Andy Burnham will set out plans to tackle social care and youth unemployment in his speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool this afternoon. Senior government sources have suggested that the PM will signal he is willing to consider scrapping the pensions “triple lock” to help fund a new social care service, a move that one union boss described as “electoral suicide”. The five men suspected of plotting a bomb attack on RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire were released on bail yesterday after experts found no trace of explosives. Counter-terrorism police are still investigating whether the men were proxies for a foreign state. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the incident “clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor”. AI could detect type 2 diabetes by listening to voice recordings, a new study has found. Researchers at an Australian tech firm, which trained its software on more than 63,000 voice samples from more than 21,000 people, said the recordings could pick up the increased hoarseness and inability to control breath which are associated with the condition.

Labour’s party conference is inevitably “suffused with the imagery of class politics”, says John Rentoul in The Independent. Speeches make liberal reference to “working people” and imply that the party represents the poor and middle-income majority against the rich. “None of it is true.” New polling shows that since the 2024 election, the proportion of Labour voters who are “middle class” (social grades ABC1) has shot up, as has the proportion of graduates and those earning more than £40,000 a year. Reform voters are the most working class and the Conservatives are somewhere in between. The Greens and the Lib Dems tend to be more middle class, though still not as much as Labour.

This “Great Class Inversion” of British politics means the Labour conference is one long exercise in cognitive dissonance. When delegate after delegate comes to the lectern to rehearse old lines about class struggle, they will be talking about someone else’s class, whose members mostly feel Labour doesn’t represent them. This explains why the party is more concerned with Gaza, say, than with immigration, which is what really bothers the working class. And why Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer misjudged the winter fuel payment – “most pensioners they know give it to Greenpeace or spend it on wine”. It makes Andy Burnham’s northern working-class schtick seem like a form of “historical re-enactment”. When he talks about “re-industrialisation”, or “reversing 40 years of Thatcherism”, it comes across as an attempt to resurrect a mythical working-class party idealised by many middle-class people with distant working-class origins. Labour has always been a funny coalition of intellectuals and organisers, but it’s become the home of well-off graduates with a “tiny outhouse of the genuinely disadvantaged”.

Chancellor John Healey spent five years as a minister in Gordon Brown’s Treasury, says Ben Riley-Smith in The Sunday Times, and describes his old boss as an “inspiration” and a “mentor”. Brown hasn’t been shy about giving his former underling advice since his elevation to No 11. “I’ve talked to him,” says Healey, smiling. “I’ve had his block cap emails in the middle of the night.”

If a candidate arrived for a job interview with an iced coffee, would you immediately show them the door? It’s a simple question, says Julia Munslow in The Wall Street Journal, but it has sparked heated debates online about workplace decorum and the shifting expectations of professionalism. The divide falls mostly along generational lines, with Gen Z confused at the fuss, and Gen X and baby boomers bothered by the casualness, poor preparation and bad time management. “If you can’t go without a coffee for an hour,” says one recruiter, “there’s a problem.” It’s also the “sipping, and swirling, and the noise, and the wet hand”, says another. “There’s just a lot going on. And why?”

Recent victories by the far-right AfD in German regional elections have led many international commentators to the same comfortable conclusion, says Mark Brolin in The Wall Street Journal. “Germans are losing their minds.” The less comfortable truth is that the radicalisation of German politics is the direct result and fault of Angela Merkel. Treated for years as the “great grown-up of Western politics” – steady, pragmatic, unexcitable – Merkel turns out to have been the ultimate establishment tribune: brilliant at managing insider consensus but incapable of noticing when the consensus itself had become the problem.

The most obvious example is migration. The AfD began in 2013 as the niche brainchild of an eccentric Eurosceptic professor. But when Merkel admitted almost a million Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians into Germany in 2015, the party was rapidly transformed into a much broader nationalist force opposed to an establishment that had radically shifted migration policy away from previous norms. Then there’s energy and defence. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Merkel accelerated Germany’s nuclear phase-out and allowed the country to become cripplingly dependent on imported Russian gas. It should have been obvious at the time how mad this was: Europe’s most important industrial economy at the mercy of its principal geopolitical adversary. Yet those who sounded the alarm, not least Poland and Ukraine, were ignored. Merkel was exceptionally good at giving respectable opinion what it wanted, but couldn’t see when policies labelled “moderate” were being pushed to absurdity. The AfD isn’t some inexplicable German aberration. “It is the political shadow of the Merkel era.”

A whopping 60 of the world’s current heads of state went to university in the UK, according to a new “soft power index” published by the Higher Education Policy Institute. They include Finland’s Alexander Stubb (LSE); UAE president Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Sandhurst); Cameroonian prime minister Joseph Ngute (Warwick); Czech president Petr Pavel (King’s College London); and Canada’s Mark Carney, Naruhito, the Emperor of Japan, and Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (all Oxford). Britain is behind only the US, where 66 leaders were students, and ahead of France (29), Russia (12) and Australia (eight).

I have a very sensible policy of never discussing the Israel-Gaza conflict at social occasions, says Rachel Johnson in The Telegraph. But sometimes I can’t avoid it. My husband and I were once out for dinner with three other couples, when – just as the Lebanese mezze arrived – one of the other women there said brightly: “So, does ANYONE round this table think Israel is NOT guilty of genocide?” I raised my hand, unlike everyone else, whereupon the woman said she couldn’t sit next to me. “So I left the restaurant.”

It’s the Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, says Lizzie McAllister in Metro, which is showing encouraging signs of being alive. Three years after the adored acer was illegally felled by vandals, and thanks in part to a National Trust fence keeping hikers away, a thicket of fresh shoots has sprouted around the stump. The vandals, who travelled from Cumbria during a storm to film themselves carving into its trunk with a chainsaw, and kept a wedge of wood as a trophy, have never explained their motive.