The murdered student Henry Nowak repeatedly told police “I can’t breathe” as they handcuffed him minutes before he died. Newly released bodycam footage of the incident in Southampton last year shows Nowak telling officers he had been stabbed, to which one replies: “I don’t think you have, mate.” Vickrum Digwa, who lied about Nowak racially abusing him, was handed a life sentence for his murder yesterday. Keir Starmer’s authority took another hit yesterday with the release of the so-called Mandelson files, which lay bare ministers’ private criticism of the PM’s premiership. Contained within the almost 1,500 pages of correspondence was Peter Mandelson saying the PM lacked “verve”, and senior cabinet minister Pat McFadden complaining that Labour MPs only care about who they can tax to “pay benefits to others”. Mushrooms are set to be deployed in rivers to filter out toxic pollutants that pose a risk to human health. Ofwat has awarded Anglian Water £1.5m to use fungi to clean up waterways after a trial in Devon’s River Erme showed that fungal spores absorbed as much as 80% of the water’s E. coli.

The first Chinese robotaxis have arrived in London, says Tym Syrytczyk on Substack. Apollo Go, owned by Beijing tech giant Baidu, is the third autonomous vehicle company to test its driverless machines in the capital. But unlike Google’s Waymo and British-founded Wayve, its cars are designed and built in China and operated entirely by Chinese software. Shouldn’t we be more concerned? Last year, Norway’s transport agency discovered a widget buried in its Chinese-made buses capable of cutting the power supply remotely. What happens if there are similar “kill switches” in Apollo Go’s cars? Chinese firms are legally required to support their country’s intelligence work when needed. So the more deeply embedded they are in our transport infrastructure, the greater the potential for Beijing to use that infrastructure against us.

It’s not just the risk of vehicles being remotely powered down, causing traffic chaos or worse. Driverless vehicles scan hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles around them, making them potent tools for mobile surveillance. And even if Beijing isn’t up to any dodgy tricks, what of cybersecurity? Earlier this year, hundreds of Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan stopped suddenly in live traffic, reportedly because of a hack. Other countries have come up with policies to mitigate these issues: Switzerland struck a deal with Baidu but insisted on Swiss-based remote operators, full ownership of the vehicle data and the right to dismantle cars to check for kill switches. What we don’t want is a repeat of the Huawei saga, when Britain allowed the Chinese firm to build out the country’s 5G network only to then rip it all out to mitigate the surveillance risk. Robotaxis look certain to become critical national infrastructure. The time to ask who controls them is now.

America’s “profit machine” looks extraordinary, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT, with a massive stock market boom defying war, tariffs and even an oil shock, apparently justified by giant corporate earnings. But look closer and “cracks appear”. What few people realise is that corporate profits are padded by the government’s deficit – federal dollars eventually make their way into people’s pockets, and from there into corporations’ coffers. In the past decade, deficit spending has accounted for more than half of corporate profits, twice the level of the dotcom era. And the biggest names about to list on US stock exchanges – SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI – have “little to no profits” at all.

Rollers at the ready, says Susie Lethbridge in The Times: the return of the Disney+ smash hit Rivals appears to have prompted a renaissance of the eighties-style “bouncy barnet”. Recent converts to the so-called Jilly cut, named after Rivals author Jilly Cooper, include the likes of former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, the model Cara Delevingne and Amandaland actress Lucy Punch. Searches for “80s hairstyle” on Pinterest have risen by 50% in the past month. Andreas Wild, a stylist at the celebrity-favourite salon Larry King, recommends using a round brush to backcomb your hair before putting in the rollers, saying it “gives you extra volume”.

No one knows exactly why Vickrum Digwa stabbed 18-year-old Henry Nowak five times with a ceremonial blade in Southampton last December, says Gus Carter in The Spectator, still less why he filmed Henry as he lay dying, “goading him”. The judge who just sentenced Digwa to spend at least 21 years in prison for the murder said he was “sure that Henry had said nothing racist” and he had no history of causing trouble. But there is no mystery in why, when Hampshire police turned up, Digwa claimed Nowak had racially abused him, knocking his turban off. Because instead of arresting him, or believing Nowak when he told them he had been stabbed, they put him in handcuffs. His haunting last words as he lay bleeding out in the road: “I can’t breathe.”

The officers involved in Nowak’s appalling, degrading and entirely pointless death will rightly face an investigation. But however brutal and stupid their conduct, I have some sympathy with them. Not because there is any excuse for what they did, but because they have been “trained to act in this absurd, inhumane way”. In recent years, policing has become far less about old-fashioned ideas of “reasonable suspicion” and “due process”, and far more about being “allies” of ethnic minorities and policing as “anti-racists”. It’s a horrific irony that Hampshire Constabulary’s “Race Action Plan” cites the murder of George Floyd – whose dying words in Minneapolis were identical to Nowak’s, in similarly tragic circumstances – as a “pivotal moment for policing in the UK”. It is precisely the resulting obsession with “anti-racism” that led officers to assume they were on the side of the Sikh Digwa against the white Nowak, even as he lay dying on a British street.

This is not an isolated instance of lethal anti-racism, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. In 2017, a security guard at Manchester Arena ignored a “dodgy” Arab-looking guy for fear of “stereotyping him because of his race”. That man detonated a bomb that killed 22 people. In 2023, a violent young man named Valdo Calocane murdered three people after officials declined to detain him because of the “over-representation of young black males in detention”. And when a headmistress in Lancashire told authorities she felt a “visceral sense of dread” about her student Axel Rudakubana, she was told she was “racially profiling” him as a “black boy with a knife”. He went on to murder three little girls. “With a knife.”

Earth might seem like a perfect planet for life, says the YouTube channel In a Nutshell, yet huge parts of the natural environment are hostile deserts of ice, rock, heat or darkness. Even our vast oceans are mostly barren voids. But as astro-boffins discover more and more exoplanets, they are discovering that there may be worlds that are far better suited to life than Earth ever was, and where ecosystems may flourish on a scale we’ve never imagined. For some highly enjoyable speculation on what glories such “Super-Earths” might hold, click here.

For decades, say Pamela Paul and Jeffrey Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal, there was a nailed-on present for father’s day: a book about some little-known battle in World War Two, or the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, or perhaps the latest presidential biography. But “dad books are a dying breed”. Nonfiction titles are suddenly the “most challenged segment of the print market”. Publishers say celeb memoirs, self-help and religious books do ok, but proper biographies, current affairs, business and economics – what booksellers call “serious nonfiction” – is in precipitous decline. Publishers blame the rise of Substack newsletters, Netflix documentaries and podcasts.

It’s an explosion at a fireworks factory, says Lily Shanagher in The Daily Telegraph. The unplanned pyrotechnic display in Malta – which injured two farmers and a food courier and killed four cows – began yesterday at 6.30am, shattering windows at a nearby hotel and littering surrounding fields with debris and unexploded combustibles. Fireworks continued going off for hours after the initial explosion, the cause of which has still not been explained.