Britain has held emergency talks with European allies to avert a diesel crisis after Donald Trump issued an ultimatum over the continent’s fuel reserves. The US president threatened to ban US diesel exports if Europe doesn’t release its diesel stockpiles, in an effort to lower American fuel prices ahead of next month’s midterms. Ministers are considering replacing a key disability benefit for the under-25s with a multi-billion-pound scheme to get them into work. Under the plans, young people would lose the health element of universal credit, amounting to £217 a month, and instead be offered intensive support to help them find work, including subsidised jobs and mental health support. Parents will no longer be charged extra to sit with their children on flights. Under a new government crackdown on airlines, passengers under 14 will have to be seated next to their parents free of charge, while fees to tweak the name on a flight booking are also set to be scrapped.

It’s been a bad few days for “well intentioned people trying to call out racism”, says Ava Vidal in The Independent. Last week, the BBC – “which ties itself up in progressive knots whenever it can” – removed 11 sketches from its Mitchell and Webb archive after deciding the material “no longer works”. Whatever you think about the skits, the move came across as “Orwellian”. Then the corporation published a truly mad news story about manicures, headlined: “How the bare nails trend became a class issue.” This suggested that having your nails done in neutral colours “perpetuates white supremacy”, because brightly coloured varnishes are typically associated with black, Latino and Asian cultures. Some friends and I, all of us black, have long worn our nails plain and understated. Thinking about it now makes me channel my inner Mitchell and Webb: “Are we the baddies?”

But at the Labour conference this weekend, “anti-racist allyship became unmoored from reality and lost its mind”. Speaking at a fringe event, a government minister called out country pubs, ale and black labradors as at best undesirable and at worst “racist-adjacent”. Such things, said privately educated Suffolk MP and nature minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, represented a “very far-right, nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, and that never really existed”. It didn’t take long for social media sleuths to dig up an old photo of Riddell-Carpenter pulling pints in the country pub she used to work in, and another revealing her as the former owner of a black lab. Since when did progressivism mean attacking anything deemed “British”? Lefty politics being what it is, it won’t be long before someone calls Riddell-Carpenter out for not referring to “labradors of colour”.

I have ADHD, says Sarah Carson in The i Paper, but the new trend of disclosing your neurodivergence in your email signature is “excuse culture” gone mad. One such sign-off reads: “My email style can feel a bit direct for some. We’re all good, it’s just AuDHD (autism and ADHD).” Another requests that information is distilled into bullet points. Have any of these people considered “getting a grip”? Nobody perturbed by a “direct” tone or the lateness of a reply will be reassured by an explanatory coda about your condition. They’ll just be annoyed by your “avoidance of accountability” and the expectation that everyone else “must accommodate you”.

Britain throws away more than half a billion bananas every year, says James Moore in The Independent, but that number could soon be much lower. Tropic Biosciences, a gene-editing company in Norfolk, has tweaked the gene responsible for triggering browning to create a version of the fruit that stays ripe for longer. The new one should be able to survive the trip to work in a rucksack and, once opened, will remain yellow, even when cut, for 24 hours. The EU bans such experiments, meaning the ever-yellow nana is one of relatively few real-world Brexit benefits.

The present wave of AI panic is exposing the public to “fresh quantities of grandiose speculation”, says James Marriott in The Times. Engineers at Anthropic tell us to expect human extinction by 2030; AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo describes the technology as “the most important thing happening in our lifetime, in all of history in fact”. Silicon Valley has long traded in self-important fantasies: a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg declared the now-flopped “Metaverse” as the “ultimate dream of social technology”. But today “AI derangement syndrome” is infecting podcasters, politicians and commentators too. In his new book, The God Test, Robert Wright describes AI as the “climax” of the history of life on earth.

There are many reasons to treat AI bores with caution. One major red flag is the over use of pseudo-scientific jargon and suspiciously precise guesstimates dressed up as maths. Kokotajlo confidently puts the chance of human extinction at “70%”. In these “Stem-worshipping times”, people are easily cowed by statistics. But those wielding them are not always experts. The writer Yuval Noah Harari, who has managed to establish himself as a commentator on AI despite having no computing qualifications, claims the advent of AI is like the “arrival of super-intelligent aliens”. For a man with a degree in medieval and military history, he is remarkably confident on the specifics, predicting that AI will “create a new financial system which is mathematically far too complex for the human brain to understand”. At the bottom of the intellectual food chain, Steven Bartlett pumps out alarmist podcast episodes with titles like “AI Will Become A God By 2027!” There’s no denying AI is powerful. “All the more reason to regret the attraction it holds for megalomaniacs and charlatans.”

🤖🤬 Don’t fall for the AI industry’s marketing claims that its models are so powerful they have been “escaping” containment, says Matteo Wong in The Atlantic, nor that they are merely research “labs”, tinkering away with new technology behind closed doors. They are giant, mature companies selling services to hundreds of millions of people, and to the world’s biggest businesses and its most powerful military, based on technology they claim to fear and evidently don’t fully understand. “It’s not ChatGPT and Claude going rogue, but OpenAI and Anthropic.”

Sean “Diddy” Combs isn’t having the most taxing time in prison, say Rich Schapiro and Chloe Melas on NBC News. The disgraced hip hop mogul, who is serving a 50-month sentence for prostitution-related offences, pays fellow inmates at Fort Dix in New Jersey to cook and clean for him, make his bed and do his laundry. He uses illicit mobile phones to scroll Instagram and look at porn, and at the weekend he tucks into a secret stash of Hennessy and other booze smuggled in by guards. “There is even a man who gives him Chinese-style massages.”

Whether Wednesday’s near-disaster on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was terrorism or “merely attempted mass murder” depends on the attacker’s motive, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic. But either way it’s tough for Dubai, which has been growing closer to Israel and working hard to keep the air route between their countries open. Last year, I noticed some clever security engineering at Dubai’s Terminal 1: the check-in desk for Israeli carrier El Al was adjacent to the desk for Iran’s Mahan Air. “Anyone tempted to attack Israeli passengers would hit Iranian ones, and vice versa.”

It’s the genus-3 polyhedron, says Andrew Paul in Popular Science, a brand-new shape with eight faces, 26 edges and 3 holes. This so-called “toroidal polytope”, discovered by mathematician Ruslan Mizhaev, probably doesn’t occur in nature, but is apparently useful for studying the relationships between “combinatorial topology, graph theory and three-dimensional geometry”. Whatever the hell that means.