The Home Office has temporarily suspended all Syrian asylum claims, over fears of an influx of migrants from the country. Several countries are taking advantage of the chaos in Syria: the US has struck targets associated with Islamic State, Turkey has attacked US-backed Kurdish forces, and Israel has reportedly sent troops into the buffer zone beyond the Golan Heights. A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week. Police say Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League graduate, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania carrying a 3D-printed pistol and a silencer. Rupert Murdoch has lost his bid to give control of the family trust to his eldest son, Lachlan. A court in Nevada ruled that when the 93-year-old dies, his other (more liberal-minded) children will also have an equal share of the media empire.

Is Britain heading for its own populist moment?

Lost amid the coverage of Keir Starmer’s latest relaunch last week was a seismic political development, says Janice Turner in The Times: for the first time, Reform polled higher than Labour. Not by much – 24% to 23%, with the Tories on 26% – and the next election is a long way away. “The game, nonetheless, has changed.” The obvious catalyst is immigration: Britain’s population increased by 906,000 in 2023, a rise even liberals have been forced to admit is unsustainable. The Tories bear responsibility for this – Rishi Sunak was “issuing more visas in a month than a year’s Channel crossings” – but it’s Labour’s task to fix it. And Starmer remains as unwilling as ever to do so.

Reform, in contrast, is developing an “electrifying USP”: it positions itself as a “truth-sayer” about issues the other parties avoid. The lack of housing, rising rents, struggling infrastructure – Nigel Farage makes no bones about blaming immigration for all this. And given the “vast sudden influx”, how can he not be right? Reform came second in 89 Labour constituencies in July, most of them in the north. It’s not impossible to see some sort of “accommodation” with the Conservatives at the next election, whereby Reform takes the north and the Tories fight to regain the south. And what if Reform finds a young star like the French National Rally’s 29-year-old wunderkind Jordan Bardella? What if the party gets “lucky” with events, such as a terrorist attack committed by illegal immigrants? At the last election it looked like Britain had dodged the populist wave sweeping Europe and the US. Maybe we haven’t swerved it at all. “Maybe Starmer is our Biden and we’re just one election behind.”

There’s one big exception to the unravelling of globalisation, says The Economist: organised crime. The shady sector has seen a surge in international activity in the past couple of decades, largely because of the spread of encrypted apps and cryptocurrencies, which make it easier to shift dirty money around, and the rise of cheap synthetic drugs that can be made anywhere. The ‘Ndrangheta, an Italian mafia group, has spread to 40 countries and has an annual turnover of around $50bn. Brazil’s First Capital Command, which is thought to have 40,000 full members and 60,000 “affiliates”, has made so many alliances around the world that it acts as a “regulatory agency of the criminal market”.

In Synonym Circuit, players are given a “start word” and an “end word”, and have to link one to the other using synonyms. Each time you choose a word, you are given a new list of synonyms and must choose the one you think will get you closer to the end word. Give it a go here.

Iran’s annus horribilis

President Assad’s downfall in Syria caps a “remarkably bad year” for Iran, says David Leonhardt in The New York Times. The Islamic Republic’s failed drone and missile attack against Israel in April – when almost every projectile was shot down – made Tehran look militarily weak and highlighted regional opposition to the regime. The country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash the following month. Two of Iran’s most important terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been decimated by the Israelis, who managed to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran using a remote-controlled bomb, and take out much of Hezbollah’s leadership by remotely detonating pagers. Now Assad’s overthrow means Syria will be run by a Sunni Muslim group hostile to Iran’s Shiite government. Tehran’s change in fortune after its annus horribilis is nothing short of “stunning”.

Assad’s defenestration doesn’t reflect well on the West either, says Kamal Ahmed in The Daily Telegraph. After 9/11, and the botched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Western governments abandoned the doctrine of liberal interventionism. Most famously, Barack Obama did nothing in 2013 when Assad crossed his supposed “red line” by using chemical weapons. The consequences of this isolationist shift are now all too visible. In Syria, the big external players are not Western nations, but Turkey, Russia and Iran. In Afghanistan, following America’s final withdrawal in 2021, the Taliban won’t even allow women to speak in public. Whatever the rights and wrongs of liberal interventionism, Tony Blair was at least clear in his thinking: that failure to play a muscular role on the foreign stage would result in terrorist-run failed states, which would export violence to the West and drive refugees to Europe. Have today’s isolationists thought their approach through?

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app, says The Washington Post. In a new project, software engineer Riley Walz has gathered millions of these unedited home videos and put them all in one place on his website, serving them to viewers at random. This unusual archive, which Walz calls IMG_0001 after the default filename the videos were given, has proved a hit online. Not only does it provide “a glimpse into different worlds”, its unfiltered nature marks a stark contrast to the “heavily produced and camera-aware” stuff you get on TikTok and YouTube today. Watch some here.

The best predictor for how long you’ll live isn’t your age, or whether you have conditions such as diabetes or heart disease, says Outside Online – it’s how much physical activity you do each day. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the University of Colorado, who looked at the predictive power of 15 longevity markers. Top of the list was how much you move – as measured by wrist-worn devices – ahead of age, mobility problems, self-assessed health, diabetes and smoking. Want to live longer? “Open the door, step outside and get moving.”

It’s baseball player Juan Soto, who has signed the largest contract in the history of sport: a 15-year, $765m deal with the New York Mets. The 26-year-old slugger from the Dominican Republic signed the $51m-a-year agreement after his current team, the Yankees, offered him a measly $47.5m a year. There are two main reasons for his enormous payday, says The Wall Street Journal. The first is that few top players become so-called “free agents” this young. The second is that Soto is a “living, breathing hitting robot” – he almost never tries to hit balls he doesn’t need to, and “absolutely obliterates” the ones he does.