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Worked as a "delivery contractor" for a food app for two years. 1099, no benefits, but the pay felt fair so I didn't question the setup. Needed unemployment after the app cut my zone last month. Filed. Got denied in nine days. Reason on the denial letter: "Claimant was not an employee. No wages were reported under employer contributions." Called the state office to understand. They explained something that never occurred to me: the company never paid a single cent into unemployment insurance on my behalf, the whole time I worked for them, because classifying me as a contractor let them skip it entirely, legally. Checked my tax documents going back two years. I paid self-employment tax, the full 15.3%, on every dollar I earned. The company paid nothing into any safety net for me, ever. So I covered both halves of a tax built partly to fund unemployment insurance, then got told I don't qualify for unemployment insurance, because the same arrangement that made me pay double also made me ineligible for the thing the extra half was supposed to protect. Two years of full contributions. Zero coverage when it mattered.

The small boats crisis has gone on longer than WWII. I will always regret that I could not solve it. We have to show people the journey is pointless. Rwanda was criticised as a fantasy, but the real fantasy is thinking you can stop the boats without it. For some time I had said that if forced to choose between membership of the ECHR and our national and border security, I would pick the latter. During my tenure, attempting to leave the ECHR with only two years left in the parliament and with no mandate to do so would have been a recipe for constitutional chaos. You couldn't resolve all the issues thrown up by leaving in 24 months with a fractious parliamentary party, a sceptical House of Lords and limited diplomatic capital. Other countries can read our opinion polls. With the help of KCs, we'd done extensive work on leaving. The plan was to say in the election campaign that we'd seek radical reform of the convention and the court, and leave if that could not be achieved quickly. Like so many things in that campaign, it didn't go to plan, and we dropped the idea after Nigel Farage entered the race, for fear it would be dismissed as a panic move and make it harder to focus the election on tax and the economy. With a mandate, a majority and a five-year term, it would be very different, and worth doing. My Sunday Times column today looks at how 👇 https://t.co/0JgAX59qVJ

Persians were storing ice in the desert 2,400 years ago without electricity or refrigerators. Meet the Yakhchāl, an ingenious ancient Persian ice house that turned extreme heat into an engineering challenge. But how did it work? Its thick, domed walls helped reduce heat gain, while deep underground chambers used the earth’s natural insulation to keep stored ice cool. In winter, water was frozen in shallow pools, and the resulting ice blocks were stored for use during scorching summer months. The secret also lay in sarooj, a traditional, water-resistant mortar made from materials such as clay, lime, sand and ash. Some surviving yakhchāls still amaze architects and historians today. No electricity. No compressors. Just a remarkable understanding of materials, climate and thermodynamics. Ancient Persian engineers didn’t fight the desert they designed around it.