Labour MPs Darren Jones and Al Carns are considering challenging Andy Burnham for their party’s leadership in order to prevent a “coronation”. Burnham will use a speech next week to bolster his economic credentials, promising to reduce national debt and borrowing costs and setting out a plan for growth. The US government has lifted oil export sanctions on Iran for 60 days, paving the way for America to import Iranian oil for the first time in decades. The price of Brent crude fell to $76 a barrel – close to pre-war levels – after the exemption was announced. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was the result of “productive” talks in Switzerland, after which JD Vance said Tehran had agreed to admit UN nuclear-weapons inspectors. A revolutionary drug that can delay the onset of type 1 diabetes by three years has been approved on the NHS. Teplizumab, which is given by a drip, will offer adults and children over eight precious extra time before having to aggressively manage their diabetes with insulin.

Last week, says Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail, a Tory MP and his wife were attending a swish Westminster party when they spotted a figure standing “alone and apparently lost in his thoughts”. It was Keir Starmer. Feeling sorry for him, the MP went over and said “Hello Prime Minister, I hope you’re bearing up”. Starmer looked at him. “You still call me Prime Minister,” he said, a little wistfully. “Not many people bother to do that any more.” In just over three weeks, no one will – an accelerated timeline that has terrified Andy Burnham’s camp. Team Burnham were “desperately” trying to negotiate a September handover, to give them the summer to prepare a policy programme, hire a team and get Andy in the right “headspace” for the top job. As one Starmer ally put it: “Well, tough.”

The one thing that could delay Starmer’s departure would be a leadership contest, says William Hague in The Times. Burnham may be tempted to hope this happens – he’s sure to win, and as a freshly-elected MP who didn’t come into office in a general election, anything that looks like a “mandate” is surely welcome. The danger is that leadership contests are always the same: candidates pander to entrenched interests (in Labour’s case, the unions demanding more labour laws and activists demanding protection for welfare) and end up making promises they spend their time in power regretting. Burnham has an unusually blank slate – apart from restating the government’s commitment to Labour’s fiscal rules, he remains “enigmatic”. If he is destined to be a good prime minister, he will benefit from this freedom of action. “If he is doomed to be a bad one, a leadership election campaign would make him worse.”

The slow, heavy desert lizard known as the Gila monster can go months between meals, says Jeff Coller in The New York Times. In the early 1990s, a scientist called John Eng began wondering how the giant reptiles kept their blood sugar steady across those long fasts and cobbled together some meagre funds to study the creature’s venom. Eventually, he isolated a molecule that behaved like a human gut hormone, except it lasted for hours instead of minutes. Years later, the synthetic version of that molecule became the first GLP-1 class of drugs better known as Ozempic and Wegovy.

Last week’s men’s tennis tournament at Queen’s was “bereft of top ten players”, says The Wall Street Journal. Australia’s Alex de Minaur, world number six, was there, but the rest were honing their backhands at a nothingy tournament in Germany. The reason? “Britain’s baroque tax laws.” UK winnings are taxed as normal income, and the government demands a cut of global endorsement deals, depending on the number of days spent in the country. If a player comes for the summer season and loses in the early rounds of Wimbledon, he could end up paying a tax bill worth more than his winnings.

There has never been a better time to be an American socialist, says Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Democratic socialists now run Seattle and New York City, and come January Washington DC will likely join them. The Soviet Union’s tainting of the socialist brand appears to have fully worn off: 66% of Democrats view socialism favourably; just 42% say the same of capitalism. With hyper-progressive, downwardly mobile college graduates clustering in big cities, the left see a “revolution marching toward victory”, because it can offer something the squishy, Obama-ish centre left has failed to deliver: “a disruptive break with an unsatisfying status quo”. They should curb their enthusiasm.

One thing hipster mayors promising to “tax the rich” are learning fast is that it’s much easier to leave a city than it is to leave a country. Try to hammer millionaires in Manhattan, and they flit off to Miami without a moment’s hesitation. This has always been true, but never more so since Zoom became a normal feature of high-powered meetings. Also, whatever young leftists prefer to believe, the American government already has a progressive tax structure that puts much of the burden on just the high-income taxpayers New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and the like want to squeeze. The Nordic-style welfare states that American socialists wax lyrical about pay for their heavy spending by hitting the middle class – an idea that is unlikely to gain much purchase with the affluent base of the Democratic Socialists of America. Today’s college-educated elite is voting for groovy vibes and better public services, “not less disposable income”.

One of the hottest new ways for singles to meet is through, ahem, newsletters, says Anna Holmes in The Atlantic. After Substacker John Fulton wrote in his newsletter The Eastside Rag that a 38-year-old guy who “dislikes Los Angeles Police Department helicopters” was single and open to dating, his reader numbers boomed. The writer Miranda July has started featuring the profile of a “date-seeking reader” once a month on her Substack, while Ava Huang of the Bookbear Express is so convinced of the likemindedness of her readers that she has even started her own paid matchmaking service.

Gyms in Beijing have seriously exacting standards for their trainers, says Eleanor Olcott in the FT. At Oxgym, for example, staff face bi-annual written exams, and must meet strict physical benchmarks, including maintaining body fat below 15% for men and 20% for women. Male trainers must deadlift twice their body weight, run 2.7km in 12 minutes and complete 15 unassisted pull-ups; women trainers must deadlift 1.5 times their body weight and perform 24 consecutive press-ups. While trainers are permitted to exercise on the gym floor, “they are discouraged from visibly sweating while doing so”.

It’s Michel Kuka Mboladinga, says Nicholas Bariyo in The Wall Street Journal, a Congolese football fan who found fame earlier this year for his “statue-like pose”, which he is back performing at the World Cup. In a tribute to the DRC’s founding prime minister Patrice Lumumba – who was slain in a Belgian-led coup in 1961 – Mboladinga stands frozen for entire games to give his side “the strength to block shots and to win battles”. He’s considered so crucial to the team’s fate that his country’s president was persuaded to include him in the “official delegation” so that he could bypass US restrictions on fans travelling from the Ebola-stricken region.