At a lavish White House state dinner last night, Donald Trump said that the US and China had “never gotten along better”. The Chinese president responded that the two countries’ ambitions should be “mutually reinforcing” rather than confrontational and called for AI to remain “always under human control”. Tech titans, including Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, attended the dinner, where guests were served sesame-crusted sea bass with bok choy. Benjamin Netanyahu faced a mass walkout last night during his fiery UN address, in which he said that accusing Israel of genocide was “the biggest lie of the century”. The Israeli PM decried what he said was a global anti-Jewish conspiracy and defended his military campaigns in Gaza and Iran. A rapid new test for brain tumours can slash the time it takes to receive an accurate diagnosis from eight weeks to just two hours. The genomic test, which is being piloted by the NHS and works by quickly analysing the tumour’s genetic code, will allow patients to start treatment much sooner.

Democratic strategist James Carville once said: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope… But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Everybody, says Ross Clark in The Washington Post, “except President Donald Trump”. Since February, bond markets have been signalling “extreme displeasure” at the US government’s finances: the cost of borrowing is at its highest level since 2007. But far from trying to cut spending, Trump is promising to give every American adult $5,000 if he does well in the forthcoming midterm elections, at an estimated cost of $1.2trn. America is not alone: most Western governments launched vast stimulus packages during the financial crisis and Covid and failed to put their finances back in order in good times. Perhaps most exposed is Britain, which has historically high inflation and a new prime minister who doesn’t seem to understand how bonds work. “A reckoning is coming.”

Half a century ago, says Dominic Lawson in The Telegraph, Britain’s national finances got so bad that the IMF had to bail us out, imposing stern spending cuts that the then Labour government had felt unable to push through without this “external compulsion”. This week, we heard again from the IMF, after new borrowing figures showed our near £3trn national debt had risen by £77bn in the first five months of the year alone, because of a welfare system in which 46% of working-age Britons receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes (at the time of the 1976 bailout, that figure was 30%). IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva urged the government to cut public spending. “It is impossible to stress strongly enough,” she told the BBC, “how critical it is to take the necessary steps.” Not a single British politician responded.

Germany’s former spy chief was so sure the Russians wouldn’t invade Ukraine that he blithely travelled to Kyiv the day before the invasion. He had to be exfiltrated from his hotel disguised in the throng of refugees heading for Poland, says The Economist. Perhaps to avoid such humiliations in future, many middle powers are tooling up: Japan is building a spy apparatus from scratch. Sweden is creating a new civilian espionage agency and Canada is debating one, too. The Germans are expanding their spooks’ authority, as are the Dutch. As ever, MI6 is the model – it remains the world’s most admired “espionage aristocracy”.

Earlier this month, says Sophie Ibbotson in The Telegraph, some 3,000 competitors from 106 countries gathered in Kyrgyzstan for the biennial World Nomad Games. Founded by Kyrgyz philanthropist and sports enthusiast Askhat Akibaev in 2014 to promote nomadic sporting traditions, the competition includes events such as Kok-Boru, which is like polo but with a goat carcass rather than a stick and ball; Er Enish, a type of horseback wrestling; eagle hunting, in which golden eagles are trained to catch birds, rabbits and foxes; and “Hungarian-style archery”, which takes place on horseback with targets just 50cm wide.

There is no shortage of books criticising the tech industry and its oligarchs, says Henry Mance in the FT. “Gil Durán’s stands out for having the most darkly amusing title.” The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy makes a persuasive case that a coterie of rich, powerful men are not merely “ideological critics of the status quo”, but have in fact “given up on our entire system of governance”. Anti-democratic ideas, writes Durán, have now become the “operating principles” of some of the world’s most influential people. And when a nation is “betrayed by its wealthiest citizens... existential crisis follows”.

The éminence grise of the tech-infused “authoritarian backlash to liberal democracy”, is PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in 2009, a quote that is “not as infamous as it should be”. Thiel has long claimed that US democracy has been going downhill since the 1920s, because of the expansion of the welfare state and the enfranchisement of women. Crucial to Thiel’s thinking, and that of his ideological compadres, is a 1997 book written by James Dale Davidson and former Times editor William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual. It predicted that the computer age would “subvert and destroy the nation-state”, while a “cognitive elite” would “increasingly operate outside political boundaries”. Online payments firm PayPal came, Thiel says, from realising that his ideas could “never win an election”, but that “maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world... through technological means”. Perhaps most striking was the moment last year when, in an interview, Thiel paused for a disturbingly long time when asked if he would like the human race to endure, before reluctantly – and rather unconvincingly – answering “yes”.

To buy The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán, click here.

An increasing number of political speeches are being written with the help of AI, says The Economist. Around one in 10 of the words spoken in Britain’s parliamentary debates are drafted by AI, up from near-zero just two years ago. The UK is not alone: speeches by Australian and Canadian MPs get flagged for AI content at triple the rate of British ones. Earlier this month, the Dutch prime minister was revealed to have used AI in many social media posts, while a third of the laws proposed by Norway’s legislature contain AI text. The lowest-AI chambers sampled were the New Zealand House and US Senate.

A family in Iowa has broken the Guinness World Record for the most generations born on the same day, says People magazine. When Emma Bell, who was born on 14 September 1997, gave birth to a son on her birthday last year, he became the fifth in a line of 14 September birthdays: Emma’s father (1972), grandmother (1949) and great-grandfather (1907) were also all born on that date. Given the births had gone boy-girl-boy-girl, Emma’s grandmother told her during her pregnancy that she’d better deliver a boy on that day. Her son, she says, arrived “right on time”.

It’s a giant mural of David Attenborough made from pumpkins, says BBC News. Sunnyfields Farm in Totton, Hampshire, which creates an annual pumpkin display at this time of year, used more than 10,000 of the Hallowe’en fruit and other squashes to create the portrait in honour of the nature broadcaster’s 100th birthday. The mosaic measures 218.19 sq m, beating the farm’s previous record of 212 sq m, set last year with a portrait of the late Ozzy Osbourne. It will remain at the farm until the end of October.