He would be keeping his distance from his opponent during the debate, he declared, “because my wallet could be stolen”.

Spending spree

The grimiest part of the whole race, said Roseann Kennedy in Estadão (São Paulo), was the vast spending spree Lula went on after losing the first round. In the final three weeks of the contest, the PT accelerated spending on measures announced in the last year, totalling R$354 billion (£50 billion) – “institutionalised vote-buying” on a huge scale. That includes forgiving the debt of micro-entrepreneurs, and pushing through a 15% increase to the Bolsa Família programme, which provides cash to low-income households – even changing the payment schedule so people would receive the benefit days before the final vote. It makes a mockery of Brazil’s electoral law, which prohibits incumbents from granting these benefits mid-campaign.

Worse, Lula’s last-minute splurge will only aggravate Brazil’s deteriorating public finances, said O Globo. They are just one of a series of crises the president immediately faces in his fourth term. There are also the accusations of corruption against Lula’s inner circle, including his eldest son. And the fact that he’ll be governing with a hostile parliament which, following the first round of elections, now has a distinctly conservative (and Bolsonaro-friendly) profile.

Brazil’s president already has an “extraordinary biography”. He led historic workers’ strikes during the military dictatorship, and helped draft the 1988 constitution. Imprisoned after governing for two terms, he stormed back to power in 2022, becoming a “symbol of democracy” when he defeated Jair Bolsonaro. Now, having just turned 81 years old, Lula faces his biggest challenge of all.

The media appears to owe the Duchess of Sussex an apology, said Sophie Heawood in The Independent. For years, critics have described Meghan as heartless for shunning her father in his declining years, but her estrangement from Thomas Markle Sr now makes a lot more sense.

Grim story

Last week, The Sun revealed that the 82-year-old had been reported to the Filipino police by his own son, Thomas Jr, who had allegedly found a “huge stash” of child sex abuse images at his father’s home in the Philippines. In a subsequent statement, Meghan revealed that she had already been aware of disturbing allegations against her father. In 2019, the Metropolitan Police had shared with her details of a letter from Thomas Sr’s ex-wife, Roslyn Loveless, who claimed that he had admitted abusing children. Meghan had apparently been assured that the matter was under investigation and advised to remain silent to avoid compromising the case.

What a grim story, said Polly Vernon in The Times. You have to feel for Meghan. Having to process such horrendous allegations “in private while simultaneously becoming one of the most famous people on the planet” must have been awful. It casts a new light on her efforts to project an image of family perfection. What “seemed like smugness” may have been more of a coping technique, an attempt to “repair a horribly damaged idea of family”.

Lamentable record

It’s important to note that none of the claims against Thomas Sr have been proven, said A.N. Wilson in the Daily Mail. He has called them “sick lies”, saying that, while he has in the past paid for sex, none of the women were underage. Meghan’s half-sister Samantha has defended him, dismissing the claims of her mother and Thomas Jr as vindictive fictions. The sooner the truth is established, the better. In the meantime, the Met has questions to answer about why it didn’t follow up on Loveless’ 2019 letter. If it thought the contents were serious enough to pass on to Meghan, why didn’t it share the information with overseas authorities?

I’d love to say I’m surprised by this lapse, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. But given the Met’s lamentable recent record of protecting women and girls, it will have come as a shock to no one that the force “did absolutely nothing”.

“Why is everybody so mad?” said The Wall Street Journal, about the Bayeux Tapestry’s return to Britain and the “class war” that has broken out around it.

Britons who want to see the historic embroidered cloth dating from the 11th century “say they’re being treated like Taylor Swift fans on Ticketmaster”, while “American tech billionaires, luxury hotel guests and museum sponsors get to skip the line”.

‘Akin to a birthright’

The Bayeux Tapestry “holds a particular position in British public consciousness” because “it tells, over 230 feet of finely embroidered cloth, the story of the last time England was conquered” – the victory of William of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

“For many Brits, seeing it is akin to a birthright.” But when tickets went on sale people found them hard to get, and then “word started to trickle out about who was having no trouble getting in”. For example, the luxury hotel One Aldwych offered tickets to the tapestry as “part of a package stay, with guests in rooms that cost around $1,100 (£825) a night promised a viewing any date and time of their choosing”.

Meanwhile, some visitors are being given a different experience, said Lara Brown in The Spectator. “Most art critics and journalists” have been “permitted by museum marshals to stop and appreciate the thing”, but “the rest of us commoners will have no such luck”.

After queueing outside, we were “informed by our guide that we would be going inside in precisely 32 seconds”. There we were “introduced to a cartoon bird who would guide us through our ‘experience’”. After a further hour’s wait, we reached the display and realised that the focus of the staff is to get us “through the exhibition hall as fast as humanly possible”.

Bayeux biscuits and a Norman soldier teddy

“The reason the queue is going slowly is because people are dawdling inside”, said Giles Coren in The Times. And “they are hustling people along inside because they don’t want the queue to be too long”. So “how, exactly, Einstein, do you think they can solve both” of those problems?

I am “sympathetic” towards the British Museum, said Brown in The Spectator, because “hundreds of thousands of people want to visit” and “they need to find a way to get us all through”. Although I’m “grateful to have seen such an important piece of English history”, I would have been “even more grateful if I had been allowed to properly look at it”.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, acknowledged that “the experience has not been as smooth as we would have liked”, and announced new measures including longer opening hours, an audio guide and extra seating for those stuck in the queue.

But his statement “stopped conspicuously short of an apology”, said The Telegraph. So “the question now is whether the museum’s attempts to right the ship will prove enough, or be seen as too little, too late”.

Meanwhile, visitors can enjoy the gift shop, which manages to “upstage” the exhibit itself, said CNN. “A box of Bayeux biscuits, Bayeux Tapestry horseman keyrings, a maritime tea light holder and a Norman soldier teddy bear”, are among the delights on offer to commoner and tech billionaire alike.

Manchester United are stuck in a “doom spiral”, said The Telegraph, with their current “collapse” under manager Michael Carrick the “latest sorry episode in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era”.

The 13-times Premier League champions have made their worst start to a league season in 40 years. They are 16th in the Premier League, just one point above the relegation places, having gone eight games without a win.

Old Trafford fans booed their players off the field after the 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth on Sunday. The result put “not only the manager’s future into doubt, but every member of the ownership, senior management and playing squad as a whole”, said Al Jazeera.

‘Dysfunction and decay’

Carrick will be in charge for this Saturday’s game at Chelsea, although it may well prove his last. But he is just the latest in a succession of managers since Ferguson retired in 2013 who have delivered “dysfunction, discord and disinterested performances that leave you wondering what on earth this team is meant to look like”, said The Athletic.

That is “a reflection of the club’s ownership, a regime that has taken so much out of United” in the form of over £1 billion in interest payments, refinancing costs and bond buybacks. The arrival of billionaire Jim Ratcliffe as a minority shareholder in early 2024 was meant to mark a new beginning but “his decision-making has been even worse than that of the previous Glazer-led regime, which is really saying something”.

“Sign whichever players you want, hire whichever manager” – it makes no difference, said The Observer. When the rot starts at the top, well-intentioned newcomers are doomed from the start, “entering rotten institutions addicted to chaos and dysfunction and decay, fettered by a toxic relationship to the past”.

‘Think big again’

“It is possible, though, for a big Premier League side to rebuild and return to the top,” said The Telegraph. For inspiration, United “need only look towards north London, where their old rivals Arsenal pulled themselves out of a similar, if not even more perilous, situation a few seasons ago”.

The lessons from Arsenal’s root-and-branch rebuild that culminated in them lifting the Premier League trophy in May is three-fold. First, “be brutal with underperforming, overpaid stars”. Second, “trust the power of youth”. Third, and perhaps most important, “culture is king”. Young talent can only thrive in the right environment, even if that means removing “problematic older players”.

“United’s priority should be to think big again, and invest big” in developing a squad that is up to the challenge ahead, said FourFourTwo. “Where are the fighters, the Crerands and Robsons, Keanes and Rooneys?”

Changes are required but will they be successful? The prospects are not good “because the club is rotting from the top down”, said The Athletic. The Glazers, Ratcliffe, chief executive Omar Berrada, football director Jason Wilcox – “these are the people” who are “planning for what happens next. Doesn’t bode well, does it?”

“It is one of the great dividing lines between schools,” said Lottie Hayton in The Sunday Times: “is your October half-term holiday one week or two?” Private school pupils typically get a fortnight off; state schools are increasingly offering the same, or considering doing so. But the policy is “not without critics”.

This year, for the first time, Surrey County Council has introduced the fortnight off for the 70 schools that it runs. “It will also be the last time.” Schools fed back that they wanted to revert to a one-week break, which teachers said was “better for children’s learning and attendance”.

‘Rest and reset’

About 15% of state school teachers in England say their school now offers a two-week October break, said Lauren Crosby Medlicott in The i Paper. That’s up from 12% in 2025 and 7% in 2023. The “rationale” is that it gives pupils and staff “more time to rest and recharge”. The longer break can also offer families “greater flexibility and the chance for a cheaper holiday”, after the main tourist season has ended. And for neurodivergent households, the longer break can offer the chance to “recover from the demands of school”. Teachers, too, would “bite your hand off” for that extra week, said primary school teacher Lee Parkinson.

A longer break is “critical to keeping concentration and energy levels up” among staff and pupils alike, said David Hatchett, CEO of the Anthem Schools Trust, which has introduced the longer half-term across its 15 schools. “When you have had such a long holiday over the summer and then you return to a long and intensive first half term, it is quite a big adjustment for a teacher and school leader,” he told the Press Association. One week is “arguably too late and short for a proper rest and reset”.

‘Stretched’ parents

As a parent of a school-age child, “no thank you”, said Natasha Hinde in HuffPost. Of course it’s important for children to rest, but what about the needs of working parents? Plenty of them are “drowning right now”, and “already stretched to breaking point”.

Most won’t have the luxury of taking unpaid leave to spend with their kids, to “swan about together” on holidays and “fun days out”. After six weeks of their summer holidays “we’re pretty much out of annual leave”, but we then have two more weeks of childcare to sort, “which ends up easily costing hundreds of pounds – potentially triple that if your child is disabled”.

And what about the parents whose children attend different schools or even nurseries, and those two weeks occur at different times? Ultimately, the thing “everyone wants is consistency”, Parkinson told The i Paper. “If an area is going to do it, everyone should.”

Economists have spent much of 2026 watching to see if the artificial intelligence bubble will burst, much like the boom-and-burn cycle of dot-com pioneer companies in the late 1990s. But another possibility looms. The wild enthusiasm for AI could settle into a sensible soft landing that spares the world a hard economic crash.

‘Reassessment under way’

Wall Street continues to believe that AI will “transform markets and the economy,” said Axios. But investors are also “pulling back funding” and looking for “evidence that their investments will actually pay off.” The markets that had a “blind enthusiasm for all things AI” are now beginning to “differentiate between players, business models and financing approaches," said JPMorgan’s David Lebovitz to the outlet. That does not have to be scary. Call it a “rational exuberance phase,” said Axios.

The recent decision by Australian data center company Firmus to pull back from a planned initial public offering is “triggering the usual angst” about the AI bubble, said Patrick Commins at The Guardian. The growing skittishness by traders “doesn’t mean the whole thing is a disaster,” said NAB economist Sally Auld to the outlet. But there is a “reassessment under way” of AI’s anticipated returns.

The damage from a popped AI bubble would be “severe but not permanent,” said Ruchir Sharma at Foreign Affairs. It will likely follow the cycle of previous technological revolutions, with the rise of artificial intelligence “moving forward even as the speculative frenzy around it fades.”

‘Double whammy’

Fears remain. The “untold billions poured into AI” have driven the economy, but the “boom could quickly invert” if profits are elusive, said Futurism. The fallout could ironically result in job losses and end up “accelerating the replacement of workers with AI,” said Greg Rosalsky at NPR’s Planet Money.

One possible solution to that “double whammy” scenario is a tax on AI and robots that would make it “economical to continue employing humans” while funding the safety net, said Rosalsky. But there is a less-frightening path forward, as well. A downturn could “leave businesses with less money to invest in AI,” making them reliant on human workers.

Fifa’s controversial president Gianni Infantino looks “increasingly likely” to be re-elected unopposed for a fourth and final term, but there could be a “sensational twist”, said Dan Roan on the BBC.

Senior figures within European football want former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger to run as a “surprise candidate”. But would Wenger, currently head of global development at the governing body, “really challenge his own boss”?

‘Break the chain’

“At first glance”, the Frenchman “looks an unlikely figure to stir a revolution from within”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. He turned 77 this week so “he would not exactly represent fresh blood”, but he “could fundamentally change an ossified bureaucracy that has produced just three presidents in 52 years”.

Infantino is a divisive figure. Critics accuse him of prioritising money and political relationships over human rights, sports integrity and the welfare of players.

The role of president of world football’s governing body has been “debased” and “mired in the machinations of keeping power by whatever means necessary”. But Wenger – “a true football obsessive” – would “break the chain”. He’s “seldom come across as financially motivated” and he could “snatch Infantino’s core vote” in Africa. “So please, Arsène, in the name of sanity, declare your candidacy now.”

Any hopefuls may be planning to “keep their identity under wraps until the last minute to catch Infantino and his acolytes off guard”, said Alyson Rudd in The Times.

The “smart money” is on Wenger. He “commands global respect and was quick to distance himself” from FFE – Infantino’s deeply unpopular plan to sell-off some of the commercial rights to Fifa competitions to a private investment firm – “despite being part of the Fifa family”. He has “universal appeal” after his success in Japan and is popular in Africa having “supported the growth of the game on the continent”.

But he may “value working from within Fifa as it stands, rather than risk being sidelined” and “ending his footballing life as a loser”. There would be “something particularly galling about coming second to a character who was prepared to sell the soul of the beautiful game, is partial to private jets” and “openly fawns over” Donald Trump.

