The left-wing firebrand George Galloway won yesterday’s Rochdale by-election by almost 6,000 votes, after Labour disowned its candidate Azhar Ali over anti-Semitic remarks. The return of the veteran agitator to Westminster is likely to “inflame tensions in the UK parliament”, says the FT, and grant the Workers Party of Britain leader a “platform to undermine Labour”. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed while crowding around aid lorries in Gaza. Hamas has accused Israeli troops of shooting into the crowd; Israel says its forces only fired at a small group who appeared to pose a threat, and most victims were killed in the crush to reach supplies. Pop star Olly Alexander has unveiled the UK’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The former Years & Years frontman’s high-energy disco track, Dizzy, “hits all the key Eurovision points”, says Will Hodgkinson in The Times, and is “the best entry we’ve had in years”. Listen here.

Turmoil in north Africa: what’s really going on?

There’s something “remarkable” happening in north Africa, says David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times: the Sahel region is facing what could be “the most conspicuous episode of civic instability and turmoil anywhere in the world since the fall of the Iron Curtain”. Six countries have endured 11 coup attempts – “eight of them successful” – in the past four years. In Sudan, a civil war has left 10,000 people dead and eight million displaced. In Ethiopia, the death toll from the government’s war against separatists is as high as 600,000 people in two years. Already, more governments in the region have fallen to military takeovers than were deposed during the Arab Spring. Just five years ago, political scientists thought coups were becoming a thing of the past. Today, you can trek 4,600 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and “pass through only countries toppled by coups d’état in those same five years”.

It’s possible this is all coincidence. Each of these coups – in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Mali and Sudan – has its own complicated back story. There may also be a “contagion effect”, with one sparking another. The whole region is “famously inhospitable” and politically unstable. But one under-appreciated factor is the role of climate change. Niger has gone “without a good harvest” for 10 years, with nine droughts in the last 20; in 2022, Mali and Chad suffered devastating floods that were made an estimated 80 times more likely because of global warming. A three-year drought in the Horn of Africa has left more than four million people needing humanitarian assistance. These natural disasters certainly aren’t the source of all the recent turmoil. But by increasing poverty and food insecurity, they’re clearly “pressuring already fragile systems”.

Matt Hancock gave the boys of Eton a good lesson in public speaking this week, says The Daily Telegraph: always check who is in the audience. During a talk on Tuesday, the former Health Secretary opened with a joke about the political foibles of Jacob Rees-Mogg. When questions were opened to the floor, a thin, bespectacled boy called Peter took the stand, and informed those assembled that “his father was a great man, both in public and in private”, before adding to enthusiastic applause: “especially as he remained loyal to his wife”.

Most old-school fashion editors would “rather have caught hypothermia” than be seen in a pair of tights, says The Times. But not any more. Hosiery is back, and this time it’s red. The real must-have on the front row this season is “opaque, tomato-toned tights”. Stars spotted sporting red-legs include Kendall Jenner and Elle Fanning, while at Copenhagen Fashion Week, “they were practically uniform”.

The paradox of Labour’s lead 

Here’s a paradox, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Mail. Labour are 20 points ahead in the polls, yet on cultural issues like immigration, gender self-identification, racial politics and crime, the electorate is to the right not just of Labour, but of “every mainstream party”. According to a major new survey, nearly two thirds of people, including a majority of Labour voters, want immigration reduced, and more than half don’t think children should be able to pick their own pronouns. So why does Britain seem poised to give a landslide victory to a party that “indulges in every politically correct fad”?

One simple reason is that the Conservatives have been in power so long, so everything from post-lockdown tax rises to the cost of the Ukraine war appears to be their fault. In any case, no party has won five consecutive general elections since the early 19th century, when just 2% of the population could vote. Also, while the country leans right on cultural issues, it leans left on economic ones. A majority would like to see any spare government cash spent on schools and hospitals rather than the Tories’ preferred tax cuts. But the most important reason is that people don’t see much difference between the two parties. The National Trust is “obsessed with slavery”, the countryside is declared “racist”, civil servants proclaim their pronouns in email signatures. And all this under a Tory government, which leads many to conclude that, on matters of “wokery”, the two parties are “as bad as each other”. But that’s wrong: there is a world of difference between civil servants “slipping identity politics past distracted ministers” and a Labour government where the politicians and mandarins are both trying to push this stuff through.

The days of popping painkillers could soon be over, says Virginia Tech. A new study by biomedical researchers in the US has found that blasting sound waves into a deep part of the brain can work just as well as ibuprofen and the like. When the bonce boffins fired ultrasound rays at an area of the brain called the insula – the spot where pain is registered – while exposing subjects to painful stimuli, they found that it reduced both the perception of pain, and the body’s physical reaction to it.

It’s a previously unknown species of sea slug that has been discovered in UK waters. The newly named Pleurobranchaea britannica joins around 100 other varieties of sea slug found in the seas around Britain and Ireland, and belongs to a specific sub-group of the marine molluscs that tend to prefer warmer waters. Scientists say its discovery off the south-west coast of England could be down to climate change affecting water temperatures off the UK.