Labour suffered a seismic defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election, finishing a distant third with 25% of the vote behind the Green Party (41%) and second-placed Reform UK (29%). The new Green MP, 34-year-old plumber Hannah Spencer, says the victory is proof the party can “win anywhere”. Independent observers reported “concerningly high levels” of family voting, the illegal practice of multiple people entering the poll booth together. Pakistan has declared “open war” against Afghanistan, bombing Kabul and other major cities after Afghan forces attacked Pakistani border troops. The prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, says that months of tit-for-tat clashes – and Afghanistan’s habit of “exporting terrorism” – meant he was ready to “crush” the Taliban. Scientists have captured a stunning image of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. The largest picture ever obtained by the specialist Alma telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert will help scientists, who have previously only been able to capture isolated patches of the galaxy, understand our origins as a planet.

By-elections seldom matter much, says Patrick Maguire in The Times, but Gorton and Denton really could prove “existential” for Labour. It’s not just that they have lost one of their safest seats, won only 18 months ago with a majority of almost 15,000 votes. It’s that the Greens have shown beyond any doubt that it is they who are the party of choice, not Labour, for voters wanting to stop Reform. “It changes the whole psychological climate of progressive politics at the worst possible time for the Labour Party.” The Tories fared little better, losing their deposit, and between them the “old duopoly” mustered barely more than a quarter of the vote – down from nearly 60% in 2024. For both parties, the local and devolved elections in May look set to be a “bloodbath”.

Labour’s defeat is thoroughly deserved, says Neal Lawson in The New Statesman. The widespread consensus was that the only possible candidate with a chance of keeping hold of the seat was Andy Burnham. But because Keir Starmer didn’t want a leadership challenge, he blocked the Greater Manchester mayor from running. This disgraceful manoeuvring is typical of a party that has “lost its soul”. Or rather, a party that has had its soul removed by a “small, hyper-factional clique” whose primary goal wasn’t to transform the country but to ensure that Labour would “never again be led from the left”. These people insisted that Britain is a “conservative country” that can only be won from a centre-right position; that the 2017 general election, in which Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour won 40% of the vote, had to be “airbrushed from history”. Now the Greens have demonstrated the folly of these positions. “The floodgates have been opened, and Labour’s right and Keir Starmer opened them.”

Gorton and Denton wasn’t the only historic election yesterday, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman. Your Party held its first leadership contest – on Zoom. Winner Jeremy Corbyn had a photo of his late cat El Gato in the background, while hated rival Zarah Sultana’s ally Grace Lewis, 22, underlined the professionalism of the proceedings by joining the meeting from her car. One candidate on mute appeared to be doing a spot of online shopping while another squinted at her screen, shaking her head beside a tartan ironing board. A third was having a cheeky vape. “We want to win everyone to our side, except the far right,” declared one candidate. Though in Your Party, the “far right” appears to encompass “Reform, the Conservatives, the Labour Party, the county of Surrey, Audi drivers and people who listen to The Archers”.

It’s not every day a piece of science fiction gets treated as a news bulletin, says Derek Thompson on Substack. But that’s effectively what happened this week, after a little-known US research firm published a report imagining a doomsday scenario in which AI triggers a massive recession. Despite Citrini Research making the whole thing up, investors panicked and the share prices of many of the companies name-checked – the likes of American Express and delivery giant DoorDash – plunged by as much as 13%. What does it say about AI, and about how clueless we all are to its potential economic consequences, that a literal science-fiction story has the power to “move a trillion dollars”?

If you’re anything like my parents, says an anonymous 15-year-old girl in The Guardian, you probably have no idea how much “vile misogyny” people my age are exposed to on social media. Girls considered promiscuous are derided as “thots” (whores), “community pussy” or “bops”, a derogatory term implying they have been “passed around” too much. Sex is often referred to as “cracking”, where “men do the cracking and women get cracked”. I was recently served an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had managed to rebuild her life after being raped six years ago. Among the comments were: “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, and “Bro could have picked a better option”.

On social media even the word “female” is a term of abuse: it is used by teenage boys – who would never describe themselves as “males” – to dehumanise us, to equate us to sows or calves. One of the worst labels is “foid”, which refers to women being “less-than-human, female humanoids”. You can argue that this is just the algorithms doing their wicked work; that the way to stop being served this stuff is to stop looking at it. Believe me, we try. And it’s spilling out into real life, too. Boys of my age are deeply susceptible to the “cool and funny framing” of all this relentless misogyny: for many of them, it’s just a big joke. But obviously we don’t see it that way, and you can see the wedge this disconnect is driving between boys and girls. A social media ban for under-16s might not fix these problems overnight. But even if society can’t stamp out misogyny, it can at least show that it disapproves.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor can, in some respects, count himself lucky, says Samuel Rubinstein in Engelsberg Ideas. William the Conqueror’s eldest child, Robert Curthose, was an early specimen of the “failson”. He spent so lavishly on “jugglers, parasites and harlots”, the last of which sometimes stole his clothes in the middle of the night and ran off, that his younger brother had to capture him during the Battle of Tinchebray in 1106 to put the country out of its misery. Curthose languished in prison for 28 years until his death.

It’s always best to stick to your mother tongue when it comes to diplomacy, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Around 25 years ago, during a joint press conference with French PM Lionel Jospin, Tony Blair was asked if he was jealous of his counterpart’s policy successes. Answering in French, the New Labour leader tried to say he was “very envious of the magnificent positions Jospin had taken on different policy issues”. What he actually said was that he “desired Lionel Jospin in many different positions”.

It’s the world’s tallest mural made of plastic bottle caps, says Jesús Maturana in EuroNews. Based loosely on the Mona Lisa, the gigantic Gioconda, erected in the Zacamil neighbourhood of San Salvador, is more than 13 metres high and built with around 100,000 lids recycled by the local community. Óscar Olivares, the Venezuelan artist behind the project, worked with litter pickers, volunteers and local organisations to complete the work, which reinterprets Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece as a woman with a dark complexion and curly hair, dressed in the colours of the Salvadoran flag.