The Metropolitan Police is launching a criminal inquiry into claims that senior Reform UK figures solicited illegal funding from overseas. Nigel Farage faces the prospect of being questioned as a witness after undercover reporters released footage of him being told of the plan to funnel illegal US donations through a UK citizen. Donald Trump claimed he would give every American adult $5,000 if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections, as he sought to rescue his party’s prospects at its first-ever midterm convention yesterday. The US president, who gave no details on where the $1.35trn needed to fund the hand-outs would come from, said his only caveat was that the payment would have to be spent in America, not Canada. A British researcher at Anthropic says he is quitting the AI industry over fears it is building systems that humans cannot control. The firm hasn’t commented, but one of its top scientists, Evan Hubinger, cheerily wrote on social media that Jacob Coxon’s analysis was broadly correct: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

Is it any wonder that balaclava-clad men have started protesting at Britain’s ports, says Juliet Samuel in The Times, when our asylum system is so “utterly negligent”? That’s not a far-right talking point – it’s the official conclusion drawn by the UN’s refugee team. Their audit found that just half of Britain’s asylum decisions meet its standards. In a sample of 60 Home Office interviews with claimants, 19 failed even to establish on what basis the migrant was making their claim. Earlier this week, a whistleblower said just one in a hundred claims is likely to be genuine. “One percent.” Bangladeshis apparently like to cite their fear of political persecution, even when they can’t name a single policy of the party they claim to support. The Pakistani fashion is to say you’re gay; for Kurds, incredibly, it’s to claim you’re dating the Kurdish prime minister’s daughter (“she sure gets around”). What a racket.

The anti-immigration lot argue that direct action is necessary because the government isn’t bringing down migration numbers, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. That’s nonsense. Net migration nearly halved between December 2024 and December 2025; small boat crossings are also down substantially, along with the number of asylum seekers being housed in hotels. Of course migration is a “legitimate” concern. But the same can be said of climate change and Israel’s actions in Gaza – that doesn’t mean Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action were right to, respectively, bring the M25 to a standstill and break into the UK site of an Israel-based defence company. That’s what should really worry the government: more and more people think their cause is so important it “transcends the rule of law”. As the former UK Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption wrote last year, this growing contempt for politics among activists risks becoming a “mortal threat to our democracy”.

Now that I’ve left the Today programme, says Amol Rajan in The Spectator, I am blissfully unencumbered by the BBC News impartiality rules. So here goes: “Dominic Cummings was right.” Go on YouTube and dig out his speech to the IPPR thinktank in 2014. He basically has three propositions: that whoever is elected, the system (that is, the civil service) “always wins”; that the system is “utterly, hopelessly” unequal to the demands of our time; and that the people who get things done are entrepreneurs and scientists, who favour action, rather than members of the system, who favour process. Is any of that wrong?

If you like your tea or coffee as hot as it comes, says Michelle Roberts on BBC News, you might want to reconsider. A new Oxford study of nearly one million Brits has shown that those who drink “very hot” beverages – defined as 65C or above – are three times more likely to develop oesophageal cancer than those who opt for a more tepid brew. Researchers say it’s because steaming hot liquid can damage the cells lining the gullet, but emphasise that the overall risk remains “relatively low”.

Open Instagram today and you may find yourself bombarded by “office influencers”, says Jo Ellison in the FT. United by youth, glossy looks and perfect hair, these late-twenties women – “it is almost always women” – time-stamp their working days: wake up at 6:30am, go for a run, commute to the office, eat a bowl of “yoghurt-something”, sit at an empty desk, tap away on a laptop, break for a matcha latte, eat a salad, more emails. By 5:30pm she’s packing up the laptop and “clicking her corporate heels towards the train back home”. There are now more than three million of these “fascinatingly banal” videos, tagged #corporatelife and #corporategirlies.

My theory is that these new professionals, the product of years of disrupted learning and social chaos, are feeling “recharged by being in the world”. Fed up with the slobbery of WFH isolation, they are invigorated by heading into the office and enjoying the buzz of the canteen or having someone to chat to by the scalding hot-water tap. Perhaps they love the commute because it’s an “exotic novelty”, and they’re happy to put on heels and “wear tight waistbands every day” because until recently their lives have been “starved of glam”. While many now see flexible working hours as a “birthright”, these fresh-faced employees view holding a takeaway coffee in one hand and a trophy Chanel bag in the other while ascending the office escalator as the “height of aspiration”, something of an “eighties yuppie throwback”. It’s never clear what these women actually do, but that’s not the point. What they want is to “make the office cool again”.

A rather dark form of tourism has emerged in Hangzhou, China, says Zoey Zhang in the South China Morning Post. At Lvxing Base, the country’s first “immersive natural disaster simulation centre”, visitors paying $135 can brave mock typhoons, torrential rain and flash floods. A $750 family package, with selected activities for children as young as six, adds in wilderness survival and water rescue training. One happy customer, who underwent a flooding simulation where water surged into an underground car park and rose up to her neck, says “the suffocating fear made me forget I was merely ‘experiencing’ a disaster”.

Monolingual Brits often have to “muddle through” without the lingo abroad but sometimes it goes awry, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Former cabinet minister turned prison chaplain Jonathan Aitken once attended a church service in Vietnam with a colleague. Not understanding a word, the pair decided to copy the man in front, standing and sitting whenever he did. All went swimmingly until he rose, they dutifully followed – and found they were the only three on their feet. The church “descended into hilarity”. The priest, it later emerged, had announced: “We have a baptism next week. Would the father of the child please rise.”

It’s Apple’s first-ever folding smartphone, says Michael Acton in the FT, which was unveiled yesterday at the company’s annual iPhone launch event at “Apple Park” in California. New CEO John Ternus said the passport-sized iPhone Duo, which folds out to a screen almost as large as an iPad Mini, would “redefine the experience of using a foldable phone”, claiming rivals’ versions were merely “like two phones stuck together”. The biggest shake-up to the iPhone in its nearly 20-year history doesn’t come cheap: when the Duo is released next month, it will cost between $1,999 and $3,199.