Since her arrival at the Wall Street Journal, British editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has shaken up not only her own newsroom but also the White House

The danger posed to Donald Trump was obvious. It was a story that not only drew attention to his links to a convicted sex offender, it also risked widening a growing wedge between the president and some of his most vociferous supporters. The White House quickly concluded a full-force response was required.

It was Tuesday 15 July. The Wall Street Journal had approached Trump’s team, stating it planned to publish allegations that Trump had composed a crude poem and doodle as part of a collection compiled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.

It wasn’t the first hit memoir to tell a story of redemption inspired by the great outdoors – but could it become one of the last? Authors and publishers assess the damage

When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven’t read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth’s emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth’s diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.

But it wasn’t the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old’s hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she’d grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year’s bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.

An experienced clinician in prosthetics, Jim Ashworth-Beaumont found himself the perfect guinea pig for a radical new option for amputees

When the air ambulance brought Jim Ashworth-Beaumont to King’s College hospital in south-east London, nobody thought he had a hope. He had been cycling home when a lorry driver failed to spot him alongside his trailer while turning left after a set of traffic lights. The vehicle’s wheels opened his torso like a sardine tin, puncturing his lungs and splitting his liver in two. They also tore off his right arm. Weeks after the accident, in July 2020, Ashworth-Beaumont would see a photo of the severed limb taken by a doctor while it lay beside him in hospital. He had asked to see the picture and says it helped him come to terms with his loss. “My hand didn’t look too bad,” he says. “It was as if it was waving goodbye to me.”

Ashworth-Beaumont, a super-fit and sunny former Royal Marine from Edinburgh, would go on to spend six weeks in an induced coma as surgeons raced to repair his crushed body. But as he lay on the road, waiting for the paramedics, his only thoughts were that he was dying. He did not have the wherewithal to consider the irony of his predicament.

A good crisp should be dangerously moreish – but which were perfectly seasoned and crunchy, and which weren’t worth their salt?

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‘What I’ve learned today,” says my friend Lucy, stepping firmly away from the crisp buffet, “is that you can have too much of a good thing.” My volunteer testers and I were enthusiastic about the prospect of tasting our way through 10 types of lightly salted, crisply fried potato, but we all agreed, once they were laid out side by side in anonymous bowls, that it was surprisingly hard to differentiate between them. That said, good news: every single one had its cheerleaders, so there were no real duds in this sample.

To outline what I’m looking for from a salted crisp, it should be crisp, obviously. To this end, all the bags were opened at the same time, just before the blind tasting. Salt levels are a matter of personal preference, though it should be upfront rather than a mere seasoning, while, in an ideal world, the potatoes themselves would be the primary flavour, rather than a mere texture. They should be cooked long enough that they crunch, rather than melt between the teeth, but it’s a delicate balance: too long in the oil and they’ll be bitter. And that oil – if you can taste it at all – should be pleasant: too strong a flavour, even of the best fat, will overpower the spuds. Last, crisps should be dangerously moreish: if you can eat one and stop, they’re not good crisps.

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the power

There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.

As the Canadian technologist and engineer Ursula Franklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “needs-driven, scrappy, on location, iterative, practical, mundane”. The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down “solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free.

Crime agency says there were more than 60 investigations into at-sea drop-offs last year with 34 people arrested

• How a high-speed ocean chase led to an £18m cocaine seizure in Cornwall

Law enforcement agencies have urged people living in coastal communities in the UK to help them catch drug gangs that are using ever more imaginative methods to get vast quantities of cocaine into Britain.

They have warned that gangs are favouring a method called “at-sea drop-offs” (Asdos) in which packages of drugs are released into the ocean from “mother ships” for smaller vessels to pick up and take into the UK via small coves and harbours.

Rights bodies say new law and proscription of direct action group create risk of censorship of Gaza-related content

The Online Safety Act together with the proscription of Palestine Action could result in platforms censoring Palestinian-related content, human rights organisations have warned.

Open Rights Group, Index on Censorship and others have written to Ofcom calling on it to provide clear guidance to platforms on distinguishing lawful expression from content deemed to be in support of terrorism.

Jon Ruben, 76, remanded in custody in connection with the incident at Stathern Lodge in Leicestershire

A man has been remanded in custody charged with child cruelty offences after children became unwell at a summer camp in Leicestershire.

Jon Ruben, 76, appeared in Leicester magistrates court after being charged with three counts of wilfully assaulting, ill-treating, neglecting, abandoning or exposing children in a manner likely to cause them unnecessary suffering or injury to health, where he was told he would be remanded in custody and appear at Leicester crown court on Friday 29 August.

Parents watch children waste away as deliberate aid restrictions from Israel mean hunger is becoming a killer, as experts confirm famine is currently playing out

The people of Gaza did not need this week’s official confirmation from UN-backed hunger experts that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was unfolding there. For months they have watched as their children waste away.

“All my children have lost nearly half of their body weight,” said Jamil Mughari, a 38-year-old from Maghazi in central Gaza. “My daughter, who is five years old, now weighs only 11kg. My son Mohammad has become just skin and bones. All my children are like this.