The Week 1568

A golden retriever from County Fermanagh has been given a medal for helping to save her owner’s life, by raising the alarm when he had a cardiac arrest while asleep. Polly’s barking woke Hannah Cooke from her sleep in March 2024 to find that her husband, Adam, 37, was breathing strangely; they think Polly heard his noisy breathing from the kitchen directly below their room. Hannah performed CPR and called 999. Polly was this week honoured as a “CPR hero”. A three-year-old boy’s response to pioneering gene therapy has delighted doctors at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. Oliver Chu, from California, suffers from Hunter syndrome, a rare disorder that stops his body from producing a crucial enzyme. The disease gradually robs children of their physical and cognitive abilities; but within months…

Reeves’s Budget What happened After months of leaks, speculation and policy shifts, Rachel Reeves finally delivered her second Budget on Wednesday. It is a Budget designed to plug a roughly £30bn hole in the public finances with a series of tax hikes and some spending cuts, while also helping those on welfare. The Chancellor called it a “Labour Budget with Labour values”, telling MPs it would more than double her fiscal headroom, to £21.7bn, giving her a wider margin of error for meeting her rules on spending and borrowing. A leak by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) meant that the entire contents of the Budget were revealed 40 minutes before she stood at the dispatch box. The single biggest revenue-raising measure in the Budget is a three-year extension of…

What happened After days of frantic diplomacy, Donald Trump claimed this week that his negotiators had made “tremendous progress” towards ending the Ukraine War. The Ukrainian leadership indicated that it had accepted the “core terms” of a US-backed peace plan – and Trump said that his envoy, Steve Witkoff, would be dispatched to the Kremlin for talks with Vladimir Putin next week. However, significant doubts remained, both about the exact terms of the deal, and about Russia’s position. On Wednesday, Russian officials indicated that the deal was not acceptable. Last week, Trump had piled great pressure on Kyiv to sign up to a 28-point plan that the US had drawn up following Witkoff’s talks with Russian envoys in Miami. That proposal echoed Moscow’s maximalist war aims, by calling for Kyiv…

Controversy of the week A Cop to forget As the Sun sets on Cop30, it’s hard to judge this summit as anything other than a “failure”, said Genevieve Guenther in The Guardian. When delegates first gathered in Belém, Brazil – the “gateway of the Amazon” – for the UN climate conference earlier this month, there was excited talk of finally agreeing a “roadmap” for the world’s transition away from fossil fuels. In the end, the final text didn’t even mention fossil fuels. Petrostates led by Saudi Arabia and Russia blocked that. (While President Trump, who describes climate change as a “con job”, snubbed the talks entirely.) Gone, too, was another roadmap to end deforestation; while the tripling of a climate change Adaptation Fund, allowing poorer nations to cope with its…

A new fashion line called “I Wool Survive” made its debut at a New York fashion show, using wool from gay sheep. The Los Angeles designer Michael Schmidt partnered with Rainbow Wool (a German non-profit that rescues rams that refuse to mate with ewes) and Grindr, the LGBTQ+ dating app, to bring an “animal rights story” to the runway. More than half of published novelists in the UK believe that AI could replace their work entirely, according to a new report from Cambridge University. The study surveyed 258 novelists: 51% thought AI was likely to replace them; 39% said their income had already fallen as a result of it. Romance authors, followed by thriller and crime writers, were deemed the most exposed.…

The Daily Mail group, which has struck a £500m deal to buy The Daily Telegraph, pending government approval (see page 35). Mutts and mongrels, with news that the Royal Kennel Club will admit non-pedigree dogs for the first time in its 150-year history. They will also be included in the club’s nationwide “dog census”, to be carried out later this year. Superman, after an original copy of the June 1939 first edition became the highest-priced comic book ever sold. The comic, which sold for $9.1m (£7m) at auction, was found by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s loft in California, stacked under a pile of faded newspapers in a cardboard box.…