John Healey has rejected calls from several cabinet ministers to increase capital gains tax in his first budget amid concerns that a hike would damage economic growth and hinder investment by triggering a wealth exodus. The chancellor is understood to be planning a relatively uneventful budget on 28 October, says The Telegraph, rather than introducing a huge package of tax rises and public spending. Engineers running Britain’s power system say they have “high levels of stress and concern” about their ability to keep the lights on as the UK shifts to renewables, an independent report has found. Staff at the National Energy System Operator believe senior management is ignoring their concerns about potential blackouts, because of the need to keep political leaders happy. Doctors at Mass General Brigham in Boston have developed a tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a selfie. The AI system, which was trained on more than 40 million facial photographs, analyses the image to estimate a person’s biological age and gives an indication of their survival outcome.

Sally Rooney has taken a “brave and humane” stand on Palestine, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. When Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist group last year, the Irish author announced that she would use royalties from her bestselling novels to support the organisation. Last week, she said that because this potentially constituted a serious criminal offence, she would withdraw her books from sale in the UK. In doing so, she is not only taking a financial hit. She is also making a much-needed “mockery” of Britain’s terrorism laws. Nobody seriously thinks Rooney poses a danger to the British state, nor do they truly fear the many eighty-somethings who have been arrested for peacefully holding placards supporting the direct action group.

Sorry, says Lionel Shriver in The Telegraph, but there’s nothing brave about Rooney’s announcement. It’s merely “attention-seeking self-aggrandisement”. For starters, her decision is a “luxury sacrifice”. Would she be making the same choice if her novels, and their subsequent adaptations, hadn’t been so lucrative? But most crucially, the gambit is “perfectly pointless”. Her novels’ withdrawal from British bookshops won’t improve the lot of Palestinians, just as her refusal to sell Hebrew translation rights to her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, didn’t “deprive Israel of a single bullet”. It’s reminiscent of the mass posting of black squares on Instagram and trooping about for Black Lives Matter in 2020, neither of which had even the “weensiest” effect on policing in Minneapolis. Real virtue entails action with some chance of helping the people on whose behalf it was ostensibly taken. Rooney’s sort just parade trendy political credentials in a show of “me, me, me”.

🪧🩸 Whatever you make of Rooney’s decision, says Eli Lake in The Free Press, some of Palestine Action’s operations are far more “sinister” than people think. Take, for example, the “direct action” against the British headquarters of Israeli defence tech firm Elbit Systems, in which a security guard said he was whipped by activists and a police officer was “bludgeoned with a sledgehammer”. During a break-in at another Elbit-linked facility, one security guard suffered lacerations to his face after protesters shattered his car window, and a second was doused in red paint and beaten.

The students spearheading the protests in France are organising themselves on Snapchat, says Antoine Goullin in Teen Vogue, where unsaved messages disappear and generic usernames blur identities. One schoolgirl from Saint-Denis said her school walkout started when a classmate made a Snapchat group with almost the entire student body. Others use features like Snap Map, which shows the location of your friends, to find out which schools are demonstrating and when, and video recording to capture evidence if they think police are abusing their authority.

Returning after a three-year break from playing Wordle, says Mark Thompson on Substack, I was sure it had become harder. I was right. Crunching the numbers on every puzzle since the game began in 2021, and scoring them by how often they appear in everyday English, I found that while in the first two years only one in every four Wordle answers was “rare”, over the past three months it’s more than one in three. This is largely because easy words – such as “cigar”, the first-ever answer – are running out. Hence the appearance of really weird words like “pshaw”, “carom” and “capon”.

The one and only press conference of Katie Zacharia’s scant five-day tenure as Donald Trump’s press secretary lasted a “pretty excruciating 14 minutes”, says Jemima Kelly in the FT. The latest “platinum blonde superfan” to find herself in the upper echelons of Trump’s entourage delivered a statement so “stilted and oddly stressed” it sounded like her “first encounter with punctuation”. Then she bravely attempted to talk all on her own, taking questions from three outlets “across the political spectrum”: Fox News, Breitbart and the Daily Mail. Asked how she planned to balance family life with her new job, she replied: “So my president – or excuse me, my husband, that’s a good one! My husband is out here for the week.” As it turned out, that was more than enough.

The world will “little note, nor long remember” the Zacharia era, says Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. But her failure represents a return to the chaos of the president’s first term, when Trump “cycled through personnel like Spinal Tap drummers”, hamburgers were thrown in anger against the walls of the White House dining room, and aides held an important press conference at a small landscaping firm on an industrial estate because they got it mixed up with the Four Seasons hotel. The second term has operated with, “if not normality”, at least comparative efficiency. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles turned the executive branch from an “exploding fireworks factory” into a machine relentlessly processing the president’s whims into law. In recent weeks, that machine has begun to sputter. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he would livestream a public execution, only for Trump to overrule him. The administration fired its ambassador to Greece for engaging in corruption so overt it “embarrassed even the most corrupt administration in history”. Zacharia’s disaster is just a return to form.

When it comes to dating, says Sadie Kargman in The Cut, Gen Z are skipping a crucial step: the “Entry-Level Boyfriend”. While previous generations enjoyed a series of early relationships – from the serious to the casual – young women today seemingly only want to commit if a boy ticks “every box on our future-husband wish list”. But those initial boyfriends teach you “how to actually be in a relationship”. My first taught me how to love; my second, what I could and couldn’t compromise on. That’s part of the point of dating: to learn what it takes to build a relationship worth keeping.

Republicans are awash with big donor cash ahead of the midterms, says Hans Nichols in Axios, but in terms of “hard dollars” – money given directly to candidates rather than to super PACs – the Democrats are streets ahead. Between July and September, the party massively outraised the Republicans for battleground Senate races in Texas ($64m to $18m), Georgia ($33m to $3m), Michigan ($31m to $10m) and Ohio ($23m to $5m). The totals suggest there’s a “yawning enthusiasm gap” between the two parties – “the kind of energy money can’t buy”.

It’s the Botley Road railway bridge, says Joanna Sugden in The Wall Street Journal, a 20-yard monstrosity in Oxford that took longer to build than the Eiffel Tower or the Titanic – “and cost more”. In a stunning example of Britain’s appalling inability to get even simple infrastructure projects done in a reasonable way, the combined rail and foot bridge connecting Oxford Station over Botley Road cost more than £237m and took 41 months to complete. The Titanic was built in 36 months, at an inflation-adjusted cost of around £190m, and the Eiffel Tower was up in 26 months, a snip at £38m.