All-star Blue Origin crew back to Earth after reaching space

Katy Perry and five other women successfully launched into space on Monday on the first all-female mission in more than six decades.

The crew lifted off on board an autonomous rocket made by Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“I don’t really have words for it,” the billionaire’s fiancée Lauren Sanchez said in an interview following the flight. “Earth looked just so quiet.”

“It is the highest high and it is surrender to the unknown,” said Perry. “I couldn’t recommend this experience more.”

Perry and Sanchez were joined by CBS News host Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn.

The only other all-female crew in 64 years of human spaceflight took place in 1963.

The rocket lifted off as part of Blue Origin mission NS-31 at 8:30 a.m. local time. The craft flew through space for around four minutes before floating back down to Earth, with the entire journey taking a little over 10 minutes.

When in space, Perry sang the song “What a Wonderful World.”

“It was a feeling of joy. It was a feeling of gratefulness,” Sanchez added.

Trump suggests he can predict future after markets react to tech duty pause

Donald Trump has said that he can be “very flexible” when it comes to tariffs, without going into detail.

The president was asked about exemptions from tariffs on some electronics, saying that “I’m a very flexible person. I don’t change my mind, but I’m flexible, and you have to be. You just can’t have a wall, and you’ll only go, you know, sometimes you have to go around it under it or above it.”

Late on Friday night, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that smartphones, computers, chips, and other electronics would be exempted from the tariffs implemented by the president.

However, over the weekend, Trump and his advisors said any such exemption is temporary.

This comes after Trump bizarrely claimed to be able to predict the future after the markets reacted positively on Monday to his decision to exclude electronics from the ultra-high levies on goods imported from China.

“THE BEST DEFINITION OF INTELLIGENCE IS THE ABILITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE!!!” he posted on Truth Social.

The president has insisted that no country is “off the hook” for “unfair trade balances” ahead of his expected new tariffs on powerful computer chips.

What SNL’s Aimee Lou Wood gag tells us about the state of US satire

The US sketch show Saturday Night Live is well known as a TV institution, forever hailed as a hotbed of talent and for being a safe space for comedic experimentation and the slaying of sacred cows. But there’s a difference between experimentation and plain crapness, and a skit in last Saturday’s edition – which somehow got past the show’s filtering system and made it on to air – fell into the latter category.

In a sketch called “The White Potus”, characters from the newest season of the hit TV show The White Lotus were replaced by Donald Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) and his inner circle. Very apt, you would think, given the show’s portrayal of morally reprehensible rich people.

But after Jon Hamm’s Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK) asked: “What if we took all of the fluoride out of the drinking water? What would that do to people’s teeth?” – a reference to Kennedy’s anti-fluoride stance – up popped SNL regular Sarah Sherman, wearing exaggerated prosthetic teeth, and quipped: “Fluoride? What’s that?”

The joke, such as it is, is linked to the fact that Aimee Lou Wood, a British actor on The White Lotus, has slightly protruding front teeth.

In the pantheon of powerful people ripe for satire, she is certainly not an obvious choice, being neither a world leader with a criminal record (Trump), nor a high-ranking politician and unapologetic conspiracy nut in charge of a nation’s health (RFK). Nor, for that matter, is she your typical self-regarding Hollywood actor with more money than sense.

She is a rising young performer making her way in a ruthless industry that prizes a narrow and homogenous form of female beauty. So all power to Wood for using an Instagram post to decry the skit as “mean and unfunny”, adding, “The whole joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth, not bad teeth. The rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on.”

The skit certainly seems to misjudge the current feeling around Wood, a hugely popular actor who has cornered the market in playing big-hearted young women, from the loyal, daffy Aimee in Sex Education to her sweet-natured waitress helping Bill Nighy’s office drone make the most of his final months in the movie Living.

As The White Lotus’s Chelsea, yoga-teacher girlfriend to Walton Goggins’ troubled older man, Wood once again plays an earnest young thing with a heart of gold.

Near the start of the series, Charlotte Le Bon’s Chloe says to Chelsea: “I love your teeth. You’re from England, right?”, a line that prompted a lengthy disquisition in The New York Times about Wood’s “broad, beautiful” smile being a novelty in a “sea of actors with straight, evenly spaced teeth having been apparently willed into submission by orthodontics or cosmetic modification.”

