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“Breakfast at Meloni’s”: Europe’s new migration mindset

🏡 $195m gaff | 👴🏻 Grandad style | ️🫖 High tea

In the headlines

Donald Trump’s campaign has accused the Labour Party of interfering in the US election. In a formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission, Trump’s team accused Keir Starmer’s party of “blatant foreign interference” over plans for roughly 100 activists to travel to America and campaign for Kamala Harris. Israel has confirmed the killing of Hezbollah’s presumed next leader. The IDF said Hashem Safieddine, the cousin of the terror group’s late boss Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an airstrike on southern Beirut earlier this month. More than 1,000 serious criminals were released from prison early yesterday, as part of the government’s attempt to ease overcrowding. One, identifying himself as a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, praised the scheme and then sped away in a £250,000 Lamborghini Urus. Another shouted “big up Keir Starmer” before pootling home in a new £150,000 Bentley.

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Franco Origlia/Getty

“Breakfast at Meloni’s”: Europe’s new migration mindset

If you’re in any doubt about where Europe stands on migration, says Steffen Lüdke in Der Spiegel, just look at who was invited to “Breakfast at Meloni’s” in Brussels last week. At the start of the bloc’s annual migration summit, the Italian PM invited a select group of leaders, including fellow right-wingers like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Peter Pellegrini, to brainstorm “radical isolation plans” over coffee and croissants. The harsher the idea, the better. The Netherlands’ scheme to deport migrants to Uganda? “Interesting!” Formally suspending the right to asylum altogether, as Poland plans to do? “Yes, please.” It seems European leaders are currently engaged in an “open competition to outdo each other”, with Meloni leading the pack. Her scheme to process asylum seekers in Albania – currently on hold due to legal challenges – is lauded as a new “model”.

It’s no surprise that Meloni, whose country is a key entry point for migrants, is fighting for more aggressive controls. What’s striking is the “sleepwalking indifference” with which more liberal EU leaders are allowing the bloc to drift “further and further to the right”. Europe’s political centre is entirely “lacking in imagination” on how to tackle the problem, leaving the increasingly radical ideas on the right to gain ground. Not only is this stretching international law to breaking point, it’s also changing the European project as a whole. The bloc was once a progressive bastion with “liberal values, democracy and human dignity” at its centre. In a few years, “things could look very different”.

🇷🇺🪖 What few people realise about immigration is how much it’s being driven by our enemies, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. “Global instability is asymmetrical” – people fleeing wars and suffering want to come to western countries, not to those “enemies of freedom”, Russia, China and North Korea. The despots ruling those countries know full well that if they incite conflict in the right places, the “exodus of misery” will heap pressure on the West. That’s why all those “thugs” from Russia’s Wagner group are in the Sahel – to stir up trouble in a way that drives refugees north to Europe. “We’re being played like violins.”

Property

One of the largest homes in the US has gone on the market, says The Wall Street Journal. Perched on a six-acre site in the hills above Los Angeles, the roughly 50,000-square-foot mega-gaff has 16 bedrooms, 27 bathrooms and 18 fireplaces. Features include a flower-prep room, a soundproofed bowling alley and a “large theatre”. Outside there’s a detached two-bedroom guesthouse – with its own lift – along with an outdoor kitchen, a tennis court, a 75-foot infinity pool and a “custom swimsuit spinner”. The property was built by the billionaire hotel tycoon Tony Pritzker and his wife Jeanne, who are selling up after divorcing earlier this year. $195m.

Inside politics

Recent UK chancellors have made it a tradition to hang balloons in the office of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to represent spending deals that must be negotiated with government departments. As each settlement is reached, the corresponding balloon is popped. Rachel Reeves says this process has now been completed ahead of the forthcoming budget. “There are no balloons left,” she tells Radio 5. “The balloons have been burst.”

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Fashion

Gen Z has declared that the sharpest look of the autumn is “grandad style”, says The Daily Telegraph. Think shaggy knits in multiple colours and patterns, slip-on shoes, and acres of corduroy and tweed. The sleeveless jumper “falls straight into the grandad playbook”; the “nerdiness” of a checked shirt means it fits the bill; loafers, slippers and moccasins are now bang on trend. For extra kudos, add chunky ribbed socks. The older man is finally having his moment in the “sartorial sun”.

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Musk with Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. X/bagdoddy

Why is Elon Musk tying his fortune to Trump?

Of the many audacious gambles of Elon Musk’s career, says the FT, few have been bolder than his bet on Donald Trump. In a coin-toss election, the world’s richest man has “tied his reputation and fortune” to the Republican candidate, donating at least $75m to his pro-Trump funding group “America PAC”; co-opting X to pump out pro-Trump messages (and “lurid conspiracy theories”); and recently relocating to Pennsylvania, “the most important swing state”, to personally oversee the Republican campaign there. His latest scheme is a “petition” backing free speech and gun rights that’s only open to registered voters in seven swing states – signatories are given $47 in cash and entry into a lottery with a daily giveaway of $1m. As Musk himself said of Trump in an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this month: “If he loses, I’m fucked.”

Musk, who used to be an ardent Democrat, says the biggest reason behind his U-turn – aside from his online war against the “woke mind virus” – is the need for looser regulations. From “satellites to electric vehicles, brain chips to AI-powered robots”, the billionaire’s businesses depend heavily on contracts and rules set by the federal government. He told the crowd at a rally in Pennsylvania last week that his company SpaceX “can build a giant rocket faster than the licence can be processed by the government”, and argues that only a Republican presidency can end what he calls “strangulation by over-regulation”. In a broader sense, Musk has always had “aspirations to shape the future of humanity”. His bet is that, if Trump wins, he’d gain substantial influence over how the government treats his companies – which would give him a free ride to do just that.

Nice work if you can get it

A (sloppily spelled) poster for Thatcher and Thatcher, as imagined by ChatGPT

ITV wants to hire a £95,000-a-year AI expert to use the technology to come up with new show ideas, says Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. But why does it need an “expert”? Anyone can ask AI for TV ideas and it will “pump out more suggestions than you can handle”. I just asked for some that might appeal to our readers, and it didn’t disappoint. There’s Red Hot, a “steamy erotic thriller set behind the scenes of Labour’s election campaign”; Thatcher and Thatcher – in which Maggie and Denis become detectives; and Truss in the Dust, which sees former PM Liz transported to the Old West, where she has to use “her political savvy to survive and thrive”.

Letters

To The Guardian:

Remembering passwords needn’t be hell. Many times I have successfully done so by adopting the simple practice of changing a password to “incorrect” so that, whatever wrong password I use, I am always helpfully informed: “Your password is incorrect”.

Adrian Brodkin
London

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s a tiny Australian crevice with an even tinier Australian woman stuck inside. Matilda Campbell was walking in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales when her phone fell into the crack. Leaning down to retrieve it, she fell in, kicking off a seven-hour ordeal – the first hour of which she spent upside down – which only ended after emergency services winched away a 500kg boulder and jimmied her out of an S-bend. “We were all like, how did you get down there?” NSW ambulanceman Peter Watts told the BBC, describing Campbell as a “trooper”. Unbelievably, she was rescued with only minor bumps and bruises – but sadly no phone.

Quoted

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
American economist Thomas Sowell

That’s it. You’re done.