Why I’ve cancelled my trip to America

Villains
The makers of an iconic early-2000s anti-piracy advert, which appears to have featured a pirated font. A social media user found that the dramatic thriller-style ad, which compares pirating films to stealing cars, handbags and televisions, used a typeface illegally cloned from a font licensed by designer Just van Rossum. “The campaign has always had the wrong tone,” van Rossum tells Sky News. “The irony of it having used a pirated font is just precious.”

Hero
Ewan Valentine, who inadvertently spent £20,000 buying back his own stolen car. The 36-year-old from Solihull began looking for a replacement for the 2016 Honda Civic Type-R shortly after it was boosted from his driveway, and quickly snapped up another model that looked “identical”. But he soon began recognising various items inside – a Tesco sandwich bag containing the locking wheel nut, some Christmas tree pines in the boot – and the penny finally dropped when he found his own address saved in the satnav.

Villain
A Chinese student who had to be rescued from the slopes of Mount Fuji twice in four days. The 27-year-old was airlifted from Japan’s highest peak last Tuesday after losing his crampons, only to get in trouble again when he went back to look for his mobile phone. No word on whether he found it.

Heroes
Four teenage entrepreneurs who raised $1.5m from investors to put on what they said was the world’s first “sperm race”. The event, at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, pitted samples from two university students on an 8in-long “racetrack” modelled on the female reproductive system, with video taken from microscopes and beamed out to cheering spectators. “Quite an odd way to spend one’s weekend,” says Sophia Money-Coutts on Substack, “although on balance I’d probably still rather watch this than the golf.” Enjoy the full race here.

Villains
Some dozy sailors in the US Navy, who allowed a $67m fighter jet to roll off the side of an aircraft carrier into the Red Sea. The crew were towing the plane on the hangar deck of the USS Harry Truman when they lost control and – very sensibly – jumped out of the way before it went overboard.

Labour’s Islamist gamble has backfired

Local elections are a chance to meet the “next generation of political idealists”, says Ed West on Substack. Take Maheen Kamran, a newly elected 18-year-old independent in Burnley, who wants to end what she calls “free mixing” between men and women. “Muslim women aren’t really comfortable with being involved with Muslim men,” she told PoliticsHome. “I’m sure we can have segregated areas.” Well, quite: “sensible policies for a happier Islamic Britain”. Kamran reflects a growing problem for Labour, which lost five seats to “Gaza independents” at the general election last July. That campaign was marred by grim scenes of intimidation, with Labour MPs such as Jess Philips and Jonathan Ashworth angrily jostled and jeered on election night. It was reminiscent of 18th-century electioneering, “minus the excuse of drunkenness”.

This development – “sectarian politics in England for the first time in a century” – has received surprisingly little attention. Sure, leftist groups appealing to Islamic issues have won before. But this was more overt, with the Palestinian flag coming to symbolise a new “political identity”. There’s no telling whether the shift away from Labour will be permanent, not least because Muslims obviously don’t vote in one big bloc. But the baradari clan system has a long record of delivering Pakistani votes – as Labour well knows, because it has long benefited from those very votes. The party is reluctant to address this issue head on: Philips blamed the “startling unpleasantness” she faced at her election count on “men”; Ashworth has stayed schtum despite at one point having to “hide in a vicarage” to escape a screaming pro-Palestinian mob. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy. Labour has long cosied up to Islamist misogynists, gay-hating bigots and anti-Semites for the sole purpose of winning power. “Now their allies have turned against them.”

The East End oyster shucker who conquered New York

Like so many good books, says Dwight Garner in The New York Times, I Regret Almost Everything is driven by its author’s dislikes. The new memoir by British restaurateur Keith McNally – who spent decades defining New York’s dining scene and made headlines in 2022 when he blackballed the appalling James Corden from his iconic SoHo brunch spot Balthazar – contains many: the name Keith; the word restaurateur (“does a plumber call himself a plombier?”); restaurants that close before midnight; Cat Stevens. He’s also down on men who claim the days their children were born were the best of their lives. McNally has five children, by two mothers, and he’s ambivalent about the benefits. “You’re never out of the woods with your own kids,” he writes. “Not even when you’re dead and buried.”

The book is also the story of an East End lad who hit the 1970s hippie trail and washed up in New York, working as an oyster shucker while trying to become an actor. Back in London, he had been introduced to the world of culture during a sexual relationship with Alan Bennett. For 50 years, he writes, he’s been trying to recreate on his restaurant walls a deep mustard colour he first saw in Bennett’s flat. After a young Anna Wintour took him on a tour of Paris bistros, he returned to Manhattan determined to open his own version of the Parisian brasserie. Such was his success that he is often referred to as “the restaurateur who invented downtown”, though he’s never felt it. Every day, he says, he expects some authority figure to tap him on the shoulder and say: “McNally, you’re a fraud, we’re putting you on the next plane back to London.”

I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally is available to pre-order here