Suffolk’s Sizewell B nuclear power station is on “high alert” due to a rapidly spreading wildfire three miles away. A major incident has been declared after 90 firefighters were dispatched to tackle the blaze at Dunwich Heath yesterday evening. Meanwhile, the Environment Agency says half of England, including London, is facing “flash drought” conditions following back-to-back heatwaves and low rainfall (see pictures below). The convicted fraudster George Cottrell transferred more than $2m to his mother in the days before her 2024 donations to Reform UK, says The Guardian. Fiona Cottrell received one deposit of $1.4m and two tranches of more than $300,000 each from her son, known as “Posh George”, in the 24-72 hours before she donated either directly to Nigel Farage’s party or to one of its fundraising vehicles. Paul McCartney has received his first ever nomination for the Mercury Prize. The 84-year-old is recognised for his nostalgia-laden The Boys of Dungeon Lane, with other nominees for the £25,000 prize including Olivia Dean, Raye, and Florence + the Machine.

That famous bit in The Life of Brian about the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front was a satire of the forever splintering left, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. For fragmentation in today’s politics, “look right”. Reform is losing voters to Restore. Poland’s ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party is splitting because members cannot agree on whether to become “still more hardline”. In Italy, a new party launched in February to outflank the right-wing League already outpolls it. In France, the best hope of avoiding a hard-right presidency is a schism between the movement’s two figureheads, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Among America’s Republicans, the post-Trump battleground is already forming.

All of this provides a consoling thought for liberals: “Populism will eat itself.” A movement that worships aggression and thrives on conflict “cannot help but eventually rough up its own side too”. You cannot seek “round-the-clock confrontation” with your opponents, including the media, and then be a different person among colleagues. “Belligerence is just too difficult a trait to psychologically compartmentalise.” (The same phenomenon helps explain why autocracies struggle to co-operate for long with other autocracies.) The one thing that can hold these movements together is a charismatic leader: Donald Trump in the US, Nigel Farage here. What happens when they’re gone? For an example of Reform’s “underlying flakiness”, consider that its home affairs spokesman “once quit and then un-quit within 48 hours”. Unsatisfying as it may be for liberals, their most effective strategy against populism is to wait it out. The trait populists hate most about them – their desire to compromise, their “wateriness” – is exactly what makes them such formidable opponents. Because it stops them splitting.

🍿😴 Another factor is that the public appears to be tiring of the “No 10 show”, says James Marriott in The Times. Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street not amid the usual interest and optimism that greets a new PM, but to widespread indifference and scepticism. “News avoidance” is rising, and there are a “zillion other options” competing for our attention beyond Westminster. People often say politics has become another branch of the entertainment industry. They forget that no Netflix Svengali has ever worked out how to keep viewers hooked on a single show forever. “Even Breaking Bad came to an end.”

To The Guardian:

Whatever you think about Andy Burnham’s first few days in the job, you have to hand it to him. How many people start a new role and immediately move the office closer to their home? Respect.

Mary Foley
Wandsworth, London

Sweeping measures introduced in 2021 to protect China’s depleted Yangtze river are resulting in a “remarkable comeback”, says The Economist. Fish biomass, the estimated weight of all the fish in the river, has risen by over 200% in the past five years, and an increasing proportion are now reaching sexual maturity. In April, a rare type of sturgeon was spotted breeding in the wild for the first time in two decades. And more than 1,400 finless porpoises are now living in the river’s basin, up from a low of 1,000 in 2017.

When the top US health official Anthony Fauci became the public face of Covid lockdowns, says Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times, he became a sort of folk hero to liberals. But the release this weekend of his private diaries – they were found on government servers ahead of his Congressional appearance yesterday – shows that the good doctor became “consumed by his own image”. In entry after entry, he gleefully chronicles his glittering adventures with the Washington party set: being treated “like Elvis Presley” at a book launch; taking calls from Barbra Streisand (“It is always good to hear from her”); receiving flowers from Julia Roberts. “Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post,” reads a typical entry. “Very flattering… It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country.”

Fauci’s embarrassing self-obsession sits in stark contrast to the “careful scientist” image he cultivated in public, says The Wall Street Journal. More consequentially, his diaries reveal that on the big issues he was “both wrong and dishonest”. He tried to freeze lockdown sceptics out of policy-making roles. And he publicly insisted that Covid must have evolved naturally in animals rather than artificially in a lab, painting dissenters as “politicised cranks”, despite widespread dissent behind the scenes: at a meeting with a dozen prominent virologists on 1 February 2020, just two of them believed the “natural origins” theory. It’s also worth reflecting on how Fauci was lionised by the establishment. The doctor of the diaries is “all too human” – stubborn, biased, vain, vindictive. Yet our media-political class treated him as “a Solomonic sage, the perfect technocrat capable of managing all of society”. If you want to know why voters rebel against rule by “experts”, there’s your answer.

Zack Polanski must still be recovering from “one of the all-time brutal Newsnight grillings”, says Andrew McDonald in Politico. In a “Paxman-esque” interrogation on Tuesday night, Victoria Derbyshire repeatedly probed the Green leader on why he wouldn’t apologise for reposting an Instagram picture of a man wearing a T-shirt with a grim joke about Nigel Farage being guillotined. Polanski put forward several “increasingly convoluted” reasons for his refusal – it was an accident, Farage had unfairly amplified the story, and so on – as Derbyshire struggled to contain her disbelief. Watch the full exchange here.

A tobacco hawkmoth’s wings do more than just fly, says Gayoung Lee in Gizmodo – they’re also responsible for the insect’s sense of smell. Researchers in Germany found that the wings contain tiny hair-like sensory structures capable of detecting airborne chemicals, and have a particularly strong response to compounds in tobacco plants and moonflowers, where the hawkmoth likes to lay its eggs. These compounds don’t normally drift through the air; the scientists think they are possibly released when a moth scratches or disturbs a leaf surface while hovering and inspecting a potential egg-laying site.

It’s Jimothy, says Kelly Lambert in The Independent, a raccoon in Seattle who suffers from a spinal deformity that makes his body and tail unusually short, and who became an internet sensation earlier this month when footage of him scampering around went viral. The “proverbial underdog” has been honoured in countless memes, fan art, a custom Lego build and even a few tattoos. Seattle council member Alexis Mercedes Rinck has honoured the malformed mammal with a “city proclamation”, declaring it a “Jimothy Summer”.