UK - Britain must prepare for the threat of food shortages, ministers have been warned. The National Audit Office (NAO) said disruption to Britain’s food system was “becoming more likely and potentially more severe” because of extreme weather events, cyberattacks and disease outbreaks. It said the Government needed to do more to prepare for these potential “catastrophic events” that could cause severe disruption to the nation’s food supplies. The NAO called for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) to urgently work with businesses and households to draw up emergency plans that could be used in the event of shortages. The warning came after wildfires and drought devastated crops across Europe this summer. The London-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said that British farmers were facing the worst harvest on record after the extreme weather.

UK - The Environment Secretary has advised the British public to stockpile food before the biggest El Niño on record. Dame Angela Eagle said people in the UK should store supplies in case of emergencies caused by the natural weather phenomenon, which is predicted to strengthen in the coming months. Forecasters have warned that the weather pattern, which can increase the risk of drought and flooding across the world, needs to be taken seriously in Britain. Dame Angela said this year’s El Niño would lead to wetter winters and more extreme storms in the UK, which has already experienced one of the driest summers on record. In the coming months, the Cabinet Office will launch a campaign on preparing for emergencies. El Niño is a natural cycle that is not caused by climate change, but can be intensified by warmer ocean temperatures.

UK - Global hunger poses a direct threat to Britain’s national security, and tackling it should be a government priority, a new report from the London School of Economics has warned. It says hunger is a major driver of mass migration, extreme violence and war – events that threaten significant repercussions for Britain and Europe’s national security. “Hunger prevention is an important part of national security policy, not an optional act of charity,” Stuart Gordon, professor of International Development at LSE and author of the report, told The Telegraph. Recent hunger crises in places like Sudan, Afghanistan and across North Africa have contributed significantly to rising numbers of people moving to the West.

GERMANY - Volkswagen has confirmed plans to cut up to 50,000 jobs as it battles competition from China. The German carmaker said that the restructuring would be in addition to 50,000 reductions that it has already made since 2024 and could lead to plant closures. It is racing to cut costs as it grapples with fierce competition from Chinese rivals such as BYD and slowing demand in Europe. It has also struggled under US tariffs and Volkswagen vehicle sales fell by 8.4 percent in the first half of the year, while its operating profit dropped by 11.6 percent.

UK - Lloyd’s of London has warned it will suffer losses of £1.4 billion as a result of the war between the US and Iran. The insurance market, which dates back to the 1680s, said it expected to pay out the sum to policyholders after fighting in the Middle East triggered major claims. Iranian strikes on Dubai and Qatar have caused significant damage to buildings and infrastructure since the start of the conflict. A recent strike on a petrochemicals plant owned by Sabic, the Saudi Arabian chemicals company, is expected to result in an $800 million (£600 million) insurance claim, according to the Financial Times.

ARGENTINA - Javier Milei said Argentina would “prevail” in efforts to reclaim the Falklands as he announced plans for sanctions on oil drilling off the islands. The Argentine president cast Britain as a country in decline during a televised speech that seized on Donald Trump’s recent interventions in the territorial dispute. “If we evaluate the structural conditions of the United Kingdom, however, they confront multiple crises of a migratory, demographic and economic character that will be difficult to solve. It is clear that they are in decline. However, Argentina is flourishing, and it will prevail.”

UK - African rulers were willing sellers and without them there could have been no American or European buyers. States that participated in the slave trade should build statues and monuments to black worthies, and censor school text books and curricula to impose the bien pensants view of “transatlantic chattel slavery”. Behind all this lies a demand for Western, and particularly British, self-abasement as a step towards unleashing vast rivers of cash. It would indeed be comical if we did not have a Government that is already determined to give away the Chagos Islands on equally spurious grounds and a Church of England that is stubbornly insisting on giving away £100 million from non-existent slave-trading profits and urging others to do the same. The King is coming under similar pressure, including from ambassadors of Caribbean states.

GERMANY - This Sunday, voters in Germany’s former Communist East will elect the next regional government of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the country’s 16 federal states. Regional elections may not be seismic events in Britain, but in Germany this is the most pivotal in decades. Sunday’s vote could be the first time that a radical Right-wing party has controlled a German state since 1945. An AfD state government would control education, state intelligence, asylum and policing in Saxony-Anhalt, a former industrial heartland of coal mines, Soviet-era bases and medieval castles. The party has promised mass deportations, a ban on LGBT symbols, the segregation of German children and refugees in classrooms, and closer ties with Moscow if it takes power. But even if it misses out on a majority in Saxony-Anhalt, the party sees this campaign as a stepping stone towards its true goal: total victory at the next federal election.

