The government’s borrowing costs rose to an 18-year high yesterday, further worsening the economic picture ahead of next month’s Budget. The increase, caused by a worldwide sell-off in government bonds, saw the yield on 10-year UK government bonds hit its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, who has been advising Andy Burnham, says the news should force Labour to “get real” about “excessive” welfare spending and the unaffordable triple lock on state pensions. Tehran has launched attacks on US bases across the Middle East after shrapnel from an American missile attack allegedly hit a home in southern Iran where a wedding party was taking place. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the US would “regret” the strikes, and launched drones and missiles at American targets in Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait. Which? Magazine managed to list the prime minister’s flat in 10 Downing Street on booking.com for £55 a night. The bogus listing stayed live for two months, and when booking was made possible for a 20-minute window, 14 people requested to stay.

Andy Burnham returned to the government despatch box for the first time in nearly 17 years yesterday, says Madeline Grant in The Spectator. His “grand entrance” was somewhat overshadowed by Keir Starmer’s pettily timed announcement that he was stepping down as an MP, but the new PM took it in his stride. After thanking Starmer for his service “in the same way one might thank the veterinary nurse who euthanised your pet gerbil”, he got down to business. “This is politics done differently,” he purred, as if governing the country were “a lamb hot pot from a supermarket’s luxury ready meal range”.

What did we actually learn from this mammoth three-hour-plus Commons session? Well, for all the talk of “pie-and-chips plain speaking”, Burnham seems as addicted to “LinkedIn Lanyardism” as any of his colleagues. He promised to develop a “triple helix approach” to economic development – a piece of “deep policy management woo woo” that was considered nonsense even back in the mid-noughties, “itself a high point for managerial voodoo”. It’s “Baron Samedi meets David Brent”. When Kemi Badenoch or others asked the PM something direct – on whether there will be further tax rises, say – Burnham “batted his eyelashes” and avoided the question. Still, you can’t deny that this is a PM who can paint a picture. Whereas Starmer presented his ideas with a mix of “sententious pomposity and comic incompetence”, like “a coroner ruling on the death of a clown”, Burnham is a genuinely compelling speaker. How that shtick goes down when he actually has to answer all these tricky questions is another matter.

There’ll be plenty who criticise Chancellor John Healey for refusing to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, says James Kirkup in The Telegraph, not least because he resigned as defence secretary over that very issue. But it’s a “sadly sensible” decision. Short of further tax rises, the only way to fund the extra £10bn a year would be through cuts – and when Keir Starmer asked Labour MPs for modest reductions to welfare, they refused and destroyed his premiership. Healey, quite rightly, doesn’t want to spook the bond markets with a pledge they know he won’t be able to keep. Labour’s backbenchers will hopefully come around to welfare reform eventually. Until then, the chancellor will have to hold fire.

In car-clogged Miami, says Jessica Flint in The Wall Street Journal, the rich have a few new tricks for beating the traffic. Rooftop helipads are no longer just for tall office buildings, but now adorn apartment blocks and even private homes. Some traffic-averse residents land their chopper on a floating helipad and get ferried to their final destination by a waiting water taxi. One agent says rich locals may even be buying condos “just for helipad access”.

Compared with Donald Trump’s “chaotic, divided and violent America”, says Michael Schuman in The Atlantic, China is a “bastion of steady progress and serene order”. This, at least, is the story Beijing’s propagandists are trying to sell. The Global Times, a news outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, proclaimed earlier this year that the “world’s peace and development increasingly rely on China’s stability”. The state news agency, Xinhua, said that “in today’s uncertain world, China’s stability and predictability provide a rare and valuable anchor”. The message seems to be resonating – a study of three dozen countries recently found that China is seen more positively than the US, while respondents expressed greater confidence in Xi Jinping to “do the right thing” in world affairs than Trump.

Inside China, however, it’s obvious that what looks like “stability” from the outside is in fact policy paralysis, economic stagnation and intensified political repression. The country’s property market meltdown “has not hit bottom” – house prices continue to fall, eating away at middle-class wealth. The war in Iran has pushed up oil prices, raising the cost of production for Chinese companies. The underlying problems of weak demand and oversupply remain entrenched. Youth unemployment has become chronic, with a jobless rate of around 18% among those aged 16 to 24. Yet Xi stubbornly refuses to make the market-friendly reforms that might fix all this. Instead he is pushing yet more state-led projects, which have seen China’s debt balloon to more than three times the size of its economy, surpassing even America’s epic debt burden. China’s star may continue to rise by default, as Trump’s rashness erodes US standing. But make no mistake: Beijing is a basket case.

To The Knowledge:

I was intrigued to read in The Knowledge last week that your urine should ideally be a “light straw” colour. In the private health sector, they suggest the colour should be “champagne”.

Roderick James
Lochaline, Argyll

The Trump administration has made a point of getting its deportation programme out of the headlines, says The Economist. Border Patrol agents are no longer “rappelling from helicopters on to apartment buildings or casually tear-gassing protesters in the streets”. But a retreat from “deportation theatre” is not the same as a retreat from deportations. Arrests of immigrants shot up to 43,000 in June and nearly 50,000 in July, the highest monthly total since Donald Trump took office. And the Justice Department’s immigration judges are issuing migrant removal orders at “by far the highest rate ever”.

It’s an ultra-rare half-male, half-female bird, says Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian Magazine. The unusual looking bobolink is what’s called a “bilateral gynandromorph”, meaning that, thanks to a genetic anomaly, one side (in this case the right) is male while the other side is female, with a straight vertical line separating the two halves. This one, spotted by lucky birders near Chicago, behaved like a male: singing, flying around and establishing a breeding territory in hopes of attracting a female mate.