Organisations across the world are scrambling to fix two critical cyber-security flaws affecting around 70% of the internet. The vulnerability within the PHP programming language was discovered using AI tools and exposes millions of websites and users to potential hacking. Several governments, businesses and universities have shut down their sites as they race to fix the issue. The Kremlin has agreed “in principle” to resume trilateral talks with Ukraine and the US in November but said new peace proposals lack “substance”, after Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg yesterday. The US special envoy is facing sharp criticism at home after praising the Russian president as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner detained on bogus charges. Blackpool, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Wrexham have been shortlisted to become the UK’s next City of Culture. The winning city will be announced in May and awarded £10m to deliver a year of cultural events and activities in 2029, drawing on its “local strengths and stories”.

Credit where it’s due, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. The government’s announcement that the development of the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea can go ahead is a “victory for common sense”. The case for it is overwhelming: the gas, which could start flowing within months, will be fed directly into the UK grid, reducing our dependency on expensive imports from America, Qatar and Algeria. More importantly, Jackdaw will reduce gas-related CO2 emissions. The liquefied natural gas (LNG) we currently import from the likes of Qatar is ludicrously energy-intensive to produce and transport, not least because you have to chill the fuel to -160C and then “regasify” it at the UK end.

What’s incredible, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian, is that it’s taken Labour this long to recognise the obvious benefits of Jackdaw. The real “bizarreness” of the government’s previous approach was that, even as it touted the virtues of “clean homegrown energy” like wind, solar and nuclear, it pursued a policy that maximised imports when it came to oil and gas. This hare-brained attempt to appease the emotional demands of the party’s base created a mad situation in which the roughly 23 million UK homes with gas boilers found themselves burning fuel from the shale fields of Texas, when lower-polluting supplies were available off Aberdeen. This was transparently foolish even to the likes of Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, who pointed out that it was a bit rich for the UK to claim “climate leadership” when it was simply off-shoring emissions. The Jackdaw decision is a welcome step towards a grown-up approach to energy security.

When Donald Trump visited a US aircraft carrier early in his first term, says Marcus Weisgerber in The Wall Street Journal, an unidentified sailor told him it was a mistake to replace the steam catapults used to launch fighter jets into the air, because modern electromagnetic systems could only be fixed by “geniuses from MIT”. Industry officials strongly dispute this, and say the new kit is more effective. But Trump has never forgotten the exchange. In August, he ordered the navy to look into reverting to steam for its next carrier – meaning that single conversation may lead to a “multibillion-dollar change”.

After years of people coveting the hyper-filtered features of Instagram influencers, says Amy O’Brien in Vogue, AI is shifting the gaze back from other people’s faces to our own. Anil Joshi, a top plastic surgeon in London, says his patients are increasingly bringing in AI-rendered images of themselves rather than the celebrity images and heavily filtered selfies they used to show as the blueprint for how they wanted to look. The trouble with “AI face” is that it’s not always anatomically possible. The tech, Joshi says, “may encourage people to confuse digital possibility with what surgery can realistically achieve”.

Visiting Riyadh last week, says Karen Elliott House in The Wall Street Journal, I was struck by an overwhelming sense that all is not well. Houthi missile attacks are now a daily occurrence – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is apparently being shuttled from bomb shelter to bomb shelter in Jeddah. But to maintain the illusion of normality, there are no sirens warning of incoming strikes, like the ones that badly damaged the airport earlier this month, killing more than a dozen and disrupting travel for an entire week. Schools have been closed “with no explanation”. Government ministers who have, on my previous visits, always been “readily available” to boast of their nation’s progress are suddenly “invisible”. And things are only going to get worse.

Nobody wants to visit a country under “persistent deadly missile attacks”, and even fewer want to invest in one. The Saudi finance ministry expects GDP to decline 3.6% in 2026 and oil activity to fall by about 22%, thanks to blockages in the straits of Hormuz (by Iran) and Bab al-Mandeb (by the Iran-backed Houthis). In other words, a kingdom trying to wean itself off oil by becoming a hub for tourism and investment risks losing not just the tourism and investment but also the oil revenue essential for its survival. Worse, Donald Trump has left the kingdom to fight its own battle, providing intelligence but no more. China, which the Saudis have been wooing to dilute their dependence on the US, is giving aid to Iran and the Houthis. When the Saudis ask them to stop, they deny doing it. (Israel has offered help, but the crown prince has declined.) When we look back on the Iran war, “almost certainly the Saudis will be seen as the big loser”.

🛢️🚢 In the 81 years since Franklin D Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz on the carpeted deck of a US Navy cruiser in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake, there have been many ups and downs in the US-Saudi friendship. Harry Truman recognised Israel in 1948, despite FDR’s promise that Washington would discuss it with Riyadh first; in 1962, John F Kennedy ignored pleas from the then crown prince Faisal not to recognise the newly formed Yemen Arab Republic; the Saudis embargoed US oil sales in 1973 and urged George W Bush not to invade Iraq in 2003. Each time, America has remembered why it loves the largest, richest oil nation in the Middle East.

Skulled starts easy with “classic” mode, in which players are presented with images of a skull and have to work out what animal it belonged to. More challenging modes include “taxonomy” in which you must identify the class, order, family, genus and species of a skull; “skull match”, which involves matching four skulls to four different species; “speed run”, which gives players 60 seconds to identify as many skulls as possible; and “odd one out”, which presents three skulls from the same group along with one interloper and asks players to find the odd one out. Give it a go here.

Tech workers in Silicon Valley are shelling out stacks of cash to find a partner, says Georgie McKay in Bloomberg. Matchmaker Amy Andersen, who has been in the business for 23 years and built up a database of 25,000 eligible singles, charges a minimum of $75,000 and more than $500,000 for a VIP service. Pricing depends largely on the duration of membership, the complexity of the search and the number of introductions she makes. Most VIP clients also pay “milestone bonuses” when they enter exclusive relationships or get engaged, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s a 60-year-old Japanese office worker who has become a “global internet star” for his irreverent dance videos, say Javier Hernández and Hisako Ueno in The New York Times. Toru Utsumi’s short clips poke fun at the country’s buttoned-down corporate culture. In one, dressed in a red tie and trainers, he shimmies and clicks his heels mimicking scenes from Singin’ in the Rain, while getting drenched by a typhoon. In others, he boogies exuberantly at train stations, in cramped hotels and on the beach. “The more I move,” he says, “the more my spirit rises, and I start feeling good.” Click here to see more.