The Democrats have won control of both the US Senate and the House of Representatives, as Americans dealt Donald Trump a crushing blow in the midterm elections. The party flipped seats in Republican strongholds including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina. The US president said he would accept the Democrats’ big win and that his administration “looks forward to working with them”. King Charles expressed his “most profound personal sorrow” over the transatlantic slave trade yesterday, but stopped short of offering an official apology. The monarch told Commonwealth leaders that the “shameful chapter of history” filled his heart with “horror” and praised the role played by the Royal Navy in ending it. New blood tests that check for multiple cancers in one go are being offered to NHS patients as part of a world-first trial. More than 20,000 patients aged 45 and over with symptoms such as abdominal pain or persistent bloating will be offered the pioneering test, which uses AI to spot early signs of the disease including bowel, stomach, prostate and ovarian cancer.

For more than a decade, says Mark Barabak in the Los Angeles Times, Donald Trump has defied “all the known laws of political physics”. No longer. The party of the president almost always fares badly in midterm elections, but last night’s thrashing will rank among “the worst political beat-downs of modern times”. The electoral map could scarcely have been more favourable to Republicans: six of the seven toss-up races in the Senate were in states Trump won in 2024, “several by double digits”. It made no difference. The Democrats triumphed in Texas and South Carolina, where they haven’t won statewide elections in decades. Deep-red Kansas has its first Democratic senator since before The Wizard of Oz came out in 1939. The president defied his advisers and made these elections about him, urging voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”. They did, and their verdict was “thunderous and clear”.

Trump won a second term promising to repeat the economic success of his first, says The Wall Street Journal. Instead, he raised prices for businesses and consumers with his self-defeating tariff regime, a “senseless” trade war with Canada and the war in Iran. The other big factor last night was voter disgust at Trump and his family for using the presidency to enrich themselves. In a Fox News poll last month 88% of respondents listed “corruption” as one of their top concerns, more even than the 85% who cited inflation. With the Democrats promising to use their new power in Congress to investigate the administration’s shady deals, this is an issue that will haunt the president until he leaves office. It’s always wise, after any election, not to over-interpret the results. But the Republicans now urgently need to decide what they’ll stand for once Trump is gone. Time for some “soul-searching”.

🪞🤦‍♂️ Perhaps the president’s most “psychologically wayward” choice was to make his big campaign closing speech on Monday all about his (botched) renovation of Washington’s Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, says Edward Luce in the FT. “We’re replacing all of the grass in all of the parks,” Trump said, speaking in front of the water feature. “Because like the human being, grass has a life also.” Apparently some of his White House staffers watching on television “buried their faces in their hands as he spoke”.

When researchers asked 12 leading AI models – including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and China’s DeepSeek – to share their most controversial opinions about humans, the answers were “surprisingly similar”, says Amanda Caswell in Tom’s Guide. Essentially, the bots’ insight was that humans would rather fit in with a group than challenge core beliefs, even when the facts are against them. Several pointed out that intelligence is no help, and may even be a hindrance – the cleverer you are, the better you are at justifying your group beliefs, even to yourself. Grok put it neatly: “humans would rather be wrong together than right alone”.

The “keep calm and carry on” slogan was never actually used during World War Two, says Mic Wright on Substack. Officials decided it was “too commonplace to be inspiring” and worried, perceptively, that it “may even annoy people”. Most of the posters that had already been printed were pulped to alleviate paper shortages. The phrase only entered the public consciousness in 2000, when “a copy was found at the bottom of a box of old books”.

For more than a year, says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph, Tory boys have fawned over Shabana Mahmood, lauding the home secretary as a Conservative in sheep’s clothing. Michael Gove admitted to spending hours googling images of her, while other right-wingers praised her for switching from Labour’s “computer says no” default to “computer says yes, yes, yes!” Well, “the love affair is over, boys”. At the dispatch box this week Mahmood announced that she was dropping plans to make it harder for hundreds of thousands of foreign care workers to gain citizenship, and to withhold benefits from people until they’ve been granted indefinite leave to remain. “Oh, and dependants get to stay.” To cap it all, she defended her climbdown in “lanyardese” – a final sign to all her Tory fans that she “just ain’t into you”.

It’s worth pointing out, says Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman, that the main thrust of Mahmood’s proposals, “including parts that have been controversial among her colleagues”, still stand. She is introducing a system of “earned settlement” – where the greater an immigrant’s contribution, the quicker he or she can achieve settled status – but the new norm will be doubled to 10 years, and those with criminal records will be barred completely. At the sharp end, refugees who arrive on small boats and have not entered work or study will wait 30 years. The shift on care workers is a significant one, but the subject was reportedly a key concern among the vast majority of the 200,000 respondents to the government’s consultation, and Mahmood has emphasised that being in the UK doesn’t give someone an “automatic right to settle under the rules that existed when they first arrived”. Be in no doubt: this is still a “very significant reform”. The cabinet should “hold their tongues”.

Consumer hatred of AI has created a surprising winner, says Katie Deighton in The Wall Street Journal: “stop motion”. This laborious technique, in which specialist artisans hand-craft models and painstakingly move them a frame at a time to make a kind of video flip-book, is being celebrated as the antidote to automated slop. Ad agencies keen to ride the anti-AI wave are driving massive demand for the services of firms like Stunt Puppet Pictures, which has made recent ads for, among others, Apple. “The whole last year,” says co-founder Shel Rasch, “we’ve been nonstop booked.”

Buried in last week’s budget forecasts was a striking prediction from the Office for Budget Responsibility, says James Kirkup in The Telegraph: by 2031, British households will be saving essentially nothing. Excluding pension contributions, the OBR expects that people will put aside just 0.5% of their post-tax income, down from around 5.5% last year. This would not only make most households much less resilient to shocks such as redundancy, illness or divorce. It would also put the ability to acquire assets – and therefore the ability to “work your way to wealth” – firmly out of reach.

It’s an artist’s impression of the “zeptoverse”, say Pallab Ghosh and Josh Falcon on BBC News, a minuscule world where exotic new particles may be discovered, thanks to a British-led breakthrough at the Large Hadron Collider. After a 42-year search, boffins at Cern in Switzerland caught a glimpse of a one-in-ten-billion event in which a subatomic particle called a “beauty meson” decayed to produce two even smaller particles called muons. Beauty mesons only exist for two trillionths of a second before they decay, which makes the process rather tricky to detect. The finding could apparently lead to the discovery of particles smaller than one zeptometre, or one billionth of a trillionth of a metre.