US authorities have released new images of the man they believe shot dead conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, along with CCTV footage of the suspect jumping off a roof and fleeing the scene. The FBI, which has so far failed to identify the killer, has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Former Brazilian president and Donald Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup. A panel of five Supreme Court justices found the right-wing politician guilty of leading a conspiracy aimed at keeping him in power after he lost the 2022 election. Trump said the ruling was “very much like they tried to do with me”. Tourists driving in Scotland can now fit their vehicles with “T plates”, a green version of learners’ “L plates”. The stickers, available to buy online, were declared legal by Transport Scotland after a sharp increase in crashes linked to a tourism boom in the Highlands, often involving travellers unfamiliar with driving on the left. Och aye.

What this “needless” scandal tells us about Starmer

In the end, Keir Starmer had to fire Peter Mandelson, says Nick Cohen in The Spectator. It’s a damning indictment of his judgement that he made the New Labour veteran Britain’s ambassador to the US in the first place. Some in government are said to have known about Mandelson’s close ties to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein at the time of his appointment. But Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s “supposedly Machiavellian” chief of staff, is apparently a full-on “Mandelson protégé” and pushed hard for his scandal-prone mentor to be given the job. McSweeney is even said to have sought Mandy’s advice on the Cabinet reshuffle last week, at a time when anyone with half a political brain knew the so-called Prince of Darkness was in trouble. “Apparently McSweeney does not possess half a political brain.”

More broadly, this whole “needless” mess exposes Starmer’s folly in tying himself to veterans of Tony Blair’s government. The PM doesn’t seem to have grasped just how tainted Blair and his fellow “third way” pioneers – the likes of Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder – have become. These centre-left leaders insisted that they embraced oligarchs only as a “regrettably necessary electoral tactic”. But once they left office it became clear this wasn’t true: far from hating billionaires, “they liked them and wanted to be like them”. So you had Blair cosying up to Rupert Murdoch and now Donald Trump; Schröder becoming pals with Vladimir Putin; the Clintons embracing Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This shameless personal enrichment produced “mass disillusion with centre-left politics”, and fuelled right-wing populism by adding to the feeling that all politicians are “in it for themselves”. If Starmer wants to see out his first term, “he needs to ditch Blair as quickly as he ditched Mandelson”.

🏇🇺🇸 With Donald Trump coming to the UK for his second state visit next week, says Jessica Elgot in The Guardian, Starmer will be keen to get a new US ambassador appointed pronto. Runners and riders include veteran diplomat Karen Pierce, Mandelson’s highly rated predecessor; Richard Moore, the outgoing head of MI6; and the former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was shortlisted for the role last year. George Osborne is also telling anyone who’ll listen that he was approached last time, but after the Mandelson mess the former Tory chancellor will probably be considered too risky.

I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on pretty much everything, says Ezra Klein in The New York Times, but he was “practising politics in exactly the right way”. He was showing up to college campuses and talking, respectfully and sincerely, with “anyone who would talk to him”. And it was extraordinarily effective. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was “absolute”, Kirk “showed up again and again to break it”. Slowly, then all at once, he did exactly that: college-age voters moved sharply right in the 2024 election.

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What Britain does best

At the risk of contradicting the widespread belief that everything in Britain is broken, says Danny Finkelstein in The Times, it’s worth pointing something out. “Children in England are the best readers in the western world.” They’re also a lot better at maths than they used to be – from 27th in the global rankings in 2009 to 11th in 2022 – and much better-behaved. The man responsible is former Tory MP Nick Gibb, who outlines his experiences in a new book, Reforming Lessons. Gibb was schools minister under David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, giving him enough time to work out what was going wrong and to see through the changes required.

What he realised was that the traditional political arguments over how schools were organised, or the benefits of grammar schools, were beside the point. What mattered was that the progressive ideas that had taken hold – including so-called “child-centred learning”, the idea that each child should be taught in a different way, and a “softly-softly” approach to discipline – had been a failure. So Gibb took what he called an “evidence-based” approach. He grasped, for example, that synthetic phonics – using letter sounds as building blocks – was a better way of teaching reading than expecting children to recognise whole words. He insisted on high expectations of all, yearly exams and teacher-led lessons. A powerful “side-by-side test” of this theory comes from Scotland, which moved further towards the old progressive ideas, and it proved a “gigantic flop”. Many lessons can be drawn from this: cabinet reshuffles are disruptive; money isn’t everything. But the most important is that public policy is not doomed to failure. “We can do something about our problems.”

A new US startup is using artificial intelligence to cheaply mass-produce thousands of episodes a week of entirely made-up podcasts with entirely made-up hosts, says Caitlin Huston in The Hollywood Reporter. Inception Point AI reckons each episode costs just a dollar to make, and ads can be automatically inserted, so only 20 people have to listen to each one for it to become profitable. Topics are chosen using AI, generally based on whatever is trending online. “People who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop,” says CEO Jeanine Wright, “are probably lazy luddites.” Watch out, Rory and Alastair.

Are Britons getting sicker, asks Ross Clark in The Spectator, or is our health improving? New figures show the average number of sick days per worker has gone up from under six a year to more than nine, with the most common reason for long absences being “mental health”, at 41%. (This is excluding the 6.5 million who claim out-of-work benefits, up from under four million in the 2010s.) Yet between 2011 and 2021, the number of people saying they enjoy good health increased, especially among older workers. Britain’s real sickness, it seems, is a virus that persuades us we are “too ill to earn a living”.

It’s the world’s highest bridge, says Hans van Leeuwen in The Daily Telegraph, which is due to open to cars later this September, with a cafe and bungee jumping due to follow. The Huajiang Canyon Bridge, which connects two mountains in China’s Guizhou province, is 1.8 miles long and stands 625 metres above the river below. Astonishingly, construction began only three years ago – the UK, by comparison, has taken the same length of time to not-quite-finish a small motorway overpass near Manchester.