Donald Trump will speak to Vladimir Putin tomorrow about a ceasefire deal in Ukraine. The US president told reporters on Air Force One that the two leaders would discuss “dividing up certain assets” between Moscow and Kyiv, including land and power plants. Keir Starmer says Britain is willing to deploy thousands of peacekeeping troops for “as long as it takes” to deter another invasion. The government is facing a growing revolt from senior Labour figures over plans to save £5bn by cutting disability benefits. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says “there is no case in any scenario for cutting the support available to disabled people”, while veteran left-winger Diane Abbott says cuts are “not a Labour thing to do”. The reforms are due to be set out in full tomorrow. Parts of England could be warmer than Ibiza and Corfu this week. On the first official day of spring – Thursday’s vernal equinox – temperatures are forecast to reach 19C in the southeast. So that’s something.

An arrest that shames America

You may have missed it, what with everything else going on, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack, but Donald Trump is tearing apart America’s constitutional right to free speech. Last weekend, a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist at Columbia University called Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by Department of Homeland Security agents as he arrived home from dinner. The 30-year-old, a green card holder, hasn’t been accused of a crime. But the Trump administration has decided that his “pro-Palestinian activity” is reason enough to kick him out of the country. He was immediately transported to a notorious jail in Louisiana, a state where “a more pliant judge is likelier”. The White House, disgustingly, mocked him on X with a Jewish term for goodbye: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.”

Trump has said this is “the first arrest of many”. The legal rationale for Khalil’s deportation is that his pro-Palestinian activities could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US” – an astonishingly broad interpretation that could apply to almost anything. (If the law under which he was arrested sounds McCarthyite, that’s because it is – it was passed in 1952 to collar Holocaust survivors suspected of communist sympathies.) The government has already launched a massive AI-assisted programme called “Catch and Revoke”, which scans everything written online to “flush out” non-citizens deemed wrong ‘uns. What a disgrace all this is. It was only a month ago that JD Vance was lecturing Europeans about the decline of free speech. You don’t have to support Hamas, or even think Khalil is a good egg, to see his treatment as “an outrage in a free country”. And let’s see if all those “brave” conservative defenders of free speech are condemning this. “If they aren’t, never take them seriously on this subject again.”