The Conservatives have pledged to invest £10bn in a “British Iron Dome” if they win the next general election. The party says the so-called “Britannia shield” would provide an integrated network of radar, command and control systems, as well as interceptor missiles, and could be paid for using savings from cuts to welfare and net zero. The US says it is “closely monitoring” the case of a Russian lab technician who died at a plague research centre in Siberia last week. The female researcher is said to have succumbed to an “unknown” form of pneumonia. Russian authorities say there is no evidence her illness is linked to the pathogens she worked with. Jeffrey Archer has died aged 86. The former Tory MP, who was jailed for perjury in 2001 after lying in a 1987 libel case against the Daily Star, was a bestselling novelist, selling some 300 million books, including Kane and Abel and Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.

After exasperated pupils blockaded their high school in a Parisian suburb last week, says Le Monde, students across the country have staged some of the largest and most violent demonstrations since the Gilets Jaunes. Protesting against overloaded schedules, persistent staff absences and inadequate facilities – and whipped up by the radical far-left party La France Insoumise – high school kids have set rubbish alight in the streets, violently clashed with police and burned emergency response vehicles. Two teachers in Marseille were splashed with petrol. The statistics are horrifying: 1,000 schools affected, 235 students and teachers injured so far and 305 police officers injured last Thursday alone.

These grim riots are exactly what you get, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, when you “marinate an entire generation in bad political ideas, lies and victimhood”. Just like their counterparts in Britain, French kids have been told that everything is about race, that “you will die if you don’t recycle” and that the “truth” is subjective. Such mad ideas have even been pushed in Britain’s primary schools – in 2019, one teacher cooed to a tiny child on the BBC that “there are over 100, if not more, gender identities”. There’s a place for talking about grown-up issues with children, but forcing such “complex, frightening” topics on the youngest merely ignores the boundaries and protections that have long stood to serve them. Meanwhile, any sense of community, connection and humanity has been stripped away as these children have grown up in the glare of their phones. You don’t throw petrol at teachers if you’re angry about a missed maths lesson. It’s what you do if you feel “detached and reckless”.

Coming back from the pub one evening, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times, I spotted a suspicious-looking car parked up by one of our woods. I came to a quiet stop alongside the passenger window to see what was going on, and inside was a young man, 17 or so, smoking a joint with one hand and “frantically pleasuring himself” with the other. On realising he was being watched, he wound down the window and said: “Oh my God. You’re Jeremy Clarkson.” After I’d confirmed as much, he replied with the immortal line: “I rather wish we’d met in different circumstances.”

India has become remarkably good at protecting wild animals, says The Economist. Over the past two decades, the country’s tiger population has more than doubled to nearly 3,700, and it has even begun exporting the stripey quadrupeds to Cambodia, where they had gone extinct. A whole new reserve has been established in Gujarat to accommodate the expanding population of Asiatic lions, and India has been importing cheetahs in the hopes of re-establishing a species that went extinct within its borders in 1952. Other successful conservation efforts include Project Elephant, Project Snow Leopard, Project Dolphin and Project Rhino.

With Andy Burnham out there “wearing his great big bruised British heart on his sleeve”, says Anne McElvoy in The Independent, and Nigel Farage soaking up the “angry” vote on the right, Kemi Badenoch has been looking for an “authentically me” moment of her own, to mark herself out in voters’ minds. Her answer is a clever one: to lean into the side of her personality that is most criticised – “that she does not court likability” – as a foil to the “people-pleasing tendencies” of the new prime minister. In an interview with The Spectator in the run-up to this week’s Tory conference, she let fly. Andy Burnham? “Saying yes to everyone is a recipe for disaster.” Starmer? “Not interesting.”

In her conference speech tomorrow, the Tory leader will differentiate her party from Labour by arguing for “faster and tougher welfare reform”. It’s political territory that has been left “tantalisingly open”. Even some of Labour’s reformers are getting nervous about the lack of urgency in reducing the ballooning sickness benefits bill, especially for the young. Any mention of this was “squeezed out” of Burnham’s speech. Instead, the PM insisted on trumpeting a small adjustment to the pensions triple lock (concrete steps to follow... after the budget later this month), that will raise half of what he says he wants to spend on a new care service. Badenoch is betting not only that voters will notice “Labour’s sums don’t add up”, but also that previous Tory leaders have wasted their time trying to win over people who will never vote Conservative anyway. A return of the “nasty party” values of tough love and “saying no” to entitled voters could be just what people want from a Tory leader. “Being nice is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

🗳️🙏 Badenoch’s change in attitude mirrors a big change in strategy, says Emilio Casalicchio in Politico. Having previously all but given up on voters who defected to the Lib Dems or Labour – and instead battled Farage for right-wing support – the Tories are now prioritising winning back those middle-class centrists. The hope is that if enough “classic swing voters” come back on board, moderate Reform supporters will coalesce around the right-wing party best placed to win. Conservative strategists acknowledge it’ll be an uphill struggle. As one special adviser puts it: “We’re lower in the polls than we were at the 2024 election when we got our arse handed to us.”

The Swedish rapper Yung Lean and a swath of dancers dressed as public school boys performed part of their viral music video for Storm II – choreographed by the Belgian dancer Damien Jalet – at last week’s Video Music Awards. It was an “electric” moment, say Preezy Brown and Jaeden Pinder in Rolling Stone. The 30-year-old began his charged performance by throwing a chair and then smashing one of the night’s coveted VMA award statuettes, and finished it by spitting blue ice cream on to the camera. Watch the full video here.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is using an “aggressive interpretation” of tax law to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for its data centre expansion, says The New York Times. The trick is to tell the Internal Revenue Service that its vast spending on data centres is a “giant experiment that could fail”, allowing the firm to tap into a tax credit intended for research and development. The company has form in this area: it claimed in 2013 that $4.1bn of stock options exercised by Zuckerberg counted as a “research expense” because he helped invent software such as Facebook’s News Feed.

It’s the “Birmingham Tapestry”, says Lizzy Buchan in The Mirror: an 88ft-long mock-up of the Bayeux Tapestry at the Conservative party conference. The AI-generated spoof embroidery retells the past two years of politics from a Tory slant, taking aim at Labour and Reform. While Kemi Badenoch is portrayed as a “conquering hero”, Chancellor John Healey is seen trying to grab cash from a magic money tree, Angela Rayner is depicted vaping and Nigel Farage is shown having a hissy fit over questions about his finances. Naturally, there are plenty of images of a “tiny, wailing Robert Jenrick”.