Counter terrorism police say they are now leading the investigation into the murder of Ann Widdecombe, after “new information and evidence” came to light. The announcement comes after the man arrested on suspicion of the killing was seen in CCTV footage appearing to get into a car with a foot-long stick in Yorkshire, almost 300 miles from Widdecombe’s Dartmoor house, on the morning of her death. The UK will proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps under new powers allowing the government to label state-backed groups as terrorist organisations. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said activity linked to the IRGC involved “threats to life and intimidation on UK soil”. The much-loved actor Sam Neill has died aged 78. Best known for his turn as Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park franchise, the New Zealander also starred star in The Piano (1993) and later as a Belfast police chief in the TV series Peaky Blinders.

I’ve worked out what the problem is with summer, says Giles Coren in The Times: “It’s common.” Winter, with its jumpers, books, fires and red wines, is classy. Spring is full of promise; autumn refined and nostalgic. But summer is a hooligan. It’s all “RAAAAAAAA! Here I am! Clothes off! Give me a lager!” For a start, everyone wants to be outside all the time, like animals, or humans from the miserable past when we spent all day hiding in tall grass hoping to spear a tasty rat. For most of the year we live indoors, like civilised folk. But no, once the sun’s out we’re forced to endure the spectacle of our topless, vulgar fellow man, with his hideous pop music and endless shouting.

In summer, everyone wants to eat “al fresco”. So common. Eating outside is for tramps and foxes and “fatties scoffing chips on the seafront”, besieged by common seagulls. The hot weather also makes people dress appallingly: in short trousers (“like children”), or “topless in the street like Yahoos, with their skinny tattooed arms and legs out, their fat tummies, their grotty little nipples”. And people always riot in the summer, which is “desperately common”. They might pretend to be cross about immigration or Palestine or fuel prices or whatever, but really what they want is to take off their tops, bash a copper, shag in a doorway, smash a window and nick a telly. It’s just so common. Can you imagine Jacob Rees-Mogg rioting? No, you can’t. And to cap it all, summer is monstrously long, stretching from mid-May to the end of September. Being so dreadfully common, “summer just doesn’t know when to leave”.

With Keir Starmer away last week, says Madeline Grant in The Spectator, prime minister’s questions presented another opportunity for MPs to demonstrate “just how crashingly unimpressive many of them are”. David Lammy and James Cleverly clattered at each other in “lumbering” fashion. Daisy Cooper of the Lib Dems “added the square root of nothing”. Our MPs occupy an incredible building, packed with reminders of the nation’s past and the parliament’s achievements. Now it feels like a sort of “gilded asylum for the terminally mediocre”, the “troglodytic inhabitants who scamper round the ruins of a superior civilisation”.

For those whose mental image of Iran is informed by news photos of mass protests or US bombing, an Instagram account called The Rich Kids of Tehran provides a striking alternative. A week ago, for example, the account – which exclusively features gorgeous young Tehranians living decadent Western-style lives, including drinking, partying, going to art galleries, wearing sexy outfits and eating a certain amount of brunch – captioned a set of images with: “It’s the weekend up in T town, the post war vibes! How’s your weekend going lovely people? Good vibes, and stay motivated ❤️”

For months last year, says Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, human rights experts warned that a murderous militia in Sudan’s civil war was poised to overrun the city of El Fasher and butcher its people. Donald Trump and other leaders “mostly shrugged”, and sure enough, the militia stormed the city and massacred some 60,000 residents. Now that same group – the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – is besieging El Obeid, home to half a million people, some already starving. And again, the world is looking the other way. While Sudan’s army, the other side in this conflict, has also behaved horrifically, the RSF are “particularly notorious for savagery”. Survivors describe their soldiers systematically killing men and boys over the age of 10, and gang-raping women and girls.

What Western and UN officials won’t say out loud is who stands behind this ultra-violent militia: the United Arab Emirates. The Emirati government denies this, but its backing is well established. And because it’s rich and influential, it has become “The Country That Must Not Be Named”. That’s what makes this genocide – as both the Biden and Trump administrations have called it – all the more tragic: halting the bloodshed would probably require neither troops nor money. Pressure from the West could surely shame the UAE into calling off its “murderous friends”, as it did with a brutal war in Yemen in 2019. One Yale researcher reckons that if the RSF lost their ammunition supply, the war could end in a fortnight. All it takes is the courage to speak up. If you only care about human rights in certain places, “you don’t actually care about human rights”.

For ordinary Russians, says The Economist, “the war has come home”. Drone strikes and internet outages are increasingly frequent, and petrol is rationed across the country: drivers wait up to three hours to fill up, while in some areas pumps are reserved for officials only. The trains running from Moscow to Crimea – usually bustling with summer holiday-makers – are “spookily empty”. And there have been reports of men being grabbed in public or in door-to-door sweeps and forced to sign contracts with the army. “I forbade my husband from leaving the house,” says Elena, who lives south-east of Moscow. “When I go out, I lock him from the outside.”

If Nigel Farage wants to re-earn public trust after his present financial scandals, he will need to express “extreme humility”, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. I’ve seen him do it. Before the Brexit referendum, I watched him, while addressing a hall of hostile students at the London School of Economics, deride Greece as a “wretched place”. A Greek student calmly rose and rebuked him for kicking her country when it was down. Farage stepped forward and made a “genuinely moving” apology. Incredibly, the students gave him a round of applause.

It’s the Isaac 1, says design blog Moss & Fog, a domestic robot built by San Francisco’s Weave Robotics with the “refreshingly modest” ambition of helping out with the laundry. The android assistant has two arms mounted on a wheeled frame that can telescope up and down, and it comes trained to find dirty clothes, fold clean ones, make the bed and generally tidy up. One caveat: when the $8,000 automaton gets into trouble, a human user can take over remotely, which does mean you might, at some point, have a random stranger staring at a pair of your pants. If you don’t mind that, pre-order yours here.