Crossword - Oct. 23, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 23, 2026

Crossword - Oct. 16, 2026

Sudoku - Oct. 16, 2026

Palo Alto, Calif.

In the Community Center neighborhood is this refreshed, 1973 mid-century modern atrium Eichler home. With the same owner for 53 years, the four-bedroom—plus office—has clerestory windows, its eponymous atrium, a brick fireplace flanked by glass walls, exposed beams, wood-clad walls and ceilings, and an updated kitchen and dining room.

Outside are a patio, mature landscaping, and an attached garage. Stanford University, dining, parks, and shops are a short drive. $4,988,000. Jennifer Buenrostro, Compass, (650) 224-9539

Belgrade, Mont.

This 2023, modern mountain home in the Gallatin Valley about 30 minutes north of Bozeman is set against Evan Reese Creek with mountain views. The great room features hickory hardwood floors, wood ceilings, and a stacked-stone Rumford fireplace, plus a chef's kitchen with a walk-in pantry, walnut cabinets, and a coffee bar.

The more than 33-acre lot has two covered patios and a heated, attached garage. $4,595,000. Charlotte Durham, Big Sky Sotheby's International Realty, (406) 581-8891

Minneapolis

On the National Register of Historic Places, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Usonian Frieda and Henry J. Neils House, a 1951 mid-century modern, stone-clad home overlooking Cedar Lake.

The L-shaped floor plan is anchored by a large fireplace, and the three-bedroom also includes larch paneling, marble stone walls, built-in furniture, and roof-line windows. A new garage is outside, plus patios, a firepit, and water views. $2,495,000. David Stickney and George Stickney, Coldwell Banker Realty, (952) 473-3000

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Built in 1977, this updated, open-plan, California modern-style home in Foothill has four bedrooms. The living room features wide-plank wood floors, tongue-and-groove wood ceilings, a stone fireplace, and a glass wall; the kitchen includes an oversized quartzite island; and a guest suite has a Japanese soaking tub.

The nearly 1-and-a-half-acre lot with ocean and mountain views spans seating areas, gardens, a chicken coop, yard, sheds, and citrus trees. $5,395,000. Cimme Eordanidis, Village Properties/Luxury Portfolio International, (805) 722-8480

East Hampton, N.Y.

This 1985 organic-modern home in the Clearwater Beach Association was gut renovated in 2025. The five-bedroom's great room features high ceilings and arched shelf niches, while a second living room has a large conversation pit under a skylight, and the primary suite’s oversized glassed shower includes a built-in bench.

A pool on the half-acre, fenced property is surrounded by yards, a deck, and a heated cabana. $2,650,000. Sotheby's International Realty - East Hampton Brokerage, Yorgos Tsibiridis, (646) 270-4544

Evanston, Ill.

Near Lake Michigan, this updated, 1955, three-bedroom ranch in a Chicago suburb is less than 10 minutes from town. The industrial modern style home includes exposed ducts, a black brick fireplace, dramatic chandeliers, and a kitchen with exposed brick and an eat-in quartz peninsula.

It also has a sunken dining room and primary bedroom with a glass slider to an outdoor space. The set-back lot has a fenced yard and brick patio. $550,000. Bryce Hoffman, Coldwell Banker Realty, (217) 502-4940

Americans keep buying a lot of stuff, even though said stuff is getting more expensive. The spending helps keep the economy afloat amid rising inflation — but at a cost to households digging deeper into debt to stretch their paychecks.

What did the commentators say?

Americans “continue to spend” even though they are “feeling pessimistic about their finances as affordability pressures mount,” said NBC News. Retail sales were up in August, and holiday spending is “projected to hit record levels this year.” The seemingly good numbers flick at a gloomier reality, however. The rise in spending is largely “because people are paying more” for the stuff they routinely buy.

The trend is “particularly remarkable” given the overall “downbeat consumer sentiment,” said The Wall Street Journal. Those dark moods historically “correlated with lower consumer spending,” but that rule of thumb mostly broke since the pandemic. Now economists say bad feelings about the economy are “increasingly decoupled from spending and other economic indicators.” Americans are “spending their financial condition, not their psyche,” said Mark Mathews, the chief economist at the National Retail Federation, to the outlet.

Older consumers are driving the economy, said CNBC. The affordability crisis is for “younger people,” said economist Ed Yardeni to the outlet. Senior Americans have “accumulated an enormous amount of net worth” that has allowed them to keep spending.

What next?

It is not clear the spending can continue much longer. U.S. households are “borrowing more, saving less and watching their paychecks lose purchasing power,” said The Wealth Advisor. Consumer debt is now above $18 trillion, a total which will carry future consequences. Today’s borrowing has the potential to “constrain spending for years, particularly when balances carry high interest rates.”

High prices “haven’t put a dent in U.S. holiday spending,” said The Street. Consumers have already begun Christmas shopping, increasingly relying on “buy now, pay later” options to buy gifts and other seasonal items. September purchases of holiday items “ran well ahead of 2025,” said Bank of America in a statement, per the outlet.

‘Live at Carnegie Hall’ by Cameron Winter

★★★★

While listening to this album’s opening track, “I hear the Great American Songbook compressed into a brilliant point of light,” said Walden Green in Pitchfork. Cameron Winter, the frontman of the rock band Geese, was just 23 when he took the stage at Carnegie Hall last December for a single solo performance in which he put away his guitar to accompany himself alone on a grand piano. The resulting album—and the concert film that’ll soon accompany it—may be exercises in mythmaking, but Winter earns his acclaim here. The more he strips down his sound, “the closer he gets to some platonic ideal of music,” and though his 2024 solo album provided most of his set, the three new tunes are “some of Winter’s very finest.”

Still, this record “might drive a further wedge between the believers and the skeptics,” said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal. Winter’s “unusual” singing style is even more conspicuous here; if you can’t get past that, his gifts as a songwriter may escape you. Still, the album is inspiring “precisely because it’s challenging.” It’s fun engaging with music “that needs time to sink in.”

‘She’s the Best’ by Troye Sivan

★★★

“There seems no reason why Troye Sivan should still be a relative cult figure within pop rather than an actual multiplatinum star,” said Alexis Petridis in The ­Guardian. The fourth album from the 31-year-old Aussie native is packed with “very hooky” songs and evidence of his many A-list backers. They include Madonna, who signed off on his cribbing of a past hit for “Party,” a deadpan good-times anthem. But at least Sivan “seems to be using the space he occupies to his advantage, to push and experiment,” and to write lyrics “as unapologetically queer” as they are here.

She’s the Best is “easily his finest collection of songs to date,” said Craig Jenkins in NYMag.com. “On the surface, the album is an ode to women Sivan has called friends, collaborators, and defenders,” but it’s “perhaps more interested in unpacking the invisible strings of lust and yearning that drag Sivan off the couch night after night.” For now, club life answers his worries about failing to find a forever mate, and an array of producers help him connect to today’s “time-travel-pop wave” as he expresses those feelings. The effort leaves him “redefining himself from song to song.”

‘Dedicated to You’ by Branford Marsalis Quartet & Dianne Reeves

★★★

The 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman “will always remain sacred,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. But in Coltrane’s centennial year, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and singer Dianne Reeves have reinterpreted the most revered ballads album in jazz and made it newly stunning. “For so many of us who have grown used to Hartman’s warm baritone over countless listens,” hearing a new vocalist sing the same six standards “can be ear-bending.” But Reeves “wrings every drop of emotion from the title track,” delivers a “flawless interpretation” of “You Are Too Beautiful,” and teams with pianist Joey Calderazzo for an endearing “My One and Only Love.”

Marsalis and his quartet fill out the album with three Coltrane instrumentals, said Chris Pearson in The Times (U.K.). Still, “it’s those vocals that stay with you.” Reeves, to her credit, “becomes very much part of the band, embedded, one of the instruments.” On “Lush Life,” she does so by singing the intro alone, then stopping halfway through for solos from Marsalis and Calderazzo that “echo and expand on her initial vocal, as if they are her thoughts.” It’s an “exceptionally brilliant” take.

Many horror hits are more fascinating or engrossing than terrifying. But these four films manage to create genuinely unnerving atmospheres of dread.

‘The Exorcist’ (1973)

Director William Friedkin’s classic brought demonic terror straight to the heart of the postwar American suburbs with this story of a young girl’s possession. It retains its capacity to unsettle, leaving the “audience subject to devilish, claustrophobic torment,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)

The film that invented the “found footage” trope is also viscerally scary, following a group of students into the woods to investigate a local supernatural legend. Relying on atmosphere instead of flashy special effects, it “set up a convincing everyday reality and furtively sneaked the horror in,” said Steve Rose at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

‘Session 9’ (2001)

A group of workers is sent to clear asbestos from an abandoned mental hospital and slowly succumbs to claustrophobia, paranoia and fear. This “character-driven take on the classic haunted house movie” is “one of the great American horror films of the 21st century,” said Matthew Monagle at Roger Ebert. (AMC+)

‘The Witch’ (2015)

Director Robert Eggers delivers a taut, terrifying period piece with this tale of a 17th-century New England family expelled from their village and stalked by a witch — a movie that also put the then-fledgling studio A24 on the map. Suffused with “quiet, tangible malevolence,” the tale “carefully strips you of modern sensibilities, pulling you into a world without irony or awareness,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Prime Video)

For the first time in years, applications are flowing in to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that controls web addresses, for new top-level domains. These proposed suffixes at the end of URLs will shape the internet’s next era.

What did the applications reveal?

