Tony Blair and Jared Kushner met Hamas leaders in Egypt yesterday to push forward Donald Trump’s stalled peace plan for Gaza by urging the terror group to fulfil its commitment to disarm. The pair have now travelled to Israel to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, who last week publicly rejected the US peace plan, which calls for Israeli troops to withdraw from the embattled strip. Donald Trump has abruptly scaled back plans for joint military exercises with South Korea, saying they are too costly and threaten his “very good relationship” with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The US president said that while South Korea had refused to help in the denuclearisation of Iran, Pyongyang had been “unthreatening and respectful” since he returned to the White House. The UK is in line for rain and cooler temperatures this week after a record-breaking summer of extreme heat and dry weather. Showery rain is expected across the country by mid-week, while temperatures are set to fall to below average for this time of year, with some areas experiencing lows of around 3C.

Last week, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, almost a thousand illegal migrants landed on Britain’s beaches, including 230 in a single mega-dinghy. Andy Burnham, as always, turned it into a class war: it shouldn’t just be the “poorest communities” who have migrants foisted on them, he said, we must also give them our nicest streets. Take Piddington, an Oxfordshire village of about 350 people, which has been told it must accept 1,200 asylum seekers in its disused army base. “The obvious thing that 1,200 young men are going to need,” added Edwina Currie, “is a brothel.” How disgraceful to turn the fears of a small community into a gruesome joke. And how dare an unelected prime minister of a mere 27 days chide worried locals that “all parts of the country need to play their part”. When Nigel Farage says Burnham doesn’t have the “guts” to tackle migration, no wonder people listen.

For all that Farage gets right about Britain’s “catastrophic failures of immigration control”, says Charles Moore in The Telegraph, this summer has revealed “everything that is bad about the Farage phenomenon”. Last week’s unnecessary by-election was a “self-centred ruse” to distract from the obvious dodginess of the company he keeps and the “donations” he accepts. And while the Reform leader was canvassing votes on the beach in Clacton, the country continued to suffer “numerous symptoms of decay”, including overcrowded prisons; dangerous early release schemes; migrant-carrying “small boats” becoming large boats; incompetent water companies and so on. What we need is not drama and moaning about “broken Britain”, but a serious analysis by politicians of how to put it together again. Kemi Badenoch is right to call out how Farage’s “obsession with victimhood” gives him a vested interest in continuing failure. It’s the last thing we need.

The Clacton by-election ruse was a failure, says Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail. Despite ploughing in “huge resources”, Reform fell well short of their 70% target (winning 63% of the vote), while count Binface, without any serious organisation, won 27%. Conspicuously, the Reform leader legged it before the results were declared. The old Farage would have been milking his victory for all its worth. It’s yet more proof that we’ve reached “peak Reform”.

Over the past decade, the number of university students paying for “personal service providers” has exploded, says Grey Battle in The Washington Post. E&R Laundry, which charges up to $1,800 a year for regular clothes washes, now has more than 10,000 student customers across 106 colleges. Dorm Mom offers laundry, room cleaning, food shop delivery and moving services, with the tagline: “There are better things you could do with your time in college”. And Maids of Capitol Hill appeals straight to the (presumably paying) parents, offering reassurance that “there’s at least someone there straightening up” for their child.

Hit the Dot is a simple game that tests your ability to gauge time. You’re given a target – 7.24 seconds, say – and once you click “start” you see the stopwatch run for a second or so before it fades away. You then have to hit “stop” when you think you’ve reached the target time, with your score determined by how close you get. Give it a go here.

The death of Jason Arday is not only dreadful, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, “it is enraging”. Behold the “human wreckage” of the cult of diversity. The academy made Arday the golden boy of its philistine project of “decolonisation”, giving not a single thought to what might happen when his thin story inevitably unravelled. It was reckless in the extreme for the intellectual elites to fashion a new “black genius” and then say “oops” when his legend started to fray. But this is the poisoned chalice of the state religion of diversity: it handpicks members of “the oppressed” for moral anointment and institutional gushing, building teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace can be twice as deadly.

And what a pedestal they made for Arday: worshipping him as “the best in the world” and beatifying him as a “black wunderkind” whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help “wash away its sins of whiteness”. Their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour is what made them overlook the questionable elements of his CV and life story. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them saw the inevitable scandal coming. What this tragedy shows is that the politics of identity is a disaster for everyone, black and white alike: white kids are demonised and overlooked, black kids are patronised as “perma-victims” who require the “gracious helping hand” of elites to make anything of their lives. “Enough.” Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality, and the rescue of merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.

The Telegraph has compiled a list of the “world’s weirdest border crossings”. They include the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau, which contains a “bonkers” array of Belgian exclaves on Dutch land, some of which contain further Dutch enclaves within them; the border between Lahore and Amritsar, where crowds watch elaborately dressed Pakistani and Indian soldiers have a daily “stamp off”; the Haskell Free Library, half of which is in Quebec and half of which is in Vermont; and the Sarpi crossing between Turkey and Georgia, which commissioned a major architecture firm to build “some of the world’s most beautiful border posts”. To see the rest click here.

Earlier this summer, Norfolk’s Grimston Cricket Club hosted the 2026 World Snail Racing Championships, says Rhi Storer in The New Statesman. Competitors from across the world brought their gutsy gastropods in lunchboxes stuffed with leaves and branches, ready to inch along the 33cm course towards a finish line smeared with organic cucumber to entice them along. This year, the favourite, Beans, was up against Jude Shellingham, but it was Snailor Swift who took the gold after three minutes and 13 seconds – a rather underwhelming one minute, 13 seconds slower than the world record.

It’s a Wehrmacht motorbike that has been discovered in the depths of the Danube river in downtown Budapest because of record-low water levels, says Alys Davies on BBC News. The two-wheeler was found alongside the remains of two German soldiers, their identification tags, a wedding ring and a Wehrmacht combat badge. Other World War Two remnants uncovered by the dry conditions include an unexploded 700kg British bomb in Slovakia and the wreckage of a Nazi warship in Serbia.