‘Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,’ the couple wrote on Instagram

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sent shock waves through social media on Tuesday with a joint post announcing their engagement after a two-year courtship.

The 35-year-old pop star and 35-year-old tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs wrote: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married” with a firecracker emoji on Instagram, alongside a series of images of themselves in a lush, floral setting.

Reform UK’s leader isn’t offering border control. He’s dismantling democratic constraints and replacing them with fear and authoritarian fiction

Nigel Farage wants you to believe Britain could deport 288,000 people annually. That’s nearly 800 a day – 30 times the current rate of asylum-related returns. This is a fantasy concealing his real aim: to destroy public trust in democratic institutions, crush legal constraints and turn fear into power. Mr Farage isn’t trying to fix the asylum system. In fact, he wants to dismantle the political framework necessary to achieve that goal: the treaties, parliamentary conventions and centuries of legal protections. In their place, a Reform government would operate by executive fiat cloaked in nationalist rhetoric.

“Operation Restoring Justice” is a louder, more extreme version of Rishi Sunak’s failed 2023 strategy to detain everyone, deport everyone and process no one. This led to a backlog of unheard asylum claims, spiralling hotel costs and public anger – with no drop in small boat crossings. But Mr Farage wants to go further. He pledges to withdraw from the European convention on human rights (ECHR); repeal the Human Rights Act to remove legal routes of appeal; disapply the UN refugee convention for five years; and exit anti-torture and anti-trafficking treaties.

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Each day, the evidence of war crimes amasses. Yet the starvation continues and the offensive intensifies

Tragedy has piled on tragedy in Gaza. Yet Israel’s attack on Nasser hospital – the only functioning public hospital left in the south – still stood out. One strike was followed within minutes by another, hitting those who had raced to help the wounded. Monday’s attack was multiple egregious acts in one: hitting a hospital, injured civilians, rescue workers and journalists.

With events caught on video, Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “tragic mishap” instead of blaming Hamas for the deaths or smearing the dead. (The military, which has a record of misleading claims following incidents, later alleged a camera had been “positioned by Hamas” at the site.) Can anyone believe that this was all an error, when such “double tap” strikes are becoming routine, and when those killed this time are so typical of those killed throughout this war?

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Recent announcements at major publications have seen critics losing their positions, an ongoing shift that we should all be alarmed by

Media layoffs are no longer breaking news; at this point, it’s more of a weekly check-in to determine which publications are shaving a few more jobs, firing people en masse, or shuttering altogether. But for the admittedly niche demographic that follows the ups and downs of professional film and culture criticism, it’s been a particularly rough couple of weeks, in part because the job losses feel so specifically targeted. The Chicago Tribune isn’t just undergoing a round of layoffs to weather some bad economic news; they’re eliminating the position of film critic entirely, and with it mainstay Michael Phillips, who inherited a beat once occupied by Gene Siskel.

Phillips kept the Siskel torch burning in more ways than one; after Ebert retired from regular on-camera reviews, Phillips co-hosted a Siskel & Ebert offshoot with AO Scott, who has since also left the film-crit world, albeit voluntarily. But over at the New York Times, where Scott still works at the Book Review, four culture critics have recently been reassigned, essentially stripped of their original titles before being eventually replaced by … well, let’s have culture editor Sia Michel try to explain it: “Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms.” Translation: critics better learn to TikTok. And they better not expect to write so many of their dumb reviews.

Research reveals why single fermentation beers sometimes lack the thick, stable foam of other pub favourites

A flat pint of beer with no head is a common gripe among pub-goers. And while the bar staff’s pint-pulling technique is often assumed to be the cause, scientists have discovered that the stability of beer foam is also highly dependent on the chemical makeup of the brew.

Triple fermented beers have the most stable foams, the study found, while the froth created by single fermentation beers, including lagers, are inherently more likely to collapse before you have time to take the first sip.

• Striker remains keen on move to Liverpool

• Newcastle to make improved Strand Larsen bid

Alexander Isak is understood to have declined a high-powered invitation to return to Newcastle’s first-team fold.

The Sweden striker has spent most of this summer on a form of strike as he attempts to engineer a move to Liverpool by refusing to play for Eddie Howe’s first team or rejoin the squad for training.