UK government borrowing hit £3.1bn last month – twice as much as the same period last year – driven by increased spending on public services and welfare. The figure was far higher than the £0.1bn forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility, raising fears that Chancellor Rachel Reeves may have to increase taxes. Barack Obama declared that the US is “ready for a new chapter” with Kamala Harris as president in a speech to the Democratic National Convention last night. The former president warned that the party was still facing a “tight race” against Donald Trump, while Michelle Obama told crowds: “Hope is making a comeback.” Eating a ham sandwich a day could significantly increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. Researchers found that eating just 50g of processed meat, equivalent to two slices of ham, or 100g of unprocessed red meat, like a small steak, increased the risk of developing the disease in the next decade by 15% and 10% respectively.

The Democrats are trying to erase Joe Biden

This week’s Democratic National Convention was meant to be a coronation for Joe Biden, says Evan Osnos in The New Yorker. Instead, the president turned up briefly on Monday night to “hand off the prize he once coveted”. His speech was valedictory, “mapping the arc that he hopes will form the centre of his legacy”: the story of America passing from a moment of national peril to one of possibility. Not long ago it looked like the old statesman might mar the end of a long career with an “unwillingness to accept reality”. But in this final lap, Biden may have saved both his reputation and his party, by embracing the simple realisation: “I love the job, but I love my country more.”

Hang on a second, says Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal. The Democrats came to bury Biden, not praise him. There’s something “impressively Stalinist” about the way the party is erasing his presidency, “like those air-brushed photos of missing Politburo members from the 1930s”. Kamala Harris has evidently calculated that she won’t win defending the record of the last four years, “so she is going to run against it”, complaining about the crisis at the southern border and the nation’s “broken economy”. The fact that she left “such a light footprint” on the Biden administration as VP is now working to her advantage: she can plausibly claim she had nothing to do with it. Having assisted the suicide of the presidency, the party has decided to “euthanise Biden’s record and legacy too”. It’s “cynical, dishonest and ruthless”. And it might work.

🏛️🎣 If it suddenly seems like Barack Obama is running the Democratic show again, says Edward Luttwak in UnHerd, that may be because he is. Witness the highly coordinated way in which America’s liberal elite switched from propping up Biden to cheerleading for Harris – unimaginable without “a single directing hand behind the scenes”. Obama’s former staffers have long filled Biden’s White House (Biden’s crew from his years in the Senate are all dead or retired). And it’s worth noting that Obama is the only recent ex-president to have gone on living in Washington DC. “It is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.”

It’s often said that a key reason the UK can’t cut immigration is that the impact on “Our NHS” would be too high. This is balls, says Sam Bidwell in The Critic. Of the 1.2 million people who migrated to Britain last year, just 3% came to work as doctors or nurses. And regardless, any shortage of doctors is entirely artificial: incredibly, in 2008 the British Medical Association capped the number of places for student doctors at 9,500 a year, for fear of, in their words, “devaluing the profession”. There’s no shortage of demand – when the cap was briefly lifted during Covid, enrolment shot up. But who wants the extra competition for those cushy consultancy jobs?

The Ozempic boom has famously transformed Denmark’s economy, says Air Mail: Novo Nordisk – the firm that makes the weight-loss wonder drug – has boosted the country’s GDP by 1.8%. Now it’s coming to the nation’s beach towns. CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen recently made an $8.6bn investment in Kalundborg, a town near one of its manufacturing plants where company employees make up a quarter of the population. Further along the chichi coastline known as the Danish Riviera, change is also visible in the exclusive, old-glamour town of Tisvilde, which has long drawn Copenhagen’s arty elite. The high street’s quaint shops now sell Dior sunglasses, raffia beach bags and Goop-y sun cream. Succession actor Jeremy Strong has a house there.

The “wilful ugliness” of Britain’s streets

Why isn’t our street furniture more beautiful, asks Laura Freeman in The Oldie. Looking around our cities, one is struck by the “wilful ugliness” of the lamp posts, bins, bus stops and the like. The end of my road in London is home to a monstrous regiment of rubbish and recycling containers, “big, square-shouldered bruisers, loitering by the iron railings”. Walking around Vauxhall recently, I was appalled by the forest of poles, lights and signs, each “solid, stolid and without any decorative grace”. This stuff matters. We may occasionally pop into an art gallery, but we look at kerbs, bins and bus stops every day. And if a council can’t be trusted to make “even a bollard beautiful”, what hope is there for building schools, houses and parks that make people proud?

It wasn’t always like this. The first traffic light, a 20ft-high gas lamp erected in Parliament Square in 1869, was “a thing of beauty”, designed in keeping with both the Gothic Abbey and the Palace of Westminster. The Victorians nicknamed their public lavatories “Temples of Relief”, with ironwork lattice doors, filigree domes and porcelain stalls. There are glimmers of hope. Around the back of Westminster Abbey, a green cabman’s shelter has been repurposed to hide the holy bins: “an ingenious solution to an ugly problem”. And I always think the flashing black-and-white beacons of our pedestrian crossings “have a certain monochrome chic”, while their names – zebra, pelican, puffin, toucan – never fail to delight. “Let there be traffic lights. But let them be beautiful.”

Ukraine’s unexpected invasion of Russia’s Kursk region is proving to be something of a headache for Vladimir Putin, says Amy Knight in The Wall Street Journal. Influential pro-Kremlin military bloggers have begun to openly question Moscow’s defence establishment. And more remarkably, the oligarch Oleg Deripaska – one of Russia’s richest businessmen – has recently criticised the government’s defence spending, calling the Ukraine war “mad” and advocating an “immediate, unconditional ceasefire”. Deripaska is a bright chap – there’s no way he’d risk speaking so candidly “if other members of the business and political elite didn’t agree with him”.

Homebuyers are increasingly on the lookout for one particular luxury, says the FT: “a snoring room”. One in six couples in Britain now sleep apart, according to research by the Sleep Council, with half of those in separate bedrooms. That’s leading more people than ever to demand what property experts euphemistically label a “secondary master bedroom”. The trend has already taken off in the US, where homes with two main sleeping spaces are now priced 13.6% higher than the national average. “We never call it a snoring room,” says one estate agent, “but that’s what it is.”

It’s Indiana Jones’s signature fedora, which has just been sold for a whopping $630,000. The hardy headgear – this one specifically worn by Harrison Ford in The Temple of Doom – became an iconic symbol of the franchise, even getting a mention on the 1989 poster for The Last Crusade: “The man with the hat is back!” According to the auction catalogue, the fedora, made by the Herbert Johnson Hat Company in London, is made from “sable-coloured rabbit felt” with a leather sweatband imprinted with the initials “IJ” in gold. The sweatband also apparently features “some makeup residue”.