Keir Starmer says he will stand down as an MP to turn his attention to “international affairs”. The announcement by the former prime minister, who had previously said he would stay in parliament until the next general election, came ahead of Andy Burnham’s first statement in the House of Commons as PM this afternoon. A former gang boss has been found guilty of orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur, almost exactly 30 years after the rap superstar was shot dead in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Prosecutors argued that although Duane “Keffe D” Davies, 63, didn’t fire the gun, he ordered the shooting and supplied the weapon used by his nephew, who died in 1998. Small-boat crossings from France have fallen to their lowest summer level since 2020, with 6,949 people making the journey in June, July and August. A total of 16,391 migrants have crossed the Channel so far this year, down 43% compared to this time last year.

Maga world is furious, says Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. At a re-election rally last month, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff said all Donald Trump wants to do is “travel with Natalie” – an innuendo-laden reference to Natalie Harp, the president’s devoted 35-year-old special assistant. Top White House aide Stephen Miller called Ossoff’s remarks “among the most vile things I’ve seen in American politics”. Communications director Steven Cheung blasted “Jon Jerkoff” as “the biggest cuck loser in politics”. Before long the entire Maga ecosystem – lawmakers, podcast hosts, political commentators – had piled in.

One explanation for this over-the-top response is psychological. Trump’s supporters feed on grievance so they’ll seize on anything that satiates that appetite. Another factor is the need, with Trump’s support collapsing and the Maga movement fragmenting, to find a common enemy. But there’s something else going on, at least with one subgroup of the president’s supporters. These are the people who were dedicated conservatives before Trump came along – they believed “character was destiny and virtue mattered”, they championed free trade and a strong Western alliance, and so on – but made their peace with him because the cost of speaking out was too high. What this group sees in Ossoff’s comments is a chance to signal that “they are still who they once were”; that they won’t tolerate, as they put it, Ossoff’s “misogynistic lies” and “punching down” at “defenceless” women. Never mind that the man they have aligned themselves with has been found liable for sexual abuse, called women everything from “fat pigs” to “disgusting animals”, and claimed you can “grab ‘em by the pussy”. These “gallant souls” want to feel better about themselves and – they hope – for others to think better of them too. Don’t be taken in.

🖨️🥰 Harp really is “obsessed” with Trump. Known as “the human printer” – because she uses a portable printer to provide the president with hard copies of positive news coverage and polling data on the move – she has written him letters saying “you are all that matters to me” and “I never want to bring you anything but joy”. One even ended with a quote from Jane Austen: “I could not have parted with you, to anyone less worthy.”

Public transport “speedrunning” is a niche hobby in which competitors try to visit every stop on a city’s transit network in as little time as possible, says Ellie Davies in The Wall Street Journal. After extraordinarily detailed planning, participants spend nightmarish-sounding days rushing through underground stations praying delays don’t knock their attempts off course. With only 50 stations, San Francisco’s BART network is popular with beginners (the record is 5 hours 47 minutes). The fastest time for visiting all 272 stations on the London Underground is 17 hours 46 minutes, while New York’s 472 Subway stations have never been hit in less than 22 hours.

Grabbing a coffee might seem like a simple process, says Ayesha Muttucumaru in Which? Magazine, but the results can vary “wildly”. A single espresso at Caffè Nero, for example, has just 67mg of caffeine, while the equivalent from Greggs has 75mg and Pret a whopping 180mg. A cappuccino from Costa contains an extraordinary 325mg of caffeine – more than three Red Bulls.

When I was a teenager, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, it seemed like every night BBC News ran a report on the “most evil ideology on earth” – South African apartheid. All right-minded people were appalled at the suffering in townships, the segregation in schools and the millions being treated as second-class citizens just because of their colour. Thank God it’s over. But what most people don’t realise is that “apartheid still exists”. In America, across Europe and “right under our noses” in the UK, there are Muslim women suffering under husbands whose dominance is “encouraged by religious leaders”.

Despite the hard-won rights that protect all women in countries like ours, these women require permission from Sharia councils (populated almost entirely by men) to secure a religious divorce, while their husbands can cancel marriages unilaterally. Some are hemmed in by “cultural norms” every bit as restricting as Nelson Mandela’s prison cell: instructed not to learn English, warned never to reveal their faces in public, pressed into marriages they don’t want, often to cousins. Precise figures are hard to come by – Britain doesn’t routinely log the religious identity of perpetrators and victims of crime, and “most go unreported anyway” – but police in England and Wales recorded almost 3,000 “honour-based crimes” in the year ending March 2025, including 125 forced marriages and 109 female genital mutilation offences. Yet not only do we fail to call this intolerable injustice apartheid, many progressives who called it evil when perpetrated by whites in South Africa call it “cultural practice” when perpetrated by browns in Britain. This grotesque double standard has to end. As Nelson Mandela understood, “if freedom is to mean anything, it must belong equally to everyone”.

Two airline pilots caused a stir in the aviation world on Saturday, says Marisa Garcia in Aerospace Global News, when they performed an ultra-low flyover of Cape Town’s rugby stadium shortly before kick-off between South Africa and New Zealand, passing within just 50 feet of the roof. Airlink, the airline responsible for the stunt, said the two Embraer passenger jets (one painted in the livery of the All Blacks, the other in Springbok green and yellow) executed their flight plan as rehearsed and with full approval of the authorities. Online critics weren’t impressed. “There are old pilots and bold pilots,” wrote one. “But no old bold pilots.”

After a sleepless night, says Jake Currie in Nautilus, the temptation is often to try and slink back to bed for a snooze. According to a new study, you may be just as well off getting on your bike. When researchers at Canada’s McGill University kept a group of healthy adults awake for 30 hours, then made them either go for a 20-minute cycle, take a 90-minute nap, or do nothing, they found that the cyclists and the nappers both significantly outperformed the control group on a memory test.

It’s a Humboldt penguin on the scales during London Zoo’s annual weigh-in last week, says Megan Howe in The Standard. More than 10,000 animals across 4,000 species were measured as part of the zoo’s mammoth yearly task, after which the data is uploaded to a global research database. Some of the animals are happy to perch dutifully on the scales, while others have to be tempted with a strategic snack. Two capybara siblings weighed in at 45kg and 50kg, while this year’s lightest load was the Partula snail, which weighs less than a gram.