Two key aides to Nigel Farage have stepped down pending the outcome of an investigation after an undercover sting suggested they knowingly sought illegal overseas funding. Channel 4 News broadcast footage of the Reform UK leader’s right hand man, Dan Jukes, and the party’s head of policy, James Orr, talking to reporters posing as potential donors about paying for three opinion polls. Javier Milei has made a televised address saying the “winds of change” are favourable to Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands. The Argentinian president cited Donald Trump’s suggestion earlier this week that he was reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the territory, and said he would sanction firms working on a new oil and gas development in the North Falkland Basin. Two workers have been rescued from a hydropower tunnel in Nepal nine days after the catastrophic floods that left at least 1,259 dead and more than 5,000 missing. Nearly 40 people are still thought to be trapped in the tunnel, which has what one expert calls a “Goldilocks zone” that could be “friendly to life”.

For months, says Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal, everyone thought Donald Trump would take the “easy exit” in the Iran war: let Tehran keep its “bogus sovereignty” over the Strait of Hormuz, and declare the operation a success because the Iranian military and nuclear programme lie in ruins. You can understand the temptation. The conflict remains unpopular, and every day seems to bring new media reports about weapons shortages and “grumbling” military commanders. But Trump now understands, after his endless “boasts and threats and migraine-inducing equivocations”, that the regime has to collapse if he wants to call the war a success without being laughed at. “Regime change or failure – pick one.”

Another, little-acknowledged, reason why the US president is holding out is that it’s personal. Would-be assassins linked to Iran have made at least two attempts on his life in the past couple of years. At the week-long funeral of Ali Khamenei, regime toadies waved placards offering money for killing him. Last week, Iranian state media aired a three-minute video offering $10m to anyone who kills his youngest son, Barron, with a supposed guide to the 20-year-old’s usual whereabouts. Other state outlets have urged attacks on Melania and Ivanka. What people forget is that none of this will “expire” when Trump leaves office in 2029. It was 33 years after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie that an American-born Islamist finally acted on it in 2022. Tehran denied all knowledge of the assassination plot but “celebrated Mr Rushdie’s near-fatal injury all the same”. Hatred like this doesn’t mellow. As long as the 1979 revolution lives, “its bloodlust will too”.

James Orr, who stood down as Reform UK’s policy chief this morning after an undercover sting, was 25 when he had his “religious awakening”, say Helen Warrell and Ramsay Hodgson in the FT. It was on New Year’s Day 2003, just off a black run above Verbier. Orr, extremely hungover, was hurtling down a storm-ravaged gully with his sister when he suddenly shouted at her to stop. Peering through the mist, they realised they were on the roof of a chalet, “barely a ski’s length from a sheer drop on to jagged rocks”. The cloud broke, revealing an 8ft crucifix propping up the house. When his sister asked how he had sensed danger, he foggily remembered drunkenly uttering a sceptical prayer the night before, challenging God to reveal himself. “Here was the sign.”

British tech tycoon James Dyson has released his first toothbrush, says Tom Ravenscroft in Dezeen. The Dyson CameraJet includes a tiny camera that watches while you brush and directs a precision spurt of mouthwash at the gaps between your teeth. Most people don’t floss, says Dyson, “even though we know we should”. By combining “a camera, machine learning, precision fluid dynamics, advanced brushing technologies, connectivity and WiFi”, he says, “Dyson CameraJet introduces an entirely new way to keep your mouth healthy”. At £420, you’d hope so.

Here’s something we can surely all agree on, says Celia Walden in The Telegraph: anything that has survived “flour bombs, rotten-fruit peltings and the sustained wrath of the Women’s Liberation Movement” has earned its place in popular culture. So it is with the Miss World contest, which is still going strong. A scarcely believable two billion people are set to watch the beauty gala’s 75th anniversary final tomorrow – a whopping 12 times more than tuned in for last year’s Eurovision and more than 100 times the viewership for the Oscars. How heartening, in these “po-faced times”, that something so gloriously off-message can attract such a massive audience.

Yet one place they won’t be watching is here in Britain, where the contest originated. As the chief executive of the Miss World Organisation told me in 2019, we British are uniquely “apologetic about beauty”. Tell a Latin girl she’s beautiful and she’ll thank you; say it to a British girl and she’ll immediately think: “Why are you saying that?” We’re hilariously hypocritical about it, too. Those second-wave feminists criticising beauty contests as “demeaning” and “patriarchal” are the same ones chanting “my body, my choice” about abortion. And how many of those who claim they are offended by Miss World buy clothing and handbags from companies flogging their products with semi-naked women? Or follow influencers “flaunting far more than any Miss World contestant on Instagram daily”? We are in an era of “peak self-objectification”, in which OnlyFans creators selling shots of toe cleavage to foot fetishists are applauded for being “girl bosses”. How, in that context, can anyone still have an issue with a few “perfect human specimens” strutting around a stage?

The latest romance trend on TikTok is the rather judgy “Illiterate Boyfriend” test, says Alaina Demopoulos in The Guardian. Female users have compiled a list of relatively uncommon words – hyperbole, cynicism, diaphragmatic and so on – and ask their boyfriends to read them out loud. Most fail badly. In one video with more than nine million views, an American boyfriend pronounces fuchsia “foo-chee-ah” and hors d’oeuvres “hoard of ours”. He does manage to nail “colonel” and “regime”, prompting one commenter to brand him “obviously a Republican” (🙄). When another chap pronounces queue “qwi-wee”, a commenter is incredulous. “And you still have sex with him?”

Volodymyr Zelensky has condemned two of Ukraine’s intelligence agencies over a shoot-out between their respective agents on the streets of Kyiv, says Carlotta Gall in The New York Times. Officers from the country’s military intelligence agency (HUR) and State Security Service (SBU) got into the armed confrontation in broad daylight on Wednesday morning over the SBU’s detention of Stepan Kaplunov, the deputy commander of a third group made up of anti-Kremlin Russian dissidents and overseen by the HUR. Three HUR agents were shot, one critically. Zelensky called it “absolutely shameful”, adding: “Here in Ukraine, shooting is permitted only at Russian occupiers.”

It’s Lt Col Jonny Thompson, says Tony Jones in The Independent, the so-called “hot equerry” who is retiring from royal service. King Charles’s personal assistant, who previously served under Queen Elizabeth II, became a viral sensation when he was spotted beside Liz Truss in 2022, caused a similar stir at the Coronation the following year and then again during the King and Queen’s US tour earlier this year. Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who met him while waiting to shake hands with Charles, described the 43-year-old as “totally charming, completely cool, exceedingly handsome”.