Plans to legalise assisted dying are being debated in parliament ahead of a make-or-break vote this afternoon. If the legislation – which would allow a terminally ill person with six months left to live to be given help to end their own life – is voted down, it will be shelved indefinitely. If it is approved, and makes it through further Commons votes in the coming months unamended, the House of Lords will not be able to halt its progress a second time. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has told police chiefs to prepare for more far-right protests this weekend, encouraging them to make “full use” of new powers to ban masks at demonstrations. Tommy Robinson ally Daniel Thomas is understood to be planning further protests in Portsmouth, after describing the scenes at Dover last weekend as a “dummy run”. This year’s champagne will be some of the strongest in the region’s history. The scorching summer, which left grapes unusually rich in sugar, has forced the appellation authorities to increase the maximum alcohol content from the usual 13% to 15%. Santé!

It’s almost impossible now to remember how secure and comfortable America felt before 9/11, says Gerard Baker in The Times. The big domestic argument of the 2000 election was how to spend the looming fiscal surplus. George W Bush’s inaugural address spared barely two sentences for foreign policy. His first prime-time address to the nation, a month before the towers fell, was on “the need for a proper regulatory framework for stem-cell research”. When the hijackers struck, everyone knew the world had changed. What we didn’t know was how, and 25 years later it’s time to make a “painful judgement”. In ways Osama bin Laden could never have imagined, those attacks triggered events, decisions and consequences that have dragged the US down from its position of “unrivalled global supremacy”, leaving it a weaker and more fragile nation. America didn’t just lose its innocence that day. It lost its way.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than 7,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of civilian ones and trillions of dollars, turning that surplus into a debt now above $40trn. Seeing the world’s sole superpower flounder for a decade against roadside bombs and Soviet-era rifles wrecked American self-esteem and drained Washington’s international authority. But the deeper damage was to Americans’ faith in their government and in themselves. The hyping of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons destroyed the bond between voters and their leaders. A compliant press finished off what trust remained. With it went the old rules of argument: facts became optional and each side picked “their truth”. The result is the “chaos and insanity” of our politics today. On the night of 9/11, a “visibly shaken” Bush declared that the attacks had “shattered steel but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve”. Does anyone believe that today?

🛩️🫡 On the Air Force One flight back to Washington on 9/11, says former CIA deputy director Michael Morell on The Rest Is Classified, Bush waved me over and pointed out of the window. Outside, with the “still smouldering Pentagon” in the distance, were two F-16 fighter jets, one on each wingtip, so close you could see the pilots’ faces. Bush asked me if I knew why the F-16s were there. I told him I didn’t. He said: “They’re there in case someone fires a surface-to-air missile at us on the final approach. Their job is to put themselves between that missile and the President of the United States.”

Singapore’s prime minister – already comfortably the highest-paid head of state – has been given a whopping pay rise, says Owen Walker in the FT. After an independent review, Lawrence Wong’s annual package will soar from $1.7m to $2.8m. That’s around four times that of the leader with the second-highest salary, Hong Kong’s chief executive John Lee, and vastly outstrips the likes of the US president ($400,000) and the UK prime minister (£170,000). Singapore pegs political pay to the incomes of the country’s top 1,000 earners in a bid to attract talent. Rather charitably, Wong says he’ll give his additional moulah to good causes.

Americans are deeply sceptical of pretty much everything AI does, says Ben Berkowitz in Axios, with one exception: “making dinner”. In a recent poll asking people what sort of information they’d be comfortable getting from AI, 74% said they’d trust the technology for recipes. None of the other categories – including news, history, personal finance, medical advice, parenting and relationship guidance – scored more than 34%.

Stanley Praimnath was on the 81st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre when he saw United Airlines Flight 175 bearing down on the building, says David Smith in The Guardian. “Lord, I can’t do this,” he recalls screaming. “You take over.” When the aircraft struck the building diagonally, cutting through the 77th to 85th floors, the impact flattened entire walls, severed electrical wiring and sent a shock wave of jet fuel and debris through Praimnath’s office. “I remember flames all around me,” he says. “The floor above me collapsed and it’s hovering over the desk and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die.’”

Three floors above, Brian Clark and some colleagues had, somehow, found a stairwell that remained open. When they got down to the 81st, Clark heard a muffled cry: “Help, I’m buried. I can’t breathe.” Clark squeezed through a hole in the wall, directed the man towards him and hauled him to safety. “I stuck out my hand and said, ‘I’m Brian Clark.’ He says, ‘I’m Stanley Praimnath; we’ll be brothers for life.’” Noticing that both their hands were bleeding, Clark smooshed them together and said: “In fact, we’ll be blood brothers for life. Come on, buddy. Let’s go home.” When they got to the stairwell, they made the critical decision to ignore a woman telling people to go upstairs to the supposed safety of the roof, and headed downwards. Some 1,620 steps later they emerged on to the street, and within minutes the tower had collapsed. Two of only four people known to have survived from above the impact zone in either tower, they stayed true to their blood brothers promise. They phoned one another regularly and shared family milestones. When Clark’s eldest daughter married, “Praimnath and his wife were seated at the top table”.

Postered is a fun online game in which players are given a film title and five potential taglines, and have to guess which one was used on the original movie poster. There’s a new film every day, and a decent archive. To give it a go, click here.

A Swiss start-up has found a way to make the country’s more than 3,000 miles of railway generate clean electricity, says Quinn Glabicki in The New York Times: sticking solar panels between the tracks. Last April, Sun-Ways installed panels on a short stretch of track in a “craggy mountaintop”, and predict that if the technology were adopted across the national rail network it could power as much as 30% of the country’s energy needs for public transport. France, Italy and South Korea have all struck deals to start testing the tech on their own railways.

It’s a Grade II*-listed Wimbledon home designed by Richard and Su Rogers, says Amy Peacock in Dezeen, which has been handed over to the National Trust. Designed in the 1960s for Richard’s parents, 22 Parkside is a celebrated example of modernist architecture and has long been considered a prototype for his later works, including the Lloyd’s of London building and Paris’s Centre Pompidou. The single-storey home, constructed from a yellow-painted steel frame with glass façades, will host events and guided tours.