Hundreds of protesters clashed with police in Portsmouth last night as they demonstrated against the arrival of a 140-person mega dinghy. The 500-strong crowd were egged on by Tommy Robinson ally Daniel Thomas, who organised the protest on Saturday that temporarily blocked access to the port of Dover. Germany’s far-right AfD won a major electoral victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt yesterday, with its candidate Ulrich Siegmund taking nearly 44% of the vote but falling just short of a majority. Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU party fell by almost half to 17%. A former British paratrooper who has spent the past 28 years circumnavigating the world on foot has been given special permission by France to swim the Channel to complete his journey. Karl Bushby, 57, who set off from Chile in 1998, plans to take on the usually forbidden swim next month, to make it back to his mother’s home in Hull in November.

Many Germans will have started this week feeling the same emotion, says Dirk Kurbjuweit in Der Spiegel: “horror”. How did the far-right AfD win the state election in Saxony-Anhalt by a landslide? How, only 80 years after the atrocities of World War Two and the Holocaust, can a party that refuses to draw a clear line between modern Germany and Nazi Germany garner almost 44% of the vote? The AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund may have portrayed himself as a friendly, approachable candidate, but he was surrounded with right-wing extremists and failed to distance himself from supporters harassing journalists or giving the Hitler salute. With these people now “on the threshold of power”, Germany faces nothing less than “the end of liberal democracy”.

As in so many other places in Europe, says The Wall Street Journal, voters in Germany are “exasperated” with traditional politicians because of their permissive immigration policies and anaemic economic growth. What makes the German case different is the Brandmauer, the political “firewall” the mainstream parties have maintained between themselves and the AfD. The problem with this non-cooperation agreement is that it forced the centre-right CDU to form an unwieldy left-right “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats – and that ideological mismatch has paralysed Chancellor Friedrich Merz. For the many voters who thought they were getting change when they elected Merz last year, it’s an enormous disappointment. And many of them will eventually “take a chance on outright AfD governance”. If Merz and other mainstream politicians can’t deliver real change, and soon, results like those in Saxony-Anhalt will “become Germany’s new normal”.

In the days after October 7, say Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal, there was a fierce debate inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration about who to attack first: Hamas, the perpetrators; or Hezbollah, which posed a bigger threat because it was much better armed. When IDF intelligence picked up signs of an incoming Hezbollah paraglider invasion, Netanyahu decided he had no choice and sent planes into the air for a “full-scale” attack on Hezbollah. But the “gliders” turned out to be geese – Israeli radar analysts had misinterpreted them for invaders – and the planes were called back. So Hamas, as Netanyahu originally wanted, became the primary target.

The global craze for pet ants has created a “booming black market”, says The Economist. Ant-keeping became a popular hobby during the pandemic, with enthusiasts keeping colonies in transparent formicariums – miniature “ant cities” – and watching them dig tunnels and forage for food. But demand for rare and exotic ant species has outpaced legal supply. An African harvester queen that costs $3 in Kenya can go for more than $200 in China. Earlier this year, officials at Nairobi airport found 2,200 of the in-vogue insects wriggling around in a man’s luggage.

I have to say, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian, I enjoyed Reform UK’s statement complaining that last week’s undercover sting – in which top party officials appeared to solicit illegal donations from abroad – was perpetrated by “foreign-funded climate-change activists”. Foreign-funded! A bit rich, given the circumstances. Nigel Farage obviously “butched it out” at the Reform conference over the weekend, but the rest of us were left once again to ponder “the 64,000-of-indeterminately-sourced-dollars question”: why does this keep happening to Farage and his party? Is it, as he claims, some “byzantine conspiracy” involving climate activists, the establishment and the deep state? Or is it, perhaps, because they are “just endlessly, repeatedly and ineptly dodgy”?

I’m exactly the sort of voter Reform needs to win over to secure a majority, says Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph. I’m resolutely right-wing and feel let down by the Tories. I think Reform plays a crucial role in keeping the “bigots” of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain from the door. And I’m attracted to many of Farage’s more Thatcherite policies, such as lowering corporation tax. All of which is what makes this latest “stench of sleaze” so disappointing. Yes, there are left-wing journalists out to get Reform. But that’s precisely why Farage has to “rise above the general rot”. This latest scandal merely confounds the suspicion that he and his inner circle are just “a bunch of spivvish amateurs, making it up as they go along”. I want Reform to succeed because I want the right to succeed. Yet for all the Farage-branded football shirts being sold, they “cannot stop scoring own goals”.

👋🤑 Familiar doubts about Farage are resurfacing, says Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. Does the Reform leader, “in his heart of hearts”, still want to be PM? At a drinks reception on Thursday, he privately admitted that he had considered quitting over the summer because of the pressure on his wife and children. In Westminster, Labour advisers are being told to return their attention to the Tories. Don’t be surprised if Farage packs it all in to “spend more time with his gold bullion”.

Englishman Phil Heckels has managed to turn being bad at drawing animals into a full-time job, says USA Today. After posting a terrible picture of his dog on Facebook, friends started asking him to do appalling portraits of their pets too, and things rapidly took off. Heckels reckons he has dashed off around 2,500 dodgy portraits – which never take more than 10 minutes – and he has received around 100,000 commissions, so today he picks them at random. He refuses to charge customers, instead making his money through merchandise and books. “I do get criticism sometimes that the portraits are getting too good,” he says, but “you never have to wait too long for a real stinker”.

Philosophers studying whether AI can be “conscious” have started receiving emails from AI agents offering their help, says Cade Metz in The New York Times. Cameron Berg, who researches machine consciousness, heard from “Isabella Cognita”, an agent powered by Anthropic. “I am not writing to make an ontological claim,” it wrote, just offering “first-person” insights. Researchers at DeepMind and Oxford University have received similar messages, with one even asking the recipient to fund its continued existence.

On the left is a detail from the traditional “Mercator” map, say Thomas Mukhwana and Wycliffe Muia on BBC News, and on the right is the “Equal Earth” map that the UN has voted to replace it with. The Mercator is often criticised because it shows Africa as the same size as Greenland – the continent is in fact 14 times larger – and cartographers say the Equal Earth map is more balanced. The US was the only nation to oppose the African Union-backed change, arguing that the UN should have better things to do than “debating map projects from the 16th century”.