‘Intriguing prospect’

In Zurich, where Fifa is based, there’s “no indication” that Wenger, who joined Infantino and others for dinner last week, is “plotting a bid”, said Roan.

But a “large number of Fifa’s staff” want Wenger to run and they “believe he could change the organisation’s image”, so “it is an intriguing prospect”.

Wenger hasn’t commented on the speculation. Any reluctance to stand on his part “probably comes from the fact you cannot risk losing to Infantino”, said John Cross in the Daily Mirror.

The president “looked damaged beyond repair after the summer but has gone round the world on a charm offensive – and it appears to have worked, outside of Uefa of course”.

The Italian received a further boost after a “major U-turn” from the head of the Asian Football Confederation, who had previously signed a joint letter with other federations criticising Infantino over his FFE plan. Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa told the AFC Congress in Tokyo – which Infantino attended – that “we reaffirm our full commitment, of course, to supporting you as you seek a new mandate as president”.

The deadline for candidates is 18 November so all eyes in the meantime will be on Wenger.

How many times, since leaving school, have you needed to know what an oxbow lake is, asked Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph. “When did you last write out the periodic table, or conjugate a Latin verb?”

I bet, though, that you have had to make speeches: “presentations at work, suitable words at birthdays, pep talks to a team”. It’s odd, then, that you were almost certainly never taught public speaking in the way you were taught geography or maths. Lucy Powell, the new education secretary, now wants to give “oracy”, to use the “ugly” 1960s term, “the same status as reading and writing” in England.

‘Aversion’ to speech

Traditionalists don’t like the plan – but they ought to. For centuries, rhetoric was a central part of classical education. Computers and AI have made much of the knowledge in the curriculum less important than it was. More useful now is knowing how to sift through information, to present arguments, to engage people, to disagree constructively. “Oracy, if we must call it that, does these things.”

Traditional British education certainly has an “aversion to the spoken word”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Worse still, today “speaking itself is going out of fashion”. Technology is distancing young people from adults and from each other. Studies suggest that in the past two decades, the number of words people say each day has shrunk by nearly a third. A quarter of young people “never even answer the phone unless pre-arranged”. Powell’s plan to teach children “to use the spoken word to their advantage” is long overdue.

‘Positive strides’

Andy Burnham’s government seems determined to “rethink” education policy, said The Times. The danger is that the “positive strides that have been made over the past decade” will be undone. From 2010, Michael Gove fought an all-out war against many in the profession to push a traditional, knowledge-rich curriculum. The results have been very impressive. According to the OECD’s Pisa rankings, England now ranks in the world’s top 10 for reading, maths and science – while Scotland and Wales have seen their performance drop significantly.

It’s true, though, that oracy has been overlooked, said Kristina Murkett in The Spectator. For GCSE English language, there is one box-ticking exercise called the “Spoken Language Endorsement”, based on a single presentation. In other humanities, there is no oracy element at all. The danger is that the oracy drive could lead in a dumbed-down direction – away from deep knowledge and longer texts. It’s also unclear how it would be assessed. Powell will have to iron out these issues if oracy is to be more than just another “pedagogical buzzword”.

“It’s been more than two years since Nigel Farage promised to expel racist and nasty people from the party,” said Michael Crick in The i Paper. Back in 2024, the Reform UK leader referred to them as a “few bad apples”, insisting that they’d soon be “long gone... You have my 100% promise on that.” Yet a shocking documentary broadcast on ITV on Sunday has shown that this promise was “worthless”.

‘Louts, loons and loudmouths’

In footage covertly recorded for “Undercover: A Year in Reform”, several of the party’s councillors were caught using extreme and highly offensive language about ethnic minorities. Alan Feeney, a councillor in Solihull, describes his local area as “infested” with Asians. “Drag them out their homes, stick them on planes and f**k them off to Pakistan,” he says. His colleague Jamie Campbell suggests burying pork chops on the site of a proposed mosque. In Bromley, Dean Miller refers to King Charles as “a f**king Muslim” who should have his head cut off for treason.

Farage has tried to brush off this latest scandal, said Stephen Daisley in The Daily Telegraph, accusing the show’s makers of “probable criminal activity”, and pointing out that the councillors in question have quit Reform or been suspended. But instead, he should be asking himself why “louts, loons and loudmouths” still find a home in his party. This is frustrating for its supporters. In policy terms, Reform is gaining substance: the party recently set out clear proposals for tackling crime and illegal immigration; but this new professionalism “makes it all the more inexcusable” that it is still “so rankly amateur on vetting... and institutional culture”.

‘Skin-crawling’

It “wasn’t the racism that shocked me most”, said Poppy Jay in The i Paper. It was vile, but I expected that. It was the comments made by one of the councillors about a female Reform colleague. “If it was my daughter,” he said of this woman, “it’d still be bath night on a Thursday.” “WHAT?” This was “genuinely skin-crawling”; and yet I fear that there will have been people who saw the footage and who were not horrified – but delighted.

The polls suggest otherwise, said James Frayne in The Daily Telegraph. A year ago, Farage’s upstart party was ahead of the pack on 27%, and the extremism or eccentricity of some of its members was excused as teething problems. But as the scandals have mounted up, Reform has dropped to third place. Farage should pay heed, said The Times. “However frustrated Britons may be with the status quo, fewer and fewer of them are willing to look kindly on Reform’s antics as a price worth paying for change.”

Wearing a poppy has always been political. Intended as a symbol of commemoration for those who died in war, its association with conflict, violence and, sometimes, nationalist chauvinism stirs up annual arguments as Remembrance Day approaches. And, this year, said Tessa Dunlop in The Independent, the “predictable indignation” is directed at “the Palestinian lobby” for having “appropriated” the poppy “to remember the ongoing horror story in Gaza”.

The enamel Palestine Peace poppy badge, designed by NHS doctor Abdul Qader Ismail, was listed on eBay for £1.78, with profits said to be donated to charities working to “end the occupation and war crimes” in Gaza. Ismail has since drawn criticism for deleted social media posts suggesting that Israel is a cancer, and writing “books for Muslim teenagers justifying stoning and crucifixion”, said The Times.

Not ‘such an outrage’

“The Palestine-Israel conflict is the hot-button issue of our time,” said Dunlop in The Independent. It’s a war in which “words and symbols are heavily contested”, so it’s no surprise that the flower that is the “cornerstone of commemoration” and a “ubiquitous symbol of the fallen” is now “centre stage”.

Critics of the Palestine Peace poppy fear that identity politics and global conflict will “sully” the poppy’s soothingly British reputation. But it’s already been “picked up as a symbol of right-wing extremists”: I doubt “Britain’s fallen were front and centre in the minds of Tommy Robinson and Britain First when they flaunted poppy iconography alongside their anti-immigration and anti-Islam diatribes”. I’d argue that “the scale of loss” in Gaza “resonates more directly with the First World War” than many other conflicts involving Britain in recent years. “In this context, is it really such an outrage that a few brave souls (and some misguided ones) wear a poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag?”

The flower has long-standing cultural significance for Palestinians, too, said The New Arab. The Anemone coronaria poppy grows everywhere in Palestine and has long represented a relationship between the people and the land; now it is also a symbol of “bitter memories of bloodshed during wars” that is “widely used to support Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation”. And those who object to its association with Britain’s Remembrance Day should be reminded that Palestinian soldiers played a supporting role in the British Army during the Second World War.

A ‘raised fist’

People should be free to wear a Palestine poppy “but we are also free to mock and condemn those who corrupt our traditions”, said Druin Burch in The Spectator. “Symbols carry weight, which is why they are worth stealing.” The now-offline Palestine Poppy website claimed “Israel has a history of appropriating Palestinian culture”. But to make this accusation and then “paint the Remembrance poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag is killing something and wearing its skin”. The Palestine poppy is “polemic”, a “raised fist”, when “what a poppy should be is an evocation”.

“It is the sheer upside-downness of this which feels like a gut punch,” said Nicole Lampert in The Telegraph. We remember each November those who “fought for our freedoms”, yet others are now trying to “smirkingly appropriate the image of how we remember them”. The freedoms past generations fought for are being “used against us. And it seems like we don’t have the fight to stop it”.

Go into a British bookshop and you may notice “a glaring stock gap”, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “Star novelist” Sally Rooney, whose bestsellers include “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, has announced that her books will no longer be sold in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action.

The Irish novelist had pledged to donate royalties from her books to the direct-action protest group, despite the fact that the UK has, controversially, proscribed it as a terrorist organisation. Rooney said last week that her publisher, Faber & Faber, had therefore decided it could no longer sell her work in the UK because doing so could “constitute a serious criminal offence”. For fans and bookshop owners, the news “hit like a gut punch”.

‘Affront to decency’

Rooney has shown courage in choosing “the thorniest path possible for this cause”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Authors can “write essays and sign letters” in support of Palestinian people, musicians can shout about it on stage, but that doesn’t “entail actively breaking the terrorism laws”. It’s Rooney’s support for this specific group that’s “effectively both barred” and “banned” her work from the UK and cost her "innumerable” sales and opportunities.

For her “more excitable” home-grown fans, it’s a case of “perfidious Albion strikes again”, said Eilis O'Hanlon in the Irish Independent. Fellow Irish novelist Colm Tóibín said Britain had gone “insane”, and the whole issue is “an absolute affront to decency” and freedom of speech. But I think that framing is “ridiculous”. Even if “the fiendish Brits” wanted to prosecute one of its “most illustrious” publishers for paying one of its authors what she is owed, Rooney is an Irish citizen living in Ireland, and thus not subject to UK terror laws. Her personal freedom of speech and right to protest are not at any risk. And Faber can keep publishing and promoting her in other countries, including her native Ireland.

‘Attention-seeking self-aggrandisement’

Despite “the uproar”, this isn’t “massively risky” for either Rooney or Faber, said Camilla Long in The Times. How many of her “whopping 6 million” worldwide book sales will she forgo? Her books “remain in libraries” and in any bookshops where they were already stocked. This isn’t a “book ban”; it’s a millionaire’s “self-imposed withdrawing of one’s further sales”.

This is “attention-seeking self-aggrandisement”, said Lionel Shriver in The Telegraph. Thanks to lucrative TV adaptations of her novels, Rooney can “easily live without further British royalties” and continue to “shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops” (or fund their cause via multiple legal outfits). Faber, on the other hand, was caught “between a rock and a hard place”.

I’m “no fan” of Palestine Action; some of its members have “committed a campaign of criminal damage”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. But Rooney and Faber have pushed the “simultaneous intolerance and vagueness of the UK government’s position” on the group onto “the front tables at Waterstones”. Supporters of Palestine Action are “being bundled into paddy-wagons for wearing T-shirts”. Will a UK citizen now face arrest for saying “I support Sally Rooney” or “carrying a ‘Normal People’ tote bag”? The problem isn’t Rooney’s speech, free or otherwise; it’s Britain’s “inconsistent attempt to police the border between legitimate protest and criminal thuggery”. What a “fine mess” we’re in.

In March last year Wes Streeting, then the health secretary, suggested that mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions were being “over-diagnosed”. In doing so, he rode “headlong into another culture war”, said Patrick Butler in The Guardian.

Stretched services

Although he later changed his mind on the subject, Streeting seemed to be endorsing the popular view that everyday stresses and disappointments are being too often medicalised, “resulting in a surge of bogus clinical diagnoses” – and creating a “snowflake generation” of fragile, work-avoidant young people.

Last week, a “mammoth review” of mental health, autism and ADHD in England, commissioned by Streeting and chaired by Prof Peter Fonagy, published its findings. It “has no truck with the snowflake generation caricature”: there has been a steep rise in mental health problems, it concludes, particularly among the young, and this is causing genuine distress.

The report cites insecure work, unaffordable housing and the growing influence of social media as major contributing factors to mental distress, said The Guardian. There is a “lack of hope among young people that their lives will be better than their parents’”. And stretched mental health services are clearly failing them.

Surge in demand

The rise in mental distress is real, said The Times, but when it comes to diagnoses for ADHD and autism, the report suggests that the process is certainly in danger of “going awry”, and that there is an increasing risk of overdiagnosis. The report cites research estimating that about 1.2% of children in England are autistic. Yet by last year around 6% of boys aged six to 11 had been diagnosed with autism.

The overall surge is due, in part, to an explosion in the number of private clinics offering sometimes unreliable services. They should be prevented from direct advertising, as the report suggests. While sometimes necessary, diagnoses can also cause harm if they hold people back; children diagnosed with ADHD are four times more likely to end up as Neets – not in education, employment or training. Young people need “prompter psychological help”, not “a label for life”.

So what should be done, asked Sean O’Grady in The Independent. “It’s not that obvious.” The review backs government plans to help more people into work as a way of addressing underlying problems. It also recognises the dangers of over-medicalisation: many young people would benefit more from rebuilding social connections than from antidepressants. But Fonagy doesn’t offer any clear advice about the policy choices on, for instance, welfare. That will have to wait for Alan Milburn’s review into youth unemployment later in the year.

With affordability concerns threatening Republican control of Congress, President Donald Trump last week announced an agreement to increase supply by relaxing sanctions on Russian diesel fuel. But economists say lower prices are unlikely to result, and the announcement produced pushback from both Ukraine and Trump’s GOP allies. The only clear beneficiary may be Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

‘More dangerous world’

The president’s deal “has no winners,” said Keith Johnson at Foreign Policy. Trump’s announcement will not “help consumers, won’t help Kyiv and won’t mean riches for Moscow.” The global market consumes about 120 million tons of diesel monthly. The 500,000 tons offered by Russia is “too small to move prices.” And the move does nothing to address the U.S. war on Iran, which is the “real cause of the global energy crunch.”

It “makes no sense” to think easing pressures on Russia can “lower diesel prices before the midterms,” said Timothy Snyder at Project Syndicate. Moscow is already struggling with its own “domestic shortages” because of Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure. But the announcement has the effect of “visibly aligning” the United States with Russia. The president’s “openly pro-Russian foreign policy” is creating a “more dangerous world” of emboldened aggressors.

