Andy Burnham has triggered his second funding row in as many days, after saying he will pay for a new £2 cap on bus fares across England – with an expected bill of £500m – by taking around £450m from Net Zero projects, and the rest from Department of Transport funding already signed to buses. Pressed on whether the money was all there, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander wasn’t sure. “The detail will need to be worked out,” she said. “We wanted to make the announcement today.” Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, after days of protests over last week’s dismissal of the popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43, one of the country’s best-known battlefield commanders, will replace the Soviet-trained Syrskyi as head of Ukraine’s armed forces. Chimpanzees hug and kiss before stressful events as a way to build trust and keep the peace. Researchers at Durham University, who have been studying the apes in Zambia and the DRC, found that those who engaged in physical contact before a known feeding time were more likely to eat alongside each other peacefully.

In Christopher Nolan’s new film of The Odyssey, says James Marriott in The Times, the great director contrives to make the gorgeous Aegean Sea – traditionally imagined as a sun-dazzled realm of clifftop temples and azure harbours – look like “November on the northeast coast”. Nolan’s gruff Odysseus forges his way home to Ithaca under lowering skies and across “bruised blue-black seas”. It’s easy to imagine the teacher of some future humanities module on “The Morbid 2020s” explaining how the film “speaks to the anxieties of its time”, alongside the gloomy novels of Sally Rooney and the recent analysis that found pop music was getting “sadder” and “more stressful”. When exactly did people fall for the idea that “more sophisticated” has to mean “more depressing”?

A recent scan of Oscar winners confirms that ambitious directors would be unwise to offer much levity: Nomadland was a bleak portrait of homelessness in America, Parasite a bleak portrait of economic inequality in South Korea, Oppenheimer a bleak portrait of nuclear armageddon. The last out and out comedy to win Best Picture was Shakespeare in Love in 1999. Previous grim ages haven’t fallen into this trap. The 20th century gave us two world wars, and also Charlie Chaplin and PG Wodehouse. Jane Austen’s novels were written during the Napoleonic Wars. Great art can hold a mirror up to reality, obviously, but it can also be a refuge. Art that ignores the “remarkable persistence of the cheerful and silly parts of life” is guaranteed to miss something essential about the human experience. Perhaps a more counter-cultural Odyssey would have been “brighter hued”, with rich robes and silver waves catching the dazzling Mediterranean sun. “Maybe even some jokes.”

Dubai airport could soon allow passengers to walk seamlessly through immigration without having to show a passport or boarding pass, says Laurence Sleator in The Times. The massive transport hub is trialling a system that uses biometric cameras, integrated flight data and AI to match up faces in the airport with registered documents and corresponding flight bookings, clearing up to 10 people within just four seconds, and removing the need for anyone to wait in a tedious queue for a kiosk.

When the super-rich holiday in Rome, there’s one man they call, says Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic: Fulvio De Bonis. Co-founder of Imago Artis, the pinnacle of “luxury travel” in Rome, he puts together exclusive itineraries for clients, including Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry. Previous requests include securing private access to Villa Borghese at dusk, clearing the Colosseum for a “small evening event”, seeing a privately-owned Caravaggio behind the walls of a Roman palazzo and getting white truffles from Piedmont delivered for supper. Whatever the request, Fulvio’s answer is the same: “You want what? Okay, we’ll see what we can do.”

While the world is distracted by falling bombs and flimsy ceasefire agreements, says Masih Alinejad in The Free Press, life under Iran’s mullahs remains brutal. On Sunday, as part of the regime’s “systematic execution campaign”, 18-year-old Erfan Esfandiari and 23-year-old Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi were hanged. Their crime: opening their front doors to protesters fleeing regime bullets during the January uprising. They are just two of at least 47 people who have been sent to their death since the war broke out in February, while hundreds more await their death sentences. The most common charge is moharebeh, meaning “waging war on God”. Today, humanitarian workers, mothers and teenagers accused of this supposed crime are languishing on death row. When 18-year-old Shervin Bagherin was told on state television that he’d been charged with moharebeh, he broke down. “Please forgive me,” he begged. “I’m just a child.”

Others are charged with “acting against national security” – essentially, “you protested” – and locked up in the gruesome Evin prison. And if the regime really wants to kill you, without even the option of mounting a defence, you are accused of espionage. At least nine have been executed on such an accusation since the war began, including the Swedish-Iranian dual national Kourosh Keyvani. He opposed the regime, so it wanted him dead and needed a label that would silence international objection. “‘Spy for Israel’ works every time.” This is a regime so devoted to its “ideology of death” – and proving that resistance is futile – that even under US fire it has found time to capture a “steady supply of young bodies”, organise show trials and build gallows. It’s despicable, and “the world is not paying enough attention”.

Norway’s Erling Haaland was one of the standout stars of the World Cup, says Mitchell Hall in The Sun, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Peru. More than 500 Peruvian children have been given a name inspired by the Scandi striker. A whopping 468 have the name Haaland somewhere in the mix, while a further 91 enjoy the full moniker Erling Haaland. Newsy naming is clearly something of a national pastime – there is a Peruvian footballer, born in 2002, who rejoices in the name “Osama Vinladen”. His brother’s name? “Sadam Huseín.”

The latest status symbol among the health-obsessed is a regimen of peptides, says Carson Griffith in the FT. These molecules – produced naturally in the body – instruct cells to repair, regenerate, reduce inflammation or release hormones. Ozempic, for example, is a synthetic version of a peptide that helps with weight loss. Bespoke cocktails of other peptides – typically injected by private doctors – are said to help with everything from cognitive function to anti-ageing and fat loss. Tellingly, several of the most sought-after haven’t been approved for human use, and many people buy them from dodgy Chinese factories on the internet.

It’s a puffling (or baby puffin), says Steven Morris in The Guardian, which has been spotted peeping out of a crevice in the Dorset cliffs for the first time in 30 years. The last puffin colony on the south coast of mainland England – Dancing Ledge in Purbeck – is clinging to survival, with only three adult pairs of puffins thought to remain on the Jurassic coast, compared with more than 40 in the 1950s. “One puffling alone won’t save this colony,” says bird boffin Richard Caldow, “but one is a whole lot better news than none.”