All 20 living Israeli hostages were released by Hamas this morning after 737 days in captivity. Donald Trump arrived this morning in Tel Aviv, where he addressed Israel’s parliament; he will later meet the families of hostages before travelling to Egypt for a peace summit with other world leaders. Nigel Farage will break with his manifesto pledge of £90bn in tax cuts in a bid to bolster his party’s economic credibility, says The Times. The Reform UK leader will promise next month that before cutting any taxes, his party will reduce spending, slash the civil service and implement a ban on borrowing to fund government expenditure. Trigger warnings have little to no impact on whether people view offensive content. In a new study, 90% of participants happily ignored warnings that they were about to view distressing material – irrespective of whether they had previously suffered from trauma. The most consistent response was to be intrigued.

Young people are giving up on democracy

France is mired in its “most serious political crisis since 1968”, says Sylvie Kauffmann in the FT. Four days after the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu – the country’s third prime minister in 12 months – Emmanuel Macron revealed on Friday that the new prime minister would be… Sébastien Lecornu. “Again.” With a new poll putting Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally on 36% – probably enough to scrabble together a parliamentary majority – the mainstream parties may be willing to agree a compromise on pension reform that would avoid another dissolution of parliament. But that would only be a temporary reprieve. After his disastrous snap election last year strengthened the far left and far right, Macron assumed he could still “muddle through” to the end of his term in 2027. Even some of his allies now wonder whether that’s possible.

France isn’t the only “ungovernable” democracy, says Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. The Czech Republic has just followed Poland, Austria and other EU states in “lurching towards the populist hard right”. Several countries have experienced upheaval and anti-government protests in the past couple of years, including Nepal, Morocco, Kenya, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and Madagascar. Polls in the UK and the US show that more and more voters think democracy “isn’t working”. There are myriad reasons for this, such as cost of living, de-industrialisation, wealth inequality and mass migration. But underpinning it all is a fundamental shift in thinking: people, young people in particular, no longer believe the post-Enlightenment idea that “human progress is constant”; that everything ultimately gets better over time. Their lives aren’t improving, and they haven’t been for decades. Unless something changes, democracy itself is in danger of “being jettisoned”.

🤏⏰ Lecornu’s initial resignation came after just 27 days, says The Spectator, but even that wasn’t enough to earn him the title of Europe’s “shortest-lived PM”. That honour goes to Magdalena Andersson, who, after being elected Swedish leader back in November 2021, resigned just seven hours later when her coalition partners dropped out. (She did later return as PM and lasted a more creditable nine months.) Putting them both to shame is Pedro Lascuráin, who took over as president of Mexico as part of a coup d’état in 1913 for a crisp 45 minutes.

The Tories portrayed themselves at their conference as the “only party” of fiscal responsibility, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. It’s quite a claim. The party’s biggest success in opposition so far has been a campaign against Labour’s plans to remove Gordon Brown’s winter fuel payments for most pensioners. They also helped Labour backbenchers kill off the government’s (admittedly rushed) attempt to cut £5bn from the disability benefits bill. Politically shrewd, no doubt. But fiscally serious, when we’re “on the cusp of a sovereign debt crisis”? Pull the other one.

We may have passed “peak social media”, says John Burn-Murdoch in the FT. It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on the platforms peaked in 2022 and has been in steady decline ever since. This effect is most pronounced in the group that used to be the heaviest users: teens and twentysomethings. And the trend holds across the world, with the exception of North America, where consumption of “extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop” sadly continues to climb. The rest of us, it seems, are turning back to human interaction, and with AI about to deluge the internet with rubbish, not a moment too soon.

The EU’s harsh migration policies are working

Populist politicians often say the flow of immigrants entering Europe illegally is “unstoppable”, says The Economist. The actual data suggests the opposite is true. In the first eight months of this year, 112,000 people entered the continent illegally, down 21% from a year earlier and down 52% from 2023. The influx has decreased not because the underlying causes of migration have changed: the likes of Afghanistan and Eritrea remain repressive; Sudan and the Sahel are still ravaged by civil wars and insurgencies. It’s because the EU has effectively built a “big, invisible wall far from its own borders”.

Starting in 2015 – the year a million refugees from the Syrian civil war and other conflicts arrived in Europe – the EU began striking deals with so-called “transit countries” on popular migration routes. In exchange for preventing migrants from passing through, these nations receive large sums of aid and investment. Egypt was promised €7.4bn, Tunisia €1bn, Turkey €9bn. This patchwork of agreements initially did little to reduce overall numbers because they blocked only some of the migratory routes. But as more have signed up – Mauritania did so last year – it has become increasingly difficult for would-be migrants to “skirt around blockages”. (Technology has also helped: Frontex, Europe’s border agency, uses drones to patrol the skies above Libyan and Tunisian waters.) The strategy isn’t flawless. Some of the “so-called coastguards” in Libya are “little more than militias”. Turkey and Morocco have used their newfound ability to open or close migrant flows as leverage to extract more funds and concessions from Brussels. But it’s still an “astonishing” drop. If anyone wants proof that harsh policies can reduce illegal migration, the EU is providing it.

To Popbitch:

Your story last week about Martin Lewis takes me back to when at News UK we closed the News of the World. Most of the star columnists and commercial partners called in to say how sorry they were and to offer support to the hundreds of journalists who were about to be laid off. Martin Lewis called in to make sure that he was still going to get paid for his column that would go out in the last edition, and one he’d written for the week after that would never ever get published.

Anonymous

After the Manchester synagogue attacker turned out to have been a Syrian-born British citizen called “Jihad”, The Spectator decided to investigate how many babies are given that name in England and Wales each year. There aren’t many:

1997 – 4
1998 – 5
2000 – 4
2001 – 3
2002 – 3
2003 – 4
2012 – 4

And there have been none registered since 2012.

They’re the “world’s weirdest new celebrity couple”, says Maddy Mussen in The Standard: Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. The unlikely pair – who have apparently been dating in secret since the start of the summer – were spotted canoodling on the upper deck of Perry’s 24m yacht off the coast of California late last month. It wasn’t exactly snooping, says one witness: “She pulled up her boat next to a small public whale-watching boat, then they started making out.” Marine life fans were also treated to Trudeau, who is topless in the photos, but inexplicably wearing trousers, grabbing Perry’s bum. And why not.