Andy Burnham says he is “increasingly confident” he can prevent the early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers. The PM has told his justice secretary, Alex Norris, to draw up proposals on accelerating the deportation of foreign prisoners, repurposing women’s prisons for male offenders, and freeing “lower-risk” inmates serving Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences, a controversial and now-abolished scheme for prisoners considered dangerous. Ministers are bracing for further arrivals of so-called mega-dinghies, as stronger police operations on both sides of the Channel are leading to people smugglers using ever-larger vessels for each crossing. Yesterday, a 49ft vessel carrying 230 migrants made the crossing, far surpassing the previous single-boat record of 165 people. England is on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C. Initiatives including free at-home finger prick tests mean the target of treating 80% of all known cases by 2030 has already been met, and the number of annual deaths from the liver-attacking virus has fallen by 36% in the past decade.

Donald Trump is apparently “livid” at his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, for failing to inform him earlier that America was running out of ammunition, says Andreas Kluth in Bloomberg. The war on Iran has reportedly used up “virtually all” of the Pentagon’s global stockpile of high-precision offensive missiles, including ATACMS (pronounced “attack ‘ems”), the even longer-range Precision Strike Missiles, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. It’s the same for defensive stocks, known as interceptors: one Washington think tank estimates that the US has ploughed through two-thirds of its Patriot missiles and half its THAAD arsenal, which shoot down ballistic missiles. Defence manufacturers are ramping up production but replenishing these supplies will take years.

The consequences could be catastrophic. Missile shortages constrain Trump’s options for military escalation with Iran – they were reportedly a factor in his climbdown over threatened strikes earlier this month. If he does escalate, the dearth of interceptors means he’ll have to leave either US bases or American allies in the region unprotected. And the Middle East isn’t the only potential theatre of war. American military might is supposed to deter China from attacking Taiwan or the Philippines; to prevent the Korean War from reigniting; to keep Russia – currently waging hybrid war against European NATO countries – from encroaching further west. The missile crunch is already hurting Ukraine, which was hoping to buy more American weapons to defend itself against Moscow’s constant bombardment. Trump can rage against Hegseth all he wants. It is he who has “wrought a global disaster”.

A credible Iranian threat to assassinate Donald Trump during his trip to Turkey last month prompted an “extraordinary” security operation, says The Washington Post. The US president announced on social media that he would leave Ankara on the old Air Force One rather than the newer jet – given to the US by Qatar – in which he had arrived. But after boarding in front of the cameras, he secretly got into an airport catering truck positioned on the other side of the aircraft and was whisked off to a military plane nearby. All three jets then flew to RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, where Trump sneaked back on to the old Air Force One, disembarked to pose for pictures and then travelled back to Washington on the fancy Qatari jet.

If you want to know why Kemi Badenoch thinks the council housing system needs reform, says Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator, consider the case of Fatima Bio, Sierra Leone’s First Lady. Anyone would think her excellency would have “quite enough moolah” to buy her own place in the UK. Yet between 2007 and 2025, when the press got wind of it, she rented a council flat in Walworth, south London. Even then, it took the council’s crack investigators another 12 months to determine that she was indeed the wife of an African president, and probably shouldn’t be ahead of the 18,000 people on Southwark’s housing waiting list.

A simple fact about Zack Polanski often goes unmentioned, says Bagehot in The Economist: “he is a middle-aged man”. At 43, he is the age David Cameron was when he became prime minister; by the 2029 election he will be nearly as old as the “grey-haired” John Major was when he took office in 1990. Yet to his sympathisers, Polanski is merely a child. His time pretending to enlarge women’s breasts through hypnosis was explained away by his having been “only just 30” and “still learning”. When he failed to vote in May’s local elections, they cooed that he hadn’t had time to register, like a student unsure whether he’d be “in halls or at Mum’s on election day”.

Polanski is an “eternal adolescent”. He is one of the first major party leaders to be a social media addict but still makes a mess of it. After reposting a picture including a guillotine and a reference to Nigel Farage, he whined, in a manner recognisable to parents of teenagers everywhere: “If I’d done it deliberately, I’d be apologising.” Like all politicians, the Greens leader is shaped by his formative years. Keir Starmer began as a lawyer and remained one in office. Polanski was an out-of-work actor, so to him “all of politics is a stage”. This “perpetual youth” is not uncommon today. Adulthood’s trappings are harder to obtain: entry-level jobs are being crushed, fewer young people have a driving licence and only a quarter of 28-year-olds own a home. “Should it be any surprise that Mr Polanski, a skint actor, until recently lived on a narrowboat?” If Britain is seeing the rise of the permanent adolescent, they’ll want a leader. “Who better than one of their own?”

In the US, the humble hot dog has had a “glow-up”, says Adam Chandler in The Wall Street Journal. At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hungry gallery-goers can enjoy two mini hot-dogs topped with caviar and pickled shallots for $39. At a ski resort in Colorado, there’s a platter of six hot dogs with waffle fries for $60, while one restaurant in Denver does a two-foot-long sausage in a 19-inch bun for $45. Perhaps most absurd is the viral sell-out at this year’s Miami Grand Prix: the $100 Golden Glizzy, featuring mascarpone, 30g of Ossetra caviar and 24-carat edible gold flakes.

Largely overlooked in the Jason Arday scandal is the “gobbledygook of his writing style”, says Richard Dawkins in UnHerd. It’s full of phrases like “theoretical paradigm” and “qualitative research design”, and for some reason shuns the first-person pronoun (“This process allowed the researcher to immerse themself in the data collated”). Such obscurantism is always a red flag for non-serious topics. You don’t see physicists deploying flowery language to bolster their writing, because their subject is complicated enough already. As the biologist Peter Medawar put it: “No one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

It’s a policeman in suburban New Jersey, says Rob Beschizza in Boing Boing, who stuck on a ghillie suit and stood against foliage as part of a crackdown on drivers using their phone at the wheel. The camouflaged copper stood in a heavy-traffic area of Dunellen’s main street, where he caught a whopping 74 texting drivers in just six hours. “Did you spot our ‘shrub’ today?” the department later posted on Facebook. “If you had your head buried in your phone, probably not!”