GERMANY/JAPAN - Militarism was supposed to be defeated at the end of World War II. Eight decades later, it is returning. What was supposed to end in 1945? Japan’s surrender ended a catastrophic war in Asia and the Pacific. Germany’s defeat ended an equally catastrophic war in Europe. In both cases, military power had ceased to be merely an instrument of state policy and had become a force shaping policy itself. Countries were destroyed and tens of millions were dead as a consequence.

UK - European wholesale gas prices trade at seven to eight times the American wholesale Henry Hub price. British industrial gas prices are around four to five times higher than American prices, in a country where approximately half of final industrial energy consumption still consists of directly burning fossil fuels. Despite this, electrification remains unattractive for manufacturers because industrial electricity prices are even more uncompetitive, around 150 per cent higher than US prices and more than three times average Chinese prices. The mess is so total and complete that it would be advisable for future British Right-wing governments, despite their commitment to saner energy policies, not to promise any major immediate consumer relief on energy bills. Fixing this will take decades. Britain, like much of Europe, has got itself in such a horrible mess that there is simply no easy way out.

UK - Andy Burnham has been hit with a warning from the City of London that he risks market turmoil unless he slashes spending. Investors and economists said Britain would face a fresh surge in borrowing costs unless the Prime Minister outlined credible plans to rein in the size of the state. Government borrowing costs around the world have surged to multi-decade highs this week amid a bond market sell-off. Britain has been hit particularly hard, amid growing concerns about Mr Burnham’s first Budget next month. The Prime Minister has made a series of expensive commitments on everything from defence to housing despite the parlous state of public finances. Paying for these policies would require either tax rises, more borrowing or spending cuts elsewhere. Lord O’Neill, a former minister and Goldman Sachs economist who turned down an offer to join Mr Burnham’s Government, said Mr Burnham must “get real” and cut public spending to win back market confidence.

UK - Two factors have apparently not been lost on the Foreign Secretary. First, that the present moment offers a unique opportunity to shove Britain’s Middle East policy into an anti-Zionist stance; such a thing would have been unthinkable before October 7 (which, as a sentence, tells you everything you need to know). To someone with revolutionary blood in his veins, that must be pretty inviting.

UK - Gene-edited strawberries and tomatoes are set to be sold on British shelves for the first time. Fruits that have had their DNA altered by scientists have reached the final approval stage before being legally allowed to be sold to the public. The Government is set to approve a marketing notice for strawberries that stay in season for longer and tomatoes that contain more vitamin D. The so-called “sunshine” tomatoes, created by John Innes Institute in Norfolk, have as much vitamin D as two eggs or 28g of tuna, according to the developers. Scientists turned off a gene that makes an enzyme convert vitamin D3 into cholesterol so that it stays in the leaves and fruit. Once the products reach shelves, they will not require a label identifying them as being gene-edited. Gene editing involves making small, specific changes to the existing DNA of a product, or removing a section of DNA. The process differs from genetic modification, which adds new genes to a crop.

UK - The El Niño weather phenomenon is 'supersizing before our eyes' as it threatens to wreak havoc on the UK in autumn and early winter, experts have warned. Scientists from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the climate pattern – where Pacific sea surface temperatures become significantly warmer than average – is now 'firmly established' and is set to have huge impacts on rainfall and temperatures globally, triggering floods, drought and extreme heat. Forecasts indicate an 'exceptionally huge likelihood of nearly 100 per cent' that El Niño will cause problems until February – the first time such an unequivocal update has been issued. In the UK, El Niño is likely to make autumn and early winter colder, wetter and stormier, according to the Met Office. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: 'El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters – and those waters are heating up. The world is in the danger zone of extreme weather."

RUSSIA - We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are right now. The Russians are absolutely furious that NATO countries have been providing many of the long-range missiles and long-range drones that have been raining down on their major cities night after night. They are publicly threatening the UK and Germany, and I believe that we should be taking those threats very seriously. Meanwhile, the fact that the Russians are openly aiding Iran’s war effort is deeply upsetting the Trump administration. At this stage, the Russians are not even trying to hide it. Both sides just continue to push the envelope, and that has brought us dangerously close to a shooting war with Russia. When asked about the potential for direct strikes in the UK by the press, Putin did not deny that this is on the table…