Criminals could serve their sentences in Estonian prisons to ease the strain on Britain’s overcrowded jails. Government sources told The Daily Telegraph that the option was “on the table” as the prison population in England and Wales hit another record high, after the Baltic state offered to rent out spare capacity to other countries. Saltwater nose drops can cut children’s colds by two days. A study into the age-old remedy has found that using homemade saline solution can reduce the duration of a cold in young kids by up to a quarter, as well as lower the chances of them passing it on to family members. Asda’s Everyday tea bags have been crowned Britain’s best brew 2024. The budget cuppa came top in a blind tasting by “experienced and committed” tea drinkers, narrowly beating PG Tips and Tetley. Twinings Everyday, which is four times the price of Asda’s, came last.

Blame Angela Merkel for the rise of Germany’s far-right

If you want someone to blame for the rise of the far-right in Germany, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, look no further than Angela Merkel. Much of the AfD’s support comes from Germans opposed to mass immigration – and it was Merkel who, in 2015, “opened Europe’s doors to an unknown number of refugees and migrants”. More than a million people arrived in Germany that year, primarily Syrian refugees, and Merkel was lauded around the world for her “humanity, generosity, tolerance”. But Islamic extremism quickly became “a feature of European life”, with terrorist attacks in London, Brussels, Barcelona, Nice, Berlin, Wurzburg, Manchester, Stockholm and Paris. That accelerated the rise of anti-immigrant right-wingers in Germany, as well as the likes of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. They all owe Merkel “a debt of gratitude”.

It’s not just Merkel’s immigration vision that’s hit the rocks, says Anne McElvoy in The i newspaper: another of her big mistakes was her over-reliance on US-backed security. This has left Germany much more vulnerable to terrorist attacks – like the catastrophe in Solingen last month – and led to woeful under-spending on the country’s armed forces and Nato contributions. Add to that a “fateful, lazy reliance on Russian gas and oil” and it’s no surprise Germans are wondering how things could possibly be going worse. I once lived in Thuringia, and “by no means do all these voters have pictures of Hitler in the hall cupboard”. But they are angry, and they feel ignored by the Berlin bubble that “love-bombed” Merkel for 16 years.

🇩🇪😬 One worrying trend is how well the AfD is doing with young people, says Lisa Haseldine in The Spectator. In the weekend’s elections, it was the most popular party among 18 to 24-year-olds in Thuringia and Saxony, winning 38% and 31% of the vote respectively. With a year to go until Germany’s federal election, “it is hard to deny the AfD’s claim that it is the ‘party of the future’”.

As children head back to school, says AP, they’re likely to come home with an “alien language you may find befuddling”. Words like “skibidi” and “rizzler” are becoming commonplace among today’s tweens. Are you fluent enough to survive the back-to-school season of today’s under-14s? Take this Gen Alpha quiz to find out.

Robert Jenrick’s lead in the Tory leadership race is starting to provoke some snippy comments from critics who don’t like the evolution of his views, says Politico. One long-serving Tory, not working for any camp, says: “He’s the kind of guy that if you told him he’d get 1% extra in the polls by beheading a kitten on College Green, he’d do it without question.” Yikes.

Atheism is out, “cultural Christianity” is in

Five or 10 years ago, says Madeleine Davies in The New Statesman, everyone was down on religion. The views of the so-called New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris et al – were still in the ascendancy. How things have changed. Today, the people you hear talking about religion are mostly singing its praises. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has described movingly her conversion from atheism to Christianity. The musician Nick Cave has talked of his “considerable surprise” at finding enlightenment in the Church. Celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson is finding huge audiences with his “therapeutic exposition of the Christian scriptures”. For all the talk of its decline – just 1% of Britons say they regularly attend a Church of England service – Christianity is undergoing something of a revival.

Perhaps people are starting to realise how much of our culture is subtly underpinned by Christian beliefs and history. In his seminal 2019 book Dominion, the historian Tom Holland argued that the values we regard as universal or self-evident actually spring from the Bible – that almost everything has been shaped in some way by Christianity. He compares the faith to dust particles “so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye” and “breathed in equally by everyone”. Holland is unsure whether Christian morality can survive the broader loss of belief in the biblical story. CS Lewis was adamant that you can’t accept Christ as a “great moral teacher” without also accepting his claim to be God. “You must make your choice,” he wrote. “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.” Either way, it seems we’re finally ready for a “more grown-up” conversation about faith.

Yulia Putintseva is taking tennis brattishness to a new level. During her straight-sets defeat in the third-round of the US Open, the 29-year-old from Kazakhstan asked a ball girl to throw her balls, then made no attempt to catch them or pick them up, instead glaring at the girl with her arms down by her sides. She has since apologised, saying she got “deep in my thoughts”.

Margaret Drabble once made a striking observation about the reading habits of the two sexes, says David Hare in The Spectator. “Only boys like spy stories,” she said, “because they’re about derring-do. Girls prefer detective stories, because they’re about psychology.” The argument doesn’t say much for men, since spying depends on “pretence, dishonesty and subterfuge”. But murder mysteries are about “suppressed fury and violent malice”, so maybe the theory isn’t great for women either.

It’s the world’s oldest cognac, bottled some 328 years ago. The 1696 Jules Robin, owned by Dutch collector Lars Janssen, has been officially named the oldest in the world by Guinness World Records, beating its predecessor: a 1762 Cognac from Gautier which sold at Sotheby’s in 2020 for $146,000.