Trump’s move has created a rift with both “Republican allies and European leaders,” said Nick Wadhams at Bloomberg. It is a bet that “lowering fuel prices will be the best way to win more votes next month.” The gambit is “unlikely to succeed.”

Helping the Russian economy?

Trump “proffered sanctions relief for Russian diesel” while Putin “offered more war” in return, Paul Sonne said at The New York Times. The deal benefits Trump to the extent it enables his “stubborn denial that his own decision to go to war against Iran caused fuel prices to skyrocket.” And it could “pour billions of dollars into the Russian economy,” further enabling Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Putin is a “dictator reviled by most Americans,” said Axios. Polls show 81% of Trump’s voters dislike the Russian leader. That makes it “unclear” what the agreement will do for “American security, European allies or his own political fortunes.”

“Acts of true heroism are rare,” said The Daily Telegraph. But the actions of those on board flydubai flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv last Wednesday “surely qualify”.

‘Constant threat’

As the plane neared Israel, the co-pilot, an Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami, attacked his Indian colleague, Smit Machchhar, with an axe, kept in the cockpit for emergencies. Badly injured, Captain Machchhar somehow opened the cockpit door, allowing passengers to overpower al-Hammami, and two off-duty pilots to take control of the plane and land it in Saudi Arabia. It is a “fresh reminder” that, three years on from 7 October, “Israeli civilians continue to live under the constant threat of terrorism”.

“Israel almost experienced its own 9/11,” said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. We now know that al-Hammami had been preparing for the attack long before he joined flydubai. He intended to fly towards Israel as though making a normal landing, then to divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion Airport or nearby tower blocks, before Israeli fighter jets could intervene.

‘Shirking responsibility’

The attack points to a “massive security failure on several fronts”, said The Wall Street Journal. Omani officials knew of al-Hammami’s interest in radical Islamism but failed to flag their concerns; flydubai never checked his record with the Omani authorities. The attack raises the question of whether pilots should be able to lock cockpits from the inside, said Jason Burke in The Guardian – a measure introduced after 9/11 to prevent passenger hijackings. If Machchhar’s “desperate efforts” to open the door had been unsuccessful, “there is little doubt all on board would have died”.

The Israeli authorities have questions to answer, said The Jerusalem Post. They knew of the risks posed by this flight route. Pilots from states without diplomatic relations with Israel, such as Oman, are in theory prohibited from landing in Israel. Yet no official body seems to have been in charge of vetting them. With various authorities “shirking responsibility”, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has “vowed to fix the cracks”. But as the “euphoria” over the mid-air heroism dissipates, there must be “accountability”.

Just hours after Andy Burnham sent the Labour Party faithful “into raptures” over his conference speech, his remarks about the Manchester City football scandal triggered a “whiplash mood shift”, said The Mill.

Asked about the Premier League’s conclusion that Man City had broken its financial rules for nearly a decade, the prime minister – and former Manchester mayor – told the BBC’s Chris Mason he would be “really concerned” if the club’s UAE owners decided to sell up. They had been “such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester”. Within minutes, social media was buzzing with outrage at Burnham’s apparent sympathy for Man City’s situation, and questions about how close he’d become to big-time foreign investors. Downing Street began a frantic back-pedal.

This was Burnham’s “biggest self-inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street in July”, said the BBC’s Mason. No. 10’s “jitters and discomfort about this were there for all to see”. Football-loving Burnham has got himself “caught up in one of the biggest domestic stories of the year, and one that is only just beginning”.

‘Football blokeyness’ undone

Relationships between politicians and wealthy foreign businessmen are much “easier to navigate as the mayor of a big city” and “a lot harder when you’re prime minister”, said RTÉ’s Sean Whelan. Burnham now has “a big opposition and noisy, nosey media watching every move”.

There is a wild irony that football, which is “so tightly stitched into Burnham’s own story” is now gripping him with “its great, dripping, bloody fingernails”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. He rode the “horse” of “football blokeyness” all the way down to Westminster, and now that horse is “threatening to run right over the top of him”. Yes, he benefited hugely politically from Abu Dhabi investment in Manchester but he needs to “stop thanking the UAE so profusely”. They didn’t do him a favour; it was a “business deal, with something very clearly going back in return”.

Burnham has “tied himself in more knots than when Scotland tried to play out from the back against Brazil”, said The Times’ chief football correspondent Jonathan Northcroft. His “mealy-mouthed” intervention only “muddied the process of upholding” the Man City verdict. Abu Dhabi is reportedly now “threatening to cut billions of pounds of UK investment in umbrage” at the Premier League’s decision. It makes you wonder if “outside elements sticking their spoons into football is the path to salvation after all”.

‘Inseparable’ UK-UAE relationship

This was a “clumsy episode”, said Adam Crafton on The Athletic. It “felt revealing” that Burnham’s “first instinct” was to laud the ownership group, rather than empathise with the “masses horrified” by apparently systematic breaches of football’s financial rules.

But City and Abu Dhabi are seen as “inseparable”, emblematic of a broader UK-UAE relationship that “is considered crucial across security, investment and trade”. That any subsequent harsh sanctions handed down to the football club by the Premier League could damage Britain’s economic prospects only underlines the “uneasy realities of governing the UK in 2026”: having left the EU, we are “working overtime to entice investments from Gulf nations”.

Burnham was “probably right” to turn attention, briefly, away from mismanagement of a football club and on to the “more important” issue of Manchester and its inhabitants, said Simon Kelner in The i Paper. His remarks were “a welcome change of tone”, countering “the general opprobrium” with an appreciation of how “good” the UAE has been for the city.

As mayor, he had welcomed the “hundreds of millions of pounds Abu Dhabi ploughed into the area around” the Man City ground, turning “one of the most deprived and desolate quarters of the city” into a thriving economic hub. Now he’s prime minister, no doubt he felt he was “being true to his sense of fair play in illuminating” those benefits but, in future, it’s best that he “keeps well clear”.

The Green Party conference vote to treat Zionism “as any other form of racism” has caused turmoil within the party, and been roundly condemned as an attack on the Jewish community in Britain.

Jubilant chants of “Free Palestine” could be heard outside the Brighton conference hall after the vote, which the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has called “poisonous antisemitism” that is “a threat to British Jews and to Britain”. There is now a “genuine fear” among some Jewish members of the party, said The Guardian.

‘Taken over by zealots’

“This radical turn in official Green Party policy underscores the grim transformation that has taken place since Zack Polanski became its leader,” said The Times’ editorial board. It is veering “unnervingly close to open hostility towards the people of Israel and to Jewish interests”.

Zionism is the simple belief “in a Jewish national home in some portion of historic Palestine”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. A large majority of British Jews identify as Zionist, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Using the new logic of the Greens, who don’t admit members of self-described racist organisations, “they could not tolerate members” of Zionist organisations, which would include “almost every synagogue, or synagogue movement, in Britain and indeed the world”. This vote betrays a “deep ignorance of what the word Zionism means” and “a wilful misunderstanding of Jews and Judaism”.

“To blame all Israelis – all Zionists, indeed – for atrocities against Palestinians and to seek to punish them as a group is unjust,” said The Economist’s editorial board. The Greens’ new policy goes so far as to endorse “the destruction of Israel”, to be replaced by a Palestinian state “possibly run by the murderers of Hamas”. This is “a damning moment for a political party with pretensions to power”. Polanski “needs to grasp that his movement has been taken over by zealots” and lead an effort to take the party back.

‘Strategic mistake’

A “sizeable group” within the party see the vote – which passed by 1,022 votes to 813 – as a “strategic mistake” that will both “alienate potential voters” and “be the only thing the party is asked about” for months to come, said Meghan Kenyon in The New Statesman.

Deputy leader Mothin Ali is known to have voted for Sunday’s motion but four of the party’s five MPs – Ellie Chowns, Sian Berry, and former leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer – publicly rejected it. MP Hannah Spencer did not reveal how she voted but posted on Instagram that she was “proud to be part of a party committed to Jewish rights, and Palestinian rights”. Former MP and party leader Caroline Lucas spoke against the motion, condemning it as “divisive” and reliant on an “over-simplification” of complex issues.

Two attempts to water down the motion, both backed by Polanski, failed. Polanski, who is Jewish, has since been banned from Israel, and the country’s foreign ministry have accused the Greens of legitimising “the elimination” of Israel “through armed struggle”.

Criticism of the Israeli government, demands for an end to war and occupation, and calls for Palestinian freedom “are all legitimate”, said David Davidi-Brown of the New Israel Fund UK, in Prospect. But how can a party that defines Zionism as racism “protect members who attend UK synagogues”? Just as “those who care about Israel must stop treating every anti-Zionist as an enemy”, so “those who oppose Zionism must stop treating every Zionist as a racist”.

The opening of the National Gallery’s “Renoir and Love” exhibition has triggered record-breaking ticket sales – and a new outbreak of loathing for one of the world’s most famous Impressionists.

Renoir “gets a hard time from critics – and makers of memes”, said visual-art magazine Apollo. Where others see “joyous, light-flooded paintings”, they see “indifferent compositions, careless brushwork, overly saturated colours and a sentimental gaze”. A US group called Renoir Sucks at Painting once picketed Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, demanding that his works be removed from display, and its Instagram account was immediately flooded with pictures of people pretending to vomit in front of his paintings.

As ‘soft focus’ as Doris Day

I grimaced my way around the “Renoir and Love” exhibition – to a soundtrack of “tweeting birds, splashing oars and crickets clicking in the grass”, said The Times’ chief art critic, Laura Freeman. The nudes are “puddingy”, with “clumsy hands” and “vacant expressions”, and Renoir’s “tendency to potboil” makes everything “formulaic” and “stupefying” – like eating slice after slice of French custard tart. “I left convinced more than ever that Renoir was the Barbara Cartland of Impressionism.”

Renoir’s paintings can be “bland and mediocre”, often tipping “into the saccharine”, said Artlyst. He was the “chocolate-boxiest” of the Impressionists, with works that seem “painted through a soft-focus lens reminiscent of a Doris Day film”.

“I’ve hated his work for decades,” said art critic Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. It’s chintzy and safe, lacking the “hard-edged absolute dedication to angular, prismatic experimentation” of other, better Impressionists. Last month, thieves grabbed four Renoirs from a French museum but ditched two “as they ran for it”, including a portrait of a boy “who looks almost exactly like Boris Johnson”. I’ve never pulled off a “piece of criticism as incisive” as that “bunch of criminals looking at a painting that they’d already nicked and thinking: ‘Leave it – it’s not worth it’”.

‘Life-affirming, pulse-quickening’

Yes, Renoir can look “soft touch”, especially when compared with the “tough, ironic realism of Manet”, said art critic and former Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. But he was radical in his “enthusiastic embrace” of people enjoying bourgeois French life. “He doesn’t just paint the changing light of the passing moment; he urges us to live in it.” His “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette” (pictured, above), the centrepiece of this exhibition, captures “flirtations, longings and consolations” in a “dappled, mobile dance of golden light and cool shadow”. It’s “as grand as a history painting and as light as a soufflé”.

“Renoir’s people dance, drink, flirt and sprawl,” said Country & Town House. “By the 1870s, the corsets – figuratively and sometimes almost literally” – were loosening, and he elevated these scenes of ordinary life “to the scale and seriousness once reserved for loftier subjects”.

His best pictures “are so seductive” that you are “soon swept up and whirling to the artist’s rhythm”, just like the “beaming, waltzing” people he paints, said Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph’s chief art critic. “Happy art doesn’t have to be vapid and dumb”; this is “life-affirming, pulse-quickening, sap-stirring stuff” that challenges the “entrenched notion that art is only great when it deals with darkness and conflict”.

“Renoir and Love” may not sway the haters but, for me, what shines through this exhibition’s early Renoirs is a “truly great modern artist”, said Jones in The Guardian. His later work “went off” a little but it’s still fun. “Be happy, be in love, mes amis.”

What was the key factor that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term? If you’d asked him that a couple of years ago, said Virginia Heffernan in The New Republic, his answer would almost certainly have been the cost of living.

“The beautiful but simple word ‘groceries’,” he once rhapsodised. “I won on that word.” Well, we now know the word on which he’ll likely lose: diesel.

Supply disruptions caused by the Iran and Ukraine wars have had a particularly severe impact on diesel prices: they hit a record high of $6.52 a gallon in the US last week, up from an average of $3.63 at the start of 2025. The price hikes “aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate”, such as pickup truck owners, lorry drivers, and farmers in states such as Iowa. By upsetting the “diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him”.

‘Cheap appeal’

To fix this problem, Trump is toying with the idea of banning US diesel exports, said National Review. The policy has “cheap appeal” ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, but it would only bring down prices for a short while, and only in some areas. While America makes more diesel than it consumes, pipeline constraints mean that most of it remains relatively close to refining hubs on the Gulf Coast.

Other areas of the US, such the Northeast and the West Coast, largely rely on diesel imports, so would end up paying even higher prices if the US further reduced global supplies of the fuel. What’s more, if Gulf Coast refineries were unable to export diesel, they’d soon run out of storage space for it and have to slash their output. Result? Not just less diesel, but also a reduced volume of other refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

‘Fake fix’

A diesel export ban wouldn’t help America, agreed Catherine Rampell on The Bulwark. And it would cause major problems for countries that rely on these exports, such as Mexico, the UK and the Netherlands, which trade with the US in other oil-based products, and could well decide to retaliate in some form.

Still, this is the Trump White House we’re talking about – a team of people with “zero policy expertise” and “zero patience”, who care “only about what talking points will get them through the next news cycle, tomorrow’s consequences be damned”. The worse the opinion polls get ahead of the midterms, the more tempted Trump will be to reach for this “fake fix”.

The age of artificial intelligence has ended. Now dawns the age of “super intelligence.” So says President Donald Trump, who this week signed an executive order mandating that the federal government abandon the term “artificial intelligence” for a more maximal adjective. (Other options floated across Trump’s social media included “supreme” and “superior.”) But not everyone supports the shifting labels. As digital intellect continues to develop at breakneck speed, why does what we call it matter?

