I dream about clafoutis for breakfast every day, says Alice Kelly. I can’t make a pancake now without wishing it was a clafoutis instead. Something about its sugary crust, creamy centre and the tangy blackberries won’t leave my head. If you make this, I am almost certain it will be one of your favourites too.

Ingredients (serves 8)

• 30g (2 tbsp) salted butter, melted
• 150g plain flour
• 125g caster sugar
• 3 medium eggs
• 250g whole milk
• 1 tsp vanilla bean paste
• 125g blackberries for the topping
• 50g caster sugar for the topping
• To serve: vanilla ice cream or warm custard

Method

• Preheat the oven to 190°C. Brush the melted butter all over the base and sides of a large (approx. 30.5cm) ovenproof frying pan.
• Put the flour, sugar, eggs, milk and vanilla in a large mixing bowl. Using an electric mixer, beat until smooth, then pour the batter into the buttered pan. Scatter the blackberries evenly over the top, then sprinkle over the caster sugar.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, until the clafoutis is golden brown around the edges and set in the centre.
• Serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or with warm custard.
• Tip: the clafoutis is best eaten on the day it’s made, but if you want to make it ahead of time, store the baked clafoutis in the fridge and reheat it in the oven before serving.

Taken from “Scratch” by Alice Kelly, published by Nine Bean Rows at £30. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £26.99, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk to place your order, or call 020 3176 3835 to speak to a bookseller.

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You finally got a raise at work. Now you feel a little more comfortable ordering in a few times a week, and you are not thinking twice if you need to opt for an Uber over taking the bus. Your quality of life may have improved, but when you look at your bank account, the numbers are more or less the same — even though your salary went up.

This phenomenon is what is known as lifestyle creep, and it’s not uncommon for it to occur when you start bringing in more money, whether due to a pay increase, a bonus or a new job. While there is a case to be made for leveling up as your career does, doing so in lockstep with your income can leave you right back where you started financially.

What is lifestyle creep, and why is it a problem?

Lifestyle creep, sometimes called lifestyle inflation, “occurs when your spending gradually increases as your income rises,” said U.S. News & World Report. Basically, what happens is those two figures move up in tandem, squeezing out the opportunity that a higher income should provide to save and invest more.

What makes it so insidious is that “it happens little by little, so you may not even realize it,” said Investopedia. In other words, “it sneaks (or creeps) up on you.” The small shifts you are making in your lifestyle, whether that be splurging on slightly nicer clothes or making your weekly latte a daily occurrence, can have big impacts. Unfortunately, “lifestyle creep can deplete your savings and prevent you from achieving long-term financial goals.”

What are the warning signs of lifestyle creep?

Improving your lifestyle and overall quality of life is not inherently a problem. To “some degree, lifestyle creep is expected,” said U.S. News & World Report. There are signs, however, that you may have taken it too far.

One sure sign that “your lifestyle may be creeping up too much can be that you begin saving and investing less and less,” said Fidelity. Another tip-off is that you have started accumulating debt, perhaps carrying a credit card balance.

You may also notice your attitude toward budgeting and tracking your spending has changed. For instance, maybe “you have stopped following your budget because you assume you’re earning enough not to have to worry about spending,” or you now “feel as if you can afford to buy whatever you want and no longer stick to previous limits,” said SoFi.

How can you avoid lifestyle creep?

To avoid falling into the trap of lifestyle creep, follow these three steps.

Make a budget. “Give all income a job to do,” said SoFi. Before you start spending, put a portion into savings and invest another amount, making sure to reserve enough to cover essentials. Anything that remains, you can allocate toward fun splurges or upgrades.

Track your spending. Often, lifestyle creep is not an intentional choice but an accrual of small shifts in spending. To make sure that does not happen, keep tabs on where your money is going. Budgeting apps make this easy to do.

Set goals. A new pair of shoes may feel nice, but reaching a financial goal, whether that is finally buying a house or being able to retire early, will arguably feel even better. “One key to avoiding lifestyle creep is to set long-term financial goals and keep your eye on the prize,” said SoFi.

‘Healthcare is more badly broken than political leaders admit’

Marj Halperin at the Chicago Tribune

While “rising costs are a barrier for too many, even those who can afford comprehensive health insurance are finding money can’t buy you a timely appointment,” says Marj Halperin. Americans in cities are “now in much the same bind as patients in rural areas who have long found limited doctors available for routine care, with specialists often a few hours’ drive away.” It is “time for political leaders to spell out a strategy to speed in the opposite direction.”

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‘A wildly popular movie meets the film world’s most revered label’

Sophia Nguyen at The Atlantic

“‘KPop Demon Hunters’ seems to have completely overtaken culture,” says Sophia Nguyen. But “even the most ardent fans likely did not anticipate the mega-hit’s next big merch drop: a disc release from the Criterion Collection, home to some of cinema’s most distinguished titles.” Some of the “label’s longtime devotees greeted the addition of ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ with an eye roll,” but “Criterion has good reason to widen the net: Netflix, Apple and Amazon make and distribute a significant share of films.”

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‘Trump’s tariffs prove even Canada can’t afford to be nice to the United States anymore’

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board

It “fell to Canada, a country famous for friendliness, to demonstrate the limits of an age-old friendship with the United States,” says The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board. After a “decade of dealing politely with President Donald Trump’s manic ricocheting between trade agreements and trade warfare, supplies of northern niceness are sorely depleted, and rightly so.” Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “defiance in the face of his neighbor’s unprovoked bullying should inspire other traditional American allies to abandon appeasement.”

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‘Meta’s $18 billion settlement could reshape social media for young people’

Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute

Meta “reached a landmark settlement and agreed to pay up to $18 billion to 47 states” to settle claims it “endangered children through addictive features,” says Tom Jones. Meta’s promised changes are “meant to curb endless scrolling, which can interrupt sleep and have other negative effects on young people’s health and well-being.” The “smart move for Meta was to settle,” as a “major challenge for all social media companies is verifying the ages of their users.”

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Falling in love is close to a universal human experience. So it’s no surprise that audiences return again and again to see glamorous movie stars go through both the mundane and sublime beats of getting swept away — and sometimes shattered — by love, as in these ten brilliant films.

‘Casablanca’ (1942)

“Casablanca” may be unique in the history of cinema for its timelessness and cultural staying power. Humphrey Bogart is Rick Blaine, a gimlet-eyed bar owner in Vichy-governed Morocco, who must choose between his desire for his former lover, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and his ability to use letters of transit for her and her husband, Laszlo (Paul Henreid), an anti-Nazi resistance leader. The iconic film “continues to fascinate audiences in a way that is beyond explanation, except to resolve that the picture seems to result from and fully encompass that somewhat fantastical notion of Movie Magic,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘Roman Holiday’ (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays Ann, the glamorous princess of some unnamed European kingdom, who is on an exhausting goodwill tour in Rome and slips out for some fun and respite. When she falls asleep on a bench, she is attended to by journalist, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), who accompanies her on a tour of the city, planning a scoop but eventually falling for her. The lovingly rendered portrait of Rome has inspired countless romantic getaways to the city. The film “takes an understated, dignified approach worthy of its royal protagonist” and rather than hitting the familiar beats of the romantic comedy, it ultimately “swerves to something more poignant,” said Caroline Siede at The A.V. Club. (Prime Video)

‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1965)

Director David Lean’s follow-up to “Lawrence of Arabia” is another sweeping historical epic, this one set in revolutionary Russia, where doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) circle one another before, during and after the First World War and the tumultuous Bolshevik revolution.

Their simmering chemistry carries the narrative through war, hardship, romance and tragedy, set to the now-beloved score by Maurice Jarre. It is a “timeless tale, outliving the era when it was set and the era when it was made,” and even with its 3 hour and 20 minute running time, is an “unforgettable experience,” said William Cook at the BBC. (Prime Video)

‘The Way We Were’ (1973)

Director Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were” tells the story of the love between the handsome, conservative Hubbell (Robert Redford) and the rabble-rousing communist Katie (Barbra Streisand), set against the backdrop of the early 1950s Hollywood blacklisting affair. They meet in college, marry and then struggle to reconcile their politics when they move West so that Hubbell can pursue his dreams as a screenwriter. It’s “one of those romantic melodramas that can send you to bed in inconsolable tears,” said Steve Vineberg at Critics at Large, yet is nevertheless a “deeply lovable film. (Prime Video)

‘Before Sunrise’ (1995)

The simple premise of director Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” is part of its enormous charm. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a Vienna-bound train. Taken with each other, Celine agrees to continue talking with Jesse in Vienna before his morning flight. Their one, magical, conversation-driven night together is now the definitive Gen X romance. A film that “isn't just about 23-year-olds in love, but about the condition of being 23 years old,” it also provides a “breathtaking end to, simply put, one of cinema's finest depictions of the delightful immaturity of being young and being in love,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘In the Mood for Love’ (2000)

In perhaps the most beautiful film ever made about unconsummated love, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) are neighbors in an apartment building, devoted, or at least loyal, to their spouses, who they realize are having an affair with each other. Chow and Su gradually develop feelings for one another, even re-enacting how they believe their spouses’ affair unfolded. Director Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood For Love” is “ravishing beyond mortal words,” said Ed Gonzalez at Slant magazine, and its protagonists “come to resemble butterflies caught in a rainbow-tinted industrial web.” (HBO Max)

‘Love & Basketball’ (2000)

Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps play Monica and Quincy, best friends, aspiring basketball stars and eventual lovers who are torn apart and later brought back together. Told in four segments, the story takes them from childhood rivalry to heady high school romance through college and their respective professional careers. In addition to the consistently riveting relationship story, “Love & Basketball” is also a superb sports film well ahead of its time by taking women’s professional leagues seriously. The movie is, “at its heart, a passionate love letter to basketball and friendship and Black love and ambition,” said Roxane Gay at Current. (Prime Video)

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)

Jim Carrey plays Joel, a man who decides to have the memories of his relationship with Clementine (Kate Winslet) digitally erased after discovering that she did so first. During the procedure he realizes he doesn’t actually want to forget and races through a prismatic rendering of his own memories to preserve them. It’s a movie that “makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience” and in so doing “celebrates the essential untidiness of love, the beautiful messes two people can make together,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019)

Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s searing love story follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter newly arrived at a gorgeously rendered, remote seaside town in 18th-century France. She is hired to paint a wedding portrait for Héloise (Adèle Haenel), and the two fall madly in forbidden love. It’s a film that is “about the erotic, electric connection between women when they find their desire for creative experience fulfilled in each other, but it is equally about the powers of art to validate, preserve and console after a romance is over,” said Rachel Syme at The New Yorker. (HBO Max)

‘Past Lives’ (2023)

In director Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young (Greta Lee) are childhood best friends whose bond is severed when Na Young moves with her family to Canada. They later rekindle their relationship as adults from a distance before Na Young (who becomes “Nora” in Canada) marries Arthur (John Magaro). When Hae Sung visits Nora in New York more than a decade later, they grapple with their unrealized love and the struggle not to hurt Arthur with their feelings for one another. Its “mix of nostalgia, love and remorse” is what makes the film “so effective and lovely,” said Monica Castillo at Roger Ebert. (Prime Video)

While cooler fall days may be on the horizon, many students returning to school are still dealing with scorching end-of-summer temperatures. As climate change exacerbates the heat, experts say the negative effects of sizzling classrooms are here to stay, especially in school districts that may not have the resources to combat hotter weather.

How do hot classrooms affect students?

Students can often “struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms,” as “air quality, temperature and ventilation” can affect how people “think, focus and perform,” said Time. These factors are aggravated in poorer school districts, where a lack of air conditioning “can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time and weakens attention.” Average temperatures of 80 degrees to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above are “known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals.”

