Andy Burnham says there is “some room” in the Labour manifesto for “movement on tax”, but has promised to stick to the key pledge not to increase the main rates of income tax, VAT or national insurance. In an interview with LBC, the PM-in-waiting suggested that he could raise business rates on warehouses to fund tax cuts for pubs and other high street businesses. Get ready for a “Mexican rave”, says the Daily Mirror, after Keir Starmer announced that pubs and bars will be allowed to stay open until 5am on Monday morning so that punters can watch England take on Mexico in the World Cup. The round-of-16 fixture in Mexico City kicks off at 1am UK time. A man has been rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in Venezuela eight days after the country was rocked by twin earthquakes. With the death toll now at 2,595, and tens of thousands still missing, acting president Delcy Rodríguez described Hernán Gil as a “living miracle”.

Call it “the £5m question”, says Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman: is Nigel Farage losing momentum? Not only has the Reform UK leader had a string of by-election disappointments and seen his once imperious poll lead slip far short of what he needs for a parliamentary majority. He also cannot shake off questions about the £5m “gift” he received from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. He appears “rattled” when answering questions on the subject, struggling to give a plausible explanation and making “jarring” asides. “I don’t think it’s any of your business,” he told Nick Robinson on the Today programme. “No one cares,” he hissed at Ed Balls and Ranvir Singh on the Good Morning Britain sofa. “You care, but no one [else] cares.”

He’s probably right, up to a point – when I spoke to voters in Farage’s constituency, Clacton, the £5m issue didn’t come up once. More worrying for the Reform leader is the suspicion that he is losing the “common touch”. His party’s policy to rescind indefinite leave to remain from people already permanently settled here landed badly with a country “still committed to fair play”. His call for “pure, cold rage” before the Southampton riots associated his party with thuggery, something he has previously made a point of avoiding by denouncing Tommy Robinson. And his insistence that Reform’s Makerfield candidate, Robert Kenyon, didn’t need to apologise for his sexist online comments prompted pushback even from his own supporters. If the reason for this uncharacteristic turn is the rise of the far-right party Restore, then it’s misjudged – Farage could more profitably use Rupert Lowe’s splinter party as “extremists he can define himself against”. If he is to stand any chance of winning the next election, “he needs middle Britain”.

🧴🤣 Another worry within Reform is Boris Johnson, who has a visceral hatred of Farage, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. The former prime minister mused in a recent speech about how “wonderful, poetic, beautiful” it was to see Reform haemorrhaging votes to Restore, “which sounds like a sort of hair loss potion”, and he has privately made the case that Farage comes with a “whiff of sulphur”. Johnson was reluctant to campaign for the Tories in 2024 because it was Rishi Sunak’s resignation that triggered his downfall: “Why should I help that c***?” he complained in the car to one event. But he is in touch with Kemi Badenoch, and one close ally says he’ll be “campaigning properly” at the next election.

After Keir Starmer announced his resignation, says John Rentoul in The Independent, he told supporters in the Downing Street garden he’d oversee an “orderly transition” to ensure that “what comes next is a success”. He didn’t mean a word of it. Not only was there the “dirty rotten trick” of getting Andy Burnham to sign off on the Defence Investment Plan without telling him it wasn’t fully funded. He also refused Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s request to sack a junior minister for writing an article on immigration without her permission. Starmerites are open about why the PM is being difficult: he feels betrayed. “He is only human after all.”

The “AI-powered” New York private school Alpha has launched a Hamptons summer camp, says Emma Rosenblum in The Cut. Kids start their day with a “pep talk” followed by two hours of “core skills” on AI-enabled iPads, then spend afternoons enjoying “side quests” from how to tie knots to bird-call identification and wood carving. Week seven is the showstopper workshop: kids stage an open house for an actual on-the-market Hamptons property listing, with two agents from a top brokerage. Prices for the camp are around double the going rate, at $4,500 for a week or $36,000 for the entire summer.

While Americans tell pollsters they’re struggling financially, says The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump and his family are having no such trouble. The Trump clan, we learnt from a 927-page financial disclosure statement this week, is cashing in on the presidency in “big and sketchy ways”. The president made $1.4bn last year on crypto alone, including $635m in fees from people trading the “memecoin” he minted days before his inauguration. Another $593m has come from World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm whose co-founders include the president, his sons and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Witkoff’s son Zach is CEO. Foreign actors doing major business with World Liberty Financial – possibly trying to buy influence with the White House – include the UAE and Pakistan.

Then there’s the Trump family’s “financial alchemy” concerning government support for critical minerals. The administration has given billions of dollars in financing to critical mineral developers to shore up domestic supply, creating an “industry gold rush”. Donald Trump Jr’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, invested in Vulcan Elements three months before the firm received a $620m government loan. Investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald – headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons – has been an underwriter of choice for startups receiving government support. The administration has also offered up to $1.6bn for a project to develop a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan. A firm part-owned by Don Jr and his brother Eric invested in a company backing the scheme shortly before the US did a deal with Kazakhstan that paved the way for it. Even if all of this is legal, it is still unseemly and very unwise. The left is obsessed with the idea of oligarchs ripping off the government. Republicans will be hearing about corruption for years.

Hollywood rom-coms are always pushing the so-called “meet-cute”, the moment where two lovers first catch each other’s eye. But they don’t hold a candle to real life, says Caitlin Moran in The Times. The M*A*S*H star Alan Alda took to his future wife at a party when a huge rum cake was dropped on the floor. “She and Alda were the only ones scuzzy enough to drop to their knees and start eating it.” When Matt Damon once jumped over the counter in a bar to escape fans harassing him, the barmaid swiftly put him to work making cocktails. Two years later, he married her.

Ukraine isn’t the only battlefield being shaped by drones, say Nate Allen and Rida Lyammouri in Foreign Affairs. In Africa, the weapons have enabled small, lightly equipped forces – both state and nonstate – to “extend their reach across vast territories”. Last year, a convoy of Russian and Malian fighters was eviscerated by fibre-optic, first-person-view drones flown by a ragtag Tuareg rebel group. The al Qaeda-affiliated Jamaat Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin have hit Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger as well as northern Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, western Nigeria and Togo – regions long considered “relatively stable and insulated”. Not any more.

It’s two Russian climbers who illegally scaled the Empire State Building on Wednesday morning and got engaged at the top, says The New York Times. After the couple unfurled a large black banner – reading “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace” – Ivan Beerkus, 32, got down on one knee and asked Angela Nikolau, 33, to marry him. The precariously positioned pair were at the peak of the 1,454ft building for around half an hour, before a policeman with a presumably excellent head for heights climbed up a ladder and arrested them.