A Russian drone fired at Ukraine crashed into a block of flats in Romania this morning, injuring two people, in the most serious incursion into Nato territory since the conflict began. Romanian fighter jets were scrambled after the drone was detected but couldn’t intercept it in time. Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte criticised Russia’s “recklessness”, adding that the military alliance was “ready to defend every inch” of its territory. Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup. Dario Amodei’s company, which is behind the Claude chatbot, raised $65bn to value the firm at $965bn, surpassing OpenAI’s most recent valuation of $852bn. Blue Origin’s New Glenn mega-rocket exploded in a giant fireball during testing in Florida last night, in a major setback for Nasa’s hopes of returning humans to the moon in the next two years. The blast, which could be seen up to 40 miles away, not only incinerated the 95-metre spacecraft, it also largely destroyed a launchpad that took the Jeff Bezos-owned space company more than eight years to build.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, gave Silicon Valley a slap, says Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic. He identified the threat of AI as a form of “dehumanisation” and pushed back on big tech’s ideology of “inevitability” by reminding us that when faced with drastic change in the past, people have always found ways to resist, be it laws to protect workers, changes to humans rights, or whatever else. But what struck me most about the 42,300-word encyclical was the Pope’s ability to articulate, “with passion and clear eyes”, what is actually worth saving about being human.

Often lost in the great AI debate is an articulate appreciation of what it means to be human and therefore to “know what we’re defending”. Whatever your faith, Pope Leo is right to point to our fallibility. Humanity flourishes, he says, not despite limitations but because of them, and eliminating struggle and effort entirely, as AI offers to do, would only serve to extinguish beauty, awe, love and purpose as well. Reading Middlemarch, for example, which was written by an extraordinary mind that had wrestled with its failings, is a thousand times more fulfilling than reading something churned out by a boundless machine. The same can be said for dating, travelling, working, the cultures we have created, the cities we have built, and the stories we tell our children at night. All of them have meaning precisely because we have “confronted our human condition” and overcome friction to create it. If all that disappears, and effortless machines become responsible for developing our world, we lose the “richness” at our core. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected,” Leo wrote. For a person, it’s “a catalyst for profound change”.

Having studied Andy Burnham up close for six years in Manchester, says Joshi Herrmann in The New Statesman, I can assure you there is no such thing as “Burnhamism”. And as much as he tries to brand his political philosophy as “Manchesterism”, in reality the Greater Manchester mayor is not at all aligned with the thinking that has led to the city’s success. For decades, the council was run by Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein, two “hard-nosed pragmatists” who were willing to do pretty much anything to lure investment, including giving away chunks of public land to developers. They had an obsessive vision for a modern, services-led “knowledge economy” based in the city centre. Burnham prefers to talk about left-behind peripheries and “re-industrialisation”. Which is fine, but it’s got nothing to do with Manchester.

To The Times:

BA’s travails concerning luggage go back decades. A glamorous poster was produced trumpeting the convenience of early Concorde flights with the legend: “Breakfast in London, lunch in New York” – to which some wag had added “Baggage in Bermuda”.
Fred A’Court
Creech St Michael, Somerset

The addition to the slogan for Concorde flights reminds me of my favourite piece of graffiti, on a road sign on the A120. Underneath “Harwich for the Continent”, some wag had written “Bournemouth for the incontinent”.
Nigel Smith
London SW4

The Epstein scandal has claimed an unexpected victim, says Arnaud Leparmentier in Le Monde: “American philanthropy”. For years, the world’s most powerful charitable foundation was the one run by Bill and Melinda Gates, which supported all kinds of causes, particularly healthcare in Africa and the Indian subcontinent. But Gates’s standing has been destroyed (along with his marriage) by the revelation that he spent “far too much time” in the presence of Epstein, and the young women who surrounded him, in the 2010s. Gates is not charged with any crime, but his integrity is shredded. The one-time world’s richest man has been abandoned by his friend Warren Buffett, who said in March that he hadn’t spoken to Gates “since the whole thing was unveiled” and had paused donations to the Gates Foundation.

Meanwhile, the other tech billionaires are seizing the opportunity to attack philanthropy itself, which they consider “horribly progressive”. The movement Gates started in 2010 to get the world’s billionaires to pledge away half their fortune is falling apart. Jeff Bezos never signed it; Elon Musk, who did in 2012, is under pressure from his peers to retract. Last autumn, in a conversation with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Musk mused about the purpose of his wealth: “What am I supposed to do? Give it to my children?” “You know,” said Thiel, “it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.” At heart these billionaires believe they are better at allocating capital than governments and NGOs, and that they are “already serving humanity” by solving climate change (Tesla), making life multi-planetary (SpaceX) and making it easier to get stuff fast (Amazon). Gates was far from perfect, but with him goes the myth of the benevolent billionaire. We may live to miss it.

Gen Z are obsessed with tanning, says Kristy Alpert in The New York Times. So-called “tanfluencers” regularly post about “tanmaxxing” in sunbed salons or show off their tan lines after a day soaking up the rays. And they’re worryingly unphased about the dangers. A survey by dermatologists found that just a quarter of 18-to-29-year olds are concerned about developing skin cancer, compared with 39% of the general population, and a whopping 20% believe that getting a tan is more important than preventing melanoma. As one TikTok user put it: “The lioness does not concern herself with ‘skin cancer’.”

The top ten stocks in the S&P 500 now account for 41% of the total value of the index. That’s big, says Simon Nixon on Substack. At the dot-com peak in March 2000, the same metric was around 27%. Meanwhile, the SOX index of semiconductor firms is up more than 60% since January (the S&P 500 averages around 10% a year) and is trading a staggering 62% above its 200-day moving average (the average of every closing price on the past 200 trading days) – “the biggest deviation of any market mania since the Mississippi bubble of 1720”.

It’s a rare albino buffalo that has become an unlikely celebrity in Bangladesh because of his striking resemblance to the president of the United States, says Reuters. The nearly 700kg beast went viral on social media after he was sold for ritual slaughter in the festival of Eid al-Adha. People flocked to his farm for selfies and videos, and he became so popular that the country’s home affairs minister ordered that he be spared from sacrifice and moved to the national zoo. His owner, Ziauddin Mridha, said “Donald Trump” was “unusually gentle and needed careful upkeep, including frequent feeding and regular baths”.