Andy Burnham has refused to rule out tax rises in the autumn budget, saying he “won’t be unrealistic” about the state of public finances. When pressed on whether a tax hike would be needed to fund additional defence spending and a number of recent promises to ease the cost of living, the PM told ITV News that Britain was in a “challenging position”. Ukraine has given Britain access to what our government calls a “goldmine” of secret battlefield intelligence to help protect the UK from Russian spies. Kyiv’s vast database contains millions of frames of frontline footage of Russian tanks, air defences, troops, drones and artillery systems, which will be used by British defence firms to bolster national security and help build advanced weapons. The NHS will offer millions of women at-home cervical cancer screening kits as a “discreet and convenient” alternative to in-person smear tests. The swab kits will check for human papillomavirus (HPV), a group of viruses which lead to 99% of all cervical cancers.

Having spent months on the front foot in the war against Russia, Ukraine is once again struggling, says The Economist. Moscow is pummelling the country with ballistic and hypersonic missiles (a record 198 were launched in July alone), draining Kyiv’s supply of interceptors so badly that the Ukrainians can now shield only a few “high priority” targets. The effects on the economy are ruinous: the private postal service on which most of the country depends has been shattered; attacks on warehouses mean supermarket shelves are empty for the first time since 2022. One supermarket boss says the strikes in the past three weeks alone have cost Ukrainian businesses around $500m.

Most worrying of all is Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s exports. Ukrainian ports are the country’s “economic lifeline”, responsible for transporting around half of all globally traded sunflower oil, 15% of the world’s corn and 10% of its wheat. Since July, Russia has targeted every vessel entering or leaving Odessa’s ports, rendering them “commercially dead”. The timing couldn’t be worse, with some 50 million tonnes of harvest still to shift and the traditional alternative of shipping along the Danube rendered impossible by the river’s record-low water levels. Transport by road is equally challenging: to take one ship’s load of 100,000 tonnes would require 5,000 trucks, 5,000 drivers and 5,000 border procedures. And “worse may follow”. If the current harvest can’t be sold, farmers will likely skip this winter’s sowing season altogether, which could push losses in agriculture to as much as $12bn, and threaten food security far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Unless Kyiv can find a reliable source of ballistic interceptors, its economy and military prospects are in serious trouble.

Premium gap years are all the rage in the US, says Sarah Foster in Bloomberg. One specialist consultant says the typical schedule she offers – a structured term-long programme of college prep followed by volunteering, travel or work – costs around $35,000. Last year, one parent paid $80,000 for her son to go on an organised eight-month tour, which saw him bungee jump near Victoria Falls, visit Brazil’s largest bank, and code an app. “It was of course expensive,” she said, but “I can guarantee he learned more that year than in a year of university”.

Athletic automatons have been smashing human sporting records at this week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, says Jess Weatherbed in The Verge. In a preliminary heat on Saturday, a bot called Tiangong Ultra (pictured) broke Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second 100m record, completing the distance in 9.39 seconds. Elsewhere, highly trained humanoids knocked seven bells out of each other in the boxing ring, and competed at football, the high jump, Tai Chi, ping pong and a rather sinister synchronised march during the opening ceremony.

The crowds outside the Hong Kong courthouse knew exactly what to expect when Chow Hang-tung was found guilty last Friday, says Mark Clifford in The Wall Street Journal. Since her arrest five years ago, it has been inevitable that she would be sent down for “inciting subversion of state power”. Her crime? Holding annual memorial services for those killed by their own government in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. In Hong Kong’s appallingly corrupted legal system, only the most naive could have hoped for a pro-democracy activist to be acquitted. Since jury trials (once a constitutional right for Hong Kongers) were jettisoned in favour of hand-picked judges, the government has enjoyed a near-perfect record of convictions.

To her credit, Chow, 41, didn’t go down easily. Representing herself, the Cambridge-educated geophysicist agreed that she had called for an end to one-party rule, but challenged the court to show this was a crime. “Ending one-party dictatorship,” she told the court, “is by nature a call for the rule of law.” Chow turned to politics after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed almost 70,000 Chinese. Many of those who died were schoolchildren, victims of shoddy “tofu construction” campuses built by corrupt contractors which collapsed while government buildings remained intact. She saw what the Chinese Communist Party was capable of, so quit doing her PhD to become a lawyer in her native Hong Kong. She faces a possible maximum sentence is 10 years, but has urged supporters not to feel sorry for her. “It is actually a great fortune to be able to fight for one’s own ideas,” she says. “How many people in the world have such an opportunity? Against the biggest communist dictatorship in the world, no less. What a challenge.”

We’re living through the summer of the “hairless he-man”, says Michael Ian Black in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a weird look: the modern hunk is buffer than ever, but he appears to have “misplaced every hair below his collarbone”. You can see it most acutely in programmes like Love Island, where aggressively macho brutes compete over who’s the most manly, having clearly waxed their chests and in some cases delicately shaved their legs. I long for the days when men wanted to look like Tom Selleck, not as “smooth as Barbie dolls”.

Nigel Farage’s controversial immigration policies of mass deportations and “offshoring” (like the Rwanda scheme) are becoming “facts of European politics”, says Alexander Etkind in The New Statesman. Denmark already sends foreign prisoners to Kosovo, while Sweden exports criminals to Estonia. In June, the European Parliament authorised member states to establish “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers. Rwanda heads the list of 12 countries, from Ghana to Armenia, which the EU is scouting as hosts. Germany is leading a coalition with Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece, aiming to sign deals with host countries by the end of this year.

It’s Tŷ Hyll, or The Ugly House, which is up for sale, much to the chagrin of devoted locals, says Karl Grafton in The Independent. The Grade II-listed property in Snowdonia was constructed from boulders weighing up to three tonnes and is “steeped in Welsh folklore”. Its origin myths suggest it was a 15th-century robbers’ hideout, or possibly a Tŷ Unnos – a house that, if built overnight on common land with smoke rising by daybreak, was yours to keep. A petition against its sale with more than 500 signatures said the property, which is currently run as a tearoom, was a “symbol of Snowdonia’s heritage, folkore and identity”.