Junior doctors in England have accepted the government’s offer of a 22% pay rise over two years, ending an 18-month dispute involving 11 strikes. Some 66% of British Medical Association members backed the deal, but the union warned that if there weren’t more above-inflation pay rises in the future there would be “consequences”. Pregnancy brain really does exist, says BBC News, according to the first detailed map of human brain changes before, during and after gestation. Scientists found “remarkable” differences in regions linked to socialising and emotional processing, some of which were still obvious two years after giving birth. A capybara named Cinnamon is at large in Shropshire after escaping from a zoo near Telford. Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World issued a plea for help on social media, announcing that the “beloved” rodent had escaped into the woods on Friday and urging the public not to approach her.

Why so many American voters are still undecided

Ever since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and Donald Trump, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, Western politics has been locked in a stalemate. On one side, there’s a “credentialed elite” that keeps failing to perform the basic tasks of government. On the other, there’s a populist rebellion deemed “too chaotic and paranoid” to be trusted with power. The US election is a perfect illustration of this. Kamala Harris “smoothly” out-debated Trump in last week’s debate, goading him into his “grievance obsessed, demagogic” worst. But that smoothness was itself an evasion of the Biden administration’s record: a historic surge in migration, soaring inflation, the mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so on. Harris and her backers insist that voters should forgive or forget all that, because Trump is too unstable and dangerous for the White House.

This is very much part of a pattern. On issue after issue, “aggressive groupthink” among Western elites has led to devastating consequences: the post-9/11 debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; “Davos-man” naivety about globalisation and China; Eurocrat myopia about the manageability of mass migration. And every time “the bill comes due”, the elites furiously back-pedal and tell the unhappy swing voter that “no real price can be exacted” because the populist alternative isn’t fit for office. That’s why America’s undecided voters are still undecided – because they don’t see this as a “simple choice between stability and peril”. And who can blame them? “If you keep offering voters two bad options, you shouldn’t be surprised that they will often choose the one you are sure is worse.”

Donald Trump was in remarkably good spirits after Sunday’s assassination attempt in Florida, says The Independent. The former president even joked to his advisers that he was disappointed when Secret Service agents whisked him off the golf course. “I really wanted to finish the hole,” he said. “I had a birdie putt.”

Last September, seismologists detected vibrations “unlike any they’d picked up before”, says Yahoo News: a “monotonous hum” from Greenland that continued for nine days. They’ve now worked out that this “weird signal” was probably caused by a 650ft-high tsunami – roughly the height of the HSBC building in Canary Wharf – repeatedly crashing between two sides of a remote fjord. It seems a melting glacier triggered a landslide into Dickson Fjord, sending the whopping waves back and forth across the 1.5-mile-wide stretch of water. It’s a phenomenon known as a “seiche” – and this is the longest ever recorded.

Parisians have finally fallen for Emily

When Netflix released the first season of Emily in Paris in 2020, says The Economist, French critics were aghast. Le Parisien denounced its Instagrammable clichés and vacuous plot as “disconnected from reality”; a writer for Le Monde said it had left him feeling queasy, “as if I had eaten all the macaroons in the box by myself”. Yet four years on, there has been a volte face. When the first five episodes of the new series were released in August, the show shot to the top of the most-watched list in France. Le Point praised it as “a nice dose of irony”; even Le Parisien said it “sparkles”.

It’s not entirely clear what’s behind this shift. The series – about a gauche American (Lily Collins) who moves to the French capital – remains “the antithesis of the gritty realism” in many of the best French TV series. “The brand placement remains brazen, the dialogue vapid and Emily’s outfits eyebrow-raising.” Perhaps the French are coming round to the show because it serves as a reminder of what makes their capital so alluring. Parisians are always grumbling about “overcrowded metros, rats and roadworks”, in stark contrast to the foreigners who stop to marvel at its bakeries, bridges and luxury stores. Just as the Olympics did earlier in the summer, the Netflix show “reveals Paris to the French afresh”. Sure, it’s not all upside – filming locations, such as the street where the fictional Emily lives, have been “overrun by selfie-snapping tourists”. But such inconveniences will surely be worth it if Emily in Paris “makes the French look differently at themselves”.

Ford CEO Jim Farley has effectively conceded defeat in the consumer electric vehicle market in China, says The Wall Street Journal. On a few “humbling trips” there, he has been blown away by what his Chinese rivals are doing: not just “elegant, low-cost engineering” under the hood, but also luxury interiors with everything from heated arms and leg rests to “massive multimedia screens controlled by hand gestures”. He was so impressed that he arranged to have some Chinese EVs – which are prohibitively expensive in the US because of tariffs – shipped over to Ford HQ in Michigan for executives to look at. Directors “took turns fiddling” with the cars during board-meeting coffee breaks.

The house I’ve been staying at in Greece is just above a nudist beach, says Alexandra Shulman in The Mail on Sunday. Our host, a fiery Greek woman, told us she was walking the dog one day when one of the nudists marched up, “waggling in his naked state”, and told her that dogs weren’t allowed on the beach. Furious, she went home and did some research, then came back the next day with her pooch in tow. When the same man confronted her, she ordered him to put some pants on because it was illegal for people to “harass a woman exposing themselves in this way”. It was the last she heard from him.

It’s a durian, a smelly yellow fruit that may inadvertently be pushing up coffee prices, says BBC News. After a “freak frost” in 2021 wiped out coffee crops in Brazil – the biggest producer of barista-quality Arabica beans – buyers turned to countries like Vietnam, the primary grower of the Robusta beans typically used for instant coffee. But when a drought then hit Vietnamese coffee farmers, many of them pivoted to growing durian to capitalise on rising demand from China. As a result, exports of Robusta fell 50% in the year to June – leaving global stocks “near depleted”.