That the gag has backfired for SNL is hardly shocking in a show that is only fitfully funny and has long been riding on its own inflated myth.

The series has produced some comedy greats – Bill Murray, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler – the list goes on. But it has also featured characters in blackface, mocked domestic abuse survivors (in a sketch about the Depp-Heard trial), and welcomed Elon Musk into its midst to deliver a monologue. Poking fun at an actor’s teeth is by no means the show’s worst faux pas, but it does suggest a writing team struggling to differentiate between cutting-edge humour and schoolyard bullying.

SNL has also perhaps forgotten that young actors are increasingly willing to call out mockery and criticism they deem to be unfair. See the Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown’s public takedown of the MailOnline journalists who criticised and dissected her appearance during her press tour for the film The Electric State.

There is a sense, nowadays, that the media has moved on from the bad old days of 2000s celebrity culture, when women in the public eye had to deal with gross intrusion and judgment about their bodies and behaviour.

But Brown and Wood’s treatment shows it’s naïve to think it has been stamped out. The SNL skit reveals misogyny lives on in supposedly liberal institutions and that old habits die hard.

Former Tory MP Craig Williams among 15 charged over election betting scandal

A former Tory MP and aide to Rishi Sunak is among 15 people charged with offences relating to bets placed on the timing of the 2024 general election, the Gambling Commission has announced.

The scandal over the alleged placing of bets on the timing of the election prior to Mr Sunak’s surprise decision to call the national ballot early engulfed the Conservative Party’s campaign last summer.

While the Metropolitan Police dropped its own investigation last August, saying the bar for misconduct in public office had not been met, the Gambling Commission announced on Monday that it had brought charges against 15 individuals.

Among those were Mr Sunak’s former parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams, the former Conservative MP for Montgomeryshire, who was charged with cheating under Section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005, which is a criminal offence.

Russell George, the Tory Senedd member for Montgomeryshire, was also charged, along with the Conservative Party’s chief data officer, Nick Mason and the party’s chief marketing officer, Simon Chatfield.

Laura Saunders, who was the Tory candidate for Bristol North West at the election and her husband Tony Lee – the Conservative Party’s campaign chief – were also both charged.

The Gambling Commission said its investigation, which began during the election campaign in June 2024, focused on individuals “suspected of using confidential information – specifically advance knowledge of the proposed election date – to gain an unfair advantage in betting markets”.

The other nine people charged with cheating include a former police officer, the Gambling Commission said.

They are: Amy Hind, aged 34, from Loughton; Anthony Hind, 36, also from Loughton; former police officer Jeremy Hunt, 55, Horne; Thomas James, 38, Brecon; Charlotte Lang, 36, Brixton; Iain Makepeace, 47, Newcastle; Paul Place, 53, Hammersmith; James Ward, 40, London; and Jacob Willmer, 39, Richmond.

They are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court at 10am on Friday 13 June 2025.

Labour Party chair Ellie Reeves said: “This is a very serious development. The British people will expect that anyone found guilty of wrongdoing faces the full force of the law.

“Kemi Badenoch must make crystal clear that anyone found guilty of using insider information to cheat the system to try to enrich themselves has no place in the Conservative Party. No ifs, no buts.”

The Tory party said on Monday that staff members who had been charged were being “suspended with immediate effect”.

A spokesperson said: “The Conservative Party believes that those working in politics must act with integrity. Current members of staff who have been charged are being suspended with immediate effect.

“These incidents took place in May last year. Our party is now under new leadership, and we are cooperating fully with the Gambling Commission to ensure that their investigation can conclude swiftly and transparently.”

The Gambling Commission is the industry’s independent regulator and has the authority under the Gambling Act to investigate offences and bring criminal prosecutions.

Heiress sues travel company for £1m over cancelled Titanic wreck dive

A British explorer who guided Prince Harry to the North Pole is locked in a £1m court fight with a billionaire heiress over a cancelled expedition to the wreck of The Titanic on the ill-fated Titan submersible.

Henry Cookson, a former safari guide and polar explorer, now runs Cookson’s Adventures, an ultra-luxury adventure travel company specialising in bespoke trips for high net-worth individuals to far flung and otherwise inaccessible spots, often costing millions.