ICANN has received 1,615 applications from 481 applicants so far, according to its Reveal Day announcement earlier this month. It is the “biggest shake-up” of internet addresses in “more than a decade” and could “result in you typing .fart to reach a website,” said The Times. While some domains are “quirky,” others show how “AI companies are seeking to grab domains like .agi, .superintelligence and .chatgpt.”

Ten different companies including Meta and OpenAI applied for the .agent domain, seven for .agi, and six including OpenAI for .asi, “attempting to get in on” Trump’s push to switch from artificial intelligence to super intelligence, said The Verge. OpenAI applied for 15 top-level domains, or TLDs, while Meta filed for 21.

This is the first time ICANN has accepted applications in over a decade. The nonprofit “first sought new top-level domain applicants in 2012,” said Politico, resulting in .app, .web and .pizza. Each application costs $227,000 and is “subject to, among other processes, a community input period that runs from November to March.”

Those awarded a domain “become registries, gaining control over the suffix,” said The Times. They can keep these for themselves or “sell the registrations under it to third parties.”

Who benefits?

The domain applications show that organizations worldwide are “seeking new ways to build trusted online identities, serve their communities and connect with internet users,” said ICANN President and CEO Kurtis Lindqvist in a press release. But not everyone is enthusiastic.

Internet safety expert John Carr, who has attended ICANN meetings for a decade, is critical of the organization’s process. It’s a “conspiracy against the public good,” he said to The Times. Under its rules, ICANN is supposed to check the “real-world identities” of the people buying the domain names, but “they don’t.” These new domains are just “another way for them to make money.”

“Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s marriage was not a marriage of equals,” said Sebastian Smee in The Atlantic. “Pollock was weak and Krasner was strong.” That dynamic comes across in the new joint exhibit at the Met. More importantly, the show “does each artist the honor of representing them at their best” and, by gathering so many of their exhilarating paintings, “makes a powerful case for abstract expressionism as an unassailable peak of 20th-century American visual expression.” It’s plainly “thrilling” to stand before a great Pollock or a great Krasner. And while Pollock’s groundbreaking drip paintings, the ones that made him America’s most famous artist, have lost none of their visceral power, this show “establishes beyond a doubt” that Krasner was both more talented than her hard-drinking, insecure husband and equally as accomplished and original. At Krasner’s peak in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the paintings she produced were better than any made by more celebrated contemporaries. Unfortunately, being Pollock’s wife, then widow, “meant being relegated to second place.”

“Right off the bat, the show opens with a big blast of Krasner,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. A half dozen large collage paintings, all from the mid-1950s, “look like a lineup of ghostly raised arms, but also like a garden grown wild.” One of them, 1955’s powerful Bald Eagle, incorporates scraps of both her husband’s drawings and her own earlier work. “Inevitably, and justifiably,” Pollock’s history-making canvases are presented in a huge gallery at the heart of the exhibition. These are the pictures that “brought a merging of paint, choreography, and gravity to the point of explosion,” prompting Life magazine to canonize Pollock in 1949 as arguably the country’s greatest living artist. But abstract expressionism, “like all radical art impulses,” soon lost its freshness, even for Pollock. He hit a creative block in the ’50s, returned to heavy boozing, and died in 1956 while driving drunk, about a mile from the eastern Long Island home he shared with Krasner. His young mistress survived the crash.

“By any reckoning, ‘Krasner and Pollock’ is one of the most gorgeously designed and ingeniously installed exhibitions in the Met’s history,” said Lucy Ives in Hyperallergic. And there’s little mystery about its subtext: We come seeking insight into how Krasner survived her entanglement with a needy, art-world comet, and how it all affected her art. As it unfolds the story in politely phrased wall text, the show “has all the sweetness of a gossip session with a cherished confidante.” Yet there’s “something breathtaking” about the way it “simultaneously undercuts Pollock and demonstrates why his priceless canvases remain relevant.” Here, amid 48 of his pieces and 74 of hers, his work matters most in the ways it contributed to Krasner’s artistic development. “I’ve never seen an upending quite like this.”

Kate Atkinson is the celebrated author of Life After Life, Case Histories, and 12 other novels set mostly in her native U.K. In her latest, Our Noble Selves, a former POW becomes a murder suspect while helping stage a 1951 festival intended to boost national morale.

‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (1871–72)

Essentially, Middlemarch is a historical novel, set in the period 50 years prior to its publication. Eliot’s breadth and ambition and energy in painting a picture of a society in the midst of cataclysmic change is astounding. I also think it’s a very romantic book—not something Eliot is often accused of.

‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

It took many years before Vonnegut felt able to give fictional shape to his experiences as a POW in the Dresden firestorm. The time-­ traveling, science-­fiction elements along with Vonnegut’s typical off-­kilter style work against the odds to make this—along with its ­ brother-in-arms, Heller’s Catch-22—one of the most powerful novels about World War II.

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen (1817)

I could have simply picked all six of Austen’s novels, but if I had to choose one, then this final one—a profound exploration of the human heart—would be the one. It is also about the pain of the path not chosen and the absolute powerlessness of women.

‘Parade’s End’ by Ford Madox Ford (1924–28)

This is cheating perhaps, because it’s actually a tetralogy that follows the fortunes of Christopher Tietjens from before the First World War and into its aftermath. It’s one of those novels—sorry, four novels—that I have trouble describing and am inclined to say, “Just read it.”

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Laurence Sterne (1759–67)

Tristram Shandy is a very funny, digressive novel about a man trying to write his autobiography and failing to get past the first scene. I always remember my English tutor at university introducing it by saying that it was one of the first novels and also one of the first antinovels, although nowadays I think they would probably call it metafiction.

‘Just William’ by Richmal Crompton (1922)

I had a quietly passive only-­childhood, but ­William provided an alternative, escapist universe of naughtiness and high spirits. Even now, I would, if I could, be happy to live in William’s world. And have a dog called Jumble.

With the midterms two weeks away, there’s a good chance Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives, according to polls. And some believe Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will face a battle among fellow GOP members for the role of House minority leader in the new Congress.

‘Delicate dance’

With many seemingly resigned to a midterm loss, Republicans are “jockeying behind the scenes over who could lead their party in the minority,” said Annie Grayer at CNN. One of the top contenders is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is undergoing a “delicate dance” to position himself for the leadership role. Though Jordan has publicly supported Johnson, he may be “laying the groundwork to run for the top leadership spot if they lose the chamber.”

Some GOP members are more likely to “seek a leader who is willing to serve as a check on the Trump administration if Democrats flip the House,” said Sudiksha Kochi at The Hill. “I hear it all the time in the District. We want a check and balance. We don’t want a rubber stamp,” said one GOP lawmaker to the outlet. There will be a “potential push to support someone else as leader besides Johnson if the party suffers major losses in the midterms,” said Kochi.

‘Stay and serve’

Johnson rejects the possibility of a leadership change should the GOP majority fall. In the “unlikely scenario where we lost the majority, I would expect my colleagues would ask me to continue leading this conference, even if we have divided government,” he said to CBS News amid a push for Republican fundraising. “My intention is to stay and serve, and that’s what I have been doing, as best I can.”

Some Republicans have “insisted that Johnson has enough support in the party to continue running the conference even if they lose the majority,” said Mariana Alfaro at The Washington Post. These officials feel it would “not be Johnson but Trump who will be blamed if the party loses the House,” especially given Trump’s “unpopularity and that his policies have led to high prices.”

“It is a shame how many people wouldn’t dream of reading James Marriott’s eloquent, learned, and admirably brief book,” said Daniel Akst in The Wall Street ­ Journal. Reading is dying, as the 33-year-old London Times columnist tells us, so it’s inevitable that most of the public will miss out on the joys of following him as he lays out his concerns. The causes of his worries aren’t new. A 2022 survey found that in the previous 12 months fewer than half of American adults had read a book. A year later, another study found that in an average day only 16% read anything for pleasure. Of course, there’s “a lot more at stake” in this decline than good books being left unread. Marriott, by revisiting ties between the rise of mass literacy and mass democracy, “makes a strong case” that long-form reading is a necessary ingredient to sustaining the kind of rational and probing collective dialogue that has made mass democracy possible.

Marriott “might be insufficiently pessimistic,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post. Though he’s right that smartphones and the short-form videos they spawn have contributed to reading’s decline, the larger problem is that too many of our fellow citizens have become “pathetically nostalgic for the mental lassitude of pre-literate people.” It was not until the 18th century that large numbers of our forebears began reading widely, but we have them to thank for launching the modern age, and today, as childish thinking spreads, we’re seeing that “reason, tolerance, and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.” Marriott, “like many alarmists,” builds his argument on ­ cherry-picked data, said Chris Ferguson in Reason. He reports that reading scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low in 2024 without mentioning that they’d peaked in 2012, several years after the advent of smartphones. Meanwhile, the supposed link between literacy and healthy democracies is undermined by the highly literate societies that gave birth to the fascist regimes of 20th-­century Germany, Italy, and Japan.

“The New Dark Ages is too ominously titled,” said Michael O’Donnell in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Throughout the book, Marriott “thoughtfully acknowledges” evidence that reading and reason might not be utterly doomed, though he could have done more to acknowledge that the work many of us do still requires a lot of reading and writing. “Are we courting the same scenario as the Middle Ages, when a select few held the keys to knowledge, to the exclusion of all others? Probably not.” Still, “the thrust of Marriott’s ­argument — there is a decline in reading that is antithetical to the progress of the ­Enlightenment — strikes me as persuasive.”

Anyone shopping for airline tickets these days has likely experienced sticker shock, said Elaine Glusac in The New York Times. Airfares have “spiked,” with tickets now 24% higher on average than last year, the Consumer Price Index estimates, and holiday fares for Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching uncomfortable “new heights.” The question some consumers are asking is, Is the death of Spirit Airlines to blame? Possibly. Aviation analytics company Cirium looked at over 1,120 of the budget airline’s former routes and found that the “fares on more than 90% of those routes” have climbed since Spirit collapsed. “The median fare rose by 25.3%,” suggesting other airlines are feeling less pressure to keep a lid on their prices. “But price rises go beyond Spirit’s network” as well.

Fuel costs are the main factor, said Rio Yamat in the Associated Press. The price of “jet fuel has risen even faster than oil during the war” in Iran, since jet fuel competes with diesel for refinery space. But even if fuel prices suddenly drop, fliers might not see airfare reductions for months. Carriers “typically decide several months in advance how many flights to operate and seats to offer,” and they will try to lock in higher prices for as long as they can. Some blame can also be directed at what’s in your wallet, said Mark Kahan in The New York Times. The U.S. desperately needs more competition in air travel. But the legacy carriers get billions each year from banks that issue their popular reward cards. “These programs function as collateral, giving the biggest airlines access to inexpensive capital that their smaller rivals can’t match.” That is “the biggest barrier to another national carrier emerging” to keep fares in check.

There are still ways to find cheaper flights, said Megan Cerullo in CBS News. Flexibility with dates and times can lead to better deals, but it’s still best to book early. Google Flights recommends buying Thanksgiving flights in October, between 57 and 21 days before departure. For December holidays, look to book “56 days before departure” or around Halloween. Off-peak days are generally less expensive, especially Mondays and Tuesdays. Be careful if you want to ask AI for help, said Webb Wright in Gizmodo. I asked Meta’s new Muse AI agent for help “booking my holiday travel, something I have an annual habit of putting off until the last possible minute.” Bad idea. “I fell into a long and rather disorganized conversation” with my chatbot, which offered me “various flight itineraries” of questionable benefit. It’d be nice if Muse could simply search on Expedia, but AI agents aren’t allowed to access the site. For booking travel, AI “felt less like a seamless assistant than a slow and superfluous middleman.”

‘You Can See Everything’

Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★★

“No two people will draw the same conclusions from this movie. That is part of what makes it a masterpiece,” said Shane O’Neill in The Washington Post. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s unsettling portrait of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes became “the most anticipated documentary of the decade” when an “unnerving” teaser was released last month showing a smiling, unblinking Holmes in extreme close-up staring at Fielder and insisting on her guilelessness. Word spread that shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, she had invited Fielder, the idiosyncratic mastermind behind The Rehearsal, to bring his cameras into her home, and in the resulting three-hour film, “she doesn’t get any less weird or more scrutable.”

Somehow “more shocking, thornier, and revealing than billed,” You Can See Everything “plays like an unraveling of certainty in real time,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Holmes continues to insist she did nothing wrong when she became a billionaire a decade ago by touting a breakthrough medical device that her company couldn’t build, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Yet when she heads to prison halfway through, bidding goodbye to her husband and two children, this already riveting film “truly takes wing.” Bringing in a stand-in for Holmes, Fielder keeps pushing to understand his subject’s apparent detachment from reality, until the movie becomes “an intricate investigation into, among other things, the incomprehensibility of love,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In the end, “it’s not just the film of the year.” It’s also “a documentary that stands shoulder to shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.”

‘Sense and Sensibility’

Directed by Georgia Oakley (PG)

★★★

The new screen adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is “not the lush, buttoned-up period drama of tradition,” said Nikki Baughan in Screen Daily. Director Georgia Oakley, coming off an acclaimed 2022 art house debut, clearly wanted to foreground relatable emotions over Regency-era costumery with her take on Jane Austen’s tale of the cash-strapped Dashwood sisters. “That’s not to say the film doesn’t look gorgeous.” But compared with Ang Lee’s “candy-colored” 1995 version, Oakley’s is “decidedly more grounded” as it once again lets us watch sensible Elinor and free-spirited Marianne pursue husbands after their father’s death lands them in relative financial peril. “For those of us who adore the 1995 film, unfavorable comparisons seem inevitable,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter.

Despite a “more than capable cast,” led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, the new movie has “a low-energy feel” in part because Oakley and her screenwriter “lean so heavily into Elinor and Marianne’s crushing disappointments and the forces holding them back in a period of vast gender inequality.” Fortunately, none of Oakley’s tweaks “dim the roiling passions of the sisters as they approach love from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum,” said Derek Smith in Slant. By focusing on Elinor and Marianne’s bond and how it’s tested by their different outlooks, this Sense and Sensibility “manages the difficult feat of breathing new life into these familiar characters’ interior lives.”

‘Misty Green’

Directed by Chris Rock (R)

★★★

“If Misty Green never comes apart at the seams,” it’s because Rosalind Eleazar “simply won’t let it,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The Slow Horses actress is “never less than great” in the title role of Chris Rock’s new drama about a hot-mess Hollywood has-been who might just land a comeback role nearly 20 years after her peak if she can refrain from sabotaging herself for once. Rock’s “unkempt” script strains to combine a poignant character study with a scalding takedown of L.A.’s dream factory, and its excesses might have tanked the film if Eleazar didn’t hold it all together by “sheer force of will.”

The movie has “nothing insightful” to tell us about Hollywood’s dark corners that we haven’t heard already, said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The despicable side characters “feel a little easy,” starting with a producer, played by Adam Driver, who tempts Misty with drugs and lucrative sex work. Only one industry player comes across as noble—“probably because he’s played by Rock himself.” Fortunately, none of Rock’s misfires matter “once you lock into what Eleazar is doing,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. She brings “nuance, shade, and emotional depth” to every story beat in Misty’s quest for redemption. “Eleazar doesn’t just make the movie work; she is the movie.” The TV veteran has never previously landed such a robust role, and “dear god, does she make the most of it.” She “deserves every accolade and every bit of the spotlight that Misty Green affords her.”

An obscure island in the Indian Ocean has become an unlikely titan in the global online gambling industry. With its lack of corporate taxes and “minimal red tape”, Anjouan has become home to a “thriving industry” of gambling websites tied to the black market, and counts banks, brokers and cryptocurrency exchanges among its virtual residents, said Australia’s ABC News.

But there is “just one problem”: “none of the licences – financial or gambling – are worth the (virtual) paper they are written on”. Meanwhile, the industry continues to draw operators and gamblers from around the world – including Britain – into its ever-expanding orbit.

A widening ‘network’

Traditionally, Anjouan – one of the semi-autonomous islands that make up the Comoros archipelago – was best known for its exports of ylang-ylang oil and vanilla. But it has since “stumbled” into the “dangerous but highly lucrative” industry of underground online gambling, said The Guardian. There are now 1,500 registered gaming licence holders on the books in Anjouan.

This is far from a state-sponsored endeavour to create a low-regulation haven on the island. In fact, it appears to be led by a “small cadre of mostly British businessmen flogging unofficial ‘licences’” to online casinos, as well as banking and cryptocurrency platforms.

Anjouan-licensed gambling platforms have been linked to “serious breaches” including fraud, “theft of personal data” and a lack of payment of winnings, said Le Monde. And those seeking redress will find that “the legal value of licences from this island is highly questionable”.

‘Fighting back’

The whole operation is given a veneer of legitimacy thanks to a global “network” of organisations selling fraudulent gambling licences, which is estimated to be making “tens of millions of dollars a year in fees”, said ABC News. But the island’s authorities claim supposed gambling regulators are “fictitious entities” operating “illegally”, while Anjouan’s supposed financial regulator “lacks both credibility and accountability”.

Licences often “reassure” customers that there has been “some kind of due diligence process” in the operation, keeping their gaming and winnings “safe”, said sporting ethics NGO PlayTheGame. But under the surface, in the “overwhelming majority of cases”, customers find themselves “helpless” should they end up as the victim of fraud. And sadly, this happens “often”.

For its part, the island is “fighting back”: making efforts to rid itself of its increasingly notorious reputation, said The Guardian. The government of the Comoros Union has made a “direct request” to the British government for assistance to unravel the “unauthorised licensing regime” once and for all.

The data center boom has “entered a new, contradictory phase,” said Brian Martucci in Utility Dive. Construction activity on the massive warehouses filled with AI servers “remains robust.” But several billion-dollar projects are facing “a host of challenges,” including worker shortages, a lack of gas turbines, grid constraints, permitting delays, and widespread community opposition. The problems came to a head recently in New Mexico, when Oracle issued an unusual force majeure notice—normally reserved for insurance against “acts of God”—to “protect itself financially from the delay or cancellation” of its so-called Project Jupiter, after state regulators “blocked a gas pipeline proposed to serve it.” Google has also recently had to halt work on two data centers in Finland after a local outcry spurred an environmental review, while a Microsoft project in Michigan “faces an uncertain future amid local permitting delays.” Goldman Sachs estimates only 50% of planned data-center capacity may actually come to fruition in the near term.

That means the AI boom may soon hit a bottleneck, said Asa Fitch in The Wall Street Journal. Tech giants need “lots of data centers and electricity” to fulfill their ambitions, but the “delays are biting.” The amount of electricity demanded by data centers globally in the next two years “is enough to power around 118 million homes.” It’s curious that “chipmakers aren’t yet blaring their sirens” about the capacity squeeze. Possibly, that’s because they can’t even accurately tell “how much is being built”—and how much is being idled.

