The home secretary has launched a series of new government-backed inquiries into grooming gangs, after a fortnight of public pressure surrounding the decade-old scandal reignited by Elon Musk. Yvette Cooper announced a three-month national audit examining ethnicity data and the demographics of the gangs and victims, while £5m has been pledged towards local inquiries. Benjamin Netanyahu has confirmed that the hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas has been agreed, and that Israel’s security cabinet is meeting today to vote on it. If the agreement goes through, the first hostages could be released as early as Sunday. A sumptuous spa complex dating back to the first century AD has been unearthed in Pompeii. The private bathhouse, thought to be the largest discovered in the city, features a plunge pool and a changing room, along with hot, warm and cold rooms, at the centre of a grand home.

Rachel Reeves and the bond market “doom loop”

As the UK government’s borrowing costs leapt this week, politicians and commentators fell over one another to explain that bond investors were punishing Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as they had Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng during their disastrous mini-Budget. This is nonsense, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. Interest rates on 10-year government loans are also up in France, Germany and Italy in the past month, and “the UK is no different”. Most of this has been driven by the US, where rates have jumped ahead of the arrival of Donald Trump. I’ve been tracking bond markets since Tony Blair was in No 10, and here’s a rule of thumb: “On any average day when UK bonds go up or down, it’s because US bonds are up or down.”

The sane thing for Reeves and Keir Starmer to say during the recent market turmoil would have been: yes, global markets are going through some choppiness, “we’ll keep monitoring the situation”. Instead they panicked and promised “ruthless” spending cuts by March. “Should they want to know why this is idiocy, they need only consult Truss.” She can tell them about the “doom loop” ahead: under perceived pressure from financial markets, the government cuts spending, which lowers growth, which shrinks tax revenues, which makes markets more wary of lending to the government. “Follow this loop for any length of time and, well, the government isn’t in government any more.”

📚🤨 Last spring, says Matthew Parris in The Spectator, I tasked myself “mercilessly” with reading all 8,000 words of Reeves’s Mais Lecture. “I read them twice, and then again.” This was an important, prestigious City occasion, and a crucial opportunity for a politician everyone knew would be Britain’s next chancellor to set out her economic philosophy. And yet, as I read and reread, I found “no evidence of a presiding intellect”. She was trying so hard to caveat everything and present herself as having “no ideology” that she overshot, leaving only the impression that she had “no ideas”.

The resignation of Tulip Siddiq – the anti-corruption minister accused of benefiting from corruption – means Labour’s “holier-than-thou posturing” is well and truly finished, says William Atkinson in The Daily Telegraph. First it was Lord Alli’s “summer of sleaze”; then transport secretary Louise Haigh had to resign over some previously undisclosed police matter; now this. But Kemi Badenoch shouldn’t celebrate too hastily. If voters are given the impression that Labour are just as scandal-prone as the Tories, they may well decide to “take a punt on Reform”.

Forget the pub, says Arielle Domb in Vogue: saunas are the new place to socialise. For young Londoners, it’s become standard practice to spend a chunk of your weekend sweating it out in one of the city’s many new facilities, from community saunas in Stratford to luxe rooftop pods in Hackney. The number of Finnish-style public saunas in the UK doubled between 2023 and 2024, jumping from 45 to 90 – a figure that’s predicted to exceed 200 in 2025. We’re still a long way behind Finland itself, though: nearly 90% of the population takes a sauna at least once a week.

The case for a “cultural elite”

On Saturday, Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel took to the pages of the FT to attack the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, says James Marriott in The Times: the sinister network of media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that have traditionally controlled the public conversation. Sweep away the professors, TV producers and newspaper editors, argues Thiel, and citizens will be free to seek truth for themselves. He’s not alone. The right loathes “cultural elites” for being patronising and out of touch; the left for excluding “marginalised voices”. The idea that society requires a class of people who promote certain values and set the cultural weather has few adherents. But it’s a view to which I find myself “increasingly sympathetic”.

The internet has “radically democratised” culture. Thanks to Facebook and X, the “public conversation” – once restricted to Newsnight and the opinion pages – is now virtually unlimited. This has not exactly heralded an “egalitarian paradise of reasoned debate”. Instead, the prevalence of social media has brought about “rising political extremism, metastasising conspiracy theories, growing hostility to science and the shattering of the mainstream”. Citizens now differ on matters once deemed too obvious to discuss. Who won the election? Do vaccines work? What is a woman? Yes, many more views are heard, but the result is chaos. And it turns out many people are not intuitively attracted to “liberal democratic values”. Given half a chance, a remarkable number of people (even those who declare themselves liberals) prefer to silence and abuse their enemies rather than tolerate or engage with them. It may be that you simply can’t have a tolerant and democratic liberal society without a cultural elite “imposing those strange ideas from above”.

Amateur baker Keith Scovell has won legions of fans with his caricature cakes modelled on celebrities from Donald Trump to Freddie Mercury to the King and Queen, says the Daily Mail. The 55-year-old Londoner amassed almost 200,000 views on TikTok for his “unique take” on Claudia Winkleman (he used Tic Tacs for her teeth). See more here.

The 2025 edition of Who’s Who “includes a rare hat-trick”, says The Oldie. Major General Julian Buczacki, assistant chief of the defence staff, has been added to the directory of noteworthy people, joining his oncologist brother, Professor Simon Buczacki, and gardening expert father Dr Stefan Buczacki. Under recreations, Julian has put: “Beating the next two people at Trivial Pursuit.”

It’s the world’s largest human gathering: the Maha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival with an estimated 400 million attendees. The pilgrimage happens every 12 years on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in the northern Indian city of Prayagraj, says The New York Times, with people travelling from across the globe to “purify their sins” by taking holy baths in the water. In preparation for this year’s event, the state of Uttar Pradesh has spent around $800m building a temporary 10,000-acre campsite with tens of thousands of tents, bathrooms, parking areas and water stations.