Keir Starmer has sacked Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US. Only hours after No 10 said the PM had full confidence in the New Labour veteran, the government announced that emails showing the “depth and extent” of Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – in particular his suggestion that the late paedophile’s first conviction for soliciting minors was wrongful – made his position untenable. A manhunt is under way in the US to find the killer of Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing political activist who was shot dead at a university rally in Utah yesterday. Donald Trump, a close ally of the 31-year-old father of two, said the shooting was a “heinous assassination” and vowed to respond to what he called “radical-left political violence”. Nasa says unusual rock patterns on Mars are the “clearest sign of life” ever discovered on the red planet. Colourful “leopard spots” indicate an ancient chemical reaction, likely formed by the excrement of microbes, which may have thrived on Mars when it was awash in water 3.7 billion years ago.

America’s “self-perpetuating” cycle of political violence

The killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah yesterday was an act of unspeakable evil, says The Washington Post. And while the gunman’s motives aren’t yet clear, this appears to be part of a worrying trend. A state lawmaker in Minnesota was “horrifically assassinated” at her home in June. Donald Trump came within inches of being shot dead in Pennsylvania last summer. In 2022, an attacker broke into the home of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fractured her husband’s skull with a hammer. Five years before that, a radical left-wing gunman shot up a congressional Republican baseball practice, almost killing House whip Steve Scalise. Political violence, it seems, is becoming “disturbingly common”.

American politics is dangerous not just because it is so polarised, says David Graham in The Atlantic, but also because it is “so closely divided”. No party can win an enduring political advantage, and partisans on both sides are convinced that the stakes of each election are “existential”. The easy spread of conspiracy theories, such as claims of election fraud, add fuel to the fire. And while the impulse of people to solve political problems with bloodshed is dangerous anywhere, it is particularly lethal in a country where guns are so easy to obtain. But perhaps the most terrifying aspect of political violence is that it tends to be “self-perpetuating”. Attacks inspire copycats and reprisals, which in turn lead to more attacks. Historically, these cycles do tend to end, but only after damaging retrenchments of people’s freedoms or some catastrophic event. There’s little reason to expect this time to be any different.

🤵😎 Kirk himself was a breath of fresh air, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Conservatives on college campuses tend to be “nerds and dorks and oddballs”, the kind of guys who wear bow ties and spend their time plotting how to take over the Young Republicans. Kirk’s campus conservatism was something different: “fun-loving, masculine, rowdy, mainstream, even faintly cool”. As progressivism became more uptight, he came to embody Trump-era populism – a spokesman for a youthful right that seemed “both more rebellious and more relaxed”.

Given Donald Trump’s massive unpopularity in the UK, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, it makes no tactical or strategic sense for Nigel Farage to cosy up to him. And the Reform UK leader is no fool. So why does he do it? The answer, perhaps, is that most populists spend their lives “striving for status”. In Reform’s case, these are jobbing academics, “alternative” broadcasters and businessmen who feel “denigrated as spivs – members of the East India Club, rather than White’s”. It is this status anxiety that makes being close to the US president – whatever the political costs – irresistible. “It is a kind of social revenge.”

Nostalgia for a pre-smartphone world is everywhere on social media, says Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times, much of it now generated by artificial intelligence. One AI-generated TikTok video, shared by a user called Nostalgia Cat, shows a young man explaining that in the summer of 2000 there were “No chats, no DMs, just stories around the fire ’til morning”. On another account, Purest Nostalgia, a post titled “a peaceful Tuesday morning in the 1980s” shows a man with a briefcase showered in golden light. It’s nonsense, of course, as anyone who remembers the 1980s or 2000s knows. But it’s still rather pleasing.

Unrestrained force is becoming Israel’s “only language”

Israel’s strike on top Hamas leaders in Qatar on Tuesday has prompted the usual hand-wringing, says The Wall Street Journal. The attack – which killed six people, seemingly not including the main targets – was obviously a big deal: it’s “no small step to bomb a state not at war”. But the idea that there is any real difference between Hamas’s “political” and “military” leaders has always been for the birds. “Both are terrorists.” Operating in suits from fancy hotels doesn’t alter the moral calculus. One “grotesque” video from October 7, 2023, shows the terror group’s leaders celebrating the massacre from the comfort of their Doha office. As for the Qataris, they knew the risk they incurred by hosting Hamas. And it’s hard to have sympathy for a country that blamed Israel on October 7, and whose defence minister tweeted earlier this year: “We are all Hamas”.

There’s hypocrisy on both sides, says Le Monde. Benjamin Netanyahu once valued Doha’s role as intermediary because it facilitated money transfers to Hamas – a “cynical calculation” designed to fuel Palestinian divisions (and which led to the horrors of October 7). By targeting the group’s leaders when they were meeting to review a US ceasefire proposal, Israel has made it clear that ending the war and securing the release of the hostages are no longer the main priorities. This is “the end of diplomacy” for the foreseeable future. And once again, it looks as if the US will let Netanyahu get away with this “rogue-state behaviour”: the White House’s reaction was “anything but a sharp rebuke”. As we have seen in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and now Qatar, force – used “without restraint and in disregard of international law” – has become Israel’s “only language”.

For all Xi Jinping’s talk of immortality with Vladimir Putin in Beijing last week, says James Palmer in Foreign Policy, the Chinese leader does little to optimise his own health. The 72-year-old is overweight and – according to Taiwanese intelligence sources – secretly smokes behind his wife’s back. And his occasional disappearances from public view are allegedly linked to health issues. One recurrent claim in the “diaspora rumour mill” is that he suffers from gout.

A mining consortium in Canada has organised a nationwide treasure hunt for a chest containing $1m worth of gold coins, says Andrew Paul in Popular Science. The Great Canadian Treasure Hunt starts with a “master clue” – a 13-stanza poem referring to a phoenix, “zinc-toned waters” and “sunken whispers” – and additional hints will be released monthly over the next year. Treasure hunters are given a long list of “no-go zones” where they shouldn’t search, including private property, all manmade structures and “anywhere dangerous”. And the website is careful to note that the loot is hidden “at least 5km away from the homes, workplaces or properties of the organisers”. Get cracking here.

It’s Larry Ellison, who (briefly) became the world’s richest man yesterday, says BBC News. The software pioneer’s personal fortune surged to £290bn thanks to a 40% jump in the share price of his company, Oracle, putting him just ahead of Elon Musk, on £284bn. Oracle’s shares later settled down, returning Musk to the top spot. Ellison, 81, is a close ally of Tony Blair and rose to prominence in the 1990s because of his lavish lifestyle, which included mega-yachts, private jets, a long list of wives (he’s up to six now) and owning 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.