Keir Starmer has promised to press ahead with his decision to scrap winter fuel payments for most pensioners, despite mounting dissent from Labour backbenchers. Around 30 MPs are expected to abstain from tomorrow’s vote on the policy, but the PM said yesterday he had to accept that his government “was going to have to be unpopular”. Israeli airstrikes on military sites in Syria have left at least 16 people dead, according to the Syrian state news agency. Regional intelligence sources told Reuters the attacks in Hama province targeted a major chemical weapons centre housing a specialist team from Iran. The Paris Paralympics ended with a bang last night, says The Guardian, in a closing ceremony featuring “fireworks, laser beams, breakdance and a thumping set by the giants of French electronica”. Britain finished second in the medals table behind China, with 49 golds and 124 overall.

The “disgusting” hypocrisy of the Grenfell cladding firms

The investigation into the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire is unequivocal about the “depravity” of the firms that sold cladding to Kensington and Chelsea council, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. Arconic, Celotex and Kingspan knowingly pushed insulation that was “much more flammable” than the buyer could have known, because the firms “suppressed or rigged” the results of safety tests. A year before the disaster, executives at Ireland-based Kingspan joked over email about how they had managed to get their insulation approved for use in high-rises by sending a different material for testing. “All lies, mate,” wrote one. “Alls we do here is lie.”

The three firms have released “astoundingly insouciant” statements “disclaiming any and all responsibility” for the Grenfell disaster. They don’t want to pay for the vast cost of stripping hundreds of high-rises of their potentially lethal insulation, and their lawyers will be sweating about a possible criminal trial for gross negligence manslaughter. What’s ironic is that these appalling firms are, according to their own reports, “fully signed up to the corporate social responsibility agenda”. Among Kingspan’s “five core principles” is, incredibly, “clear, ethical and honest business communication”. Saint-Gobain, which owned Celotex until this year, claims its “purpose” is “making the world a better home”. And as one might expect from an American firm, Arconic couches its saintliness in the doctrine of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, intoning that “diversity in all areas… is essential to the foundation of a strong company”. Fat lot of good that did to the 72 poor souls whose lives were ended so violently in Grenfell. For these companies to still boast about their ethical standards is nothing short of “disgusting”.

Tony Blair’s new book, On Leadership, includes a joke that “feels accidentally pertinent”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Some people die, and the Devil appears and asks them, before they go to Heaven, to look at Hell, insisting it’s not as bad as they’ve heard. They see Hell – full of “drinking and debauchery” – and ask to be damned. When they then wake up in the real Hell, and it’s “cold, miserable and horrible”, they angrily ask the Devil why it’s nothing like what he showed them. Ah well, he replies, “back then I was campaigning”.

Garry Richardson presented his final sports bulletin on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning after 43 years on the job. Perhaps his most memorable interview, he tells Rosamund Urwin in The Sunday Times, was when he saw Bill Clinton during a rain delay at Wimbledon in 2001. He got someone to pass the former US president a note asking for a quick chat on air – and to his surprise, Clinton agreed. Richardson quickly phoned his family to get them to tune in for his big moment, without saying who he’d be interviewing. When he called again afterwards, his nine-year-old daughter answered. “We’re so disappointed,” she said. “We thought it was going to be Robbie Williams. Do you want to speak to Mum?”

“We are putting the Enlightenment into reverse”

Free speech is always first to go when dictators grab power, says Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. What’s worrying is that the right to say or write what you want is “now in retreat across the democratic world, too”. Pavel Durov, the Russian billionaire founder of Telegram, was arrested in his private jet in Paris last month for failing to clamp down on illegal activity on the platform. Brazil has become the first democracy to ban X, after Elon Musk refused to comply with court orders to remove accounts critical of the government. In the US, Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that the Biden administration had strong-armed him into taking down Facebook posts suggesting that Covid vaccines might have serious side effects or that masks didn’t work.

“Things are not that much better over here in Blighty.” Since 2014, police are thought to have investigated 250,000 so-called “non-crime hate incidents”. Examples include a Surrey parish councillor who tweeted that “trans rights are boring”, and an ex-soldier who shared an image of rainbow pride flags rearranged into a swastika. These are dumb jokes, but no sane person thinks they should be illegal – yet, absurdly, NCHIs can show up on enhanced criminal record checks, undermining your chances of being hired for a new job. And now Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, “a bossy Roundhead if ever there was one”, wants to loosen the rules so that the police can record even more of them. Of course Britain is “still a free society compared to the dictatorships”. But by chipping away at this most fundamental of freedoms, “we are putting the Enlightenment into reverse”.

The latest “very stupid trend” on TikTok is decorating the inside of a fridge to make it look like something out of Bridgerton, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. In one video, a user installs gilt-framed photos of the Netflix show’s cast alongside a tiny plaster bust wrapped (for some reason) in a pink ribbon; in another, a small plastic horse head is set up next to a floral teapot. The overall effect is like “someone’s granny has tried to hide all her valuables from a greedy relative”. And it is known, inevitably, as “Fridgerton”.

The phrase “nominative determinism” was first suggested by a New Scientist reader in 1994, says Jesse Singal in The New York Times, in response to a column pointing out that scientists and writers often seemed “pulled by their own names towards certain subjects”. The best example the column provided, by far, was “an article about incontinence in the British Journal of Urology written by the team of AJ Splatt and D Weedon”.

It’s a southern cassowary chick, one of the world’s largest and deadliest birds, which has been hatched at a wildlife park in the Cotswolds after more than 25 years of trying. A relative of the emu that is native to New Guinea and northern Australia, the flightless cassowary grows to almost 6ft tall and boasts powerful legs and dagger-like claws, says BBC News. It has been responsible for the deaths of several humans, including an exotic animal breeder in Florida in 2019. Keepers at Birdland in Bourton-on-the-Water say they’ll take looking after the new arrival – the first born in the UK since 2021 – “extremely seriously”.