Rachel Reeves is set to announce significant spending cuts this afternoon, to plug a £20bn “black hole” in the public finances left by the last government. The Chancellor will promise to cancel infrastructure projects and sell off empty public buildings, accusing the Tories of “covering up” shortfalls. Israeli air strikes hit targets across southern Lebanon overnight, in retaliation for a Hezbollah rocket attack that killed 12 children in the Golan Heights on Saturday. Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Iran-backed militant group it would “pay a heavy price”, as the government weighed a wider military response despite fears that would lead to all-out war. An unknown official wearing colourful budgie smugglers became an unlikely hero at the Olympics after diving into the pool to retrieve a lost swimming cap. The stray headwear was causing a delay between heats when the mystery man sprung into action, says BBC Sport. “Give him a medal!”

An antidote to the “Sturm und Drang” of the Biden-Trump era

You can understand why Democrats are exuberant, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden on the presidential ticket has totally changed the narrative: “prosecutor vs felon; future vs past; positivity vs hatred”. But at some point the vice president will have to tell voters what she actually stands for – and they might not like quite how left-wing she is. Her Senate record is “one long series of DEI initiatives”. She has said she believes in “equality of outcomes” over “equality of opportunity”, a position that “even Communist China has now abandoned”. And during her “catastrophic” 2020 election campaign, she favoured decriminalising illegal border crossings and said the idea that more police officers creates more safety is “outdated” and “backward”.

All true, says Irwin Stelzer in The Sunday Times, but I still think she’ll win. The mood in America reminds me of 1948, when I correctly predicted that Harry Truman would beat Tom Dewey. It was a massive shock to the experts – before the votes had even been counted, the Chicago Tribune printed an edition headlined “Dewey Beats Truman” – but I had heard the “background music”. The message I’m hearing around the country today is that people are sick and tired of the “Sturm und Drang of the Biden-Trump decade”. Many voters will conclude that “almost any change” is better than a continuation of this nasty politics. Yes, some voters may not care for Harris’s left-wing outlook. But “don’t count her out”.

😿📉 On the Republican side, there are rumours that Donald Trump already regrets picking JD Vance as his running mate, says Politico. The 39-year-old has been widely criticised for recently resurfaced comments he made in 2021 mocking Democrats as “childless cat ladies”. He has the lowest post-convention approval rating for any non-incumbent VP nominee since 1980. And, crucially, he was chosen before Biden pulled out, when Trump thought the election was in the bag. As one reporter put it: his selection was “meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter”.

Rachel Reeves’s claim that the Tories have left a worse-than-expected £20bn “black hole” in the public finances is utter nonsense, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. First, there are no secret “books”, no password-protected numbers stored away in the Treasury; fiscal policy is as open to ministers as it is to you or me. Second, far from deteriorating, the “economic outlook has improved” since Labour wrote its manifesto pledges. And third, the claim that the government is inheriting a uniquely poor situation is “palpable piffle” – things were much worse when the last Labour government left power in 2010. The chancellor is obviously trying to find a justification to increase taxes. But people shouldn’t be taken in by this “looked at the books” farrago.

Olympic swimming has a dirty secret, says The Wall Street Journal: “everyone pees in the pool”. Competitors have to hydrate until the very last moment, and then squeeze into ultra-tight suits designed to compress their bodies into the most hydrodynamic shape possible – a “dangerous combination”. Some pee in the water before the race starts; others (somehow) multitask and do it as they swim. “It sounds so gross to outsiders,” says two-time American Olympian Katie Hoff, “but because there is so much chlorine you don’t even think about it.”

Starmer’s right – soon it’ll be “bye-bye Biggles”

Keir Starmer’s refusal to commit to building the new Tempest fighter jet has been greeted with “much wailing and gnashing of teeth”, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times. And instinctively, I’m one of the teeth-gnashers. I grew up in a time when whoever had the “fastest planes and the biggest ships and the toughest tanks” had the upper hand, so it makes intuitive sense to build a new plane that can “post bombs through a baddie’s letterbox and outmanoeuvre a frightened tuna”. Except, of course, it doesn’t. Because big, exciting kit is “no longer what’s really needed on the battlefield”.

The Ukrainians are thought to have destroyed an astonishing 3,000 Russian tanks – not with Gen 6 fighter jets, but with cheap, homemade drones that look like “a length of drainpipe with some fuse wire coming out of it”. It’s the same story at sea, where Russia’s billion-dollar warships sailed majestically into Ukrainian waters, only to be sunk by “someone with a drone made out of cardboard”. Only last week, government boffins at Porton Down said they’d developed a “super-accurate laser gun” with bursts costing just 10p each. “When that tech becomes available in Dixons, which it will, it’s bye-bye Biggles as well.” Personally, if I were Starmer, I’d sack off the Tempests and spend the money on submarines instead. Because it doesn’t matter how good you are knocking up drones in your garden shed. “You can’t attack something you can’t see.”

To show what the internet was like 30 years ago, Fast Company has collated 15 screenshots of websites that were launched in 1994. They included Yahoo, which had a list of search topics ranging from “entertainment” (with 6,199 links) to “social science” (a more modest 93); Microsoft, with its “splashy image map” centred on a sunrise; Pizza Hut’s “PizzaNet”, where people could order takeaway via the web for the first time; WhiteHouse.gov, one of the first government websites of its kind anywhere in the world; and the Olympics, which provided live results from the winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway. See the rest here.

To The Times:

On the subject of book lists, in Chapters Bookstore in Dublin there is a terrible warning. A notice states: “Shoplifters will be made [to] read Ulysses. If we catch you twice it’s Finnegans Wake.”

John Colclough, Durrow, Co Laois

It’s a box of champagne discovered in a 19th-century shipwreck off the coast of Sweden, says BBC News. Baltitech, the Polish diving group that found the sunken vessel, said it was “loaded to the sides” with bubbly, wine, mineral water and porcelain. The ship is thought to have gone down between 1850 and 1867, possibly on its way to Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I. Team leader Tomasz Stachura says mineral water was a particularly exclusive product back then: it was only drunk by royals, and typically required a police escort when being transported.