One of the two people killed in yesterday’s terror attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester was accidentally shot by police. A second person received non-fatal gunshot wounds; they appear to have been behind the closed synagogue door when officers opened fire on the suspect, named as 35-year-old Jihad al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian origin. Three others have been arrested. Dame Sarah Mullally will be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman ever to lead the Church of England. The 63-year-old former midwife has been the Bishop of London for the past seven years. A date for her enthronement ceremony has not yet been announced. Taylor Swift has released her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl. The 12-song record has received more than five million “pre-saves” on Spotify, making it the most in-demand new album of the streaming era, but the reviews have been mixed. Her “mellifluously conversational singing” is as appealing as ever, says the FT, “but the promised bangers fail to materialise”. Listen for yourself here.

Our disgraceful indifference to the women of Afghanistan

Thirty paragraphs into the BBC’s report on the Taliban’s internet shutdown in Afghanistan this week came the line: “Women and girls have also been particularly hard-hit.” This disgraceful journalistic indifference has been typical for Afghan women and girls, says Faye Curran in The New Statesman, ever since the Taliban reasserted control in the summer of 2021, after the US withdrawal from Kabul. To Afghan girls, barred from education after the age of 12, the internet was their last gateway to learning. Access has since been restored, but nevertheless, for the past four years the Taliban have been steadily erasing women from public life. And the draconian repression has “intensified sharply” over the past year.

In June, Kabul enacted a “vice and virtue” law that forbids women from appearing in public without a mahram (male chaperone), adding to existing bans on using any form of transportation, attending medical appointments, participating in sports, visiting parks or travelling more than 72 km. The law is enforced by “morality inspectors” who detain individuals suspected of violating the code and bring them before Taliban courts – where many report “torture, sexual assault and abuse”. After a 6.6-magnitude earthquake last month, Afghan women were reportedly “left to die in the rubble of their homes” because Taliban rules forbade male rescuers from contacting or touching women to whom they were not related. “Touching even a dead woman will have consequences,” said one rescue worker. It’s hard to know how to help: activists now encourage donations to organisations that help women escape the country. But at the very least, we could treat the plight of these women as the headline, rather than a footnote.

I recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator: driving into the wilds of Sardinia to try casu marzu, the infamous “maggot cheese”, which is banned by the EU because it contains living larvae. It was disgusting. But while I was there, the farmer produced something even stranger: the small, brown, leathery stomach of a baby goat, which had been given one last huge feast of milk, then killed and its milk-filled stomach cut out and hung for three months. Through this technique – which is thought to be how mankind originally discovered cheese – enzymes in the stomach turn the milk into callu du crabettu – soft, pale yellow, faintly oozing. “It is probably the best cheese I have ever eaten in my life.”

Red Bull has teamed up with Prada to turn the curved exterior of a building in Brazil into the world’s largest skate ramp, says Ellen Eberhardt in Dezeen. The 22-floor government building in the southeastern city of Porto Alegre was adorned with a “huge plywood quarter pipe”, with several platforms at different heights, from which local skater and daredevil Sandro Dias was able to “drop in”. The 50-year-old broke the records for highest drop-in (70 metres) and highest speed ever recorded by a skateboarder on a ramp (64mph). Watch the whole thing here.

Does Starmer want to beat Farage, or be him?

Listening to Keir Starmer tout his progressive credentials at this week’s Labour conference was somewhat surreal, says Bagehot in The Economist. For years, the prime minister has made a virtue of “hippy-punching”. Remainers, pro-Palestine protestors, Corbynites – basically anyone with lefty tendencies has been “whacked”. Yet now, the party’s leaders are recognising a Palestinian State, on the verge of abolishing the two-child benefit cap, and encouraging activists to protest at fracking sites. This appears to be evidence of Starmer’s deep cynicism: he was happy to punch hippies when it was winning votes; now that he’s losing twice as many voters to the Greens and Lib Dems as he is to Reform UK, he’s tacking left. But just as likely it’s sincere. Remember, the prime minister is a “Remain-voting, social-democrat human-rights lawyer from north London”. Perhaps we’re finally seeing his true colours.

The truth is that Starmer tried out several different personalities at conference, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. Yes, there was progressive Keir, out to bash those “nasty populists of the hard right” and their “racist goons”. But there was also fiscally serious, anti-Brexit and pro-tech Blairite Keir. And there was Blue Labour Keir, protective of the working class and against the untrammelled immigration imposed on the country by feckless governments past. What these three rather disparate lines of argument have in common is Nigel Farage. Each is an attempt to solve Labour’s “Farage problem”, by trying to prove Labour has better answers than Reform on values, economics and immigration. The trouble is, this is all reactive. Farage, not a Labour Party with a landslide majority, is still setting the agenda. And until Starmer can work out whether he wants to beat Reform, or to be them, the real Labour leader will be: Nigel Farage.

🎤🙄 To give a sense of how obsessed Labour have become with Farage, says Steerpike in The Spectator, I counted how often he came up in conference speeches by top officials. It’s 27, including nine mentions by Wes Streeting and four by the prime minister. Whose conference is this anyway?

Autumn clothes tend to celebrate the colours of the season, says Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian: rich crimsons, chocolate browns, mossy greens. But this year, it’s a “brilliant time to wear white” – from cool-toned Scandi, creamy porcelain to warm, rich butter, or dandelion. To look sophisticated rather than sterile, there are two key principles: go for “draped and slouchy” rather than tight white; and don’t be one-note – white is a “broad church” from the edge of beige to the margin of grey. As the nights get darker, “pale starts to get interesting”.

To The Economist:

Although I agreed with the points you made on shrinking rates of reading, I could not help but notice the AI summary button conveniently located at the top of the article that offered me a “quick, smart overview of stories before reading”.

Evan Nebel
Falls Church, Virginia

It’s “pink cocaine”, the party drug of 2025, says Max Daly in UnHerd – typically a mix of MDMA, ketamine and caffeine (and, curiously, no cocaine). The pink powder is now more popular than traditional gak in Colombia, where it originated, and is increasingly turning up in Britain – a shipment found in a lorry last December was branded with the Pink Panther. The attraction of the garish gear, which also comes in pastel yellow, pale violet and sparkly blue, is that it “really pops on Instagram” – the narcotic equivalent of a green matcha latte or bright orange Aperol spritz.