This “cornucopia of holdups” should be a wake-up call for investors, said Chris Bryant in Bloomberg. AI companies are spending billions “to secure precious supplies of computer memory” from chip makers like Nvidia and AMD. But if they can’t build data centers, they could end up “with too many chips and not enough operable server farms.” Almost half of the U.S. data-center pipeline is being built by first-time developers who have jumped into the gold rush, making big promises they might not deliver. It’s a “high-stakes game of musical chairs,” where losers will be left holding chips “without a seat.”

“Why assume the data center has reached its final physical form?” asked Todd G. Buchholz in The Washington Post. Historically, as technology has advanced, it’s gotten smaller. In 1946, a computer “took up the size of a house”; now it “fits in the palm of one’s hand.” Likewise, we can safely assume that the land, electricity, and equipment needed to produce a unit of intelligence will keep dropping. “That’s why communities should welcome new investment but insist that developers pay the costs of power, water, and grid upgrades.” The benefits from the technology will last for years, but the size of the physical footprint will not.

Ukrainians are “gearing up for the worst-case scenario”, said Finbarr Toesland in The i Paper. In the face of an “emboldened Russia”, this winter is expected to be the “most brutal since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in February 2022”.

Stunned by Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of an “energy ceasefire” that would favour Russia, and apparent plans for “peace talks” without Ukraine present, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is struggling to win back US favour. But he needs ways to help Kyiv make it through winter months where temperatures can drop as low as -20C.

What did the commentators say?

“Trump’s efforts on the part of Russia” are “the act of an enemy”, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley. He has “strangled” Kyiv’s intelligence systems and “crippled weapons on the battlefield”. That’s an “act of sabotage”, and “Europe’s leaders must stand up and say so”.

This “sorry episode” shows “just how dependent Ukraine still is on the US”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. For all the “strong words” of Europe’s leaders, “there remains a gulf” between their “rhetoric and the reality” of their support. Iris2, the EU’s version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network won’t even be operational before 2030, and the Americans are still the only ones who can offer “ballistic-missile defence”. Europe must step up its provision of hardware, or “Kyiv’s security will remain hostage to Mr Trump, who has shown repeatedly that he cannot be relied upon”.

Britain and Europe have already reached their “limit” of what they can deliver, said Dimitar Bechev, a foreign-policy analyst at Carnegie Europe, in Al Jazeera. Its €90 billion loan of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine now looks like it “might be exhausted well before the end of 2027”, and any attempt to find additional funding could “open a can of worms” in both EU budget negotiations and upcoming elections in member states like France, Spain, Italy and Poland. But the EU and the UK have nevertheless “replaced the US” as the “de facto guarantors” of Ukraine’s survival. Joining the EU – or, at least becoming a closely integrated partner like Norway – is the “best-case scenario for Kyiv in the long run”.

Zelenskyy may have to “consider a temporary, if unwelcome, change of tactics” to relieve the “terminal stress” on his relationship with Trump, said The Times’ editorial board. And two US senators have suggested “a useful compromise”: if Ukraine pledges to stop attacks on Russian energy assets, SpaceX’s Starshield coverage could be “extended to roughly 200 miles inside Russia” to “help Kyiv take out some of the launchers firing at civilians all over Ukraine”.

What next?

To “reduce the impact of Russian missile and drone attacks” on Kyiv’s small number of combined heat-and-power plants, Ukraine “needs to decentralise” such “critical infrastructure”, Olena Pavlenko of Ukrainian energy think-tank DiXi Group told Toesland in The i Paper, but this is not a “short-term solution”.

More urgently, Ukraine must find a way to halt Russia’s “devastating air onslaught”, said The Times. It needs “proper air defences – and fast”, even if that means halting strikes on Russian refineries in return for Patriot missiles. Trump “may not be minded to provide these weapons” but he is under “growing pressure” from the US Congress, where even members of his own party have “expressed disquiet at the so-called energy deal” with Putin. A strategic pause in strikes may help to “prevent further Trump hostility to Kyiv”, which would be a “welcome” contribution to Ukraine’s cause.

Rising flight and hotel costs, combined with “stubbornly finite” annual leave, means most holidaymakers can take “one or two big trips” in a year, said Sarah Rappaport on Bloomberg. So a “growing cohort” of time-poor travellers are treating their holidays as an “investment” in themselves. The desire to “come home with more than Instagram shots as souvenirs” has given rise to “purposeful travel”: the skillcation.

From ‘fly and flop’ to ‘skilliday’

According to recent research by Mastercard, nearly half of Europeans plan to learn a new skill on their summer holiday – and over half of 18- to 34-year-olds have already planned a skill-based trip this year.

More than half of the 27,000 holidaymakers from 28 European countries surveyed said skill-based trips felt more meaningful than traditional holidays, especially when curated by locals. One in three (37%) booked a trip this year specifically to learn a skill, with a new language topping the list. The “era of the ‘fly and flop’” is “giving way to the ‘skilliday’”.

Tourists are looking for experiences that “create muscle memories”, said Mastercard economist Natalia Lechmanova. From “winemaking and woodworking” to pottery and painting, consumers are “opening their wallets” for a taste of local culture, and a “lesson that lasts long after they’ve arrived home”. Skill-based travel also “tends to draw people beyond the crowded hotspots”, into smaller towns and lower seasons, reducing the impact of overtourism.

These trips tend to cost more than conventional holidays, but the pay-off is high. People often see “longer-lasting positive effects on psychological well-being” than when taking holidays focused on “sun, sea and partying”, psychology professor Andrew Stevenson told Bloomberg. Spending time learning a new skill gives you the added “feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment”.

Over the years, “I’ve clumsily thrown myself into swing dancing lessons in Italy, free-diving sessions in French Polynesia, and Spanish intensives in Ecuador”, said Julia Eskins in Vogue. “I came home from each one feeling a little more capable than when I arrived.”

A trip like this has a “purpose”; said Alex Ledsom in Forbes; the traveller is looking for more than “just a break”. The goal is to fill time with “experiences that teach, reconnect and transform”. Those going on skillcations usually opt to learn something that’s unavailable to them at home, with tactile crafts like “Peruvian weaving or Japanese pottery-making” becoming increasingly popular activities. People are more interested in learning about “heritage, expertise, traditions and customs” than ever before.

That has led to one of the “fastest-growing segments” in the tourism industry, said Lindsay Cohn in W Magazine. Hotels everywhere are “ramping up” their activity programs to offer the chance to develop “new experiential abilities”, and it’s not limited to crafts.

Diving is a popular option for travellers who wish to “explore azure reefs and haunting shipwrecks”. For instance, you can get your Padi certification during a stay at the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives. As for those interested in a “culinary journey”, Grand Hotel Fasano beside Italy’s Lake Garda takes guests on a tour of a nearby village to get involved in “preparing traditional regional recipes, paired with Garda-style spritz aperitifs, homemade lemon verbena liqueur, and local wine”.

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

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

‘Affront to decency’

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

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

‘Attention-seeking self-aggrandisement’

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

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

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

Israeli police have arrested 10 suspects in the occupied West Bank following attacks by Jewish settlers over the weekend in which a US journalist and European diplomats were among those injured.

Masked settlers beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine as she covered an olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah. The following day, settlers attacked diplomats from Belgium, France and Poland, as well as representatives of the Catholic Church, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh.

Why is the harvest so significant for Palestinians?

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the olive sector for at least part of their income. Every autumn, thousands of families harvest olives that have sustained communities for generations. To many olive-growing communities, the harvest represents not just livelihoods, but cultural identity, family heritage and attachment to the land.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture estimates that olive oil production will reach approximately 21,000 tonnes this year, around a quarter of which would be surplus to domestic need and could be exported, said Palestinian News Network. But that yield is reliant on farmers being able to access and harvest their groves.

Settler attacks during this year’s olive harvest season have already surpassed the total for 2025. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented 199 olive-harvest-related settler attacks in the West Bank this season. These incidents resulted in one death, 124 injuries and damage to more than 2,500 trees and saplings.

Why is the season vulnerable to violence?

These attacks in the West Bank “are not new”, said Al Jazeera. Every year, “Israeli settlers and hardline groups use the olive harvest period to assert control over valuable agricultural lands”, including by “stealing crops, or building illegal settlement outposts and roads on private Palestinian property”.

This annual ritual of “assaulting farmers, burning or uprooting trees and stealing crops”, is “making it increasingly dangerous for Palestinians to reach and remain on their own land”, Ahmed Najar, a Palestinian political analyst and playwright, told the outlet.

The attacks are also designed to “deter international campaigners from accompanying Palestinian farmers, standing with them against settler violence and documenting the atrocities being committed”, he said. “The objective is not only to dispossess Palestinians, but to ensure that their dispossession happens without witnesses.”

What is being done?

The EU has condemned Israeli settler attacks, with a spokesperson for its diplomatic service saying it expects “full accountability as well as effective measures to prevent continued acts of violence and violent harassment against Palestinians, including during the ongoing olive harvest season”.

The Israeli military has condemned Saturday’s attack on the EU diplomats and said it has opened an investigation into the incident. However, “despite the international condemnation”, the office of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “questioned the video evidence and testimony” from what it calls “alleged” attacks, said the BBC.

Ukrainian officials are scrambling to address the recent throttling of their crucial Starlink internet connectivity, a major engine of the country’s successful drone operations. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have blamed each other for directly ordering the outage, a growing number of European leaders see the incident as a worrying sign that Musk's products have undue influence in Ukraine’s theater of war — and across the continent as a whole.

What did the commentators say?

