Having lost the war in Afghanistan, “Washington is now losing the peace”, says Larry Elliott in The Guardian. America’s “scorched-earth policy” response to humiliation at the hands of the Taliban is designed to cause maximum economic damage to some of the world’s poorest people. Joe Biden has frozen Afghan state assets held in US banks, halted payments from the World Bank’s Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund and blocked emergency Covid aid from the IMF. The result is that – apart from Taliban-controlled heroin exports – the economy has collapsed. That has left more than half of Afghans in dire need of humanitarian assistance and the poverty rate hovering around 90%.

Years from now, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph, we’ll talk about the period when we allowed mobile phones in schools “in the same amused, incredulous tones with which we remember people being allowed to smoke on planes”. It’s not just the vast amount of time young Britons spend looking at screens – 44 hours a week on average, the equivalent of “almost two whole days”. It’s also the bullying. The “manipulation and sharing of images”, most often for sexual harassment and fat shaming. The filming of organised fights for social media likes. Opponents of a ban insist that mobiles keep children safe on the walk to and from school. But the solution to that is easy: you hand over your device when you arrive and pick it up again when you leave.