Thirty three Britons are among the 1,500 people missing across Nepal and Tibet after flash floods and landslides swept away entire villages along the border. The flooding is thought to have been caused by a glacial collapse. So far, the death toll is 273, but rescuers are racing to find those still missing. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has agreed to pay up to $18bn and add safety measures and significant restrictions to Facebook and Instagram in a settlement that ended a landmark lawsuit yesterday. The social media giant, which was being sued by a coalition of 29 US states for knowingly harming young people with its products, will limit American under-18s to two hours a day, block access between midnight and 6am and send reminders to pause use after 15, 60 and 90 minutes. The UK’s first plug-in solar panels go on sale today. The portable power generators, which are significantly cheaper than roof-mounted equivalents and can be installed without an electrician, are expected to help households save around a fifth of their electricity bill while the sun is shining.

Except during ice hockey riots, says Jen Gerson in The Guardian, we Canadians are pretty hopeless at expressing the full range of human emotion. But when Prime Minister Mark Carney held a rare press conference on Saturday after the eleventh-hour collapse of trade negotiations with the US, he was “practically vibrating” with fury. The Americans had, he said, sneakily changed the wording of a trade deal only hours before 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian exports – winter coats, wine, hockey sticks – were due to kick in, so the deal was off. “We got attacked,” said Carney. “That’s fine... We’re gonna respond.” And respond he has: from 8 September, Canadian counter-tariffs will be applied to more than $27bn worth of US goods, including cheese, fridges, furniture and loo roll.

Carney’s new political strategy – “total defiance of Donald Trump” – may succeed in the very short term, says Michael Taube in The Spectator, thanks to the recent surge in anti-American sentiment among Canadians. But it’s a “preposterous” long-term strategy that could crush Canada’s economy for future generations. In 2024, for example, something like $2.6bn worth of goods and services crossed from the US to Canada every day. For obvious reasons, the US is Canada’s top trading partner by far, whereas Canada is only America’s second largest. And no matter how many bilateral trade deals Carney tries to arrange, including a highly controversial plan to increase trade with China in January, any significant loss of access to the US economy will be “devastating”. These acts of defiance only serve to drive the existing wedge between Trump and Carney even deeper. But the chance of Washington and Ottawa repairing the damage, at least during Trump’s remaining time in the White House, are “pretty slim”.

Western support for Ukraine has always been tempered by fear of nuclear escalation, says Andreas Umland in Foreign Policy. But Kyiv has repeatedly violated Moscow’s “red lines” – a ground invasion of Russian territory, drone bombing runs on Moscow and St Petersburg – and Vladimir Putin hasn’t touched the red button. This should come as little surprise. When the US lost in Vietnam, and suffered a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, nukes were never discussed. Nor when the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan, or when France lost their brutal colonial war in Algeria in the 1960s. In fact, most of the nine nuclear-armed countries have fought wars against non-nuclear states without escalating.

Carrier Pidge is an app that allows users to revel in a slower pace of life by sending text messages at the speed of a pigeon, says Emmett Lindner in The New York Times. If you send a message from London to a friend in Singapore, say, it could take around 62 hours; if you’re nearby, the message could arrive within minutes. And like real birds, the digital pigeons are programmed to have a small chance of getting lost, meaning the message may never arrive at all. “Some things,” says one 27-year-old user, “are better when they’re worse.”

Fifty years ago this week, says Martin Vander Weyer in The Telegraph, I started as a graduate trainee in the City. This was the same year the IMF came to London to bail us out, yet all my university friends came through the “milk round” with a decent job in accountancy, banking, law, or at one of the industrial giants like Shell or ICI, or at the BBC or elsewhere. In those days, there was a benign balance: a fairly tiny number of university leavers matched by a far larger number of traineeships, offered by employers who relied on annual intakes of bright juniors. If you wanted a job, in other words, you got one.

Today’s graduates are not so lucky. In July, just over 8,000 graduate roles were advertised in the UK, for something like 500,000 university leavers. And more than a quarter of a million school leavers are off to “uni” next month, with a vanishing hope of conventional job offers when they emerge. Add that to the figures released earlier this year showing 700,000 unjobbed UK graduates on welfare benefits and we begin to see the outlines of a serious crisis. The reasons are simple. Yes, AI is making employers nervous, and the Labour government’s hike in employers’ national insurance has made things worse. But the real cause is the obsession with higher education that started when John Major converted skills-based polytechnics into low-grade universities. This was accelerated by Tony Blair, creating a mass of debt-ridden youngsters – often with useless degrees in subjects ending in “-ology” (criminology, anthropology, you name it) – unfit for the working world. Universities are a lot of fun, but Britain’s will need radical reform if they are to produce the resilient, flexible, entrepreneurial self-starters we need, rather than more “fodder for the benefits queue”.

On Saturday, says Gavin Blair in The Guardian, some 1,800 Japanese people got together and chanted “so-re, so-re” (heave-ho, heave-ho) as they pulled on enormous ropes to move a 360-tonne castle about a metre. On Sunday, another group did it again. The ancient practice, known as hikiya, involves hoisting important buildings on to rollers and moving them so they can be preserved or mended rather than dismantled. Hirosaki Castle was damaged in the 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake, and painstaking works began in 2015 to repair a collapsed wall. After works were completed in 2024, 8,000 applied to help move it back to its original position.

Because all the realistic candidates for top white-collar jobs have perfect grades, says Jamie Waters in The Wall Street Journal, employers are increasingly looking for “quirky side pursuits”, like training miniature dachshunds, building birdhouses or, in one case, “perfecting restaurant-quality scrambled eggs”. For applicants, the idea now is to tempt a glassy-eyed recruiter to look again at your CV, and to make the hiring manager think “yes, this is somebody I’d like to be in the trenches with”. Hobbies were commonly listed on CVs until the woke 2010s, when the corporate world tried to minimise the hidden advantages of listing “sailing”, “shooting”, “skiing” or whatever. Apparently, those days are gone.

It’s a colourful camouflage shirt, says Tom Ravenscroft in Dezeen, which renders the wearer invisible to AI. The so-called “Digital Camouflage” top is designed to confuse AI-powered object-detection software by subverting what the system recognises as a person. Because AI doesn’t know anything, it simply scans for shapes, edges, contrasts and human-like patterns. But the design on the shirt – which was itself invented by repeated testing with AI – uses a combination of bright colours and patterns to baffle the bot so it moves on without detecting a human.