Europe “must not leave it up” to Musk and Trump to “decide whether Ukraine will be able to defend itself or not,” said Renew Europe, the European Parliament’s liberal group, in a letter last week to European Union officials obtained by Euronews. Existing European satellites could instead “fill the gap” while the countries pivot away from Musk, said the outlet. The collective effort to respond to Musk comes as French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot this month accused the tech oligarch of using his X platform to “attempt to influence debate in European democracies,” said Le Monde.

“Big man, are you playing politics with your products again?” said Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in a message to Musk on X after Starlink’s latest disruption. “As your European customers, we are watching you.” The minister’s “mocking address” recalled his 2025 clash with Musk, in which he explained that Poland provides millions of dollars for Ukraine’s Starlink access and would “seek another supplier if SpaceX proved unreliable,” said the Kyiv Post. “Be quiet, small man,” said Musk on X at the time, promising later that “Starlink will never turn off its terminals” in Ukraine or “use it ​as a bargaining chip.”

What next?

Even before this month’s throttling episode, European leaders were exploring ways to “strengthen collective satellite capacity” and wean themselves off Musk’s service, said Politico. The EU is now “aiming to give speedy antitrust approval” to a new satellite service “seen as the bloc’s answer to SpaceX,” said Bloomberg. The hope is to “help Europe cut its reliance on American satellite providers” while testing a “revamped EU approach” to creating “regional giants to compete with U.S. and Chinese rivals.”

The White House press briefing room briefly had a new boss, but Katie Zacharia ended her tenure as President Donald Trump’s press secretary last week after just five days. Questions were instantly raised about former television pundit Zacharia and her qualifications for the position, which has an infamously high turnover rate.

Zacharia’s selection

The 41-year-old Zacharia graduated from Pepperdine University in California and appeared to garner favor with Trump after regular appearances on the conservative network Newsmax. But her eligibility for the role of press secretary became a topic of discussion after her first White House press briefing, in which she spoke for only 14 minutes, read “pro-Trump talking points” and called on three reporters, said CNN. Fox News host Sean Hannity, among other critics, sounded “unimpressed with her performance and her answers.”

Questions also surrounded Zacharia’s murky legal background. Zacharia consistently described herself as a lawyer and did receive a law degree at Pepperdine. But there is “no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state,” journalist Judd Legum said in his Popular Information newsletter. She reportedly lives near Los Angeles but is not listed as an attorney with the State Bar of California. Zacharia later told reporters she took the bar while living in China, but she “couldn’t have practiced law in China because foreigners are forbidden to do so,” said The New Republic.

‘Even shorter than Scaramucci’

After her press conference and botched answers about her professional status, the writing seemed to be on the wall for Zacharia, despite the White House standing behind her. She “delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary,” the Trump administration initially said in a statement.

But five days after she took on the role, several news outlets confirmed that Trump had parted ways with Zacharia. Her time as press secretary is the shortest in U.S. history, and her White House tenure was “even shorter than Anthony Scaramucci’s as White House communications director during Trump’s first term,” said NBC News. Scaramucci was in the role for just 11 days and “his name became a descriptor for public officials whose terms were exceedingly brief.”

Trumpworld’s latest scandal “is an open-and-shut case of staggering corruption,” said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. President Trump forced U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign recently after The Wall Street Journal reported she pressured Trump donor Eric Deters to cover her $100,000 American Express bill before her 2025 confirmation hearing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters. He had been asking her for favors, including help making an IRS audit disappear, and Guilfoyle—Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée—promised that if he paid off her debt, she’d be his “Trump ride or die” and introduce him to high- ranking administration officials. Deters didn’t acquiesce, complaining he’d already paid her $300,000 in “speaking fees.” While serving as ambassador, the Journal reported, Guilfoyle’s grifting continued: She often brought a Greek energy company lobbyist to official meetings of government officials and bragged about Greek tycoons funding her luxury travel. In resigning, Guilfoyle denied any wrongdoing, but Trump said, “We didn’t like what we were reading.”

Guilfoyle’s corruption was too blatant for Trump to ignore just before the midterms, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, but she’s a dangerous person for him to alienate. As his son’s long time girlfriend and Trumpworld insider, “she’s assuredly learned too much about Trump family malfeasance” to be exiled with no means of support. Trump will likely “lateral her over to some private-sector position, buying her silence with a well paid sinecure.” Guilfoyle “isn’t the exception to the rule in how America’s third-world government operates.” In Trumpworld, “everyone is getting paid.”

That includes her ex-fiancé, said Robby Soave in Reason. “It’s fair to ask some questions about Trump Jr.,” who also had dealings with Deters, and whose May wedding was largely funded by a Russian oligarch. Trump’s sons are heavily invested in companies that have made billions in government business, while Democratic lawmakers have alleged conflicts of interest by Trump special envoys Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who often mix diplomatic roles and business interests. Republicans eviscerated Hunter Biden for foreign dealings during his own dad’s presidency but are now responding to evidence of Trumpworld’s massive corruption with “stony silence.” It’s no surprise Trump’s “team of mercenaries” are using “their roles to cash in,” said David A. Graham in The Atlantic. “They learned it by watching him.”

What happened

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) came under federal investigation recently for her finances, just days after federal agents raided her home and issued subpoenas for her family members as part of a sprawling immigration probe that could produce criminal charges or a denaturalization case against her. The moves marked a dramatic escalation targeting one of President Trump’s most outspoken critics. Sources told The Washington Post that an investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been looking into whether Omar, 44, or her late father lied about her birth date and omitted information about his past military service when they were immigrating to the U.S. from Somalia in 1995. Separately, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said her office is probing whether the representative inflated her net worth on financial disclosure forms, an allegation for which she had already been cleared by the Office of Congressional Conduct. Omar said Trump is trying “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.

The search is a highly unusual breach of the “blackout” period customarily observed by the DOJ in the 60 days before an election, during which the agency typically refrains from taking any public actions that could imply partisanship or influence the election’s outcome. Speaking to reporters last week, President Trump denied that he had played a direct role in the raid on Omar’s residence but called her a “terrible person.” One senior Democrat told Axios that the search set off alarm bells within the party, which expects “more October surprises.”

What the columnists said

This shameful episode was clearly designed to cast “an air of suspicion and criminality” over one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent progressives, said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. Omar has frequently been targeted by the “conspiracist cesspool of the far-right internet,” which has circulated a number of unfounded rumors about her, including the allegation that she was once married to her own brother. Those attacks found their champion in Trump, who “has been smearing her,” and her country of origin, “for the better part of a decade.”

After repeatedly overreaching in other cases, the Trump administration doesn’t “deserve the benefit of the doubt,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. But Omar has done herself no favors by responding to legitimate questions about her background with “angry, uninformative dismissals.” For instance, she has called her father a teacher, when his obituary referred to him as “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army.” Did he disclose that to U.S. immigration authorities?

This is Trump’s last midterm pitch, said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe: “Gutter racism.” That’s “the tie that binds Trump to his followers.” He amplified “disgusting lies” about Haitian immigrants in the 2024 presidential campaign and recently called New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a Black woman, “a dog.” Trump must believe that appealing to the MAGA faithful’s worst selves will ensure they support his “worst-of-the-worst presidency.”

What happened?

Ukraine said its access to U.S. intelligence and crucial battlefield technology was abruptly curtailed this month, days after President Trump called for the ouster of the Ukrainian president and American officials reportedly threatened to cut military assistance to the war-torn nation. Trump turned on Volodymyr Zelensky after announcing that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel, a stunning reversal of the nearly five-year-old U.S. and Western campaign to economically punish Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine. Eager to bring down the soaring price of diesel before the midterms, Trump said Russia would immediately supply 300,000 tons of the fuel, followed by an additional 4.5 million tons beginning in November. The deal, which could inject some $4 billion into Russia’s ailing economy, shocked European nations and angered Zelensky, who called it “a weak decision” that would allow Putin “to kill more” Ukrainians. Trump demanded Zelensky end Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have caused fuel shortages in the country. When Zelensky said Moscow must first end its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Trump said Zelensky must “damn well stop” and that Ukraine needs “a new leader who can make a deal” to end the war.

Three days later, Ukraine’s armed forces said their access to the Starshield satellite internet service—the military version of Starlink, used for communications and to pilot drone fleets—was being throttled. The cutback came soon after the country was hit by dozens of ballistic missiles, which took out power for 600,000 people in Kyiv, without America’s customary advance warnings. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which supplies Starlink under contract with the Pentagon, said any “limits on usage” are decided by the Pentagon “and ultimately POTUS.” The administration offered no comment, but Ukrainian officials—who Zelensky said had been threatened with an end to U.S. intelligence sharing—drew their own conclusions. “This action cannot be a coincidence,” said military adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers assailed the diesel deal, which came a month after Trump signed a bill to impose tariffs on countries that import Russian oil. The U.S. “should not provide Putin with a financial life line,” wrote six senators, including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and John Curtis of Utah. In striking a deal with “a murdering dictator,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Trump “makes us complicit.”

What the editorials said

Trump’s deal is “a moral and strategic mistake,” said The Wall Street Journal. With diesel above $6 a gallon, he wants to throw a bone to voters weeks before the midterms. But all this deal will do is “directly finance Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.” Trump announced it after a week in which more than 100 Ukrainian civilians, including at least 20 children, were killed in Russian strikes. And he asked nothing of Putin in return. “The only pressure Trump ever applies is on Ukraine.”