While heat has always been an issue in underfunded classrooms, it “doesn’t just affect places like Phoenix, which is well-known for its scorching temperatures that don’t always drop by much in the evenings,” Allison Poulos and Jennifer Vanos, a pair of health solutions and sustainability professors at Arizona State University, said at The Conversation. A number of cities, even in the northern U.S., are “oppressively hot when the new school year begins in August or September — and they are only getting warmer.”

Many schools have also “moved the start of the academic year earlier into the summer over the last several years,” said Poulos and Vanos, exposing kids to peak heat waves. But these schools “lack the infrastructure — from inadequate air conditioning to fields and play areas that are not shaded — to cope with high temperatures.” In 2025, 156 school districts nationwide saw an average of 30 more school days over 80 degrees Fahrenheit than they did in 1970, according to a study from the Center for Climate Integrity.

How are schools fighting the heat?

Many school districts are working to combat issues with HVAC systems directly amid concerns from parents. The superintendent of the Tulsa School District in Oklahoma “visited several schools and found the buildings she entered were cool but acknowledged that some sites are struggling with their air conditioning systems,” KOTV-DT Tulsa said. For schools that don’t yet have air conditioning, teachers are being asked to “close classroom doors once students are inside and shut blinds to help retain cool air.”

Conditions were even worse during summer school classes. In Boston, classrooms averaged 100 degrees Fahrenheit over several days in June, which parents “say forced teachers in nonair-conditioned buildings to turn off lights and spritz students with water to keep them cool,” said The Boston Globe. Once that heat wave broke, temperatures still “remained stubbornly high in some schools.” The problems continued even after the dog days of summer passed. Toward the end of August, students in a Northern Colorado district “spent the first three school days of the year leaving class two hours early” due to heat, said CBS News.

Experts say modern HVAC systems should “offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs,” said Time. Using “energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements,” turning “what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.” School districts in Indiana, Virginia, Wisconsin and more are already implementing these new systems.

What happened

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly testified in his Senate confirmation hearing last year that a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” but new documents obtained through freedom of information requests “refute that testimony,” The Associated Press said Thursday. Kennedy was a “prominent anti-vaccine activist" at the time, and "critics said the visit fueled anti-vaccine sentiment" before a measles outbreak that killed 83 Samoans. In one letter, Kennedy “explicitly told the Samoan prime minister he wanted to study” the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine there and “used the words ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’ eight times,” said The Guardian.

Who said what

“RFK’s platform is built on lies” that “leave a trail of dead children,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” Watchdog group American Oversight on Thursday asked the Justice Department to investigate Kennedy’s testimony for false statements. The Health and Human Services Department told the AP that “any claim or insinuation” Kennedy “lied under oath or to Congress” based on these letters is “not only false but outright defamatory.”

What next?

“Lying to Congress is a crime, whether or not the witness is under oath,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz told The Guardian. But this Justice Department is “unlikely” to prosecute Kennedy.

What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” inside the U.S. government, needling Canada amid an intensifying trade war. Trump’s order directed the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to remove and replace Lake Ontario on all federal maps and documents within 30 days, though he told reporters the name change was “effective immediately.”

Who said what

Trump’s Lake America rebrand “most likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change,” The New York Times said. “It does not have to be recognized by other countries.” New York, the only state that borders the lake, “won’t be calling it that,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), and neither will any Canadian entities. The name, from the “Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big,’” is “more than 400 years old,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said on social media. “America is changing,” but Canadians “know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”

What next?

The hydronym snub is “likely to harden public sentiment against the Trump administration in Canada,” The Wall Street Journal said. But Trump suggested he wasn’t satisfied with Lake America and the Gulf of America. “Now, all we need is an ocean,” he told reporters. “Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”

What happened

Federal courts on Thursday dealt President Donald Trump setbacks in several ongoing legal battles with broad implications. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston issued a new block on the U.S. Postal Service carrying out Trump’s executive order to limit mail voting. In Northern California, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ordered the Pentagon to end its “illegal and baseless” blacklisting of Anthropic. And U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., stalled administration plans to quickly inscribe Trump’s name back on the Kennedy Center.

Who said what

After Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI used for domestic surveillance or autonomous killing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled it a supply-chain risk using an “obscure government-procurement statute” designed to thwart “foreign sabotage,” Reuters said. The administration’s “contemporaneous words and deeds confirm” it was actually acting to “make a public example out of Anthropic,” Lin wrote. The “empty invocation of national ​security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

Talwani issued a 14-day block of USPS mail voting action a day after lifting an earlier hold in response to a Supreme Court ruling. The “whipsaw of action” could “confuse voters,” The New York Times said. But “each delay has reduced the administration’s chances of clearing the legal hurdles to execute” Trump’s order before the midterms. Now that the USPS’ “likely unconstitutional regulation” is finalized, Talwani wrote, “compliance is practically impossible” before ballots go out “as early as next week.”

What next?

After Cooper threatened to block the Trump inscription if the Kennedy Center stuck to its Sept. 8 start date, the Justice Department last night said it would delay action until at least Oct. 8.

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

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

Heat trappers

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

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

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

Trails ‘persisted and widened’ 

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

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

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

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

The data centre question

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

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

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

Meta has agreed to an $18 billion (£13.3 billion) settlement in the US to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children.

The social media giant was accused of knowingly and deliberately designing features to get children addicted to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with commentators describing it as the industry’s “tobacco moment”, said Sky News.

What happened?

Meta has agreed to make a number of changes to the way Instagram and Facebook operate for its youngest users, while denying any wrongdoing. The settlement “came as a surprise”, said BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman. “I was expecting weeks of courtroom drama.”

What will change?

The ruling could “fundamentally change the social media experience for young people in the US”, said The Guardian. The “biggest alteration” is that Meta must now “make many of its safety limitations the default setting” for accounts created by teenagers, a “pivot from its previous opt-in approach to child safety”.

The new safety barriers include a two-hour time limit on Instagram and Facebook for known teen users (direct messaging will not count towards the daily use limit). Meta agreed to limit teen accounts to only one hour a day if other platforms bring in similar time restrictions.

Notifications will be muted between midnight and 6am and between 8am and 3pm on school days. ‘Likes’ will be hidden on posts from teenagers. Meta will also enhance measures ‌to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content.

Identification or facial recognition verification systems will be used to make sure teenagers aren’t using regular Instagram accounts. But collecting identifying data poses significant privacy risks, said David Greene, legal counsel at digital privacy firm Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The case was brought by 29 US states and was based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which is nearly 30 years old. “I would be surprised,” said Kleinman, “if these measures remain within the confines of the US for very long, as other countries will almost certainly be keen to adopt them too.”

What does it mean for social media?

The hearing was labelled as social media’s “tobacco moment”, in reference to the trials tobacco firms faced in the 1990s. A “flurry of state lawsuits” forced tobacco companies to stop sponsoring sport and advertising on public transport, banned adverts that “targeted the youth and prevented cigarette companies from putting cartoons on their packets”, said James Titcomb in The Telegraph.

Other social media companies, including YouTube, TikTok’s parent ByteDance, Snap Inc. and Discord, are facing thousands of lawsuits brought by states, school districts and individuals. The litigants claim the companies intentionally designed their platforms to keep young users hooked. The lawsuits come as politicians are considering stricter rules aimed at protecting young users.

If other tech giants follow Meta’s lead, then social media “might indeed start to look more like tobacco: still a regular part of life, but heavily regulated and restricted, and widely understood to be bad for you”.

GB News went live on 13 June 2021, the first news channel start-up in the UK since Sky News in 1989. Broadcast free on most platforms, it promised to serve audiences on the right who felt ignored by traditional media with a news agenda not governed by liberal metropolitan values and assumptions: it calls itself “the people’s channel”.

GB News had a rocky start. Chair and star presenter Andrew Neil stepped back after just two weeks on air; he later complained of a lack of professionalism and “nutty” politics. It has firmly established itself since then.

In December 2025, GB News announced that it had become the UK’s biggest news channel, by daily average viewers. In 2025 it had over 80,000 viewers between 6am and 2am, narrowly overtaking BBC News’ figures. It still trails BBC and Sky in terms of weekly audience reach, with 2.1 million; the other channels have perhaps twice that. But its higher average viewership suggests it is watched consistently by a smaller and more loyal audience.

Why is the channel’s rise significant?

Its content is not just culturally conservative: it is tilted specifically, and vociferously, towards Reform UK and the right-wing of the Conservative Party. Many of its presenters are politicians. Nigel Farage presents an evening prime-time show three nights a week, while other contributors from Reform include Lee Anderson, Richard Tice, Matt Goodwin and Darren Grimes; from the Tory right there are, among others, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam Cates and Esther McVey. Michelle Dewberry, who has her own evening show, is a former Brexit Party candidate. (One former Labour MP, Gloria del Piero, serves as a presenter.)

The channel has come under fire from journalists for breaching the impartiality rules that apply to news broadcasters. Ex-Sky News editor Adam Boulton called for the channel to be stripped of its broadcasting licence.

What does GB News coverage look like?

Its content is focused strongly on populist-right themes: culture wars and “anti-woke” subjects; climate scepticism; and, most of all, illegal migration. Typically, a GB News evening show will begin with a few minutes of the presenter’s own firmly expressed views. Next, there will be four or five segments of news tilted heavily towards the channel’s favoured talking points. Then a panel of guests will discuss the issues. There’s usually a panel of two: say, Reform’s Zia Yusuf offset by one less-well-known liberal, such as Matthew Stadlen or Benjamin Butterworth, in order to provide a semblance of balance. This person is frequently shouted down by the presenter and the other panellist. Critics describe such guests as the “token leftie” or the “chew toy”.

Is this against impartiality rules?

The Broadcasting Code, a list of rules established by the communications regulator Ofcom, covers both TV and radio broadcasters: all news coverage by broadcasting companies, whether across their main channels, or elsewhere, must be presented “with due impartiality”. Ofcom stresses it doesn’t mean an equal division of time has to be given to every view or every argument represented, only that there must be a level of impartiality “adequate or appropriate” to the subject and nature of the programme.

What does this mean in practice?

In the last decade, Ofcom has permitted greater flexibility in the interpretation of its rules, allowing broadcasters to provide more partisan coverage through presenters and guests, with fewer challenging voices. The boundaries were first tested by radio stations, with LBC and TalkRadio featuring more political presenters, including politicians. GB News and Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV followed suit.

In June, the former chair of Ofcom, the Tory peer Michael Grade, gave some idea of the thinking, saying that sometimes “a sentence in a script” would be enough to comply with impartiality rules. He defended GB News, which he said represented a “majority agenda”, adding that critics just disliked perspectives outside a “liberal, Islington consensus”. Ofcom distanced itself from these views.

However, a High Court ruling from February 2025 also allowed some latitude. It found that “news programmes” must remain impartial at all times, and opinion and fact must be clearly separated, but for “current affairs programmes” – in this case, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s show – broadcasters should be given more flexibility.

Is this a matter for concern?

It opens up the possibility of a much more nakedly partisan and less factually rigorous broadcast media – along the lines of Fox News in the US, from which GB News drew inspiration. Ofcom’s investigation of an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the presenter Bev Turner may be a test case. In the interview, in November 2025, Trump claimed climate change was “a hoax”, parts of London operated under sharia law, and that the capital had no-go areas for police, none of which Turner challenged. She also told Trump it took “real backbone” to “drop so many truth bombs”. Ofcom is now looking at breaches of “due impartiality” and “material misleadingness” rules.

What do its defenders say?

To its critics, GB News is “Reform TV” – a partial, irresponsible outlet that is pushing the news agenda towards the anti-immigrant right. To its defenders, it has taken a vital step in wrenching the news out of the hands of its self-appointed liberal controllers in the mainstream media, and is providing reporting on issues that really do matter to people. A major documentary on grooming gangs in 2023 by Charlie Peters, for instance, helped to refocus attention on continuing police and local authority failures. GB News has also investigated issues such as the abuse of visas. The channel’s critics, argued Simon Evans in The Critic, “just don’t like the plebs having a show that looks them ... square in the eye”.

Who is funding GB News?

The main backers of GB News’ parent company All Perspectives, as listed on its website, are Sir Paul Marshall and the private investment firm Legatum Ventures. Nigel Farage is also a shareholder. Marshall earned the bulk of his estimated £870-950 million fortune from his fund-management company, Marshall Wace. He has long been involved in politics, having migrated from supporting the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives via support for Brexit. He co-founded the political news website UnHerd, and bought The Spectator in 2024. Marshall has said that he hopes his media outlets will fight “progressivism”.

In 2023, he established the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) with the conservative culture warrior, psychologist Jordan Peterson. Legatum, a Dubai-based fund founded in 2006 by the New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler, is also a backer of ARC.

GB News has lost investors £131 million since launch, although it is moving closer to breaking even. Its latest figures, for the year to May 2025, showed revenue had grown to £26 million. Its losses were still high, at £22 million, but the annual report stated that there was “no reason to believe” its investors’ support “might vary to a significant degree”.

Find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest news and other global events by putting your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

With three words, Democratic senator Jon Ossoff unleashed a furious row last week, said Jason Kyle Howard on Salon. Speaking at a campaign event, he declared that Donald Trump was neglecting his presidential duties because he just wanted “to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar”.

The Natalie in question is Natalie Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old executive assistant. Nicknamed Trump’s “human printer”, she’s always at his side – whether in the White House or on Air Force One or the golf course – armed with a portable printer, from which she feeds him favourable coverage and memes. Until now, Harp hasn’t drawn much public attention. But Ossoff’s comment, and the response to it, have changed that.

Fierce loyalty

Ossoff should be ashamed of his “disgustingly sly” insinuation, said Miranda Devine in the New York Post. Harp battled debilitating bone cancer in her 20s that left her in a wheelchair. Her fierce loyalty to Trump stems from the fact that she believes he saved her life by giving patients access to experimental drugs in his first term.

She expressed her gratitude to Trump in an impressive speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, after which he offered her a job in 2022. “Does Ossoff really think a hard-working single professional woman can’t succeed without sleeping with her boss?”

An ‘in-house stalker’

If only Trump and Harp were having an affair, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark. Their odd form of co-dependency is somehow worse. Harp has reportedly unnerved other staff by writing intense personal notes to Trump with messages such as “You are all that matters to me,” and “I don’t ever want to let you down.” In one, she thanked him for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life”. Trump, in turn, reportedly told staff, concerning Harp: “All of you will go off and make money … She’ll never leave me.” It’s not healthy that the president is employing “an in-house stalker”.

This isn’t just tittle-tattle, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Trump backers are presenting Harp as some “innocent bystander”, but she controls a lot of his media diet and helps draft his social media posts. It turns out she worked in the White House for more than a year without the requisite security clearance. Ossoff was right to draw attention to her, because her case deserves scrutiny and “highlights the weirdness endemic to this administration”.

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”.

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

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

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

‘Miserable feud’

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

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

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

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

Difficult future

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

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

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

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Produce shelves are becoming sparser and featuring fewer options. Economic, cultural and environmental factors have reduced the variety of vegetables available to consumers. Prioritizing the same produce can have negative health effects and could make crops more susceptible to climate change.

The same stock

Vegetable diversity is “declining due to market homogenization, land-use change and other threats,” and its “current conservation is insufficient,” said a study published in the journal PNAS. There have been “substantial declines in the range of traditional vegetable varieties grown over the past century, while almost one-quarter of assessed wild relatives of major vegetable crops are threatened with extinction,” said a release by the World Vegetable Center about the study.

“Vegetable biodiversity is one of the world’s greatest assets for improving diets and adapting agriculture to a changing climate,” Colin Khoury, the global conservation lead at the crop diversity preservation nonprofit Crop Trust, said in the release. “But we’re losing it at exactly the time we need it most.”

Several factors have reduced vegetable biodiversity. Initially, “humans selected only a portion of wild plants for cultivation, and then the variety narrowed even further due to the industrialization of agriculture, globalization and the spread of mass production,” said the news publication BB. As a result, traditional varieties of vegetables and “their wild relatives have fallen out of favor, leaving just a shrinking selection of tamed vegetables on supermarket shelves,” said IFL Science.

Also, agricultural practices like “monoculture, the practice of growing a single crop variety across vast areas,” are a “risky business, both economically and ecologically,” said IFL Science. If a “disease takes root in one plant, it rapidly spreads through the entire identical field like wildfire.”

Underrated options

People “consume nearly 40% fewer vegetables than recommended by the World Health Organization,” said the release. Low vegetable consumption is “among the five leading dietary risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease.” In addition, “relying on the same familiar crops,” like “standard varieties of eggplant, kale, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, onion and tomato,” may “not be enough to meet the climate challenges ahead,” said Food & Wine. The good news is that there are 1,480 known species of edible vegetables, most of which are underused.

“The solution isn’t simply to grow more vegetables,” Maarten van Zonneveld, who led the research, said in the release. “It’s also to grow more kinds of vegetables.” Many nutrient-rich vegetables, like “spider plant, slippery cabbage and other dark-green leafy vegetables, receive little breeding attention due to their lower commercial value compared to crops such as pepper and tomato,” said the study. The less-consumed vegetables also “carry traits that could help breed new varieties better able to withstand heat, drought, pests and disease,” said IFL Science.

Unfortunately, these underutilized crops “receive only a tiny fraction of the research, breeding and conservation efforts devoted to globally traded vegetables and staple grains,” said the release. The study highlights the need to “strengthen breeding capacity among both public and private organizations, combined with investment in participatory breeding with farmers,” said the study.

“Much of the vegetable biodiversity we need is still out there,” Zonneveld said in the release. The “urgency is to conserve it properly so that we can use it wisely to diversify diets amid climate change.”

Dating can take a toll on your emotions. Now it is wrecking people’s finances too, as “dateflation” makes standard dating-related expenses inaccessible for many singles. Faced with the economic pressure of inflation, many are turning to “infladating” and going on budget-friendly dates.

Rising costs

Finances impact “nearly every aspect of life, to varying degrees,” said USA Today. Your dating life is “no exception.”

Not only does the “state of the economy impact the kinds of dates people go on,” said USA Today, but it may also “influence who people decide to go out with.” As dating expenses continue to rise, “people become more selective about who they choose to take out.” People use calculations to determine “which dates to go on” and not just “what they’re doing on the date” but “who is worthy of that date,” Damona Hoffman, a dating coach, said to USA Today. You’ll likely “wait to see that there’s some possibility of this relationship going somewhere” before you’re willing to “make a monetary investment in someone.”

On average, Gen Z spends $205 on a date and millennials spend $252, said CNBC, according to BMO Financial Group’s survey of 2,501 U.S. adults. Nearly 47% of singles feel dating isn’t worth the money, while 48% of Gen Z and 40% of millennials say the high costs of dating are an obstacle to reaching their financial goals.

Those who have embraced “infladating” are “being more mindful about spending on dates due to rising costs,” Susan Trombetti, the matchmaker and CEO of Exclusive Matchmaking, said to Vice. Infladating does not mean “investing less energy into your dating life,” said Vice. Rather, it’s “investing less money into it.” Effort goes a “long way with the right person.”

Better than giving up

If infladating worries people, experts note the alternative could be worse. In reality, many people are “struggling in today’s economy” and are “opting out of dating completely because it’s too expensive,” dating coach Amy Chan said to USA Today. She sees it more in her “male clients who feel embarrassed that they cannot take a date out to a nice restaurant.” If the “antidote for that is infladating,” then she is “all for it!”

In any case, singles should be “wary of the person who pulls out all the stops on a first date,” said Chan. People are taught to “read that as romantic,” but this level of intensity “hasn’t been earned by anything real between you.” It’s a “performance,” and often it says “more about how they want to be perceived than how they feel about you.”

This isn’t “just a dating story” but a story about “how our finances and the things that impact them affect every area of our lives,” including “how we pursue relationships,” Michael McAuliffe, the president and founder of Family Credit Management, said to Vice. Basic everyday costs have been “increasing much faster than most people’s paychecks.”

“Leaked diplomatic correspondence” shows that Andy Burnham is “embroiled” in a row with Cuba over Britain’s “looming ban” on cigars, said The Telegraph.

Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro, who was often photographed puffing away, said the cigar “made our country famous” and gave “prestige” to Cuba. But now the island’s cigar industry is facing a perfect storm of existential challenges.

Unjustified barrier 

The Cuban ambassador in London has been writing to the UK government since 2024 to express concerns about plans for a “smoke-free Britain”, according to the leaked correspondence. Diplomats from Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also weighed in.

The incoming generational smoking ban brought in during Rishi Sunak’s reign will “disproportionately impact cigar-producing countries” and amounts to an “unjustified barrier to trade”, they said. Cigars “neither contribute to youth smoking initiation nor share the same public health profile as cigarettes”.

The rift is thought to have “deepened” after the UK government opened a consultation on extending the ban to premium cigars.

National pride

Cuban cigars have “held an unrivalled position at the pinnacle of the cigar world”, said Simply Cigars. They are “renowned for their heritage, craftsmanship and distinctive terroir”.

They are a “valuable export” and a “draw for many visitors”, as well as a “historic national industry” and a “point of national pride”, said CBC. The Cubans who farm tobacco are a symbol of “nationalism and resistance”.

But it’s getting harder to farm tobacco in Cuba, because climate change has made growing conditions “increasingly unpredictable, with a longer and wetter rainy season, and more intense storms”, including hurricanes.

Other challenges facing Cuba’s tobacco farmers include “finding workers and making their product financially viable”, as “falling global demand” for cigars means “lower prices for the leaf”.

But since the US imposed a “de facto oil blockade on the island, the Cuban cigar industry is facing its greatest challenge yet”, said Al Jazeera.

Since the start of the year, precious “little oil” has entered Cuba and the resultant energy crisis has “complicated the cultivation” of tobacco crops. The shortage has been worsened by the US seizing oil shipments from Cuba’s long-standing ally Venezuela.

Manufacturing has also been hit. Dried tobacco leaves are driven to Havana, where they are hand-rolled in state-run factories, but the “scarce supply” of petrol makes transportation “difficult”, and the “lack of electricity” to provide lighting for the factories “complicates production”.

In February, Cuba’s “iconic” annual cigar fair was postponed, said The Associated Press. Tabacuba, a state-run tobacco company, blamed “the complex economic situation” that the island is facing, due to the “intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade” imposed by the US. The organisers did not set a new date for the 26th edition of the cigar fair.

At a certain point, a “swelling retirement account isn’t really about retirement,” said Daniel de Visé in USA Today. The average American family has a little more than $268,000 saved up in an individual retirement account. But at least 32,000 people have amassed more than $10 million in workplace and individual retirement accounts like a Roth IRA, which can grow without taxes due on the earnings, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. And “at the top of the wealth heap, 208 taxpayers have $85 billion saved in IRA-type accounts” that were originally designed for the middle class. “One might wonder how any American, no matter how wealthy,” could amass so much given the restrictions that govern contributions. After all, even “at its most generous,” the federal government only allows certain older Americans to contribute a maximum of $35,750 to a 401(k). Yet some people have found ways around the guardrails.

