Elon Musk is in “demon mode”

Villain
Donald Trump Jr, who posted a video of himself on a hunting trip in northern Italy with the carcass of a rare ruddy shelduck, which some Italian lawmakers say has protected status. “This is actually a rather uncommon duck for the area,” Don Jr says in the clip, pointing at the rusty-orange bird’s lifeless body. “Not even sure what it is in English.”

Hero
Sean Manning, the head of US publisher Simon & Schuster, who is ditching the use of enthusiastic quotes from other authors on the backs of books. Few will miss their demise, says The Economist, as they tend to be both uninformative (“Spellbinding!” “Stunning!” “Compelling!”) and breathless (“Unputdownable!” “Magisterial!” “Heartbreaking!”). Still, there have been rare cases of “honest copy on dust jackets”: TS Eliot informed readers of Louis MacNeice, a fellow poet, that his works were “intelligible but unpopular”.

Hero
Toby Brown, a 16-year-old boy from London, who is deferring his GCSEs to start work on his tech start-up in Silicon Valley. The teenager, whose hero is the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, has secured $1m in venture capital funding for Beem, an AI-powered computer operating system. Toby’s dad, Alastair, tells The Times his son is constantly inventing weird systems around the house, “with sensors everywhere and alarms going off”. No wonder he’s packing him off to California.

Heroes
Network Rail, for cracking down on the use of such grossly offensive words as “mother”, “mankind” and “passengers”. In a 134-page manual entitled “Speak Passenger”, staff are advised to instead use “parent”, “humankind” and “you”. A pregnant woman is now to be referred to as a “pregnant person”; “normal” should be “neurotypical”. It’s all part of a drive to make customers less frustrated over train delays and cancellations, says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. “A better way of doing that, of course, would be to make the railways run on time.”

The extraordinary life of the Aga Khan

The Aga Khan, the billionaire philanthropist and spiritual leader of the world’s 15 million Ismaili Muslims, had “a taste for the good life”, says The Times. One of his glitziest projects was developing the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, a once-barren coastline that he turned into an exclusive private yacht club visited by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mikhail Gorbachev. He also owned an island in the Bahamas, two private jets, a helicopter and a $100m high-speed yacht. This love of fast-living pervaded his life. While his biggest passion was breeding thoroughbred racehorses, he was also an excellent skier, competing for pre-revolutionary Iran at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. When his chauffeur-driven Maserati once got held up on a winding road by a slower Ferrari, he insisted on swapping places with his driver “before swiftly speeding past”.

Known as “K” to his friends, Prince Karim, who died this week aged 88, was raised in Switzerland and studied at Harvard. He succeeded his grandfather as Aga Khan aged 20 because he was seen as a safer bet than his bed-hopping father Aly, a European playboy best known for his marriage to Hollywood star Rita Hayworth. But Karim was a philanderer in his own right. He had a string of mistresses during his first marriage to the English debutante and model Sally Croker Poole, one of whom he gave a yellow diamond ring said to have cost £1m. Yet for all his vast wealth and royal connections – Queen Elizabeth II was among his friends – “some things remained beyond him”. When his champion racehorse Shergar was kidnapped by the IRA in 1983, he refused to pay the £2m ransom. “The horse was never seen again.”

Amandaland, the new Motherland spin-off, is “hilarious and heartfelt”, says Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. Yummy mummy Amanda, “played to perfection” by Lucy Punch, has been forced to up sticks from Chiswick and “slum it in gritty South Harlesden”, or as she calls it, “SoHa”. Joanna Lumley is back as her disparaging mother Felicity – “Darling, let me in before I get mugged,” she shudders on her daughter’s new doorstep – as is the “obsequious” Anne (Philippa Dunne) as Amanda’s minion. It’s a deft script, and Punch and Lumley are a “dream double act” who provide “more laughs per scene than other BBC comedies do per year”. Six episodes, 30 minutes each.