Andy Burnham has announced plans to crack down on “subscription traps” and “deceptive deals” as part of efforts to ease the cost of living. Under the measures, businesses would have to provide regular reminders ahead of subscription renewals and make it easier to exit contracts, while shops would be banned from making misleading claims about discounts, including inflating “previous” prices. Suspected Irish crime boss Daniel Kinahan was charged in a Dublin court yesterday after being extradited from Dubai. The alleged leader of the Kinahan crime cartel, which is estimated to have made more than €1bn from drugs and firearms trafficking, will be tried amid unprecedented security: authorities bought a special bulletproof and bombproof prison van, and part of a nearby hospital has been reserved in case he is taken ill. Italian divers have discovered an ancient Roman shipwreck off the coast of Sicily, thought to be more than 2,000 years old and stuffed with hundreds of well-preserved amphorae (ceramic jars) likely used to carry wine, oil and grain. Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, called it “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years”.

There are two complementary cults in the US today, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack: “the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke”. They’re both unravelling. With Trump, no one takes anything he says seriously any more: not the Iranians, not Beijing, not the targets of his latest tariff wars. His defenders look increasingly desperate: the Fox News host claiming the Iran war is a triumph (“while weirdly calling the ayatollah gay”); the Free Press columnist trying to spin the collapse in American munitions as no big deal. Thanks to a litany of failures – slow wage growth, high inflation, ICE brutality, unprecedented corruption, to name just a few – the president is now less popular than he was in the days after January 6. The emperor’s clothes are “unmistakably falling”.

The cult of woke is less easily beaten because it’s more than just “one unhinged man”. But the case of the now-defenestrated Cambridge professor Jason Arday is surely “the apotheosis of this moral and intellectual rot” – proof that our academic establishment and the wokeness it underpins is “as big a farce and as massive a fraud as Trump is”. Even a cursory read of Arday’s work shows it to be “incomprehensible”, the sort of thing a floundering high school student might turn in, yet he was lionised by his boss as “the best in the world”. Even as his various tall tales fell apart, people defended him. More than 18,000 signed a petition saying the allegations were racist; Simon & Schuster is still, for now, publishing his memoir later this month. Most people won’t be fooled. “Wokeness is a joke everyone is now in on.” As with Trump, its power won’t evaporate overnight. But cults are based on lies, and “lies always fail in the end”.