Capabilities ‘far exceed’ outdated name

The terminology change is Trump’s “latest rebranding move,” said the BBC. It follows the White House’s effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario in Trump’s second term. The “use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake,” said Trump in his address to the United Nations last month. “It’s not fake. It’s actually amazing.”

The capacities of what we call AI “far exceed what was envisioned” when the term “first came into use,” said the White House in Trump’s executive order explaining the change. For those “working in the AI industry,” the term super intelligence means “something slightly different” than casual usage implies, said USA Today. In that context, it describes digital intelligences “smarter and more capable than humans across every imaginable skillset.”

Accordingly, this word change might “suit the major U.S. AI players” eager to “play up their advanced models,” said DW. Developers have “every interest in calling it super, hyper, superior and whatnot intelligence,” said Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, to the outlet. But this is ultimately “just marketing.”

‘Forced rebrand’

It is doubtful that using super intelligence as a general term publicly “will stick,” said Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, to the BBC. The term “exaggerates the current capacities of AI.” Super intelligence as a descriptor “refers to future AI systems,” said Defense One, and “contrasts” with the “weaker forms of AI that exist today.”

Trump is nevertheless “attempting a forced rebrand for an industry he has tightly embraced,” said CNBC. Meanwhile, the public grows “increasingly wary about the rapidly advancing tech.”

Manchester City face a large fine, a points deduction, a transfer ban, the stripping of titles and trophies and even legal action from other football clubs, after reportedly being found guilty of 114 out of 115 charges of breaching the Premier League’s financial rules.

With the verdict – let alone the punishment – still to be officially confirmed, “the chaos and uncertainty is only going to increase” as “City fans, and the rest of football” speculate about how harsh the penalties might be, said Dale Johnson, the BBC’s football issues correspondent.

‘Rewriting’ football history

Man City have reportedly lodged an appeal but, should that fail, there will be a sanction hearing at which “everything will be on the table” – “even demotion” from the Premier League, said the BBC’s Johnson.

The betting markets are already anticipating “just how heavily the Premier League could come down on the club”, wrote Lawrence Ostlere in The Independent. Despite their current position at top of the league, Man City were, on Saturday, sixth favourites to be relegated to the Championship, “with odds shortening by the minute”.

“There will be questions now” over the future of star players like Erling Haaland and Enzo Fernandez, but also “the people who run the football club”. Majority owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United Group was “directly implicated in the alleged accountancy gymnastics”. Under the new Independent Football Regulator’s “honesty, integrity and financial soundness” rules for owners and directors, Man City’s “entire ownership is at risk” if the Premier League’s charges are upheld.

“If the full weight of football law were to be thrown at them”, a “hefty slice of football history would need rewriting”, said Tim Spiers on The Athletic. Man City won nine domestic trophies between 2009 and 2018 – the years the charges span. If these titles were rescinded, former Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and former Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers would become “Premier League title-winning managers”. That would be “very surreal”.

The idea of Man City having to “hand back silverware” may feel “far-fetched” but there is a “high-profile precedent”: the 2006 Calciopoli scandal in Italy, when one of Juventus’ titles was retrospectively given to Inter. There have also been “numerous cases” of international athletics medals being re-distributed after rule-breaking doping cases came to light.

‘Forever tainted’

“It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Man City supporters,” said The Guardian’s editorial board. It seems likely that “the greatest period in their club’s history” will now be “forever tainted”. Some of the team’s football “during the Abu Dhabi era” has been “sublime, overseen by an inspired coach”, former manager Pep Guardiola. This sour ending is “a reminder that the volume of money now washing about at the top of the game has been bad for its sporting soul”.

It can’t take anything away “from the remarkable football journey we have been on”, said Man City fan and founder of City Xtra, Freddie Pye, in The Telegraph. My club has set new standards in “footballing brilliance”, led by “some of the most talented players ever seen”. That’s what we City fans “will forever cherish”, whatever sanctions are imposed or “a litany of critics argue”.

If the findings are upheld, this “will be about much more than Man City”, said Karren Brady, former vice-chair of West Ham United, in The Sun. It will become about how capable the Premier League is at “standing up to” a big club with a huge legal team, and applying its rules and punishments “fairly”. This legal battle has taken over two years already. “Man City may be the defendant” but “the credibility of the Premier League is in the dock, too”.

What surprised me, watching the documentary, “wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency”, said Mahmoud Mushtaha in +972 Magazine (Tel Aviv). The 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers interviewed for “NAZA”, a new film, coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing “a routine errand”; one likened it to a “video game”.

Their testimonies form the basis of the documentary, whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage”; it is a term used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in each air strike. The film shows that, guided by AI and automated surveillance, thousands of Palestinian civilians were knowingly killed during the war in Gaza.

‘Factory-scale’ killing

The film received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the recent Venice Film Festival, where it won a jury prize. And in Israel, it has whipped up a storm of outrage, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Miki Zohar, the culture minister, accused its directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, of “treason” and called for them to be stripped of their citizenship, a demand endorsed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

“After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening.” It describes “factory-scale”, AI-enabled targeting. Interviewees claim that “20 Naza” – 20 civilians killed for one Hamas member – is the basic benchmark. But to kill one Hamas fighter, one source claims, 500 civilian deaths were approved. (The Israel Defense Forces denies this.) The film shows how indifference to civilian death shades “into deliberate mass killing”.

The allegations warrant serious scrutiny, said Ariel Oseran on i24News (Tel Aviv). But the very fact that the IDF calculates “Naza” figures shows that it assessed, and tried to minimise, civilian fatalities while fighting the war in Gaza. Besides, some of the film’s claims seem very dubious. According to Hamas’ own figures, the largest single strike during the conflict killed 132 people – far below the 500-death figure claimed in the film.

Reality under attack

We need to examine “NAZA” carefully, said The Jerusalem Post. The interviewees speak anonymously; we don’t know their rank or their motivation for speaking out. Their testimony cannot be a “final judgement on Israeli conduct”. And “if ‘NAZA’’s case is flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated in public”. But attacking the filmmakers does not help. “It weakens Israel’s argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test.”

In Israel, the debate is being played out “purely on the basis of emotion”, said Eli W. Kowaz in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). No ministers have even watched the film, as it is yet to be released here. Nor have the public; yet there have been angry protests outside one of the filmmakers’ parents’ homes. It shows “how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war”.

While the world outside has seen reams of coverage of the war – and seems to have largely forgotten that it started with Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 people – Israel’s media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza. Consequently, to many Israelis, the film feels like an attack on their country, and “an attack on their reality”.

President Donald Trump has dominated the GOP for a decade. But that hold may be slipping, as Republicans prepare for an anticipated “blue wave” in the midterm elections driven by his unpopularity. Conservative candidates are starting to break with Trump, and the right’s pundits are rooting them on.

‘Trumpism is exhausted’

Trump has “become a real liability” for GOP candidates, said The Boston Globe. Senate candidates Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Mike Rogers of Michigan called for an end to the war with Iran, as did incumbent Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio. (Husted voted Thursday against a measure to withdraw troops, however.) The break “isn’t about just one issue,” either. Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) last week criticized the president’s immigration policy, while Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) called for an investigation into the Russian oligarch who paid for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding reception. There may be nothing “stopping a full-on revolt” against Trump’s brand.

MAGA acolytes could once argue that Trump’s agenda is “what Americans voted for in 2024,” Jim Geraghty said at The Washington Post. But polls now suggest that the electorate is “sick and tired of this version of Trump” and that “Trumpism is exhausted.” The mood was especially apparent in Vice President JD Vance’s recent plea to voters to “give us another chance.” That is not a “particularly inspiring rallying cry,” Geraghty said. Republicans have to decide if they still want to be the party of tariffs, enmity toward Canada and mass deportations to remove every “agricultural worker, hotel maid and restaurant busboy.” Vance, if he wants to save his own ambitions, will need to lead the way. “The clock is ticking.”

The GOP under Trump has “blown one of the great opportunities in political history,” Gerard Baker said at The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s election in 2024 was a “real chance to establish a new governing order” favorable to conservatives, and the president could have succeeded by controlling the border, reining in prices and keeping the U.S. out of “costly, ineffective” foreign wars. Trump instead has “widened the deficit,” levied tariffs and set off on a “reckless military adventure” that is damaging the U.S. economy. All due to “hubris, vanity, recklessness” and the GOP’s “abdication of accountability.”

‘Wide open’ GOP future

Polling shows that Trump is “slipping significantly with his own party,” pollster G. Elliott Morris said at Strength in Numbers. His approval rating with Republican and GOP-leaning independent voters remains high at 71%. But that is still an “11-point drop and the lowest we have recorded.” Those GOP defections have helped drive the president’s overall voter approval ratings to new lows.

This could be the beginning of a longer process for the Republican Party. The GOP candidates breaking with one or two Trump policies today “might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow,” Andrew Prokop said at Vox. If Republicans truly start to believe that Trump is a “failure,” then a full-on reassessment could occur. The party’s future “will be wide open.”

“The new business-casual aesthetic has permeated not just politics (where relatability is more important now than gravitas) but all modern professions,” said Joseph Bullmore in The Sunday Times. And the tie, “which has declined steadily in health and relevance over the past decade or more”, appears to be the “victim of changing formalities”.

Feigning maturity

“The tie used to be what the boss wore; the symbol of power”, said Bullmore, but now it’s “almost solely” a gesture of subservience or service: “the graduate at the job interview, feigning at maturity; the doting waiter at the Mayfair members’ club”. Meanwhile, a photo taken at the 2022 G7 summit showed the “collected leaders of the world” with “their collars gaping louchely open, like a parade of ushers come 10pm at a Surrey wedding”.

Sales of ties have decreased by 7.5% year-on-year over the past five years, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. However, the picture is less bleak than it may appear: second-hand clothing platform Depop reported a 42% rise in searches for ties in the six months to February.

“I don’t think ties are completely dead, they’re just having a down moment,” Guy Hills, a fashion photographer and owner of London clothing shop Dashing Tweed, told The Guardian. For a younger generation “more interested in sustainability and proper clothing”, he said, the tie is ripe for a comeback.

Sign of rebellion

Indeed, successive obituaries for the necktie have proved “premature”, said The Art of Manliness: the necktie has “kept on beating the odds”.

A previous generation saw the tie as an “office relic” and traded it in for the freedom of “open collars and elevated loungewear”, but for younger people it has become “a sign of rebellion”, wrote Shane C. Kurup on Country & Town House.

Inspired by the experimental styles of celebrity aficionados like Harry Styles, ties with “regimental stripes, natty foulards and 80s abstract-print silks” are “being worn excessively long, a touch short, layered up, undone, tucked in or backwards”. Dior, Hermès, and Saint Laurent all featured neckties in their Spring 2026 collections.

Menswear “tends to move in cycles” and after “periods of looseness, where comfort becomes the dominant language of getting dressed”, there’s “a pull back toward structure”, wrote Ryan Fidell on the Vintage Tie Shop. After a decade that “leaned hard into casual”, the tie is “interesting again”.

“Strictly Come Dancing” returned on Saturday, bringing “plenty of promising twinkle” and “some inevitable nerves”, said Liz Edwards in The Sunday Times.

In the launch show, celebrity contestants including Dani Dyer and Sarah Storey were partnered up with their professional dancers in a “sequinned spectacle” ahead of the first live performances next week.

This year, the seasonal stalwart has undergone a “‘Doctor Who’-like regeneration”. The accomplished presenting duo of Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman departed after the last series, and have been replaced with seasoned TV host Emma Willis, former “Strictly” dancer Johannes Radebe and comedian Josh Widdicombe. After their debut show, the judges’ scores are in.

‘Played a blinder’

“There’s a lot riding on this new series”, the country’s final link “to a time when joy, sparkle and diversity brought the nation together”, said Emine Saner in The Guardian.

The new trio have nailed a “can’t-quite-believe-we-got-the-gig humility combined with superfan credentials, which is absolutely the right note”. Willis is a “class act” with bags of experience, Widdicombe is at his “best when he’s given the space to gently rib the contestants”, and Radebe’s “air of gentle benevolence” is “genuinely fresh”. “Maybe I just really want it to work”, but overall “the signs are good”.

“‘Strictly’ has played a blinder,” said Sarah Carson in The i Paper. There were fears the departure of Daly and Winkleman from the show “spelled its demise”, but “all it took was one dance” to put us at ease: a “sublimely thrilling, playful opener loaded with details for superfans”. There was much speculation about the new hosts, but frankly, “Pingu could have been presenting and it would still be the slickest programme on television”.

With Willis, we’re in “safe hands”, and Radebe’s experience in the studio makes him look “at home”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. But “schoolboy” Widdicombe “looks out of place alongside this glam duo”, turning it into an “awkward throuple”.

The “fluid” set-up, where the new hosts moved between the dancefloor and what was previously the “Clauditorium”, looked like “musical chairs”, said Frances Taylor in Radio Times. Overall, the trio “weren’t ah-may-zing… but they also weren’t a dis-ah-ster” either. The real test will be next week, when the show is live and there “really will be nowhere to hide”.

‘Worst’ celeb line-up yet

Other revamps are working well, said Edwards in The Sunday Times. There are five new professional dancers and a new way of announcing “celeb-pro” pairings, which gives proceedings a “hint of jeopardy”. Instead of pre-recorded announcements, and pairs walking down the stairs arm in arm, the partners were revealed “via a sort of pass-the-parcel dance routine, or spangly spin the bottle”. It was “chaotic, but it worked”.

Still, there are clouds surrounding the show, including some questioning whether it had become too repetitive and “lost its lustre for celebrity contestants”. Viewing figures have slumped, but even the current audience of around 7.8 million per episode is something that rival programmes would “give their eye teeth for”.

