The UK government borrowed significantly more than expected last month, highlighting the challenges facing Chancellor John Healey ahead of his first budget in October. The budget deficit hit £1.8bn in July, some £2.3bn worse than the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast of a £500m surplus. The French government has prevented 185 small boats from crossing the Channel in the three months since Britain agreed a £660m deal to patrol the beaches. The figures account for 61% of all attempted crossings – a 5% improvement in prevention compared to the same period last year – and means some 4,312 migrants were stopped from reaching the UK. The world’s oldest person is celebrating her 117th birthday today. Ethel Caterham, who was born in 1909, during the reign of Edward VII, and now lives in a care home in Surrey, became the oldest living person in April 2025, and has spent the past year ticking off new experiences such as stroking a llama and meeting the King (below).

Millions of people in the UK have spent the summer watching their gardens turn to dustbowls under strict hosepipe bans, says Simon Kelner in The i Paper. But it’s not as though we’ve suddenly run out of water – we simply lack the infrastructure needed to capture, store, transport and conserve it. Since the millennium, the UK has built something like 450 data centres, more than 1,000 onshore wind farms and over a hundred miles of new motorway. But in all that time, we’ve built not a single new reservoir. Germany, by comparison, has built 20, and France has more than 100 water storage projects under construction. But here? “None. Nada. Zilch.”

As the Labour MP Clive Lewis told parliament last year: “In the 35 years before privat­isa­tion, almost 100 reser­voirs were built. In the 35 years since privat­isa­tion, not one.” In other words, the management of one of the nation’s most precious assets has been bodged ever since the water supply was privatised and paying dividends to shareholders took precedence over reliably supplying water. Since 2017, almost unbelievably, 35 former reservoirs and bulk storage facilities have been sold off, raising around £26m for water companies but massively reducing their ability to store water and deliver it to people’s homes. Many of those sites are now leisure parks or housing developments. British people are highly responsible – 66% say they are more than happy to live with restrictions to conserve water. But there is a growing anger that we are dutifully conserving water and paying the bill while the water companies who have plundered our national assets for private gain are running off with the profits.

🚰🫡 The water companies are a wretched bunch, says Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, but credit where it’s due: Severn Trent Water has maintained full water supply throughout the summer, without subjecting its 4.6 million customers to hosepipe bans. The firm prides itself on trusting customers to use water sensibly, without punitive measures, and says its focus is on fixing leaks at record levels. Consequently, the company hasn’t imposed water restrictions of any kind since 1995.

Faced with a ropey job market, many Gen Zers are opting to skip corporate life altogether and become their own bosses, says Redd Brown in Bloomberg. Some 43% of those born between 1997 and 2012 say they are considering starting a business or a side hustle this year – more than any other age group – while two thirds say it’s “essential” to have multiple income sources. And for some, it’s lucrative stuff. One 24-year-old former janitor started placing vending machines in bars and clubs stocked with vapes and nicotine pouches. Today, he rakes in a whopping $75,000 a month in profit.

Tired of the “endless roulette” of dating apps, increasing numbers of lovelorn singles are turning to LinkedIn, says Celia Bernhardt in The Wall Street Journal. About a quarter of workers think the professional platform, with its clear headshots and ample details about a person’s “path in life”, is an acceptable dating tool, while 22% said they had either “reached out” or responded to someone on the site with “romantic intent”. One couple (pictured) who met through the jobs platform are now getting married. “If it was LinkedIn, so be it,” says the bride. “He’s been the best connection I’ve ever made.”

It’s official, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The ultra-progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has declared the woke era “crazy”. She’s right of course, though given her own record – insisting some groups have “no choice but to riot”, calling for defunding the police and “prison abolition”, and using the demeaning term “menstruating person” to describe a woman – the “crazy” she speaks of was also her own. But it’s worth remembering, before consigning it to the dustbin of history, that wokeness wasn’t just an Orwellian linguistic fad or a series of tedious corporate training sessions or wacky policy ideas about addressing inequality. To those on the receiving end, it was a brutal system of enforced ideological conformity policed by social bullying and institutional coercion which ended reputations, careers, and some lives.

Apologies are in order. An apology, perhaps, to the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who was forced to resign in 2020 for the sin of running a piece by the paper’s architecture critic headlined: “Buildings Matter, Too”. And what about Richard North Patterson, author of 16 New York Times bestsellers, who wrote a book with a (wholly sympathetic) black female lead character – but was rejected by 20 major imprints because he was white. Or Carole Hooven, who was hounded out of Harvard after saying on TV that “male” and “female” were scientifically essential terms, even though she added that “facts about biology” shouldn’t “prevent us from treating people with respect”. And what about the countless men whose innocently fumbled romantic advances were sucked into the vortex of #MeToo, permanently scarring their lives as though they were Harvey Weinstein-style predators. Crazy is the word. It’s time more on the left said so.

England is becoming a “maths powerhouse”, says Nicola Woolcock in The Times. Ian Bauckham, boss of exam regulator Ofqual, says GCSE maths grades are firmly on the up, thanks to the adoption of “maths mastery” programmes, popular in high-performing countries like Singapore, which were introduced by Michael Gove. More than 22% of 16-year-olds who received their GCSE results yesterday achieved at least a grade 7 (equivalent to an A) in maths.

People are talking far less than they used to, says Hatty Willmoth in Science Focus Magazine. American psychologists, who tracked the speech of thousands of people across Europe and the US over 15 years, found that the average number of words people said a day in 2019 was 11,900, down from 16,632 in 2005. That’s a 28% decrease, amounting to 120,000 lost words per year. The researchers suggest the drop may be the result of fewer “incidental conservations”, which has unsurprisingly coincided with the rise of phones and social media.

It’s the rather terrifying “devil robot” that was dispatched to tackle California’s wildfires last year, says David Millward in The Telegraph. Designed by the robot start-up Satyress, the so-called “Threehalves” device stands at 7ft tall and weighs more than 100kg. Its first mission was to use a chainsaw to clear dead trees away from electrical wires and pylons before they caught fire and wreaked further havoc. The $100,000 robot‘s creepy appearance is intentional, says designer Beau Gaston. “I tried to make it look scary because it’s dangerous,” he says. “You know not to stand near it.”