The government says it will consider tightening rules around injunctions after David Walliams tried to use the courts to prevent the publication of allegations that he preyed on teenage girls and young women for sex, which he denies. Last week a judge rejected the argument by Walliams’s lawyers that the accusations should never be published because if they were, he would kill himself. A senior member of the US army has been arrested in the UK over allegations of espionage relating to Russia. The 41-year-old is believed to have tried to volunteer his services to Russian operatives, who were in fact undercover agents. He was arrested near Gloucester yesterday as part of an investigation by British counter-terrorism police, the US military and the FBI. Richmond upon Thames has been voted the happiest place to live in Britain, with Harrogate in Yorkshire second and Cirencester in Gloucestershire third. The findings are from a Rightmove survey involving 24,000 people in 221 places.

The lowlights of the David Walliams investigation are “too numerous to mention”, says Marina Hyde on Substack. The comedians making jokes about his supposed penchant for girls or young women. The celeb-filled party at Walliams’s house, where one of the wives reportedly took a young woman aside and said: “You’re very young. Be careful.” And, of course, the legions of “silencing lawyers” who kept the Little Britain star’s name out of the papers. One girl who Walliams had allegedly pursued (she was 18, he was 44) was warned she was at “significant risk” of committing a “serious civil offence” if she spilled the beans. Imagine it was your job to send letters like that to teenage girls. I’d tell my parents I worked in “something more respectable, like animal porn”.

But amid this week’s “grimness” – which began with Russell Brand being sentenced to ten and a half years in jail for rape and sexual assault – are the “faintest glimmers” of hope. My WhatsApp groups are full of women praising the judge in the Brand trial for taking the time to state, “with icy clarity”, that “whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no”. What shone through with the accusations against Walliams, which he denies, was how the perception of predatory behaviour has changed. When the alleged offences took place, these women were probably too young to think about words like “grooming”, “abuse of power”, even “assault”. In a post-MeToo era, those words have been found. “We were in a time where men were men – they did what they did, and you just had to find a way to survive it,” Lilly, one of Walliams’s accusers, told ITV News. “Now we know that that’s not what men should do.”

📺🤐 Questions need to be asked of the many “famous mates” who claim total ignorance of any wrongdoing, says Marisa Bate in The i Paper. In Brand’s case that includes Jonathan Ross, who openly joked on TV about the comedian’s predatory ways; Noel Gallagher, who had Brand as his best man at his 2011 wedding; and survivalist Bear Grylls, who helped baptise him in 2024, after the Sunday Times revelations that triggered the criminal trial.

If you’re a top business executive and you lose your job, says Jeremy Dicker in International Intrigue, try to go out in style. “After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family,” wrote Andrew Mason in an all-staff email in 2013. “Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why... you haven’t been paying attention.” He then proceeded to list all the things that had gone wrong under his tenure. Read the whole letter – including a niche reference to the 1991 video game Battletoads – here.

I usually find trigger warnings on books and plays “just a tiny bit silly”, says Michael Deacon in The Telegraph, like the university that cautioned students that Shakespeare’s The Tempest contained “extreme weather” or the one which warned that Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped “contains depictions of kidnapping”. But last week I learnt of a trigger warning that all sane people can surely endorse. A show called Ceilidh: The Musical is warning audiences of something truly distressing: “It contains bagpipes.”

Given Silicon Valley’s obsession with the AI race between the US and China, says Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, you might imagine that the boss of America’s most important AI company being caught having an affair with a suspected Chinese spy would spark “outrage and excoriation without parallel”. So it’s curious that not only has Nvidia’s Jensen Huang not faced widespread calls for his immediate resignation, he has in fact been deluged with support. “Even incredible humans make mistakes,” said billionaire investor Bill Ackman. Venture capitalist Shaun Maguire called him “irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership”; Elon Musk agreed. Donald Trump said Huang was an “honourable guy” who “probably has an excuse for it”.

Those who see this as merely another instance of “powerful men defending their kind” misunderstand just how important Huang is to American politics and the global financial system. Nvidia’s chips are arguably the most important component in the entire AI boom – without them, the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic would have no way to train their models. There are reports of billionaires, among them Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, literally “begging” Huang for more of his chips. Such demand has made Nvidia a “financial juggernaut” worth, at its peak, $5.7trn – larger than every economy bar the US and China. The company’s strange, circular investments prop up much of the rest of the stock market. It holds $99bn of shares in firms like Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and others, which use some of that money to buy more Nvidia chips. Just as Saudi Arabia is a “petrostate”, so the US has become an “Nvidia state”. And Huang has Trump’s ear on matters of AI regulation, including – now rather suspiciously – advice against blocking chip sales to China. That’s why US elites are sticking up for him. “Huang is too big to fail.”

❤️🇨🇳 This affair is a good thing, says Patrick McGee in The Free Press. Huang is, of course, very impressive, but it’s mad for AI policy to be so heavily reliant on the opinion of someone with such a flagrant conflict of interest. With any luck, these revelations will shatter Washington’s trust in him, returning policy power to those who don’t stand to profit from it quite so directly.

Whimsical web developer Neal Agarwal has made a highly enjoyable battle simulation – Battle Draw – in which players can design a deadly terrain by inserting ice, water, landmines and other impediments, then unleash competing armies of soldiers (infantry, flamethrowers, grenadiers and so on); animals like cheetahs and piranhas; and mythical beasts including giants, zombies and dragons. The combatants then fight it out until only one cohort remains. Players can add more fighters or terrain features at any time. Hard to stop. Try for yourself here.

Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe has attracted a whopping 1.7 billion views on X this year, say Jim Pickard and Amy Borrett in the FT, more than Nigel Farage, Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch combined. Only three world leaders – Donald Trump, Indian PM Narendra Modi and Japanese premier Sanae Takaichi – have had more exposure than the Great Yarmouth MP. He’s had something of a helping hand, though: almost half of his views were on posts that were either reposted or commented on by X owner Elon Musk, who has a not insignificant 241 million followers.

It’s a kingfisher, say David Profumo and Rosie Paterson in Country Life, allegedly drawn earlier this year by Prince George, then aged 12. Prince William included the image in the latest issue of Country Life, which he has guest edited, along with an interview with George’s mother the Princess of Wales, in which she describes how strongly she feels about giving her children “a childhood spent looking beyond screens”. This, apparently, is the fruit.