In recent years, the regularity of trying to figure out “who on earth the celebrities are” on “Strictly” is becoming as “steady as a rotating glitterball”, said Taylor in Radio Times. Without a doubt, the “calibre of star signings seems to dip every year” – “if you’ve heard of more than, say, five of the names taking part, give yourself a pat on the back”. Sadly, this line-up “really is the worst yet”.

The show has many flaws: the “D-listers, the judging, the pretence that half of these people haven’t had years of dance experience”, said Singh in The Telegraph. Yet every year millions flock to it and, ratings permitting, we are again set to fall in love with “contestants we hadn’t heard of a month before”.

“The Iran war is metastasising,” said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. Having evolved into a struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict is now threatening another key oil-shipping route.

One of the reasons that global oil prices haven’t risen higher in recent months is that Saudi Arabia has still been able to export large amounts of Gulf oil via the Red Sea instead. But this lifeline is now in peril.

Last week, Houthi rebels in Yemen launched a lightning offensive against Yemeni government forces, seizing control of the country’s entire Red Sea coast, including the towns and islands around the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

On Friday, another militia group aligned with Iran – this one based in Iraq – launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s vital East-West oil pipeline to the coast, forcing its closure. The combined assault pushed oil prices above $110 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia’s ‘nightmare’

Until the middle of last week, the Houthi forces had appeared to be on the back foot, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. But they achieved a sudden breakthrough against divided government factions, reportedly with the help of an AI-generated spoof message that purported to be from a Yemeni government commander and ordered a general troop withdrawal.

It has produced a “nightmare scenario” for Saudi Arabia, which faces a threat to its vital national interests but also knows from “bitter experience” how hard it is to defeat the Houthis in Yemen, having tried and failed to do so for over a decade. Turkey and Pakistan, with whom Riyadh signed a much-vaunted defence pact last month, aren’t rushing to help the Saudis out.

‘Global solution’

Nor is the White House, which already has enough on its plate with Iran and “is increasingly aware of the limits of what it can achieve through military force”, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Yet the US administration is also in a bind. Until the Houthis’ intervention, the oil situation had appeared just about manageable, thanks to Red Sea exports and the US shepherding vessels through Hormuz; oil shipments there are now at roughly a third of pre-war levels. Enough oil was reaching the global market to keep prices safely below the $100 a barrel level.

But supplies of Gulf energy to the West are now looking much more precarious. This is a global crisis requiring a “global solution”, said The Times. President Trump needs to work with China and other consumers of Middle Eastern oil to help stabilise the situation in Yemen and remove the Houthis’ threat to these crucial sea lanes. “Otherwise, the Bab al-Mandeb will continue to live up to its name: the Gate of Tears.”

The Democrats made a very wise decision this spring, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. They were considering whether to host their own midterm convention to steal attention from the one staged by the Republicans in Dallas.

In the end, they opted not to, because they were short on cash and thought it might be “strategically smart to cede the stage to Donald Trump in hopes that he would dig his own political grave”. Boy, did that pay off.

Trump, who has already alienated voters this summer by talking about how great data centres are and how he loves inflation, was on unhinged form in the two-day conference. He boasted that America “controls the Trump Strait”; he demanded that the audience join him in a pledge (“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States...”); he even promised every American a $5,000 bounty if his party wins the midterm elections.

Democrat insiders have long joked that Trump is trying to lose November’s midterms, but some are now seriously wondering whether he has lost his grip on reality.

An ‘incredibly risky’ bet

Republican candidates contesting swing seats in November certainly regard him as a liability, said Ayman Mohyeldin on MS Now. Many of them stayed well away from Dallas, wary of association with a president whose approval rating is down to below 35%. The Republican Party has nevertheless decided that, despite everything, it’s worth making Trump the face of the midterms, because of his unrivalled ability to drive Republican voters to the polls.

It’s an “incredibly risky” bet, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. The Maga base is already “fired up”. It’s among the larger category of traditional Republicans that the GOP has a turnout problem. They need to inspire these people to vote by offering a coherent agenda.

There’s little evidence of that, said The Washington Post. Trump’s wild proposal to pay $5,000 to every adult citizen if the GOP retains control of Congress in November beggared belief. It’s a “desperate gimmick” that betrays a total lack of seriousness about America’s fiscal situation. It would cost more than $1.2 trillion, in a country already saddled with $40 trillion in debt.

The Democrats are in no position to accuse Trump of trying to “trade votes for cash”, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. It’s what they do in every election, albeit in more disguised ways. But this bribe is still a terrible idea, not least because it would stoke inflation. Trump says he’s defending America from the socialists, but if his populism means throwing money at voters, “what need is there of socialism at all”?

Another Trump ‘con’

Trump’s cheques will never arrive, said Steve Benen on MS Now. Congress wouldn’t approve the move, the courts would object, and the money’s not there in any case. It’s just another Trump “con”. He pulled the same trick before the 2018 midterms, when he claimed that he and Congress were preparing a new, “very major” tax cut that would exclusively benefit the middle class. Even White House officials were “mystified” by this declaration, which had no basis in reality.

It’s bad enough that Trump spouts nonsense, said Eric Boehm in Reason Magazine. Worse was the sight of his VP, J.D. Vance, defending the bribe plan and insisting it could be funded through tariffs. Vance is supposed to be the heir apparent to Trump – “the guy with the political and policy chops” to redefine this populist movement for the next generation. Yet he has no problem with the concept of bribing Americans with their own money? “Trumpism is out of ideas, and soon it is likely to be out of power – no matter what ridiculous promises the president makes along the way.”

Sydney Sweeney is facing blowback for yet another controversial advert. Following a “great jeans” campaign for denim brand American Eagle that was accused of flirting with eugenics, the latest offender is an ad for sports betting app, Novig. The clip shows the “Euphoria” actor posing semi-nude with various pieces of sporting equipment, including a carefully positioned pair of footballs, as she suggestively tells the audience it’s all “just sport”.

Female athletes are leading a backlash to the advert, accusing Sweeney of demeaning and sexualising women’s sports. “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram.

‘Ugh, really?’

Let me begin by saying “what every woman must” when another woman poses naked in the public eye for “money or attention”, said Harriet Walker in The Times. “How empowering to have made that choice for yourself and your body!” Now that’s “out of the way” I can share what we say to our friends behind closed doors: “ugh, really?” When a woman “pointlessly” takes off her clothes in this way “the rest us are taken less seriously”. In Sweeney’s advert, “nudity is the punchline, which means women are the joke”.

Dig beneath the campaign’s “facetiousness” and the “enduring commodification of the female body, packaged as provocation and sold back to us as entertainment” begins to emerge, said Caitlin Napier in Marie Claire. Sweeney might be “winning financially, but she is playing a losing game”. Her power exists within a system that has “taught women that their bodies are valuable because they can be looked at, desired and sold”. The more value given to women as commodities, the harder it becomes to pry apart “empowerment from the very objectification that makes them profitable”.

Sweeney is “what patriarchy’s dreams are made of”, said Poppie Platt in The Telegraph. She probably “won’t care” about the backlash but she should. Already unpopular in Hollywood because of her politics (a registered Republican, she has been dubbed “Maga Barbie”), the Novig campaign cements the impression that she is not a “girl’s girl”. “If her next film opens to more half-empty cinemas, perhaps she’ll begin to understand that appealing to her own gender is not so bad, after all.”

‘Smart, cynical advertising’

I actually find the controversy “empowering”, said Sam Squiers on Fox Sports. Sweeney’s advert is a “throwback” to a time when “D cups were preferred over World Cups” and a sportswoman’s value was measured not just by her abilities but by her perceived attractiveness. Women now “have a voice and platform” to reject this narrative and they’ve used it to rally against the advert in a “powerful way”. At the same time, Sweeney, who is a partner for Novig, has profited from the advert while retaining “control and power over how she is portrayed”. The “whole saga” has “shone a light on how far we’ve come”.

Critics are missing the point, said Paul Burke in The Spectator. Sweeney was “never trying to pretend she was an elite athlete” and has not disputed the “talent, strength and sacrifice in becoming one”. Novig’s decision to use the actor’s body to sell a “very unsexy tech product” was “hardly an unusual strategy”: advertisers have long used good-looking people in their campaigns. “To rage against beautiful people in adverts is as pointless as raging against athletic people in the 400 metre hurdles.”

It’s important to remember the advert was a “deliberate business move” from Sweeney, said Chelsea Hui on Mamamia. She knows full well the “precise cultural and physical currency her image holds” and how to turn “moral outrage into money”. The actor secured a direct equity stake in the company and “helped architect the campaign” herself. But “acknowledging” her personal agency “doesn’t invalidate the criticism”. Sweeney can be fully in control of how she represents her body and “we can still question the choice itself”. Until we learn to “hold both, we’ll just keep playing right into her hands”.

Artificial intelligence developers are expressing alarm that AI could destroy humanity in the next few years, and industry leaders are calling for a slowdown in its development. Congress, however, seems uncertain about what role it should play in reining in the onrushing technology.

‘Kill all humans!’

AI researchers believe that now is “crunch time for humanity,” said Jacob Coxon to Wired. (Coxon recently resigned from a short stint at Anthropic, following several years at OpenAI.) Workers at the big companies building artificial intelligence “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said on X.

Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger agrees. AI really could “kill all humans!” he said on X. And such warnings present AI companies with a “dilemma,” said Axios: “Slow down and risk falling behind, or press ahead and risk losing control.”

Coxon’s high-profile alarm is “part of a wave of warnings about unchecked AI systems,” said Ian Prasad Philbrick at Slate. The trend raises the question of why companies like Anthropic and OpenAI do not stop or slow their work on increasingly complex and capable models.

Some developers have “talked themselves into continuing to work” on AI, believing that their less-conscientious industry colleagues will otherwise have the playing field to themselves, said Philbrick. But that kind of thinking is a “one-way ratchet toward greater AI risk.” Still, the risks might be “overstated.” Voter anger over data centers may also “compel Congress to act” with rules and guardrails.

The warnings “merit a certain skepticism,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. (The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who cofounded the Prometheus AI lab in 2025.) The people working most closely with AI do not have “special knowledge of what machines that do not yet exist will someday become.” And they can’t say how “society will adapt to the challenge.”

But their warnings could spur Congress to overregulate the sector, which may curb the development of a promising new technology. “The dawn of the AI era cries out for humility and patience,” said the Post.

‘Monumental human stupidity’

Coxon’s and Hubinger’s concerns are “unpersuasive,” said Thomas Claburn at The Register. A “Skynet scenario” would “require monumental human stupidity” in the face of AI superintelligence. But new laws should be enacted to “put executives in jail when their models do harm.” If AI models really are that dangerous, society should “hold people accountable for the harm they cause.”

Congress “won’t lead the charge” on regulating AI, said Axios. Guardrails are needed, but “we have got to make sure that we don’t lose our edge in the global competition on this with China,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

President Donald Trump is also hesitant to act. Artificial intelligence is “going to be more good than bad,” he said to reporters, per The Associated Press.

Compared with the likes of BMW (which sold more than 2.5 million cars last year), JLR is a “minnow”, said Steve Fowler in The Independent. It sold just over 352,000 vehicles last year, employing 43,000 people globally, and 34,000 in the UK. But the company, owned by India’s Tata Motors, is a “big fish in a small pond”, creating work for businesses in supply chains up and down Britain. And the “decline of a single species can cause a whole ecosystem to collapse”.

‘Rotten 12 months’

So the news that JLR is cutting 4,000 jobs is worrying, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The firm has had a “rotten 12 months” thanks to Trump’s tariffs, luxury taxes in China, inflation in materials costs and a disastrous cyberattack. But it’s a decent business, making sensible redundancies in the name of competitiveness, and is not facing a “VW-like existential crisis”.

Or not yet, said Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. JLR has not yet recovered from its “preposterous” pink rebrand in 2024. Combined with the cyberattack, a four-year new product drought, and the success of Chery’s Jaecoo 7 (the “Temu Ranger Rover”), the company looks wobbly.

Tom Homan is owed an apology, said Rich Lowry in National Review. When President Trump put his border czar in charge of unwinding Operation Metro Surge – the immigration enforcement drive that caused such controversy in Minneapolis earlier this year – critics on the Right took it as a sign of a climbdown.

Trump, they said, had clearly lost his nerve on his signature issue and was retreating from the ambition to carry out mass deportations. Yet while things have been quieter since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) ended its Minneapolis crackdown, there has been no lull in efforts to deport illegal immigrants.

Homan has avoided militarised raids, relying instead on picking up illegal aliens at routine traffic stops, immigration check-ins and airports. His low-key approach has been highly effective: in August, for the third month in a row, Ice achieved a new record for arrests, detaining almost 51,000 illegal aliens.

Campaign promise

Nobody can accuse Trump of failing to deliver on his campaign promises on immigration, said Daniel J. Flynn in The American Spectator. He pledged to stop “the invasion at our southern border” – and he did. Net migration in 2025 fell to its lowest level since the Great Depression. There are 2.3 million fewer illegal immigrants in the US today than when Trump began his second term.

Given that, as recently as 2024, Americans told pollsters that immigration was their number-one concern, you’d think voters might credit Trump “for more or less solving this vexatious problem”. No such luck. As is often the case in politics, “success engenders not gratitude but complacency”.

Shrinking workforce

Trump’s immigration restrictions may have been successful on his terms, said Stuart Anderson and Mark Regets in The Washington Post, but they’ll cost America in the long run. They’re largely responsible for the fact that Trump is set to be possibly the first ever US president to preside over a reduction in the labour force.

The labour force grew by 6.7 million during Reagan’s first term, and by 8.7 million in his second. Falling birth rates later slowed growth, but thanks to migration, Obama’s terms still added 1.6 and 3.9 million workers, respectively.

In Trump’s second term, by contrast, the workforce has fallen by 1.6 million. Economic growth is hard without a growing supply of workers. “A declining labour supply is new territory for America” – and it will leave everyone worse off.

