The Home Office has been accused of vastly understating the cost of managing asylum and illegal immigration. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, officials repeatedly told parliament it would cost an average £110m a year to cover the UK’s asylum, border, visa and passport operations, but in fact the Home Office spent an average of £2.6bn a year. Government ministers are weighing plans to ban smoking in pub gardens. Under a new scheme to phase out tobacco, smoking could be forbidden in outdoor spaces including outside restaurants and hospitals and in sports grounds. The Paralympic Games kicked off with a dazzling opening ceremony in Paris last night, featuring around 4,400 athletes from a record 168 countries. Keir Starmer flew in from Berlin for the event and is today meeting with President Macron at the Elysée Palace.

Why the French arrested Pavel Durov

It’s no surprise that Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested as he stepped off his private jet in Paris last Saturday, says Le Monde. The 39-year-old Russian tech billionaire’s encrypted messaging app is both a crucial tool for dissidents – he lives in self-imposed exile from Russia since refusing to hand over user data to the Kremlin – and also for “paedophiles, criminals, cyber-criminals and terrorists of all kinds”. What sets Telegram apart is that Durov rejects the usual content moderation practices deployed, however ineffectively, by the other social media bosses. And, remarkably for the head of a firm with almost a billion users, Durov has “so far refrained from voluntarily answering questions from regulatory authorities”.

It’s a revealing case. Libertarians like Elon Musk see Durov as a champion of free speech at its purest – no censorship, anything goes – and have denounced his arrest. But French authorities are well within their rights to ask him a few questions about offences committed via his app, specifically “swindling, drug trafficking, cyber-harassment, organised crime and apology of terrorism”. Paris prosecutors announced yesterday he had been placed under formal investigation in France, where he holds citizenship, and is barred from leaving the country. This is an “important legal and political test for the European Union”, which is trying to assert itself as the world’s most grown-up regulator. They are so far not having much luck taking on deep-pocketed US tech giants, with their First Amendment obsession with free speech, and the liberalism of Silicon Valley. Perhaps for now, a stateless Russian will have to do.

To The Times

It isn’t only operas that can be too long for many people, but church services. Hugh Montefiore, the former Bishop of Birmingham, when asked whether he was high church or low church, replied: “I’m short church.”

Philippa Russell
Birmingham

The near-daily reports of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray rubbing colleagues up the wrong way typically focus on her battles with Starmer’s strategy guru Morgan McSweeney, says George Eaton in The New Statesman. Government sources reject this framing, “but not because all is well in No 10”. It’s not “Sue vs Morgan”, they say, it’s “Sue vs everyone”. And the complaint is always the same: she thinks she runs the country. It turns out this is nothing new. “It took me precisely two years before I realised finally who it is that runs Britain,” former Tory minister Oliver Letwin said in 2012. “Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the head of ethics or something in the Cabinet Office. Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen.”

Our “champions of human rights” are blind to most of the world

Of all the world’s injustices, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times, “perhaps the saddest is that so many of them are simply ignored”. Protesters loudly demand a ceasefire in Gaza and a few still pay attention to Russian atrocities in Ukraine. But apart from that, there’s a “vast blanket of silence”, under which some of the world’s worst abusers proceed “largely unnoticed and unhindered”. Where were the student protests after Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro stole last month’s election “in broad daylight”? He’s since jailed around 2,000 of his political enemies, promising “maximum punishment”. This is from a government that has already caused starvation and the mass exodus of millions of poor citizens.

And what about the brutal regime in Iran, which systematically raped and killed civilians during mass protests in 2022 and executes homosexuals. It says something about the moral priorities of much of today’s global left that Iran is one Middle Eastern regime with which they want better relations. Campus protesters having nothing to say about the “staggering human rights abuses” taking place in Sudan, where some 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million have become refugees. In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed – surely “history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize” – massacred ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll around 600,000, and is now waging civil war again against former allies. And this is to say nothing of the Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China and Christians in Nigeria. The fact that the world’s “self-declared champions of human rights” are happy to ignore these atrocities while directing their moral fury at a country like Israel, which upholds the values they pretend to hold dear, remains “one of humanity’s great puzzles”.

When Richard Davis invented the bulletproof vest in the early 1970s, he had a hard time convincing anyone it would really work. So he did what anyone would do, says Smithsonian Magazine: put one on and shot himself. The gag worked so well as a sales pitch that Davis ended up shooting himself, at point-blank range, 192 times, sometimes followed by a cheerful: “Easy as pie, guys!” Watch a longer clip here.

AI could soon be marking children’s homework. A new £4 million government scheme aims to train artificial intelligence tools to grade pupils’ assignments, freeing teachers to use their time more productively. They may be pushing at an open door: according to a survey by Teacher Tapp, almost half of teachers are already using AI to help get through their daily to-do lists. The Department for Education says it will make a store of training data available to AI firms, with a share of £1 million to be awarded to those who have the best ideas for how to make teachers’ lives easier.

It’s Britain’s rarest orchid, which has been spotted for the first time in 15 years. The ghost orchid, which lacks chlorophyll and unusually does not need sunlight to grow, is considered the “holy grail” by botanists, and was declared extinct in 2009. This made it all the more surprising when dental surgeon and part-time botanist Richard Bate came across one of the ivory white flowers growing deep in an English wood. The exact location of the prized plant is being kept under wraps to protect it.