The prime minister’s independent ethics adviser has begun an investigation into Angela Rayner, after she admitted dodging a £40,000 stamp duty bill on her £800,000 seaside flat. According to Politico, the fate of the deputy prime minister – “and actual housing secretary” – rests on whether she received “duff” legal advice or failed to provide her solicitors with all the necessary information. At least 17 people were killed and 20 injured when Lisbon’s iconic Gloria funicular derailed yesterday. “It hit a building with brutal force,” said one eyewitness, “and fell apart like a cardboard box.” Investigators say it’s too early to determine the cause. “Martha’s rule” will be rolled out in all English hospitals that deliver acute or short-term treatment. The scheme – which helps families seek an urgent second opinion if they are concerned about the care of a loved one – has been piloted in 143 hospitals, thanks to campaigning by the parents of Martha Mills, who died aged 13 after serious failings in her care.

Xi Jinping is holding the West together

This week, Xi Jinping hosted “one of the largest get-togethers of autocratic regimes in living memory”, says The Economist. Guests included Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Kim Jong-un trundled in from North Korea on his armoured train. Even more striking was the attendance of leaders of countries that usually lean more to the West: Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam and, crucially, India. For Xi, the gathering was a demonstration that “a new reality is taking hold” – that with Donald Trump unleashing trade wars and undermining security alliances it is now China, not the US, that should be considered the world’s pre-eminent source of stability. Sure, most of the guests at his “big bash” have little in common and Beijing doesn’t yet run a “new world order”. But this was still a striking demonstration of just “how much damage Trump is doing to American interests”.

Up to a point, says Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. Many of us have warned that Trump’s abrasive foreign policy will end up “handing the world” to China. But so far, Xi hasn’t taken advantage. Beijing’s top diplomat reportedly told his EU counterpart in July that China couldn’t allow Russia to lose in Ukraine, because that might prompt the US to switch its focus to Asia. That position, combined with a “hard stance” on trade, has left Beijing unable to improve its ties with Europe. Similarly, China has done little to “shake up” American alliances in Asia, instead continuing to alienate its neighbours by “aggressively asserting” claims to most of the South China Sea. Xi’s mistake is that he is still treating the West as a “unified adversary”, rather than trying to pick off those left out in the cold by Trump. In doing so, ironically, he is “holding the US alliance system together”.

🫀😬 During the festivities in Beijing, Xi and Putin were caught on a hot mic discussing how organ transplants might lead to immortality. “Biotechnology is continuously developing,” Putin’s interpreter could be heard saying in Chinese. “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.” Xi responded: “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.” Beats talking about the weather.

Delegates at the Green Party leadership announcement on Tuesday didn’t disappoint, says Olivia Utley on X. A sticker on one laptop read: “I’ve got 99 problems and white heteronormative patriarchy is basically most of them”.

If you ever think your calls to IT are stressful, says Brad Lendon in CNN, spare a thought for the US Air Force. In January, an F-35 pilot in Alaska spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with five engineers trying to solve a problem with his jet’s landing gear. After various attempts to fix it – including two so-called “touch and go” landings, where the wheels were briefly rolled along the ground in a bid to straighten out the jammed gear – the onboard computer system malfunctioned and the aircraft plunged to the ground (pictured). The pilot ejected safely, but the $200m fighter jet was totally destroyed.

Trump’s distinctly un-American capitalism

The US government taking an ownership stake in Intel really is a “watershed” moment for American capitalism, says Andrew Ross Sorkin on The Daily. This wasn’t Donald Trump’s first such intervention. He told Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel earlier this year that it could buy US Steel only if the US received a so-called “golden share”. He had the Pentagon take a stake in a rare earth minerals company, and allowed Nvidia to sell its less advanced semiconductors to China on the proviso that the US government received a 15% cut. With Intel, the president decided he wanted something in exchange for the billions of dollars the tech firm was receiving in government chipmaking grants. So the CEO handed over 10% of the company.

This is just the start – Trump and his team have been clear that they want stakes in more businesses in industries such as defence and construction. His rationale, beyond national security, is simple: if a company is benefiting from taxpayer money – either through subsidies or just because its business relies on selling stuff to the government – then the taxpayer should get something in return. This sort of thing is common in countries like China, and Russia, and indeed France. And it’s by no means unpopular: Bernie Sanders is fully behind the Intel move. But it’s antithetical to the free market traditions on which the US was built. Americans – Republicans in particular – have long sneered at Europe for the inefficiencies of state-backed capitalism. The reason the US is the most dynamic economy in the world, they always argued, is that innovation comes from competition – not from “picking winners and losers”. Trump, for better or worse, is tearing all that up.

I do feel a bit sorry for Angela Rayner, says Mike Warburton in The Daily Telegraph. I’m a tax expert, and even I didn’t know about the rule she broke. Normally when buying a second home, you don’t have to pay the stamp duty surcharge if you’ve already given up your financial interest in the first property. But in Rayner’s case the first place is owned by a trust set up to provide for her disabled son – which means she could be treated as having a financial interest in that property. And that was one of at least two trusts involved, complicating matters further. No wonder everyone’s confused.

University English lecturers everywhere are terrified that AI summaries are obliterating their students’ ability to read whole novels and rotting their brains, says Spencer Klavan in The Free Press. It’s a reasonable concern, but it isn’t new. In the 4th century BC, it became the trend for “chic philosophers” in Athens to sell written copies of their lectures to the young elite strivers of the day. Plato wrote a dialogue, Phaedrus, in which Socrates complains that the young are addling their minds by outsourcing their memories to the hypey gadget of the day: “papyrus”.

It’s Wytham Abbey, a grade I listed 15th-century manor house in Oxfordshire that was bought by the so-called “Effective Altruism” movement for technologists and philosophers to meet and solve the world’s hardest problems. The 27-bedroom, 18-bathroom estate has been up for sale since one of EA’s major backers, the disgraced former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding the customers and investors of his $32bn crypto empire. But the cursed property has struggled to find a buyer – the original £15m asking price was reduced to £12m in June, and has now been dropped to a bargain £5.95m. To make a cheeky offer, click here.