The UK is at risk of creating a “lost generation” unless education, health and welfare policy are reformed, a government review has warned. Former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn found that 58% of the country’s roughly one million economically inactive 16-to-24-year-olds have never had a job, and that a growing number of graduates are unable to find work because the current system “fails to enable their participation in the labour market”. Keir Starmer is under mounting pressure from his cabinet to rethink Labour’s opposition to new North Sea drilling, after Tony Blair urged the prime minister to scrap Net Zero to boost the economy. Andy Burnham hit back at Blair’s warning against the government lurching leftward, accusing the former PM of “not understanding” the role of inequality in today’s politics. The Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180ft-tall naked, club-wielding chalk figure cut into a hillside in Dorset, is undergoing a once-in-a-decade revamp. Increasingly vulnerable due to changing weather patterns, the centuries-old Giant is being spruced up with 17 tons of new chalk to stop it fading away.

There’s something “strangely shiny” about Peter Murrell, says Madeline Grant in The Spectator, like he’s a dodgy undertaker who’s been “siphoning off the corpse lacquer to use on his own face”. After spending 20 years as the chief executive and self-proclaimed “money man” of the Scottish National Party, Murrell has just pleaded guilty to robbing £400,000 worth of political donations and going on an “almost inconceivably OTT” spending spree, including an oddly expensive camper van, a Jaguar SUV, an inexplicable £2,618 worth of salt and pepper shakers, and, really pleasingly, a £42.99 copy of Grand Theft Auto V. After years of the SNP presenting itself as the “great moral alternative” to all the wickedness and corruption in Westminster, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the party’s upper echelons getting caught with their fingers in the till.

The scandal comes in the context of the utterly abominable outcomes which the SNP – through its former leader, Murrell’s wife, the Grand McKrankie herself Nicola Sturgeon – has inflicted on Scotland over the past decade: in education, drug deaths, the rise of a “moribund public intellectual life” suffused with “hypocrisy and cant”. It all has the echoes of one of those corrupt African dictatorships where the wives of the Generalissimos clear out Harrods while the World Food Programme intervenes on the ground, with Murrell as the tartan Grace Mugabe. What’s funny is that Sturgeon is trying to maintain that this all comes as a terrible shock and betrayal, and that being bought shed loads of jewellery and having to shimmy past crates of Mont Blanc pens was some sort of “profound personal trauma”. If her claims of ignorance are truthful, Sturgeon must be the “least curious woman on the face of the planet”.

Samsung’s two largest unions have voted in favour of a wage agreement that will see employees in the South Korean company’s booming memory chip division handed an average bonus of nearly $400,000, says Mariella Moon in Engadget. After months of wrangling, and a threatened 18-day strike, over how to share the profits of an AI-driven bonanza, a deal was struck yesterday giving 78,000 semiconductor workers 10.5% of the firm’s operating profit, which amounts to an estimated bonus pool of more than $22.6bn.

Long derided as the “poor man’s racehorse”, whippets are fast becoming one of Britain’s most popular dogs, says Samuel Montgomery in The Daily Telegraph. Whippet litter registrations in the first three months of 2026 showed an 18% increase year-on-year, putting them into the top 15 most sought-after breeds in the country. The boom in popularity is thought to be partly driven by Miuccia, a four-year-old whippet from Venice who beat 18,000 dogs to be crowned Best in Show at last year’s Crufts, as well as the pacy pooch becoming a desirable choice among celebrities including Jennifer Saunders, Kit Harrington and Emily Maitlis.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, says Edward Luce in the FT, Donald Trump called it “genius”. In fact, Vladimir Putin’s war turned out to be the modern era’s “costliest great power error” until Trump launched Operation Epic Fury three months ago. Both leaders gambled on a weaker adversary buckling within days and each has now burdened their country with costs that will persist for years after they have lost power. As case studies of how to throw away a strong hand, “Putin and Trump are without peer”. And neither can escape their “self-created traps”. For Putin it’s existential: to admit the failure of his “special operation” would cost him his job and likely his life. Trump’s mental block is more about pride and politics, but no less immovable.

In brute terms, any loss for the US and Russia benefits China, purely by comparison. But the ultimate victors are middle powers. Most directly benefitting is Ukraine, which has turned the front line into a charnel house with a Russian casualty rate of 35,000 a month, and which now has the ability to strike oil, factory and infrastructure nodes 1,000km inside Russia. Putin even had to get Trump to ask Volodymyr Zelensky to leave Red Square unmolested by drones during this month’s Victory Day parade. And just as the US is running low on missiles and battery defences, Kyiv has reinvented warfare. Iran is not far behind, using cheap drones to shut the Strait of Hormuz. Suddenly aircraft carriers are looking like “floating white elephants”. With Iran’s regional status enhanced and Ukraine certain to join a post-US Nato, it’s not just Taiwan trying to learn how a mid-weight country can take on a colossus, and win.

China’s solar industry is the best in the world, says The Economist. It’s also in “turmoil”. Yes, the war in Iran has boosted exports. But demand in the much larger domestic market is falling because the grid can’t keep up, with installations expected to drop between 24% and 43% this year. And excess production has triggered price wars that have left most suppliers running at a loss since 2024. More than 40 big solar firms have hit the rocks since then, and the five biggest companies have laid off a third of their combined workforce. After years of “blistering growth”, the world’s solar factory faces a brutal reckoning.

Many years ago, says Matthew Parris in The Times, I tried the “tree frog experience” in the Peruvian Amazon. This is the extremely inadvisable practice of exposing yourself to a tiny amount of the toxin carried on the skin of the Amazonian tree frog, which induces violent vomiting followed by a “psychedelic journey into your own spiritual interior”. It didn’t go well. I took fright the moment I began to feel dazed, and washed the poison off before it could really take effect. But I did have a particularly vivid dream that night – of hitching a ride in the boot of Denis and Margaret Thatcher’s car. “So much for my spiritual interior.”

It’s Gus, says Zehra Munir in the FT, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex that Sotheby’s is auctioning off with an estimated price of $30m. The lot comes two years after the auction house sold the most expensive fossil in history – a Stegosaurus named Apex – to the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin for $44.6m. Gus, named after Gary “Gus” Licking, a rancher on whose land it was found in South Dakota, has been given the highest estimate ever for a fossil, after a run of mega sales including Stan, a T-rex that went to Abu Dhabi in 2020 for $31.8m. Register to bid here.