Telling off black men is no way to win an election

Heroes
Two alleged drug dealers in Portland, Oregon, for giving the police an easy life. The pair were pulled over in a stolen car with a bag labelled “Definitely Not a bag full of Drugs”. Officers say it was in fact definitely a bag full of drugs.

Villains
Party-pooping city officials in Prague, who have banned organised night-time pub crawls. Deputy mayor Jiri Pospisil says the Czech capital is “seeking a more cultured, wealthier tourist… not one who comes for a short time only to get drunk”. More beer is drunk per head of population in the Czech Republic than in any other country: an average of 128 litres per person in 2023.

Hero
A dog that climbed right to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The daring doggo was spotted by a man flying overhead in a powered paraglider, says ABC News. Somewhat inevitably, it was “barking at birds”.

Villain
David Jakins, the men’s winner at this year’s World Conkers Championships, who has been accused of cheating. The 82-year-old (pictured) was found to be carrying a metal replica conker in his pocket after winning the title at Sunday’s event in Southwick, Northamptonshire. He also happened to be the competition’s top judge, or “King Conker”, and thus responsible for drilling and inserting strings into competitors’ seeds. Jakins insists he is innocent, and that he only brought along the replica for “humour value”.

Villains
The builders who constructed a supposedly state-of-the-art fire station in Stadtallendorf, Germany, but didn’t bother putting in any fire alarms. The whole €16m building went up in flames on Wednesday, along with all 10 fire engines inside. District fire inspector Lars Schäfer says the structure wasn’t legally required to have a fire alarm, in part because it was classified “not as a fire station but as a building that stored equipment”.

Growing up with Elvis

Lisa Marie Presley’s life was “quite the ride”, says Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph. Elvis’s only child, who died last year aged 54, grew up at the rock ‘n’ roll legend’s Memphis mansion, Graceland, which she described as “like its own city, its own jurisdiction” with her dad as “the chief of police”. He let her ride her pony through the house, where it would defecate outside her great-grandmother’s bedroom. Elderly relatives would pull knives on each other. There was a shed full of weapons and fireworks that Elvis liked to shoot at his friends (until an unfortunate incident when the whole shed went up in flames). The “Memphis Mafia” – her dad’s friends, family and other assorted hangers-on – would congregate in a pool room full of dirty magazines and “never-ending cigarettes”. He once threw in a stink bomb and locked the doors so no one could get out.

Lisa Marie’s love life was equally crazy. She was married four times, including two years of “wildly inflated luxury” with Michael Jackson, who would drive her twins to school with his pet chimpanzee. Her briefest marriage was a tumultuous 108-day union with Nicolas Cage, a “known Elvis obsessive”, who turned up at her house every day in a different Lamborghini and “showered” her with diamonds. When “things became rowdy” during one yacht trip, Lisa Marie threw a $65,000 engagement ring Cage had bought her into the Pacific Ocean. He simply went and bought her another one, “even more expensive than the first”.

What to listen to – Sweet Bobby
Sweet Bobby, a gripping six-part podcast from Tortoise Media which has just been made into a new Netflix documentary, “incensed listeners around the world” when it debuted in 2021, says Stefano Montali in The New York Times. Investigative journalist Alexi Mostrous tells the story of Kirat Assi, a successful 29-year-old woman from London who was taken in by an elaborate “catfishing” scam. It began – and don’t read on if you don’t want spoilers – with a simple Facebook request from a man calling himself Bobby. They chatted online, then began “dating” (again, all online), before finally getting engaged – even though they had never met in person and Assi had never seen his face. He eventually agreed to meet her – “and then her world fell apart”. Six episodes, 40m each.

What to read – Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel
Plenty of authors have written additions to series that weren’t originally theirs, says David Sexton in the New Statesman. Think of Kingsley Amis’s James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun, Emma Thompson’s various Peter Rabbits, and the endless restorations of Poirot and Miss Marple. Now there’s a new George Smiley, written by John le Carré’s youngest son, Nick Harkaway. And he’s done a terrific job. Karla’s Choice is “intricately interwoven” with the existing books – constantly harking back to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – and even manages to imitate le Carré’s “roundabout” narrative style. It’s full of exciting “tangles and byways” that take Smiley everywhere from Berlin to Budapest. Every bit as compelling as the originals, this is a book that successfully revives one of British literature’s iconic figures. Get your copy here.