Xi Jinping received a rare planeside welcome from Donald Trump, complete with a 100ft-long red carpet and a flyover of B1-bombers, as he landed in Washington last night for a three-day summit. Shortly after the Chinese president’s arrival, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a two month extension to the two countries’ trade truce, which was due to expire in November. Reform UK would win fewer seats than both Labour and the Conservatives if a general election were held today, according to new seat-by-seat YouGov poll. Labour would be the largest party in a hung parliament, with 241 seats, followed by the Tories with 130. Nigel Farage’s party would drop into third on 123 seats, a fall of 208 compared to the same poll last year. A baby has been born on Orkney’s northernmost island for the first time in 34 years. Two midwives were transported to North Ronaldsay by coastguard helicopter to help deliver wee bairn Duncan Wilder Thorstein Traill Suarez Ford, who entered the world at his mother’s centuries-old family home.

When Andy Burnham addressed the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, says Anne McElvoy in The Independent, he can’t have expected to make a “vast impact”. The Labour prime minister ended up speaking to a near empty hall at midnight. But – as well as surviving a first in-person meeting with Donald Trump – Burnham took the opportunity to put his personal stamp on what he sees as the biggest issue of the day. And strikingly, he chose Russian disinformation. Announcing a new centre to “stem the poisonous tide” of AI-powered fake news, Burnham said Moscow was spending more than £1bn a year manipulating information online to undermine UK support for Ukraine and amplify discord about illegal immigration.

The problem for Burnham, though, is “that discord does exist”. Yes, Russian bots might be fanning the flames of anti-migrant sentiment, but that doesn’t change how furious perfectly reasonable people feel about successive governments “giving away control of our borders”. At the more febrile end, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Gosport marina in Hampshire after reports a large migrant boat was due to dock there. The “rising ferocity” of these protests is a clear warning to the government that “grip on public order” remains fragile. And the Home Office is still adrift. For all the blandishments and financial inducements thrown at France by Keir Starmer (and now Burnham) in an attempt to prevent migrants setting off in dinghies, 51 arrived on the migrant dinghy bound for Hampshire alone. (It landed in Dover to avoid a clash.) Their continued determination to risk life to reach Britain comes from a growing sense that the situation “eludes the control of governments”. Yes, the Russians are malign, but the sources of “discontent and rage” lie closer to home.

🏝️🤷‍♂️ Britain’s foreign and security policy is also a “mess”, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. We want to keep the Falkland Islands, but we’re desperate to give away Chagos; we want to sanction Israel, but rely on its intelligence and military technology; we have “recognised” Palestine without any indication of where we think its borders are or who its government is. We lecture the world on carbon emissions while relying on gas shipped across the Atlantic rather than our own. It’s time for Britain’s policymakers to “grow up”.

Is Andy Burnham about to call an election? Yes, says Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph. The right is divided, Reform is struggling with unpopular donations and the prime minister is still enjoying the “Burnham bounce”. He will not get a better moment. No chance, says Philip Johnston in the same paper. Burnham has long craved power and truly believes in his ability to transform the country in the next three years. Why would he gamble now and risk becoming a “footnote” in political history? Labour insiders aren’t so sure, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. The PM started the month with a rousing speech to his inner circle, which some took to be a starting gun. Burnham’s top lieutenants deny it emphatically, but those of us who were around before the snap elections of 2007, 2017 and 2024 remember equally emphatic statements from close allies of Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak. We’ll see.

However much they might try to dress it up as “wellness” or “optimisation”, says Phoebe McDowell in Air Mail, many men are going “all in” on beauty treatments. One 33-year-old Romanian (pictured), who has doctors on speed dial in London and Dubai, spends around $54,000 a year on an elaborate routine including botox, peptide injections and jaw-tightening treatments. One 64-year-old goes to Harley Street for filler, “micro-collagen threads”, and “facial balancing”, while a third “high-maintenance man”, who has an eight-step skincare routine, has started to outspend his former beauty editor wife on treatments and talks about his aesthetician with the “same affection as others do their grandmother”.

I’ve never been a victim of Trump derangement syndrome, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Of course, there’s plenty about the man’s character and rhetoric I’ve found “repellent”. But whatever his shortcomings, it seemed obvious to me in 2016 that the country had reached a point in the left’s “malign cultural revolution” that required “radical change”. I figured that jarring change – “perhaps necessarily delivered by a jarring figure” – might be the only way to restore the primacy of American interests against “globalised progressivism” and reclaim our “traditional civilisational values”. Even after Jan 6 removed any doubt about the threat he posed to constitutional norms, I felt the nation’s institutions were strong enough to constrain his worst instincts, which was a price worth paying to prevent the restoration of the progressive left’s “crippling hegemony”.

I am sorry to report that I have now self-diagnosed with a “virulent form of TDS”. Over the past year, disappointment has turned to disillusionment and now full-blown dismay. When Trump won in 2024, becoming only the second Republican since 1988 to win a plurality of the popular vote, he had a historic opportunity to use his victory, and a Republican Congress, to make real changes: take control of the border, protect ordinary workers from inflation, roll back the woke authoritarian takeover of cultural institutions and keep the military out of costly pointless foreign wars. Well, thanks to a self-indulgent tariff fixation based on a “profound misunderstanding of international economics”, a feckless attitude to public finances and a reckless adventure in Iran, that’s all shot to pieces. Even his success at the border was needlessly cruel, at a cost to America’s global standing. Add in the monuments and the monumental corruption, and “it’s enough to give anyone a case of Trump derangement syndrome”.

The Daily Shop Game is an addictive, if humbling, test in which you’re presented with a virtual shopping list of standard items you might buy at a British supermarket and you have to guess how much the total price would be. You get four guesses, and after each you’re told whether it’s higher or lower. Give it a go here.

In February, say Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra in Bloomberg, two American Tomahawk missiles mistakenly struck an Iranian primary school, killing at least 123 children in the “deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century”. Pentagon investigators have discovered that although the site was used as an IRGC compound in 2017, satellite data clearly shows that by 2018 it had been adapted as a school, with brightly painted walls, a football pitch and painted play markings. But the AI system used in the targeting, which was made by military tech giant Palantir, used old data, and no human thought to check.

It’s a doll: Lenny Kravitz in Ken form, says Alexis Mikulski Ruiz in Rolling Stone, complete with dreadlocks, jewellery, tattoos and ludicrously ripped abs. The four-time Grammy Award winner is only the second man to be honoured with a doll-sized doppelgänger, after basketballer LeBron James became the first official “Kenbassador” in 2025. The 62-year-old American Woman singer described the experience as “an honour and absolutely surreal”. To get your hands on one, click here.