Serious sex offenders will be excluded from Labour’s early-release scheme aimed at tackling overcrowding in prisons, after a review by Andy Burnham. Under the measures due to come into effect in October, killers convicted of manslaughter and some violent offenders will still be eligible to be released after serving only half of their sentences rather than two-thirds. The NHS criteria for screening women under 50 for breast cancer are so narrow that up to 95% of those at higher risk are being missed, researchers have warned. The current guidelines focus solely on inherited genes, but new research has found that three-quarters of women under 50 who develop breast cancer within a decade have no family history of the disease. Wildfires in the south of France have revealed – and set off – a cache of around 400 World War Two-era shells and munitions in the village of Le Porge. Mayor Martial Zaninetti likened the explosions, initially thought to be gas cylinders, to “the sound of war”.

Europe’s right-wing headbangers were quick to jump on those videos of more than 50,000 migrants entering Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in northern Africa, from neighbouring Morocco, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick claimed they were “on their way to Calais”; Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD, said her own country was their “likely destination”. In fact, most of the border-crossers were quickly returned to Morocco, and any stragglers won’t be able to access the EU’s passport-free Schengen Area – illegal immigrants in Ceuta are forbidden from travelling to mainland Spain. This was, it seems, an orchestrated campaign to create a political crisis. Many of those who crossed had seen TikTok videos claiming the border was open, falsely citing a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea.

Whatever the cause, says William Hague in The Times, we can expect much more of this in the future. In the Sahel, in northern Africa, a “vast human crisis is developing”. Populations are swelling – Chad and Niger are forecast to double in size in the next 25 years alone – while the already scorching climate is warming faster than the global average. Efforts by France, the US and other Western nations to stabilise the increasingly conflict-ridden region have effectively been abandoned, leaving Russia and China to move in. How long before the hundreds of millions of young people there start moving north, “in numbers never seen before”? Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, is rightly concentrating on toughening our immigration policies – quicker deportations, sensible court decisions and effective reform of the ECHR are much needed. But “building a fortress is not enough” – you also need to address the root of the problem. Ceuta is “a warning the West cannot ignore”.

Donald Trump is obsessed with his renovations in Washington, says Maggie Haberman on The Ezra Klein Show. The various projects – including the new White House ballroom, the redesign of the Kennedy Centre, a giant arch he calls the Arc de Trump – probably account for about 70% of his thinking time. During one meeting, he was musing whether to top the arch with a gold version of that iconic “fight, fight, fight” image from the day he was almost assassinated in Pennsylvania. So he called up Emmanuel Macron and asked him about the Arc de Triomphe. “What’s it like? Does it have a visitor’s desk? Do people jump off it?”

The columnist Rod Liddle, who has died aged 66, was baffled when readers didn’t understand his dark sense of humour, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Not long after writing a column in which he described putting a cat on trial, then building and using a miniature gibbet, he received a visit from police investigating potential animal cruelty. “You’d have thought they’d have realised it was a joke,” he said, “when I said that three field mice watched the execution and applauded.”

Over the past decade or so, say Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and Katie Danielson in The Washington Post, technology has crept into the classrooms of even our youngest children. Primary school kids aren’t read to by their teachers any more but by audio playing through an interactive whiteboard. Their reading lessons consist of wearing headphones and clicking through an individualised series of AI-generated questions. Maths takes place not on tiny tables, where problems are solved together, but on individual laptops. In America, nearly 80% of school districts facilitate children aged five upwards having a device in school.

All this may improve efficiency: adaptive software promises individualised teaching at exactly the right level. But it diminishes so much of the other vital learning – essentially, how to become a decent person – that schools once offered. Children had to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own. They had to negotiate disagreements, explain and justify their thinking and engage in collective problem-solving. When stories are delivered through videos instead of being read aloud, their human essence diminishes. When maths becomes a solo project rather than a group effort, children are never exposed to different ways of thinking. And in today’s AI-powered world, those are exactly the skills that computers cannot cultivate: curiosity, judgement, empathy and collaboration. Children don’t need school to become more like the digital world – “they are already immersed in that world for much of the time outside school hours”. They need a place to converse and collaborate. As technology becomes more powerful, “distinctly human capacities become more valuable, not less”.

In the new trailer for Ebenezer, Johnny Depp winks, leers, cackles and then growls: “It’s good to be back.” It wasn’t the subtlest of messages, says Emily Lawford in The New Statesman. Just six years ago, Depp was found by the UK High Court to have physically abused his ex-wife, Amber Heard. Now, it seems, all is forgiven in Hollywood: his co-stars include usually outspoken actors such as Ian McKellen, a longtime advocate for gay rights, and Rupert Grint, who publicly distanced himself from JK Rowling over her stance on trans rights. If the MeToo movement was ever powerful enough to destroy a man’s career, “that moment has passed”.

The company that makes the government’s iconic red despatch boxes – Barrow, Hepburn & Gale – sends each one out with two keys, says Olivia Empson in the FT. But by the end of John Prescott’s 10-year spell as deputy prime minister, “he had 16”. Apparently the former union activist was always losing his keys, and on more than one occasion used a coal chisel and a long hammer to try to “smash his way back into the box”. Issuing him with 16 keys was viewed as the best solution.

It’s a US government map of Africa, says Jessica Donati in Reuters, which mislabelled every country it highlighted during a State Department presentation at a global AIDS conference in Brazil last week. The dodgy display showed Nigeria as landlocked in the Sahara desert, Mozambique in the Horn of Africa rather than the south-east and Côte d’Ivoire on the opposite side of the continent. Predictably, the image appeared to contain an OpenAI watermark. The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the errors, saying the deck had been hastily edited ahead of the event.