Guy Ritchie made his name in the 1990s with films set in cartoonish criminal underworlds; but he is himself of posh stock, and owns a shooting estate in Wiltshire. In his Netflix series “The Gentlemen”, he mixes his fantasy vision with his personal history, said Nick Hilton in The Independent.

Ludicrously entertaining

The show stars Theo James as Eddie, aka the 13th Duke of Halstead, who inherited the family seat at the start of series one – and discovered that it was playing host to a cannabis factory run by a crime family (headed by geezer-in-chief Ray Winstone).

Eddie, who recently left the Army and is as hard as nails, gets in on the action and in series two, he extends his criminal empire and forms a transactional alliance with a shady fellow aristocrat (Hugh Bonneville).

Unfolding over eight episodes, this brash gangster romp is ludicrous enough to be entertaining in its own way; but the dialogue and plotting really are unforgivably bad.

Baroque deaths and showdowns

A “caper composed primarily of fists, shouting and men made of fists shouting ‘faaackin’ ’ell’ in tweed” sounds like a composite of everything Ritchie has ever made, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. It is fun, but it lacks the energy that fizzed through his early work.

You feel that Ritchie wants to say something meaningful about Eddie’s moral descent, said Ben Dowell in The Times; but the show is far too in love with carnage and wisecracks to hold on to anything serious. Besides, you don’t come to this unsophisticated series for that. You come for “chases, showdowns and more baroque deaths than you can shake a shooting stick at”.

“Zia Yusuf is a brilliant man, and he’s a genius actually, and he’s an incredible communicator,” Tory defector and Reform member Nadine Dorries told Times Radio recently. But, she added: “I wish he closed down his Twitter account.”

The interview followed a tweet by Reform’s self-styled “shadow home secretary” in response to reports that Somali-born Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of Camden Council, was the favourite to be Labour’s candidate to replace Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Yusuf asked his followers: “Do you understand what’s happening?”, a remark that drew condemnation from across the political spectrum for its apparent racial undertones.

‘Remarkable and rare gifts’

“Even in these polarised times”, it is hard to imagine another politician as “unlikeable”, “rebarbative” and downright “sneery” as Yusuf, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. I can’t help feeling that “every time he appears in the media or tweets a controversial opinion, he shaves another slice off Reform UK’s increasingly fragile poll ratings”.

Take, for example, his decision to call former defence secretary Ben Wallace, a former Scots Guards officer who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a “traitor”. Just for good measure, he then added a poll asking if Wallace should be prosecuted for treason.

That episode earned Yusuf a “ticking off” from Nigel Farage, but “the more one sees and hears from Yusuf, the more obvious it becomes that he is a liability for Reform”, said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator.

The son of Sri Lankan immigrants, Yusuf built a hugely successful business career and is clearly “a man of remarkable and rare gifts”. But he is also “the latest example of the truism that business success is no indicator of political acumen, let alone political success”.

‘Ticking timebomb’

Whether Yusuf is or is not a nice person, “behaving as he does is entirely politically rational”, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. In labelling former Army officers traitors or arguing those not born in Britain shouldn’t be able to stand for Parliament, Yusuf is signalling “an assault on established institutions” and conventions. “The very fact that this alienates people unnecessarily makes his signal – that with him there is no compromise or messing about – more reliable.”

This has also endeared Yusuf to rank-and-file Reform members. A poll conducted in June found that 22% of those asked would opt for him as leader in a contest to replace Farage, ahead of current deputy Richard Tice, party chairman Lee Anderson and Reform’s “shadow chancellor” Robert Jenrick, said the Daily Express.

Politically this makes sense, said UnHerd. Having seemingly failed to absorb and replace the Conservative Party, Reform is “reasserting itself as an unambiguously populist party. All it needs now is an unambiguously populist leader.”

Senior figures within the party are forming what they call an “Anyone but Zia” group to try to prevent him from succeeding Farage, should he step down, said The Observer . “They all know [Yusuf’s] a problem, but he is popular among the grassroots,” one critic told the newspaper. “He’s a slowly ticking timebomb.”

Andy Burnham is facing growing pressure to scrap the state pension triple lock from MPs across the political spectrum, businesses and financial experts.

The British Chambers of Commerce has called on the government to ditch the policy, which guarantees the state pension rises each year by whichever is the highest out of 2.5%, inflation or wage growth.

Many argue the policy is “draining government finances”, said MoneyWeek, due to its “ever-increasing cost” since being introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010. But policymakers have been “hesitant” to get rid of the triple lock because of its popularity among voters, “namely older ones”.

Triple lock ‘has worked’

Much of the debate around the triple lock suggests that “pensioners have never had it so good”, but the reality is “very different”, said former pensions minister Steve Webb in The Telegraph. Pensioner poverty has been “rising steadily” since the early 2010s, and the state pension offers a valuable safety net with “equality” for men and women.

While it is “undoubtedly true” the triple lock will become unaffordable if it continues for ever, “now is not the time to be taking our foot off the gas”. Requiring the decision to be taken by Parliament “once every five years” is the most sensible course of action.

To “justify” the resultant “wave of retiree rage”, axing the triple lock would have to save the nation “a good chunk of money”, said Will Dunn in The New Statesman. But while it may work in the long run, scrapping it “doesn’t raise that much money in the present” – only £3.3 billion in two years. And for all the opposition, the triple lock “has worked” in providing British pensioners with greater benefits and security, particularly when measured against the cost of living.

A ‘colossal burden’

The triple lock remains only because “no one is willing to risk the wrath of British pensioners”, said Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg. If we lived in a “rational world”, at least one mainstream leader would be “brave enough” to “declare an uncomfortable but self-evident truth” that scrapping the triple lock would provide fairness and affordability. But we do not.

Since its establishment, the triple lock has become “something of a holy writ” despite its “financial and moral justification” being long gone, said Simon Kelner in The i Paper. Aside from this, the mechanism fails to account for the income differences between a “pensioner on the poverty line” and a retiree “with a large, mortgage-free home and a private pension pot”. Consequently, it is a “blunt instrument”.

The “reality” is simple, said David Blair in The Telegraph: keep the triple lock and Britain risks a spiralling national debt, with this “colossal burden” of £3 trillion passed to our children and grandchildren. It is they who will “bear the cost of the spending from which we benefited”.

Taking the decision to end the triple lock will by no means be easy – in fact “there would be many losers” – but it “would be right”.

Syria is on the verge of an “economic revolution”, said Ksenia Svetlova in Haaretz. Its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qa’eda militant who led the rebel offensive that overthrew dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, has been struggling to rebuild a nation devastated by almost 14 years of civil war.

One of his biggest coups last year was to persuade the Trump administration to lift the strict economic sanctions imposed on Syria in 2019. But the country was still on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation first made in 1979 in response to Damascus’ support for Iran and its harbouring of Palestinian terrorist groups. So, like Iran, it remained cut off from the international banking system, and large-scale reconstruction proved impossible.

But that all changed last week at the stroke of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pen. Now, at long last, the flow of “dollars, dinars and dirhams” to Syria can begin in earnest. Saudi Arabia has promised to build desalination plants and two airports, and invest in telecommunications projects worth more than $1 billion. Other countries are keen to follow suit. “If everything goes according to plan, Syria will soon become one vast construction site.”

‘Limited progress’

The rehabilitation of Syria into the world order has happened at “remarkable speed”, said Ilan Berman in The Washington Post. And there’s an obvious logic to it. By removing Damascus from its terrorism list, the US has pulled it towards the West and away from Iran and Russia’s orbit. Yet there are dangers to being so hasty: Washington is “basing its bet more on hope than hard evidence”. For all their promises of liberalisation, Sharaa and his government haven’t fully moved on from the past. Jihadist ideology is prevalent in school curriculums, and there has been no more than “limited progress” in removing 5,000 foreign fighters – extremists loyal to the current regime – from the new Syrian army.

Sharaa also won a significant victory last week in his quest to centralise power, said Smadar Perry on Ynet: he has managed to disband the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led militia founded in 2015 to fight Islamic State and create a secular, democratic and federalised Syria. At its height, it controlled at least a quarter of the country, including its major oil fields. Its commander, Mazloum Abdi, has now agreed to let his troops be incorporated into the national army, in what he calls “a genuine transition from battlefields to the fields of construction”. But the truth of it is that Sharaa forced his hand by seizing swathes of the SDF’s territory in a lightning offensive in January. Folding the SDF into the army is going to be a hard ask: and though the president has promised to make Kurdish a national language and to protect Kurdish rights, many Kurds still don’t trust him.

Victor’s justice

Sharaa’s government has also been busy bringing members of the Assad regime to justice, said Chris Doyle in Arab News. In August, nine of its most senior figures, including Assad himself, were sentenced to death for war crimes – verdicts that gave rise to an “outpouring of joy”. However, only Atef Najib, Assad’s cousin, a security chief infamous for his brutality, is likely to face execution, the rest having been tried in absentia.

Nor is this exactly a victory for the rule of law: the accused can hardly be said to have received a fair trial; and no corresponding action has been taken against the perpetrators of last year’s massacres of over 1,400 Alawites, the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs. There’s a strong smell of victor’s justice about it all.

Still, progress is undoubtedly being made and “the psychological importance of the removal of sanctions should not be underestimated”, said The National. We have room to hope that the barriers now being torn down in Syria will be replaced “with bridges, roads and tunnels en route to a more stable, secure and prosperous future”.

“Now is the twilight of Donald Trump’s supremacy,” said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. The US is “still the richest and most heavily armed nation on Earth”, and the president – indulged by a “supine” Congress – still has far-reaching powers. Nevertheless, with more than two years of his second term still to run, Trump looks “thwarted and impotent”.

‘Deranged demands’

History will record that the disastrous war against Iran was a “turning point”. But evidence of his policy failures can be seen all around the world. Canada, citing unreasonable last-minute demands from US negotiators, has promised all-out trade war. The Ukraine conflict is as bloody as ever, despite Trump’s promise to end it. Europe, horrified by his indulgence of Vladimir Putin and his “deranged demands” for Greenland, has turned away. In the Middle East, America’s allies are furious that they’re bearing the brunt of Iran’s attacks. And at home, fuel prices are rising, and electoral disaster is looming: November’s midterms are set to flip the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate too, against the Republicans.

In a matter of months, Trump has “burned through decades of accumulated goodwill” across the democratic world, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. “He has created a sense that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend, for it buys its enemies and sells its friends.” Never once has Trump spoken about Putin in the way he talks about Canadians, Danes, South Koreans and other partners.

‘Erratic behaviour’

A couple of years ago, it would have seemed impossible, said The Spectator. Now it’s quite normal for Washington, in its dealings with its allies, to threaten economic coercion, the withdrawal of military support, and even outright annexation. When Russia behaves like this, it is sanctioned. But in the case of the US, we sit back and do nothing.

There are still some who believe that “Trump’s erratic behaviour is part of a cunning plan to discombobulate opponents and get his way”, said Sam Freedman on Substack. The truth, as his lack of success makes clear, is simpler: “this guy is in obvious cognitive decline, ill-informed, and doesn’t know what he’s doing”.

Worse may be to come, said The Economist. Many would be delighted if “a fuming, friendless Mr Trump, so weakened by his own blunders and by plunging approval ratings” were to retreat to the White House to “tinker with plans for his ballroom”. Alas, that is not in his character. He’ll be less a “lame duck”, and more an ageing “silverback gorilla” – lashing out ever more viciously at anyone within his reach. “Now that his dominance is threatened, the world will find him more disruptive than ever.”

President Donald Trump last week announced the United States is obtaining rights to 65 million barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves. The agreement was made under the auspices of unelected President Delcy Rodríguez, who owes her position to the January U.S. military operation that snatched her predecessor out of the country. It is the “biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump said in a statement. Critics say the pact is illegal and exploitative.

‘Almost certainly unconstitutional’

Venezuela is “becoming the 51st state in all but name,” Joseph Zeballos-Roig said at MS NOW. Trump’s deal would give the U.S. “privileged access” to the country’s oil production and allow the United States to replenish its “dwindling stockpiles” of petroleum depleted by the war with Iran. The agreement will also “temporarily shore up” Rodríguez’s government thanks to an influx of tax revenues. But it looks like “gilded imperialism” and will likely “deepen a disconnect between Venezuelans and hopes for a new government” after the downfall of dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The agreement is “almost certainly unconstitutional” under Venezuelan codes, Elliott Abrams said at The Washington Post. The country’s laws say petroleum resources “are the property of the Republic” and “not transferable” to outside entities. Trump’s deal “hardly meets that criteria.” The scheme also relies on a private company led by Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering and made his fortune “under the corrupt Hugo Chávez and Maduro regimes.” What seems certain: “The deal will fail if democracy ever returns to Venezuela.”

The Venezuela deal has given the U.S. a “strategic victory” over its rivals, Arturo McFields said at The Hill. The country’s oil fields were previously controlled by Russian and Chinese companies, and revenues flowed also to Maduro’s allies in Cuba and Iran. No more. The U.S. is obtaining “energy security” and lower gas prices, while the government in Caracas gets an agreement that “revitalizes its oil industry, creates jobs and fosters prosperity.”

‘Old-school colonialism’

The agreement could be remembered as the “moment Venezuela shut the door on communism,” Yuri Perez said at Fox News. Critics who say the government “lacks legitimacy for long contracts” are right that legitimacy “must be completed at the ballot box.” But the alternative should not be “idle oil fields and an open door to Cuba, China and Russia.” A “future democratic congress” can and should ratify the deal on behalf of Venezuelans.

“The deal smacks of old-school colonialism,” Liam Denning at Bloomberg. And it is unlikely to draw major oil companies back to Venezuela. (Chevron, the only outside oil company that remained, said this week it will double its production there.) The “opaque settlement” possibly puts new elections “further out of reach” and will thus be “inherently brittle.” Rebuilding Venezuela’s oil production and its democracy will be the “work of many years of intense effort.” Trump has instead opted for a “shortcut” that relies on “raw U.S. power.”

