Keir Starmer has warned Iran not to attack Israel in his first call with the Islamic Republic’s new president. The prime minister spoke to Masoud Pezeshkian yesterday amid a push by Western leaders to de-escalate regional tensions over the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month. A reservoir of liquid water has been discovered on Mars for the first time. While frozen water and evidence of vapour have been found on the red planet before, new seismic analysis suggests there are liquid stores between six and 12 miles beneath the Martian surface. The Northern Lights were spotted across the UK last night, thanks to a strong geomagnetic storm. Skies as far south as Cornwall were lit up by the aurora borealis, which coincided with the Perseid meteor shower – a celestial spectacle caused by Earth passing through trails of debris left by a comet.

Washington’s new dilemma over Ukraine

Ukraine has just made a move that military analysts “didn’t think was possible”, says Max Boot in The Washington Post. As the war settled into a stalemate, the assumption was that no one could mount a surprise attack, because the battlefield is “blanketed by drones”, or a fast-moving offensive operation, given the extensive defences on both sides. With its “surprise, lightning-fast thrust” into Russia’s Kursk region, Kyiv has disproved both theories – shocking not just the enemy but “the entire world”. In contrast to previous offensives, when Ukrainian troops were met with well-prepared resistance, they “practically waltzed” across the border. In doing so, they have demonstrated two key weaknesses for Russia: its interior is only lightly defended, and its lumbering military “cannot react quickly to new threats”.

The question now is whether Ukrainian troops will try to hold the territory, “perhaps in hopes of gaining leverage in a future negotiation”, or pull back before Russia can mobilise a large counter-offensive. This will partly depend on Washington – specifically on whether the Biden administration will grant Kyiv permission to use American-made ATACMS missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia. If not, Ukraine’s forces will be “forced to retreat sooner than necessary”. But at the very least, the Kursk incursion has reminded the world of the “Ukrainian derring-do that was the main story of the war’s early days”. Given the importance of global opinion for the outcome of this conflict, “that is no small achievement”.

There has been frustration within the Labour Party about Keir Starmer’s response to the riots, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. The PM has done a good job of looking stern on TV, but he hasn’t yet managed to create a “narrative” – to tell a positive story about British values and resilience that brings the country together. Tony Blair would definitely have done that; so too David Cameron, who was “at his best in a crisis”. Boris Johnson would probably have “bungled the technical elements” of his response, but he would still have found a way to “turn despair into a message of optimism”. Starmer looks in control. But so far, it is “the control of a manager, rather than a leader”.

Will Young’s parents enjoy winding their son up, says Music Week. The singer had a feature on his recent tour whereby fans could email him questions to answer between songs. At one concert, a message that popped up on the screen was from his mother, asking: “Can you tell your father to stop varnishing the chairs?” Shortly afterwards came a message from his father: “Your mother shouldn’t have this email address.”

The Democrats are still taking a risk with Biden

Now that Kamala Harris is the big story, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, it’s easy to forget some of the astonishing details that emerged about Joe Biden when his party were trying to force him out of the presidential race. We learned that he hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October, and that his “handlers” expected scripted questions from cabinet officials. That his mental capacities peak between 10am and 4pm, but diminish the rest of the time. And that Jill Biden’s aides shielded her husband from household staff in the White House residence, seemingly to create a “cocoon of loyalty and silence” around him “even when he isn’t on the job”.

These are all “interesting and pertinent facts” about America’s commander-in-chief – and they haven’t ceased to be interesting and pertinent just because he is no longer running for re-election. The thing is, Biden was effectively offered a bargain by his fellow Democrats: bow out, and he would “trade the shadow of scandal for the halo of self-sacrifice”. And this bargain is working out so well for them, with Harris reaping glowing coverage, that no one dares mention the president’s mental deterioration. It’s a dangerous game. Not just for the US – these challenging geopolitical times are ill-suited to a “10-to-4 presidency” – but also for the Democrats. If Biden mishandles a big crisis, many will question why he was allowed to continue – and who, including Harris, let that happen. The party is hoping to ride it out until November. But “events, not hopes, decide when a presidency is finished”.

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have become the first married couple to top the US box office for 34 years, says USA Today. Reynolds stars in the Marvel blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, which took $54m at American cinemas over the weekend; Lively leads the Colleen Hoover book adaptation It Ends With Us, which came in just behind at $50m. The last husband and wife to achieve the feat were Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in 1990, with Die Hard 2 and Ghost.

To The Economist:

Schumpeter tells us that Mark Zuckerberg is fond of using Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome, as a role model (“Why is Mark Zuckerberg giving away Meta’s crown jewels?” July 27). Augustus presided over Rome’s transition from a long tradition of self-government to authoritarian rule by impossibly rich tyrants, supported by foreign mercenaries and a bureaucracy of highly trained slaves. The parallels are uncanny.

Matthew Draper
Charlottesville, Virginia

It’s a Lego shark, rediscovered 27 years after it was lost at sea. The plastic predator is one of five million pieces that were swept overboard in a container from a cargo ship off the coast of Cornwall in 1997. There were only 51,800 sharks among the fun-sized flotsam, and this is the first to have been reported found. Richard West, the fisherman who spotted the curious castaway in waters south of Penzance, said it had made him happier than “anything else I caught this week”.