Police have arrested a man on suspicion of attempted murder after an apparent attempted beheading on a street in Belfast. Footage of the attack last night appears to show the suspect, who is believed to be Somali, pinning the victim down and repeatedly stabbing him in the head. Keir Starmer has described the incident as “sickening”. Terrorists, hostile states and gangsters were given more than £28bn of taxpayers’ money between 2015 and 2021, says The Telegraph. A Cabinet Office report buried by the previous government shows that foreign aid and Covid relief loans were misappropriated on a vast scale, with millions going to Russia and Islamic State and billions to organised crime. AstraZeneca’s first weight-loss pill has been shown to help people lose up to 10% of their body weight in just six months during trials. Elecoglipron targets the same GLP-1 gut receptors as weight-loss injections such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, and because the pills will be cheaper and more convenient than jabs, pharmacies expect millions of UK patients to switch.

No Russian thinker has worked harder than Aleksandr Dugin to “rationalise the invasion of Ukraine”, says Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. Long before it began, Dugin cooked up a whole philosophical system, “neo-Eurasianism”, to explain why Russia, the biggest country in the world, needed to steal even more land from its neighbours, killing thousands in the process. His work on the subject was so influential in the Kremlin it earned him the nickname “Putin’s brain”. But today, even Dugin seems to be having second thoughts. Interviewed on Russian TV last week by a propagandist widely rumoured to be Putin’s goddaughter, he was so unable to answer the basic softball question “what is worth fighting for?” that even his interviewer couldn’t keep a straight face. And at the end of last month, he posted that Russia’s chances “not only of achieving victory but simply holding the country together” were “critically low”.

In recent months, says Andrei Zakharov in The New York Times, criticism of the war, and of Putin, has reached corners of Russian society that never previously raised a murmur of dissent. Authorities have been blocking popular messaging apps and pushing users on to Max, a state-backed alternative. Messages are so widely understood to be visible to the FSB that a comedy show on Russia’s biggest TV channel did a joke in which a private message on the app began: “Hi everyone!” On previously pro-war Telegram chats the Russian president is now habitually referred to as “grandpa”, a derogatory term long used by his harshest critics. For years now, Russia’s social contract has been: stay out of politics, and the state will stay out of your lives. The Kremlin’s grandpas fail to see that cutting internet access breaks that contract, and “rage is boiling over”.

Among the more extravagant purchases Peter Murrell made with the £400,000 of SNP money he embezzled were three coffee machines costing between £1,300 and £2,600 apiece. So it’s perhaps no surprise, says Popbitch, that when Murrell’s now estranged wife, Nicola Sturgeon, appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2015, she chose as her luxury item… a coffee machine. “She probably had plenty of them to pick from at home.”

The Wall Street Journal has rounded up 10 great innovations that were born of mistakes, including the pacemaker, which came about when Wilson Greatbatch used the wrong resistor while creating machinery to record the heart’s sounds; bubble wrap, the result of two men trying to make textured wallpaper by sticking plastic sheets together and finding that pockets of air got stuck in between; the microwave, which came about after an engineer’s chocolate bar melted as he approached a magnetron; cornflakes, which followed the Kellogg brothers’ experimentation with cooking wheatberries; and Post-it notes, which started out as “hymnal bookmarks”. To see others, click here.

You can see why JD Vance’s ugly intervention into the Henry Nowak debate prompted a “rare public rebuke” from Downing Street, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. The US vice president not only said that “righteous anger” was “the only response” to the 18-year-old’s tragic murder. He also claimed that Nowak would still be alive today if “the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”. Never mind that Nowak himself had Polish heritage, or that his killer, Vickrum Digwa, is the “British-born son of a British-born father”. What really stings is that Vance’s comments can’t be explained by the Trump administration’s “America first” doctrine. This was a “purely ideological” – evangelical, even – attempt to “reshape the world in Maga’s image”. Clearly, we can no longer “take our political sovereignty for granted”.

Sorry, says Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator, but the idea that Vance’s remarks cross some “red line of diplomatic protocol” is nonsense. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, the then opposition leader Keir Starmer said the killing had “shone a light on racism and hatred” in the US and emphasised that he stood “in complete solidarity with those standing up against police brutality”. Barack Obama intervened in the Brexit referendum by warning that if the UK voted to leave we would be at the “back of the queue” for trade deals. European politicians frequently comment on America’s gun laws and abortion policies. During the 2024 US election, around 100 Labour Party activists travelled to swing states to campaign for Kamala Harris. Criticise the substance of Vance’s remarks all you like. But spare us the “pearl-clutching” over the intervention itself.

There’s a “hot debate” about the extent to which Labour’s decision to charge VAT on private school fees is pushing some of those schools into bankruptcy, says The Economist. What isn’t in doubt is that the average size of the places going under is “jumping up”. It used to be tiny schools with as few as 50 pupils that tended to fail. In the past 18 months, at least a dozen schools with more than 200 pupils have announced their closure – “about as many as in the eight years that came before”.

Uber has published its 10th annual “lost and found index”, marking a full decade of “forgotten phones, rogue belongings and questionable decisions”. Among the 50 weirdest items left behind were live fish, an oxygen tank, a child’s prosthetic eye, a double door oven, 20lb of duck sausage, a package of live butterflies, hunting waders, 420 doughnuts, two trees and pelvis implants. See the full list here.

It’s a peculiar poster that has been plastered all over public transport, seemingly to remind people that it is a bad idea, on a train, to make female yellow snakes feel uncomfortable. I wouldn’t dream of doing so, says Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday, “though they are rare on my route to work”. Of course, after a little thought, it’s clear that this is actually a public service announcement discouraging men from being unpleasant to women and girls. Quite right too, but perhaps such campaigns ought to be “a bit less clever and a bit more direct”.