Two men have been charged over a suspected Iranian terror plot at RAF Fairford last month. Mohmed Abdulkarim, 24, is charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service, while Nouman Essghir, also 24, is charged with entering a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the UK. Israelis are heading to the ballot box today for what is widely viewed as one of the most pivotal elections in the country’s history. Polling suggests Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority in the Knesset, but that the opposition bloc will also fall short of the 61 seats needed to form a government, potentially leading to weeks of political wrangling. England captain Harry Kane has won this year’s Ballon d’Or, becoming the first Englishman for 25 years to win football’s most prestigious individual trophy. The 33-year-old Bayern Munich striker, who scored a whopping 73 goals last season for club and country, beat French forward Kylian Mbappé and Argentina’s Lionel Messi to the prize.

Hammersmith Bridge is a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with British government, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. The historic crossing has been closed to traffic for seven years and is barricaded by what looks like Checkpoint Charlie in Iron Curtain Berlin. The council has already spent £54m on “stabilisation”, and with estimates for a full restoration job running to £300m (with “astronomical” maintenance costs thereafter) a growing body of opinion says it should simply be replaced. In most cities, designing a new bridge would be a “competitive challenge” embraced by the mayor. Unfortunately, British mayors spend their time vying for headlines, “or Downing Street”. Sadiq Khan appears to have no view on Hammersmith Bridge at all.

London may be the “richest, smartest, coolest” place in Britain, but it’s run like a high-street vape shop. Its buses are ever slower – one recent study found that the No 22 had an average pace under 6mph, some 16% more sluggish than a decade ago – homeless people ever more prevalent, waiting times at hospitals ever longer. London’s traffic is officially the worst of any capital in the world, in large part because of an appalling epidemic of roadworks. In 2017 The Economist published a notorious map showing roadworks in Paris and London – Paris had a spatter of red dots, London was a “sea of blood”. In most cities, such works are subject to “intense regulation” for the obvious reason that they’re a damn nuisance to everybody. In London “there is no regulation worthy of the word”. Chaotically privatised water and cabling companies have “virtually unlimited freedom” to dig where and when they please, leaving central London a “permanent construction site”.

The Conservatives can once again claim to be the leading force on the right of British politics, says David Jeffery in UnHerd. Kemi Badenoch’s party has overtaken Reform UK in The Economist’s polling tracker for the first time since January 2025, with 22% planning to vote for them, to Reform’s 21%. YouGov also has the Tories one point ahead, on 23% to Reform’s 22%, and Ipsos gives them a four-point lead, 24% to 20%. There’s still a long way to go: Labour are a few points ahead, and Badenoch has merely dragged her party back to where it was for its disastrous 2024 election defeat. But it’s a sign the Tories are finally re-emerging from the “political wilderness”.

Pourcent is an enjoyable online game that tests how well you can judge a pour. Each day, you are given five empty receptacles – pint glass, teapot, champagne coupe, and so on – that you have to fill to a given percentage. You click and hold to start filling, and you can top it up as many times as you want – but you can’t get rid of the “liquid” once it’s in the vessel. Give it a go here.

It’s quite a feat, in these debased and polarised times, to create a political advert so “shocking and indecent” that it attracts criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. But the Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has managed it. His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, was 12 when her stepfather, Bud, was arrested and indicted on charges of raping her. Bud skipped town before he could be tried, but Acton’s mum stood by him and she hasn’t seen Acton since. So Ramaswamy’s campaign “dug up” this elderly woman to record a video denouncing her estranged daughter as a liar who can’t be trusted to lead the state. It’s perhaps “the most disgusting ad in American political history”.

What’s been interesting is the reaction of Ramaswamy’s fellow conservatives. Some appear to see this as a chance to “drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter”. National Review magazine – which published an entire issue early in 2016 titled “Against Trump” only to turn into “apologists and bootlickers” the moment he took office – has been leading the condemnation on the right. On the other side you have JD Vance declaring himself “disgusted” – not by the ad, but by Republicans “whining” about it. The vice-president’s motives are equally clear. If conservatives suddenly decide that moral depravity is disqualifying, it’ll be bad news for Donald Trump and those closest to him. And if Ramaswamy loses a state as red as Ohio, Vance “might start to look like a bad bet in 2028”. At the heart of this “proxy debate” on the right is a crucial question: will post-Trump conservatism continue on its current path, or try to “reclaim some base-line morality”?

Local Wikipedia is a “brilliant idea”, says Matt Muir on Web Curios: a website where you enter your location and it pulls out Wikipedia entries of everyone and everything within a 30-minute walk. Next time you’re somewhere unfamiliar with time to kill, see what you find. Click here to try.

Liz Truss has published a short new book, Bank Job, making her now-familiar argument that her failure in Downing Street was collectively orchestrated by unelected bureaucrats, the governor of the Bank of England, the mass media, and Michael Gove. It’s a “preposterous” read, says Simon Heffer in The Telegraph, like listening to the worst sort of pub bore “ranting in a corner while other patrons realise it’s time to go home”. Truss was, and remains, the author of her misfortune. Of all the books I have reviewed that purported to offer a serious thesis, this is without doubt “the most deranged”.

It’s “Puppy Live”, say Amelia Nierenberg and Lara McCoy in The New York Times, a 24/7 livestream of newborn puppies, which has become a phenomenon in Finland. Broadcast by Yle, the country’s public broadcaster, the programme offers a round-the-clock view of a mother and her six puppies over their first eight weeks, showing everything from birth to weigh-ins and first nail trims. Now in its sixth season, the livestream racks up millions of views and is part of a growing Nordic desire for “slow TV”. As one fan put it: “Nothing bad happens in the puppy box.” Click here to watch.