The Home Office has squandered billions of pounds housing migrants in hotels due to flawed contracts and “incompetent delivery”, according to a cross-party investigation by MPs. A series of Home Office failures mean the cost of 10-year asylum accommodation contracts is expected to hit £15.3bn by 2029, up from the £4.5bn forecast in 2019. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says Washington and Beijing have agreed on a “very positive framework” for trade talks between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, who will meet on Thursday. US officials have retreated from Trump’s threat of an additional 100% tariff, while China signalled that an export ban on rare earth minerals would be shelved. The Kennedy family is set to be the subject of a new The Crown-style historical drama on Netflix. The series will chronicle the life of John F Kennedy, beginning in the 1930s and starring Michael Fassbender as JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy Sr.

Why the grooming gangs scandal is different

It’s obvious Labour never wanted a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, says Trevor Phillips in The Times. Keir Starmer initially said those calling for one were “jumping on a far-right bandwagon”; the party’s newly appointed deputy leader, Lucy Powell, accused an opponent of “dog-whistle” politics merely for raising the issue. Having eventually bowed to public pressure, the government then attempted to dilute the inquiry by expanding its scope. That would be a terrible idea. The first reason is the “industrial” scale of the abuse, which is disproportionately carried out by men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan backgrounds. The number of (mostly white) children raped and assaulted likely runs into the tens of thousands.

But the grooming gangs scandal is different in nature, not just scale. Whereas paedophiles typically operate in secret, here it’s all out in the open. Girls are seduced, often by young “loverboys” in flash cars, and then “handed over to older men”. Locals know something is going on: they see the men hanging around a shop or a taxi firm, each one “disappearing for a short while to take his turn”. Another difference is that abused children usually know their abusers – they are relatives, teachers, religious and community leaders, and so on. This is not the case with the grooming gangs’ victims, many of whom are driven to other towns “to be raped by dozens of strangers”. And crucially, again uniquely, these abusers “can and do” benefit from political protection from local authorities, social workers and police, largely thanks to “ethnic affinity”. Identifying and exposing these evil enablers will be a painstaking and challenging task. It needs to be pursued “without distraction or complication”.

According to a survey of 1.8 million office projects and 28 million individual tasks, says John Lloyd in The Oldie, “the most productive time of the year is 11am on a Monday in October”.

In Merriam-Webster’s new online puzzle, Reunion, players must drag letters (and two animals) to form words in rows and columns. The letters go yellow when they’re in the right line, and green when they’re in the correct position. To win, get everything in its right place. Simple enough, but engrossing. Click here to play.

Come off it, the White House needs a ballroom

Donald Trump made no secret of his desire for a “big, beautiful ballroom” at the White House, says Collin Levy in The Wall Street Journal. Still, it came as something of a shock when the bulldozers rolled in last week and demolished part of the original building before anyone could stop them. It’s classic Manhattan real estate shenanigans: “knocking things down in the dark of night and dealing with the legal consequences later”. The problem with this giant, tacky addition to the “people’s house” is not just the presence of “nouveau riche architecture on federal property”. The modest scale of the White House is intentional. Vast palaces loom over the landscapes of Riyadh, Baghdad and Kuala Lumpur. In America, the president exists to serve the people, not the other way around. History matters, and today a piece of American history lies in rubble.

If you’re worried about “architectural vainglory” and “presidential ego”, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, look no further than Barack Obama’s $850m presidential centre, which currently looms, unfinished, like a Star Wars barracks over the poor residents of Chicago’s South Side. It is ugly and intimidating and inappropriate to its setting. Trump’s large neo-classical White House ballroom, by contrast, is positively fitting. Yes, the project has proceeded apace, without much outside consultation and with a “whiff of private-donor corruption”. But the presidency has needed a ballroom for a long time. Why should the US president host state banquets in temporary tents? Nobody else does. And the general design is perfectly in keeping with the character of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Things change. Whatever Trump’s critics would prefer to believe, “it is simply good to build a White House ballroom”.

According to recent visitors to Royal Lodge, says Sam Leith in The Spectator, Prince Andrew now “spends much of his time playing video games”. The exiled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is also said to pass his days holed up in his Moscow apartment gaming. The rumour is that he plays the online multiplayer war game World of Tanks. Apparently he “prefers using Russian equipment”.

The English language is a mysterious beast, says Cat DiStasio in Mental Floss, with arcane rules of grammar and spelling that fox even the deftest foreign learners. But it is also a repository for words “so wonderfully preposterous” that they sound fake, even to seasoned ears. “Snickersnee”, for example, is a real word for a large knife. A “snollygoster” is a shrewd, unprincipled person. “Quomodocunquizing” means “making money by any means” (or at least it did in the 1600s). “Kakorrhaphiophobia” is a fear of failure, presumably familiar to anyone asked to spell it. And the excellent “to absquatulate” means “to leave suddenly”. See more here.

It’s an avocado ripeness indicator, say Kale Williams and Asher Price in Axios, developed to get rid of the disappointment of cutting open a mushy avocado. Researchers at Oregon State University used roughly 1,400 images of perfectly ripe Hass avocados to train an AI model, which can now predict firmness with 92% accuracy and the fruit’s internal quality with 84% accuracy. Disappointingly, it’s not yet ready for consumer use, so for now you’ll have to stick with the tried and tested method of prodding every single one in the shop.