Nigel Farage is facing a possible second parliamentary investigation after claims that he received undeclared benefits from a convicted fraudster. A Sunday Times investigation found that crypto entrepreneur George Cottrell, a longtime ally who was imprisoned in the US in 2017 for wire fraud, supplied the Reform UK leader with accommodation, private security and social media staff ahead of his election as an MP in 2024. Police leadership in England and Wales is plagued by “nepotism and bias”, a government-backed inquiry has found. The report said there had been 78 investigations into chief officers since 2018, with 47 involving chief constables, covering cronyism, nepotism and abuse of position for sexual purposes or corruption. England produced one of their greatest-ever World Cup performances to beat co-hosts Mexico 3-2 in the early hours of this morning. Jude Bellingham scored two goals in two minutes and captain Harry Kane nailed a penalty to secure a place in the quarter-finals against Norway at 10pm on Saturday night.

Whatever else Andy Burnham is planning, says Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph, his desire to decentralise power in the UK is “dead right”. In no comparable nation are local councils so powerless. Just 5% of tax revenue is collected by local authorities in Britain, compared to 70% in fully decentralised Switzerland. The system we have, “incomprehensible to Australians, Canadians or Europeans”, has several malign effects. It distorts our politics, as local elections are so irrelevant to people’s lives that voters use them to register their anger over immigration, Gaza or whatever else. Worse, the reliance on Treasury money encourages profligacy. If two-thirds of your budget comes from Whitehall, you have to cut spending by £3 to give residents a £1 cut in council tax. So why bother?

I’m not convinced, says Matthew Parris in The Times. This is just the latest example of the “legacy politics” Labour has always loved: “governing by shunting people and resources around”. You can “rewire” the country’s economy all you want: a “No 10 North” in Manchester, Whitehall to the English regions, and so on. But all wires do is carry electrical power, not generate it. It is the latter – wealth creation – that Burnham should be concentrating on, and that comes from private enterprise rather than government. Besides, just look at the evidence on devolution. Devolved Scotland has become a “corrupt, one-party banana republic”; Wales and Northern Ireland are “gibbering subsidy junkies led by pygmies”. The truth is that Labour has always been more interested in how to cut the cake rather than how to grow it, hence its obsession with needless reorganisations. If Britain were completely devolved, they would be pushing for socialist centralisation; because we are centralised, they “burble” about devolution. It’s all just one “great big evasion”.

Learning another language could slow ageing in the brain, says Anna Bawden in The Guardian. A new study found that people who speak two languages had brains around six years younger than those who speak just one, increasing to seven years younger for those with three languages and a whopping 13 years younger for polyglots who have mastered four. Early acquisition of a second language was important, but if you haven’t mastered your French yet it’s not too late: the level of proficiency achieved also appears to have a marked benefit on brain ageing. Bon courage.

Michael Burry, the investor whose bets against the market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis were immortalised in the Michael Lewis book The Big Short, is convinced the AI bubble is about to burst, says Kevin Dugan in The Wall Street Journal. Burry has taken short positions – which will give him big payouts if their price plummets – on a range of stocks and funds exposed to AI, including the chipmaker Nvidia and a broader semiconductor index. He says a recent announcement by Samsung and another South Korea tech giant, SK Hynix, that they are spending $500bn on a chip-building hub marks “the beginning of the end”.

One of the essential features of liberal democracy, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack, is that if one side in the political system turns illiberal and extremist, there is another to counter it. The problem in America is that the radicalism of Donald Trump is increasingly being matched by the “fanaticism” of the hard left. Candidates for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a faction of the Democratic Party, are winning dozens of primary races everywhere from New York to Colorado. This is a group that cheers on Hamas and the Venezuelan and Cuban tyrannies, and whose proposed platform calls for giving amnesty to all immigrants and scrapping the US Senate. One victorious DSA candidate attended a pro-Hamas rally on 8 October 2023, “as bodies still lay on the ground” in Israel. Another insisted a deadly firebomb attack on a march for Israeli hostages wasn’t anti-Semitic, merely “anti-Zionist”.

It’s worth noting that their communism – for that’s what it is – is a “luxury belief”. A 2021 survey of DSA members found that 85% were white, just 4% blue-collar and over 80% had degrees, double the national rate. And while this unreconstructed “woke elite” is nothing like the Democratic base, it wields outsized power in low-turnout primaries. Not one Democrat has backed the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling upholding a ban on trans athletes in female school and college sports, which some 80% of Americans support. When 13 House Democrats signed a pledge rejecting socialism, DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scolded them for creating an “antagonistic dynamic”. So unless some Clinton or Obama-like figure emerges to rebuild a “sane centre”, it looks like we’re in for a re-run of 2020: open borders, hostility to police, hatred of Israel. Which in turn means we’re probably heading for a post-Trump “Republican era”. Strap in.

AI is making people thicker, says David Brooks in The Atlantic. Researchers at MIT found that brain connectivity declines by as much as 55% when people are using ChatGPT compared with when they are performing similar tasks without it. And it gets worse. Academics at Carnegie Mellon University, trying to find out if that effect lasts, concluded: “After just 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”

The House of Cards author Michael Dobbs is working on a new play about Winston Churchill, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. One of his favourite lines is when the former PM and Lady Astor entered the Guildhall and she said: “You could fill half the hall with all the brandy you have drunk in your life.” Churchill looked around the vast room and replied: “Yes – so much more still to do.”

It’s a pair of deep-fried crocodile arms, says Carlie Kollath Wells in Axios, which had the internet “doing a double take” ahead of America’s Fourth of July celebrations on Saturday. The chicken-wing alternative, which leaves the reptile’s claws intact, was created by New Orleans chef Mark Stevens Roncoli for an event in Australia. He brined the croc’s limbs in pickle juice and buttermilk, then fried them in a cast-iron pan over an open fire. Roncoli says the dish went down a storm and now wants to do an alligator version in Louisiana.