Kemi Badenoch has defended allowing a former neo-Nazi to stand for the Conservatives in a council election in Somerset. Joshua Bonehill-Paine was jailed for anti-Semitic abuse against Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger in 2016 but has since turned to counter-extremism work. Badenoch said that while his crimes were “appalling”, she had made a “judgment call” that he had been successfully rehabilitated. A SpaceX rocket segment is thought to have crashed into the moon at 5,400mph this morning. The collision, involving a 4,000kg piece of space debris from last year’s Falcon 9 lunar mission, was expected to produce a blast roughly equivalent to 15,000 sticks of dynamite, causing a debris plume up to 62 miles high. MI6 is admired by peers as the most powerful foreign intelligence service in Europe, according to a study by French magazine L’Express. Sixty professionals from 25 countries said our spies were the best at recruiting high-level moles and penetrating elites in Russia, China, Iran and Turkey. As The Times put it: “Nobody does it better.”

With most of Donald Trump’s attention on Iran, says Thomas Graham in The New York Times, he may be missing a rare opportunity to end the war in Ukraine. The conflict is “ripe for resolution”. The main reason is that both sides need it to end. Kyiv is running short of fighters; the longer the fighting drags on, the fewer of the millions who fled will return, and the higher the reconstruction bill, already in the hundreds of billions. Russia faces a demographic crisis of its own, a stalling economy and a widening technological gap with America and China. Equally important is that, for now at least, both leaders could plausibly claim victory: Volodymyr Zelensky for preserving Ukraine’s independence, Vladimir Putin for thwarting the West’s effort to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

Putin and Zelensky have signalled in recent months that they want Washington to re-engage with negotiations. But they won’t wait forever. While the Russian president still speaks “approvingly” of Trump, some senior officials and high-profile commentators are noting US assistance to Ukraine and questioning whether Washington can act as a trusted emissary. In Kyiv, meanwhile, there is a push for the Europeans to be more directly involved in the negotiations – a sure-fire way to widen the divide with Moscow. On the battlefield, the conflict has entered a “dangerous escalatory spiral”. Ukraine is striking ever deeper into Russia, hitting energy and military targets and slowly severing Crimea from the mainland. Moscow is retaliating, pounding Ukrainian cities from the air and exploiting Kyiv’s depleted supply of interceptors. Trump should act now, “before escalation closes the diplomatic opening that exhaustion has begun to create”.

Donald Trump has found yet another way to line his pockets, say Dan Primack and Zachary Basu in Axios. His previously loss-making social media company, Truth Social, is now charging finance companies up to $1.2m a year to receive his market-jolting posts a few milliseconds before they go public. That split-second advantage may not sound like much, but it gives traders – or the algorithms they’ve set up – a crucial and potentially lucrative edge over everyone else. It’s the “logical endpoint” of Trump’s profiteering: the US presidency’s unrivalled power to shift markets, “packaged and sold as a subscription”.

Twice a day, says Anna Griffin in The New York Times, a lengthy stretch of icy water in Alaska called Turnagain Arm produces a “tidal bore” – a lofty wave with speeds of up to 15mph, which can be ridden by surfers for miles. On sunny days, as many as 40 wave-riders line up, waiting to spot it as a ripple on the horizon before scrambling down the rocks and into the water to catch it. For many, it’s the “ride of a lifetime”: one brave boarder once cruised the bore tide for an hour, covering a thigh-burning six miles.

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe have spent the past few days flirting with the idea of a rapprochement between their two parties, says James Frayne in The Telegraph. For Farage, this would be a “huge mistake”. Not only is the rift between the two men “irreparable” – their characters are such that a “sensible working relationship” could never happen – the deal would also taint Reform as being a party of the “unacceptably hard right”. Of course, many on the left think as much already. But a massive chunk of voters don’t, including, crucially, those who could send Reform to Downing Street.

Reform is not “meaningfully vulnerable” on its right flank – the party’s recent dip in the polls is the result of Farage’s failure to quash the issue of his £5m gift and Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period in No 10. So entertaining Lowe’s hard-right demands – committing to the deportation of millions, holding a referendum on the death penalty, banning Muslim women from wearing the burka and more besides – would be madness. Many want reduced migration and a crackdown on crime, but the merciless approach Lowe sets out towards them is totally unacceptable to the majority of our “self-consciously moderate” electorate. Farage’s best chance of getting into power is by “ruthlessly courting” the centre-right voters who have stayed with the beleaguered Tories but who nonetheless have some sympathy for his party. For these “self-consciously patriotic and decent” people, there’s a way of conducting politics, business and personal life which makes them worry that voting Reform “simply isn’t what respectable people do”. If Farage jumps into bed with Lowe, they’ll never make the switch.

Andy Burnham talks a lot about his love of indie music, says Bagehot in The Economist: in a video tour of No 10 North, he pointed out a framed copy of a Smiths album and joked that he needed to return it to the band’s guitarist, Johnny Marr. But he’s hardly the first Downing Street resident to be into alternative bands. When David Cameron appeared on Desert Island Discs, he picked tunes by the Smiths and Radiohead. Cameron’s wife, Samantha (pictured), was such a fan of BBC Radio 6 Music that staffers monitored the station’s news bulletins to hear “what she might mention to her husband over dinner”.

Back in 2009, says Simon Kelner in The i Paper, Evgeny Lebedev asked me to find him a punchy editor to make his newspaper, The Independent, “talked about again”. I set my sights on Rod Liddle, who died on Sunday aged 66, and Evgeny insisted we meet at a Venetian palace with his Russian oligarch father. Panicked, I gave Rod – a “barely house-trained” smoker, drinker and user of salty language – strict instructions on how to dress and what not to say. Unfortunately, my pep talk was so successful that the lunch unfurled in almost total silence: he was unfailingly polite, “straining every sinew” not to say anything off-colour. It was a disaster, and a reminder that Rod was always at his best when “off the leash”.

It’s a controlled explosion carried out by Romania’s navy, says Lorenzo Tondo in The Guardian, in a bid to redirect vital cooling water from the drought-hit Danube to the country’s last working nuclear reactor. Engineers used 180kg of explosives to move a large rock restricting the flow of the river, channelling towards the struggling Cernavodǎ plant. Romania isn’t the only country struggling with power because of the drought: Hungary’s nuclear power station is operating at less than half its capacity, and Serbia’s key hydroelectric plant is operating at just 20%.