Donald Trump has promised a “major statement” on Russia today, telling reporters last night he was planning to send “various pieces” of “very sophisticated” military equipment to Ukraine. It marks a major shift for the US president, who has until now only provided defensive kit to Kyiv. The statement is going to be “very aggressive”, Senator Lindsey Graham told Axios. “Trump is really pissed at Putin.” Britain has become the “No 1 target” for Russian cyberattacks and espionage. With Moscow trying to appease Washington, which previously bore the brunt of its digital dirty work, UK officials say there’s been a surge in the number of “hybrid attacks”, including attempts to sabotage key infrastructure. Upmarket delis and Michelin-starred restaurants are running out of buffalo mozzarella, creamy brie and other continental cheeses due to an outbreak of lumpy skin disease among cattle in Italy and France, says The Times. “Overzealous” border officials are blocking the fine fromages from entering the UK, leaving retailers and restaurant owners distinctly “cheesed off”.

The “sickfluencer” who makes £500,000 a year

Whitney Ainscough boasts that she makes £500,000 a year from her social media posts, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Her content? Telling people how to exploit welfare rules. The mother of three walks followers through the “buzzwords and correct answers” that will unlock maximum benefits. In one post, she gloats about receiving £1,151.90 a week from taxpayers. “I get your monthly wage in a week,” she says, “so why would I put myself out and get a job? I mean, I’m living my f***ing best life!” Ainscough is part of an army of online “sickfluencers”. One charges £750 for a three-hour session – not much less than a London KC. But given our “rotten” welfare system, £750 is a “reasonable up-front investment”.

Like the Channel people traffickers, sickfluencers are merely “facilitators”. They service a demand created by perverse incentives: in one case an asylum system where judges reflexively overturn deportation orders; in the other a benefits system that will soon let people earn £2,500 a year more than the minimum wage. The numbers are most striking among the young: claimants aged 25-34 have risen 69% in five years (if real, such a “cataclysmic explosion in disability would surely be visible on the streets”). The reason for this tragic waste of human potential is that, during lockdown, people who had never interacted with the benefits system learned how easy it was to make claims, and began to see work as a “lifestyle choice”. And many civil servants never came back to the office, meaning 70% of claims are now made over the phone, where claimants find it “much easier to lie”. As legendary money manager Charlie Munger put it: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.”

I had a number of run-ins with the late Lord Tebbit when I was editor of the Today programme, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. He felt, not without justification, that we were a “nest of malevolent pinkoes”. But he did send me what is “perhaps the greatest letter I have ever received”. We were doing a feature on religious belief among politicians and I sent Norman a letter asking if he believed in a literal hell. “Dear Liddle,” he replied. “I do not know if Hell exists. But if it does, I trust that you will burn in it for eternity.”

Very rich Americans have found a new penny-pinching travel hack, says Andrew Zucker in The Wall Street Journal: using WhatsApp to buy and sell spare seats on private jets. Invitation-only group chats with names like “S. Florida <-> NY/Northeast” serve specific routes, allowing jet owners to rent out the spare seats on their Gulfstream for a few thousand dollars, or those without their own to say: “Hey, I’m going to Aspen on 1 August. Who wants to split a plane with me?” Tensions are inevitable – usually over take-off times – but folks tend to rub along ok. After the first three or four shared flights, says one regular user, “I realised it’s all pretty much the same types of people”.

Why won’t Trump release the Epstein files?

The MAGA revolution is “eating its own”, says Peter Savodnik in The Free Press. Trumpy types have long claimed that Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide in his jail cell in 2019 was in fact staged by powerful people who didn’t want the paedophile and financier revealing their dirty secrets. After Donald Trump’s election win last November, these guys were elated. “All the puppets and puppet masters would be revealed!” Instead, the Department of Justice announced earlier this month that there was no secret client list and no conspiracy. And the MAGA guys went crazy. Tucker Carlson accused Attorney-General Pam Bondi of a cover-up; FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, who had pushed the conspiracy before entering office, was reportedly considering resigning. As Elon Musk put it: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

It’s bizarre that these guys thought Trump was the man to get to the bottom of this, says David French in The New York Times. He was one of Epstein’s “most powerful friends”: they used to party together and in 2002 Trump described him as a “terrific guy”. No wonder the president wants to move on: Bondi is doing a “FANTASTIC JOB”, he wrote on Saturday. But this whole affair is also a window into the post-Trump world. The MAGA movement is driven almost entirely by a sense of grievance against government, elites and so on – much of it legitimate, but much of it fantastical. Trump is the only one with the credibility to get these people to fall into line, as presumably will happen with Epstein. But what happens when he’s gone? Without him at the helm, the movement could well “tear itself apart”.

🫵 ❌ I’m actually with the “MAGA conspiracy theory loonies” on Epstein, says Tina Brown on Substack: there are still too many unanswered questions. Either way, he was a menacing bastard. After I published an exposé of his wrongdoing in The Daily Beast in 2010, I returned from lunch one day to find him in my office. “Just stop,” he said heavily as I stared at him from the doorway. “There will be consequences if you don’t.” I asked him to leave and suggested he talk to our lawyers. “You heard me,” he said in a “deadly” tone. “Stop.”

One aspect of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that hasn’t received enough attention is the dismantling of subsidies for clean energy, says Simon Nixon on Substack. Solar and wind are currently the fastest-growing sources of power in the US, accounting for 80% of new energy coming on to the grid. The BBB puts at risk an estimated half a trillion dollars’ worth of investment – enough to power “half the homes in America” – all at a time when AI data centres are massively boosting demand for power. Trump is giving handouts to industries of the past (coal, oil and so on) while hobbling industries of the future.

For a scary insight into how much data Google has on you, says Lila Shroff in The Atlantic, try its AI chatbot, Gemini. When I asked it to write a birthday card for my friend, it included his birth date and referenced a conversation we’d had before our graduation. Separately, it accurately listed my financial goals, my vaccination history and what my parents looked like. When I asked it for a CIA dossier about me, it gave details of a long-term romantic relationship and a brief high-school fling, dissected my communication style, and correctly “diagnosed me as an overthinker”.

It’s a $19 strawberry, says The Economist, available “individually wrapped” from the upmarket grocery chain Erewhon in Los Angeles. The pricey plant is part of a recent boom in “luxury fruit”: Fresh Del Monte began selling a $395 Costa Rican pineapple in the US last year after it proved a hit in China, and Japanese Crown melons – known for their exceptional sweetness and tender texture – can go for hundreds of dollars. Oishii, the US berry specialists, grow the highly sought-after Japanese Omakase strawberry in New Jersey, selling them for $14 by the half-dozen, neatly wrapped in what looks like a fancy chocolate box.