The Week 1549

A surfer has been rescued from a remote island off Australia after being swept eight miles out to sea. The family of Darcy Deefholts, 19, raised the alarm after he failed to return home to Wooli in New South Wales. A search was launched; but it was only when a friend of Terry, Darcy’s father, plotted his trajectory based on wind and tide that rescuers went to North Solitary Island – and found him there, 19 hours after he’d left home. “It’s a one in a million,” said Terry. “Who survives this?” A three-year-old girl from Powys will compete at next year’s Crufts with her miniature schnauzer, Zeeva, after becoming one of the youngest-ever handlers to qualify for the show. Caitlyn Mellor, whose first word was “doggy”, has been competing…

What happened The Afghan data leak A Ministry of Defence data breach put the lives of as many as 100,000 Afghans in danger and led to the biggest covert evacuation operation in peacetime, it was sensationally revealed this week. The leak happened back in 2022, when a soldier accidentally released a dataset containing the details of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to move to the UK with their families under official resettlement schemes, to escape possible reprisals from the restored Taliban regime. The leak, to an Afghan contact, was only discovered 18 months later, in August 2023, when details appeared on Facebook. In response, Ben Wallace, the then Tory defence secretary, applied for a four-month gagging order, to prevent the Taliban getting wind of the leak. The judge who…

What happened The Health Secretary Wes Streeting was due to hold talks with union leaders this week, in a bid to avert a fresh wave of strikes by resident doctors in England. Streeting said the planned five-day walkout by resident (formerly junior) doctors starting on 25 July – potentially the first of several – would be a “catastrophic mistake”. He added that advice from the British Medical Association (BMA) that doctors should not inform hospitals whether or not they planned to strike was “shockingly irresponsible”, and risked leaving wards dangerously under-staffed. BMA members had last week voted to strike in pursuit of a 29% pay rise the union says is needed to restore real-terms pay to pre-2008 levels. Resident doctors had been offered a 5.4% increase this year, on top…

Controversy of the week One-in, one-out There “was a sense of déjà vu” last week, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron proudly unveiled the latest plan to “stop the boats”. Will this one work any better than its predecessors? Under a new “one-in, one-out” scheme, migrants arriving in the UK on small boats will be returned to France; for each migrant sent back, the UK would accept an asylum seeker who hasn’t tried to enter illegally. Starmer called the initiative “groundbreaking”, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, but in truth, it is – as the French would say – “ne vaut pas un clou” (not worth a nail). First, the deal needs to be signed off by EU member states; at least five, including…

A rock band that topped Spotify’s daily chart in the UK, Sweden and Norway has been uncovered as an AI hoax. The Velvet Sundown, who have 1.4 million monthly listeners, quickly reached No.1 on the streaming site after releasing their debut album Floating on Echoes, which listeners have likened to the folk-country of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Promo photos showed the band’s four “members” sporting denim jackets and long hair. But after weeks of speculation about the band’s origins, a statement was issued confirming that The Velvet Sundown was an AI creation, as part of an “ongoing artistic provocation”. One fan vowed to continue playing their music during his yoga sessions, praising their songs’ “emotional tone”.…

Diplomacy, with confirmation that King Charles III and Queen Camilla will host Donald Trump for an unprecedented second state visit to the UK in September. The visit will involve a state banquet at Windsor – but with the House of Commons in recess, the US president will be unable to address Parliament. AI nerds, after former Apple engineer Ruoming Pang was lured to tech rival Meta with a $200m pay package (see page 37). Mark Zuckerberg’s company has reportedly poached several top engineers from competitors as part of the AI talent war – offering huge base salaries, shares and signing bonuses of up to $100m. Tree huggers, who have been encouraged to wrap their arms around a 6ft section of the Sycamore Gap tree trunk that has gone on public…