Zack Polanski has confirmed his intention to run in the by-election triggered by Keir Starmer’s resignation as an MP. The Green Party leader put his name forward for the race in Holborn and St Pancras – which Labour won with a majority of 11,572 at the 2024 election – ahead of a vote by local party members next week to choose their candidate. Londoners can hire self-driving taxis for the first time, after rides in Wayve’s autonomous cars were added to the Uber app this morning. It’s not yet the full techno-future experience: so far there are only 15 of the robotaxis across the whole capital, and each one has a human in the front seat ready to take over in an emergency. King Charles hailed the “unprecedented” loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum at a private viewing with Emmanuel Macron last night. The King said the 70-metre embroidery, which goes on view to the public next week, “tells the story of the beginning of what I like to think of as the French side of my family’s history in these islands”.

At first glance, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times, the forthcoming by-election in Holborn and St Pancras is a nightmare for Andy Burnham. Having made a massive fuss about not being from London, and about moving politics out of London because London is so awful, and even about “having special casual clothes that people don’t understand in London because we all apparently dress like Jacob Rees-Mogg”, the new PM now has to defend a safe seat in, yes, London. But in fact this will be a much bigger test for Zack Polanski. Holborn and St Pancras should be ideal territory for the Greens. It’s urban and ethnically diverse. More than half the population are graduates and up to a third are students. And it’s receptive to the harder left: in 2024, candidates well to the left of the incumbent, Keir Starmer, took almost 30% of the vote. The problem? It’s “candidates”, plural.

Starmer’s main rival was an independent, Andrew Feinstein, who later helped set up the “Jeremy Corbyn-meets-Zarah Sultana internecine argument engine” that is Your Party. But Feinstein no longer appears involved in Your Party and may run again as an independent – meaning the non-Labour left could be a three-way fight. Yikes. Polanski no doubt wishes an easier London berth had come up, where he could have “ditched the green stuff altogether” and leveraged the Gaza-motivated Muslim vote to become “the new George Galloway”. But having already declined to stand in one winnable by-election in Gorton and Denton, he couldn’t duck out of another. The Greens leader has said he wants to “replace” Labour as the main party of the left. Hard to do if he can’t even unite a “handful of fellow travellers in Camden who have marginally different leaflets”.

South Korea’s latest cultural export, says Itika Punit in Rest of World, is an online shopping trend in which consumers search sites such as Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes for products, compare reviews, add items to their cart, enter a shipping address and place an order. “Then… nothing happens.” No money changes hands and no package arrives. The idea seems to be that the experience of shopping online has become so addictive that people will happily go through the motions with no real interest in the final product.

Day and night, says Gerry Shih in The Washington Post, some 5,000 trucks rumble through the Syrian desert carrying oil from the refineries of southern Iraq to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas. This bumper-to-bumper procession began in April to bypass the shuttered Strait of Hormuz, and there are now plans for a $5.7bn US-backed pipeline to trace the same 1,000-mile route. Mohammad Hatem, a cheerful Iraqi tanker driver, makes about $1,800 for each 10-day round trip from Basra to Baniyas. “I’m so scared of this new pipeline taking away my business,” he says with a belly laugh, “I might blow it up.”

It’s easy to forget that Milo Yiannopoulos was “once a big deal”, says Moira Donegan in The Guardian. Ten years ago, the British-born far-right provocateur – who was arrested by ICE this week and deported from the US to the UK – contributed to Donald Trump’s first election win, driving an online tidal wave of right-wing populism. The Cambridge graduate was a pioneer of “algorithm-optimised outrage bait”, fanning the flames of any minor online spat he could turn into a culture war. Whether he was mocking feminists or attacking Muslims, the ensuing firestorm would generate mountains of “discourse” and much personal publicity for him. And as a jokey, gregarious, gay, digitally savvy millennial, backing Trump made him an eye-catching novelty.

The trouble was, it was such a good schtick that Yiannopoulos was quickly overrun by competitors – the rightwing influencer field became “crowded, then saturated”. He has spent the past few years “at the fringe of the fringe” of Trumpworld, hobnobbing with a hodgepodge of odious figures who now criticise Trump from the right, such as former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes. By saying frankly what many in the US right merely imply, he has often found himself overstepping: he was banned from Twitter, then from Facebook, then from Australia. Now he has been purged from America, supposedly after another right-wing provocateur, Laura Loomer, told ICE and the FBI he had overstayed his visa. There is schadenfreude in all this of course: Yiannopoulos has long been a vocal advocate for mass deportation. But there is also something faintly unnerving about America’s massive federal security apparatus being used to “settle internet feuds among crackpot influencers”.

😇🤐 Even after all this, Yiannopoulos hasn’t lost his impish sense of humour. Writing in The Spectator, he said he couldn’t possibly live in England “because I don’t speak Arabic”, and declared himself a “persecuted human rights icon”. Like it or not, he wrote, “I am Mahatma Gandhi. I am Nelson Mandela. I’m not exactly sure who Aung San Suu Kyi is, and can’t be bothered to look it up, but, yes, I am him too.”

Composer Matt Wilcock has turned the London Underground’s arrival data into an unlikely musical instrument. Each of the 12 Tube lines is assigned a note, and each time a train arrives at a station a note is triggered. Oddly delightful. Listen here.

It’s bizarre that so many commentators think the only way to cut Britain’s deficit is by raising taxes, says Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph, when the level of taxation is already at its highest rate since 1947. “Stop and think about that for a moment.” In 1947, Britain’s economy was still very much mobilised, with every scrap of national wealth commandeered for the war effort. You couldn’t drive a car unless it was for official purposes. Rationing was still in place, so you were limited to a single fresh egg per week. How on earth have we come to accept that taxes should rise above the level they were at then?

It’s Pattaya, says Anantha Lakshmi in the FT, a city in Thailand known for its high-energy nightlife and popular red light districts, which is this week welcoming around 5,000 US sailors and marines. The crew of USS Abraham Lincoln, who have been at sea for a record nine months straight while fighting the Iran war, will disembark from the aircraft carrier in stages after its arrival at a nearby port yesterday. Certain entertainments are off limits – service folk have been reminded that prostitution and drug use are technically illegal in Thailand, however enthusiastically they may be offered.