Strong figures suggest Tesla’s auto business is regaining momentum after two straight annual sales declines

Tesla blew past ​Wall Street estimates for second-quarter deliveries on Thursday, posting a record for the period as recovering demand in Europe outweighed persistent weakness in North America.

The strong figures suggest Tesla’s ⁠mainstay auto business is regaining momentum after two straight annual sales declines, providing the spending cushion needed to power its ambitions in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence – the main drivers of the company’s roughly $1.6tn valuation.

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Just before being kicked out of No 10, the PM is dreaming of lifting the World Cup for a nation – and political immortality

The dream lives on. With 15 minutes left against the Democratic Republic of Congo in Atlanta, England were in danger of going out of the World Cup. The defeat would have been one of the more humiliating exits from an international tournament the team had experienced. But with heads going down and nerves shattered, up stepped Harry Kane with a couple of goals. The second, sublime. Captain Fantastic. Thank goodness Spurs had the foresight to send him out on loan to Bayern Munich to polish his finishing skills.

The dream in question, of course, is Keir Starmer’s. For months now, he might have spent the first few minutes of every day staring at his wall chart, plotting England’s journey so that he becomes only the second prime minister after Harold Wilson to lead his country through World Cup glory, and maintain the record of the men’s team only winning a major international tournament under a Labour government. For that alone, Keir would go down in history as one of the immortals. Guaranteed the eternal thanks of a grateful nation. A state funeral in the bag. This would be his most lasting legacy.

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An estimated 185,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers in England and Wales between 1949 and 1976. I was one of them

After my adoptive father died in November last year, my adoptive siblings found a short story by Enid Blyton among his possessions. The Child Who Was Chosen was read to us as children to explain the circumstances of my adoption. It follows a nice middle-class couple whose domestic bliss is marred by childlessness, prompting them to go to a “very kind lady” who helps them to find a “chosen baby” instead. In its foreword, Blyton advises adoptive parents to tell the tale to their adopted child “again and again … so that to him ‘adoption’ means something lovely”.

The “chosen child” narrative, where parents tell adoptees they were specially picked, helped to shape the still widespread public perception of adoption as unambiguously altruistic. But it has also long been criticised by adult adoptees for masking the trauma of separation from their original parents. Reading Blyton’s saccharine story, I was struck by its glaring omissions. There is no mention of how the boy, who is unnamed until he is adopted, came to be put up for adoption; nor any suggestion that he once had another family and identity. There is no recognition of his first mother or her loss, only the loneliness of the prospective adoptive mother. The woman from the adoption agency also tells the couple that if this child isn’t the one they really want, she will find another one – as though she’s running a baby market.

David Batty is a news editor and writer for the Guardian

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Participant-led YPS scheme creates green projects while providing summer jobs in country with high youth unemployment

Oona Verveld and Clara Vikberg have just secured their first paid summer jobs. While their peers are mostly limited to entry-level positions in retail or fast-food restaurants, the 18-year-olds are some of the first among their generation to have landed a new type of role: young planetary stewards.

“Someone came up with the simple idea that, since young people clearly need jobs, why not create them?” says My Sellberg, the project manager and programme lead for regenerative development at Upplandsbygd, a non-profit based north of Stockholm. “The strongest objective was to inspire hope for the future among our young residents.”

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Het overgrote deel van mensen in opvanglocaties komt niet in aanraking met de politie. Volgens nieuwe cijfers was 3 procent van alle personen in opvanglocaties betrokken bij een misdrijf. Jongeren, mannen en asielmigranten met weinig kans op een verblijfsvergunning zijn oververtegenwoordigd onder verdachten en betrokkenen bij incidenten.

Rapper, punkzanger en schrijver Abel van Gijlswijk (1990) las Siddhartha (1922) van Hermann Hesse voor het eerst in Bangkok op precies een goed moment. Zeven jaar later herlas hij het, dit keer mét de drie pagina’s die in zijn eerste exemplaar ontbraken.

Though United Russia is expected to dominate, the elections could offer insight into how the war in Ukraine has affected Russian politics.