UK government borrowing rose more than expected to £18.3bn in August, adding to the challenges facing Chancellor John Healey ahead of his high-stakes Budget next month. The increase, which was £3.5bn greater than the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast, was largely driven by government spending on public services and rising debt interest. Andy Burnham says he expects to find “common ground” with Donald Trump at the pair’s first face-to-face meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York this afternoon. The PM plans to use the summit to present himself as a global leader on AI and to push the US on help for Ukraine. The NHS is rolling out Martha’s Rule to every A&E department in England, giving patients and their family, as well as hospital staff, the right to ask for an urgent second opinion about their care. The expansion of the scheme, named after Martha Mills who died aged 13 after her parent’s concerns were not listened to, is expected to be complete by March 2028.

At a fraught moment in world affairs, says Gideon Rachman in the FT, it might seem fortunate that the leaders of the two most powerful nations will meet later this week. There’s plenty for Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to discuss: wars in Ukraine and Iran, a possible energy crisis, safely regulating runaway AI, smoothing global trade, Taiwan, the White House ballroom. But while the two have a lot in common – “narcissism, nationalism, narrowness of vision” – the fact that mutual trust is almost “non-existent” means even matters of urgent common interest won’t be solved. The two leaders have agreed to hold an “AI dialogue”, for example, but Trump believes “whoever wins AI wins” and China suspects international coordination is designed to lock in America’s narrow lead. What the moment requires is far-sighted leaders. “That is not what is on offer.”

What few seem to have noticed, says Max Boot in The Washington Post, is just how much of a “China dove” Trump has become. After years of talking tough – and a brief attempt to act tough by imposing heavy tariffs of up to 145% in April last year – Trump quickly backed down after Chinese restrictions on rare-earth metals threatened to cripple US manufacturing. Since then, he has lowered tariffs to an effective rate of 23% and, crucially, loosened restrictions on US technology exports to China – including approving the sale of Nvidia’s second-most powerful AI chips, which massively helped China to gain ground in the AI race. He has also done Beijing a favour by depleting US military stocks in an unnecessary war in Iran. Given Trump’s one-sided attempts to woo Xi, the summit should be a congenial one. But it leaves the US “dangerously weak”.

Britain’s productivity turns out to have grown at twice the pace previously estimated in the decade after the global financial crisis, says Delphine Strauss in the FT, making the UK look like “much less of an international outlier”. According to new official figures from the Office for National Statistics, “output per hour worked” (the main measure of labour productivity) grew by an average of 1.3% per year between 2009 and 2019, not the 0.7% the ONS had previously calculated. The change is based on a new methodology that better reflects the likes of annual leave, sickness absence and overtime, and shows people have been working “significantly” fewer hours than previously thought.

Diana Ross doesn’t mess around, says Popbitch. On one magazine photoshoot, the singer insisted on staying until the negatives had been developed so she could mark them for approval. She asked the editor for a single cigarette and, “lit fag in hand”, went through every image, “burning neat holes through the ones she disliked”.

Almost immediately after a picture of Archbishop Sarah Mullally handing Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi a “Reconciliation and Interfaith” award on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was published, says Charles Moore in The Telegraph, “grim information” began to emerge about the Pakistani cleric. In response to Salman Rushdie’s 2007 knighthood, Ashrafi praised Osama bin Laden for waging jihad against Britain. He lauded the “freedom fighters” responsible for the October 7 massacre, saying “Allah crushed the pride of Israel”, and called the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a “martyr”. Lambeth Palace withdrew the award last week, saying it hadn’t been aware of Ashrafi’s previous comments. But uncovering them didn’t require the services of MI5, just “10 minutes on the internet”. Why hadn’t the archbishop’s team done its due diligence?

As is the case with the British government and most leading British institutions, the Church of England holds a “weird reluctance” to scrutinise anything involving Muslims. Leaders refuse to ask necessarily tough questions out of fear they’ll be accused of “Islamophobia” and racism, governing not by facts but by “fear of Muslim reaction”. And the “Ashrafi absurdity” isn’t the only example of the church prioritising empty gestures over “unpalatable truths”. The same is happening “on a colossal scale” with the Church Commissioners’ Project Spire, a mad scheme which will see £100m given to atone for the Church supposedly profiting from slavery in the 18th century, despite a vast body of historical work proving that it didn’t. The new archbishop, gentler than her predecessor and with a well-respected “conscientious decency”, should instead concentrate on trying to save daily parish life. The Anglican prayer of “general confession” says: “We have erred, and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.” Today’s problem is that there are too many lost shepherds.

We are probably much closer to a “hot war with Russia” than most people think, says Tom Newton Dunn in War & Peace. When a Russian drone hit Yahodyn station in Ukraine last Sunday, several prominent Westerners – including Boris Johnson, Britain’s national security advisor Jonathan Powell and ex-CIA chief David Petraeus – were travelling through the area on their way back from a security conference in Kyiv. Had any of them died, public fury in Britain or the US would surely have forced a “punitive military strike” on Russia. And “war would be under way”.

If you’ve ever arrived at a hotel and found a chocolate on your pillow, you can thank Cary Grant, says Colson Thayer in People magazine. In the 1950s, the English-American movie star – then married to his third wife, Betsy Drake – stayed at the penthouse suite at the Mayfair Hotel in St Louis, Missouri for a secret romantic rendezvous with another woman. As part of his lovemaking, Grant left a trail of chocolates leading from one bedroom to another. One of the hotel’s managers noticed, loved it, and a tradition was born.

It’s a black robin, says Eva Corlett in The Guardian, which has been crowned New Zealand’s “Bird of the Year” after record voter turnout in the public ballot. Found only in the Chatham Islands some 800km east of mainland New Zealand, the tiny creatures dwindled in the 1970s to just one breeding pair, but were saved by a pioneering programme in which other species fostered the robins’ eggs. Today, though still classed as “threatened”, there are 350 adult birds, which are fondly known as “goths” for their striking black eyes, beak and plumage.