Keir Starmer nominated a former adviser for a peerage despite knowing he had campaigned for a councillor charged with child sex offences. The PM, who removed the whip from Lord Doyle this week, said his former communications chief “did not give a full account of his actions” before his nomination. Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire co-owner of Manchester United and founder of chemicals giant Ineos, has been criticised for saying yesterday that the UK has been “colonised by immigrants” who are costing “too much money”. Britain’s seventh-richest man said this morning he was sorry that “my choice of language has offended some people”, but insisted it was “important” to raise the issue. Two senior employees at American AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic have resigned, issuing public warnings about the direction of the companies. Zoë Hitzig left her role as a researcher at OpenAI, expressing “deep reservations” about the company’s strategy, while Mrinank Sharma stepped down from leading Anthropic’s safeguards research team, warning that the “world is in peril”.

The Epstein files are full of Russian names, says Seva Gunitsky in UnHerd. One of the late paedophile’s most frequent contacts was FSB officer Sergey Belyakov. Epstein helped Belyakov locate tax havens, evade sanctions and meet US tech titans, and Belyakov helped Epstein scare (at least) one of his “Russian girls” into silence. The financier was also chummy with a former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, finding his son a job and briefing him on how to handle Donald Trump before a summit that worked out to Russia’s advantage. And he helped launder the reputations of several Russian intelligence agents by introducing them to high-profile Americans as legitimate businessmen, allowing them to operate in the US without suspicion. To sensible, educated liberals, the idea that Epstein was a Russian agent has always looked like a loopy internet conspiracy. The facts, as we have them, look “almost designed to exploit this blind spot”.

The sheer volume of incriminating evidence Epstein collected at his bugged properties suggests a “systematic and organised effort” to harvest compromising material on men of power, says Ben Macintyre in The Times. Last week, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said openly what Western intelligence services are saying in private: “The suspicion is that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organised by Russian intelligence services.” The Russians are old hands at generating “kompromat” – an elision of “compromise” and “material”, with the sinister bonus that “mat” is Russian for “checkmate”. Today, Polish, French and British intelligence agencies are scrambling to establish whether this was, indeed, the “world’s largest honeytrap operation”. On current evidence, it’s impossible to say for sure that Epstein was a Russian agent, but in espionage it’s always worth asking: cui bono? No one will be enjoying all this more than Vladimir Putin, “the Kremlin’s king of kompromat”.

📽️🫢 In 1999, grainy footage emerged of Russia’s prosecutor-general, Yuri Skuratov, who at the time was investigating President Boris Yeltsin for corruption, in bed with two prostitutes. The then head of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, went on TV to declare the video genuine, ending Skuratov’s political career and launching his own. A year later, Putin was elected president. Mat.

If you’ve ever wondered what a billionaire’s personal finances look like, says The Wall Street Journal, the Epstein files provide a “rare look”. The financier Leon Black paid the late paedophile $158m for financial advice. In 2015, when Black’s net worth was $5bn, his assets included seven homes, 11 cars, a Gulfstream jet, a Benetti yacht, an $82m rare book collection and Chinese bronzes worth £335m. His dozens of bank accounts contained a whopping $154m in cash, presumably for emergencies. Over two months that year, he splurged $27,000 on eating out, $35,000 on clothes and an impressive $67,000 on booze.

Something extraordinary happened at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, says Tom Peck in The Times: someone said something funny. “Mr Speaker, rubbish is building up right beneath my very nose,” declared Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. “It’s becoming a bit of a problem.” He was talking about bin strikes in his city, but it happened that beneath his nose in the House of Commons – sitting just in front of him – was a row of Reform MPs. Almost everyone found it funny, including Nigel Farage, who shared a “sporting handshake” with Khan afterwards. Watch the full clip here.

Young men and women seem to be “increasingly fed up with one another”, says Sarah O’Connor in the FT: they are spending less time hanging out face-to-face; online romance often stalls at the “talking stage” for fear of rejection; and in politics, everywhere from the US to Germany, South Korea and Tunisia, they are moving in opposite directions, with men becoming more conservative, and women more liberal. Enter, with grim inevitability, AI girlfriends and boyfriends. It’s hard to imagine more fertile ground for the arrival of these simpering chatbots who live on your screen, won’t hurt, reject or ignore you, and can be tweaked to embody your desires and endorse your values. It should be no surprise that business is booming.

In recent years, scores of “AI companion” platforms have sprung up. One survey found that 31% of young American men and 23% of young women had chatted with an AI system designed to simulate romance. In the US, the keenest users are “lonely young men in their parents’ basements”, but in China the market is aimed at women in their twenties and thirties who are more likely than their male peers to go to university and then move to a city for work. One obvious worry is that the tech firms that make these bots are strongly incentivised to manipulate users into spending more time and money on their platforms. A common add-on is “additional storage” – paying to prevent the companion from forgetting you. Possibly worse is the effect on real-world relationships. Dating apps already encourage the idea that love is like online shopping – keep swiping and you’re bound to find something better. Who will settle for a mucky, confusing human when they’ve got used to an always-attentive bot that never leaves dirty dishes in the sink?

The modern Olympics includes a total of 43 sports across the summer and winter events, says Logan DeLoye in Mental Floss. But the list has changed over time. In 1900, Belgium’s Leon de Lunden shot 21 live pigeons in a row to take home the gold. The 1912 games in Stockholm included “pistol duelling”, in which world-renowned marksmen would line up and fire at mannequins in coats with targets painted on their chests. Several Olympics between 1912 and 1948 included simply “art”, in which competitors could submit any work “inspired by sport” to the “notably disorganised” judges, who occasionally didn’t like anything, so awarded no medals.

To The Daily Telegraph:

When I was a BBC obituary editor, I made sure that my reflections on the deaths of the great and the good avoided any euphemisms. I do recall my shudder when coming across the deaths column in a Los Angeles newspaper headed “Passings”. A more robust approach was taken in the past. One 19th-century Cornish newspaper carried an account of the death of an elderly lady that ended with the line: “She fell from her chair, a corpse.”

Nick Serpell
Beaminster, Dorset

It’s The Loop, says Tom Ravenscroft in Dezeen, a bonkers high-speed rail concept proposed by RIBA president Chris Williamson. The raised railway line would in theory connect the English cities of Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool with Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, Bangor in Wales, Dublin in Ireland and Belfast in Northern Ireland. The estimated £130bn project – which Williamson says, rather gamely, was “informed by Neom”, the disastrous mega project in the Saudi desert – is meant as a “manifesto” to “inspire” and “provoke”. No mention of whether he means it to be, you know, “built”.