The “mother of all tax breaks” comes to those who stash startup shares in a Roth, said Brian Contreras in Inc. Entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, and Silicon Valley insiders who have access to early and promising startups will often deposit “that stock in an IRA or workplace retirement account” and watch it pile up “massive gains while still enjoying substantial tax benefits.” Because those shares are cheap at first, they remain within annual contribution limits. Roblox board member Gregory Baszucki, for instance, has “at least $68 million worth of Roblox stock in his Roth IRA, and potentially about $158 million in tax-free holdings total.”

That’s how retirement accounts have become “an artifact of ever-expanding wealth inequality,” said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. While 40% of working Americans “don’t have any retirement savings at all,” the rich abuse the system to amass millions tax-free. “The outsize growth of plutocrats’ retirement accounts has bubbled up to public notice” again recently, after Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) proposed legislation to cap IRAs and 401(k)s at $10 million. Even that amount seems “excessive.”

But anyone can supersize their retirement account with some savvy execution, said Anne Tergesen and Theo Francis in The Wall Street Journal. A “little-known fact about 401(k) plans” is that employees can really set aside “as much as $72,000 in these accounts every year, rising to as much as $80,000 for those 50 and older.” To go beyond the usual $24,500 limit, a worker can contribute as much as another $47,500 after taxes—and then convert that money to a Roth 401(k). “Someone who saved the equivalent of today’s $72,000 maximum” every year from 1984 to 2019 would have had $20.6 million by the end of 2024, “assuming returns consistent with the S&P 500 index.”

‘Video gamers alone can’t keep our skies safe’

Sheldon H. Jacobson at The Hill

The FAA is “recruiting video gamers for air traffic controller job openings,” but “adding more people into the existing system does little to resolve the structural issues that have led to persistent shortages,” says Sheldon H. Jacobson. Skills “developed by video gamers” are “similar to the skills used to manage dozens of flights in the sky in real time.” However, recruiting “video gamers to be air traffic controllers makes good sound bites but falls short of resolving staffing shortages.”

Read more

‘A new poll shows how John Fetterman has created a 2028 predicament for himself’

Zeeshan Aleem at MS NOW

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s “popularity with Democrats has taken a nose dive in the last couple of years,” says Zeeshan Aleem. Fetterman “should not be shocked by how his own party’s voters have soured on him,” as he “still caucuses with the Democrats, but he’s made a name for himself by defecting from the party on several notable occasions.” Should he “seek reelection in 2028, it’s safe to wager that he would face tough chances of winning in a Democratic primary.”

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‘Trump’s Korean gambit exposes a shifting East Asian order’

Wenran Jiang at Al Jazeera

When President Donald Trump “ordered the Pentagon to cut the annual United States-South Korea Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise,” he “laid bare the transactional logic of his approach to East Asia,” says Wenran Jiang. The move “blindsided Seoul and drew a calculated rebuff from Pyongyang, underscoring how growing doubts about the U.S. defense umbrella are reshaping strategic calculations across the region.” If Trump’s “rapprochement with Pyongyang produces only theater, North Korea’s nuclear program will continue to advance.”

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‘Public health advocates are so desperate for help against conspiracies they’ve turned to the place you’d least expect’

Molly Olmstead at Slate

Public health officials have one “innovative and surprising, if disconcerting, solution to our national public health information crisis: AI has the potential to help stave off a conspiratorial catastrophe during the next pandemic,” says Molly Olmstead. Looking to AI for “rescue is usually an eye-roll-worthy impulse,” as AI is a “Pandora’s box of yet-to-be-imagined evils.” But in “this case, the desperation of the situation might just call for public health advocates leaning into the dangerous new technology.”

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

Colorado: ‘Legal and political battles’

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

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

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

Europe: Altering the ‘old map of power’

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

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

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

The trade war between the United States and Canada has turned white-hot, and it is not clear when or if the conflict will abate. America’s northern neighbor is hunkering down for extended economic pain, while President Donald Trump argues that Canada has been “ripping off” the U.S. for years. Tariffs are flying in both directions. Will anybody blink?

‘Undiplomatic’ bargaining

Last weekend’s breakdown of U.S.-Canada trade talks is a sign that Trump’s “bulldozer approach” to trade “may be reaching its limits,” said The Washington Post. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations “rather than accept a lengthening list of U.S. demands,” choosing to face new American tariffs on an “array of Canadian products” that includes “hockey sticks and Crown Royal whisky.” (U.S. consumers could also face a surge in toilet paper costs.)

Carney is digging in. Trump’s “undiplomatic style” of bargaining — including frequent references to Canada as a “51st state” — has made once-friendly Canadian public opinion “fiercely anti-American,” said the Post.

Canada is “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social. “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” That proclamation “depends on the meaning of the word ‘need,’” Paul Krugman said on Substack. Canada “dominates” the type of lumber that U.S. contractors prefer for framing houses, and America “imports millions of barrels a day” of Canadian oil. The United States economy is much larger, but an “all-out trade war would create a lot of pain” at home when American voters are “already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.”

Trump’s latest trade conflict “makes no economic or political sense,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. GOP candidates are “already getting pounded” on affordability issues on the campaign trail. The president’s abysmal approval rating is the result of voter perceptions as he wages “blunderbuss wars without a strategy.” Now Trump is providing fresh fuel for those concerns a “mere 10 weeks before midterm elections.”

‘United against Donald Trump’

Carney was “right to call Donald Trump’s bluff,” Tony Keller said at The Globe and Mail in Canada. There was widespread fear among Canadians that “Ottawa was about to sign a bad deal” with the United States that would make major concessions to Trump “in return for nothing much.” The good news for Ottawa: U.S. voters “won’t understand why Mr. Trump is so intent on severing our partnership.” Canadian leaders must now “appeal to Americans and American business” for support.

Canada is now “more united against Donald Trump than ever,” Stephen Maher said at the Toronto Star. The Canadian government is preparing aid to assist the country’s hardest-hit businesses. Trump seems equally determined. It is “time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” he said Wednesday to interviewer Glenn Beck, per Reuters. This may be a long fight: Carney “sees little chance” of resuming trade talks until after the U.S. midterm elections in November, said Bloomberg.

What happened

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a first-of-its-kind drug for advanced pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest types of cancer and among the hardest to treat. The FDA’s expedited approval of daraxonrasib, a daily pill developed by Revolution Medicines and sold as Rasonque, followed a clinical trial in which patients on the drug lived a median 13.2 months, twice as long as those who underwent chemotherapy, and with fewer side effects. Some “patients who have gotten the drug through clinical trials have lived for years,” The New York Times said.

Who said what

Daraxonrasib has “electrified cancer specialists and patients,” the Times said. It’s “not a cure, but it is the first treatment to substantially extend the lives of patients” with a disease long considered among the “most hopeless in medicine.” Nearly all pancreatic tumors are fueled by a mutated cellular protein, KRAS, that’s stubbornly resistant to interventions. Daraxonrasib “uses what’s essentially a molecular glue to bind with multiple KRAS subtypes” and shut them down, The Associated Press said. Revolution is “studying its technology for several other forms of cancer, including lung cancer.”

What next?

Revolution said Rasonque is “now available in the United States at $39,800 for a 30-day ​supply,” Reuters said. The “vast majority of the cost is expected to be covered through insurance,” the Times said.

What happened

A catastrophic mix of floodwater and mud crashed through Himalayan valleys in Nepal and China-administered Tibet on Wednesday, killing at least 359 people, officials said this morning. More than 1,300 people were reported missing, including 517 foreigners in Nepal and 260 foreigners in Tibet. The death toll is expected to rise as rescue teams reach areas cut off by washed-away roads and bridges and buried under up to 6 feet of mud.

Who said what

“There are no human-made things, no human settlement left,” Sagar Pandey, CEO of a tourism operator that serves Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims who flock to the area, told Reuters. “Everything is just flat.”

Scientists around the world are “trying to solve the mystery of what caused such a destructive flood,” The Wall Street Journal said. The “leading hypothesis” is that a “large piece of a glacier broke off and tumbled hundreds of feet into the valley below, where the ice was pulverized into water by the sheer velocity of the fall.” The impact of the “enormous chunk of ice — possibly a half-mile wide,” registered as the “equivalent of a 5.2-magnitude earthquake and crushed the ice into a fast-moving mix of water, ice and rock that pulverized everything in its path,” said The New York Times.

What next?

Searchers are using helicopters to seek out survivors and drop supplies to hard-hit areas.

What happened

Social media giant Meta on Wednesday agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and implement new safeguards for underage Instagram and Facebook users as part of a landmark settlement with 47 states and other U.S. jurisdictions. Meta also reached a $1 billion settlement with Texas over similar allegations that it endangered children by designing its platforms to be addictive, like cigarettes.

Meta agreed to limit users under 18 to two hours a day on its combined platforms, lock them out from midnight to 6 a.m., block “beauty filters,” hide “likes” and improve age verification tools. A federal judge in California approved the settlement Wednesday evening.

Who said what

Meta’s “dramatic capitulation” could “signal an inflection point for a social media industry that has largely escaped regulatory scrutiny over the harms its products have caused children,” The New York Times said. It also “effectively ends a bellwether federal trial” underway in California in which four states were seeking roughly $200 billion from Meta.

“In a unique setup,” Meta “will pay out only 70% of the settlement,” The Wall Street Journal said, withholding $5.3 billion, unless YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat agree to also pay the states $5.3 billion and join it in implementing stricter one-hour daily limits for underage users. “This framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a blog post.

What next?

The $18 billion settlement, representing “about one month of revenue for Meta,” will be paid out over 10 years, Reuters said. “It could provide a template for resolving thousands of other lawsuits against social media companies.”

“Has any actor, especially a glamorous former ‘EastEnders’ star, embraced the grotesque on stage as admirably and wholeheartedly as Tamzin Outhwaite,” asked Nick Curtis in The London Standard. Following her “utterly un-vain” performance as Kath in “Entertaining Mr Sloane”, Outhwaite now reprises her “monstrous” turn as Beverly, the “egomaniac” hostess from hell in Mike Leigh’s 1977 comedy “Abigail’s Party”.

“In a diaphanous orange frock and ratted Farrah Fawcett wig”, she gives a “tour de force” star turn in Nadia Fall’s assured revival: “every gesture, every wag of her sandalled ankle, reeks of self-satisfaction and command”, even as her drinks party descends into chaos. And there’s fine support from Kevin Bishop, deploying a roster of “sitcom harrumphs and double-takes” as Beverly’s “pretentious, prating” husband, Laurence.

“Revitalised by a crack cast, this is a party you won’t want to miss,” agreed Kirsten Grant in The Telegraph. Casting two Asian actors in the roles of new neighbours Angela and Tony adds edge to certain lines about the local area (in suburban Essex) going downhill. Lauren Patel is “deliciously tactless” as the prattling Angela. As the taciturn Tony, Omar Malik winces with “embarrassment and pent-up frustration”.

And Pandora Colin is “superlative” as Sue, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. A divorcée whose teenage daughter, Abigail, is holding her own party a few doors down, she’s an “unassuming woman who would just like some proper dinner”.

“Abigail’s Party” has often been accused of snobbily punching down on the aspiring working classes, said Clive Davis in The Times. In fact, like “The Diary of a Nobody” – of which Mike Leigh is a huge fan – the play is a brilliant study in “how we construct facades”.