In 2017, his company was paid £680,000 by Karen Lo, the super-rich heiress to a Hong Kong soy milk fortune, to organise a once-in-a-lifetime submarine visit to the Titanic, planned for 2018 aboard the OceanGate Titan craft.

But the 2018 dive was canceled after the vessel was damaged by lightning, with Ms Lo being offered a priority place on a future trip instead.

However she never got her trip after Covid intervened and the Titan vessel then infamously imploded during a dive to the wreck in June 2023, killing all five passengers, including OceanGate founder Stockton Rush, and causing the company’s operations to cease.

Ms Lo is now suing Holland Park-based Henry Cookson Adventures Ltd, claiming the company is responsible for refunding her for the Titanic trip she paid for but never took.

But Mr Cookson’s company is fighting the claim, saying the heiress knew there were no refunds when she put her money down for the Titanic trip, and that she had a chance to go on the expedition later but never did.

Ms Lo is a Hong Kong based heiress with a reported net worth of $1 billion. Her wealth comes from Vitasoy, a soymilk and drinks company founded by her grandfather Dr Lo Kwee-seong, which has a reported global turnover of $1 billion and over 7,000 employees.

She hit the headlines in 2018 when she bought Sting’s New York apartment for $50m and again in 2023 when she sued a gallery owner for £500,000 over alleged non-delivery of a Banksy painting she had bought.

On his company’s website, Mr Cookson describes how he used his experience guiding horseback safaris in Kenya and in polar exploration, including a mission to the Pole with Prince Harry and the Walking With The Wounded charity, to set up ultra high-end adventure travel company Cookson’s Adventures.

“It’s these expeditions that served as inspiration in founding Cookson Adventures, bringing the same standards of ground-breaking excellence to the world of private travel. That’s whether working with remote tribes in Africa or organising Alaska’s most complex charter operations,” the website states.

Papers lodged with London’s High court describe how Mr Cookson had previously been “on friendly personal terms” with Ms Lo, even attending her wedding, and had organised trips worth “tens of millions of US dollars” for her and her guests.

Her barrister Jack Harding states in court papers: “The defendant agreed to organise and supply a two-week expedition for the claimant and 17 others to visit the wreck of the Titanic between 30th June and 14th July 2018.

“The defendant’s supplier for the expedition was OceanGate, a company which, at the material time, specialised in the provision of crewed submersibles for tourism, research and exploration.”

Having paid around £670,000 up front for the trip in May 2018, an email was sent by Cookson Adventure to Ms Lo explaining that the mission had been cancelled because the Titan craft had been struck by lightning and its electronic systems damaged.

The contract “provided ‘clients’ with 100% credit toward 2019 Titanic dives or any other expedition offered by OceanGate” due to the cancellation, but “OceanGate did not carry out any further dives to the Titanic wreck in 2019 or 2020,” he said.

“The claimant, through her agents and legal representatives, subsequently requested repayment of the sums paid under the contract. The defendant has refused to refund any of the claimant’s money.”

Ms Lo is suing under the Package Travel Regulations 1992, arguing it was an express or implied term of the contract that the dive would take place within a “reasonable time.”

“In repudiatory breach of the aforementioned express and/or implied terms, the Titanic Expedition did not take place in 2018 or at all,” he says.

“As a result of the defendant’s breach of contract, the claimant was entitled to and did elect to treat the contract as at an end.

“As a result of the matters set out above, the claimant seeks damages for her wasted expenditure in entering into a contract which was never performed.

“The defendant was enriched, at the expense of the claimant, by the payment and receipt of her money. It is irrelevant that the defendant may have subsequently passed some or all of the money to its own supplier.

“The claimant did not receive any benefit from the money that she paid to the claimant and/or the defendant did not provide any service of benefit to the claimant.”

Ms Lo’s lawyer says she wants her £670,000 back, plus interest at 8% from May 2018, taking the total claimed over £1m.

However in the defence to the action, Henk Soede, for Mr Cookson’s company, denies they owe the heiress a penny.

“She was introduced to Mr Cookson through a personal friend in 2011-12 and has been using the defendant’s services since then, in every case for exclusive unique and tailor-made trips at very high cost,” he says.

“For example, in 2018/19, after the postponed dive voyage to which this claim relates, the defendant arranged and the claimant paid in full for a multi-million dollar trip to the Antarctic on three yachts, including the super-yacht purchased in the name of the claimant the year previously, with twin helicopters and two submersibles, for a total of 13 guests and four nannies.

“The claimant’s annual budget with the defendant ran into tens of missions of US dollars.

“The claimant and Mr Cookson were on friendly personal terms and Mr Cookson had attended her wedding in Rome and accompanied a number of her friends who traveled with the couple to Egypt as part of their honeymoon.

“At no stage did the defendant agree to ‘organise and supply’ an expedition for the claimant and her guests to visit the wreck of The Titanic,” the lawyer states, insisting that Mr Cookson’s company instead had an “affiliate agreement” to be a booking agent for some of the planned trips, with OceanGate remaining the “organiser”.

The contract had also contained a no-refund clause, with the agreement being that a credit towards a future voyage with priority booking rights be provided instead if the mission did not go ahead for technical reasons.

“The defendant disputes this claim because, in outline, the Package Travel Regulations 1992 do not apply because the holiday was neither sold nor offered to be sold in the UK,” he says.

“Alternatively, even if the regulations did apply, the claimant would not be entitled to a refund as the package was not cancelled but only postponed, in accordance with the agreed terms.

“Nor in any event would the defendant be liable to refund monies paid to it, which, as the claimant was well aware, had been passed on to the party providing the voyage, which was also, if the regulations applied, the organiser.

“The claimant did not take up the credit within a reasonable time and thereby waived or lost her entitlement. Further, by notifying the defendant that she did not intend on using the credit in the future, the claimant terminated the contract and/or cancelled the voyage.

“Alternatively, the contract was in any event frustrated as a result of the complete loss of the dive vessel in 2023 and the resulting cessation of the provider’s trading activities.”

The lawyer states that whilst no dives took place in 2019 and Covid restrictions stopped any missions in 2020, dives took place in 2021 and 2022 which Ms Lo could have joined using her credit, prior to the ill-fated final mission in 2023.

“At all material times, OceanGate acknowledged that the defendant was entitled to a credit for un-taken 2018 missions,” he says.

“However, the claimant made clear that she did not want to use her credit in 2019 or at any time in the future.”

Her solicitors had instead demanded a refund in June 2019, he said.

The case, unless settled, will come before a judge in court at a later date.

The Titan submersible was the first privately-owned submersible with a claimed maximum depth of 4,000 metres and the first completed crewed submersible with a hull constructed of titanium and carbon fiber composite materials.

After testing with dives to its maximum intended depth in 2018 and 2019, the original composite hull of Titan developed fatigue damage and was replaced by 2021.

In that year, OceanGate began transporting paying customers to the wreck of the Titanic, completing several dives to the wreck site in 2021 and 2022.

During the submersible’s first 2023 expedition, it imploded during the crew’s descent to the wreckage of Titanic, about 320 nautical miles (590 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland.

The submersible was carrying tourists Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, crew member and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder and the vessel’s pilot, Stockton Rush.

It’s time to make your smartest investment move yet

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Why Hull could become ‘the new Bordeaux’

The south of France is set to have a new rival by the end of the century, as a new report predicts that climate change will allow wine production to flourish as far north as Yorkshire.

By 2100, Hull could be known for its cabernet sauvignon with warmer temperatures and sunshine allowing the grape variety to grow in England.

The first annual Fine Wines and Restaurants Market Monitor report, which has been written by the consultancy firm Bain & Company, predicted that the area around Bordeaux in France will be too hot and dry to support production of the wine in the coming decades.

Currently, cabernet sauvignon can only be produced in southeastern England, and is traditionally produced in Europe’s warmer climates.

However, new areas such as Germany, England and southern Scandinavia are predicted to be able to grow the grape as climate change disrupts usual winemaking patterns.

The report states: “Climate change is redrawing the wine map. Southern regions face rising temperatures of plus 3C from flowering to harvest in 2024 and extreme droughts, threatening traditional vineyards. Meanwhile, northern areas like Denmark will gain ground with longer growing seasons and milder conditions.

“If the climate challenge is not addressed, cabernet sauvignon, once exclusive to southern Europe, may thrive in central and northern regions by 2100. To adapt, the industry must invest in policy reforms, agricultural technology and collaborative solutions to ensure a sustainable future.”

