British water companies are under fire after new data revealed that the amount of raw sewage discharged into rivers and seas has more than doubled in a year. According to the Environment Agency, untreated waste flowed into waterways for a cumulative 3.6 million hours in 2023, up from 1.75 million in 2022. Angela Rayner has refused to publish details of her tax affairs, amid questions over whether she dodged capital gains tax during the sale of her old council house in Stockport. Greater Manchester Police are reassessing their previous decision not to investigate the Labour deputy leader, who denies any wrongdoing. More than 20 Japanese words have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Most of the new entries relate to food, including donburi, a rice-based dish, and katsu, which refers to deep-fried morsels. Others include omotenashi, meaning good hospitality, and kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by joining pieces back together with gold lacquer, to make a feature of the flaws and “embrace imperfection”.

Is Israel alienating its strongest ally?

“America is something you can easily manoeuvre,” Benjamin Netanyahu told a family of Jewish settlers in the West Bank back in 2001. “And if they say something, they say something. So what?” Two decades later, says Donald Macintyre in the I newspaper, it looks like the Israeli PM’s “proclaimed mastery” of his country’s relationship with its biggest ally has “begun to unravel”. On Monday, the US decided to abstain from, rather than veto, a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Furious, Netanyahu has “petulantly” cancelled a planned visit to Washington by two of his most senior lieutenants. Joe Biden has long been distinct among US presidents for his “long and visceral attachment to Israel”. But faced with serious discontent among his party’s base over the administration’s “steadfast support” for Israel’s war, it looks like he might change tack.

If only, says Mohamad Bazzi in The Guardian. Though Netanyahu cancelled one delegation to Washington, he didn’t recall his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who is currently in the US “with a long wishlist of US weapons”, including thousands of the bombs and other munitions that sustain Israel’s “brutal” bombardment of Gaza. As a sop to progressive voters, Biden has instituted a requirement that countries which receive US military aid must comply with international law. But this is no more than “bureaucratic ass-covering”. The US has “inexplicably” declared that Israel has not violated international law – despite onerous restrictions on food aid getting into Gaza, which teeters on the brink of “catastrophic” famine – so it can merrily continue to ship weapons over. The Israeli PM’s “strategic temper-tantrum” hasn’t affected the US-Israeli relationship where it matters most.

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UK property “offers the worst value for money in the developed world”, says Bloomberg. That’s according to an analysis by the Resolution Foundation, which found that British housing was more expensive relative to other goods than in any OECD country. Not only does the average Londoner have less floor space per person than the average New Yorker – the average resident in the whole of England does too.

People mocked North Korea’s state broadcaster for blurring out Alan Titchmarsh’s jeans, on the basis that they were a “symbol of US imperialism”, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. But the Hermit Kingdom is hardly alone. China forbids TV shows and films that depict time travel because it can “disrespect history”. Australia has repeatedly banned an episode of Peppa Pig where the piglets learn that spiders are “ultimately harmless”, as many spiders Down Under are deadly. And Britain is “no stranger to berserk censorship”. As recently as the 1990s, the government banned the voices of Irish republicans and loyalist paramilitaries from being broadcast – interviews had to be dubbed over by an actor, lest the sound of their voices somehow managed to “corrupt our brains”.

The digital age is just one big con

On the radio yesterday morning, the manager of a big NHS trust said the key to improving patient satisfaction is to invest more in digital technology. Just at that moment, says Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph, “my phone pinged”. It was the GP surgery, reminding me to book a vaccination for one of my children. You can’t make appointments by phone, so I went online, where I was asked to click on an outline of a body to identify the location of the ailment. I clicked on the arm and was confronted with a list of 60 arm-related conditions, ranging from “lumps” to “paralysis”, but no mention of vaccines. At that point I gave up and – “like some kind of crazed luddite” – tried calling the surgery. No answer. So, no vaccine.

It’s a stark reminder that “digital technology doesn’t actually make life easier”. The tech firms keep promising us more “speed, efficiency and convenience”, and we keep buying their “awful products”, and then what? When the app glitches and the website can’t answer your question and the customer assistant is a bot and the simplest task is suddenly impossible, “we blame ourselves for being bad at tech”. It would be one thing if the benefits were “so overwhelmingly wonderful” that they balanced out the bad stuff. But what, really, is easier now than 40 years ago? “Getting junk food delivered to your door, starting culture wars and destroying the mental health of a generation.” What would improve my patient satisfaction would be considerably less digital technology in the NHS. Ideally, there might even be real humans answering the phones, listening to patients and organising appointments. “I think they used to be called receptionists.”

NBC News is parting ways with its newest hire, former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, after a backlash from the network’s presenters over her efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It could be a costly decision, says Politico. McDaniel says she expects to be fully paid out for her two-year, $600,000 contract, because she didn’t breach its terms. Given she made only a single appearance on the channel, lasting around 20 minutes, this would work out as an earnings rate of $30,000 a minute, or $500 a second.

It’s a sculpture of Prince Philip in Cambridge, says The Independent, which is being taken down years after it was erected without planning permission. The four-metre-high bronze effigy, which features an abstract face, has been standing outside an office block since 2014, despite once being described by a council official as “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted. No artist has admitted to creating it: the Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry described claims that he was responsible as “an abuse”.