Around 900 small boat migrants will be housed in army barracks in Inverness and East Sussex from next month as the government aims to end the use of asylum hotels. They will be the first of up to 10,000 migrants the Home Office hopes to house on military sites as it works with the Ministry of Defence to find more disused locations. Around 150,000 homeowners would be hit by a “mansion tax” that Labour is reportedly considering ahead of next month’s budget. Under the proposal, higher-value property owners would face an annual 1% levy on the portion of the home’s value above £2m. One longer walk a day is better for you than lots of short strolls, according to a new study which tracked the health of more than 33,000 people over eight years. Those who walked for at least 15 minutes without stopping – around 1,500 steps – had a lower risk of heart problems than those walking in quick bursts.

President Xi’s obsession with the Soviet Union

“The purges have been brutal and spared no one,” says Le Monde. Three days before the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee plenary session last week, nine of the country’s top generals fell to “corruption investigations”. Among them was the number two in the whole Chinese military, second only to Xi Jinping. He Weidong was a longstanding ally of the president’s, having served in Fujian province, across the water from Taiwan, when Xi was in charge there. Also removed were Admiral Miao Hua, who until 2024 oversaw party loyalty and recruitment for the world’s largest military, and General Lin Xiangyang, who was responsible for “preparations in case of war against Taiwan”. Previously, in 2024, authorities arrested two successive defence ministers, and a corruption drive in 2023 dismantled the entire missile force.

It’s tempting to view these endless purges as a sign of weakness – of a president’s inability, after 13 years of consolidating control, to choose the right people and stamp out corruption. “Xi does not see it that way.” For him, public purges demonstrate his absolute power. They signal that trust is never guaranteed, and that if the army – “and therefore China itself” – is found to be unprepared, then the boss will remedy the situation by any means necessary. Xi is obsessed with the idea that the Soviet Union collapsed because of a “relaxation of elite discipline and tight social control”. He came to power after three decades of China opening up to the world, which allowed it to modernise but also brought, in his view, “corruption, liberal ideas and the party’s loss of control over the individual”. He has made it his mission to “correct what needs to be corrected”.

You can tell a lot about someone by how they order in a restaurant, says Vittles. Take Rishi Sunak, who was spotted at The Dover in Mayfair last week. The former PM asked every single person at the table what they were ordering, then got the waiter’s thoughts, then spent the next 10 minutes “fussing about whether the Dover sole was too big”, then asked the waiter whether the Dover sole was too big (“answer: no”), then tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of his friends to share it with him, before “capitulating and ordering penne arrabbiata”.

On Friday, says Laurie Wastell in The Spectator, Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin told viewers of TalkTV it drove her “mad” to see “adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of people who are anything other than white”. Naturally enough, her remarks have provoked a “wall-to-wall chorus of condemnation”. Pochin has sensibly conceded that her comments were “phrased poorly”, but maintains that adverts today are “unrepresentative of British society”. She’s not wrong: a recent Channel 4 study found that while black people account for 4% of the population, they appear in more than 50% of the ads.

Vindication for Argentina’s “Mad Man”

Just as some commentators were starting to draft Javier Milei’s political obituary, says Juan Pablo Spinetto in Bloomberg, the libertarian firebrand secured a shock victory in Argentina’s midterm elections. Despite enduring the most turbulent period of his presidency to date – which required him to “call on his friend Donald Trump” for a $20bn bailout – the president’s party won around 41% of Sunday’s vote, tripling its seats in the Senate. Together with its allies, La Libertad Avanza now has close to a working majority and certainly enough political clout to “reinvigorate Milei’s reformist agenda”.

Argentina now has a rare opportunity: the chance to implement pro-growth measures with broad political support, while benefiting from the backing of the US and big global investors. Having strengthened the popular mandate for his inflation-fighting, budget-balancing efforts, Milei can continue to “institutionalise” his vision for a smaller, more disciplined state and keep moving the country closer to the “economic rationality” achieved by its neighbours. The self-proclaimed “Mad Man” is now working to soften his image and reach across the aisle. “There are dozens of deputies and senators from other parties with whom we can find basic agreements,” he said in his pointedly moderate victory speech, dressed in a suit and without wielding any chainsaws. “We will be able to sit down and discuss the foundations for a different Argentina.” Of course, the path to economic stability remains treacherous. But this win makes some “big strides”.

🇦🇷🇺🇸 One reason the US is helping Argentina is because it wants to drive a wedge between Buenos Aires and Beijing, says Brian Schwartz in The Wall Street Journal. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has talked to his Argentinian counterpart about curbing China’s access to the country’s resources, including critical minerals, and urged the Argentinian government to strike deals with American companies rather than Chinese ones. It’s all part of Trump’s updating of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, under which the US asserted hegemony over the Western hemisphere. White House officials call it the “Donroe Doctrine”.

Claudia Winkleman’s 2020 memoir, Quite, is full of useful dating advice, says Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times. For example, “never go home with a man who proves incapable of getting a cab” – faffing around trying to get signal for an Uber, wondering if anyone else is heading the same way so they can share, and so on. “It’s a sign of things to come.” Also, never date a man who, early in the relationship, buys you something with a plug. “The plug is the death of romance.”

That modern howl, “nothing works”, isn’t quite right, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. What people mean is: “Nothing works, compared to Deliveroo, Expedia and Netflix.” Modern consumer life has “rewired” people to have zero patience for inconvenience. Clothes? “Asos alone has 435 types of jeans in my size.” Entertainment? Streamers have all music ever committed to record. Government has been unable to emulate this “paradise of choice and responsiveness”, resulting in an “ever wider breach between public and private experience”. Those who blame Silicon Valley for the rise of populism are half right: it is culpable not so much for social media as for making life “so immediate and frictionless as to raise untenable hopes for the remainder”.

It’s a highly opportunistic, and rather canny, advert made by the German crane firm Böcker, says Yang Tian on BBC News. The company found one of its products on the front of newspapers around the world last week, when the Louvre thieves were spotted using the firm’s mechanical furniture ladder to escape with £76m worth of France’s crown jewels. “If you’re in a hurry,” reads a banner under the image. “The Böcker Agilo transports your treasures weighing up to 400kg at 42m/min – quiet as a whisper.” Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humour?