Andy Burnham says he will review “all possible options” to deport the ringleader of a Rochdale rape gang who is set to be released from prison today. Shabir Ahmed, 73, was stripped of his British citizenship after his 2012 conviction, but reportedly cannot be sent home to his native Pakistan because of a loophole in the law that prevents the deportation of Commonwealth migrants who arrived in the UK before 1973. Scientists in the US have created a synthetic cell that can feed, grow, replicate its DNA and divide, a crucial step towards creating new forms of life from scratch. The hope is that SpudCell, named for its potato-like shape, will pave the way for more advanced lab-grown cells that will give us new ways to make medicine, food and materials. Call him “Harry Houdini”, says the Daily Star, after England came from behind to beat World Cup minnows DR Congo 2-1 thanks to two goals from captain Harry Kane. The Three Lions will face co-hosts Mexico at their feisty Azteca Stadium in the round of 16, with kick-off at the deeply antisocial time of 1am on Monday morning.

The idea that AI will steal all our jobs has been much hyped by the tech tycoons, says Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. But it’s worth noting what has happened in cases where jobs have actually been handed over to the technology. In March, Meta announced that anyone who got locked out of their Facebook or Instagram accounts would no longer speak to a customer service agent, but deal with specially trained AI. Scammers tricked the bot into handing over control of more than 20,000 Instagram accounts, including a senior official in Donald Trump’s administration. Air Canada disabled its AI chatbot after it wrongly promised a customer a refund, while McDonald’s scuttled the bot taking orders at drive-ins after viral videos showing it to be “wildly dysfunctional”, including once adding hundreds of chicken nuggets to a customer’s order.

What’s important to understand is that these cock-ups aren’t coding errors – they’re an inescapable feature of the large language models that all the major AI chatbots are built on. LLMs have no understanding of the world: they can’t reason, and they can’t check if their results are right or wrong except in limited circumstances like maths problems. We have been wowed by ChatGPT and Claude because they spit out natural-sounding language, which our brains have evolved to equate with human-like intelligence. But that’s totally misguided. The one area where AI is affecting the world of work is coding, where the result is either right or wrong (the app works or it doesn’t). But as anyone who does a normal job knows, most things don’t work like that. No matter how many spooky announcements Big Tech’s marketing departments put out.

👨‍💼📈 Not only is AI not destroying jobs, says Clara Murray in the FT, it appears to be having the exact reverse effect. According to a new study of 22,000 American companies, white-collar worker numbers increased 10.2% overall at the firms that used generative AI most intensely in the first two years after they first adopted it, with gains across occupation types and seniority levels. Even entry-level employment rose by 12%.

King Island is a “weirdly accurate indicator of global conflict”, says David Fickling in Bloomberg. The Australian islet contains Dolphin Mine – one of the world’s largest deposits of tungsten, a “preternaturally tough metal” used for bullet casings, shells and armour plating. The mine opened in 1917 to support munitions production in World War One, then shut down when peace broke out, before starting up again on the eve of World War Two. It reopened twice more – for Korea and Vietnam – then in 1990 it closed, seemingly for good. But since the start of 2025, tungsten prices are up eightfold. So Dolphin Mine is cranking back to life.

Andy Burnham’s ascent to No 10 could lead to the return of a New Labour veteran, says The Times: David Miliband. The former foreign secretary left parliament after losing the 2010 Labour leadership race to his brother Ed and has spent 13 (very lucrative) years running a humanitarian charity in New York. He is now eyeing a return as Foreign Secretary, and Burnham is said to be “keen on the idea”. The dilemma is whether he can have two Milibands in the great offices of state. As one cabinet minister puts it: “You cannot have more Milibands than women in the top jobs.”

If you want to understand why the traditional mainstream parties are fighting for attention, and Reform continue to lead the polls, you only need to know one name, says Stephen Pollard in The Spectator: “Shabir Ahmed”. Ahmed is being released from prison today after serving just 14 years of a 19-year prison sentence for multiple counts of rape and other sexual offences against girls in his capacity as leader of a Rochdale rape gang. This appalling criminal – who made victims as young as 12 call him “daddy” – is a Pakistani national, having had his dual British citizenship revoked after his conviction. But here is what will happen after this guest in our country, who has committed some of the worst crimes in its history, is released: “nothing”.

According to Probation Service documents leaked this week, Ahmed will remain in Britain because the Immigration Act 1971 says he can’t be deported. He arrived here before 1973 and lived here for more than five years before anyone suggested deporting him, so his removal is barred. This is a sickness. The scandal that led the police and local authorities to turn their backs on the victims of rapists like Ahmed is one of the most shocking and devastating in our history. Saying that they “cannot” be deported is merely further evidence of the moral depravity of our elites. The law is not an abstract thing handed down to us over which we have no control; we could change the law tomorrow if there was the political will to do so. When the system puts the rights of a despicable foreign national, responsible for the mass rape of children, ahead of his victims and the rest of us, is it any wonder so many have lost faith?

To mark the 30th anniversary of the driving theory test, The Telegraph has created a 10-question quiz of sample questions. Would you know, for example, what restrictions apply if you’re towing a trailer on a three-lane motorway? Or what liquid you should use to top up your battery fluid level? Give it a go here.

The website Below the Fold provides detailed analysis of everything The New York Times has published this century, providing a useful indicator of who and what the newspaper considers important. In the obituaries section, for example, the 10 people with the longest write-ups include such globally significant figures as Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger. But in ninth place is a less familiar name: Arthur O Sulzberger. Who was this Mr Sulzberger, deemed worthy of a longer obituary than Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela or Mikhail Gorbachev? He was none other than the publisher, chairman and chief executive of The New York Times.

It’s a 52-year-old broth, says Shan Li in The Wall Street Journal, which has been constantly on the slow simmer at the same restaurant in Thailand since 1974. The superannuated soup, which is four years older than its current guardian, Nattapong Kaweenuntawong, has been tended by the same family for three generations, and forms the backbone of the restaurant’s signature beef noodle soup. No precise recipe has been handed down through the generations. Instead, the family simply adds ingredients – fish sauce, soy sauce, chunks of beef, sachets of Chinese herbs – to taste each day. “We almost never take vacations,” says Kaweenuntawong. “I can’t leave the broth alone for long.”