Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced emergency measures to prevent a “total breakdown of law and order”, as male prisons are set to run out of space by November. Three new prisons will be built, while offenders recalled to jail for breaching their parole conditions will be automatically re-released after 28 days. Vladimir Putin will not meet Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul today for the first direct negotiations between the two sides since the early days of the war, says The Times, instead sending a “junior delegation” in his place. Zelensky will decide whether to bother with the “decorative” Russian delegation after meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this morning. Italian scientists have created a dark chocolate biscuit that could have the same effect as Ozempic. The tweaked treat, which is made using a compound from a wormwood plant that boosts the same satiety hormones targeted by weight-loss jabs, made trial participants feel less hungry.

A “shameful reckoning” for France

A Paris court this week found the 76-year-old actor Gérard Depardieu guilty of sexually assaulting two women, says Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. The “one-time sex symbol, hell raiser and star of more than 200 films” was handed an 18-month suspended prison sentence, fined around £26,000 and will be added to France’s sex offender register. He didn’t bother to turn up for the verdict – perhaps busy drowning his sorrows, or just “marvelling at how he got away with it all for so long”. For the best part of 50 years, however badly he has behaved – extreme drinking, allegations of tax fraud, a riotous autobiography filled with stories of robbery and prostitution – “nobody in France seems to have cared”.

This should come as no surprise, because the French have all but ignored the #MeToo movement. Back in 2018, Catherine Deneuve and 100 other women signed a letter defending men’s “freedom to bother” women as vital to that “oh-so-French ritual of seduction”. The day before Depardieu’s trial, Brigitte Bardot defended “talented people who grab a girl’s bottom”. Even Emmanuel Macron briefly stood up for the disgraced actor after a documentary showed him making sexually charged comments about a young girl, saying on national television that he “makes France proud”. Last month’s damning parliamentary report concluding that sexual violence and harassment are “endemic” in the French entertainment industry goes some way to explaining why, of the countless complaints made against the actor over the years, “nothing really stuck”. His conviction is a “shameful reckoning for all of France”.

When George Clooney publicly urged Joe Biden to give up his re-election bid last year, he mentioned that the president had shown his age at a recent fundraiser. In fact, say Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in their new book Original Sin, the then president didn’t even recognise Clooney at the event, even though the two have known each other for years. “Thank you for being here,” Biden kept telling the film star. “You know George,” an aide gently told him, before clarifying “George Clooney” when it became obvious that the 81-year-old still hadn’t made the connection. “Oh yeah!” said Biden. “Hi, George.”

The Australian outback has a growing menace, says Sean Williams in National Geographic: thirsty camels. The hump-backed ungulates were brought to the country in the 19th century by colonial surveyors, and now number as many as a million, roaming around the bush “trampling ecosystems and destroying infrastructure”. The biggest headache is what the 450kg animals will do to find water: ripping up pipes, destroying public loos, even knocking air conditioning units out of windows. Ranchers say the problem is only going to get worse. Gathering and butchering the animals for meat is prohibitively high, and the government’s camel culling programme – which involved snipers in helicopters – ended in 2013.

Trump is leaving Netanyahu out in the cold

Donald Trump is in the Gulf this week hunting trillion-dollar deals and foreign policy wins, says Kim Ghattas in the FT. The latter are coming from unexpected quarters: Yemen’s Houthi rebels have agreed to stop firing at commercial shipping in the Red Sea (including US vessels but excluding Israeli ones), and Hamas has released its last living American-Israeli hostage, Edan Alexander, as a “gesture to Trump”. Other Gulf powers are positioning themselves as “mature, constructive partners”: hosting Ukraine talks, upholding détente with Iran, helping rebuild post-Assad Syria and supporting a new government in Lebanon. The one regional leader who isn’t “scurrying to build goodwill” with the US president is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And he’s starting to pay the price.

The first sign of Trump’s irritation with Bibi came during their White House press conference in April: he didn’t reverse his 17% tariffs on Israel and pointed out that the country receives $4bn a year in aid. “That’s a lot,” he told Netanyahu. “Congratulations by the way.” The US also has a growing trade deficit with Israel – always a red rag to the president – and when Trump revealed that Washington was talking to Tehran directly, the strain on Netanyahu’s face was visible. The US president is no humanitarian, but is unhappy that Israel’s plans for a renewed offensive against Hamas could run counter to his “grand vision for a Gaza Riviera”. Trump’s next surprise could be a civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, bypassing the original proposition of Israeli-Saudi normalisation in exchange for a Saudi-US defence pact. The decades-long alliance between the US and Israel will endure, but Trump’s message to the Israeli leader is clear: “get with the programme”.

😡👋 Trump might be at odds with Netanyahu, says Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic, but he’s remarkably aligned with the Israeli people. Some 70% of Israelis support striking a deal to free hostages and end the war, with the same proportion wanting Netanyahu to resign now or after the conflict. And just 20% back the “extremist endgame” of expelling Gazans followed by Jewish resettlement. Like Trump, Israelis are tired of war and absolutely sick of Netanyahu.

There’s a new trend among intrepid youngsters, says The Economist: going it alone. In the past decade, Google searches for “solo travel” have more than doubled, and in Britain the share of travellers heading off on a trip by themselves has nearly tripled from 6% in 2011 to 17% in 2024. It’s all about “finding yourself” in far-flung places, with travel bloggers attesting that on, say, the white-sand beaches of Belize, you can “become a truer version of yourself”. Strikingly, 84% of solo travellers are women.

The jailing of six Bulgarians who ran a Russian spy ring from a Great Yarmouth guest house reveals how the “secret world” is changing, says Gordon Corera on The Rest Is Classified. The war in Ukraine has ramped up scrutiny on Russian nationals in western Europe, making it much harder for the Kremlin to run traditional agents. So today they’re more likely to reach out to criminals or others already in their target country on the encrypted chat app Telegram and say: “Hey, go carry out this act of arson or sabotage and we’ll throw you some cryptocurrency.” Often, these “gig economy” spies and saboteurs never find out who they’re working for.

It’s an original version of the Magna Carta, says Jo Black on BBC News, which Harvard University bought in 1946 for just $27.50 (around £370 today). Only 25 versions of the iconic charter survive out of the 200 or so issued by English kings between 1215 and 1300. By studying the document’s handwriting, two British medieval historians have concluded that the Harvard version is one of six dating from 1300 – not, as the original buyers assumed, an unofficial knock-off from 1327. “I would hesitate to suggest a figure,” says Nicholas Vincent from the University of East Anglia, “but the 1297 Magna Carta that sold at auction in New York in 2007 fetched $21m.”