“The dark lord returns,” says Politico, as the government braces itself for this afternoon’s release of the next tranche of the Peter Mandelson files. The 1,000 or so pages of emails and messages between senior officials and ministers are said to include “humiliating” remarks about Keir Starmer and examples of Mandelson advising Cabinet ministers on how to do their jobs. Israeli troops have captured the strategically significant Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon, as they further expand their ground offensive against Hezbollah. The seizure of the 900-year-old hilltop citadel marks the first time the IDF has pushed beyond the demarcation line of the Litani River since 2006, an escalation that has been condemned by the UK, France and Germany. A daily pill has been found to double survival time for patients with pancreatic cancer. In what experts say is a “game-changer” for treating the disease, trial participants who took daraxonrasib lived for an average of 13.2 months, compared with around 6.6 months for those who underwent chemotherapy.

There is a condition I call “total moral anaesthesia”, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. It happens when powerful people who ought to believe one thing – rape and murder are simply wrong, for example – adopt a “new, less objective belief system” in which it isn’t the crime that matters but “who’s committed it”. It’s how police in Southampton last year were so ready to believe that 18-year-old Henry Nowak had racially abused a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, that they handcuffed Nowak as he lay drowning in his own blood, after being stabbed by Digwa. And it’s how Judge Nicholas Rowland was able to tell three teenage boys who were sentenced for multiple counts of rape two weeks ago that, given their limited intelligence, they had “done very well” to understand the trial. “None of you,” Rowlands cooed to the rapists, “need to go to jail today.”

Am I being old-fashioned when I say “I expect all rapists to go to jail”? And that I don’t think a criminal’s stupidity is any reason to reduce their sentence? This wasn’t a learning moment for a few wayward teens. It was two gang rapes, one involving a knife, during which two of the boys (later joined by the third for the second rape) “laughed and filmed themselves” as they committed their appalling crime. One of their victims said later “all I want to do is die”. But Rowland’s insane leniency is part of a gruesome pattern: “poor men, brown men, stupid men” – all of them rank, somehow, above vulnerable young girls. It’s not that police and judges don’t want to protect women. “It’s that they don’t see them at all.”

American admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”, had rigorous standards, says Paul Shriner in a letter to The Economist. And he knew how to enforce them. When submarine captains complained about the quality of repair work carried out by outside contractors, Rickover told all the contracting firms that their entire senior management team had to be onboard a refitted submarine the first time it dived.

I analysed 200,000 similes from popular fiction to find the most common ones, says Russell Samora in The Pudding. Among the most frequently used were “busy as a bee”, “fit as a fiddle”, “brave as a lion” and “cold as ice”. The top three comparisons for “dry” – bone, desert, dust – account for 43% of all usages, while for the adjective “cool” there is a 92% chance it will be paired with “as a cucumber”. “Cat” is one of the broadest metaphorical nouns, being the most popular partner to a range of adjectives including “nervous”, “active”, “graceful”, and “weak”. To see more, click here.

After decades of dismissing humanities and insisting that mastery of science, engineering and maths is the key to success, says Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, the world’s tech titans have come around to the idea that understanding human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming AI revolution. Purely technical tech jobs are beginning to dry up – “who needs to code? AI does that for you.” But what AI can’t do – yet, and maybe ever – is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei, who studied English at university, says the company is looking to hire people who are “compassionate and curious” about other people. The best models are already “very good at STEM”, she says, but there are some things that remain uniquely human: “understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick”.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings says if he had a three-year-old daughter today, he would be “doubling down” on teaching her “emotional skills”. It’s cutting through: for the first time in 20 years applications to read computer science at Stanford have fallen, and some professors report an uptick in students asking to read harder texts – Kant, Nietzsche, Camus – after realising “you have to avoid sautéing your brain in AI slop if you want to keep it fit”. The billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, an AI optimist who predicted a decade ago that those with English degrees would have an edge in the future, told me: “AI is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff that’s going to be insanely important and cool. But, you know, humans are humans. Curiosity is the greatest skill you can have in an AI universe.”

🤖🤑 Top corporate bosses, faced with ballooning IT costs, uncertain productivity gains and growing employee scepticism, are starting to question whether rushing to embrace AI was actually worth it, says Madison Mills in Axios. Uber’s COO has said the AI spending is getting “harder to justify”, while Microsoft has cancelled most of its Claude Code licences, citing cost as one of the reasons. And you can see why: an AI consultant says one client recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licences for its workers.

Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage claims the Reform UK leader will never be invited on Desert Island Discs because staff and other guests might boycott it, says Daniel Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. It’s astonishing if true. Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and even Andy Burnham have all been castaways already. And the show never used to be squeamish about its guests. In 1989 alone, the “fearless” Sue Lawley grilled Enoch Powell on his “Rivers of Blood” speech, Arthur Scargill on his conduct during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and Hitler’s friend Diana Mosley on her Holocaust denial.

It’s England’s first official “cycle street”, says Pat Kinsella in Cycling Weekly, a route through Cambridge that totally removes on-street parking and requires cars to give way to cyclists and pedestrians. The £2m overhaul of Adams Road – one of the city’s busiest cycle routes – has reconfigured junctions to slow car traffic and installed raised crossings and wider footpaths with the space that used to be taken up by parked cars. The Dutch-inspired transformation, which took seven months to complete, has led to a handful of complaints from the permanently indignant, but has mostly been welcomed.