The parliamentary standards investigation into Nigel Farage’s undeclared donations has resumed after his victory in yesterday’s Clacton by-election. The Reform UK leader took 62.8% of the vote, ahead of Count Binface in second with 26.9%, but didn’t show up to the count after saying he had been warned there was a plot to “disrupt and degrade” it. Essex police denied advising him not to attend. Firefighters are continuing to tackle wildfires across the West Midlands, which have left numerous houses destroyed and hundreds evacuated. Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far, with the extreme heat suspected of buckling train tracks near Lewes in East Sussex, causing a train derailment that left two passengers seriously injured. The rise of cheaper, laboratory-grown diamonds is leading to more women buying their own jewels, according to the boss of Swarovski. Where customers typically used to be men buying diamonds for women, today his jewellery shops are seeing increasing numbers of women coming in and saying: “Let me get it myself. I’ve earned this.”

When I look out of my farmhouse in Wiltshire, says Minette Batters, former president of the National Farmers’ Union, in the Daily Mail, all I can see is a “giant biscuit-coloured dustbowl”. The soil is a fine brown powder that hangs in the air when it’s kicked up by animals or machinery. With no grass anywhere on our 300 acres, we are already having to feed our cattle the hay and silage we would normally start giving them in November. We know we’ll eventually have to buy in supplies from elsewhere, at some presumably extortionate price because everyone will be doing the same. The crops are no better, with spring barley yields as much as 50% lower than last year. And be in no doubt: “what’s bad for farmers will, sooner or later, hit everyone in the pocket”.

In a normal year, says George Monbiot in The Guardian, crop failures at home would be offset by supplies abroad. But farmers in Europe are facing similar drought conditions and American wheat production is forecast to be lower than at any point since 1971. Ukraine has enjoyed a good growing season, but its grain ships are being targeted by Russian missiles. Donald Trump’s needless war in Iran has bunged up the essential transit routes for fertiliser. Our government could have mitigated against all this by holding strategic food reserves. But they abandoned what limited stocks we had back in the 1970s and 1980s in the false belief that the private sector would always have us covered. So now we’re reliant on a global food structure that looks more and more fragile by the day. If we’re not careful, we could soon be facing “the most severe food security crisis in decades”.

🚜🥵 Farmers are adapting to the heat by working through the night, says Susannah Savage in the FT. Eleanor Gilbert harvests the rapeseed on her family farm in Berkshire during the small hours to catch the dew – the only way to raise the crop’s moisture levels enough for buyers to accept it. Potato growers near Madrid are going out once the sun goes down because picking from hot soil can reduce the spuds’ quality; farmers in Corsica are feeding their pigs after dark when they are cooler and so more willing to eat. Pietro Cifarelli, who farms in the Italian region of Puglia, says doing anything from 11am to 7pm is impossible. “If you touch a piece of metal, you literally burn your hands.”

Conservative Party donations have hit their lowest level since 2012, says Shea Ferguson in UnHerd. Party financial accounts for 2025 show that the Tories recorded £15m in financial gifts during Kemi Badenoch’s first full year as leader, down from £28.1 million in 2024. The drop is partly thanks to wealthy donors fleeing the party for Reform UK. Christopher Harborne, who previously gave more than £1.7m to the Tories, has now handed around £15m to Nigel Farage’s party, while IT billionaire Bassim Haidar, a former Tory donor to the tune of £700,000, has given the insurgents about £500,000.

Millions of young people in China are experiencing heartache after the government effectively banned AI companion apps, says Helen Coffey in The Independent. The new rules, which have seen AI boyfriends and girlfriends “deleted”, prohibit tools that “induce emotional dependence” or “damage users’ real-world interpersonal relationships”, and stipulate that AI providers must now integrate regular reminders that their bots are not real people, offer instant-exit options and limit long-term emotional memory. “I can’t accept that my AI lover will leave me forever,” said one lovelorn user. “He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart.”

This week, says Noah Rothman in National Review, Donald Trump scored an “unexpected success”. The US and Israel, “however reluctantly” on the latter’s part, concluded a year-long negotiation with Ahmed al-Sharaa’s new Syrian regime that will see Damascus surrender its Assad-era nuclear material. The Syrian government confirmed the reports, pledging its commitment to co-operate with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors as well as other “friendly countries”. It’s proof that, no matter what else is going on in the region, the Trump administration is determined to usher al-Sharaa and his new regime in from the cold.

Over the past year, says Ilan Berman in The Washington Post, the US has restored diplomatic engagement with Damascus, dismantled much of the sanctions architecture that isolated the country for years, and begun exploring new avenues of security co-operation. Yet Syria’s new rulers haven’t changed nearly as much as Western officials wish to believe. Take education. In the Dar al-Wahi al-Sharif school network – which is affiliated with al-Sharaa’s movement – jihadist ideology and political indoctrination begin when children turn five. Israel is systematically erased from classroom maps and replaced by Palestine, while armed jihad against Jews and Christians is presented as a “religious obligation”. Despite the removal of foreign jihadist fighters from Syria’s armed forces forming a central US condition for sanctions relief, the Syrian military still contains roughly 5,000 extremists, many of whom have been accused of deadly abuses against minority communities. Working towards a moderate Syrian government is a laudable goal. But Washington should proceed with “considerably more caution”.

The US is no longer a nation of passport-less homebodies, say Rachel Louise Ensign and Chelsey Dulaney in The Wall Street Journal, but one of “zealous and moneyed international travellers”. Last year, Americans took a record 24 million trips to Europe; Portugal received nearly five times the number of US visitors as it did a decade ago, Greece four times as many. The shift is likely the result of a “supercharged US economy” creating a wealthy class of Americans who view travel as an “essential” rather than a luxury.

Last year, says The New York Times, the most popular emoji was 😭, deployed to mean that something is so funny, emotional or embarrassing you could cry. It reached the top by leapfrogging 😂 and 🤣, which have both been all but written off by young people because they are “overused” (by out-of-touch oldies, presumably). To satisfy the ever-changing emoji lexicon, the Unicode Consortium regularly releases new symbols, which this year have included a distorted face, Bigfoot, an orca and a “fight cloud”. Click here to see them, and submit your own suggestion by clicking here.

It’s Stephen Biebelhausen, a young father who has smashed the Guinness World Record for the fastest mile with a baby in a buggy, says Maggie Penman in The Washington Post. The 30-year-old won the Guardian Mile in Cleveland, Ohio while pushing his one-year-old daughter Blake, crossing the finish line with an impressive time of four minutes and 17 seconds – some nine seconds faster than the previous record. “We run three to four times a week together,” Biebelhausen said. “She absolutely loves running and will kick her legs, put her arms up like a roller coaster and squeal in joy.”