James Landale
Diplomatic correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

This state visit is designed to improve UK-US relations and
cement the government’s relationship with an at-times-unreliable ally.

Diplomats say the president will focus on royal pageantry and avoid
controversy.

But the potential for disagreement remains.

Peter Mandelson: The sacking of Lord Mandelson as the UK’s man in Washington, for his links to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, will cast a pall.

Questions about this may dominate Thursday’s news conference.

The risk for
ministers is that the focus shifts from Prime Minister Starmer’s competence to President
Trump’s links to Epstein.

Middle East: The UK is expected to recognise Palestinian statehood at the
United Nations next week to keep alive the idea of a two-state solution.

The US is fiercely
opposed to this, saying the move would reward terrorism and encourage Israel to
annex parts of the West Bank.

Free speech: The White House claims UK regulation of the Internet
threatens free speech, which is something ministers reject.

US officials say the issue
may come up, as it is something “we
in this administration are very much focused on”.

Protests: This state visit will take place behind a ring of steel away
from the public.

But anti-Trump demonstrations are planned and the president
could push back angrily if he watches coverage of the protests on television.

My colleagues didn’t believe me when I told them all my app icons looked slightly crooked after updating my iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26 and getting Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface.

I told our staff reporter Kyle Barr—an all-round consumer tech guru, mind you—to look at my home screen and tell me that my icons were tilting slightly to the left, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “I don’t see it,” he said, trying to convince me there was no slanting. He checked his own newly updated iPhone 14 Pro and didn’t see any tilted icons, either.

Turns out we are both correct.

To create the effect of glass and all of its reflective and shimmering properties, iOS 26 forces every icon on your iPhone home screen to have a slight glow to them in the top left and lower right corners. This gives the subtlest parallax effect when you tilt your iPhone, creating the illusion that they’ve got the thinnest layer of depth.

Against most home screen wallpapers—particularly more colorful ones—app icons do not appear skewed to the eye. All the hues draw attention away from the refractive app corners. But that’s not the case with many dark wallpapers, or solid black like I have on my iPhone. On top of a pure black wallpaper and with the icons set to “Dark,” “Clear,” or “Tinted,” everything looks tilted. I’ve found it just a little bit disorienting and kind of frustrating if I look at my home screen for more than a few seconds.

I’m not the only one bothered by this optical illusion. A post on r/ios has over 2.5K upvotes and nearly 500 comments at the time of writing. “The frame glow effect makes apps look tilted, and it’s really distracting for me (I even feel a bit dizziness),” wrote user tantunidevourer.

People who hadn’t noticed it after updating their iPhones confirmed the tilted icons. “I hadn’t noticed it at the first glance, but now I can’t unsee the tilted app icons,” wrote user Silacko. Another Reddit user, OrganicCoffeeBean, said, “This update is making me feel drunk.”

Some users have suggested turning off the parallax effect buried within the Accessibility section within the Settings app. Apple added a “Reduce Motion” setting after users complained about the zooming in/out icon animations in iOS 7 causing dizziness and nausea. (I was one of those users who felt nauseous at the zooming icon effect.) Turning on Reduce Motion kills the animations, and the additional “Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions” setting further helps “reduce the motion for user interface controls that slide in when appearing and disappearing,” according to Apple’s description. I turned on both settings and can confirm that it doesn’t remove the refractive app icon corners. Maybe Apple will add another toggle to the ever-growing section under Accessibility in a future software update. At this point, why not just let users decide how liquidy and glassy they want iOS 26 on their devices with some kind of slider setting that lets you adjust the transparency?

With Liquid Glass, Apple was going for a unified design language that runs across all of its products, from the iPhone to iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Some people like the fluid-like interface; others hate it. If you’re the latter, you can make Liquid Glass less liquidy and glassy with a few Accessibility tweaks.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say all of iOS 26 is an “optical nightmare,” like Reddit user demenghi, but I do think there’s room for improvement, or at the very least, more customization needs to be added.