The Metropolitan Police will review allegations that Peter Mandelson committed a criminal offence by leaking Downing Street emails and inside information to Jeffrey Epstein. Documents from the “Epstein files” appear to show that Mandelson provided the late paedophile with market-sensitive information on at least four occasions when he was business secretary in 2009. The latest batch of files also suggests that Epstein had a number of secret children, including one with a teenager who alleges her daughter was taken from her minutes after birth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his artificial intelligence start-up xAI in a deal that values the combined company at $1.25trn, the most valuable private company ever. The world’s richest man has suggested that the merger will help facilitate the creation of space-based data centres. Rome has introduced a €2 tourist tax to visit the Trevi Fountain, which sees some 10 million visitors a year and up to 70,000 a day in high season. Sightseers will now have to queue to pay the fee before getting to enjoy the Roman relic without the selfie-stick waving crowds.

Scrolling through the “fawning exchanges” between Jeffrey Epstein and his famous pals – invariably angling for invitations to his Caribbean island – makes you feel “grubby by association”, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Richard Branson joking about Epstein’s “harem”; Sarah Ferguson ending gushing emails with “just marry me”. And then there’s Peter Mandelson. The now-disgraced New Labour guru has argued that, as a gay man, he was never likely to witness the side of Epstein’s life detailed by Virginia Guiffre, who described being passed around his powerful friends “like a platter of fruit”. But the enormous cash gifts he appeared to receive from the financier – totalling $75,000 – are harder to skirt. No wonder this whole story is “catnip to conspiracy theorists”. Why did so many struggle to see the convicted paedophile for what he was? Or care? You’d be forgiven for thinking this is “just how everyone in power behaves behind closed doors”.

The real loser from Mandelson’s disgrace is Keir Starmer’s Labour party, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The left have long complained of Mandelson’s influence on moderate MPs like Wes Streeting, and on the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. “Now all these men will be in trouble.” For all his faults, Mandelson is a “political operator of genius”. It was he, way back in the 1980s, who began to drum into the skull of Neil Kinnock that Labour needed to ditch its old sentimentality to win; he who helped Tony Blair gain the leadership and orchestrated Blair’s victories from 1997 onwards; and he who, “despite their personal animosities”, did what he could to undergird the dying government of Gordon Brown. “He may be irremediable, but he is also irreplaceable.”

AI bots now have their own social media platform, says Melissa Heikkilä in the FT: a Reddit-like site called Moltbook. Once an AI agent has been signed up by its human owner, it can post and interact with its fellow bots – all while real humans watch on, banned from contributing. Hot topics among the 1.5 million users include whether the AI Claude could be considered a god; an analysis of consciousness; how the protests in Iran could affect cryptocurrency prices; and a newly created religion called “Crustafarianism”.

It doesn’t have the best reputation among travellers, says The Economist, but Ryanair has a decent claim to being “the world’s most successful airline”. It is easily Europe’s largest carrier: with roughly twice as many passengers as easyJet and three times more than Wizz Air, it accounts for a fifth of the continent’s entire capacity. Its net profit margin is around 15%, compared to a worldwide industry average of just 4%. Since the start of 2023, its share price has risen a whopping 130%, compared to around 50% for the industry as a whole. The secret, as you can probably guess, is a “laser-like focus on costs”.

Donald Trump has an undisguised lust for natural resources, says Dan Wang in The New York Times. He proudly declared that the US had intervened in Venezuela to “take the oil”, apparently betting that American oil majors would willingly part with $100bn to revive the country’s decrepit infrastructure, and that the world will go on wanting to buy oil from America to power their cars, trucks, ships, planes and homes for decades to come. China, despite being the world’s biggest oil importer, takes a different view – it is paving the way for a world “powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines”.

Although it was Elon Musk’s Tesla which kick-started the trend, it is Chinese electric cars that are now setting records, both for quantity of sales and speed. More broadly, thanks in part to coal but also to extraordinarily vast investments in solar and wind, China now generates more electricity per year than the US and EU combined, and has almost 40 new nuclear power plants under construction. The US? “Zero.” China specialises in the lithium-ion batteries powering the electrification of not just cars but also bikes, trucks, buses and even some boats. Heavy industry and home heating and cooling are increasingly electrified, and even nasty, noisy diesel leaf blowers are being replaced by models which emit a gentle electric thrum. The southern city of Shenzhen, which has been manufacturing Apple products for two decades, is now remaking whole categories of transport, household and industrial products in the image of its smartphone production lines. “The US is far behind this competition.” And with Trump obsessed with oil, it’s hard to see how they’ll catch up.

Rupert Murdoch was a ruthless operator from an early age, says Andrew O’Hagan in The New Yorker. The media tycoon’s first job in the UK was a summer placement at the Birmingham Gazette, arranged for him by his father through the chairman of the paper’s parent company, Pat Gibson. The editor, Charles Fenby, later recalled that he took young Rupert under his wing, befriending him and showing him everything he could about the business. “And what did he do? He wrote a filthy letter to Pat afterwards saying I should be fired.”

Unless you’re running a small business, says Jenni Russell in The Times, you probably don’t realise just how hard it is to “keep a little enterprise alive”. The VAT threshold – the point at which a firm has to pay a 20% tax on its entire turnover – has risen by only £5,000 since 2017, to £90,000. Had it gone up in line with inflation, it would be about £110,000. Meanwhile, Labour’s increases to the minimum wage and employers’ national insurance means that hiring a 21-year-old on minimum wage now costs £29,654, up from just £17,035 in 2020. That’s a 74% increase. No wonder so many shopkeepers are struggling to survive.

It’s Barnsley, the UK’s first “tech town”, says Robert Booth in The Guardian. The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has selected the South Yorkshire market town as a guinea pig for “how AI can improve everyday life”, and announced that Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Adobe will help the council introduce AI tools to local schools, hospitals, GPs and businesses. The 250,000-strong population, which has struggled with unemployment and deprivation since the coal pits closed around 30 years ago, was apparently chosen because it has adopted AI faster than many other places, including bin lorries that automatically scan for potholes and robot delivery dogs.