Anticipation for Grand Theft Auto VI reached a fever pitch in August when developer Rockstar Games finally released a first look at gameplay. But while the long-awaited project is widely expected to have the biggest premiere in video game history, there is also concern about what it means for the gaming industry’s future. Some say it could be the industry’s coup de grace; others are more optimistic.

Gaming’s ‘time of tumult’

GTA VI is expected to be a slam dunk for Rockstar financially, projected to generate up to $5.2 billion in sales by the end of its first launch week this November, according to gaming analytics firm Newzoo. But the game’s release also “comes at a time of such tumult for the gaming industry as a whole,” as “open-world games are arguably tired and online multiplayer games with $200 million budgets can crash and burn the moment they are launched,” said Troy Farah at Salon.

Part of the problem is that this game is “such a big release that it’s scaring off other studios from releasing their own games around the same time in November” lest they fail because “everyone is spending their cash on Rockstar’s latest,” said Farah. GTA VI’s $80 base game price and $100 ultimate version may “just seem like typical capitalist extraction, but the end result will likely be a narrower industry that squeezes creatives and makes things a lot more miserable for players.”

With the “cost of living crisis that’s eating every last penny of disposable income out of average household budget, it won’t take much to turn a chorus of Champagne corks into a firing squad aimed directly at the games industry’s already-exposed guts,” said Jim Trinca at IGN. The “real issue here is that so much of the games industry finds itself both scared by and dependent on the success of one single project.” Gamers should prepare for the “possibility that GTA VI, rather than being the savior of the video games industry, might trigger its next big crash.”

A ‘halo effect’

Despite some nerves about current trends in the industry, Rockstar hopes its upcoming blockbuster will “retain cultural influence for another decade,” said Christopher Byrd at The New York Times. Many are hoping a strong debut from Grand Theft Auto VI will also “boost the struggling console market, which has seen higher prices due to the rising cost of memory and storage,” said Jenni Reid and Alex Buckmaster at CNBC, though this game is only being released digitally.

Many insiders also hope the game will have a “halo effect for the entire industry,” said Rob Fahey at gaming news outlet GamesIndustry.biz. If it succeeds, GTA VI “will be a rising tide that lifts many other boats around it,” as the effects from the “biggest media launch of the decade being a video game will be very significant.” It could also cement a “reaffirmation of video games’ position on an equal footing with other media in the flow and transfer of styles, influences and ideas.”

Even amid industry falterings, GTA VI is the “type of game that can pull a lot of people back into gaming and even convince them to buy a new console to play it,” Dan DeFrancesco said at Business Insider. But the jury is still out on what the full effect of the release will be. “Big fires burn bright, but they need a lot of oxygen to grow.”

Over 100 days into the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “the response is still struggling to keep pace”, said Liz Cookman in The Independent. It’s estimated that more than 2,500 people have now died, with the death toll accelerating sharply in recent weeks.

It is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, spreading much quicker than the deadliest crisis to date, the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people. To put it in context, that outbreak took a year to reach 2,000 deaths.

Destabilised by conflict

“The situation is bad,” said Devi Sridhar in The Guardian. The mortality rate seems to be nearly 50%. More than half of victims are dying without receiving care. Children make up almost a third of all deaths.

Yet this outbreak isn’t attracting much attention abroad. Compared with the 2014 outbreak, the current silence is “astounding”. That year, Ebola was one of the most Googled terms in the world; this year, “no one wants to hear about infectious diseases”. Things are only going to get worse. A “perfect storm of factors” is making the spread hard to contain. The virus is the Bundibugyo species, for which there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific treatment, although clinical trials are under way.

The location of the outbreak has made it worse, said Matthew Mpoke Bigg in The New York Times. Uganda has succeeded in eliminating an outbreak; but Ituri province in north-eastern Congo is unstable, with ongoing conflict and roaming militias. More than 900,000 people have been displaced, while the region’s gold mines draw workers from a wide area. The virus has now spread to six provinces across the DRC. There are fears that it could spread to South Sudan, and to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, one of Africa’s biggest cities.

Dismantling of USAID

The situation in DRC has been “disastrously compounded” by cuts to Western aid, said The Guardian, above all by the US. The dismantling of USAID has weakened health infrastructure and surveillance capacity, while Washington’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation has also undermined the response. European countries, too, have started to treat international aid as “luxury expenditure”.

The 2014 outbreak laid bare the risk of Ebola spreading in the region and beyond. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, countless pieties were uttered about disease control. Yet here we are again. “Subsequent actions by governments have belied those words” leaving the DRC exposed to an epidemic that could soon spiral “out of control”.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said a hiker as Jamie Richardson climbed the final steps to reach the summit of Snowdon. Alongside a friend, he was scaling the mountain to raise funds for a motor neurone disease charity in May, Richardson said he was “getting booed”, and a man “physically tried to stop” him from bypassing the line of people waiting.

This month, Marc Screeton went viral after he posted a video of himself being heckled for queue-jumping. “I haven’t endangered anyone or ‘shoved or barged’ past anyone,” he said. “Imagine queueing on a mountain.”

Hikers have been up in arms over Wales’ 1,085m summit for years, with mixed views over the etiquette of accessing Snowdonia’s best views.

Like ‘insulting Paddington Bear’

Queuing is what Britain is known for doing “better than anyone else”, said travel editor Alice Murphy in Metro. It is part of an “unspoken” social contract, Johann Go, assistant professor of ethics at University College London told the outlet. If you were to jump the queue, you are effectively saying “to hell with them” and “my time is more valuable”.

At Snowdon, also known as Yr Wyddfa, if people just “barged past each other”, there could be serious consequences, etiquette expert Jo Hayes told the paper. “People could potentially fall” or be “crowded in like sardines”, and it would be “unpleasant, and very likely, unsafe”. Some say it should be “different strokes for different folks”, said Murphy. If you are just wanting to touch the top to complete the hike, “fire ahead”, but if you’re “doing it for the ‘gram”, then “get in line”.

Queuing on Snowdon may be “frustratingly long”, said The Guardian, but what do you expect? As one of the “most beautiful parts of the UK”, it is “bound to attract crowds – so people should expect to queue”. This debate has been going on for a “decade and a half”, and recent queue jumpers have added to the outrage. “Skipping a queue is the least British thing of all time. It’s like insulting Paddington Bear.” Blame over-tourism and social media all you like, but “if you want to climb a mountain in 2026, expect to join a line”.

Queues ‘ruining’ the climb

Sorry, this is “Snowdon, not Chessington World of Adventures”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. This episode is an example of “taking docile queueing too far”. “Yes, it’s nice to be polite and wait your turn, blah blah, but what next – waiting in line to enter the sea at Bridlington?” The reason there are so many queues is because “morons tit around at the top” taking their “stupid selfie for their stupid social media post that interests no one”.

Screeton probably “secretly” made his fellow hikers’ day. The only thing Brits enjoy more than “meekly joining the end of a pointless queue” is “bitching about people who disobey that pointless queue”. However, queuing is essential in “supermarkets, cash machines and public lavatories”. Failure to do so is always an “outrageous violation of the social code and a recipe for a fat lip”.

Mountain summits have traditionally been associated with “achievement, community, and endurance”, said Portia Jones on Wales Online. But in recent years they have become “akin to a tourist attraction, subject to queuing rules and hostile public policing”.

Additionally, experts say that in extreme conditions, whether hot or cold, stationary queuing can create “safety concerns”. The practice is “absurd”. The “real achievement” is reaching the summit, not taking a “staged photo”. “If you want to wait in a long line, may I suggest Alton Towers instead of our wild and precious mountains and stop ruining them for the rest of us.”

“Standing in an orderly line is the closest thing we have to a national hobby,” said The Times’ editorial board. But it “has its limits”. Snowdonia (Eryri) National Park Authority’s refusal to intervene – advocating a policy of “self-policing” – is a “refreshing departure from nanny statism”. “Good.” And regardless, there are many other viewing points in the park from which to “admire its majesty”, instead of waiting an hour at the top on a “mindless quest for social media fodder”.

There’s no mistaking the message of this summer’s wildfires, said Rebecca McQuillan in The Herald. It’s that we need “to stop procrastinating and cut emissions, fast”. But is Britain ready to accept this fact of life and act on it? We’ll soon get an answer to that question when the government announces whether or not it’s giving the go-ahead to the development of two oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

Both projects – the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen and the larger Rosebank oil and gas field west of Shetland – were approved by the previous Tory government. But they had to reapply for development consent after a court ruled that ministers had to consider the lifetime carbon costs of the developments, not just the emissions generated during extraction. Consultations on that issue have now closed, leaving the final decision in the hands of Andy Burnham and his energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh.

Climate ‘hysterics’

Reports suggest that a decision is expected next month, said Kathryn Porter on UnHerd. Climate campaigners have presented it as a choice between exploiting new fossil fuel reserves or stopping using oil and gas, but that’s misleading. Given that the UK is still many years away from being able to rely purely on clean energy, it’s really a choice between developing these North Sea resources during the transition to net zero or just relying on imported oil and gas, which generally involves higher emissions. Burnham can allow new oil and gas production to protect jobs and the UK tax base. “Or he can cave in to the hysterics, harming the economy and the planet in the process.”

Questionable benefits

The prime minister is pitching himself as a “pragmatist” on this issue, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. He “isn’t swayed by expensive fossil fuel lobbyists”, but he is sensitive to the arguments of oil rig workers, car manufacturers and those like the eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince, who say that if we need oil and gas from somewhere, we might as well get it from our own backyard. But Labour voters are looking for more from Burnham than mere pragmatism. They want him to be the sort of leader who can face up to the challenge posed by climate change and “sell difficult answers”.

If Burnham gives the go-ahead to developing one or both of these North Sea fields, he’ll do a lot of damage to his reputation and lose many of the voters Labour has won back from the Greens, said Hannah Martin on LabourList. And for what? The new fields wouldn’t generate huge amounts of tax, and Jackdaw would “only create 27 direct full-time jobs in total”. The economics of new North Sea drilling is questionable. The politics is even worse.

A “tectonic shift” has taken place in the geopolitics of the Middle East, said Ilker Sezer in Türkiye Today (Istanbul). On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan formed “the holy grail of military alliances”, with the three Sunni Muslim nations vowing that “an armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all”. That clause of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, named after the holy city where the treaty was signed, is the “Islamic equivalent of Nato’s Article 5”.

Three-pronged advantage

Hitherto, Saudi Arabia had been wary of entering into any kind of multilateral pact: it had previously opted for bilateral deals like the one it reached with Pakistan in September, while continuing to rely on the US for its security. But the Iran war, during which Riyadh’s territory has been attacked by both Tehran and its regional proxies, has altered its thinking.

The new alliance has a three-pronged advantage: it will benefit from Saudi Arabia’s financial might; from Turkey’s formidable army (the second largest in Nato) and arms industry; and from Pakistan’s battle-tested military and nuclear arsenal, the only one in the Muslim world. Together, these powerful resources are bound to affect “the strategic calculus of every adversary”.

Still, though highly symbolic, it’s “a thousand leagues away from being a new Nato”, said The Times. There’ll be “no integrated command structure, no joint doctrine, no integrated air defence network and no joint operational commands”. And no budget either. The pact simply provides a framework for closer military and political cooperation: it’s an attempt by the trio to free themselves from their “vassal-like dependence on the American security umbrella”. Such hedging makes sense in an increasingly volatile region in which the US has been unable, or unwilling, to protect its allies.

Washington doesn’t seem overly concerned by the arrangement for now, said Umair Jamal on The Diplomat (Washington DC). It maintains close relations with all of them, and has long been keen for other nations to assume more responsibility in the Middle East. But in the long term, the US could lose leverage as a result of it, “particularly with respect to arms sales, negotiation of military-basing rights and the management of regional crises”. The effect will be all the greater if Egypt, Jordan and some additional Gulf states also jump on board.

‘Third pole’

With US influence receding in the Middle East, Iran and Israel have looked set to exert more control over the region, said Khalid Al-Jaber on Al Jazeera (Doha). That’s where this pact comes in: to counter Iranian and Israeli dominance, Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad seek “to build a third pole” to ensure neither achieves hegemony. And one key step in that direction will be the co-development of Turkish and Pakistani weapons systems, including advanced drones and armoured vehicles, on Saudi soil.

For Israel, this alliance marks a dangerous “turning point”, said Oshrit Birvadker in Israel Hayom (Tel Aviv). Turkey has morphed from an ally into a “major threat to Israel, no less significant than Iran”, while Saudi Arabia has pivoted from its intention to join the Abraham Accords to recognise Israel.

The alliance’s first test could well be in Yemen, said Mohammed Nail Abdulqader on Responsible Statecraft (Washington DC). The Houthis, an Iran-aligned group battling the Riyadh-backed Yemeni government, have recently renewed hostilities with Saudi Arabia following the collapse of a 2022 ceasefire. As part of a maritime blockade against Riyadh, they have fired missiles at a refinery in the Saudi city of Jazan and attacked vessels in the Red Sea.

A major future attack by the Houthis could test the “grey area” that has not been publicly defined by the Mecca accord. If the alliance’s response is weak, the Houthis may become emboldened; if it’s too strong, there’s the risk of a wider conflagration. Carving a middle path between these two extremes will be mightily hard. But that’s the only way to build a “credible deterrence without opening the door to a new war”.

U.S. allies in Asia have long depended on the American military for their defense. But President Donald Trump in recent days has curtailed U.S. participation in joint exercises with South Korea and at the same time ordered the lone American aircraft carrier to depart for the Middle East. The question now is whether the United States remains dedicated to Asian security.

No more ‘pivot to Asia’

The Trump administration “promised a pivot from the Middle East to East Asia,” Matthew Petti said at Reason. The opposite is now happening, with the U.S. commitment in the Pacific “taking a back seat to the U.S. presence in the Middle East.” The war with Iran is “dominating both the long-term planning and day-to-day execution” of foreign policy in the Trump White House. This is not new: Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also promised to redirect attention away from the Middle East and toward China but failed to do so. “The problem is deeper than the hubris of one president.”

