Pope Leo XIV has been diagnosed with lung cancer following surgery to remove a growth on his right lung on Tuesday. The Vatican says the 71-year-old pontiff has lung adenocarcinoma and will undergo more tests to see if the disease has spread, but that the Holy Father is recovering well from the 90-minute operation. Chancellor John Healey is expected to pay for all new giveaways in this month’s budget with higher taxes or spending cuts rather than more borrowing, in line with the IMF’s recommendation. People briefed on budget preparations told the FT that the fiscal package would be “scorecard positive” in 2029-30, meaning all extra discretionary spending will be fully funded. A new relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex has been identified from a fossil that had been sitting in a drawer in the Natural History Museum for nearly 100 years. The 120-million-year-old predator, which has been given the name Invictibellatrix amberina, meaning “unconquered female warrior found in amber”, had long claws and was about the size of a tiger.

Saudi Arabia is increasingly “under siege” by the Houthis, says The Economist. The Iran-backed Yemeni rebels have stepped up their missile and drone attacks in recent weeks, culminating in a strike on the international airport in Riyadh on Saturday that killed at least 12 people and injured more than 300 – the deadliest assault on the Gulf kingdom in more than a decade. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has “no good options”. A long war would not only be almost impossible to win, it would also upend his plans for the economic diversification he is hoping will turn Saudi Arabia into a Dubai-style hub. And cutting a deal would only teach the Houthis that if they want concessions, attacks on civilian infrastructure are an “effective form of blackmail”.

The idea that the Houthis will ever do a deal is for the birds, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic. Their stated goals are uncomplicated, if ambitious: “the ‘death’ of America, Israel, and their allies, and an apocalyptic victory for Islam”. Their reasons for attacking Saudi Arabia are obvious and non-negotiable. In recent decades, the Saudis have consciously traded cosmic goals (the spread of Sunni Islam) for local ones, like opening hipster coffee shops in Jeddah and hosting pro-wrestling competitions in Riyadh. To religious maniacs like the Houthis, the Saudis are no longer Muslims at all, but “Zionists” who follow “Satan”. Sensible Saudi leaders, the Houthi leadership insist, would “join” their cause. That’s obviously never going to happen. Which means the footage of travellers dressed for pilgrimage to Mecca being blown off their feet in Riyadh’s airport won’t be the last of its kind. All the Houthis have ever done well is fight. They are showing no signs of wanting to stop.

🫣🇸🇦 You may wonder why Saudi Arabia is constantly begging for outside help to defend itself, says Edward Luttwak in UnHerd, when it has a 350,000-strong military, top-of-the-range weapons and officers trained at elite Western academies. It’s because what the kingdom fears most is a coup d’état. To guard against this, its rulers have pursued a “divide and rule” strategy within their own military: the different combat elements are geographically separated across the country, each one commanded by a different prince. That makes a unified offensive against the Houthis all but impossible.

One worry after the arrest last week of former German spy chief August Hanning is that he might have sold secrets shared by MI6. In fact, says David Blair in The Telegraph, Germany is one country where the arrest of a former top spook is less alarming than you might suppose. Berlin punches far below its weight in intelligence, mainly because its modern agencies were built from the ashes of the Gestapo and the Stasi, meaning they operate in a thicket of regulations. Their intelligence-gathering operations are so lacking – agents can’t break into premises or target priests, lawyers, doctors or journalists – that they’re really “more of a think tank”.

Elon Musk has quietly funnelled more than a quarter of a billion dollars into the Republicans’ midterm election efforts, says Theodore Schleifer in The New York Times, making the one-time trillionaire “by far” the largest donor of this election cycle. Over the summer he gave the party’s Senate Leadership Fund $158m – one of the largest political donations in US history and more than the group’s Democratic equivalent raised from all donors over the same period.

French students are rioting over the state of their education system, says Niall Ferguson in The Free Press. The kids are out on the streets of Madrid too, incensed by Spain’s housing crisis. In Brussels, the gripe du jour is government budget cuts. Youthful revolutionaries in Europe are nothing new – think of the Paris uprising of 1968 – but the generational politics of 2026 is very different. Since 1960, across the 38 OECD nations, the number of retirees per 100 working-age people has doubled from 15 to 30. And as the oldie population has ballooned, politicians have developed a dangerous habit of courting pensioners with unaffordable handouts in the knowledge they have a high turnout rate in elections.

The fiscal crises in France, Britain and Italy are rooted in “generational imbalances” in welfare and tax systems, and exacerbated by reflexive indulgent spending every time something nasty happens – a financial crisis, say, or a pandemic. Spending on British over-65s has risen by 2.5 percentage points of GDP since 2000; in France it’s closer to three points. In that time, the public cost of care for Britain’s pensioners has doubled. And since 2011, they’ve enjoyed the now unaffordable triple-lock pension – a perk they may lose under Andy Burnham but only to fund something else that will benefit them, namely a new National Care Service. In both France and Britain this century, real median incomes for over-64s have risen by almost 50% more than those for 18-to-64-year-olds. Put simply: “It has paid better in both countries to be retired than to be employed.” With public debt levels now totally unsustainable, the day of reckoning for the over-investment in the old, and under-investment in the young, has arrived.

A pumpkin grower from Rhode Island has likely broken the world record for the heaviest pumpkin just a week after British grower Ian Paton set the record in Hampshire, says CTV News. Ron Wallace took home $3,500 for his 1,431kg squash – Paton’s weighed in at 1,296kg – at a local competition and is now waiting for Guinness World Records officials to verify his achievement. “It’s truly massive,” he said. “It was a pleasure to grow.”

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, is “churning out Catholic priests”, says Joshua Spencer in 1843 magazine. In 2024, there were around 4,150 seminarians in the country, compared to just 104 in Ireland. Many of them study at Ledalero, a training college on the island of Flores, where around 85% of the two million residents are Catholic. Such enclaves produce enough priests to serve not only local dioceses but also congregations abroad, “from Angola to Austria”. And these so-called “reverse missionaries” make up a rising share of the church’s leadership: Asia has 36 cardinals, second only to Europe.

It’s Donald Trump’s new press secretary, says Megan Brand in NBC News. Katie Zacharia, previously a Republican commentator and advisor to the company that runs the president’s social media site, Truth Social, gave an unusually brisk 15-minute first briefing to the White House press corps yesterday, taking questions from only three (conservative) outlets Fox News, Breitbart and the Daily Mail. The 41-year-old made one unfortunate slip-up, referring to her husband as “my president”, but Trump was impressed, saying afterwards: “She did very good.”