The Kremlin has expelled six British diplomats for “spying and sabotage”. The incendiary decision came as Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to discuss letting Ukraine use long-range missiles deep inside Russian territory, a move Vladimir Putin has warned would leave Britain and the US “at war” with Russia. The High Court has quashed plans to build the UK’s first deep coal mine in more than 30 years. The judge agreed with a legal challenge by environmental campaigners that the proposal for the development in Cumbria didn’t take into account the impact of burning coal on the environment. Police minister Diana Johnson had her purse stolen while giving a speech to senior officers about the dangers of theft. The apt acquisition took place at the annual Police Superintendents’ Association conference in a Warwickshire hotel, says The Sun. “Oh for plod’s sake.”

Harris hasn’t won yet

Kamala Harris achieved three important things at the debate in Philadelphia this week, says George Will in The Washington Post. First, to the millions of voters who know nothing about her, she presented herself as a “plausible president” – especially compared to the “Krakatoa of volcanic, incoherent, fact-free bombast” beside her. Second, she successfully “befuddled” Donald Trump into blathering on about his hatred for immigrants and his admiration for foreign strongmen. And third, she provided fresh momentum to her flagging “golly, this is fun” campaign. For traditional conservatives like me, one can now glimpse a “tantalising possibility”: a win for Harris in November, coupled with a Republican Senate to “regularly remind her” that most Americans don’t subscribe to her progressive views. Such an outcome might just lead to “the restoration of normal politics”.

Not so fast, say Anthony Scaramucci and Katty Kay on The Rest is Politics: US. After the assassination attempt on Trump in July, many of us thought it would totally change the election campaign and that he couldn’t possibly go on to lose. In reality, it had “virtually no impact on anything”. The debate is the same. Yes, it might give Harris a brief lift and help her fundraising, but it will soon be forgotten. What Harris needs is “more media time”: she needs to get out and answer journalists’ questions. Because say what you like about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance – he is at least going on TV, taking on anyone willing to interview him. Harris also desperately needs to sharpen her economic message. Inflation tops every single poll of what voters care about, but the vice president still hasn’t come up with a “clear and passionate” message on what she’ll do about it. Until she does, “she won’t go anywhere”.

Keir Starmer came into power promising to “reset” Britain’s relationship with Europe, says Jon Stone in Politico. But the EU is “starting to wonder whether he really means it”. His “swift rejection” of EU priorities, such as setting up a youth mobility scheme and rejoining the Erasmus student exchange programme, has gone down particularly badly with European officials and diplomats. “People are starting to think it’s a bit of a facade,” says one senior EU official. “The answer is always ‘no’.”

There was a time when “to be hatless was to be half-dressed”, says Sam Kashner in Air Mail, and for decades, the right hat was a Borsalino. The style was invented in 1857 when a pair of Italian hatmakers, the Borsalino brothers, added two dents into a typical soft felt fedora, allowing the wearer to “easily tip his hat to a lady”. It quickly caught on, and by the mid-1900s the Borsalino was worn by everyone from Al Capone to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But hats then dramatically went out of fashion in 1961, when John F Kennedy became the first president to be inaugurated hatless. As one of the Borsalino heirs remarked: “A man has lost the pleasure of taking his hat off in front of a lady.”

Why we should pay to go to hospital

Everyone agrees the NHS is broken, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. The new landmark report by surgeon and former health minister Lord Darzi is a “devastating indictment” of the utter betrayal of the public (and medics) by a visibly failing system. This, he found, is a country where one in five deaths are avoidable; where higher-risk heart attack patients needing rapid intervention to unblock an artery wait for 146 minutes, half an hour longer than a decade ago. Visiting NHS facilities, Darzi was “appalled” to find mental health patients in “rooms that were constructed for a Victorian asylum”, with “infestations of mice and cockroaches”.

To many, the answer appears obvious: “more money!” But the Tories tested this theory to destruction, leaving Britain’s health service one of the best-funded in the world. Spending is up by a third, in real terms, in 10 years, and the hospital workforce is 17% larger. “The real poverty is one of ideas.” And what nobody dares admit is that the “free-at-the-point-of-use” principle may be the health service’s “main curse”. Of course everyone should get the healthcare they need regardless of income – only Americans think otherwise. But even the most progressive and high-taxing countries ask patients to pay a small amount to see a doctor, to deter time-wasters; in Britain, some 45,000 patients a day gum up the system seeking free prescriptions for cheap painkillers like paracetamol. The rich can skip all this with £120-a-visit private GPs. The only way the government can provide the poor with the same level of service is by forcing those who can afford to pay to do so.

🤖👨🏻‍⚕️ When Sajid Javid was health secretary, he was shown a robot that carried out prostate surgery five times faster than a surgeon, and more safely, resulting in faster recovery times. Why isn’t it rolled out, he asked? “Surgeons don’t like it,” came the ridiculous reply. Well, obviously. “What about patients?”

George Bernard Shaw once found in a second-hand bookshop a copy of his works that he had inscribed to a friend, says Patrick Kidd in The Times. It read, simply: “To —, with esteem, G Bernard Shaw.” The playwright immediately bought the book and sent it back to the same friend with a second message: “To —, with renewed esteem, G Bernard Shaw.”

It’s Leticia Sarda, a former Burberry model who has finally been identified after a vast online manhunt, says The New York Times. Five years ago, a Reddit user posted a picture of a piece of printed cloth featuring illustrations of several supposedly famous faces. The others were quickly recognised, but Sarda remained a mystery – prompting the creation of a Reddit community of 40,000 online sleuths devoted to tracking “Celebrity Number Six”. Finally, this month, a user digitally edited the image and ran it through face-recognition software, which turned up Sarda’s name. The 43-year-old, who had no idea about any of this until the user emailed her out of the blue, says the experience has been “funky”.