Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor made money subletting cottages on his Windsor estate despite paying “peppercorn rent” himself. A report by the National Audit Office shows that the former prince rented out three cottages on the grounds of Royal Lodge to generate personal income, collecting payments even after he had moved out following the revelations about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. The White House has called for an end to “two-tiered policing” in the wake of Henry Nowak’s murder. The US State Department said the case was a symptom of “civilisational decline” that must be “rejected across the West” and offered condolences to Nowak’s family. Bumblebees are capable of a form of problem-solving not seen before in insects, a new experiment has shown. Female worker bees figured out how to push a small ball into the right place before climbing on top of it to reach an otherwise unobtainable sweet reward, suggesting that even a sesame-seed-sized brain is capable of improvisation.

Nigel Farage’s behaviour since Henry Nowak’s killer was jailed on Monday reveals him for “precisely what he is”, says Ian Dunt in The i Paper: “a persistent threat to national security”. Whipping up racial conflict, when Nowak’s father, with great “dignity and precision”, said he did not want his son’s murder to create “further hatred, division or tension”, is despicable on its own terms. But by explicitly racialising the tragedy, framing it as “anti-white prejudice”, Farage has fired up some of the most unsavoury elements in our society, including the “lagered-up racist thugs” who launched projectiles and chanted “racist police, off our streets” in a riot on the road where Nowak died. This street-level carnage – and further mistrust of our vital police – is what happens when you encourage “rage, hatred and white nationalism”. Farage should be ashamed.

But the Reform leader has a point, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. For three decades, ever since the inquiry into the handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, police have lived in fear of any further accusations of “institutional racism”. Thanks to the findings of the 1999 Macpherson Report, officers are obliged to believe anyone who claims to have been the victim of a racist crime. This is how Nowak’s despicable killer, Vickrum Digwa, was able to get away with the vicious lies that left the 18-year-old struggling for life on a cold pavement, being read his legal rights in handcuffs as he lay dying. We don’t know if the arresting officers are callous by nature or not. But we can say for certain that they are the product of “post-Macpherson policing”, in which few crimes are taken seriously unless the “R word” is introduced into the equation. Even if the victim is “bleeding out in front of you”.

😡📢 The idea that Farage might row back on his incendiary intervention is to “misunderstand the intent”, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. He was uncharacteristically furious after watching footage of Nowak’s arrest and strongly believes much of the country shares that rage. He sees this as the “new dividing line” in British politics: between the politically correct establishment and the politicians, like him, willing to say what his supporters think, “no matter how divisive, problematic or abjectly unforgivable his political opponents may believe it to be”.

Last night’s Question Time special for the Makerfield by-election was a “terrifying insight into modern Britain”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Each candidate was the perfect representation of their party, “as if grown in a test tube”. The Greens woman, “all empathy and teeth”, told the audience she was on maternity leave. The Lib Dem had a “local shop for local people” vibe. The Tory looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. Reform’s Robert Kenyon came dressed as a “cheeky bus conductor from the 1970s”, and patiently explained that he couldn’t possibly be sexist because his mother and his grandmother are women. As for “Our Andy” Burnham, who confirmed that he’d seek to replace the PM if elected, he was “unrelentingly not bad; consistently not terrible”. So compared to Keir Starmer, he “looks like JFK”.

As tech firms race to build robots capable of doing household chores, humans are cashing in, says Stephanie Yang in CNN. Gig workers now earn as much as $25 an hour for strapping a camera to their heads and recording themselves carrying out simple tasks – folding clothes, doing the washing up and so on – so that the footage can be used to train up bots. Micro1, based in Palo Alto, has around 4,000 of these minions working in 71 different countries, providing the company with more than 160,000 hours of footage each month.

If social media is to be believed, says Magdalene Taylor in The New York Times, men and women are at war. We live, apparently, in the world of Andrew Tate and OnlyFans, trad wives and incels. Men, say women, are at best “clueless and emotionally immature” and at worst “actively toxic”. Women, say men, are “romantically spoiled”, drowning in options they’re too self-absorbed to notice, and anyway just something to “dominate and discard”. With young folks swimming in this all-too-pervasive “hetero-pessimism”, it’s no wonder they aren’t having much sex. But let me correct the record. “There has never been a better time in human history to happily and successfully pursue heterosexuality.”

For one thing, you can go out with whoever you like. For thousands of years, women were married off by their parents the moment they became a reasonable prospect. And if it wasn’t a great match, says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, “that was tough darts”. Today, some women are finding all that choice something of a burden. On a podcast discussing whether having a boyfriend had become “lame”, the top comment reads: “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” This sort of hyper-political madness is self-fulfilling. Now, nearly 70% of college-educated singles feel negatively about the possibility of finding a partner who’s right for them and just over half of single women believe they and their footloose peers are happier than married women. But they’re wrong – married women are more likely to report being “very happy” than singles, and the same goes for men. It doesn’t mean you have to get married, but it would be mad to suggest you mustn’t. Forget the gender wars. “Let’s go forth with the excitement and fun we deserve.”

If you’re wondering how Restore’s Rupert Lowe has become so popular, says James Ball in The New World, the answer is social media. On X, which pays “power users” based on how viral their posts go, Lowe has half as many followers as Nigel Farage, but since July 2024 he has earned a whopping £72,000 compared to Farage’s £20,000. He is often retweeted by Elon Musk, and there has even been speculation that the X owner has tailored the platform’s algorithm to boost Lowe over his Reform rival.

China reported a 17.7% reduction in so-called “carbon intensity” – a measure of emissions against GDP – between 2020 and 2025, just shy of its 18% goal. It’s a remarkable effort, says The Wall Street Journal, especially given earlier official numbers suggested the reduction would be only 12.4%. How did they manage it? Simple: they changed their definition of which carbon emissions count for this measure, stripping out booming industries such as chemical production and plastics manufacturing. “With the stroke of a pen, Beijing has created a statistical gap more or less equal to the total emissions of South Korea or Germany.”

It’s a “boy martini”, says Bettina Makalintal in Punch, or what most people would call a Manhattan. The canny rebrand comes from a sketch posted online by Ray’s, a chain with bars in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Miami, in which a bartender tells a male customer it’s “like a martini, but it has whisky and it’s dark, so it’s for a boy, like you”. The video has racked up over three million views on TikTok and Instagram, and has seen the renamed cocktail crop up on bar menus as far afield as Austin, Amsterdam and Bristol. Ray’s bartender Dylan Wells says he’s not sure people even know it’s a Manhattan: “Everyone wants to drink martinis now.”