Hamas says it will delay the scheduled release of the next three Israeli hostages on Saturday, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the ceasefire deal by stopping displaced Palestinians returning to Gaza. Donald Trump says that if the terror group does not return all the remaining hostages by noon on Saturday, “all hell” will break loose. Oliver Ryan has become the second MP to be suspended from the Labour party over offensive comments made on WhatsApp. The Burnley MP mocked a colleague and was rude about the vice-chairman of the local Labour party on a group called “Trigger Me Timbers”. Elon Musk has escalated his longstanding feud with OpenAI’s Sam Altman by leading a consortium of investors to submit a $97.4bn bid for his AI company. Altman rebuffed the offer, posting on Musk’s social media platform X: “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74bn if you want.”

The populists hoping to “Make Europe Great Again”

It was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who came up with the slogan MEGA, says Le Monde: “Make Europe Great Again”. The phrase was everywhere this past weekend at the summit held by the Patriots for Europe – the third-largest bloc in the European Parliament – in a hotel conference centre near Madrid Airport. The event, hosted by the Spanish far-right party Vox, had a “triumphalist atmosphere”, no doubt fanned by the “powerful gust of reactionary impetus blowing in from across the Atlantic”. The return of Donald Trump and the “libertarian crusade” being waged by Argentina’s Javier Milei, who sent a video message of support to his European brothers-in-arms, have given Europe’s nationalist-populist leaders the feeling that the time for “reconquista” – a term used by several speakers – has come.

There were the usual points of agreement. From Orbán to Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s Lega party, from Holland’s Geert Wilders to the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš – all reject immigration, worry about the threat of Islam, oppose onerous environmental standards, and are committed to the fight against “woke-ism” and multiculturalism. But there were “discordant notes”, too. Orbán attacked EU spending to support Ukraine in a “hopeless war”, a subject others “carefully avoided”. And when Vox’s Santiago Abascal expressed support for the AfD’s Alice Weidel, he was alone – most in the European Parliament consider the German far-right party “toxic”. Perhaps most strikingly, no mention was made of Trump’s possible tariffs on Europe and demands for greater defence spending, nor of his newfound chumminess with Big Tech, nor his proposal to expel two million Palestinians from Gaza. It might be on the rise, but the MEGA movement is still rife with ambiguities.

Since 1997, Britain has been carrying out a “vast demographic experiment”, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. In the 25 years before Tony Blair came to power, 68,000 more people came into the country than left it. In the 25 years since he took office, that figure is “almost six million”.

WikTok is exactly what the name suggests: Wikipedia, but TikTokified. Visitors to the site are shown a random entry from the online encyclopaedia: from Peru’s Mountain of Seven Colours, to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, to a Polish word (Potrzebie) used as a gag in the comic book Mad. If you’re interested in that entry, you can read it; if not, you swipe to move on to the next one. Click here to give it a try.

“It must be lonely being so right all the time”

Dominic Cummings has been immersing himself in the history of Britain’s wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, says Alex Massie in The Times. The results are as you’d expect. “Whitehall in 1800 was much more like SpaceX,” Boris Johnson’s former adviser told an interviewer. William Pitt and co “took elite talent very seriously”. This superficially clever stuff collapses under the weight of a moment’s contemplation. Pitt and his successors were able to devote a huge portion of the state’s energies to fighting Napoleon because that’s all they did. And they funded it with a newly introduced and much-hated income tax, and by borrowing so much that at the war’s end government debt was 200% of GDP. We could, of course, return to that minimalist form of government, if only our politicians had the courage to abolish, you know, the NHS, the state pension and public education.

The Cummings manifesto is radical: everything must change because at present nothing can be done. Elections are “fake”, and “the system, uncontrolled by anybody, just kind of follows its own dynamics”. Only the best, clearest thinkers, like our Dom, can perceive the true scale of the problem. “It must be lonely being so right all the time.” But of course, “the system” is just the accretion of voter demands. If it’s hard to build houses, it’s because voters like such construction in principle but very much object to projects in their neighbourhood. Politicians can’t be blamed for wanting to win elections and taking into account what voters will – and crucially will not – wear. Yes, liberal democracy is annoying. But it remains the “least bad means of organising a society”.

Gastronomy boffins in Italy say they have found the best way to boil an egg, says PopSci: “periodic cooking”. All you need is one pot of water kept at a steady 100C and another pot kept at 30C. Submerge the egg in the boiling water for two minutes, then transfer it to the cooler pot for another two. Repeat that cycle eight times, for a total of 32 minutes, “and voilà”. Apparently this technique not only creates a perfectly runny yolk with a perfectly solidified white, it also maintains more of the egg’s nutritional content. Ideal – if you have half an hour to spare.

Here are two tricks for peeling off stubborn stickers, says Lifehacker. Either wet a sponge made from melamine foam and scrub – the sticker should dissolve, with any left-over residue easy to pick off by hand. Or use a hair dryer to blast the sticker with heat for a few seconds. The warmth will have melted the adhesive, which means no residue either.

It’s a deepfake video showing Emmanuel Macron’s face superimposed on to the bodies of various celebrities and partygoers, released by the French president himself to promote an AI summit in Paris. The faked footage shows Macron apparently dancing to the hit French song Voyage, Voyage by Desireless; replacing Jean Dujardin in the 2006 spy comedy OSS 117; performing a rap song; giving a hairstyle tutorial; and, at the end, in the guise of US action hero MacGyver, after which le président jokes: “that’s really me”. Watch the full clip here.