However, even by 2100 Scotland will have to stick to producing whisky as it will remain too cold and wet, with nowhere north of the border able to produce a drinkable wine.

Cold temperatures can result in grapes struggling to reach their full sugar levels, while the early harvesting, which occurs in cooler climates due to autumn frosts, can cause high acidity in wine.

Ideal temperatures to successfully grow grapes is between 20C and 30C, with long hours of sunshine beneficial to create full-bodied red wines.

Despite only a few vineyards successfully operating in the UK at present, the Met Office predicts that the UK’s average annual temperature could increase by between 2.3C and 5C by 2100.

The largest vineyard is currently the Denbies Wine Estate near Dorking in Surrey, with attracts around 300,000 visitors each year. The most northerly vineyard is Ryedale in North Yorkshire, and produces a range of wine such as pinot noir and rondo.

Britain’s aid cuts harm the world – and the UK itself

When the government announced that it was to divert almost half of the annual foreign aid budget to defence spending, the outcry, beyond the aid community and the demonstrative resignation of the development minister, was rather less than might have been expected in response to such a drastic switch.

To be sure, the muted response had its causes, which included the acceptance that Europe was going to have to pay a lot more towards its own defence; the continuing strength of UK public support for Ukraine; and the regrettable reality that foreign aid is rarely a popular destination for taxpayers’ money. If there was also an element of ignorance – or, at the very least, a reluctance to acknowledge the likely consequences of such a major redirection of resources – such excuses are no longer tenable, if ever they were. The scale of the likely damage has now been spelt out in an analysis by the charity Save the Children – and a disastrous picture it presents, too.

As is so often the case, the first to suffer will be the poorest, and chief among those are women and girls, mothers and babies. Programmes designed to widen access to education, family planning, clean water and food are all likely to be cut back or ended, affecting as many as 12 million people. Almost 3 million fewer children could be in education compared with five years ago. Poor sanitation means the spread of disease; curtailing sexual health programmes risks increasing the spread of HIV. By any measure, these add up to a big step in the wrong direction.

Even those dismal figures, however, do not tell the whole story. When the reallocation between the aid and defence budgets was announced, the prime minister insisted that aid to Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan would be protected. Together, however, these commitments amount to nearly £7bn of the £9.2bn that is envisaged to be the aid budget in 2027. To that has also to be added the £3bn or so that currently goes from the foreign aid budget towards the cost of accommodating asylum seekers and irregular migrants in the UK. Save the Children estimates a “black hole” of at least £750,000 that could presage the end of practically every other aid programme, with as many as 55 million people affected around the world.

One very partial remedy might be for the government to reallocate the asylum costs to domestic spending departments. But this looks unlikely. While it was questioned at one time by none other than the foreign secretary, David Lammy, the use of the foreign aid budget to fund accommodation for asylum seekers is clearly designed to fend off criticism and, with the number of small-boat crossings only rising, these costs look unlikely to come down soon, despite the home secretary’s hopes of cutting spending by speeding up procedures. Dan Paskins of Save the Children has it right when he says, “We should not fund our response to one crisis at the expense of others.”

International pressure to keep up foreign aid spending is also diminished. The Trump administration went so far as to disband one of the world’s biggest aid agencies, USAID, with some immediate dire consequences, including for earthquake relief in Myanmar. Rather than being seen as an example of what not to do, however, that one move seemed to give others a green light to downgrade their own foreign aid efforts. The UK was one – and the scale of the cut was savage. At 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI), the UK’s aid contribution is now at its lowest for 25 years.

It is a far cry from the 0.7 per cent of GNI that is called for by the UN, was promised by the Blair government, and was finally reached by the UK in 2013. This is where it stayed until 2021, when it was “temporarily” reduced to 0.5 per cent by the Johnson government in the light of Covid spending pressures. Last year’s Labour manifesto included an undertaking to restore the budget to 0.7 per cent. For all the current special circumstances, the government should be held to its pledge.

Summary cuts to vital aid programmes harm the intended recipients above all. But they harm the donor country and its government, too. They damage its reputation and its projection of “soft power”, but they also threaten to increase multiple risks, from the spread of disease to security threats and enforced migration, any or all of which could eventually reach our shores. A supposedly short-term slashing of the foreign aid budget today can all too easily translate into much higher costs for everyone tomorrow.