Andy Burnham says he will shift responsibility for economic growth from the Treasury to No 10 North as part of a “huge transfer of power” out of Whitehall. The PM says the move, which is supported by Chancellor John Healey, would allow the Treasury to focus on controlling public finances. A California court heard claims that Facebook and Instagram deliberately preyed on young people and hid the truth about the impact of social media on children’s mental health, as a huge legal challenge against the social media giant Meta began yesterday. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are leading the vast case brought by a total of 29 US states, which could result in fines of up to $1.4trn. Scientists say they have been “stunned” by the recovery of children’s lungs since the introduction of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone in 2019. Researchers found that reduced emissions had vastly improved the lung capacity of primary school children whose lung growth had been stunted by pollution.

As Washington searches for an off-ramp from the fighting in Iran, Tehran’s leaders want to “continue or even expand it”, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg. That’s because, for them, “peace is more dangerous than war”. It’s not just Israel and America that want the regime gone – “so does a majority of its own population”. The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has no better ideas for the soaring inflation and deep economic failures that sparked nationwide protests in January than his father, the late Ayatollah. “And the economy is in even worse shape today.” In Iran’s upper echelons, the debate today is about how best to ensure regime survival in the face of these foreign and domestic threats.

Pragmatists like the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who wanted to end the fighting and focus on economic recovery, lost the argument. Instead, the uncompromising list of demands sent to Washington in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz seemed “designed for rejection”. The generals who run Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have spent the 60-day ceasefire rapidly rearming and reorganising the country’s military around a new “long-war strategy”, bringing the regular army under IRGC control and offering a $30,000 bounty for any US soldier captured or killed. Internally, repression is accelerating. By one count, the regime has executed 26 protesters already this year, up from two in 2025, and with another 70 protesters on death row in one prison alone, this “officially sanctioned carnage” will only grow. “Long a police state, Iran is becoming a prison.” All this suits regime leaders, who are incapable of running a successful state without such brutality. Donald Trump might want to pivot to economic sanctions, but the regime isn’t likely to let him.

I’m a defence hawk, says Max Boot in The Washington Post, but even I can’t get behind Donald Trump’s proposed 2027 defence budget of $1.5trn. His “Golden Fleet” of battleships will cost $275bn and is full of out-there gizmos like lasers and electromagnetic rail guns that are, to put it mildly, “not ready for deployment”. At $23.4bn, the first “Trump class” ship will be the most expensive warship ever built. The Golden Dome missile-defence system is even more expensive: $1.2trn for a system with little hope of protecting the whole country. And billions of dollars are earmarked for moving future aircraft carriers’ command towers from the rear to the centre, “as demanded by Trump on aesthetic grounds”.

Today, world-class wine is being made in a sunny corner of Sweden, says The Economist. “Yes, Sweden.” Warmer weather combined with Scandinavia’s unusually long summer days mean wineries in the region of Skåne, sometimes called the “Nordic Tuscany”, are capable of producing the real thing. In 2024, Immelen, a white wine from the Kullabergs winery, beat famous whites from France, Italy and Spain in a blind taste test by an international panel. It was such a success they served it at the Nobel Prize banquet the following year.

Andy Burnham can hold as many Cobra meetings about the environment as he likes, says Camilla Tominey in The Telegraph, but nothing will change while the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is stuffed with a “dangerous cabal of ideologues”. Secretary of State Miatta Fahnbulleh has championed even more aggressive net-zero policies than Ed Miliband and has just appointed two special advisors with a similar outlook, who have previously lobbied to mandate heat pumps and halve urban car use. Elsewhere in the department are numerous Miliband acolytes with a long history of doubling down on his “zealotry”, essentially creating an echo chamber of people operating in “complete isolation from economic reality”.

British energy costs are among the highest in Europe, and official figures show that the UK spent a record £439m importing electricity from the continent in May alone – a 54% surge from April’s £285m. Yet rather than recognising that our “catastrophic” energy crisis is hindering growth in every part of our economy, the DESNZ ideologues are obsessing over “arbitrary targets”. The switch to renewables is a complex, long-term project that will require hundreds of billions of pounds in private capital. Yet not a single minister in the seven-member DESNZ team possesses even an undergraduate qualification in engineering or any scientific field of study, and none has ever run a company, “let alone managed a power project”. The combined parliamentary experience of the Commons front bench tasked with nuclear strategy, to name just one “pivotal energy policy”, amounts to fewer than three years per person. Driving complex legislation through parliament – from building nuclear power stations to upgrading the energy grid – requires “seasoned political veterans”. Instead, we’re stuck with a bunch of “hard-left interns”.

The Telegraph has compiled a list of the “world’s oldest trains” still running today, including the London Underground’s Bakerloo line, which has the longest-serving carriages of any European metropolis; Le Train Jaune, which has been in service since 1910 and plies a spectacular route through France’s Pyrénées-Orientales region; the M1 line in Budapest, which was opened by the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph in 1896; the picturesque trams of Osaka, now almost a century in service; and Canada’s stainless steel VIA Rail carriages, which still offer sleeper passengers access to an old-style dining car. To see more, click here.

A new study into pronunciation has found “açai” is the word most commonly mangled by UK adults (it’s ah-sigh-ee, apparently). Also in the top 10 were segue (seg-way, obviously); charcuterie, which some folk incorrectly start with a hard “ch” as in “Charlie”; Worcestershire, which some apparently misread as “wor-chest-er”; and chipotle (“chi-poht-lay”), which is commonly – and quite wrongly – pronounced “chipottle”, rhyming with “bottle”. To see more, including the excruciating “expresso”, click here.

It’s a stuffed “fox head” bought at a market for £50, which recently sold at auction for a whopping £60,000 after it turned out to be a rare taxidermied Tasmanian tiger, says Herbie Russell in The Times. The mounted head far surpassed its guide price of around £30 after two bidders realised it was the “unbelievably rare” head of a thylacine, an Australian marsupial that went extinct in 1936, and cranked up the price into the tens of thousands. “It will be invaluable to science,” said the new owner James Cranfield. “I want to make it available to institutions.”