Reform UK has accused the government of trying to “retrospectively change the rules” after Angela Rayner hinted that the party could be forced to return £72m donated by two cryptocurrency billionaires. While the communities secretary didn’t comment specifically on the twin gifts of £36m each by Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, she said it was “very clear” when new rules on foreign donors were proposed in March that they would apply retrospectively. Oil prices climbed to $108 a barrel this morning, following a wave of attacks last week on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. On Friday, Riyadh was forced to shut down a vital pipeline that enables the kingdom to export crude from its oil-rich east to its west coast. Alexander Zverev won the US Open last night without realising it. The 29-year-old German was so focused that when opponent Ben Shelton fluffed his shot on championship point, Zverev turned around and began to prepare for his next return of serve (pictured). “Teachers always tell you, ‘Forget about the score,’” he said. “I forgot about the score.”

It is often said that America “lost” the quarter of a century after 9/11, says Janan Ganesh in the FT: blundering into not one but two unwinnable wars, electing a “rogue” president in part to punish the elites who oversaw those follies. Osama bin Laden clearly “deranged the far enemy”. But much less is said about how he fared with the “near enemy”. The al-Qaeda founder wanted to sweep aside what he considered the “apostate regimes” of the Middle East. He was exiled from his native Saudi Arabia for complaining that the regime was, effectively, “not repressive enough”. In an open letter to the Saudi king in 2004 he set out all that was profane in his homeland, from the “usurious transactions” to the “infidels as allies”. Yet today, Riyadh is more liberal – and US-aligned – than ever.

Western music is becoming more popular by the day, while Saudi Arabia’s football league is luring genuine “prime-age” stars from European clubs. The London restaurant group JKS, “which cannot see the wallpaper through all its Michelin stars”, has opened a branch of Gymkhana in Riyadh. No, it doesn’t yet serve alcohol, but a woman can now drive there herself. If Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is serious about replacing Dubai as the expat capital of the Gulf, these permissive reforms will only accelerate. As for the infidels, over the summer bin Salman further strengthened the US-Saudi alliance with a nuclear deal. In short, if bin Laden influenced his homeland at all, it was in the opposite direction to what he hoped. That’s what makes 9/11 such an odd historical event: it was a “double defeat” that left two parallel disappointments. “It is just that westerners dwell on America’s.”

Much of the canned “mackerel” sold in British supermarkets now contains precisely zero mackerel, say Mari Novik and Antonia Cundy in the FT. Amid worries about dwindling stocks, major suppliers, including Princes, now use Chilean jack mackerel, an entirely unrelated fish that happens to have “mackerel” in its name and contains around half as much omega-3, as well as larger bones and less oily flesh. “It smells rather metallic,” says canned seafood reviewer Marcus Ansell on Instagram, in a recent video about Lidl’s version. “Ugh, just like cheap, rubbish tuna.”

Princess Diana’s so-called “revenge dress” is up for auction, say Brandon Livesay and Aleks Phillips on BBC News. In 1994, in what became an “iconic pop-culture moment”, the late Princess of Wales arrived at a party at the Serpentine Gallery wearing the strapless silk number as her husband, then the Prince of Wales, admitted to his infidelity in a televised interview. Sotheby’s expects the dress to fetch £220,000 when it goes under the hammer on 9 December, but after Diana’s famous red-and-white sheep jumper fetched $1.1m in 2023, many predict it will go for much more. Register to bid here.

Watching Ed Miliband announce that West Bank settlements would be subject to British sanctions, I felt a “tremor of deep unease”, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. I agree the settlements are indefensible, the violence is intolerable, and the blind eye turned by the “extremist” government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is a betrayal not just of innocent Palestinians but of Israel itself. But look who cheered: Western “progressives” and Hamas – an “ever-more visible pincer movement” of leftwing extremism and “Islamofascism”. The world is full of human rights abuses. Why do we not sanction the Chinese over their genocide in Xinjiang? Or Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, or the UAE, which provides military support to Sudanese forces implicated in mass murder and rape? “I think we know the answer.”

Perhaps the decisive moment in Palestine becoming a cause célèbre was the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Marxist academics saw their world collapse. Under capitalism, the working classes were enjoying booming living standards; Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had huge popularity among “the proles”. The brutalised workers of eastern Europe saw capitalism not as enslavement but liberation. Yet instead of binning their debunked anti-Western ideology, Marxists went looking for new “oppressed” groups to liberate. Rather than the global proletariat, left-wingers would liberate trans people, queer people, black people and so on. As Nancy Fraser put it in her influential 1995 essay From Redistribution to Recognition: “In these ‘post-socialist’ conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilisation.” This is how progressives and racist, homophobic, misogynist Islamists have ended up in what should be an impossible alliance. One claims to worship freedom, the other lives for repression. But in Palestine – poor brown Muslims “oppressed” by evil white capitalists – they have found their point of convergence: “The Jews.”

Clues by Sam is a testing logic puzzle which presents a 4x5 grid of people, each with a name and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals by using the clues – you’re given one to kick you off – that each person reveals when you correctly guess their status. The game gets harder each day from Monday to Sunday. Give it a go here.

Zoos across America are letting their animals play around with technology in a bid to recreate what their lives outside captivity would be like, and allow them to “act more wild”, says Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. At Stone Zoo in Massachusetts, a 10-year-old arctic fox has a “puzzle box”, while two black bears play with a motion-sensitive bubble machine. At Maryland Zoo, polar bears have a robotic hunting simulation, while at Zoo Atlanta elephants mess around with an “interactive audio wall”, penguins play iPad games designed for pet cats, and orangutans have been taught to play on an Xbox.

It’s the “Bey Keeper Collector’s Box”, says Caitlin Moran in The Times: a wooden crate on Beyoncé’s website that costs a whopping $948.01. That price, for “an empty wooden box” – supposedly designed for storing vinyl records – has prompted fury among the singer’s fans online. “For that,” wrote one, “I need you to pop out of the box and perform.” Particularly angry were the woodworking community, who complained about the joinery – “That’s not even nice dovetail joints, it’s just BOX JOINTS” – and the cheap wood used. “Pine is the wood of poor people,” explained one Reddit user, “and outhouses.”