Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Iran was behind a foiled bomb plot at RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday morning. A farmer returning late from a party alerted police after seeing three vans and a group of masked men around 400 metres from the Gloucestershire airbase. Five UK nationals were arrested on suspicion of terrorism and explosives offences, and 85 nearby homes were evacuated while bomb disposal robots examined the vehicles. John Healey says Britain is about to enter a “new age of industrialisation”, with the announcement of a £6bn plan to build three new floating docks at the Royal Navy’s submarine base on the Clyde in Scotland. Speaking at the Labour conference in Liverpool, the Chancellor promised that the work would be carried out by British firms as part of Andy Burnham’s efforts to generate jobs and growth at home. An 11-year-old British chess prodigy is the youngest player in history to become a female grandmaster. Bodhana Sivanandan, from northwest London, secured the title while representing England at the 46th Chess Olympiad in Uzbekistan last week.

Tony Blair’s forceful call for Britain to rejoin the EU is “both incisive and welcome”, says The Independent. The former prime minister’s stance is simple. It doesn’t matter that the wounds of the 2016 referendum are “still raw”. All that matters is the answer to a simple question: “Is it worth it?” And the answer is, clearly, yes. Britain is currently missing out on an estimated £100bn in lost economic output and £40bn in lost tax revenues, every single year, because of Brexit. The world has turned more protectionist, dashing Brexiteer dreams of a “swashbuckling” Britain striking lucrative free trade deals around the globe. The need for collective European security – an afterthought in 2016 – is now paramount. Blair is right. “Times change.”

They certainly do, says Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, which is why rejoining would be a disaster. In every year bar one since the pandemic, the UK has outperformed the EU’s three biggest economies – Germany, France and Italy – as well as the bloc as a whole. “So much for EU membership being the magic elixir to stimulate growth.” It’s the same with politics. A decade ago, Europe’s big three were led by centrists: Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Matteo Renzi. Today, the populist right is on the march across Europe, with Giorgia Meloni on course for re-election in Italy, the AfD ascendant in Germany and Marine Le Pen the favourite to be France’s next president. This insurgency has already changed the outlook of the EU – only four of its 27 commissioners are on the left – and that will accelerate as more of the bloc’s “all-powerful” judges are appointed. Blair says Britain should rejoin only if the EU “changes significantly”. Who does he think is going to spearhead that reform? There were good arguments for voting to remain in 2016. “There are no good arguments for rejoining.”

🙉 📣 Blair seems “chronically unaware” that he is an increasingly bad messenger for the policies he wants to push, says James Ball in The i Paper. Most millennials, who are becoming Labour’s core constituency, remember him primarily for Iraq. That unpopular image is only worsened by his constant desire to cosy up to oligarchs and billionaires. His most useful intervention on most of the causes he supports “would be to stay out of them”.

When most people imagine the “Russian spies” currently carrying out sabotage across Europe, says David McCloskey on The Rest Is Classified, they tend to imagine agents employed by a classic, centralised espionage agency, like the Cold War-era KGB. But things have changed. Today, Russia’s secret world is made up of a patchwork of entrepreneurial outfits, some with only very loose ties to the government, competing to carry out spectacular missions in hope of winning favour (and funding) from the Kremlin. One tactic is to employ local toughs in Nato nations, bunging them a few hundred euros in crypto to do the dirty work, meaning there’s no way to trace – or, crucially, predict – attacks.

After watching an online clip of a wife scratching her husband’s back – and reading the number of people commenting that they would pay for such a service – a Chinese entrepreneur has given it a go, says Alice Yan in the South China Morning Post. Zhang Xiaoqiao, 32, has opened two “scratching salons” in Shenzhen, where customers are tended to by staff wearing “specially designed pointed nails”. Zhang says the plan is to roll them out across the country, capitalising on urban dwellers who “generally experience high levels of stress”.

Keir Starmer’s big mistake was assuming that “better management would do the trick”, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. Only after arriving in No 10 did he realise “the system doesn’t work any more”. His government failed to deliver most of its promises because today anything ministers try to do is bogged down in reviews, consultations and legal challenges. Former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption calls it “law’s expanding empire” – a world of paperwork that allows lawyers to occupy space where politics used to be. Houses aren’t built, boats aren’t stopped and infrastructure projects take decades.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has cut the queue for asylum hearings, but those refused simply appeal and join another queue. In Sweden and Denmark, a refused asylum seeker generally gets one appeal, dealt with in months. Our system is “notoriously easy to play”, with several appeal options, which can take years, all while the candidate lives at the taxpayer’s expense. A similar mess engulfs housebuilding, in which various laws – “equalities, human rights, environment” – allow anyone to sue for anything. This is why Britain’s first new reservoir in 35 years has been delayed for another five years, and the water will end up costing twice as much as America’s and four times more than Spain’s. Meanwhile, HS2 is set to cost a “scarcely-believable” £700m a mile, compared to £160m-a-mile high-speed rail in California and £45m a mile in France. Starmer was in denial about the hell of Britain’s rule-by-lawyers, and the Tories couldn’t stop fighting long enough to fix it. Andy Burnham may feel “legal reform” is a boring way to start a premiership. Without it, “there’s not much point in continuing”.

📑 😱 The recently approved tunnel connecting Kent and Essex beneath the Thames needed a 360,000-page application, which took 16 years and cost £300m for the paperwork alone – more than twice what Norway spent actually building the world’s longest road tunnel.

African elephants use dozens of different plants to treat themselves and their families when they are ill, says Victoria Gill on BBC News. A new study drawing on interviews with those who live and work alongside elephants in Kenya’s Mount Elgon region found that the resourceful pachyderms have been recorded using around 35 different plant species, 25 of which are known locally to have medicinal uses. In one case a mother mixed Angurweet, which is used by humans to remedy stomach ache, with her own milk before giving it to her calf.

More than 30 years after Alexander McQueen declared the “lower part of the spine” the “most erotic area of the body”, says Raquel Laneri in The Times, “bum cleavage is back”. New York Fashion Week was awash with visible crack: tush peeked out over low-slung jeans at the Eckhaus Latta show; rugged, hunky models sported “decadent board shorts” at The Society Archive. Emily Dawn Long’s spring/summer 2027 collection was titled “The Crack of Dawn”, and featured a cashmere dress with a deep plunging back, jeans that sat “perilously below the hip” and a silk skirt with a “ruffled keyhole opening” that framed the model’s rear décolletage.

It’s Casper, says Moná Thomas in People magazine, a so-called “white” lobster that is so rare the odds of finding one are estimated to be around 1 in 100 million. The dull decapod has just been moved from an aquarium in Maine to a special marine life centre at the University of New England, where his unusual genetics will be studied alongside a collection of other colourful crustaceans, including an oddly orange lobster called Peaches and a blue-and-purple pair named Currant and Fig.