Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced a watering down of her immigration reforms, abandoning plans to make lower skilled migrants wait 15 years to stay in the UK. Legal immigrants will now wait 10 years for indefinite leave to remain, but most foreign care workers already in Britain will be able to settle after five. Under the revised plans, new arrivals will no longer be prevented from bringing non-working spouses with them. Andy Burnham will set out his plans for a “debt reset” to support Commonwealth countries in Antigua today. The PM will pledge £40m to Caribbean infrastructure and energy projects over the next three years, and begin talks with fellow Commonwealth leaders about the UK issuing a formal apology for the slave trade in the next year. “Mogging” is the Collins Dictionary word of the year. Meaning to “outshine or outperform someone or something”, the term has its origins in the “looksmaxxing” movement where men use it to assert physical superiority. To see the other contenders, including “Manchesterism”, “carspreading” and “hydration break”, click here.

Rallying Republican voters in Michigan last week, Donald Trump made a point he’s been hammering everywhere ahead of the midterms, says Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. “I had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said. “This term is going to blow it away.” But any appearance of economic strength is a distortion caused by preposterous spending on AI. The five biggest data centre builders, including Amazon and Google, are on track to spend $900bn on AI in 2026; just two AI chipmakers accounted for a third of all growth in corporate profits in the past quarter; and AI stocks more broadly account for almost half of all growth in the S&P 500 this year. Anthropic alone has more than $800bn to pay in future contractual obligations for AI infrastructure; the biggest cloud providers have nearly $3trn worth. Nearly all of these companies make large losses.

The danger, says Ruchir Sharma in the FT, is that these firms have sucked up so much money, they are now having to borrow from bond markets rather than taking investment. Servicing this debt is fast becoming a major liability, and as sustained high interest rates start to bite, the weakest firms will struggle to meet their obligations. In the final stages of all bubbles, “magical thinking flourishes”. A central myth of the dotcom era was that “enormous” demand for internet products would free tech firms from ordinary economic forces. The same thinking is everywhere today. But many boosters overlook a new vulnerability: outside AI, investment is weak – how can AI companies thrive when their potential customers are struggling? This may be “the most transformative tech boom yet”, but nothing’s big enough to defy the price of money.

Critics may not have liked it, says Ben Walker in The New Statesman, but John Healey’s budget last week was the best received by a Labour government since 2003. According to YouGov, 45% of the public regard the fiscal package as fair while just 20% say it is “unfair”. And while the majority of people think it will have little impact, only a fifth believe it will leave them and the country “worse off”. After Rachel Reeves’s 2025 budget, Labour’s reputation on managing the economy was at a humiliating -60. Healey’s effort has brought that up to -24.

Nicky Haslam has released his annual list of things he finds “common” and, as ever, printed them on a £50 tea towel. Out of favour with the socialite and interior designer this year are Diet Coke, the Hay Festival, stand-up comedians, Matthew Parris’s Radio 4 programme Great Lives, quail eggs, cold lobster, being thin and beards. One notable and rather pleasing theme this year was annoying phrases people over-use, including “no brainer”, “a country mile”, “good morning to you”, being “humbled”, talking about putting “food on the table” and calling a turkey “the bird”. Also spot on: “Birthday cakes unless under 14.” Get yours here.

There is currently a well-known man, accused of using his celebrity status to prey on young women, who has been granted anonymity while he seeks a High Court injunction against news outlets publishing stories about his alleged behaviour. The case is “bizarre”, says Sam Leith in The Spectator. In September, this man wrote directly to The Guardian and ITN – who had spent four years interviewing more than 100 sources in the course of their investigation – to tell them that if their story was published or broadcast, “at the earliest opportunity I will kill myself”. He has since “lawyered up” and is now seeking a lifetime ban on publication of the claims about him, not because he admits to what he’s being accused of, but because of (unspecified) childhood trauma.

It should go without saying that this kind of “emotional blackmail” is a ridiculous reason to shut down a perfectly legitimate investigation into alleged bad behaviour by a person in the public eye. Yes, public exposure is likely to “negatively affect” this man’s mental health. “Shame and disgrace are very difficult for anybody to cope with.” And sometimes that will have the ultimate consequence. Jeffrey Epstein, for example, didn’t stick around to hear the verdict of a jury of his peers. Does the press have a duty of care to such people that eclipses their duty to investigate the truth? In a free and functioning democracy, we should very much hope not. Granting an injunction in this case would set the “absolutely demented precedent” that hurt feelings could be used to shut down entirely legitimate investigations. “How would this look on the front page of the Daily Mail” is a question we want bad people to ask themselves, emotional blackmail be damned.

The German actress Elke Sommer, who has died aged 85, had a beguiling effect on her co-stars, says The Telegraph. Peter Sellers, “perhaps inevitably”, proposed to her when she starred alongside him in the second Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark (1964). She told him while she liked him “as a person”, she didn’t love him, to which he replied: “But that’ll come.” Sommer’s husband, the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, was used to it. When she did her second nude photoshoot for Playboy, he told her interviewer: “Elke is the perfect wife – inexpensive to dress.”

Donald Trump has boasted that America’s oil companies are “making a fortune” from the Iran war. He’s not wrong, say Rebecca Elliott and Keith Collins in The New York Times. In the six months to September, US oil producers and refiners trousered profits of more than $130bn – almost three times the $47bn they made over the same period last year. John Catsimatidis, the CEO of United Refining, says he’ll use the windfall to pay down company debt – or buy a new corporate plane. “I’m 78,” he says. “If I don’t buy a new airplane now, when am I going to buy it?”

It’s a telephone box at the geographic centre of Britain, which has been given Grade II-listed status, says BBC News. The KX100 at Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire’s Ribble Valley, just north of Blackburn, was the 100,000th phone kiosk to be installed in the UK, officially unveiled by the explorer Ranulph Fiennes in 1992. Heritage campaigner Oli Marshall says that while the glass-panelled model was always the “ugly duckling” compared to the iconic red phone box, it has in recent years developed a “cult following”.