The president has made dangerous inroads in his push toward autocracy. Yet the prospects for his success are dimming

How do we commemorate America’s democracy as Donald Trump undermines it? By embracing his opposition. The United States was founded by breaking from a monarchy. Trump wants to become king. An imperfect yet powerful system of checks and balances is being deployed to prevent him. The resistance is worth celebrating.

This is hardly the first challenge to US democracy. The early nation had no rights for Black people and no vote for women. It survived Jim Crow, the McCarthy era, and the “war on terror”. Yet there is no denying the seriousness of the threat posed by Trump.

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I used to think my phone helped me to relax. But setting strict limits on my usage has improved my mood and my relationships

I am a psychotherapist who works with frazzled, snappy parents, and spend my days writing about why we struggle to find calm. I also used to pick up my phone hundreds of times a day, failing to realise that it was making me a snappier, more irritable, less present mother.

My phone was my office, my income, my means of communication. Every time I checked it, there was something to action, a notification of something new, something that told me I was useful and productive, giving me dopamine hits that motherhood didn’t offer. It had become my coping mechanism.

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My daughter’s scruffy little pet would fall asleep with me on the sofa, stilling my racing mind. And then he changed my life in an even more significant way …

I never wanted a hamster. My eight-year-old daughter, Lily, on the other hand, had folders. Habitat drawings and wheel specifications – a case for ownership of such rigour it bowled me over. As a boy I’d had a hamster, Jerry, and remembered him as fine – but nothing more than that. So I went to a Cardiff pet shop on a cold January morning in 2021 with no plan whatsoever to fall in love.

At the back of the enclosure was a scruffy one nobody else wanted. Skinny. A bit unkempt. When the staff member lifted him out, he yawned and looked at Lily as if he’d been expecting her. She named him Popcorn Sushi and took him home in a pink carrier.

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I love gardening, hate cooking. After five years learning how to grow fruit and veg, I’m now stuck with, well, a load of fruit and veg. Can I get my own tradwife to make them edible?

I’ve spent much of the last week picking, then sorting through berries, making, straining and freezing various compotes and conserves, washing and batch-cooking chard and spinach, podding and shelling broad beans. I’m not having a granny summer, a Sydney Sweeney summer or a nun girl summer (all of which I’ve seen suggested as themes for 2026); I’m having a tradwife summer. It’s basically Ballerina Farm here, without the rosy-cheeked, tousle-haired children, raw milk or plane-company-heir husband – and my tomatoes aren’t even ripe yet.

It’s taken me five years as the genuinely grateful, happy guardian of a garden to fully appreciate the issue with growing fruit and vegetables: once you’ve done it, you have lots of fruit and vegetables. I understand that’s a privilege, not a problem – and indeed, the whole point of the enterprise. And some produce is pure, easy pleasure: strawberries and raspberries, mangetout and lettuce (at least if, like me, you accept the occasional surprise protein bonus in your salad, thanks to slapdash washing). But other stuff that thrives here requires prepping and cooking to be edible, and with my family and friends dodging my calls offering my various gluts, I find myself resignedly donning an apron and doing what I imagine my ancestors spent centuries wishing they could avoid.

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Two couples start to fall apart during a midwinter break, involving a lot of shouty dialogue that’s neither realistic nor funny

The interesting premise in this laborious and dispiriting relationship dramedy sadly leads nowhere; all we get is strained shouty dialogue and mugging performances in a film which succeeds neither in being funny or realistic.

Alexandra Daddario (from TV’s The White Lotus) is Debs, a book editor with dreams of being an author herself; her platonic best pal from college is Mitch (Josh Gad), a schlubby guy climbing the ladder in investment banking, and maybe nursing feelings for Debs he can never admit. They go to a cosy, picturesque woodland cabin for New Year’s with their respective partners; Debs is with hunky nature photographer Josh (Daveed Diggs) and Mitch is with Melanie (Ashley Park), uptight author of a bestselling cookbook called Emotional Eating (a good title, actually).

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As the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum turns 50, an expansive exhibition celebrates how art has coincided with space

Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.

James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos. From 1962 to 1974 it was led by James Dean, who then became the first art curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

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Firm reportedly felt it was in public interest to test alibi offered by former duke after Virginia Giuffre accusation

Pizza Express held an internal inquiry to investigate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s visit to its Woking branch, as he claimed he did on the day he was alleged to have had sex with a teenage victim of Jeffrey Epstein 20 miles away in central London, it has been reported.

According to sources who spoke to the BBC, senior management at the restaurant chain held the investigation because they felt it was in the public interest to test the alibi the former Duke of York had offered. The broadcaster reported that the company had found neither evidence he had been to the restaurant in Surrey, nor evidence to definitively say he had not.

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‍♂️ Official stage start time: 11.10am BST/12.10pm CET
‍♂️ Granollers to Les Angles (195.5km) | Stage two report
‍♂️ You can follow us on TikTok. And also email Andy

Here is ex-racer and Tour de France technical director Thierry Gouvenou with his briefing on the stage three:

It’s a long stage with a gradual climb for most of the way. The stage features a category-one climb, the Col de Toses [9.3km at 6.5%], which should prove quite challenging. But overall, there are no major challenges. It’s a perfect stage for the attackers. The finale will separate the riders, especially on the Col du Calvaire near Font-Romeu and the final 1.5-kilometre climb to Les Angles at a seven per cent gradient. So, this is a huge opportunity for attackers to seek out a stage win and why not even the yellow jersey.

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Rather than relying solely on regular military forces, authorities have increasingly turned to regional volunteer units and reserve formations to bolster air defense around strategic sites.

"A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs," remembers the Wall Street Journal.But "For the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking a more optimistic tone."


In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman — who has long predicted that AI will lead to seismic shifts in the workforce — said during a conference, "We've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications." Soon after, he told CNBC, "Our industry underestimated how much we're going to be able to keep people at the center of everything."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned in May 2025 that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level jobs, a year later highlighted more positive scenarios for AI-adopting businesses: "They can do the same thing with less resources, and that leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources. But that requires creativity...."

Is the sunnier outlook a move to win back customers and the public who are souring on AI's world-upending promise? Or is the role of AI in the workplace now just better understood...?

Collectively, the narrative has shifted from worker-light doomsday scenarios caused by AI to a future in which workers keep their jobs — and get a productivity boost. The sentiment change isn't limited to tech leaders: A survey by EY-Parthenon found that the percentage of CEOs who believe AI investments will result in significant reductions in head count fell from around 46% in January 2025 to just 20% this May.
"They may have noticed that the labor market is genuinely not changing (i.e., imploding) as rapidly as they expected," said David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They may have realized it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy."

The article notes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos "has a history of predicting that AI will create new jobs," and in June said AI could even lead to a labor shortage. "When asked on CNBC in May about people being afraid of AI taking jobs, he said the reason they're afraid is because 'all these smart people keep saying that.'"
The article then adds that "Fewer people are saying it now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.