In the headlines

US authorities have released new images of the man they believe shot dead conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, along with CCTV footage of the suspect jumping off a roof and fleeing the scene. The FBI, which has so far failed to identify the killer, has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Former Brazilian president and Donald Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup. A panel of five Supreme Court justices found the right-wing politician guilty of leading a conspiracy aimed at keeping him in power after he lost the 2022 election. Trump said the ruling was "very much like they tried to do with me". Tourists driving in Scotland can now fit their vehicles with "T plates", a green version of learners' "L plates". The stickers, available to buy online, were declared legal by Transport Scotland after a sharp increase in crashes linked to a tourism boom in the Highlands, often involving travellers unfamiliar with driving on the left. Och aye.

Comment

The PM with "Peter Scandalson" earlier this year. Carl Court/Getty

What this "needless" scandal tells us about Starmer

In the end, Keir Starmer had to fire Peter Mandelson, says Nick Cohen in The Spectator. It's a damning indictment of his judgement that he made the New Labour veteran Britain's ambassador to the US in the first place. Some in government are said to have known about Mandelson's close ties to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein at the time of his appointment. But Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's "supposedly Machiavellian" chief of staff, is apparently a full-on "Mandelson protégé" and pushed hard for his scandal-prone mentor to be given the job. McSweeney is even said to have sought Mandy's advice on the Cabinet reshuffle last week, at a time when anyone with half a political brain knew the so-called Prince of Darkness was in trouble. "Apparently McSweeney does not possess half a political brain."

More broadly, this whole "needless" mess exposes Starmer's folly in tying himself to veterans of Tony Blair's government. The PM doesn't seem to have grasped just how tainted Blair and his fellow "third way" pioneers – the likes of Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder – have become. These centre-left leaders insisted that they embraced oligarchs only as a "regrettably necessary electoral tactic". But once they left office it became clear this wasn't true: far from hating billionaires, "they liked them and wanted to be like them". So you had Blair cosying up to Rupert Murdoch and now Donald Trump; Schröder becoming pals with Vladimir Putin; the Clintons embracing Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This shameless personal enrichment produced "mass disillusion with centre-left politics", and fuelled right-wing populism by adding to the feeling that all politicians are "in it for themselves". If Starmer wants to see out his first term, "he needs to ditch Blair as quickly as he ditched Mandelson".

🏇🇺🇸 With Donald Trump coming to the UK for his second state visit next week, says Jessica Elgot in The Guardian, Starmer will be keen to get a new US ambassador appointed pronto. Runners and riders include veteran diplomat Karen Pierce, Mandelson's highly rated predecessor; Richard Moore, the outgoing head of MI6; and the former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was shortlisted for the role last year. George Osborne is also telling anyone who'll listen that he was approached last time, but after the Mandelson mess the former Tory chancellor will probably be considered too risky.

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Staying young

An Amish girl milking a cow. David Turnley/Getty

Allergies are on the rise everywhere in the developed world, says Meeri Kim in The Washington Post, except among the Amish. Just 7% of Amish children show a positive response to one or more common allergens in a skin prick test, compared to more than half the overall US population. Asthma affects around 10% of kids across America, but just 2% of the Amish. The reason is exactly as you'd imagine – living on a dairy farm and using horses for transport gives you pretty good exposure to microbes. "I don't know that we can give every family a cow," says molecular biologist Donata Vercelli, "but we are learning."

No slop, just knowledge

AI-generated podcast hosts Clare Delish and VV Steel

Some ghastly US techies have started using AI to mass-produce bad podcasts – more than 3,000 episodes a week – and fill them with ads. The idea, says The Hollywood Reporter, is that because episodes cost less than a dollar to make, each one needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit. In other words, they're flooding the internet with rubbish to extract a few bucks from clueless advertisers.

We at The Knowledge do the exact opposite: our all-too human team carefully read through the world's news every day and fillet out the very best bits, before using our human brains to write short, entertaining summaries. All to spare you the slop.

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