The only flaw in this show, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, is that the darkness of the ending does not quite land. The play has all been so enjoyably comical that the switch to tragedy leaves Beverly “speechless and at sea, for once”. Otherwise, Fall’s production “proves that this period comedy of manners is eternally resonant”.

Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1. Until 19 September.

The first series of the BBC’s “affable cosy crime saga” “Ludwig” was “almost irresistible”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. David Mitchell starred as John Taylor, a famous puzzle setter known as Ludwig, who has a knack for solving “seemingly uncrackable” murders.

When his detective twin brother, James, disappears, Ludwig impersonates him to help his sister-in-law, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), solve the mystery. Series two continues in the “same lively vein as the first” with each episode combining a murder-of-the-week mystery set against the overarching storyline about James’ disappearance.

I was worried that the new series couldn’t possibly be as good as series one, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. “Relief: it is.” The script is “cracking”, Mitchell is “great”, and the supporting performances, including Sian Clifford as a slippery lawyer and Mark Bonnar as a local newspaper editor, are “faultless”. The first crime, featuring an elderly woman stabbed to death, is “a belter”: John’s method of unmasking the killer “made me squeak with delight”.

How you feel about series two will depend on your tolerance for cosy crime, said Annabel Nugent in The Independent. “Ludwig” remains “as light as ever”, and the murders, though plentiful, are still bloodless – they are “cases lifted from a ‘Cluedo’ board” that are often “barely plausible”.

Still, it is a solid comfort watch for autumnal nights – “best enjoyed like a mug of milky tea, sipped down easily and without much thought”.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is “a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, and “happily it does”.

Starring Gillian Anderson as “fading horror queen”, it is both “extravagantly funny” and “recklessly bizarre”. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an “earnest yet self-loathing” director who has been asked by a Hollywood studio to reboot “Camp Miasma”, a fictional 1980s US slasher franchise.

The original is now regarded as “embarrassingly non-PC”, chiefly because its villain, Little Death, is the spirit of a gender-nonconforming child killed by other campers. As a celebrated, self-styled “queer filmmaker”, Kris is just the person to make the rebooted film: she’s a horror nerd who has been obsessed with the original since childhood, particularly with Squeak, its “final girl” (the last female character left alive). She tracks down Billy Presley (Anderson), who played Squeak and now lives, in creepy “Norma Desmond-esque” seclusion, at the former summer camp where the original was filmed.

As Kris tries to convince Billy to appear in the reboot, the pair form a bond, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And as their relationship deepens, fiction and reality begin to blur, and the film turns into something both “sexy” and “slaughterous”.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” “won’t be to everyone’s taste”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Daily Mail – the title gives a fairly good sense of whether it’s for you or not. “It gets messy. It gets pretentious.” And it’s not particularly scary (the violence is “almost cartoon-like”). But it is beautifully shot, funny and “marvellously camp – in both senses of the word”. “Either way, Anderson is terrific.”

Kazimierz Moczarski, the author of this “astonishing” book, was a Polish Resistance officer in the Second World War captured by Stalin’s secret police in 1945, and declared an enemy of the state and incarcerated for 11 years in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison, said Frances Wilson in The Telegraph.

While there, he “endured 49 different types of torture”, one of which was to share a cell for 255 days in 1949 with the former SS Commander Jürgen Stroop, an “architect of the Holocaust and liquidator of the Warsaw ghetto, now awaiting execution”.

Moczarski, who had once tried to assassinate Stroop, discovered that his cellmate was entirely unrepentant, and willing to discuss his crimes freely. Lacking notebooks, he memorised what he was told and later used those memories to produce “Conversations with an Executioner” – a book first published in a censored edition in Poland in 1977, and only now fully translated into English. Composed largely of dialogue, it offers a unique perspective on the “narcissism of Nazism” – and deserves to be considered a “masterpiece”.

Moczarski, a trained journalist and former law student, “grasped that he had been handed the opportunity of a professional lifetime” when he was forced to bunk up with Stroop, said Roger Boyes in The Times. Guided by Moczarski’s promptings, Stroop told him everything: about his rise through the Nazi ranks; about his time setting up Jewish labour camps in southern Poland; and finally, about how he oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, which he still regarded as a “career high”.

With relish, Stroop recalled “tucking into steak and pommes frites” after spending the day watching flame-throwers being “blasted at Jews in hiding”. Asked if he ever pitied his victims, Stroop replied: “Praise be what hardens.” Superbly translated by Sean Gasper Bye, this book will “gnaw at you like a prison rat”.

Because Moczarski was forced to rely on memory, questions have been raised about the reliability of his account, said Jo Glanville in The Guardian. He argued that imprisonment had so intensified his recollections “that he could replay his conversations with Stroop as if they were a tape recording”. While writing the book after his release in 1956, he “fact-checked Stroop’s version of events” – and found that everything the SS general had told him seemed true. Moczarski died in 1975, two years before his book was finally published. It offers a “remarkable insight into the genesis and mindset of a Nazi war criminal”.

Speculation is rife with just a couple of months to go until the first Autumn Budget for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey.

“It’s an unusual high-stakes moment,” said Coutts, as Burnham has only just returned to Parliament as an MP and Healey is “fresh to the chancellorship, succeeding Rachel Reeves”. The Budget will be delivered to Parliament on 28 October.

It will come at a time when public finances are “expected to be gloomier than forecast at Rachel Reeves’ spring statement”, said The Guardian, when the Iran war had only just started.

Burnham has already announced a “handful of cost of living measures”, said Which?, which include a £2 cap on bus fares, the removal of VAT from electricity bills and a business rates tax cut for pubs and clubs.

There are plenty of clues on further cost of living support but no certainty yet on what will be announced. Healey has said, however, he wants to move “power and money out of Westminster, and into every postcode around Britain”.

Here is how the Autumn Budget could impact your finances.

Tax threshold tinkering

Burnham has committed to keep Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income tax rates. But during the Makerfield by-election campaign he did hint at “revising the personal tax allowance”, said Which?, to amend when people’s earnings move into different tax bands.

Wealth taxes

Former chancellor Reeves unveiled a mansion tax in her final budget, which Healey is expected to “push ahead with”, said The Sun.

Other wealth taxes are still “much discussed”, said BDO, but there are fears that a straightforward wealth tax would lead to the wealthy leaving the UK. Other taxes on wealth, such as raising the capital gains tax rate, “might prove better at raising revenue”.

Property tax changes

Burnham has previously described the UK's property tax system as “outdated”, said Fidelity, and has “expressed support” for a land value tax to replace stamp duty and council tax. However, he did say during the summer that there were “no immediate plans” to abolish either one.

Social care strategy

One “bold idea”, said The Independent, is to scrap inheritance tax and replace it with a social care levy. But tax moves to fund a social care overhaul “may simply be delayed until a future budget”, added BDO, as Baroness Casey’s independent commission on adult social care is not due to report until summer 2027.

Pensions

Get set for “another period of speculation on pensions”, said Saxo.

The previous two Labour budgets had all kinds of speculation about limits being cut, such as pension tax relief, “leading to withdrawals and investors pulling money out of portfolios”.

Healey is “broadly expected”, said The Sun, to continue with plans to add pensions to estates for inheritance tax from April 2027.

Burnham has already committed to keeping the state pension triple lock but there is “persistent speculation about cutting the tax-free pension lump sum”, said WealthR. Trimming pension tax relief “could also be on the radar”.

Andy Burnham’s plan to impose tougher sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank risks becoming “a de facto boycott of all of Israel”, a group of Labour MPs and peers has warned.

The Times reported the PM wants to take a more “robust” approach when dealing with Israel than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, with a senior government source saying he is expected to approve plans for a trade ban and the sanctioning of individuals involved in settlement activity.

It comes after the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, said Israeli plans to open tenders for the controversial E1 settlement east of Jerusalem would effectively cut the West Bank in two and destroy any hope of a two-state solution.

What did the commentators say?

Having already pledged sanctions against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over plans to build thousands of new settlement homes, a trade embargo would “risk further harming relations, which have already deteriorated” since Burnham took office, The Telegraph’s senior political correspondent Dominic Penna said.

UK officials warn that a ban would bring “significant practical difficulties”, The Times reported. “Distinguishing between goods from the settlements and goods from Israel would be challenging” while a ban on services would be “impractical”. There is a risk that “legitimate” Israeli businesses “would be hit by the ban” which risks “undermining trade with Israel more broadly”. There are also concerns Palestinian businesses in occupied territories could be hit by the sanctions.

That may be true, but having apologised for Labour’s response to Gaza, Burnham “must ban settlement trade” to show he “meant it”, said Ismail Patel in Middle East Eye.

Unlike Ireland, which outlawed settlement imports in late July, Britain merely labels settlement goods, “a policy that acknowledges they come from stolen land while inviting shoppers to buy them anyway”.

According to The House of Commons Library, UK trade with the occupied Palestinian territories was worth around £38m in 2025, compared with total UK trade of around £1.95 trillion.

The UK, by contrast, is a “tremendously important” trading partner for Israel, said Jo-Ann Mort in Prospect, meaning if the British government really wanted to intervene, “it has weight” and “leverage available”.

What next?

Around a third of Labour MPs have signed a letter calling for a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements, with supporters also preparing a motion at Labour’s annual conference next month.

The PM is expected to set out steps to introduce a trade embargo before then “as he looks to avoid the issue overshadowing his first party conference as leader”, said the Daily Mail.

But the move still risks splitting the party.

Labour Friends of Israel, which includes senior Labour MPs and peers, said it “strongly opposes” the Israeli settlements and supported “calibrated steps against extremist settlers and extremist settler groups”. But, it added, “a boycott of trade with settlements is practically impossible and will become a de facto boycott of all of Israel, which would be deeply damaging to the UK national interest, the British Jewish community and Palestinian workers”.

The trial of a Libyan man linked to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has been postponed at the 11th hour after new evidence emerged just days before jury selection was due to begin in Washington.

Two hundred and fifty-nine passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground, were killed when Pan Am flight 103, from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, southwest Scotland, on 21 December 1988. It remains the UK’s worst ever terrorist attack.

Who was behind the bombing?

The bombing was “one of the largest and most complex acts of international terrorism ever investigated” by the FBI. “Solving the case required unprecedented international cooperation.”

Painstaking analysis of 319 tons of wreckage and thousands of pieces of evidence from a crime scene covering 845 square miles, along with thousands of interviews in 16 countries, eventually led investigators to two Libyan intelligence operatives.

In 1991 the UK and US governments charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah with the murders, which were believed to be retaliation for a series of confrontations between the US and Libya in the 1980s. A decade later Megrahi was found guilty at a trial held in a Scottish court specially built on a former US army base in the Netherlands and jailed for life. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned to Tripoli to a “hero’s welcome” before dying in 2012. Fhimah was acquitted at the trial and returned to Libya.

In 2003, the Libyan government formally “accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials” and agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to the victims’ families. “It never admitted Megrahi’s guilt directly”, though, said STV News, and “questions over the evidence, competing theories about who ultimately ordered the attack, and the involvement of only one convicted individual for an operation understood to have required a state intelligence apparatus have all persisted for decades”.

Then in December 2020, 32 years to the day after the bombing, the US charged Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi as a “third conspirator”. He was taken into custody in the US two years later and has awaited trial ever since.

Why has his trial been postponed?

US prosecutors alleged the Libyan and Tunisian dual national, now in his mid-seventies, was a long-time bomb maker for Libya’s External Security Organisation, and built and primed the explosive device placed in a radio cassette player hidden inside a suitcase on flight 103.

The trial of Al-Marimi, the first person to face justice for the bombing in a US court, was due to start in May 2025 but was delayed after his lawyers said they needed more time to work through more than 400,000 files of evidence.

Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled earlier this month that an alleged 2012 confession given to a Libyan investigator could be used as evidence at the trial that was finally due to begin this week. But the trial was again pushed back, this time to early next year, after “newly discovered evidence” previously unknown to the defence and prosecutors emerged on Friday.

The fact that Friedrich “would have been extremely reluctant to allow an 11th hour postponement after months of preparation and marathon pre-trial legal battles” underlines “the potential importance of the new evidence”, said the BBC.

For the families of those killed in the attack, the trial “represents something rare in this case: a chance for evidence gathered over nearly four decades to finally be tested, cross-examined and argued over in open court, in front of a jury asked to reach a verdict”, said STV News. This would provide some closure even though a conviction “would not, on its own, resolve the wider questions that have followed the case for decades about who else was involved in ordering and directing the operation”.

The Week is partnering with Stratford Literary Festival and Dorchester Literary Festival

Autumn is the busiest season of the publishing year, with new books by Richard Osman, Marlon James and Barbara Kingsolver set to hit shelves. That means it’s time to start planning which literary festivals to visit. The UK is home to an array of events where you can meet your favourite authors, attend talks and workshops, discover rising stars and, of course, come away with plenty of reading to keep you busy right through the winter. Here are some of our top picks.

Cheltenham Literature Festival

Launched in 1949, Cheltenham Literature Festival is still going strong over seven decades later. The revered author of “Empire of Pain”, Patrick Radden Keefe, will be discussing his latest book about the mysterious death of a 19-year-old in London with The Sunday Times chief literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr, and Mary Beard will be making an appearance to examine the surprising ties between antiquity and the present. Budding writers can also book a lively two-hour workshop that will help them finally write their first novel.
cheltenhamfestivals.org; 9–18 October

Durham Book Festival

Pet Shop Boys icon Neil Tennant will join Durham University Chancellor Fiona Hill to talk about how growing up in Newcastle shaped his music, as part of the festival’s “Forged in the North” series. And if you’re interested in life writing, join Louise Doughty and Nicola Wilding to find out how they used letters and photos to examine the complex lives of family members for new memoirs. Bestselling author Susanna Clarke will also be introducing her historic novella, “The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City”.
newwritingnorth.com; 9–11 October

Dorchester Literary Festival

Dorchester Literary Festival returns in October for an exciting week of star-studded talks, debates and live events covering everything from poetry to politics. Highlights include Jung Chang discussing the follow-up to her epic memoir, “Wild Swans”; the creator of “Downton Abbey”, Julian Fellowes, reflecting on his glittering, multi-decade career; and bestselling author Victoria Hislop sharing details of her thrilling new novel set in post-war Greece. Don’t miss the literary walk hosted by Mark Chutter, chairman and academic director of the Thomas Hardy Society, followed by a cream tea.

Tickets are on sale from 31 August, and The Week readers can receive a 10% discount using code T4YVJSDM (valid for a maximum of 10 tickets bought before 30 September). dorchesterliteraryfestival.com, 17–24 October

London Literature Festival

Dua Lipa has curated this year’s festival at the Southbank Centre. The pop star and founder of the Service95 Book Club will be hosting a series of conversations with her favourite writers including Zadie Smith. Other literary stars to look out for include “Noughts & Crosses” author Malorie Blackman and the Sudanese Canadian poet Mustafa.
southbankcentre.co.uk; 20 October – 1 November

Stratford Literary Festival

Expect another jam-packed line-up at Stratford Literary Festival this year, with fascinating talks by the likes of Celia Imrie, Greg James and Marina Litvinenko. Baroness Margaret Hodge will be discussing her memoir, “Battle Axe”, and Bonnie Garmus will be talking about her new novel, “Peck and Peck”, about a young man whose life is turned upside down when he lands a job at a prestigious poetry journal. Neill Cameron will also be discussing the latest instalment of his bestselling kids’ graphic novel series “Donut Squad”.

The Week is the Festival’s media partner and there is an inclusive discount on tickets to some events for The Week readers with the code SLFW26A on checkout. stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk, 29 October–1 November

“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”.

Since the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants last month, terminating employment authorization for beneficiaries, South Florida has been bracing for impact. The sudden loss of TPS for so many Haitian employees who reside in the region has hit its economy hard.

What is happening in Florida?

As a result of the end of TPS for Haitian immigrants, “some home-care agencies have shut down,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nursing homes in South Florida are “scrambling to fill vacant positions,” and restaurants are “scaling back operating hours.”

Few industries have been left untouched. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also struggling with staffing shortages. No other U.S. state has “more Haitian TPS holders than Florida,” said the Journal. Of the “roughly 350,000 Haitian TPS holders” in the US, almost half live in the state. Around 93,000 of them are part of the state’s workforce, according to an analysis by three immigrant-rights groups — FWD.us, Haitian Bridge Alliance and UndocuBlack Network.

The changes have affected both Haitian workers and “South Florida’s tourism industry,” said the Miami Herald. About 52,000 Haitian TPS holders were part of the workforce in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development, per the Herald. Of those, a “significant number worked in tourism-related jobs.”

The Department of Homeland Security has for decades “granted TPS designations for foreign-born people who can’t return to their home countries because of “unsafe conditions such as armed conflict or natural disasters,” said the Journal. When Trump returned to office, his administration moved to “terminate TPS status for 13 countries, including Haiti,” arguing that prior administrations had “misused the program by repeatedly extending its protections.” In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could end TPS status for both Haitian and Syrian nationals. There are “significantly fewer Syrian TPS holders in the U.S. than Haitian ones.”

Critics of TPS argue that people with the status “make up a fraction of the overall labor force — a loss the economy can absorb,” and that any difficulties in replacing them could “have the benefit of raising wages.” Their departure creates “real opportunities for less-educated, American-born workers,” Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the Journal.

Who is feeling the impact?

Employers and deportees aren’t the only ones feeling the impact. Businesses are “terminating employees with lots of experience,” Wendi Walsh, the secretary-treasurer of the South Florida hospitality workers’ union Unite Here Local 355, said to the Herald. That will “put pressure on the workers left behind.”

The local economy will “miss the workers’ income too,” said the Herald. Haitians on TPS in South Florida provided “$1.5 billion in annual economic contributions, $174 million in annual federal and payroll taxes, and $176 million in annual state and local taxes,” according to estimates by the Princeton research fellow.

In South Florida and elsewhere across the nation, many “de-documented” immigrants are “taking refuge in a growing underground economy,” where transactions are “in cash and remain off the books,” said the Sun Sentinel. Some are “going mobile to quietly deliver services that once yielded paychecks.” Others rely on friends and family to go grocery shopping, “fearing they’ll be arrested by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Many of them are “scared the government will deport them to Haiti” when they know they “cannot survive” there, Margarette Nerette, a vice president at the Florida branch of the Service Employees International Union, which represents healthcare workers, said to the Sun Sentinel. They have “kids who go to school” but don’t seek medical care or go shopping. They don’t know “what to do to survive the crisis the government has put them in.”

‘Comes in Waves’ by Carly Simon

★★★

“At this stage in her life, Carly Simon has every right to turn in a biblically gloomy record,” said Victoria Segal in The Times (U.K.). Yet despite her recent announcement that she has been struggling with Parkinson’s disease, her first album of new material in 18 years proves to be “far from doom-laden.” Recorded mostly at her studio on Martha’s Vineyard, the record’s dozen songs are “remarkably full of good cheer, quiet wisdom and, at times, a twinkling playfulness that rolls back the years to Simon’s 1970s glory days.” Anyone who thought the storied singer-songwriter might tiptoe away from her career “need only listen to the opening track,” said Melissa Ruggieri in USA Today. “Over a jaunty piano melody,” Simon “bulldozes” into a chorus in which she advises a friend to “howl like the wind” to get over a breakup. “Maybe I Never Loved You,” the very next song, addresses her famous ex, James Taylor, but its touches of bitterness matter less than Simon’s still-superb delivery. With just a slight hesitation in the final line, she “turns the song’s intention inside out,” creating just enough ambiguity to let listeners find their own meaning.

‘The Womack Sisters’ by The Womack Sisters

★★★

“The Womack Sisters’ self-titled debut album is a throwback to the heyday of soul,” said Shawn Donohue in Glide. Little wonder, seeing that Kucha, Zeimani, and BG Womack are the granddaughters of Sam Cooke, daughters of the 1980s duo Womack & Womack, and nieces of R&B legend Bobby Womack. “This music is their heritage” and the three sisters are “perfectly paired” with the retro-soul label Daptone for their 11-song coming-out. “If I Let You,” a Latin-jazz detour, was co-written by Daptone chief Gabe Roth. The sisters’ “tour de force” debut channels a host of influences, said Jonathan Bernstein in Rolling Stone. You can hear ’60s girl-group pop in “Monster,” echoes of socially minded message songs in “Laughter and Tears,” plus “gospel-infused sibling harmony” from start to finish. Despite their lineage, the sisters struggled for more than a decade to get a record like this made. After being told for years how to build a career, the opening track is the sound of a group “finally taking the proverbial wheel.” The song is “Chauffeur,” and it references one of the many side jobs the sisters took on to support their ambitions: driving for Uber.

‘Fata Morgana’ by L’Rain

★★★

“For an artist like L’Rain, the boundaries of genre are places to explore rather than fences hemming her in,” said Grant Sharples in Paste. On her fourth album recorded under that name, the Brooklyn-based musician born Taja Cheek “constructs sonic realms that feel both tactile and free-form”—a fitting trick, given that the album’s title refers to an optical illusion affecting objects seen at a distance. This “beautiful yet unsettling” record blurs the border between pop and experimental such that “Soulless Cycle,” by far the “heaviest” song of her career, “feels right at home with the soft key arpeggios of ‘With Time’ and the ambient soul of ‘Blue.’” With her lyrics here, “Cheek speaks in riddles and questions everything, especially herself,” said Stephen Kearse in Pitchfork. On “Borderline,” she “picks at insecurities like scabs,” while “Birthday” is less a celebration than Cheek trying to talk herself into even caring. At the same time, she and her two bandmates “bury the malaise under layer upon gorgeous layer of instruments and vocals.” This is music that’s “dense as a thundercloud in one moment, sheer as gauze in the next.”

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Acclaimed Scottish journalist and nature writer Cal Flyn is the author of Thicker Than Water and Islands of Abandonment. In her new book, The Savage Landscape, she travels to remote corners of the world while wrestling with the meaning of wilderness. Below are her six favorite books.

‘Dart’ by Alice Oswald (2002)

A strange, potent, even mystical text, Dart is a polyphonic poem that flows down England’s River Dart from source to sea, as voiced by those who frequent it: anglers, canoeists, naturalists, sewer workers—and occasionally the otherworldly voice of the river itself. I recommend this book to someone about once a week. Buy it here.

‘The Light Eaters’ by Zöe Schlanger (2024)

A work of soulful science writing, The Light Eaters brings together many recent, confounding botanical findings that raise provocative questions about the sentience of the vegetable world. Intelligent and responsibly reported, but still wondrous and full of possibility. Buy it here.

‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ by Rebecca Solnit (2005)

This must be my favorite of Solnit’s books, amid stiff competition. (I also have a soft spot for 2003’s River of Shadows.) As befits the title, Solnit offers meandering meditations on exploration, art, and family history. Her book’s beauty reminds me of the pleasures of the freely roaming mind. Buy it here.

‘Fathoms’ by Rebecca Giggs (2020)

Elegantly interweaving natural history, science writing, philosophy, and cultural criticism, this contemplative book concerns the lives and impact of our cetacean cousins. Factual yet as haunting as any fiction. Giggs does what I’m looking for in a writer: She makes me look at the world anew. Buy it here.

