Styles is playing a record 12 nights at Wembley stadium and 30 at Madison Square Garden, as demand for big artists soars – and audience expectation along with it

Selling out a venue such as London’s O2 Arena used to be considered a high point of an artist’s career. Now, selling out just one night there might seem a bit underwhelming. Raye and Olivia Dean will play six nights apiece at the 20,000-capacity hall this year; Dave is playing four, Ariana Grande is playing a whopping 10. Harry Styles, never one to be outdone, last month announced a staggering 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with more than 11 million people applying for presale access, as well as a record-breaking 12 nights at Wembley stadium: the most on a single leg of a tour. Taylor Swift managed a mere eight.

Swift’s Eras tour, which made more than $2bn (£1.6bn), doesn’t seem a complete outlier any more: Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour has lasted four years and made $1.5bn, and the Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour is also four years deep and has crossed the $1bn mark. It’s even de rigueur for world leaders to get involved in the fight for tickets, with the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, asking the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, to help book more BTS shows in her country, just as the then Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, publicly asked Swift to come to Canada. Meanwhile, the Singaporean government paid for Swift’s six shows in the country to be a south-east Asia exclusive.

A wartime boom in Russia has given way to sluggish growth, tax hikes and squeezed public services. Will it affect the conflict in Ukraine?

Western leaders were bullish when they imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half,” said the then US president, Joe Biden, in March, a month into the war.

With three years left and a huge majority, Labour can govern with more humility and deliver real change. But with Starmer at the helm? I can’t see it

The smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent, well-intentioned Labour leader down with him.

That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir Starmer’s life purpose, attitudes, tastes, morals or values resembles Mandelson’s and his venal world of corrupted power, where mega-billions buy anyone anything. Not friends; they had nothing in common. For all Mandelson’s pedigree, reaching into the party’s past, he never seemed to have a single Labour value or egalitarian instinct. Labour was a vehicle.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat is Labour from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party?
Book tickets here or at guardian.live

In need of a last-minute gift? We’ve tested the most beautiful blooms, including sustainable, British-grown and same-day delivery options, for Valentine’s Day and beyond

• The best letterbox gifts

I pride myself on being an excellent gift-giver, and I truly believe the uplifting feeling of finding flowers on the doorstep is hard to beat (unless they’re from an ex who “just wants to talk” – never be that guy).

Flowers are such an easy win for the gift-giver, too. Whether it’s Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or “just because”, there’s a plethora of online flower delivery services with a range of offerings. Some provide next-day delivery (great if you’ve forgotten an important date and are scrambling); some will deliver flowers monthly via subscription; some will even slip in a box of chocolates, a bottle of fizz or a candle in the delivery.

Best flower delivery overall:
Marks & Spencer

Best budget flower delivery:
Scilly Flowers

At its new Stone Mountain, Georgia, facility, Roomba-like robots shuffle between stacks, another adds shipping labels while another arranges packages in pallets

One of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don’t need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon’s hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.

Between the main doors and the entrance security gate, I paced and paced after being told I would have to wait for the tour guide to collect me and other guests for a tour of the 640,000-sq-ft, four-story warehouse.

The actor Wagner Moura and writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho explain how the Brazilian thriller mirrors their experiences of political corruption and why they are compelled to speak out

Unusually for a political period drama that is not in the English language, runs nearly three hours and peppers its authentic portrayal of a military dictatorship with sight gags and gory shootouts, The Secret Agent has transpired to be quite the awards magnet. Best picture and best actor, for its star Wagner Moura (who recently won a Golden Globe), are two of the four categories in which it will compete at next month’s Oscars.

The nominations haven’t yet been announced when I meet Moura in a London hotel room, but it is unlikely they will have turned the head of this seasoned 49-year-old. He has years of experience: he headlined the Elite Squad thrillers, played Pablo Escobar in the streaming hit Narcos, and joined Parker Posey as husband-and-wife assassins in the TV version of Mr & Mrs Smith. He exudes relaxed, matinee idol charisma, as well as the same air of decency and humility as Armando, his character in The Secret Agent. A widowed academic hiding out in a refugees’ safe house in Recife at the height of the dictatorship in 1977, Armando is plotting to flee Brazil on a fake passport. To do so, he will need to outrun the hitmen hired to kill him by a vengeful industrialist.

Pressure continues to build on Keir Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney

• Analysis: How the Epstein scandal has shaken the British government to its core

• ‘If someone had pulled the trigger’: MPs rue lack of challenger to oust Starmer

Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.

The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.

Labour Together allegedly hired company to look at Sunday Times and Guardian reporters after article about donations

• UK politics live – latest updates

A thinktank previously run by a Labour minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff is alleged to have paid a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into its funding.

Labour Together, once run by Morgan McSweeney and then by Josh Simons, now a Cabinet Office minister, hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Guardian, the Sunday Times and other outlets and to identify their sources, according to claims in the Substack publication Democracy for Sale.

Sergei Lavrov blames shooting of Vladimir Alekseyev on Ukraine but does not back up Kremlin claim with evidence

Hundreds of protesters gathered in Milan on Friday to oppose the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the closure of schools and streets in the city ahead of the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Games.

Reuters reported that protesters – mostly students with signs reading “ICE out” – assembled in Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico University in the eastern part of the city.

Two countries’ envoys separately meet Omani negotiators amid US naval buildup in region

• Iran and US nuclear talks – live updates

Oman has mediated high-stakes, indirect talks between Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear programme, seen as one of the last chances to prevent a new US attack.

Envoys for the two countries arrived for separate meetings with the sultanate’s top diplomat, Badr al-Busaidi. The negotiations are the first since the US struck Iranian nuclear targets in June, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign.