Kemi thinks the Tories left the country in fine shape and Labour have ruined it. Keir thinks the opposite. Yawn

Spare a thought for Rachel Reeves. After last week’s mini-meltdown during prime minister’s questions, the chancellor is now condemned to spend the next year grinning manically every time she’s out and about in public. Having a bad day at the office? GRIN. Had a row with the kids? GRIN. Now there is no escape.

To make it worse, you now get endless colleagues patting you on the shoulder and looking you deep in the eyes as they ask if you’re OK. When you just want to be left alone. GRIN. Everything is fine. Couldn’t be more normal. Sometimes, it’s no fun being a politician.

This meticulous tale of an investigation into a Canadian chef accused of supplying deadly toxins on a suicide forum makes you despair. It’s yet more evidence that we live in a terrible world

What – and I ask myself this question with increasing frequency and seriousness – are we going to do about people? What, more specifically, are we going to do about the number of irredeemably wicked ones and the amount of suffering they bring into the world?

If you can get through the two-part documentary Poisoned: Killer in the Post without sliding down on to the floor in despair as these questions thunder through your mind – well, you’re a better viewer than I.

Departure now leaves a question mark about the next chapter of one of the sport’s extraordinary success stories

The removal of Christian Horner from his post as team principal at Red Bull represents both the end of an era in Formula One and, in the short term, the most turbulent period in the team’s history. It carries an import that will be felt right across the sport, a significance in how it played out and what happens next as the team Horner built and led to such enormous success faces an uncertain future.

Horner has been at Red Bull since the team was formed in 2005 from the ashes of Jaguar, a team in no little disarray when Red Bull bought it. Horner was at the helm as it was transformed from an operation of 450 personnel, without so much as a win to their name, to one of 1,500 today that has won eight drivers’ titles and six constructors’ championships, and is one of the most extraordinary success stories in F1 history.

US president appears to have run out of patience with his Russian counterpart – but how that transmits into practical support for Kyiv remains to be seen

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“I’m not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now,” Trump said, expressing his frustration with the Russian leader over the war in Ukraine. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin … He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

It may not have been Churchillian in oratorical flourish, and with Trump everything is capable of being reversed in hours, but possibly, just possibly, the rupture between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump has happened. If so it is a transformatory moment, and a vindication for both Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he arrives in Rome for the annual Ukraine reconstruction conference and for those others, notably the British and the French governments, who have patiently helped the scales to fall from Trump’s eyes about Putin’s true intentions. At long last and after many false starts, the US president seems to have accepted he is unpersuadable on ending the war.

Michael Briggs was a well-known scientist - and a fantasist. When his daughter Joanne began digging into his past for a memoir, new lies kept emerging ...

Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn’t like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life.

If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool.

Hampden Park, Glasgow
He’s icy, she’s all sunshine – but the rapper and R&B star’s talents prove perfectly complementary in a historic two-hander

He’s icy and controlled, she’s a beam of sunshine. Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National stadium tour has already broken records as the biggest co-headline tour in history, and they’ve still got five months left on the road. This yin-yang spectacle is a rare chance for fans to see the world’s most influential figures in rap and R&B in one night, and to bask in their chemistry as storied collaborators.

Their sets weave together over three hours, welcoming us first into Lamar’s incisive (and enjoyably irritable) state-of-the-artform address, filmed austerely in black and white, before blossoming into full colour for SZA’s tactile songwriting about exes, bad habits and heart-leaping, interplanetary hope. The contrast is abrupt but high-energy, and when they overlap for duets, everything changes again: Lamar permits himself a broad grin as SZA circles him, looking very much in charge, during the seductive back and forth of Luther.

PM’s hopes of announcing illegal migration curbs during Macron visit depend on several hurdles being cleared

Anglo-French talks over a migration deal were deadlocked on Wednesday night, with negotiators haggling over how much Britain will pay towards the cost of policing small boat crossings.

Keir Starmer had hoped to be able to announce a returns deal – under which Britain would send back some asylum seekers once they had crossed the Channel – before the conclusion on Thursday of the three-day state visit by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

Another huge wave of Russian missiles and drones hit Ukraine’s capital as Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov due to meet with Marco Rubio

A huge wave of Russian strikes on Ukraine’s capital killed two people and left more wounded, Kyiv’s military administration said early on Thursday, with reports of loud blasts echoing over the city throughout the night.

The administration warned of a threat from drones and ballistic weapons and told all residents to “immediately head to the nearest shelters”. Dozens of residents of the capital took shelter in a central metro station during the attack, an Agence France-Presse reporter said, sleeping on mats, calming pets or waiting out the attack on camping furniture.

Latest episodes were filmed before Wallace was sacked and more co-workers made allegations against him

The BBC is facing a fresh crisis over whether or not to show this year’s series of MasterChef, in which the sacked presenter Gregg Wallace features prominently.

The Guardian understands this year’s series, which was recorded in 2024, has been completed and delivered to the broadcaster by the production company Banijay. Wallace appears as a judge right up until the series finale.

Former cabinet minister claims Tories have ‘abandoned the British people’ in fresh blow to Kemi Badenoch

The former Conservative party chair Sir Jake Berry has joined Reform UK in the most high-profile defection so far to Nigel Farage’s party from the Tories.

In a fresh blow to Kemi Badenoch, the former cabinet minister said his former party had “abandoned the British people” and said he wanted to see Reform UK form the next government.