The Bank of England says it will likely raise interest rates if the Iran war continues and warned that inflation is on track to hit 4% early next year. Despite interest rates being held at 3.75% yesterday, economists expect them to rise four times by the middle of next year, with the first increase expected shortly after the October budget. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally has been forced to retract an award given on 11 September to a Pakistani cleric who once praised Osama bin Laden for waging jihad against Britain and endorsed suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Critics also noted that Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi turned up for the ceremony with a woman entirely covered by a niqab, referred to only as “his wife”. A new species of wild cat has been discovered in Bolivia’s Yungas forest. The light brown spotted Tilcayo, which is smaller than a domestic cat and native to Central and South America, is the first addition to the wild feline family in more than a century.

Andy Burnham says he and Ed Miliband decided to sanction the Israeli government after weighing “all of the risks” and taking “close advice” from the Foreign Office and the intelligence services. In fact, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, Burnham and Miliband “ignored the advice they were given”, which was to wait until after the Israeli elections in October. Simon Walters, the British ambassador in Tel Aviv and a former Foreign Office director of national security for the Middle East, gave them a “very explicit” warning not to rush, as did widely respected National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell. The point is obvious: Miliband wants to see the back of Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right radicals in his coalition. But as he was repeatedly told by those who know, any intervention before polling day would inevitably be weaponised by precisely those unsavoury elements to shore up support. Miliband went ahead anyway.

Here’s what I want to know, says David Blair in The Telegraph. Should a foreign secretary be on a permanent mission to “salve their own conscience” by righting what they see as wrongs, or do they have an overriding duty to serve British interests, “regardless of their own feelings”? Miliband has evidently decided to treat international diplomacy as an “intensely personal quest for fulfilment and redemption”. In a revealing interview, the foreign secretary elected to apologise to “every Palestinian” for decisions taken by his own government colleagues in 2024, such as declining to endorse an International Court of Justice opinion on the legality of the war in Gaza. Disloyalty aside, has anyone told Miliband just how reliant our defence forces are on Israeli military technology? Poking such an indispensable ally is absurd. Putting conscience before duty is “not what foreign secretaries should be for”.

There’s something odd about Zack Polanski campaigning in Urdu, says The Economist’s Owen Winter on Bluesky. Not least because, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency he’s running in, only 139 people speak the South Asian language as their mother tongue, 114 of whom, according to the census, speak English “well or very well”. It’s as though he thought “hey, this worked in Gorton and Denton. Holborn and St Pancras has Muslims too.”

The American dictionary maker Merriam-Webster has added 1,400 new words to its roster. Many refer to social media culture, such as “looksmaxxing”, “meme coin” and “parasocial” (which describes the one-way relationship between fans and stars). Others come from new tech, like the always irritating noun “compute” (to mean computing power), along with “vibe coding” and “uncanny valley” (the creepy feeling that results from something artificial appearing almost, but not quite, human). Edible newcomers include “superfood” (ultra-nutritious foods like broccoli, salmon or blueberries) and less super foods such as “cake pop” – a truly revolting-sounding lollipop made from compressed sponge and icing, typically coated in chocolate and decorated with sprinkles. To see more, click here.

Keir Starmer could have donated to Downing Street’s library any book ever published, says Bethany Elliott in The New Statesman. Instead, the former prime minister chose to donate a biography of himself, “perhaps as a case study of what not to do in power”. His colleagues were no better: Rachel Reeves and Lisa Nandy each handed over works they had written themselves, “in a further act of literary self-regard”. In fairness, Westminster has always loved books about Westminster. Clement Attlee, Stanley Baldwin and Ted Heath all stocked No 10’s shelves with their own work. But leaders used to be much keener, and more rounded, bibliophiles.

Harry Truman reckoned he’d got through all 2,000 books in his hometown library by the age of 14. Teddy Roosevelt managed a book a day – in languages including German, French, Italian and Latin – and would reach for one “whenever someone was boring him”. A young Winston Churchill steeped himself in Gibbon, Plato and Darwin, and when fever-stricken in 1943 sought comfort in Pride and Prejudice. Nor was it all worthy stuff. Margaret Thatcher might have got more than four hours’ sleep a night if she hadn’t been addicted to Frederick Forsyth’s spy thrillers; Harold Macmillan liked nothing better than an early night “with a Trollope”. Thankfully, the bookworm isn’t quite extinct. Michael Gove ploughed through a volume of Robert Caro’s doorstop life of Lyndon B Johnson while his wife was in labour, and says he tried in government to read something unrelated to his work for at least half an hour a day. (For political junkies, he recommends Tony Blair’s memoir and Andrew Roberts’s Churchill biography.) In the TikTok age, let’s toast the politicians still “eagerly brandishing their library card”.

US airports are planning to allow pre-screened individuals without tickets to go all the way to the gate to wave off loved ones (or, as per rom-coms, to declare their love at the last moment). It’s a welcome return of a romantic, and sadly bygone, ritual, says Robert Jackman in The Telegraph. While we’re at it, why don’t we bring back the nostalgic flutter of analogue departure boards, or, frankly, the in-flight cigarette. It used to be common for young passengers to be invited to the flight deck. Can we bring that back? What about in-flight bars? And when was the last time you got an unexpected upgrade? It’s time to make flying civilised again.

Some Londoners probably think Piddington’s symbolic vote to secede from the UK was an overreaction, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. But consider this. The Oxfordshire village has a population of about 350, and the converted army barracks nearby will house 1,250 male asylum seekers. If London were to receive an influx of migrants in the same proportion, “there would be more than 31 million of them”.

It’s Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, say Paul Sonne and Aigerim Turgunbaeva in The New York Times, which is enjoying a “frenzied economic boom” driven by the war in Ukraine. With Moscow hit by sanctions, the former Soviet republic has become a key “conduit” for cars, electronics and other goods still flowing into Russia under the radar. Coupled with the high price of gold – the country’s biggest export – this “re-export” activity helped Kyrgyzstan’s economy grow by a whopping 11% last year. Bishkek feels like a boomtown: the skyline a sea of cranes; the soundtrack drilling. “It’s like a wave,” says entrepreneur Chyngyz Alkanov, “and you want to ride it.”