“Trump has stooped to new lows,” said the Financial Times, and his hypocrisy here is “glaring.” Having assailed India and China for importing Russian oil and threatened tariffs and other sanctions on countries that buy from Moscow, he’s now ready to hand $4 billion to Putin’s murderous regime. It thoroughly “undermines the credibility of Western efforts to isolate Putin.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s deal is “a fraud on the American people,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. He’s “desperate” to show he’s doing something to bring diesel prices down, but short U.S. supply isn’t the problem—we’re the world’s top exporter. Even if it were, the amounts involved are “trifling.” The first shipment of 300,000 tons equates to about 2.2 million barrels. Our transportation sector alone uses “about 3 million barrels of diesel daily.”

Trump ridiculously blames Ukraine’s refinery attacks for Americans’ pain at the pump, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. But the real culprit is his failing Iran war, which has choked supply from the Middle East. And “Russia has been helping Iran the entire time.” It’s provided Tehran with satellite imagery, drone components, and explosives—all of which have been used “to kill American soldiers.” Now Trump is begging Putin to take our money for some fuel? It’s “the most stunning display of submission and weakness from an American president ever.

Trump has personal reasons for “going for Zelensky’s jugular,” said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. Since he won’t make demands of Putin, that required “Ukraine’s capitulation.” Zelensky understandably refused to surrender— turning himself into “a constant reminder of Trump’s dealmaking impotence.”

This grim debacle is the latest evidence that Trump’s relationship with Russia “remains intense, important, and very weird,” said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Since his first Moscow visit in 1987, “he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views,” a stance that’s “remained remarkably consistent.” Whether he’s just a “useful idiot” or a “deliberate agent of the Kremlin” is open to debate, said David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast. But with his grotesque betrayal of Ukraine, it’s never been clearer that he’s a Putin “puppet” ready to place “Russian interests ahead of America’s.” It’s “a profoundly dangerous development,” and we can only hope that more Americans begin to “recognize that there is no greater enemy to this country than its own president.”

The government is going to announce more “everyday fixes” to ease financial pressures for Britons and show that it can “rectify some of life’s little nuisances without needing to bust the budget”, said Politico.

Andy Burnham promised in his first cabinet meeting that there are “things that can be done, big and small” to help with the cost of living. He is now “lining up” more “feel-good announcements”, including today’s “crackdown on public transport ‘headphone dodgers’”.

What policies has the government announced?

Burnham has been busy making minor policy tweaks since he came into power. In July, he removed VAT from electricity bills and capped single bus fares across England at £2 from January. A month later, he announced restrictions on high-street vape and betting shops, revoking the Gambling Act’s “aim to permit” rule to make it easier for councils to refuse them.

Since then, Burnham’s team have brought forward a ban on auto-renewed subscriptions, planned to tackle misleading sale prices from retailers, and are introducing price displays for fuel on Google Maps.

New rules have also been introduced for air travel. In a post on X, Burnham announced airlines will be required to seat children under 14 next to an accompanying adult without any additional charge. Passengers will also be able to fix any name errors on their booking for free. To reduce the “stress” of flying, the government will make it easier for airlines to ban “disruptive” flyers flagged by other carriers.

Today, under a new “share the carriage, not the noise” campaign, the government announced that councils will be able to issue £100 fixed penalties to bus passengers if they play loud music, litter or vape while travelling. “Headphone dodgers” who refuse to turn down the volume on trains face penalties of up to £1,000.

Will the measures be effective?

With the Budget nine days away, the prime minister wants to “assure weary voters that the government has their backs” without making “too much of a dent in the chancellor’s spreadsheet”, said Politico.

This Budget will already be “difficult”, said The Guardian. Inflation and “soaring” borrowing costs, exacerbated by the Iran war among other factors, have “blown a £12 billion hole in the public finances”, which could force John Healey to consider tax rises and “spending cuts to fund plans to ease the cost of living”.

Some government special advisers “admitted they had some qualms about the drumbeat of small interventions”, with one unnamed source telling The Guardian “we risk looking twee”. The smaller fixes “might not, on their own, amount to very much”, said the paper, but Downing Street hopes that added together they can “make a difference and show the government is trying”.

Could more be in the pipeline?

Consumer campaigner Martin Lewis has launched the apolitical Small Ideas Initiative, designed to fix “life potholes” by informing government policy. Lewis has invested £175,000 of his own money in the project, and will ask the public for “simple, inexpensive and broadly uncontroversial changes that could make Britain work a little better”, said The Times.

With the help of the public and a “broad political panel”, he will present a shortlist of ideas to the government and local authorities, and campaign to get the proposals adopted.

A weekend of protests in France that saw widespread violence, destruction and looting has made next April’s presidential election even more consequential than it already was.

What started off as student demonstrations over poor school conditions has spiralled into a mass protest movement driven by anger at the cost of living and the state of public services.

Emmanuel Macron refused to accept the resignation of his interior minister over the weekend. The president also used a televised address on Sunday to call for national unity and sought to reassure the public that the perpetrators of the violence would be punished.

“The French passion for protest is legendary in Europe,” said Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor. But six months out from an “already fraught” election, these demonstrations are becoming highly politicised, with the hard left, under presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of “weaponising student frustration” and the far-right, under Marine Le Pen, using footage of the violence to pitch herself as the candidate of a calm and peaceful France.

What did the commentators say?

PM Sébastien Lecornu has made little secret of who he believes is to blame for the protests, accusing members of Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise of “instrumentalising the high school movement for their electoral advantage”, then going through the motions of condemning any violence.

The 75-year-old left-wing firebrand joined Saturday’s protests in which half a million people took to the streets in Paris, but has said accusations that he was responsible for the mayhem were aimed at weakening his presidential bid.

He is in a close race with centre-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann and Edouard Philippe, from the centre-right, to see who will go up against Le Pen in a two-way run-off for the presidency next April.

Mélenchon is a veteran politician who “appeals to young people and heads an insurgent party built on grass-roots protest”, so the student-led demonstrations that have swept the country in recent weeks are “a golden opportunity” for him, said Mark Landler in The New York Times. But images of riot police, tear gas and streets in flames also carry “acute risks for a politician seeking mainstream acceptance”.

The violence on the margins of what were mostly “massive, peaceful demonstrations” is “potentially ruinous” for Mélenchon, said Peter McPhee, a history professor at the University of Melbourne, on The Conversation.

By contrast, it has been an “early Christmas present” for Le Pen, who has promised to “reimpose discipline in schools, increase funding for police” and target the instigators of the violence and looting as “obviously” illegal migrants to be deported.

“I see only one beneficiary and that’s Le Pen,” Paul Smith, from the University of Nottingham, told Al Jazeera. But Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, cautioned against automatically assuming a far-right gain, with “fear of disorder” historically benefiting conservative or centrist parties in France.

What next?

With six months left in office and unable to run for a third term, Macron is already seen as head of “pretty much a lame duck government”, said Alistair Bunkall on Sky News. Now his authority seems to be “ebbing away” even more.

“The TV pictures of the past few weeks will hardly inspire confidence,” said the broadcaster. There are “red warning signs” flashing for France’s economy and “a failure by the minority French government to secure a budget deal would be the next big tipping point”.

It is still too early to tell how this will play out at the polls next year. As Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent activist from the 2018 gilets jaunes protests, said: “Anger has no political party. An empty fridge has no political party.”

“Remember when butter was considered bad?” said Morwenna Ferrier in The Guardian. Now, though, there’s been a revival of the golden spread. In our “little treat” economy, splashing out on a slab of high-end butter feels “more manageable” than buying a “decent bottle of wine”.

After consumption reached a “historic low” in the 1990s following a spate of anti-saturated fat health campaigns, perceptions seem to have “shifted” and butter has enjoyed a “cultural rehabilitation”. This may in part be because it’s become “tangled up with the anti-ultra-processed-food movement” – unlike margarine, butter is seen as a “pre-industrial, farm-adjacent product”.

The spread is “reprising its role as a kitchen stalwart” with sales of Waitrose’s Essential butter up 16% year-on-year, said Emma Henderson in The Independent.

These days it’s “rare to find a block of butter” for under £2. As prices continue to climb, it’s worth knowing which brands are “worth their salt”. Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference West Country Farmhouse butter is something “I just kept going back to”. Made in Somerset using a slower churning process, it’s “very bright yellow” and has a “great level of salty flavour” thanks to the addition of Maldon sea salt.

“I will never tire of” President Slightly Salted butter, said Sophie Morris in The i Paper. Perfect for slathering on your morning toast, this French butter made in Normandy always seems “chic next to its frumpier, yellower, British cousins”. As well as the “elegance” of its paler hue, “I love the fact it tastes as if the cows have dined on wildflower meadows”.

And if you’re keen to show off, grab a block of Kerrygold salted butter. Made from the milk of grass-fed cows in Ireland and wrapped in gold foil, it’s a “rich and creamy treat” that’s ideal for cutting into thick slices and using to top your “hot crumpets, teacakes and hot cross buns”.

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From the classic ‘Whodunit’ style to thrilling neonoirs, mystery novels have compelled readers to solve cases alongside detectives like Hercule Poirot. Here are the best, smartest and most revolutionary titles the genre created.

