Commonwealth leaders are preparing to defy Keir Starmer by calling for sweeping reparations for slavery. The heads of state meeting the prime minister at a summit in Samoa today are said to have drafted an official statement raising “reparatory justice” for the slave trade, despite No 10 reiterating that the UK would not be paying reparations. Disposable vapes will be banned in England and Wales from next summer to prevent more children becoming addicted and to cut plastic pollution. The crackdown comes after the number of people using the flavoured e-cigarettes grew by more than 400% between 2012 and 2023, with five million vapes a week thrown away last year. Kissing may have started with lice. A new, less-than-romantic scientific theory argues that snogging can be traced back to how our evolutionary ancestors groomed one another millions of years ago, using their lips to remove ticks and lice from fur. Sexy.

The rise and fall of Canada’s “saintly” PM

When Justin Trudeau became Canada’s prime minister in 2015, says The Economist, he stood for a “modern vision” for his country: multicultural, climate-conscious and reassuringly responsible in an increasingly unstable world. After Donald Trump’s victory the following year, the contrast between Canada’s “saintly” government and the “nativist, jingoistic” lot south of the border couldn’t have been starker. How things have changed. Canada’s politics have become a “cauldron of recrimination”, and Trudeau’s poll ratings are so bad that his party may even oust him with less than a year left in his third term. How did such a hero of the centre left become a “toxic liability”?

The simple truth is that Trudeau’s virtuousness has come at a cost. He has allowed immigration to soar, on the basis that it’s the right thing to do, without ensuring there was the requisite boost in housing, education and health care. It’s a similar story with climate change. Trudeau has been praised for bringing in a carbon emissions tax, but his failure to redistribute the resulting revenue properly – and to help communities reliant on fossil fuel extraction – have created a massive backlash. Of course, any government in office for almost a decade makes mistakes. But Trudeau’s administration also takes a shockingly illiberal approach to dissent: it labels its critics as bigots, and sometimes even uses emergency legal powers to stymie them. His downfall holds an important lesson for mainstream politicians everywhere: sanctimony and identity politics are “no substitute for effective government”.

If you want to see what real election interference looks like, says The Wall Street Journal, head to Moldova. The Black Sea nation’s security service estimates that Russia spent a whopping $108m trying to influence the first round of its presidential election last week. In one alleged vote-buying scheme, the Kremlin transferred $15m to 130,000 Moldovans – that’s around $115 a person in a country where the average monthly wage is under $700. The Moldovan authorities also say some 300 pro-Russian Moldovans have undergone “protest training” in a Moscow suburb, with Wagner Group goons teaching them “violent tactics to foment civil unrest”.

It’s amazing how the relationship between directors and actors can break down, says Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment. On the set of the 2004 action movie Blade: Trinity, Wesley Snipes got into a terrible row with director David Goyer. It got so bad that during a critical scene where Snipes’s character is lying in the mortuary and suddenly opens his eyes to reveal he’s alive, he point-blank refused to open them. They had to do it using CGI in post-production.

From Baywatch babe to “domestic goddess”

Pamela Anderson has been many things in her life, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail: Baywatch babe, sex bomb, magician’s assistant, dedicated vegan. The 57-year-old’s latest move, publishing her debut cookbook I Love You: Recipes from the Heart, adds “domestic goddess” to the roster. The one-time tabloid sensation “gets her organic linen apron on” and provides recipes for Chicory Dandelion Coffee, Whipped Cranberry Porridge, and Anti-inflammatory Lentil Soup. She even throws in “My Wedding Cake”: a multi-tiered concoction of brioche layers, diplomat cream, soaking syrup and wild strawberries. Having racked up six weddings in her time, she has definitely had time to practise that one.

A molten vein of “Pam-tastic eccentricity” runs throughout, as thick and impenetrable as the layer of cashew and coconut in her ice cream sandwiches. Her recipe for a “single rose served simply as a salad” – dressed with olive oil and sumac – was inspired by a dream. Roses feature big all round actually, appearing in recipes for dill pickles, chilli beetroots and olive oil cake. Her Superfood Warrior Chocolate Chip Cookies are laced with maca root powder, which comes from a sort of South American parsnip fertilised by alpaca manure. (She says the Vikings liked it, though it’s hard to see how they got hold of it in the 10th century.) What’s unmistakable is that Pammy today is a very different woman from the “badboy magnet of yore”. The barbed wire tattoos are fading, “the implants are MIA” and she’s stopped wearing make-up. There’s no doubt this is a zany tome, but I think we should applaud her move into “glorious bucolic cronedom”.

The distinction between high tea and afternoon tea lies in the elevation of the diner’s bottom, says Howard Chua-Eoan in Bloomberg. High tea was a savoury snack eaten in the late afternoon or early evening by working-class folk sitting on “high” (ie normal) chairs at the table. Afternoon tea was for people with a “surfeit of leisure”: it was taken at around 3pm – to tide them over until a later dinner at 8pm – on low sofas in the drawing room.

Geoff Hurst, the last surviving member of England’s World Cup-winning 1966 football team, once noticed a cabbie staring at him in the rearview mirror on the way to Heathrow, says Patrick Kidd in The Times. As they got closer to the airport, the driver broke the silence: “Oi, mate,” he said, “give us a clue.” Hurst sighed and announced grandly: “My name is Sir Geoff Hurst. I played for West Ham and England and scored a hat-trick in the World Cup final.” The cabbie wasn’t impressed. “Don’t be a prat,” he replied. “Which terminal do you want?”

He’s the holder of the new Guinness World Record for walking the most dogs simultaneously. Mitchell Rudy from Canada took 38 dogs for a 1km walkies in Goesan, South Korea, just beating the previous record of 36. The world record attempt was aimed at “promoting dog adoption” – all the pooches were rescues, and some had probably been bound for the meat industry. “We wanted to do something that made these dogs be the champions that they are,” he said. “These are good dogs.”