Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Cuba this morning with 120mph winds, after battering Jamaica yesterday. Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness says the storm – the strongest to hit the country in modern history – has had “devastating impacts”: at least three-quarters of the island is without power and whole communities are under water. Israel launched a series of strikes on Gaza yesterday that reportedly killed around 100 people. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz accused Hamas of breaching the ceasefire deal by killing an Israeli soldier in an attack in Rafah and failing to return the remains of the last dead hostages. The morning-after pill will be available free of charge in England from today, in the biggest change to sexual health services for women since the contraceptive pill. The emergency birth control, which previously cost up to £35 a pop, will be offered at nearly 10,000 chemists, including Boots, as part of an NHS expansion of pharmacy services.

Protest all you like, but we need an elite

It is fashionable these days to position yourself as anti-elitist, says James Marriott in The Times, but I’m increasingly convinced elitism is “key to democracy’s survival”. People claim social media has “democratised” our discourse. In reality, the flood of “ignorant, wrathful and inexpert” voices has just left ordinary people worse informed and believing the sort of nonsense – Brigitte Macron is a man, Barack Obama is a lizard – that would have puzzled “even the Daily Sport in its Nineties heyday”. Meanwhile the (invariably richer and better-educated) minority who stick with newspapers – and first-rate lunchtime newsletters – continue to have access to reliable information about how their country really works. “Not so fair and democratic.”

The problem is that “popularity is a poor test of ideas”. It’s not that the old elite were smarter or more virtuous. But they were competing in a system that ascribed social status to “rationality as well as to mere name-recognition”. If you wanted to run for parliament, say, or not be shunned at a north London dinner party, you generally had to subscribe to a “tolerant and sane” worldview. In fact, democracy itself is a kind of “elite ideology”. Support for it is much stronger among the old-fashioned political and media class than it is on supposedly “democratised” social media. Prominent anti-democratic bloggers such as the preposterous Curtis Yarvin, who thinks America should be ruled by an absolute monarch, wouldn’t be allowed near the opinion pages of a newspaper. It increasingly seems like liberal principles such as free speech are “fundamentally counterintuitive” to most people, and that we need an elite to impose them. Elitism isn’t perfect, by any stretch: elites are self-serving, snobbish and prone to groupthink. But it’s “preferable to anarchy”.

When Keir Starmer appeared on Desert Island Discs almost five years ago, says Hephzibah Anderson in The Daily Telegraph, his choices – including Northern Soul, Stormzy and a football anthem – looked like a clumsy effort to be seen as an “Everyman”. The PM’s appearance on Radio 3’s Private Passions last Sunday was a different story. This time, his nine tracks included pieces by Mozart, Shostakovich and Brahms. He chose Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in memory of his mother, and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Emperor Piano Concerto because they gave his father solace at the end of a 60-hour factory week. It all felt refreshingly “authentic”.

Given the number of cigarettes sold in the US has fallen by a third in the past decade, you might assume the tobacco companies are struggling. Not so, says The Economist – since January 2024, their stock prices have risen more than the tech-heavy Nasdaq index. When more people smoked, there were a lot of what economists call “price-elastic” consumers: casual puffers who are sensitive to price increases. Now that many of those people have quit, only the most committed smokers are left – so the ciggie companies have been able to raise prices much faster than before. For now, the industry’s prospects are “as rich as a cloud of Davidoff smoke”.

The real stakes of the Trump-Xi meeting

“You know, Taiwan,” said Donald Trump on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year: “they stole our chip business… and they want protection.” Comments like these will “prey on the minds of the Taiwanese”, says Gideon Rachman in the FT, as Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping tomorrow. Top of the agenda is the US-China trade war, but Taiwan is bound to come up. Joe Biden said four times that the US would fight to defend the island nation’s democracy from Beijing’s autocratic clutches. “Trump has said no such thing.” Instead, he has hit Taiwan with 20% tariffs, tried to force its all-important chip maker TSMC to move its operations to Arizona, and laid the ground for a “major reorientation of US defence policy” away from Asia and towards the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, “China’s military build-up and pressure on Taiwan continues apace”.

Foreign policy hawks in Beijing are “eagerly anticipating” an American betrayal of Taiwan, which they believe will force Taipei to accept “reunification”. This is wishful thinking – two thirds of Taiwanese say they would gladly fight to defend their freedom. One recent analysis argued that if the island were backed by the US, a Chinese invasion would be “among the most complex and dangerous military operations in history”; another concluded that the People’s Liberation Army would suffer “catastrophic losses” including 138 ships, 155 aircraft and tens of thousands of troops. Even without America’s backing, any Chinese fleet would still be “extremely vulnerable” to Taipei’s anti-ship missiles, and a naval blockade to starve the island into submission would come at vast economic and diplomatic cost to China. But who knows what Xi could do if egged on by a deal-hungry Trump? As Vladimir Putin has shown, dictators can miscalculate.

After 15 years of research, the fruit and vegetable giant Dole has created a piña colada-inspired pineapple, says Mary-Linh Tran in Allrecipes. The “Colada Royale”, which has been produced through conventional selective breeding methods rather than genetic modification, contains all the tanginess and sweetness of the standard fruit but is apparently juicier and has “subtle notes of creamy coconut and vanilla”. Plus, the core is smaller so more of the fruit is edible. “Only a very small percentage of the thousands we try ever make it to market,” says developer Roberto Young. “So the Colada Royale is special.”

Today you can have almost anything – from a pizza to a martini to an “expertly seared Wagyu steak” – delivered to your door in minutes, says Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic. And people do. More than half of under-45s in the US order in at least once a week and 5% do so “multiple times a day”. This shift is “killing restaurant culture”. Chefs are turning to less interesting, less labour-intensive dishes which can easily be bunged into containers, and many have reworked their menus to avoid foods that go soggy in takeaway boxes. Interior design firms are even touting their ability to build delivery-friendly restaurants, including bike parking and dedicated entrances.

It’s Nike’s new robotic shoe, says Stevie Bonifield in The Verge. The sportswear firm’s first “powered footwear” is designed to boost stride power in a similar way to how an e-bike offers “pedal assistance”. Project Amplify consists of an ankle brace, a small motor and a rechargeable battery, and is aimed at runners who want to go further, faster, for longer, without wearing themselves out. The product is currently in testing with 400 professional athletes in the hope of rolling it out to average lazybones consumers “in the coming years”.