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

A round-up of the best mystery novels of all time is “incomplete without mentioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work,” said Book Riot. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most “recognizable fictional detectives in pop culture.” His iconic novel follows the investigation of an “apparition of a monstrous dog” that purportedly “murdered Sir Charles Baskerville.” ($7, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Murder on the Orient Express’ by Agatha Christie (1934)

Sticking all your characters in a “contained bubble” and “throwing away the key” is a great way to “create tension and intrigue,” said thriller writer Hank Phillippi Ryan at The New York Times. Agatha Christie, the “queen of the locked room,” did it with “great panache and sleight of hand” by “misdirecting the reader into believing there was just one murderer.” ($19, HarperCollins, Amazon)

‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote (1965)

Truman Capote’s bestseller “pioneered a new classification of novels”: true crime, said A&E. Capote’s “groundbreaking, real-life story” about a terrifying quadruple murder “effortlessly married” the “technique of colorful storytelling” with the “clarity and accuracy of journalism.” ($28, Penguin Random House, Amazon)

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ by Walter Mosley (1990)

The first novel in the Easy Rawlins hardboiled detective series introduced the world to Mosley’s neonoir classic’s World War II veteran protagonist. Strapped for cash, Rawlins accepts a murder case whose resolution necessitates bringing the “superficially submerged tensions” between “Black and white Americans” to the surface, said Time. ($19, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)

You may be able to turn your tattoos on and off in the near future. A new type of tattoo ink uses light to make the body markings appear and disappear. The result is customizable body art.

Light switch

Scientists engineered PhotoTat, tattoo ink that is “permanent yet rewritable,” said a study published in the journal Matter & Light. The material is “nearly invisible at rest, colored within seconds under ultraviolet light and erased by white light.” It is “made from dyes and a plexiglass-like material common in many medical technologies on the market today, including dermal fillers,” said a release about the study.

To develop the UV-activated ink, researchers used three photochromes, “molecules that can change color in response to different wavelengths of light,” in blue, magenta and yellow, said The Scientist. These molecules were then encapsulated in poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) nanoparticles, which are known for their “safety record and biocompatibility.” The three colors are mixed in different combinations and ratios, producing 16 different shades.

Human chameleon

PhotoTat can be “combined with conventional tattoo ink,” said Live Science (a sister site of The Week). For example, a permanent black ink design “could contain hidden PhotoTat elements that appear only when activated.” The ink is ideal for “people who love tattoos and have lots of tattoos but just want something kind of fun and playful,” Carson Bruns, a study co-author, said to the outlet.

PhotoTat can have additional practical applications, including for medical tattoos like those done on cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy. “With PhotoTat,” Bruns said in the release, “we could turn an involuntary medical tattoo into something that’s only visible to the doctor when you go in the clinic.”

Tracing a 135-mile horseshoe-shaped route through rural mid-Wales, Glyndwr’s Way passes through the splendid hill country that was at the heart of Owain Glyndwr’s 15-year rebellion against the English from 1400.

I am fascinated by this “great Welsh hero”, said Kevin Rushby in The Guardian, so I decided to hike the trail’s southern half, from the “pretty” border town of Knighton to Machynlleth, where the building in which Glyndwr held his Welsh parliament still stands.

I can’t say that I ended the journey feeling any wiser about the man himself – but it was a wonderful walk: “quiet, very quiet”, with highlights including the “lovely, slightly eccentric” town of Llanidloes, and the 564-metre-high peak of Foel Fadian, which affords some “great panoramas” of Snowdonia.

Marvellous mobiles in Philadelphia

Best known for his huge mobile sculptures – bright, abstract forms hanging from suspended metal frames – Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia in 1898, and last year, a new museum dedicated to his work opened in the city, said Michael Joseph Gross in Travel + Leisure.

Designed by the architects Herzog and de Meuron, the galleries at Calder Gardens are “uplifting”, light-filled spaces in which the work is presented without labels or “curatorial statements” (Calder believed that we should interpret his art “on our own terms”). Outside, there’s a “meadowlike”, 1.8-acre sculpture garden laid out by Piet Oudolf (the Dutch landscape designer behind the High Line in Manhattan), to which admission is free.

It’s a worthy addition to a city known for its great art institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation, which has a huge collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings.

A handsome port in northern Spain

The port city of Avilés, in Asturias, was once known for its “steelworks and pollution” – but with few factories left now, said Isambard Wilkinson in The Times, its air is much cleaner, and it is well worth a visit.

Avilés’ old town is one of the “loveliest” in northern Spain, with its Renaissance palaces, “leafy” parks and medieval churches, including two dedicated to Thomas Becket (“Santo Tomás de Cantorbery”). And in 2011, the city was given a major boost by the opening of the gleaming-white Oscar Niemeyer Centre, a “futuristic” arts venue designed by the Brazilian architect.

If you visit the centre, try to eat at Yume; the city also has another fine restaurant, Casa Tataguyo, which serves traditional Asturian cuisine. From nearby San Esteban de Pravia there are boat trips on the “majestic” Nalón estuary; it also has an excellent hotel, the Gran Hotel Brillante.

For hikers, the mountains of Sweden’s far north provide an “overwhelming” sense of freedom, thanks to the country’s right to roam and an almost complete absence of paths. It’s a feeling I wanted my children to experience, said Adam Weymouth in the Financial Times – and so last August, we took them camping in the region.

We travelled by train across Europe to Stockholm, and spent a weekend there before taking the sleeper to Björkliden – a journey of roughly 17 hours. This tiny place lies 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle, beside Torneträsk, a 43-mile-long lake. From the station, you can climb into the hills, and soon feel entirely removed from civilisation; if you kept walking south, you wouldn’t hit a road for 60 miles.

We could pitch our tent where we liked thanks to the right to roam, so we chose a high bluff where there was a decent breeze to keep the bugs away. From there, we struck out on daily rambles across “bare” hills, where summits are as high as or higher than Scotland’s, though they are neither jagged nor particularly craggy.

During long days outdoors, we saw reindeer and golden plovers, and the children climbed rocks, picked blueberries and slithered down the snowdrifts that persist all summer. There were rivers of the “most glacial blue”, and lakes where we swam for “frantic seconds” in water that was “magnificently cold”. At night, the “buttery evening light” bled from sunset into sunrise at around 3am. Despite all the sunshine, the average daytime high in Björkliden in August is 11C or 12C, while at night, the temperature falls to 4C to 5C, making this a distinctly “coolcation”.

The weather was changeable, and after a week, with “damp” children and no food left, we moved into a small log cabin at the Abisko Mountain Lodge, near the village of Abisko (population 150). The meals there were excellent, and the lodge proved to be a good base for further walks, including to the Kårsa Glacier, a place of “alien” beauty that made the kids “giddy” with excitement. But as the glacier has shrunk by 80% since the 1940s, it also left me with a troubling sense of “loss”.

The consensus is that Israel’s forthcoming election is one of the most consequential in the country’s 78-year history, and a defining moment for its political identity. It is the first since the 7 October attacks three years ago; and the first time voters have had a chance to pass judgement on the government’s failure to prevent that catastrophe, and on Israel’s prosecution of its subsequent wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

It could herald a reset in relations between Israel and its international allies, many of whom have been critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government, particularly over Gaza. Above all, the election could herald the political demise of Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving PM, who has led the nation for all but 18 months since 2009.

What is the current make-up of Israel’s parliament?

The ruling party needs a majority of at least 61 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Because of its proportional representation system – voters cast one vote for a national party-list – even the largest parties rarely win more than 35 seats, and Israel has always had coalition governments. At present, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud has 32 seats. To govern, it relies on two ultra-orthodox Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (with 18 seats together), the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) parties (with 13 seats between them), and the centre-right New Hope party (with four seats).

The government is widely regarded as the most extreme Israel has ever had. The main opposition bloc – ranging from the remnants of the once-mighty Labor Party to secular, liberal Yesh Atid to the centre-right Yisrael Beiteinu – has more than 40 seats, but has refused to govern with Netanyahu since 2019, partly because he was the defendant in three corruption cases. Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am, representing the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab, have ten seats.

And how likely is Netanyahu to lose?

The emergence of Gadi Eisenkot, a former general, and his newly formed centre-right Yashar party, has consolidated the anti-Netanyahu opposition. He is seen as the PM’s principal rival, and could replace him. However, according to most opinion polls, the election is too close to call. The Economist’s poll tracker suggests that Likud and Yashar are neck-and-neck, on 22 seats each; that Netanyahu’s coalition will fall short of the 61 seats needed for a majority; but that Eisenkot’s coalition is likely to fall short too.

What are Eisenkot’s credentials?

A former IDF chief of staff, Eisenkot served in Netanyahu’s war cabinet until June 2024, when he resigned with a scathing criticism of the PM’s revanchist strategy in Gaza. He launched his party, Yashar (meaning “straight” or “honest”) just over a year later; since then, it has steadily risen in the polls. Although without Netanyahu’s charisma, Eisenkot, the son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, is widely regarded by voters as a man of integrity. His son, Gal Meir, was killed in Gaza in December 2023, during an operation to recover the bodies of two Israeli hostages.

Netanyahu’s allies have sought, somewhat unconvincingly, to cast him as too left-wing and squeamish to protect Israel’s security. In fact, as a general, he pioneered Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine”, named after Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Beirut, which calls for the overwhelming use of force against civilian infrastructure in areas from which attacks are launched; he also categorically opposes the creation of a Palestinian state.

Are there other contenders?

Conceivably, there is Naftali Bennett, who served as PM in 2021-22 but could not keep his diverse coalition together. Another right-winger, and a former Netanyahu aide, he has merged his party with that of the centrist Yair Lapid, another former PM, under the banner “Yachad” (“Together”); but their party lags well behind leaders Yashar and Likud in the polls. Bennett also rejects a two-state solution. Lapid accepts it in theory, but thinks that it is not realistic for the foreseeable future.

How about the Arab parties?

They are on course to win at least ten seats in the Knesset. However, Eisenkot has ruled out a coalition with the Arab parties, only one of which (the conservative-Islamist Ra’am) has ever agreed to join an Israeli government (briefly in 2021). Their very participation has been the subject of controversy: on 2 October, Israel’s supreme court overturned a ban on them running in the contest at all. The ban had been imposed by the central elections committee, a political body dominated by Netanyahu allies, on the basis that the parties supported armed struggle against Israel.

