Keir Starmer has demanded answers from the BBC over its Glastonbury coverage, which included live footage of the punk rapper Bobby Vylan leading crowds in a chant of “death, death to the IDF” – a reference to the Israel Defence Forces. Glastonbury boss Emily Eavis apologised, saying there was “no place” at the festival for “anti-Semitism, hate speech or incitement to violence”. The number of new entry-level jobs has fallen by around a third since the launch of ChatGPT. Research from jobs site Adzuna found that vacancies for graduate roles, apprenticeships, internships and junior positions with no degree requirement – so everything, basically – were down by 31.9% since November 2022. Dario Amodei, boss of AI firm Anthropic, says AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. It’s “Meltdown Monday”, says the Daily Star, as temperatures in Britain soar to the mid-30s, part of a continent-wide sunny spell that has seen highs of 46C in Spain and Portugal. “Dig yer trunks out, folks.”

Bob Vylan’s antics: vile and idiotic but not illegal

There can be little doubt, says Laurie Wastell in The Spectator, that the “idiotic antics” of Bob Vylan at Glastonbury constituted a “grotesque and deeply anti-Semitic display”. In leading a chant of “Death, death to the IDF”, the English punk duo were not just calling for a far-off military defeat. They were calling for the destruction, in effect, of the entire Jewish state, which survives in a hostile neighbourhood only by the muscle of its defenders. The BBC has been heavily criticised for airing the set, and the usual suspects – Kemi Badenoch, the front page of The Mail on Sunday – are calling for the performers to be arrested. I can see why many, especially British Jews, are furious. But the “censorious, knee-jerk response” that it’s a matter for the law is entirely wrongheaded.

Our “hypersensitivity to distasteful speech” is why the childminder Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months over an unwise and hastily deleted tweet which was deemed to have incited violence before last summer’s Southport riots. And it’s why 30 Brits a day are arrested for writing unpleasant things online. This is absurd – speech is not violence. Calling the police every time you hear something objectionable “erodes all our freedoms”. Bob Vylan’s chant was reprehensible, but it wasn’t incitement. “Did Glasto’s middle-class crusties proceed to put down the natural wine, pack up their tents and carry out a pogrom?” Certainly Hamas, “burning with a violent, genocidal hatred of Jews”, weren’t waiting for a band of “leftie gimps in a field in Somerset” to tell them how to feel about the IDF. Not prosecuting Bob Vylan would also deny the group the opportunity to pose as “anti-establishment martyrs”. Let’s not waste police time. “Sometimes, nasty words are just nasty words.”

A number of US presidents have been “shocked” to learn how quickly they would have to decide whether to launch retaliatory nuclear weapons in the event of an incoming attack, says Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. Ronald Reagan was aghast when told he might have as little as six minutes. Barack Obama said it was madness that a president doesn’t get more time for the most important call that would “ever be made by a single person in all of human history”. George W Bush put it most memorably, complaining that he wouldn’t even have time to get off the “crapper”.

In case there weren’t enough sports essentially consisting of people giving each other concussions, says BBC News, Aussies have invented a new one. In “run it straight”, two competitors line up 20 metres apart, one carrying a rugby ball, and run at each other. Whoever comes out on top is the winner. It started out in backyards and school playgrounds, before becoming a social media trend and now a popular spectator sport: the Run It League held its grand final in Dubai on Saturday – the winner took home £98,000 – and is planning an expansion to the UK and US.

Stop apologising and lead, Prime Minister

If love means never having to say you’re sorry, says Trevor Phillips in The Times, then the relationship between Keir Starmer and the British electorate is already over. The prime minister’s latest “apologia” is about a speech he made last month in which he said rising immigration risked making Britain “an island of strangers” – a term many felt was redolent of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood”. Starmer said he hadn’t read his speech carefully because he’d been distracted: he’d just returned from Ukraine; his old family home, then occupied by his sister-in-law, had been fire-bombed that morning. While it would be “churlish” to discount these stresses, it’s hard to believe a man as smart and diligent as the PM would read out words he didn’t mean.

Besides, this is an “unusual kind of reverse ferret”. Politicians typically retreat from positions that are unpopular – in this case, 41% of voters told pollsters they agreed with both the sentiment and language of his remarks, and 12% felt uncomfortable about the words but backed their meaning. In a previous survey of more than 13,000 Britons, 44% said they sometimes felt like “strangers in their own country”, a view shared equally by white and Asian respondents. Why does the PM feel the need to apologise for making the (entirely valid) case for integration? Because he is being “pushed around” by activists – just as he has been on the winter fuel cuts, gender identity and welfare. Almost a year after its landslide win, Labour remains essentially a “liberal pressure group”, ready to be blown around by the breeze of fashionable opinion, “in office but still not in power”.

💬🏝️ In fairness, I’m not entirely impartial on this topic, says Phillips. After the 7/7 terrorist attacks 20 years ago, when I was chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, I warned: “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other, and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.” Two decades on, “I would not change a word”.

The most-feared error message in technology will soon be no more, says Sopan Deb in The New York Times. Microsoft has announced that it is replacing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death in Windows with a “less friendly but more efficient” Black Screen of Death. Industry analysts say the rebrand may have been prompted by the CrowdStrike outage last year, when a botched software update by a cybersecurity firm crippled Windows machines around the world – leading to countless pictures of people staring in frustration at the blue background and the sad-face emoticon. :(

The late BBC broadcaster Alan Yentob had an “endearing/infuriating” habit of name-dropping, says Grayson Perry in The Spectator. I remember coming across him after arriving early at a big arts event. We chatted for a while and then he wandered off, only to return 10 minutes later. “Couldn’t you find anyone more famous to hang out with?” I joked, to which he replied: “No.”

It’s a new boat-shaped Louis Vuitton shop in Shanghai, says Christina Yao in Dezeen. The top floors of the three-storey building are designed to resemble the luxury brand’s iconic trunks, while the main body is wrapped in a metallic monochrome and has a giant silvery anchor shaped like the Louis Vuitton logo. The French firm has form with this style of branding: in November last year its under-renovation flagship store in New York was wrapped in a facade modelled after its distinctive suitcases (click here for pictures).