The head of UK air traffic control is facing calls to resign after a technical issue caused hundreds of flights to be delayed or cancelled yesterday at the peak of summer holiday travel. Airline bosses have criticised Martin Rolfe’s management, and Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has summoned him for a meeting about the disruption. Canada has followed France and Britain by announcing a plan to recognise Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Mark Carney says the diplomatic move is partly contingent on the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank, reforming its governance and holding elections without Hamas. The world’s “oldest baby” has been born in Ohio from an embryo frozen in 1994. Lindsey and Tim Pierce adopted the fertilised egg, which was frozen before either of them had started primary school, last year, and Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July. “We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” says Lindsey. “We just wanted to have a baby.”

Britain is in better shape than many think

The “hyperventilation” on the right over Britain’s supposed decline has to be seen to be believed, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. There is talk of total social breakdown, reversible only with “extreme measures”. Yet which countries of similar size and complexity are in better shape? France is even more indebted and reluctant to reform. Germany has been in recession for a couple of years. “This isn’t the 1970s, when the UK stood out as the European straggler.” Equally misguided is the idea that Britain is worse than it used to be. Crime has fallen significantly since the 1990s, however you parse the data, as it has around the world. “When was the UK’s last blackout? Or three-day week?” Growing up, I saw half a dozen National Front logos every day, etched into school desks and sprayed on concrete underpasses. “Give me 2025, thanks.”

The problem with nostalgia is that it’s an ever-moving target. People pick out their favourite bits – “the homogeneous culture of the 1950s, the industrial peace of the 1990s, the rampant growth of the pre-crash noughties” – and smush them all together into a single fictitious moment, a “Best Of” compilation from the last century. How can the present ever “win” against that? This gloominess can be self-fulfilling, as it gives people licence to “roll the dice” on the basis that things can’t get much worse. “Hence Brexit.” Yes, of course Britain needs reform. Welfare, the European Convention on Human Rights, the NHS – all need re-examining from first principles. But the reason voters drag their feet about big change is “precisely that things aren’t disastrous”. For now, at least, “Britain does not need turning upside down”.

Venezuela has become a byword for economic mismanagement and “eye-popping” price rises, says The Economist. But it wasn’t always so. Between 1950 and 1980, Venezuela had the lowest rate of inflation in the world. In Ian Fleming’s 1961 novel Thunderball, Ernst Stavro Blofeld considers the Venezuelan bolívar, along with the Swiss franc, to be the “hardest” of the world’s currencies – the one that loses its value the least and is thus the best place to store his ill-gotten gains.

The latest viral trend among women on TikTok is showing off their “claw grip”, says Alisha Haridasani Gupta in The New York Times: holding on to a dizzying array of everyday items – water bottles, phones, purses, cups of matcha – without the help of pockets and bags. In one video, a woman manages to handle 15 different bits and pieces, including lip balm, a pen, hand sanitiser, a Kindle, a notebook, a wallet, a backup power bank, a comb and three water bottles. This “Jenga act” has been hailed as a “secret superpower” – one that men, obviously, could never pull off.

No, Sydney Sweeney isn’t a secret eugenicist

Before this week, I’d never heard of American Eagle, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. I certainly have now – and all thanks to “the world’s most shriekingly hysterical Leftists” convincing themselves that the clothing brand’s jeans are racist. A few days ago the company launched an advert featuring actress Sydney Sweeney (known for The White Lotus, Euphoria and her “not-exactly-reticent attitude towards exhibiting her physique”) with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. This, it was claimed, was clearly an endorsement of far-right eugenics, because, well, “jeans” sounds like “genes”, and Sweeney has blond hair and blue eyes. “You know, like the Nazis.” Maybe they’re right, and this really is a “neo-Nazi plot to help usher in the Fourth Reich”. Or maybe – and stop me if this sounds too outlandish – it’s just a clothes company trying to sell some denim trousers.

Personally, I’m just happy to see a return to advertisers using beautiful people to sell their wares, says Paul Burke in The Spectator. Back in the 1980s, Levi’s was a “deeply unfashionable” brand until the singer Nick Kamen and a then-unknown Brad Pitt were enlisted to put them on (“and take them off”). Same with Diet Coke, whose fortunes were transformed by that ad where a gaggle of office workers ogle a hunky construction worker swigging from a can. We’re forever being told that people want to see themselves reflected on screen, no matter how unshapely and unattractive. What utter balls. In advertising, aspiration is everything. Sadly the industry has been colonised in recent years by “pompous, po-faced pearl-clutchers” – the type who think customers look to the Co-op to solve climate change and Maltesers to address post-natal depression. A return to common sense and clarity of purpose was “long overdue”.

High-end residential developments in London are offering increasingly “comprehensive” services to tempt in high-net-worth buyers, says Nicky Rampley-Clarke in The Sunday Times. Residents of The Peninsula in Belgravia, where properties start at around £15m, have access to a fleet of extremely fancy cars, including a vintage 1935 Rolls-Royce Phantom. The OWO in Whitehall, which has 85 “branded homes” by the super-luxury hotel group Raffles, offers Michelin-starred room service, LED light therapy massages and cacao-infused baths. And amenities at the Six Senses Residences at The Whiteley in Bayswater offer “dial-a-nannies”, grocery shopping, and an “in-house sommelier and on-site bottle storage”.

The first successful bone graft in recorded history was a complete accident, says Carly Anne York in Nautilus. In 1668, a Dutch doctor called Jacob van Meekeren inserted a fragment of a dog’s skull into an injured soldier’s head in a bid to reshape his deformity. The surgery was a success, but the patient was then excommunicated by his church for being “partially dog”. When he pleaded for van Meekeren to remove his canine implant, the surgeon obliged – only to find that the dog skull had completely fused into the human skull.

It’s a “supersized” stick insect that has been discovered in high-altitude trees in north Queensland, says Eelemarni Close-Brown in The Guardian. The 40cm-long species, named Acrophylla alta, weighs just less than a golf ball, meaning it is probably the heaviest insect in Australia. Scientists think the colossal critter’s bigger body mass helps it survive its cold living conditions, and say it hadn’t been discovered sooner because of the inaccessibility of its habitat. “Unless you get a cyclone or bird bringing one down,” says Angus Emmott, who found the insect, “very few people get to see them.”