Benjamin Netanyahu says it is too early to tell whether Iran was behind the apparent attempt to crash a Tel Aviv-bound flight yesterday. After the co-pilot stabbed the lead pilot, the Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft, before passengers entered the cockpit, subdued the assailant and brought the aircraft under control. The Israeli PM says their actions averted a “9/11 disaster”. A Tennessee death row inmate has been taken to hospital after an attempt to execute her by two lethal injections failed. Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was given two syringes of pentobarbital but could still be heard snoring 40 minutes later. The broadcaster and campaigner Esther Rantzen has died aged 86. The That’s Life! presenter launched both the youth charity Childline and the old age charity Silver Line, and became a vocal supporter of assisted dying after an incurable lung cancer diagnosis in 2023. Andy Burnham led the tributes, saying Rantzen “changed countless lives”.

Say what you like about Andy Burnham, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, “at least he does not pretend to care about growth”. What he calls his “theory of growth” is so thin I double-checked the transcript of his conference speech for a missing page. Unlike Keir Starmer, who feigned interest then raised taxes and red tape on business, or the last few Tory prime ministers – who extolled dynamism in the abstract while favouring pensioners, gumming up the planning system and spurning Europe – Burnham is a “fairly honest stagnationist”. Asked about the potential economic tonic of a third runway at Heathrow, he said it was a “matter for London”, as though he were not prime minister in London. He still says things like “UK plc”, the kind of 1990s flannel someone with “nil interest in business” rote learns before a speech.

Doubtless Burnham would prefer healthy growth, but what matters is whether a government wants it more than other things: “equality, sovereignty, climate goals, low immigration”. The US, for example, doesn’t have a growth plan but a “growth preference”. When faced with inevitable trade-offs, it reflexively chooses growth. What did Burnham spend his conference speech on? “Adjusting” the unaffordable pensions triple lock to find savings to spend on social care for the elderly (a “fiscal transfer from the retired to the retired”), and electoral reform. “A man who spends scarce time and political capital on this while his country borrows more expensively than Greece is letting you know who he is.” So welcome the new candour. A Labour government exists to steer cash to its own people “until the economic waters close over it”. At least Burnham, unlike his predecessors, “hardly pretends otherwise”.

🤝🗳️ Burnham’s pledge to push for electoral reform is probably an attempt to “lock in his coalition for after the general election”, says George Osborne on Political Currency. If there’s a hung parliament, the Liberal Democrats (and possibly others) will have to choose whether to do a deal with the main parties. By dangling electoral reform – a perennial ambition for Britain’s third party – the PM is pre-emptively making them an offer they can’t refuse.

When politicians talk about their favourite books, says James Marriott in The Times, it’s always best to be sceptical. Does anyone believe Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite novel is Ulysses, as he claimed? (At least he could name one, unlike poor old Keir Starmer.) But I confess I was impressed when Andy Burnham told Times Radio this week that his favourite book was Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s novella about Belgian atrocities in the Congo. This is not the kind of book young progressive political advisers would suggest, and it has been subject to a fierce literary culture war ever since the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe called it racist in the 1970s. It’s a great book. “Credit to Burnham for choosing it.”

A new dating app lets random users pick your matches, says Samantha Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. Created by a former Tinder executive, Rivet relies on a pool of volunteer “matchers” who rate whether two given profiles might be compatible. Prospective daters are then fed a few “pre-vetted” options at a time in a bid to prioritise quality over quantity and to encourage people to take a chance on someone who falls outside their usual preferences. Dating app users are becoming increasingly judgemental, says founder Taru Kapoor. Rivet “surfaces a lot of people that you may otherwise swipe past”.

America has been rocked by allegations that a Cornell University student was gang raped by her peers, says Claire Cohen in Vogue. The alleged victim says in a court filing that she was already drunk when she went to the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024 to see a male friend. Once there, she says, she was plied with beer, rum and ketamine, before several men repeatedly raped her over the course of several hours. One of the men used a group Snapchat to invite others to join in, saying there was “free pussy”. Another student replied: “I f***ing love Chi Phi.”

So much is disturbing about this case. The police initially declined to bring charges, only reopening their investigation this week after a civil lawsuit filed by the alleged victim prompted outrage. Cornell reportedly expelled only two of the men and punished the others, in part, by making them write essays. (“Explain in 800 words why you sexually assaulted a fellow student and we’ll let you off.”) The alleged culprits, who deny the claims, are predictably eliciting sympathy in some quarters for having their reputations ruined. What I keep coming back to is the Snapchat group thread, specifically the men who saw those messages but didn’t either raise the alarm or tell their frat boy pals to stop. Did they think nothing of it? Or that it was none of their business? I’m not sure which is worse, and in a way it doesn’t matter. Without men getting angry and speaking out, these awful attacks will keep happening.

⚖️🧑‍⚖️ The “court of public opinion” has already decided the seven men involved are guilty, says Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press, with their identities widely shared on social media. But it’s worth noting that they all say they’re innocent, and that the alleged victim’s account appears to have changed significantly between her initial report to police and her new lawsuit. America has been riveted before by lurid allegations of student gang rape that turned out to be false, most famously involving the Duke lacrosse team in 2006. However shocking these Cornell claims are, it would be prudent to “withhold judgement”.

Greek painter Miltos Manetas has created a website that allows you to create your own Jackson Pollock-style work. To create your masterpiece, drag your cursor across the blank screen – fast movements make thin lines; slow movements or pauses lets paint pool into larger blobs. To change the colour, click the screen. Give it a go here.

Since the summer, says Dmytro Kuleba in Foreign Affairs, Russian drones and missiles have been “terrorising Kyiv with exceptional intensity”. Air raid sirens blare constantly. Many drones get shot down, but some don’t, and the ballistic missiles have largely made it through, killing around 100 civilians since July. The bombardments have become so intense that, in recent weeks, Ukrainians have been posting a grim joke on Instagram and TikTok: “Thank God I live in Kyiv, so I do not have to plan for the future.”

It’s 89 Backpack, says Madison Malone Kircher in The New York Times, the winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week. The annual competition, which celebrates the feeding season in Alaska’s Katmai National Park with a public vote, came down to a battle of the sexes: Backpack, an adult male, against 910, an adult female whose mum was a former Fat Bear Week champion. Backpack’s name comes from childhood, when he was often spotted clinging on to his mother Holly (another ex-champion) as she crossed the river. Naomi Boak, who used to help run the event, describes him as a “gentleman bear”.