‘Osebol’ by Marit Kapla (2019)

Composed of poetic extracts from interviews Kapla recorded with residents of a settlement deep in the Swedish forest, this book offers a collage of everyday gripes, lyricism expressed in everyday language, and unexpected glimpses of the sublime. I recognized those clashing chords from my time living on an island off the far north coast of Scotland. Buy it here.

‘The Animals in That Country’ by Laura Jean McKay (2020)

McKay’s novel is a mind-expanding work of speculative fiction in which an epidemic of “zooflu” allows people to suddenly hear the voices of animals. This is not the cutesy, singsong world of Disney, but a deafening chorus of demands and unsettling declarations. Hilarious, surprising, and disconcerting. Buy it here.

‘On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World’ by Florence Hazrat

Not so long ago, said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, “WRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHIS.” We’re all thus fortunate that punctuation gradually emerged, beginning with the Babylonians’ breakthrough idea of grouping words inside boxes. A bigger leap occurred in the 2nd century B.C. when Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of Alexandria’s unmatched library, came up with a system odots to indicate pauses amid written language’s rivers of words. In the years since, “the rules of punctuation have been codified, but they have never stopped evolving,” and Florence Hazrat’s entertaining new book ushers us through that history. The book is “no mere wacky usage guide,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It’s instead “a lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries,” all of it undergirded by Hazrat’s “admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.”

“Dashes, colons, parentheses—they are all covered here, as are emojis,” said Jim Kelly in Air Mail. The ancestor of the question mark debuted in the 5th century while the spaces that we place between words didn’t exist until Irish monks introduced them three centuries later. Hazrat makes the particulars of each of these developments “utterly delightful.” Speaking of which, “let’s give a shoutout to Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio,” the godfather of the exclamation point. Hazrat is “a keen user” of that particular mark, said Constance Higgins in The Telegraph (U.K.), and her spirited style can grow annoying. But she’s also willing to accept that her story can’t remain one of constant innovation. Most of the punctuation marks we know today were “cooked up in the rhetorical hotbeds of Renaissance Italy.” If we’re honest, “progress more or less stopped there.”

“There’s a lot of good in On the Mark,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, Hazrat’s achievement is undercut by her determination to enlist punctuation’s history in scoring political points. While she’s on firm ground when she notes that the editors who added exclamation points to Shakespeare’s plays forever changed how readers view the female characters, we quickly “go whizzing off into the land of political grievance.” Ignoring countless less hateful political figures who littered their pronouncements with exclamation points, she calls out Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for the offense, then links Goebbels’ speechwriting to Donald Trump’s social media posts. She even finds proIsrael bias in the hyphen at the heart of the phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Ignore the partisan preaching in this book, though, and you’re likely to agree with its central message. In short, “punctuation marks do matter.”

‘They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy’ by Lauren Collins

“The Wilmington Massacre constituted a watershed moment in American history,” said Sally Greene in American Scholar. Lauren Collins’ “brilliant” new book isn’t the first to shed light on the events of Nov. 10, 1898, when a mob of armed white men launched a deadly attack on the Black political and business leaders of Wilmington, N.C., ending the city’s rule by a multiracial coalition and its successful post–Civil War run as a Black-majority municipality. At least 22 and perhaps hundreds of Black residents were killed in the violence. But Collins, a white New Yorker writer who was born and raised in Wilmington, “expands the timeline and widens the lens,” building on David Zucchino’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilmington’s Lie to show how the massacre’s aftermath continues to shape her hometown more than 125 years after it inspired the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters across the South.

Collins’ book is “distinguished by its deep interest in the origins of the horror,” said The Economist. She opens by introducing an enslaved teenager working on a 1770s plantation and, while developing the stories of four families still tied to Wilmington, builds toward the 1898 clash. The elite planners of the coup wanted power back, and they ensured that the militia they assembled was “armed to the teeth in advance.” As Collins follows the ripple effects of the resulting massacre, “she rightly measures the crime not just in violence but in loss of livelihoods, opportunities, connections, and futures.”

Collins’ book “uncovers history that even many longtime Wilmingtonians don’t know,” said John Staton in Wilmington’s Star News. One of the white families she chronicles is celebrated locally for having brought European workers to the area in the early 1900s, but Collins notes that the landowner who did so was an 1898 insurrectionist who refused to hire Black workers. She also connects 1898 to the city’s troubling school desegregation battles of the 1960s. It’s “sobering” to realize that Collins was right when she decided that the story of the massacre couldn’t be contained to its own time period, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “It had numerous antecedents, and its effects continued to reverberate across generations.”

If you have ever looked into how to make a budget, you’ll quickly find the calculations typically hinge on how much money you earn each month. But what if you don’t know how much you will make next month, let alone six months from now?

This kind of income uncertainty can create a wrinkle in the budgeting process for gig workers, seasonal employees, freelancers and commission-based workers. However, that does not mean they should skip budgeting altogether. Rather, those with irregular or unpredictable incomes just have to approach the budgeting process a bit differently than those with steady paychecks.

1. Plan around your worst month — not your best

If your income is high one month and low the next, you may think the best way to approach that from a budgeting perspective is to work based on the average amount you’re earning. But it’s actually “way better to start low than to start with an average,” said Ramsey Solutions, a personal finance blog. “If you budget low, you can always go up from there,” whereas if you end up “overestimating and then having to scale back later, that can put you in a real tight spot.” So find the month in which you earned the least, then build from there.

2. Make sure every dollar you earn has a purpose

When figuring out how to budget with irregular income, “one of the most effective strategies is the zero-sum budget,” said Discover. With this budgeting method, you assign every dollar that hits your bank account a specific purpose, whether that is covering groceries, contributing to your retirement account or paying off student loans.

You can use the lowest-income figure that you determined in the prior step to set a baseline for assigning purposes. Using that amount, figure out how you will put every last dollar of your income to use. Then, if there is some extra one month, you can top off your savings.

3. Create a buffer with savings

An emergency fund becomes especially important if you do not have the reliability of a regular paycheck. If one month goes off the rails — maybe you lose your most important client or have a health issue — then your savings account is what will see you through. To keep steadily building up that balance, a “good strategy is to put at least a portion of every paycheck you get into savings,” said NerdWallet. And if you aren’t “making enough to do that, you may need to branch out.”

4. Remember to plan ahead for taxes

Many people who do not earn a paycheck from a traditional employer are responsible for paying their own taxes, rather than having them automatically deducted from their paycheck. The impact can be surprising, adding another element of unpredictability. But planning can help lessen the blow. “A good rule of thumb for commissioned and self-employed people is to set aside 25% to 33% of every payment for federal and state taxes,” stashing that in a separate account reserved exclusively for quarterly estimated tax payments, said U.S. News & World Report.

Filmgoers love sports movies for the same reason that networks linger on players celebrating championships after the big game, then cut to the losers to capture their heartbreak: Sports narratives are innately moving. These nine superb dramas keep audiences riveted because they are about much more than winning or losing.

‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ (1973)

John D. Hancock’s largely forgotten “Bang the Drum Slowly” is the story of a friendship between New York Mammoths star pitcher, Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), and his unsophisticated catcher, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), a frequent target of his teammates’ cruelty who receives a terminal diagnosis and plays brilliantly through it for one last season.

“From here on in, I rag nobody,” Henry announces at the end of this quiet, moving character study, a mantra more people could stand to adopt. Its “mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness and bleak humor” hit home despite the lack of “telegraphed big moments on the field,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

‘Rocky’ (1976)

For a niche sport, boxing has produced an outsized share of the greatest sports movies, including “Rocky,” a movie that still inspires countless people to run up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sylvester Stallone (“Rambo”) is Rocky Balboa, a down-on-his-luck Philly boxer who gets an unexpected shot at greatness when reigning champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) chooses him to fight in the exhibition bout that comprises the film’s final set piece. A movie that features “some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen,” its most winning element is Rocky himself, a “character of enormous appeal and charm,” said Arthur Knight at The Hollywood Reporter. (Netflix)

‘Raging Bull’ (1980)

The turbulent life of boxer Jake LaMotta gets the biopic treatment in director Martin Scorsese's instant black-and-white classic. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta as almost tortured with kinetic jealousy and bottomless insecurity, at one point pummeling another boxer in front of his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), because she had said he was handsome.

“Raging Bull” is also a groundbreaking film in the depiction of domestic violence, one of the first commercial films to take the scourge seriously. This “brutally nihilist tale” is told in a “stunning, dreamlike series of episodes in and out of the ring,” with the boxer ultimately “brought down by his own toxic machismo,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘Hoosiers’ (1986)

Gene Hackman delivers one of the best performances of his long, storied career as Norman Dale, a fallen college basketball coach who steps in to lead the high school basketball team in tiny Hickory, Indiana. Tasked with transforming a motley crew of unseasoned players into a contender, he hires the recovering alcoholic Shooter (Dennis Hopper) as assistant coach, and the team gels and starts winning.

“Hoosiers” sounds like a hundred other sports films. But its attention to detail sets it apart, produced in large part by casting mostly unknown local actors as the players. In director David Anspaugh’s film, the “emotions it asks us to feel are genuine and fairly achieved,” so its “artful familiarity becomes a balm instead of a stumbling block,” said Kenneth Turan at ESPN Classic. (YouTube)

‘Bull Durham’ (1988)

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) is a baseball groupie who picks one ballplayer a year on the minor-league Durham Bulls to sleep with and tutor. She picks the gloriously named Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), a fireballer with an unfortunate lack of depth and wisdom but comes to prefer the aging veteran Crash Davis (Kevin Costner).

Full of timeless observations like Crash noting that “strikeouts are boring and besides that they’re fascist,” it is uproariously funny but also succeeds as both a romance and a baseball film. Written and directed by former minor-league ballplayer Ron Shelton, it is a “long, smart kiss to baseball” with the “loping narrative rhythm of a baseball season,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Mubi)

‘Million Dollar Baby’ (2004)

After spending the bulk of his career on Westerns and vigilante films like “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood underwent an astonishing transformation into a widely respected directing auteur. Here he also stars as Frankie Dunn, an aging, dyspeptic coach who agrees to take on the unpolished Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), as she seeks to rise through the ranks of women’s boxing.

The film’s turning point is a tragedy during a fight arranged by Frankie, making its second half more of a dirge than a sports film. A “rueful rumination on sin and absolution,” Eastwood’s “striking framing has the muscular simplicity and directness of Ernest Hemingway's prose,” said Colin Kennedy at Empire. (Paramount+)

‘Moneyball’ (2011)

A movie about the data analytics revolution in baseball is an unlikely contender for one of the best sports movies, but director Bennett Miller’s take on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book gets it done. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the woebegone Oakland Athletics, who hires data wizard Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to revolutionize the team’s scouting and gain an edge over the team’s better-funded peers. Featuring a “sharp, sleek script,” it is as much about a “fundamental cultural shift and the rise of the information elite” as it is about baseball, said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘The Fire Inside’ (2024)

Ryan Destiny (“Grownish”) anchors “The Fire Inside” as Claressa Shields, the two-time Gold Medal-winning boxer from Flint, Michigan, and her coach, Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry). Written by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and directed by Rachel Morrison in her feature debut, it is both an unflinching look at the obstacles faced by a community that would soon be plunged into a national news-worthy water crisis and an unusually well-shot sports film whose boxing sequences jump off the screen. It asks a question rarely posed in sports films: “If you don’t come from privilege, what happens when you fight your way to the top, only to realize that it looks a lot like where you started?” said Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times. (MGM+)

‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)

One of the only feature films about the niche sport of ping-pong, “Marty Supreme” is a character study of the distinctly unlikeable antihero Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), one of those people who leaves a wake of chaos, heartbreak and destruction wherever he goes. He also happens to be a truly gifted table tennis player who pursues his dream of becoming the world’s top-ranked with savage self-interest, running cons on everyone from his own love interest, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), to Gwyneth Paltrow’s depressed, aging film star Kay Stone. Buoyed by Marty’s “endless slippery charm,” it is also a “very unconventional coming of age story,” said Kieran Battams at Voice. (HBO Max)

‘Sports medicine must get better at treating women’

Ashley Austin at Newsweek

Even as “more eyes turn to women’s sports and female athletes surge in popularity, there’s still a great deal that sports medicine doctors don’t know about actually treating women,” says WNBA doctor Ashley Austin. Americans need “increased investment in women’s sports science — not just to improve outcomes for elite athletes but to improve care for women and girls across the healthcare system.” Doctors should learn to “provide care that is truly based on evidence specific to women’s anatomy and physiology.”