So what would the opposition do differently?

In many respects, not much: the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal has described Israeli politics as “50 shades of right-wing”. However, an Eisenkot coalition would establish a commission of inquiry into the 7 October attacks. It would seek to end the exemption of Haredi men from military service, an agreement dating back to 1948 that has become very controversial. It would roll back many of the judicial reforms introduced by Netanyahu, designed to give more control over the judiciary. It would also crack down on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank – though it would retain settlements authorised in Israeli law. And it would try to reset troubled relations with Israel’s allies.

And if Netanyahu wins again?

It would mean more of the same. Many liberal Israelis fear that a new Netanyahu coalition, again likely backed by the far-right, would take the state in an increasingly autocratic direction: comparisons to Hungary and Turkey are often made. For the first time in Israeli history, emigration has begun to outpace immigration: in the period 2023–26, more than 200,000 Israelis left the country.

Every family needs a one-pot wonder they can have on repeat with no complaints, said Bob Dickinson. This Greek-inspired chicken and rice dish is ours. What makes it something you’ll look forward to eating are the simple additions that take no time at all: fragrant herbs, salty Kalamata olives and creamy feta. The herbs can be dried or fresh, and to make the recipe even quicker the next time you make it, you could mix up an extra batch of the seasoning.

Ingredients (serves 6)

• 1.5kg chicken thigh fillets (or 12 chicken thighs)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 courgettes, halved lengthways and finely sliced
• 250ml dry white wine
• finely grated zest and juice of 2 lemons
• 300g basmati rice, rinsed
• 500ml chicken or vegetable stock (broth) or water
• 100g Kalamata olives
• 1 tbsp oregano
• 1 tbsp basil
• 1 tbsp dill
• 1 tbsp mint
• 2 tsp rosemary
• 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
• 1⁄4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground black pepper

Method

• Preheat the oven to 200C. To make the Greek seasoning, combine the ingredients in a small bowl. Add the chicken thighs to a large mixing bowl, sprinkle over the seasoning and mix to make sure the thighs are well coated.
• Heat a large flameproof, ovenproof casserole dish (Dutch oven) over medium heat. Add 1 tbsp of the olive oil, then fry the chicken for 2-3 minutes on each side or until browned. Do this in batches, making sure that the chicken is only one layer deep and that all of the thighs come into contact with the bottom of the pan, so as not to sweat the meat. Transfer the chicken to a plate and set aside.
• Reheat the pan and add the remaining olive oil, garlic and courgettes. Cook for 5 minutes or until the courgettes are soft. Add the chicken back into the pan, along with the wine and lemon zest and juice. Sprinkle the rice over the top of the chicken, pour over the stock or water, stir, and cover.
• Transfer to the oven and bake for 30 minutes or until all the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. To finish, sprinkle with the Kalamata olives and crumble the feta on top.
• Tip: You can use finely chopped fresh herbs or dried herbs for the Greek seasoning. If you’re planning on doubling and storing the recipe for future use, dried would be best.

Taken from “The From Scratch Kitchen: Recipes and inspiration for rediscovering the joys of home cooking”, by Bob Dickinson. Available from The Week Bookshop, £24.99.

Populist parties of the far-right and radical-left are on the rise; Germany’s once booming economy, built on an industrial base that was the envy of Europe, is flatlining; and its government – previously deemed a “grand coalition” – is weakened, said Ulf Poschardt in The Telegraph. Now, in yet another blow to national self-esteem, the ex-head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has been arrested on charges of exploiting state secrets.

Over 12 years from 2010, August Hanning, 80, is alleged to have paid his ex-chief of staff to pass him some 2,000 documents, many classified, and to have sold on the secrets they contained. Germany’s leaky, bureaucratic secret services have long had a credibility problem; what makes this case especially damaging is that the alleged crimes were uncovered only by accident. The evidence was found during a raid on Hanning’s house by police looking into an unrelated matter – his suspected role in the abduction of the children of a German steakhouse heiress from their father.

Warning signs

The intelligence world is full of “scandals and scandalettes”, said Der Spiegel, but this one is in a different class. The papers are said to have contained highly sensitive information, some likely supplied by Germany’s intelligence partners – so the affair could have serious international ramifications at a time when Europe is facing grave security threats.

And the charges include treason. Having set himself up as a security consultant, to boost his €11,000-a-month state pension, Hanning (who denies wrongdoing) took on a host of “dubious” private clients, including Putin-aligned oligarchs; but he is also accused of selling secrets to a foreign intelligence agency. Reports suggest that it was Azerbaijan’s.

With hindsight, there were warning signs, said Constanze Stelzenmüller in the Financial Times. It was well known in Berlin, for instance, that Hanning had lost two-thirds of his pension as a result of his directorship of a Latvian bank that went bankrupt in 2019. Yet his alleged crimes went unnoticed for years. Where was the oversight? This scandal comes as an appalling blow to the BND, and Germany as a whole, at a time of great danger. People love spy stories, but there is nothing amusing, or romantic, about this one.

“Jeffrey Archer, who has died aged 86, was irrepressible,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian – “though not necessarily in a good way.” At various points, he was accused of lying about his background, embellishing his CV, committing plagiarism and fraud and – perhaps worst of all – of being “unpleasant to underlings”. And while some of the allegations were never proved, he was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in jail.

Yet Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare – senior Tory politician, former athlete, bestselling novelist and bon viveur – simply sailed on. Editors continued to adulate him; his books kept selling in their millions; and sports stars, writers and politicians still flocked to the “shepherd’s pie and Krug” parties he hosted in his “sumptuous”, art-filled apartment overlooking the Thames. Archer, it turned out, was what the “Titanic” was supposed to be: “unsinkable”.

Murky beginnings

Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, Archer was doted on by his mother, who worked as a journalist on the local paper and sent him to Wellington School on a scholarship. As an adult, he’d imply that he had been to the grander Wellington College. Bullied for being puny, he threw himself into athletics and bodybuilding, and distinguished himself as a sprinter. He stayed at the school until 18, yet left with just three O levels.

On the basis of a false report that he had three A levels and had studied anatomy at a university in the US, he was then accepted to Oxford. But though he presented himself as an undergraduate at Brasenose, he was actually doing a one-year diploma in education at a teacher training college linked to it.

As a student in Oxford, he arranged fundraising drives for Oxfam, including via the coup of persuading The Beatles to appear at Brasenose. Yet as Michael Crick revealed in his biography, Oxfam was not only troubled by the way he exaggerated the sums he had raised; it also suspected that he was skimming off funds.

In Oxford, Archer met Mary Weeden, a chemistry student who became his wife in 1966. Settling in London, he found work as a fundraiser for the United Nations Association. Its chair, the ex-Tory MP Humphry Berkeley, became convinced that he was embezzling funds. But the UNA hushed it up, and Archer was accepted for the safe Tory seat in Louth, Lincolnshire, which he won at a by-election in 1969.

Pride and perjury

In his writing, Archer was no stylist, but he could tell a “rollicking story”, said The Times. In 1976, his debut novel, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less”, became a bestseller. His novels would go on to sell more than 300 million copies. He also returned to politics: Margaret Thatcher made him deputy Tory chairman in 1985, describing him as “the extrovert’s extrovert”.

Then, in 1986, the Daily Star sensationally accused Archer of having been a client of a sex worker named Monica Coghlan. He sued for libel and, in court, denied ever even meeting Coghlan (though he did admit to asking an intermediary to pay her £2,000 in cash to leave the country). She was vilified as a liar and an extortionist. In summing up, the judge famously highlighted Mary Archer’s testimony: “Remember Mary Archer in the witness box,” he told the jury. “Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?” With such a wife, how could Archer “possibly be in need of cold, unloving rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?” Having presented what seemed to be a solid alibi, Archer won and was awarded £500,000 in damages.

Two years later, Archer was accused of insider dealing over shares he’d bought in Anglia TV just before a takeover bid. His wife sat on the firm’s board. He was cleared of that, but then fell out with a friend who had helped concoct his alibi in the libel case, and was charged with perjury.

Following his release from jail, Archer published his prison diaries, carried on with his charity work and wrote more novels. Mary, who survives him with their sons, remained by his side to the end. Explaining her loyalty, she once said: “I think I would find it a little monochrome, a little grey, to have a sort of a more conventional life with a more conventional husband.”

Multiple news sources, expertly edited together

Multiple news sources, expertly edited together

Multiple news sources, expertly edited together

The best crime thrillers consider the way violence, an endemic feature of human societies, can spiral out of hand. These four superb films approach that reality from very different vantage points.

‘The French Connection’ (1971)

A pulse-pounding narrative follows hard-nosed New York City cops Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) as they try to bust up a heroin ring based in France. It’s a “story about ugly things and awful people, headlined by one of the era’s finest antiheroes,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Fargo’ (1996)

In this mordantly funny parable, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two inept sociopaths to kidnap his wife and puts himself on a collision course with small-town cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). The film “rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I’ve ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (MGM+)

‘Memories of Murder’ (2003)

Director Bong Joon Ho’s iconic procedural follows a sometimes hilariously inept investigation into a series of small town murders. The film “challenges and subverts the serial killer procedural in its entirety,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Blue Ruin’ (2013)

Macon Blair stars as Dwight Evans, a man living on the margins of society who learns that his parents’ killer is being released from prison. Dwight then sets off to seek revenge. The movie succeeds by “probing deeper than usual into the effects (and practicalities) of violence,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Peacock)