Trump’s sudden decision to pull back from the South Korean drills “does not mean the U.S. alliance system in Asia is collapsing,” Retired Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum said in The Korea Times. The abruptness of Trump’s decision — and his linking it to his friendly relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — does however mean that Asian allies will “inevitably begin asking how much they can rely on U.S. commitments during a future crisis.” The answer to that question is vital as China becomes “increasingly assertive” and North Korea begins “cooperating more closely” with Russia. South Korea’s “survival and security are at stake.”

Asia’s ‘indispensable military power’

The stakes of Trump’s apparent pullback are high “not only for U.S. allies, but for the United States, too,” Sheila A. Smith said at the Council on Foreign Relations. A reduction in American fidelity to the Pacific could cause South Korea and Japan to seek nuclear weapons, while also ceding ground to U.S. rivals such as China and Russia. Another factor: Reported shortages of U.S. munitions in Iran have raised questions about whether the U.S. is even capable of “offering protection to its allies in Asia.” But the apparent trend of “deliberately weakening” longstanding American alliances will be “cause for celebration” in Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang.

The United States is Asia’s “indispensable military power,” Craig Singleton said at The Washington Post. The American president’s unpredictability has already forced U.S. allies to begin “assuming greater responsibility for their own security.” Japan has begun its “largest postwar defense buildup” by signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines, India is expanding its military commitments and Taiwan is spending heavily to “harden its military, civil defense and critical infrastructure” against a Chinese invasion. That should fit Trump’s “American First” agenda, but the region still depends on “predictable American commitments and clear crisis planning.”

Public figures have joined friends of Jason Arday to call for a public inquiry into the “witch hunt” the former Cambridge professor faced before his death.

Labour MP Diane Abbott, actor Jameela Jamil and Green Party leader Zack Polanski are among 30,000 signatories of a letter to the prime minister about the "relentless harassment" Arday was subjected to as allegations about plagiarism, and questions about some of his claimed achievements, dominated the news. Last night, thousands of mourners gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square for a vigil organised by Stand Up to Racism. Addressing the crowd, Abbott said she believed “the vicious media campaign drove” Arday “to his death”.

‘Institutional murder’

The Spectator and The Telegraph ran “article after article about Arday” but there were also attacks from the left, including Novara Media, said University of Oxford professor Sneha Krishnan on Al Jazeera. “Many academics are investigated for misconduct in their scholarship” but “none should involve public shaming or racist glee”. Arday’s “harassment and death” is tantamount to “institutional murder” by a media ecosystem that has repeatedly shown itself to be “infused with anti-Black racism”.

Getting to the bottom of plagiarism allegations is “in the public interest” and, for the sake of Cambridge University and its academic integrity, “exposure does matter”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But in this case, the coverage was never free from “a miasma of race”. Even after Arday had “taken the decision to step away from the spotlight”, he continued to be held up as a “talking point” in a row about diversity, equity and inclusion, his shortcomings highlighted “not just as the usual failures” of academic rigour but “as exceptional proof” that diversity efforts at Cambridge had “gone too far”.

This was a “death by a thousand headlines”, said Alan Rusbridger in Prospect. “Torrents of verbiage cascaded” from journalists but none of it was directed at the “troubled history” of Nathan Cofnas, the “race realist” who “claimed the credit for unmasking Arday”. Unfortunately, “Fleet Street in full pursuit can only manage one narrative at a time”.

‘Out of his depth’

“The basic job of the press is to find out the truth,” said Charles Moore in The Telegraph. And it discovered “substantial untruths, seriously damaging to the reputation“ of one of our greatest universities, “and reported them”. “What else could it have done?” (Arday denied allegations of plagiarism but acknowledged errors in his work.)

It was the University of Cambridge, “not the press”, which was “obsessed” with the colour of Arday’s skin. It paraded its youngest-ever Black professor “like some exalted tribal chief captured by colonising explorers in the 18th century”. Arday was not a villain but “a young man out of his depth”, and a responsible institution would “quietly have nurtured his talents and sorted out his problems”, rather than leave them to be publicly exposed.

“The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. The leftist spin is that “hacks hounded him into despair” but the truth is that journalists “found a story and they told it” – unlike Arday’s colleagues who “failed to prize merit over identity”.

Kemi Badenoch is not a fool, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph; nor is she remotely an antisemite. So why did she stick her neck out for Joshua Bonehill-Paine, the former neo-Nazi who’d hoped to stand as a Tory councillor in Somerset?

Having served time in jail for waging a repulsive campaign of racial hatred against the former Labour MP Luciana Berger, Bonehill-Paine claims to be a reformed character, dedicated to fighting antisemitism.

And perhaps he is – but that didn’t make it appropriate for him to stand for office, especially when he hadn’t even apologised to Berger for what he termed “Operation Filthy Jew Bitch”.

Belief in ‘second chances’?

Yet when his candidacy was being condemned by all sides last week, said Harris, Badenoch defended it; and when he withdrew it, she gave him a role as an adviser on radicalisation instead. The Tory leader is savvy enough to have seen the risk to her reputation. So the only possible explanation for her apparent poor judgement is that she believes in second chances – and has the courage to stick to her principles, even if they make her unpopular.

I don’t buy it, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Her belief in “second chances” was not in evidence in 2024, when it emerged that the Labour minister Louise Haigh had been convicted of fraud a decade ago. We need “conviction politicians”, she said, “not politicians with convictions”.

Yet Haigh’s offence – falsely reporting the theft of a mobile phone – was as nothing compared with Bonehill-Paine’s (who also has a conviction for assault). Unwisely, Badenoch tried to further justify his candidacy by saying he’d only sought a local platform – “looking at parking and sorting out bins” – thus insulting her existing councillors at the same time.

‘Wider concerns’ about strategy

In May, Badenoch impressed many by taking a clear stand against antisemitism, said Kate Maltby in The Observer. Yet last week found her supporting a former neo-Nazi – presumably because she’d decided that the Tories needed his Crewkerne Gazette platform, known for its viral AI videos mocking Labour, to be on its side.

This row has revived “wider concerns” about her entire strategy of tacking to the right, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Only days earlier, Badenoch had warned that ex-centrist MPs – who support net-zero targets, or don’t want the UK to leave the ECHR – won’t be allowed back into the parliamentary party. But while she seeks to win votes from Reform UK, her critics argue that, for an outright majority, the Tories need to win back the seats they’ve lost to the Lib Dems. Time will tell who is right, but for now, the One Nation lot are well and truly out in the cold.

When the young Greek-Cypriot entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched easyJet in 1995, in a bid “to democratise travel”, the no-frills airline operated just two routes, said Angharad Carrick on This is Money.

Since then, it has grown into the UK’s largest airline by passenger numbers – becoming synonymous with cheap holidays across Europe and setting the pace for change in the industry.

But now the orange upstart is being taken private after 26 years on the London Stock Exchange, having agreed a £5.7 billion takeover by the US private equity giant Apollo, “which some analysts believe is something of a cut-price fare in itself”.

Other airlines ‘in the crosshairs’

The words “private equity” might spark fear among easyJet customers, said Carrick, “who have seen other well-loved British brands being taken over and stripped of their assets”. Whether or not these forebodings are realised, it’s the end of an era.

Unlike its rival bidder, fellow US investment firm Castlelake, Apollo has at least obtained the royal consent of Haji-Ioannou, whose backing of the bid was vital to its success, said Ali Lyon in City AM. He described the firm as “one of the most well-resourced and experienced institutional investors in the world” and said he planned to remain an investor.

But, ultimately, it was probably the price that swung the matter: Apollo’s offer is an 81% premium on the airline’s share price prior to takeover speculation. EasyJet now becomes “the first large European carrier to be held in private markets” – assuming Apollo’s formula for persuading EU regulators to nod through the deal works.

It may not be the last, said Hugh Leask on CNBC. This deal could presage a flurry of interest in European budget airlines from private equity buyers, with Jet2 especially “in the crosshairs”.

‘Blow the budget-airline market wide open’

Reports that easyJet will be “loaded” with £3 billion in debt after the takeover are disturbing, said Dominic O’Connell in The Times. Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, has already signalled its disquiet.

Still, Apollo has some experience of airlines, said Peter Campbell in the Financial Times: previous investments include Aeroméxico and Sun Country Airlines, which it listed on Nasdaq in 2021. It has already signalled its intention to take easyJet “upmarket”, with more “business-focused product features on key routes”.

That might suit rivals like Ryanair, but it won’t please cash-conscious travellers. Indeed, this deal could “blow the budget-airline market wide open”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph – as well as fuelling more soul-searching in the City about leading British companies being taken private on the cheap. “It may not be long before we need a FTSE 50, or even a FTSE 30, to reflect how few significant companies are left.”

“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” said Anna Wintour in Vogue, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced that it will celebrate the work of the flamboyant and controversial designer.

The New York exhibition, due to open next spring, “won’t shy away” from “any of the darkness” in his past, she added.

‘Thorny choice’

He was caught making a series of racist and antisemitic comments, so it’s “an astonishing comeback”, wrote Zoe Sottile on CNN. It “resurfaces” the question that has “dogged” artistic and cultural institutions during the “past quarter-century” of reckonings: what do we do with “great artists who do bad things”?

This is a man who “once proclaimed my whole family – and millions like us – should die”, wrote Faran Krentcil in the New York Post. But the exhibit is still “a fine idea” because he has repented, his clothes are “extraordinary” and Jewish “scripture” calls us to “gaze at our former enemy and search for shared humanity”.

High fashion, an “explicit celebration of wealth inequality” has “never been the place to look for lessons on virtue”, wrote Dana Thomas in the New York Times. But his “rehabilitation” and “coronation” is a “terrible idea” because his “infamous antisemitic rants” were “not an aberration”.

In fashion, “addiction, provocation and eccentricity” are “seen as normal” or “necessary”, elements of the creative process, but Galliano’s “comportment” went “way beyond all that”. Not all “great creators” deserve a retrospective, and someone as “incendiary” as Galliano “certainly shouldn’t be the subject of one during his lifetime”.

‘Nostalgia is so now’

But he “apologised often” for his “outburst”, claiming he had suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction, wrote Craig Saueurs on Euronews, and “many Jewish leaders” have “accepted his contrition as genuine”. The Institute consulted the Anti-Defamation League and the Union for Reform Judaism and they “signed off” on the project.

The Met is “tapping into something very current: nostalgia”, wrote Isobel Van Dyke on Dazed. We “look back on the runways of the past” and “moan” that fashion “will never be as good again”. Perhaps it won’t but “either way”, Galliano is “the epitome of fashion’s nostalgia” because he’s a “creative genius”, so there’s “a strong case” for exhibiting his portfolio and “confronting his contributions” to “fashion history”.

Well, is it on or is it off? No one’s quite sure, said Al Jazeera (Doha). Two weeks ago, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a multibillion-dollar deal allowing US companies to build and operate nuclear power plants on Saudi soil over the next 30 years.

But a day later, President Trump added a new condition, via social media: Saudi Arabia must fall in line with the UAE and other Arab nations that have signed the Abraham Accords, and recognise the state of Israel.

‘Reckless’ agreement

And that may prove a deal breaker, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Riyadh had been working towards this landmark pact for almost two decades. Thanks to the savvy of its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who ensured the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would get its share of the billion-dollar nuclear licensing deals at stake, he almost got it over the line.

But now it must surely be in doubt, said Mohamad Elmasry on Middle East Eye. Riyadh has vowed it won’t normalise relations until Israel guarantees Palestinian statehood. And MbS has reportedly told US officials that hostility towards Israel is so great among Saudis in the wake of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, that to sign a normalisation treaty would probably get him assassinated.

It’s obvious why the Saudis still badly want this nuclear deal, said Joseph Cirincione on MS Now (New York). It’s not, as they claim, to diversify their energy profile: that makes no sense for a nation sitting on an ocean of oil and blessed with the ideal wind and solar conditions for generating renewable energy – a far cheaper option.

No, the real reason is to gain atomic weapons to protect itself against its main foe: Iran. MbS has made no secret of his desire to build a bomb, and the deal would be a concrete step in that direction. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, it appears to permit nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil, thus enabling Riyadh to follow the likes of India, Israel and Pakistan in covertly enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.

‘Guiding hand’

Who knows what’ll happen if this “reckless” deal goes ahead, said Mitchell Plitnick on Mondoweiss (New York). The “gold standard” nuclear-power pact that the US signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009 required the UAE to forego the ability to enrich uranium, and obliged it to submit to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections: this Saudi deal has no such restrictions.

Which is why it would inevitably trigger a Middle East arms race, said Azriel Bermant in Foreign Policy. If the deal proceeds, Iran would openly seek its own nuclear deterrent, something it has so far officially forsworn. “It beggars belief that the US went to war against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon yet now acts in a way that is an open invitation for Tehran to weaponise.” And in a way that would also pour “proliferation kerosene” on Turkey and Egypt’s “smouldering nuclear ambitions”, said Matthew Kroenig and Henry Sokolski in The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s deal invites disaster.

Actually, the US is doing the right thing, said the Washington Examiner. The hard truth is that the “era of non-proliferation is coming to an end”: Pakistan and North Korea are both testing nuclear weapons. Given that sobering reality, better the US offer “a guiding hand” to the Saudis and oversee their nuclear agenda than let China or Russia fill the void.

Good or bad, the deal matters a lot to the US president, said Sharon Squassoni in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago), so rumours of its death “are premature”. After all, it’s not some “spur-of-the-moment fantasy” cooked up by Trump. The same deal was also being considered under Joe Biden, and then too enrichment was a quid pro quo for recognising Israel.

The Saudis won’t do so, of course, given recent history, but they won’t have to. Although Congress can disapprove the deal once it’s submitted, the present Congress – due to adjourn on 18 December – is much less likely to do so than any freshly elected one. So the Saudis can “call Trump’s bluff by simply sitting back” and waiting for him to succumb to the pressure of the December deadline.