Villain
Will Smith, who appears to have used AI to edit the crowds at his shows in a video on social media. The actor and hip-hop star is currently on tour in the UK, and posted a selection of clips from venues including Scarborough, London and Wolverhampton. But fans say the video is riddled with obvious deepfakes (identifiable from distorted faces and odd-looking hands with misplaced fingers), including an ostensibly fan-made sign that reads “You Can Make It [one of Smith’s songs] helped me survive cancer. Thx Will”, which experts say has all the hallmarks of being entirely made up.

Villain
Keir Starmer, who recently boasted – quite wrongly – that his government had made it “cheaper” to travel by bus. “The £3 bus fare cap,” the prime minister declared, “has already cut costs for families.” It’s a curious claim, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Under the Conservative government, the bus fare cap was £2, rising to £3 at the start of this year. “I’m no Alan Turing”, but I’m sure when I was at school “three was generally considered to be a larger number than two”. Unless Starmer is talking about families who can no longer afford the bus, and cannot reach the shops on foot, and so buy nothing. “Their costs have indeed been cut.”

Hero
Charlie Ireland, Jeremy Clarkson’s affable land agent on the hit Amazon TV show Clarkson’s Farm, who has inspired a new generation to apply to agricultural college. Daniella Miles, head of recruitment at Cirencester, tells The Times that while interest in agricultural courses has remained steady, applications for rural land management – as practiced by “Cheerful Charlie” – have “really gone up” in the past year. Harper Adams University, which has its own 550-hectare working farm, reports a similar effect, as does Plumpton College, where one recent graduate says enrolment in some courses “tripled” while she was there, specifically crediting Clarkson’s Farm and social media.

Hero
Friedrich Merz, who is the only politician in the Western world to level with voters, says The Wall Street Journal. The German Chancellor said at a Christian Democratic Union conference on Saturday that “the welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy”. Because government handouts have grown so large, and penetrate so deeply into the middle class, conventional leaders and populists alike dodge the difficult reforms needed. Perhaps Merz is the man to finally break the taboo.

Villain
The Australian bank ANZ, which accidentally sent an email to more than 100 senior staff asking them to return their laptops, without having told them they were being fired. The firm has issued an apology and offered “psychological counselling” to the affected bankers, says the FT, but held an online call later that day confirming that those who had received the rogue email were, in fact, surplus to requirements.

In 1954, Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of the Guinness brewery, got into a heated debate at a shooting party over which was the fastest game bird – grouse or golden plover. It persuaded him of the need for an “authoritative almanac” that could settle such arguments once and for all, says Lucy Bannerman in The Times. He enlisted the help of Fleet Street fact-finders Norris and Ross McWhirter – having been the timekeeper for Roger Bannister’s world record-breaking sub-four-minute mile, Norris was “no stranger to a stopwatch” – and together they compiled and wrote the first book of Guinness World Records.

Ever since, it has catalogued humanity’s wildest – and most “seemingly pointless” – endeavours. A West Yorkshire high school made the largest “toast mosaic” (189.5sq m); Nick Stoeberl has the world’s longest tongue (10.1cm); Najee Richardson can do the “farthest backflip between hanging ropes” (19ft); and British inventor Colin Furze has engineered the world’s fastest pram (a truly alarming 53.46mph). To mark 70 years of “celebrating superlatives” Guinness has announced 70 new, as yet unclaimed, titles, including: most anchovies eaten in a minute, most t-shirts put on in 30 seconds, most kisses by a pair in 30 seconds, most whoopee cushions sat on in one minute by a team of two, fastest 400m sack race, most origami cranes made in three minutes by an under-16, and most water moved by the hands in 30 seconds. If you’re tempted, have a look at the rest here.

It took Britain and France more battles than you can count – Hastings, Agincourt, Castillon, Waterloo and so on – to conclude they are on the same side, says Phillip Stephens in the FT. Even today, it’s hard to understand how two nations with so much in common – geography, history, “unbridled national pride”, shared international and economic interests – can be so different. So Richard Vinen’s “intriguing and deeply researched” biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, or “The Last Titans” as he calls them, is well-timed. While Churchill is a “byword for British resilience”, de Gaulle kept alive the idea of a proudly independent France. Together, as Vinen shows, the two leaders – “very different but similarly stubborn” – are a metaphor for the “cacophony of tensions, collisions and sneaking mutual admiration” that both separates and binds their nations.

The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle by Richard Vinen is available to order here.