Wes Streeting has said that the public should stockpile three days’ emergency supplies, as he warned that Britain must be prepared for a national crisis. As part of a new “national resilience conversation”, households are being advised to keep extra water, food, medical supplies and cash in preparation for potential disruption to essential supply chains caused by cyber-attacks, state-sponsored terrorism and other threats. Storm Austen has left thousands without power after 80mph winds hit parts of the UK. More than 18,000 homes across Devon and Cornwall have experienced power cuts as strong winds and heavy rain lashed the southwest this morning. Raye won this year’s Mercury Prize for her hit second album This Music May Contain Hope. The 28-year-old’s pop record, full of golden age Hollywood glamour, beat the likes of Paul McCartney and Olivia Dean to scoop the £25,000 prize, which recognises the best British or Irish album of the past year.

Historical comparisons are always “inexact”, says Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. But Donald Trump’s shameless appeasement of Vladimir Putin carries “more than a noxious whiff” of Neville Chamberlain’s failed attempt, in Munich in 1938, to avoid war with Nazi Germany. The difference is that Chamberlain’s peacemaking efforts had the enthusiastic backing of most people in Britain and France, who were desperate to avoid repeating the horrors of World War One. Trump enjoys no such public support, nor does he face any danger of a US war with Russia. His betrayal of Ukraine – trashing Volodymyr Zelensky, buying Russian diesel, waiving sanctions and seemingly ordering “mysterious, lethal interruptions” in US satellite and intelligence sharing – is cynically self-interested, globally dangerous and “utterly contemptible”. He makes Chamberlain look like a man of iron principle. “All that’s lacking is an umbrella.”

Nobody believes Trump has a “strategic vision” for the US, says Gerard Baker in The Times. But ending the war in Ukraine is essential to his goal of re-asserting America’s global supremacy and reaping the financial opportunities of “raw power”. Trump knows that as long as Putin is killing innocent people, Americans won’t accept his vision for a new, highly profitable, normalisation in US-Russia relations. American leverage over Ukraine has decreased – Europe supplies almost all Kyiv’s military and financial assistance. So the natural focus of Trump’s diplomatic effort is Putin, hence Steve Witkoff’s cringing homage to the “humanitarian” in the Kremlin this week. Unfortunately, the plan is doomed. Putin has repeatedly shown his “imperialist ambitions” and knows Trump’s “new world order” won’t survive long. Whoever succeeds the US president, Democrat or Republican, will see Russia not as a friend but as the “implacable adversary” it’s always been.

The past few weeks have seen something novel in the conflicts in both Ukraine and Iran, says Elisabeth Braw in Foreign Policy: tit-for-tat targeting of data centres. “This is the new face of war.” Data centres are so important to both companies and individuals that attacking them with drones has become an invaluable military tactic. Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex, Russia’s equivalent of Google, left Russians unable to access their email accounts, open work files or book taxis. The outages even left residents in many Moscow apartment blocks unable to access shared areas, because the entry gates were operated by a company entirely reliant on Yandex.

Same Five is an online game in which players must answer five multiple-choice questions each day, in 20 seconds apiece, with 2,000 points available for each correct answer. The type of question varies, with categories including general knowledge, maths, wordplay and logic. For example: “A snail at the bottom of a ten-metre well climbs three metres each day and slips back two metres each night. On which day does it reach the top: day ten or day eight?” A running ranking shows your position among other players. Give it a go here.

Brits are madly obsessed with animals, says Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman. Over 60% of households own a pet, and we spend a collective £8bn on them every year. By popular demand, our banknotes are about to lose admirable figures such as Winston Churchill and Jane Austen to make way for puffins, bumblebees and hedgehogs. We built a monument to the animals of World War Two (“They had no choice,” reads the inscription) before we built one for women. Look at High Court claim listings on any given day and you’ll invariably find an animal charity vs a long list of family members “desperate to rescue their inheritance”.

This feeds into our politics, often in amusing ways. The Labour MP Stella Creasy was recently hounded online for misidentifying a parakeet as a parrot in a social media post. Wall-to-wall headlines about Suella Braverman accidentally standing on a guide dog’s tail led to her issuing an “apology to all dogs”. The Tories’ call to bring back fox hunting contributed to Theresa May’s election humiliation in 2017 – hardly a surprise, in a land where we have a network of “fox ambulances” driving around Kent, Sussex and London treating foxes in distress 365 days a year. (“I don’t dare find out their response rates.”) In 2021, an “exasperated” Cabinet Office official told me they were on “Geronimo duty” for the entire summer as demonstrators picketed Downing Street to save an alpaca with tuberculosis from being put down. That same summer, hundreds of dogs and cats were evacuated to Britain from Kabul as it fell to the Taliban, “initially leaving the charity’s Afghan staff behind”. The electoral power of animal welfare, it seems, can “make politicians lose their minds”.

We may soon have our next 007, says Borys Kit in The Hollywood Reporter. Starting today in London, a “very select” group of actors – said to include Slow Horses star Jack Lowden and Dua Lipa’s husband Callum Turner – will get in front of the cameras to screen test for the role of James Bond. Other candidates are unconfirmed, but are rumoured to include The Crown’s Josh O’Connor, and exclude previously tipped names including Saltburn star Jacob Elordi; Jack O’Connell, who plays Paddy Mayne in SAS: Rogue Heroes; and the otherwise ubiquitous Paul Mescal.

During a recent visit to the UK by German politicians, says Peter Hitchens in The Spectator, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry claimed that Germany “is, and has always been, a key ally” of Britain’s. Now look, history is hard. But until quite recently, every boy in the land was brought up on comic strips in which rock-fisted British heroes yelled “Eat lead, Fritz!” at cringing Krauts, who cried “Aaaaargh!” as they died. English football crowds, where German teams are involved, still chant: “Two world wars, one World Cup!” Yet today Thornberry – the chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, no less – thinks Germany has “always” been our ally. Achtung.

It’s a video capturing the abnormal beating of cilia in a child with a respiratory disease, says Jack Guy in CNN Science, which has been stripped of its first-place prize in the annual Nikon Small World in Motion competition. After scientists criticised the winning clip as inaccurate – one said the cells look “nothing like” the real deal – Nikon launched an investigation and concluded that the video and its supporting materials had breached competition rules regarding generative AI. The new winner is a video showing a tiny roundworm grabbing a single-celled microorganism known as a Dileptus: click here to watch.