Read more

‘Are US black ops targeting boats in the Galapagos?’

The Dallas Morning News editorial board

Attacks on “fishing boats off the coast of Ecuador earlier this year are surrounded by mystery and unanswered questions,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. The “evidence is scarce, but it is enough for Congress to start asking questions.” Who “ordered these attacks and to what end”? If there is “indeed some sort of black ops targeting fishermen with no accountability, it will mark another stain in a long, bad history of U.S. intervention in Latin America.”

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‘I’m a physicist. Congress is about to close the door that let me in.’

Stephanie L. Bailey at The Seattle Times

Somewhere in the “country, a talented future scientist is about to be overlooked, not for lack of ability, but because no one has decided they’re worth helping,” says Stephanie L. Bailey. Two House bill provisions “would bar federal science agencies from funding the offices and grants that broaden participation in STEM.” Some “argue federal agencies should simply fund the best science and that programs like these distract from that mission,” but “in fact, the opposite is true.”

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‘My road trip revealed the good and the bad that hold America together’

LZ Granderson at the Los Angeles Times

There is a “commonality I saw on my drive across America: homelessness,” says LZ Granderson. Americans “like to tell ourselves it’s a California problem, a Chicago problem — something that happens in big blue states.” But of the “states I drove through, all but one were red.” We are “teaching the next generation that, in the richest country that has ever existed, it is acceptable that some people are reduced to huddling in storefront entryways overnight.”

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Treasury Department regulators have granted World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked cryptocurrency enterprise, conditional approval to begin operating as a federally chartered trust bank. The status change provides “new powers and federal credibility” to an enterprise in which the Trump family retains a “substantial financial interest,” said Politico. But the prospect of Trump administration officials clearing a regulatory path for the president’s family businesses has many Democrats and ethics groups warning against corruption on a massive scale.

‘Pretty unprecedented’ arrangement

The preliminary approval for the Trump family’s “flagship crypto venture” allows World Liberty to “issue, redeem and safeguard USD1,” the “dollar-backed stablecoin” introduced by the firm last year, said The Wall Street Journal. USD1 is currently “custodied” with financial services provider BitGo, and has a market value of “about $4 billion.”

After relying on BitGo’s third-party services to “provide a stable digital currency,” said ABC News, World Liberty can “cut out the middleman and provide the service directly.” This marks the “first time in U.S. history” that a business “owned by the sitting president’s family has been granted bank status.”

The arrangement is “pretty unprecedented,” said New York University Stern School of Business Professor Austin Campbell to CBS News. There is now an “awkward situation” in which the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) will need to “police World Liberty, which has an affiliation with the president’s family.”

While World Liberty “won’t be able to take deposits or make loans,” said CNN, critics warn this could be a “new wrinkle on the classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.” Moving forward, “corporations and foreign actors” will have a “new way to stealthily curry favor with the White House.”

‘Brazen act of self-dealing’

Although Washington has been “in knots” over the “steady drumbeat of news” regarding Trump’s expanding businesses during his presidency, the World Liberty decision “stood out to many,” said Politico. Critics call the arrangement “one of the clearest examples” of the conflicts of interest federal officials face as they “weigh the wishes of Trump family-backed companies.”

Trump is now the first ever president to “approve, operate and supervise his own bank” in the “most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a statement. “Congress cannot allow it to stand.” To that end, Warren and a group of Democratic Senators have introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act, a bill that would ensure no high-ranking government official or their families can “exploit their positions to own or control a bank, which could serve as a major vehicle for corrupt dealings.” Democrats will “likely probe the OCC’s approval of the World Liberty bank charter” should the party “regain control of Congress” in the coming year, said Politico.

A significant drought in Panama caused by the El Niño weather pattern has forced the Central American country to slash the number of vessels it lets through its major canal. And the reduced flow of goods through one of the world’s most consequential shipping lanes could create a ripple effect that shakes the world’s economy.

What did the commentators say?

Starting on Sept. 15, the Panama Canal Authority will let 32 ships pass through the canal’s locks daily, a drop from the 36 it currently allows. While a decrease of just four ships per day may not sound significant, it represents a major change for a “critical chokepoint that moves about 5% of the world’s shipping,” said CNN. The United States is the “canal’s biggest user — about 70% of all the goods moving through it are coming to or going from the U.S.”

These reductions are necessary because the Panama Canal “relies on fresh water to operate its locks and has had less rain than normal” in recent years, said the Financial Times. The coming El Niño, when “surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise, potentially causing severe drought and warmer winters, could be one of the most intense ever.” And for Panama, the “result is a wet season that’s already been drier than usual and is likely to get worse,” said CNN, possibly causing a massive shortage of freshwater in the canal.”

This shift in the number of vessels could result in higher prices for consumers in the U.S. and globally, experts say. While some ships “may wait to transit to avoid the higher fees, those carrying more time-sensitive cargo are likely to take the plunge and pay the steep transit prices, driving up the price of those goods,” said CNN. One notable example: the pharmaceutical ingredients in Tylenol and certain prescription drugs, which “come, in large part, from China and are believed to transit through the Panama Canal to the U.S. East Coast,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to CNN.

Others are not convinced the change will have much impact on prices, especially in the United States. There is only a “small chance that cargo owners, pressed by paying more for shipping and other costs, will pass on this increase to customers,” Simon Heaney, a senior manager at the Drewry shipping research and consultancy firm, told Newsweek — especially since global shipping has already “been upended for months by the U.S.’ war with Iran,” said the outlet.

What next?

The shipping reductions are just the Panama Canal’s latest in a line of “other water conservation measures, such as lowering the maximum draft — the vessel’s depth in the water — for the largest ships,” said The Guardian. But the canal itself could also turn into a hindrance for vessels, as officials said that with the “upcoming reduction, waiting times for ships trying to get through without making a reservation beforehand will increase.”

In the meantime, shipping companies have already been “preparing for possible disruptions in the 110-year-old canal,” said the Financial Times, with many taking drastic measures to get ahead of the cuts. For ships that don’t make reservations to pass through the canal, officials typically issue several extra slots through an auction; at least one large ship “paid a staggering $4 million to fast-track its trip,” said CNN, leaving “others, either unwilling or unable to shell out that kind of sum, in maritime limbo.”

This week’s question: A wooden replica of Stonehenge that stood outside a pub in southern England since 2015 was recently destroyed in a fire. In seven or fewer words, come up with a message that could be inscribed on a memorial plaque for the short-lived Woodhenge.

How to enter: Submissions should be emailed to contest@theweek.com. Please include your name, address, and daytime telephone number for verification; this week, please type “Woodhenge epitaph” in the subject line. Entries are due by noon, Eastern Time, Tuesday, Sept. 1. Winners will appear on the Puzzle Page of the Sept. 11-Sept. 18 issue and at theweek.com/contest on Sept. 4. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. All entries become property of The Week.

The winner gets a one-year subscription to The Week.

Click or tap here to see the winner of last week's contest: Spam bill

What happened

Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday won the Republican primary to succeed her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, defeating hard-right Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) 52% to 48%. At President Donald Trump’s urging, Gov. Henry McMaster (R) last month appointed Graham to serve out the last six months of her brother’s term.

Trump’s pick for Oklahoma governor, businessman Mike Mazzei, also narrowly beat state Attorney General Gentner Drummond in Tuesday’s GOP runoff primary. In Georgia’s heavily Democratic 13th Congressional District, former school board chair Everton Blair Jr. won a special election to fill out the term of Rep. David Scott (D), who died in April.

Who said what

The South Carolina runoff was “seen as a test of Trump’s endorsement power,” The Wall Street Journal said, and he “flexed his political muscles in the final days of the campaign” to get Graham “over the finish line.” Trump “did more to support her than he had for any other Republican candidate this year,” The New York Times said, and it took the strength of his “political capital” — including a rally and $830,000 from his MAGA Inc. super PAC — to “overcome her inexperience” and a “flubbed” debate answer about national security.

What next?

Once Blair and Aisha Wahab, the Democrat who won last week’s special election in California, are sworn in, the GOP’s thin House majority will shrink to just four members, 218 to 214.

What happened

Dolly Parton, the country music superstar who wrote and recorded iconic songs like “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene,” died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, after “bravely facing a brief battle with cancer,” her publicist said. She was 80. Over her six-decade career, Parton wrote more than 3,000 songs, sold more than 100 million records, and won 11 Grammys, along with numerous other accolades. She also gifted more than 300 million books to children worldwide through her Imagination Library program.

Who said what

From “hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom,” Parton’s life was the “stuff of make-believe,” said The New York Times. Her songs “vividly captured details of her impoverished Appalachian upbringing” and “shared her views on love, faith, loss and regret,” said Rolling Stone. Parton’s “curvy physique, massive blond wigs and skin-tight outfits” served her “self-deprecating wit,” The Associated Press said, and she was the “rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.”

Parton’s legacy is “not celebrity but humanity,” Country Music Hall of Fame CEO Kyle Young said in a statement. She was a “champion of equality and literacy” and a “picture of dignity, even when dressed outrageously.”

What next?

“At Dolly’s request, a small, private service will be held for immediate family,” Parton’s family said in a statement. “In lieu of flowers,” fans and friends can donate to Imagination Library.

What happened

Canada on Tuesday released a list of more than 700 U.S. products it plans to tax at up to 50% in response to 50% tariffs President Donald Trump imposed on $20 million of Canadian goods over the weekend. The “dollar-for-dollar, rate-for-rate counter-tariffs” will be paired with $5.4 billion in support to protect Canadian workers and businesses, said Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne in a press conference. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said Canada was “targeting products” that will “put political pressure” on the Trump administration in certain states.

Who said what

Trump’s “trade war with Canada is escalating as the midterm elections approach,” voters are angry over rising costs and “control of the U.S. Senate hinges on states along the border,” like Michigan, Ohio, Maine and Alaska, The Associated Press said. Senior Canadian officials maintained that Ottawa “did not design the new measures around the U.S. electoral map.”

But Canada’s retaliatory tariffs “targeted products made in states with hotly contested congressional elections,” The Wall Street Journal said. Ottawa is “trying to show the Republican Party that there’s a systemic cost to doing this sort of thing,” former U.S. trade official Ed Gresser told the Journal.

What next?

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs don’t take effect until Sept. 8, so “there’s still time to pull back from the brink of an even bigger trade war,” the AP said. “Voters hate tariffs,” and Trump must be “hearing from political folks that if he wants any chance of salvaging the midterms he can’t start a trade war with Canada,” Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute told the AP. “My guess” is “cooler heads do prevail somewhere in the next few weeks.”