Birmingham's financial demise comes after dire warnings that dozens of other English authorities could soon follow suit, with worrying figures suggesting at least 30 per cent of councils in some of the poorest areas of the country are considering declaring effective bankruptcy this year or next.

Last week it was revealed a survey of 47 councils in the north, the midlands and on the south coast were facing overwhelming strain on finances - with five in the process of deciding whether to issue a section 114 notice of their inability to balance their annual budget in 2023-24.

Meanwhile, a further nine local authorities which are members of the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities (Sigoma) said they may have to declare bankruptcy next year. Sigoma claimed it was the first time so many member councils were considering issuing a section 114 notice, which freezes all non-essential spending.

• Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.”


• And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.


• And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.


• And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus. So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change — which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions.

This is Germany’s rising far right, a movement gaining steam, particularly in the country’s formerly Communist east. The rise shows Germany’s Nazi past is no longer deterring voters from embracing far-right populism. It is also remarkable because while other nativist groups in Europe have become more moderate to broaden their appeal, the AfD has grown more radical, causing alarm among security authorities who see parts of it as potentially hostile to the country’s democratic order.Despite some successes at local elections, it is unlikely the AfD, founded in 2013, could rise to power nationally because the electoral system favors ruling coalitions and all other parties have pledged never to join it in government. Yet it could gain enough votes to make Germany harder to govern. Germany’s current government, the first three-party coalition in the country’s postwar history, is already struggling to govern because of the limited political overlap between the three parties, and its ratings have collapsed since it took office.

The biggest benefit is a technical, legal one. It gives House investigators the power to compel testimony and documents from all Executive Branch agencies, even the most reluctant, as well as private parties.

Current investigations might have fallen short for two reasons, and we don’t know which is decisive. There might not be sufficient evidence (the Democrats’ answer) or the evidence might have been suppressed by the White House, DoJ and other executive agencies (the Republicans’ response). An impeachment hearing would remove most of the obstacles. That, plus the damaging findings already uncovered, are why Chairman Comer is signaling the move is “imminent.”

Despite these political advantages, there are good reasons why Speaker McCarthy has been cautious. First, he knows a high-profile investigation could alienate independent voters if it doesn’t turn up compelling evidence. Without that evidence, however, the entire effort will seem like a costly distraction, motivated by Republican revenge.

Catch up fast: The kingdom said Tuesday morning it's keeping the current reduction of 1 million barrels per day (bpd) in place for another three months, subject to monthly review. Russia, meanwhile, extended its 300,000 bpd export cut for the same time.

Driving the news: Tuesday's news helped push Brent crude prices above $90 per barrel, their highest since November 2022. What they're saying: "These bullish moves significantly tighten the global oil market and can only result in one thing: higher oil prices worldwide," Rystad Energy analyst Jorge Leon said in a note. The bottom line: Markets and politics are never far apart.

A combination of a G7 cap mechanism on payment for Russian oil, a softening Chinese economy and slowing Western economies, as normalised interest rates take hold, was meant to keep global oil prices low. It isn’t happening like that. Motorists filling up this week are experiencing a 7p to 8p price rise on the forecourts after Brent crude zipped up from $78 per barrel in mid-July to $90. Some on Wall Street are girding their loins for $120 a barrel.

And who is responsible for this kink in the market which could unleash fresh inflation? None other than our Saudi pals, who have extended a 1 million barrel a day reduction in pumping oil for a further three months, enriching the Gulf states and making a nonsense of the West’s efforts to battle against Russian returns on its oil exports. It is a gift to Putin’s war machine. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The researchers' aim is to be able to ethically study what happens in the very early stages of a pregnancy without experimenting with real human embryos. The model developed by the team is a cluster of cells that cannot grow into a person. The artificial embryo model had all of the elements a 14-day human embryo would be expected to have, including the placenta, yolk sac, membranes and other external tissues.

Many miscarriages and birth defects occur in this early period, but currently, little is understood about it. Professor Jacob Hanna, who led the research team, said: 'The drama is in the first month; the remaining eight months of pregnancy are mainly lots of growth.' 'That first month is still largely a black box. Our stem cell–derived human embryo model offers an ethical and accessible way of peering into this box.'

Internationally, Swedes were portrayed as gamblers defying the scientific consensus. But it was they who were following the epidemic protocols drawn up by the WHO in cooler-headed times — protocols that never contemplated the mass immobilization of the population.

The rest of the world embarked on an experiment; Sweden was the control. And the leaders of other countries knew it at the time. Hence their resentment of that stolid, sensible social democracy. Other rankings use different methodologies, and Sweden is not always the single best performer. But it is always at or near the top of the table, far above countries that chose to incarcerate their peoples.

Our World in Data, for example, puts Sweden’s excess death rate at 5.6 per cent compared to 10 per cent in Britain and 14% in the United States. The Economist puts it at 180 per 100,000 people, compared to 345 in Britain and 400 in the United States. No, there is no way to sugarcoat this. The people who ordered the lockdowns caused needless poverty, illness and death. They did not mean to, but they did.

In no case is this truer than the present proxy war between the US and Russia in Ukraine. The news we receive is consistent and yet quite false. And so, the average person can be forgiven if he’s struggling to figure out how this will all play out. Who would actually win such a war?

For eighteen months, the viewer has been assured that Mister Putin is incompetent and is hated by his people, that the Russian military is disorganized and about to quit, and, on any given day, Ukraine is making progress in beating back Russia and will soon win. Yet, if we do our homework, we find that Russia is not only not failing, it’s expanding its might rapidly. Its troops are better armed, better equipped, better trained, better supplied, better commanded, and their munitions are more advanced than their Western counterparts.

Along the way, in 1993, the Pentagon urged the existing 51 defense contractors to consolidate into just five, essentially eliminating competition. Although MIC [Military Industrial Complex] prices were already exorbitant, that one move sent prices off the charts, as the five companies then had a monopoly.

Raytheon, the sole supplier of Stinger missiles, was charging the US government $25,000 per missile – a whopping price – but today, the price for one such missile is $400,000. Not surprising, then, that with such markups on all goods provided by the MIC, the US spends more on “defense” than the next ten countries combined. Therefore, the cost of fighting the same war costs the US many times what it would cost the enemy. This leads us to a principle that I have regarding war: “In warfare, the loser is likely to be the country that goes broke first.”

Johnson continues to pay $2 million a year for a research team to investigate how we can live longer – and he is certainly not the only rich guy in Silicon Valley dedicated to the search for eternal life. At the moment, ageing and death still comes to us all. Has Krotoski’s relationship with this certainty changed while making the podcast? It was the death of her father that reignited her curiosity into such technology.

But, she says, it is ultimately a story about faith and belief. Belief in a pill. In an elixir. “We developed religion because we were scared of what was going to happen after we die. This is ultimately a story about that.”