UK shop prices have fallen for the first time in almost three years, as retailers flog their stock after a summer of poor sales and bad weather. The British Retail Consortium says prices in August were 0.3% lower than in the same month last year, the first deflation since October 2021. Emmanuel Macron has refused to name a prime minister from the leftwing coalition that won the highest number of seats in last month’s French election, despite two days of horse-trading with party and parliamentary leaders. The decision not to select the New Popular Front’s candidate Lucie Castets was met with anger, but the Elysée insists the talks were “fair, sincere and useful”. Liam and Noel Gallagher have confirmed that Oasis will reunite next summer, 16 years after the band first broke up. In a press release, they announced a series of 2025 gigs across London, Manchester, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The high-tech answer Britain’s growth woes

Why is it, asks Will Hutton in The Observer, that Britain is not a tech superpower. We have an “outstanding science research base”, entrepreneurial start-ups and the largest venture capital industry in Europe. Yet we have just one software company and one electronics company in the respective global top 100s. And any time we produce a genuinely world class firm – Mike Lynch’s Autonomy, AI pioneer DeepMind – a deep-pocketed US rival turns up to buy it. The only way Labour can meet its ambitious growth targets is with massive tech investment. Yet foolishly, Rachel Reeves has allowed Treasury bean-counters to talk her into cancelling an £800m exascale supercomputer project in Edinburgh and appears ready to lose AstraZeneca’s vaccine production to the US amid quibbles over investment support.

It was madness to cancel that supercomputer, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. It’s exactly the kind of kit we’re going to need to boost our standing in AI, which holds the key to increased productivity in Britain. Yet Keir Starmer is looking “strangely Luddite”. Tony Blair’s think tank estimates that applying AI to government could “cut workforce time by 20%”. Just think of the improvement it could make to the creaking NHS, where ever-increasing expenditure and workforce numbers have been accompanied by zero increase in operations or basic medical procedures. One Brexit benefit that Rishi Sunak wisely spotted was the freedom to adopt bespoke AI regulation – taking a “wait and see” approach rather than aping the EU’s bizarre and arbitrary limit on the size and power of AI models. But Starmer has reversed this, bringing the UK into line with the EU. Stymying Britain’s nascent AI industry will kill the growth that Starmer claims is his principal mission. “I’m beginning to wonder if he knows what he is doing.”

More people than ever are choosing to leave money to their cats and dogs when they die, says The Times. One in every eight people who inquire about the Co-op’s will-writing services now wish to make provisions for their pets, typically a wodge of cash for their chosen guardian. They join an illustrious tradition: Karl Lagerfeld famously left his cat Choupette £1.2m when he died; Oprah Winfrey has apparently set aside $30m for her three spaniels. When US property mogul Leona Helmsley passed away in 2007, she left £10m to her pet maltese Trouble – cutting two grandchildren from her will in the process.

Every year the Notting Hill Carnival attracts a fresh round of pearl-clutching, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. And yes, bad things happen – on Sunday alone, there was one recorded theft, four sexual offences, 18 incidents of possession of an offensive weapon, three stabbings and some drug-dealing. But a two-day festival where a million people have a wild time “should not be judged by the villainy of a few”. At Glastonbury, which attracted just 200,000 visitors, this year’s festival saw a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 thefts, 30 acts of violence and two sexual offences. Funnily enough, you don’t see newspaper columnists calling for the famous “hangout of middle-class white folk” to be shut down.

Kamala Harris has to win

It is now “absolutely imperative” that Kamala Harris wins the US presidential election, says Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. It’s essential for the survival of America’s “sense of itself as a rational nation”, and for its “continued role in Nato and the free world”. But also for the survival of the Republican party. Only an “unambiguous, definitive defeat” of Donald Trump can end the delusion that he is the anointed saviour of a nation whose founding principles “he doesn’t appear to appreciate or even understand”. Destroying the Trump phenomenon and reviving the Republicans as a responsible opposition “may turn out to be the greatest achievement of a Harris administration”.

In trying to attack Harris, Trump and his cabal are making two contradictory claims. The first, that her policy pronouncements are vague and noncommittal, is simply bunk – I’ve seen enough campaign speeches to know that avoiding concrete objectives is par for the course. The second, that she is a rabid leftwinger, is laughable to anyone outside the US: her most radical pronouncements are pledges like giving employees the right to take medical or maternity leave and finding ways to offers cheaper prescriptions to pensioners. So forget about the “dangers” that a left-wing Harris administration is supposed to represent. Even if there is cause for conservatives to worry, it’s all the more urgent that Republicans force themselves out of the Trump miasma and “start engaging in serious political argument again”.

The late Christopher Lee holds the world record for most deaths in an acting career, says Mental Floss: he croaked in at least 61 movies. But he’s not the only cinematic record breaker. A whopping 34 feature films have been called Broken, making it the most common title of all time. The 2015 James Bond film Spectre wins the prize for the largest stunt explosion, with nearly 2,224 gallons of kerosene used for the 7.5-second blast (above). And a fake broadsheet known as The Recurring Newspaper gets the glory of being the most reused prop, appearing more than 10,000 times to date.

Nancy Pelosi gives a gripping “hour-by-hour account” of the 2021 storming of the US Capitol in her new memoir, The Art of Power, says Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Lawmakers who had served in the military fashioned pikes from the wooden stands that held anti-Covid hand sanitiser, “in case they had to physically defend themselves”. Some were so sure they were about to die, “they rang their families to say goodbye”. It was also the first time that politicians had to make use of the gas masks which had been kept under the seats in the Capitol’s two chambers since 9/11. And, once it was all over, the building apparently “stank to high heaven” of human faeces.

It’s Sandilands, a former golf course that’s being converted into a 75-acre landing strip for migrating birds. For over a century, local divot-makers dominated this long stretch of the Lincolnshire coast, but the club closed six years ago when the firm running it went bust. Now the National Trust plans to transform the ex-links course into a pitstop for wandering warblers, and a wetlands home for water voles, badgers, deer, frogs, and rare toads.