Three children have died and five other youngsters are in a critical condition after yesterday’s knife attack in Southport, Merseyside. Police have arrested a 17-year-old boy following the “ferocious” assault at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class for six to 11-year-olds, which also left two adults critically injured. Rachel Reeves has defended her decision to scrap winter fuel payments for around 10 million pensioners, arguing “tough decisions” are necessary to shore up the nation’s finances. The chancellor announced billions in cuts yesterday in areas including rail and road infrastructure projects, as well as £9.4bn in pay rises for public sector workers and a 22% increased pay offer for junior doctors. Lettuce appears to be just as effective at soothing nettle stings as dock leaves, a small new study suggests. As treatments go, says The Daily Telegraph, it’s a “little gem”.

There’s nothing more un-American than death

Joe Biden and Donald Trump have at least one thing in common, says Terry Eagleton in UnHerd: they’ve both been in denial about death. Biden gave us the “indecent spectacle” of an elderly man desperately clinging to power with his fingernails; Trump came within inches of being killed by an assassin’s bullet, yet continues to show “all the hubris of a man who is a stranger to death”. But we shouldn’t be surprised by their attitude. Because sickness and death are “even more un-American than Marxism”.

The American Dream – that anyone can achieve whatever they want if they try hard enough – now extends to mortality. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel has compared the “ideology of the inevitability of death” to “confiscatory taxes” and “totalitarian collectives” – death, in other words, is “as much an affront to individual freedom as a Stalinist state”. Another Silicon Valley mogul has spent a big chunk of his $125bn fortune developing technologies to keep him alive. Madonna says she doesn’t think about her age (65) at all – a laudable stance, though she “may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or so years’ time”. In fairness, it’s a logical approach for these folk, given the way death “strikes meaningless a lifetime of piling up wealth”. But as shown by the Struldbuggs in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – a race of creatures immiserated by being granted eternal life but not eternal youth – only one thing is worse than death, and that’s not dying. It’s a lesson Biden, Trump and the rest of America “urgently need to learn”.

Broad beans could be the cure to Britain’s blues, says The Observer. The humble legume has been found to contain levodopa, a chemical used to treat a rare condition that makes sufferers unable to experience pleasure, and which has been linked to lasting improvements in mood and emotions. Cambridge University bean boffin Nadia Mohd-Radzman argues that eating more of them would be a cheap and easy way to improve mental health. “That is my mission,” she says. “To get the country to love the broad bean.”

The Hamptons have long been the go-to summer destination for well-heeled New Yorkers, says The Daily Telegraph. So where do Europe’s “quiet luxury” set spend their holidays? The French elite love Cap Ferret, an “old-school beach haven” on the Atlantic where weekending Parisians “cruise between heritage oyster farms on bicycles”; in Greece it’s the Athenian Riviera, a ritzy strip of coastline rarely visited by foreign tourists; the Spanish head to Empordá in the northeast, famous for its “picture-perfect bays”; and for the Germans it’s the Frisian island of Sylt, where the golden beaches and windswept dunes are scattered with luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants.

“Excuse me, can you put your headphones on?”

I took a trip across London earlier this summer, says Hannah Ewens in The Guardian, and at every stage – bus, overground, train – someone was playing video or audio on their phone, loudly, for the whole world to hear. One woman impatiently flicked through TikTok videos comprising “four-second assaults of traditional Chinese medicine tutorials, girls pranking their boyfriends, and self-help tips”. Another broadcasted a 20-minute voice note from a friend to the entire carriage. On the final bus, a man next to me blared out a podcast. “This is the life of the passenger in our new ambient hell.”

Playing things out loud used to be considered the height of rudeness. Back in the 2000s, there’d be kids pumping out music at the back of the bus to school, but adults would tell them off and they’d stop. Even five years ago, you’d rarely hear anyone play anything. Yet somewhere along the line – almost certainly during the pandemic, when we collectively decided “every conscious moment had to be filled” with content – people began turning the volume right up. “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Since that journey across the capital, I’ve been doing something revolutionary: asking my fellow travellers, politely but without apology, to put their headphones on. And you know what? Almost every one of them has responded well. “God, sorry,” said one man, blushing. “Was in my own little world there.” Just imagine how much happier we’d all be if we could make this incessant noise taboo again. We’d be able to think clearly. “We could even have pleasant interactions with each other.”

Starbucks almost turned its back on one of its biggest hits, says Kevin Petersen in a letter to The Economist. The company gained the rights to the Frappuccino when it bought Coffee Connection, a rival chain in Boston, in 1994. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was a “coffee purist” and wanted to get rid of it, but the drink was so popular with locals that he had to keep it on the menu. “Cold drinks now make up around 75% of the company’s beverage sales.”

Not everyone gives directions in the same way, says Mental Floss. In Bali, rather than compass points, locals talk about kaja (towards the mountain), kelod (towards the sea), kauh (clockwise around the shore) and kangin (counterclockwise). Australia’s Guugu Yimithirr people, in contrast, use compass points for everything because they don’t have words for left and right: they would say, for example, “there’s an ant on your southeast leg”. Perhaps the most impressive navigators are honeybees. To alert their pals about a new food source, they perform a “waggle dance”, with different variations used to convey its direction and distance from the hive.

It’s the UK’s newest world heritage site, says BBC News: a bog in Scotland. The Flow Country, “one of the most intact and extensive blanket bog systems in the world”, covers about 1,500 square miles of Caithness and Sutherland, and is home to a range of rare species including golden plovers and red-throated divers. The unique ecosystem is the first peatland in the world to be designated by UNESCO, joining the likes of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the Serengeti in Tanzania.