The heads of the Metropolitan Police, MI5 and the National Crime Agency have criticised Keir Starmer’s plans to release prisoners early, as a “net detriment to public safety”. Six of Britain’s most senior police chiefs have also warned of a £1.3bn gap in police finances, telling the prime minister that without fresh funds, government promises to recruit 13,000 new officers, slash knife crime, and tackle violence against women and girls are doomed. Thames Water has been hit with a record £122.7m fine by Ofwat. The regulator found the utility giant had broken rules on wastewater, including sewage spills, and handed investors more than £130m in “undeserved” dividend payments over the past two years. Being beautiful boosts your bank balance – unless you’re also brainy. A decades-long analysis of 37,000 workers in Britain and America found that while hotties earn more than their plain peers, the advantage all but disappears among the most intellectually gifted.

The ugly truth about Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

Last week, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, the US Congress passed Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by one vote. The bill’s shortcomings are by now well known: “fiscal incontinence” will add $3trn to the government’s $36trn debt in the next ten years; Joe Biden’s “spending extravaganza” is not reversed; the tax code is now a mess of new deductions and exemptions; the list goes on. But the details are less important than the “overall picture of political dysfunction and economic ineptitude”. Instead of working to boost the better parts of Trump’s economic ideas and acting as “constitutional ballast” against the bad parts, Congress is “diluting the good stuff and doubling down on the madness”, leading to bigger tax cuts, minimal spending restraint and “ruinous” global trade policies.

The signs all point to the “advancing economic derangement” of America: policy unpredictability, fiscal disorder and “erratic interventionism on the shifting whims of a mercurial leader”. We have a president who makes radical changes to tariffs based on “economically dim views about international trade”, before changing them again and again with no notice or consultation. We have a president who believes he has the authority to dictate the prices at Walmart and how Apple should arrange its supply chains, and who wants to stop the world’s brightest minds from coming to the US and contributing to the country’s world-beating science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. And we have a Congress that ignores its constitutional responsibility to rein all this in, and instead compounds the problem with “politically expedient and economically reckless” contributions of its own. “This great republic is moving steadily up the steep curve of the banana.”

🤬🤑One person who’s unimpressed by Trump’s massive spending bill is Elon Musk, says Joe Miller in the FT. The Tesla founder says he is “disappointed” to see the president he previously bankrolled increasing the US budget deficit and undermining the work of Musk’s controversial government cost-cutting team. “I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful,” the world’s richest man told CBS News. “But I don’t know if it can be both.”