Israel has taken control of the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Ceasefire talks are set to resume today in Cairo after Hamas said it had accepted a deal brokered by Egypt and Qatar, which Israel rejected yesterday as “far from meeting” its “core demands”. China has been blamed for a cyberattack targeting the Ministry of Defence in which hackers were able to access the names and bank details of thousands of military personnel. The attack on a payroll system used by the British Army, Royal Navy and RAF is believed to have affected up to 270,000 troops, reservists and veterans. High tourist numbers are turning Lake Windermere green. A new report suggests peak tourist periods – and the accompanying uptick in sewage – may be the cause of “algal blooms” (as pictured below) at one of the Lake District’s most scenic spots.

The American left is giving Trump a helping hand

When Donald Trump left the White House in 2021, “I was hopeful we’d seen the last of him”, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. Now I’m not so sure. Despite his drift “into an ever-more deranged revenge-fantasy” – he’s openly said he’d use the law to “prosecute his political foes” if re-elected – the former president is “narrowly leading in national polls and ahead in most of the swing states”. Why? Because Joe Biden, who I thought would be a “normie moderate president”, has lurched to the extremes too. Thanks to his administration’s “chaotic border policies”, millions of illegal immigrants have entered the country “with zero-to-minimal chances of deportation”. One major poll has had immigration as the most important issue to voters for three months running, and Biden’s attempts to get a handle on the problem are too little, too late.

Then there’s his weak response to the campus protests about Gaza. I’d be the first to condemn Israel’s “near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians”, and I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But what we’ve seen at many American universities has not been “humane concern” but “rank illiberalism and ideological extremism”. Students For Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s October 7 atrocities by declaring “glory to our resistance”. One of the leaders of the Columbia protests has said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; in DC, activists defaced a statue of George Washington. This lot don’t want to win over the country – they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the MAGA fringe. It’s reminiscent of how the “new left” got Richard Nixon elected in 1968 by undermining the Democratic vote. And it’s precisely “how you re-elect Trump”.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who recently hurt her chances to be Donald Trump’s running mate by bragging about shooting a puppy, badly underestimated the public’s love of animals, says Henry Mance in the FT. Even Teddy Roosevelt, “the most trigger-happy US president”, knew that there are limits to which animals voters want you to shoot dead. On one hunting trip, he famously spared a captured bear, sparking the craze for “Teddy bears”.

France has reclaimed the record for the world’s longest baguette, says The Guardian. For the previous five years, the title had been held by “a clutch of bakers” in Como, Italy, but on Sunday a dozen French dough-kneaders in a western suburb of Paris, spent 14 hours crafting a 140.5m-long loaf – smashing the Italian record of 132.6m. Bien joué!

Why the Tories keep losing to Sadiq Khan

There’s a simple reason Sadiq Khan “smashed” his Conservative rival in last week’s mayoral election, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Like Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey before her, Susan Hall campaigned on the idea there was “something insidious” about him. Something – “whatever could it be?” – that voters ought to find frightening. “Look at Paris, look at London, they’re no longer recognisable,” said Donald Trump last week. Hall herself, in 2019, agreed with the provocateur Katie Hopkins’s description of him as “our nipple height mayor of Londonistan”, and it’s not long since Lee Anderson was sacked as deputy chairman of the Tory party for saying “these Islamists” had him under their control.

The hysteria is remarkable when you consider what an unremarkable candidate Khan has always been. Even his own colleagues were “bewildered” when this “backroom supporter of Ed Miliband” won the mayoralty in 2016. “He’s only Sadiq Khan!” said one Labour adviser. “How the hell did that happen?” And while his fans and his foes alike portray him as a “5ft 4in revolution”, his time in office has actually been “rather flat”. Yes, he expanded the controversial Ulez, but that was a policy inherited from his predecessor Boris Johnson. What he’s really been doing for the past eight years is making “incremental changes to things like buses”. Yet Tory HQ keeps thinking the way to win is to field “shriekers who sound like they loathe London and everyone in it”. Many would like to try the same against Keir Starmer. “This is how you lose elections, and keep losing them.” By the end of this term Khan will have been in office longer than Margaret Thatcher. It’s not hard to see why: “How shrill his rivals are. How bitter. How alarming. And look at him. What a relief. He’s only Sadiq Khan.”

The British self-driving car company Wayve has raised more than $1bn, the biggest ever investment in a European AI startup. Three of the world’s most powerful tech companies – mega-investor SoftBank, Microsoft and chipmaker Nvidia – teamed up to boost the firm, which was founded in a Cambridge garage in 2017. Unlike most autonomous driving systems, which try to feed their computers “rules” to account for every random eventuality, Wayve “teaches” its cars how to drive by training them on driving videos taken by partners including Asda and Ocado.

It’s the “thermonator”, says The Guardian: a robotic dog with a flamethrower attached to its head. The $9,420 pyro-pup has a 30ft roasting range and laser sight, says Throwflame, the Ohio firm which makes it. It suggests the device could be used for “wildlife control”, “agricultural management” and “ecological conservation”, as well as for “entertainment and special effects”. Unsurprisingly, it’s sold out.