Keir Starmer has eased sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to soften the impact of the Iran war on jet fuel supplies and living costs. Imports of diesel and jet fuel derived from Russian crude and processed in a third country will no longer be restricted, and some sanctions on the transport of Russian liquefied natural gas have been temporarily lifted. The government is also pressing supermarkets to freeze the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk in exchange for lifting regulations on packaging and healthy food. Reform UK has chosen local “plucky plumber” Robert Kenyon as its candidate to stand against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election. The 41-year-old former army reservist ran for the seat in 2024, finishing second behind Labour’s Josh Simons. Comedian Josh Widdicombe, TV presenter Emma Willis and professional dancer Johannes Radebe have been confirmed as the new hosts of Strictly Come Dancing. The show’s executive producer, Sarah James, said the new combination was “unexpected” but that “their magic was undeniable the moment they came together”.

Having enraged most of their natural voters, Labour MPs are now clambering on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. “Do the rest of us blindly hop on board?” The Greater Manchester mayor is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He’s the party’s most popular politician, has an “easy northern charm” and genuine progressive achievements to his name. But failure to scrutinise Burnham would “smack of fatal naivety”. If he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, “he will have to earn it”.

First he must demonstrate that his previous contempt for the left – voting for the Iraq war, attacking the mansion tax as “spiteful”, abstaining from the 2015 Conservative vote on benefit cuts – is firmly a thing of the past. He says Britain has been “on the wrong path for 40 years” and is loudly championing “stronger public control” but is yet to offer clear explanations of either. Of particular concern is his record on housing. The developments built from his Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund mostly consist of luxury flats the average Mancunian can’t afford, and when he promised in 2024 to build at least 10,000 council homes, the first year of the scheme produced a mere 10. Why should we expect better outcomes in higher office? Then there’s his naivety. Last year, he said government had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”, causing confusion that only added to the market pressures he now faces. Burnham may well become a “sincerely committed progressive politician”, but he’ll first need to dispel concerns about the “firmness” of his ideological commitments.

In Brazil, there’s a new craze for “whistling-only” WhatsApp groups, says Tiago Rogero in The Guardian: chats full of random people in which the only permitted communication is voice notes of whistling. The choice of tune is up to the sender – some contribute two chirps while washing up, others deliver full-blown renditions of the Pink Panther theme. The groups are now receiving as many as 600 messages a day, with the most popular performances racking up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok.

Long written off as obsolete in the age of online reviews and ChatGPT, “the travel agent is alive and well”, says Heidi Mitchell in The Wall Street Journal. Total revenue for the industry is projected to hit $134bn this year, up 17% from 2023, while LinkedIn listed “travel adviser” as one of the 25 fastest-growing jobs of the past three years. The trend is apparently being driven by travellers wanting to avoid the busy tourist spots that everyone else goes to, and to have local intel and seamless transport, particularly for complicated trips or uber-luxe experiences.

When Eric Schmidt, the former boss of Google, brought up AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona on Friday, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, the graduates erupted in boos. “Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done,” he told them, possibly as a promise of opportunity. “The students seemed to hear it as a threat.” It was the same a week earlier, when the real estate executive Gloria Caulfield addressed the University of Central Florida and described AI as the “next industrial revolution”. Amid the boos, someone shouted: “AI sucks!” Both speakers appeared shocked, but they shouldn’t have been. Evidence of a ferocious backlash against AI, especially among young people, is everywhere.

One recent report found that just 18% of Gen Zs feel hopeful about AI, while almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. American politicians with a following among young folks – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left, James Fishback on the right – are calling for moratoriums on data centres. And AI is increasingly a pop culture villain: “The people who make this stuff are losers,” says Hannah Einbinder, star of the HBO hit Hacks, which has put hatred of the technology at the centre of its current season. A young man recently threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI boss Sam Altman. The industry’s “oligarchic leaders” are responding the only way they know how: pouring money into politics to block any attempt to regulate them. But this is a huge part of the problem. Young folks abroad believe their governments will regulate AI for public benefit: Japan helps companies use AI to complement humans, not replace them; last month, Oslo introduced self-driving public buses. Americans, quite rightly, know they will be fed to the wolves. And they’re furious.

I analysed every “sound event” from nearly 2,000 action movies over the past 75 years, says Stephen Follows on Substack. The car chase is clearly dying, with vehicle sounds down 16% since 2000. Explosions have nearly doubled over the same period, presumably driven by the Marvel movies and their many imitators. Gunfire is up by a whopping 43%, but the percentage of lead characters killed by gunshots has been in steady decline since the 1950s. “The only logical conclusion is that the aim of action movie villains is getting considerably worse.”

In 1919, says Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, a tank in Boston containing around 9.5 million litres of molasses burst, flooding the city with a “fearsome wave of syrup” reportedly 50ft high and travelling at 35mph. The clean-up took weeks, and for months afterwards everywhere that people had tracked molasses – underground subway platforms, and so on – remained sticky under foot. “Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house.”

It’s the first ever chick born from an artificial egg, says Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Colossal Biosciences, which describes itself as the “world’s first de-extinction company”, revealed yesterday that it had hatched live chicks inside a capsule which provides the growing embryo with everything it needs to develop, with a little window that allowed scientists to watch the chicks grow. The idea is – eventually – to resurrect New Zealand’s 12ft-tall South Island giant moa, which was wiped out some time in the 14th or 15th centuries by the arrival of the Maori from Polynesia, and is far too large to be borne by any living bird.