Kemi Badenoch has pledged to end social housing provision for foreign nationals in England if the Conservatives win power, saying Britain cannot be a “cash machine for the world”. The Tory leader says ending new tenancies for foreign nationals and ejecting non-EU foreign national households would free up almost 230,000 council houses. Meta has been ordered by a court in New Mexico to pay $567m towards redressing harm done to children by its platforms, with the judge comparing the social media giant to a “public nuisance” akin to air pollution. The ruling is in addition to $375m in fines that Meta was ordered to pay as part of the same case back in March, taking the total to $942m. The tech giant is appealing. English winemakers are hopeful that 2026 will be one of the country’s best-ever vintages, as the sun and warm temperatures have intensified flavours, ripeness and sugar levels in their vines. The clement climate’s effect on ripeness is expected to be particularly good for still rather than sparkling wines.

Listening to Education Secretary Lucy Powell railing against a rigorous, “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching gave me “a strong sense of déjà vu”, says Toby Young in The Telegraph. Fifteen years ago I helped set up the West London Free School, the first free school to be given the green light by Michael Gove, with the aim of providing the sort of education traditionally confined to the likes of Eton and Westminster. Houses, uniforms, strong discipline, Latin until the age of 14, “the whole nine yards”. It prompted a tsunami of opposition. We were told our plans would only appeal to “middle class snobs”; that parent-run schools would be as bad as patient-run hospitals. As one irate protester screamed: “What have you got to offer black single mothers struggling to bring up adolescent boys?”

Quite a lot, it turned out. We had 10 applicants for every place, an “unheard of” ratio for a state school. Black single mums, it seems, are “as keen on securing a rigorous, academic education for their kids as happily married white parents”. (Most opposition came from middle class liberals worried it might “stifle Tarquin and Emilia’s creativity”.) The results speak for themselves. Last year we were in the top 2% of England’s non-selective state schools for GCSEs, and almost half our sixth form students secured straight As and A*s. Crucially, this success is “far from exceptional”. Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School in Wembley gets even better results with the same approach, along with several other academy chains. These are the schools driving the “miraculous transformation” of England’s state sector – a shift so significant I’ve been approached by the education ministers of three different countries. Why on earth would Powell want to undo that success?

Jeremy Clarkson has found a novel way of boosting donations at charity auctions, say Rory Tingle and Stuart MacDonald in the Daily Mail. When the total at a recent event with his fellow prostate cancer sufferer Chris Hoy stalled at £850,000, short of the cyclist’s £1m target, Clarkson stood up and said: “Everyone here who has got a helicopter, I want ten grand.” And he meant it. The Clarkson’s Farm star walked around the room pointing at anyone who owned a chopper, saying “ten grand from you, ten grand from you”. They hit the million mark in no time.

Russia’s drones aren’t just attacking Ukrainian forces, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. A 2025 UN inquiry documented hundreds of drone attacks on civilians across eastern Ukraine including those walking on pavements, working in gardens, driving ambulances, or commuting to work. Sometimes, drones loiter by burning buildings, waiting for fire brigades to appear so that firemen can be murdered too. When a Ukrainian market stall owner recently heard the distinctive buzz of a Russian drone (pictured), he gestured at his produce to show the operator that he wasn’t a soldier, but it pursued him and detonated anyway, leaving him with cuts and concussion.

For the Democrats, says Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic, this week’s primary election in Michigan was an “outright catastrophe”. The party’s four-term centre-left Representative Haley Stevens was defeated by the uber-leftist Abdul El-Sayed, who has previously attacked his party as corrupt, offended many of its heretofore-cherished principles, and who is currently trailing the Republican candidate in the race to hold what ought to have been an easy-to-win seat. For the party’s centre-left liberals, this needs to be a wake-up call: leftists like El-Sayed will take over the Democratic Party unless they adapt to their rise.

Some of the fixes are obvious. Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless centre-left Democrats stop supporting unconditional aid for Israel. The party should also do more to stop multiple candidates splitting the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate. But the real challenge comes in working out how to convince progressive voters that electing leftists in primaries won’t help their party when it comes to general elections. El-Sayed, for example, was able to win in Michigan by endorsing policies popular with leftist voters: cutting financial support for Israel, abolishing ICE, providing health insurance for tax-paying undocumented immigrants, and making private health insurance “redundant”. But most of this doesn’t chime with the broader electorate. What’s more, while mainstream Democrats have been focusing their energies on defeating the Republicans, the leftist faction has focused almost entirely on defeating them, playing down the establishment’s every success and forcing it to own every failure. If the liberals want to win, they need to realise they’re now fighting a “two-front war”.

Postcards haven’t always been just “light-hearted” holiday mementos, says The Economist. In 1942, Britain’s naval intelligence chief took to the BBC with a public plea: your photos and postcards from trips to France, he said, might look like holiday frivolity but “experts may see a lot more”. He asked people to send them in, expecting to receive 10,000 or so. Instead, they got ten million, and British intelligence immediately began sorting them into categories including “Omaha”, “Sword” and “Juno”. The preparations for D-Day had begun.

Sport is full of nonsensical superstitions, says Patrick Kidd in The Spectator. Some golfers are so convinced the Masters will never be won by the victor of the par-three competition the day before that they deliberately fluff their final hole. Football manager Barry Fry once urinated on all four corners of the pitch at Birmingham City at the suggestion of a clairvoyant, in an effort to banish a long-running gypsy curse. There’s also a ludicrous claim that every time Wales win a grand slam in the Six Nations, a Pope dies. In fact, this has happened only twice in the 12 times the Welsh have won the slam. And given Wales’s current form, “Leo XIV should not expect a short reign”.

It’s the national parks trail, says Will Humphries in The Times, a 2,300-mile trek linking all the national parks of Britain. The route was conceived by Dan Raven-Ellison, founder of Slow Ways, a network of trails which are checked, reviewed and improved by volunteers before being verified with a difficulty grading. This week, a veteran hiker called John Scott became the first to complete the new trail, arriving in Nairn, near Inverness, around 160 days after setting off from Cromer in Norfolk. Asked what advice he’d give to anyone thinking of doing the route, Scott is characteristically blunt: “Get on with it.”