Keir Starmer is facing a revolt from Labour MPs after abandoning a manifesto pledge to allow workers to sue for unfair dismissal from day one of their employment. Under the change in the policy, which was originally championed by former deputy PM Angela Rayner, employees will have to be in their job for at least six months to qualify. The death toll from the high-rise apartment complex fire in Hong Kong on Wednesday has risen to 128, with around 200 still missing. Authorities say the fire alarms were not working effectively and attribute the blaze’s rapid spread to mesh-covered bamboo scaffolding covering the flats. A Brittany town is so fed up of the French being perceived as rude and unwelcoming that it has launched a “courtesy week”. Residents of Saint-Brieuc are being told to stop moaning and strike up polite chatter with one another as part of a drive to become the nation’s “capital of courtesy”. Bonne chance.

Worry about the young leaving, not the billionaires

Labour has been heavily criticised for driving billionaires such as Lakshmi Mittal to quit the country, says Alice Thomson in The Times. But these non-doms, useful as they are to the wider economy, have always come and gone with tax regimes, flitting from London to Milan “with their Louis Vuitton luggage on private jets”. Far more worrying is the burgeoning trend for the aspirational young to pack their bags and board an economy flight in search of what they can’t find here: “jobs and prosperity”. These aren’t the so-called “quiet quitters” who want to do as little as they can from under a duvet. They’re skilled, driven folk – and crucially for the UK, “much-needed future taxpayers”.

Many of those leaving are engineers, accountants, doctors and teachers. Last year nearly 2,000 GPs, resident medical officers and nurses were given visas with potential for permanent residency in Australia. They’ll be joining the 3,324 British doctors who have settled there in the past three years – “high on sunshine” and very well-remunerated for their British taxpayer-funded expertise. The Americans are luring high-flyers with the promise that they could quadruple their salaries; young expats in Portugal are “thriving” thanks to a one-year 100% tax break for under-35s earning less than £25k a year. This brain drain isn’t going to let up any time soon. Some 28% of 18-to-30-year-olds say they are actively planning or have seriously considered emigrating, because here in the UK they feel “overtaxed, underhoused and undervalued”. The government needs to wake up and realise it’s “losing the international talent war”.

When X added a feature this week that showed each account’s “country of origin”, says Oliver Bateman in UnHerd, it triggered a “wave of mass unmasking”. MAGA Nation (392,000 followers) was posting from Eastern Europe; RedPillMedia (108,000) was confirmed as Pakistani; Republicans Against Trump (978,000 followers) – based in Austria. This isn’t some complicated Russian psy-op. These highly influential political accounts, which in some cases resulted in real pressure on lawmakers, turned out to be young foreigners trying to make money and realising that “dumb, inflammatory” posts – “Should a statue of Jesus be built on the White House lawn?” – would generate the most engagement, and therefore the most revenue.

Everyone hates AI, says Cody Delistraty in The New York Times. Polls suggest just 17% of American adults believe the technology will improve the country in the next two decades. So AI firms are changing how they present themselves. Anthropic recently opened a pop-up in New York called the “Zero Slop Zone”, where phones were banned and humans were encouraged to, er, interact. And ChatGPT’s latest ad – a brother furtively uses AI to plan a road trip for his sister – doesn’t mention the tech once. This attempt to rebrand themselves as a “complement to creativity”, or even the solution to too much tech, is classic “double-think”.

Is Russia gearing up for war in Europe?

Last summer, says Sylvie Kauffmann in the FT, Ukraine’s then foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba was in a sombre mood when I asked what he thought of Europe’s attitude to Russia. You cannot understand war, he said, “until it gets under your skin”. Tens of thousands of his countrymen were dying under Russian fire. “Wait until French mothers have to send their sons.” Kuleba’s prediction has not yet materialised, but the dark menace of war broke into the French national conversation last week when the chief of the armed forces warned that Russia was preparing for major conflict “by 2030”. France will need “the strength of character to accept we will have to suffer to protect what we are”, said General Fabien Mandon. The risk? That the nation “falters because it is not ready to accept losing its children”.

Suddenly France, at peace for 80 years and nowhere near Russia, is debating “war, death and sacrifice”. The French love their 200,000-strong, nuclear-backed armed forces, but that love is mostly expressed at the spectacular Bastille Day military parade on the Champs-Élysées. The handful of recent conflicts in the Sahel or Middle East were wars of choice. Ukraine is a “war of necessity”. As Russia intensifies its hybrid war on Nato countries – cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation – many leaders are starting to think similarly. After explosives were found on a Polish train track last week, German defence minister Boris Pistorius told fellow citizens they “may have already lived through the last peaceful summer”. Germany and France are considering military service for the young; Poles are preparing “go bags” with government-recommended necessities like water, a torch and a radio. Without America’s longstanding security guarantee, Kuleba’s prophecy may yet come to pass.

There’s a depressing new trend in telly, says Helen Coffey in The Independent: “making bad stuff pays”. Not mediocre stuff, not “bang average”. But genuine, solid-gold garbage. Take the recent legal show All’s Fair, starring Kim Kardashian as a high-flying divorce lawyer. Despite garnering rare zero-star reviews from several publications, it shot to No 1 on Disney+ in the UK and has been renewed for a second series. These days it’s a three-star review that’s the real “death”: not good enough to be worth seeking out, not bad enough to be “its own object of powerful fascination”.

The world’s first traffic light was built outside the Houses of Parliament in December 1868, says Keith Lowe in Engelsberg Ideas. It was 24ft tall, with two massive semaphore arms that “loomed out of the London fog like some kind of supernatural apparition”. When these giant mechanical limbs were raised and the light switched from green to red, horses and other road traffic stopped to allow pedestrians to cross. Unfortunately, three weeks later, the base of the structure exploded because of a gas leak and it soon fell into disuse. “The streets of London would not be illuminated by traffic lights again for more than half a century.”

It’s a wool knit Fair Isle jumper, says Danya Issawi in The Cut, which has fuelled “toil and torment” among fragile MAGA types. The peony-coloured pullover, from the preppy American label J Crew, was posted on X by Juanita Broaddrick – who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault in the 1970s, and is now a prominent right-wing commentator – with the caption: “Are you kidding me?? Men, would you wear this $168 sweater?” The consensus was an emphatic no. “Who stole this guy’s balls??!” responded one user, while the account @MOMofDataRepublican replied: “No man in my family would wear it!” Other commenters suggested it was more suited to 1980s Sorority sisters, anti-Trump wokesters and Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor.