Keir Starmer sought to save his premiership in the wake of his party’s disastrous performance in the local elections last week, acknowledging in a speech this morning that the government has “made mistakes” but reiterating his promise not to “walk away” from No 10. Labour MPs and union bosses continued to demand the PM’s resignation after the speech; backbencher Catherine West dropped her threat to trigger an immediate leadership contest, but said she still wanted the PM to stand down and called for an “orderly transition” in September. Donald Trump called Iran’s response to America’s 14-point peace proposal “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE”, as it reportedly fell short of American demands for a 20-year moratorium on Iranian nuclear enrichment. Meanwhile, Iran warned yesterday that any British or French ships sent to the strait would face a “decisive” response. Adolescence was the big winner at last night’s Bafta TV Awards, taking home a record-breaking four wins, including best actor (Stephen Graham) and best supporting actor (Owen Cooper). Other winners included The Celebrity Traitors and the BBC comedy Amandaland.

We are entering a week that will “define British politics for years to come”, says Tom McTague in The New Statesman: Labour MPs have finally – “and definitively” – concluded that Keir Starmer is not up to the job, and the conversation has turned from whether to remove him to precisely how to do so. What did for the PM in the end wasn’t last week’s local election results, which were only as abysmal as they were expected to be, but what Cabinet members felt was his “lamentable” response to them over the weekend: his “tone deaf” initial reaction; the absurd appointments of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman; and today’s “underwhelming” speech, which didn’t impress MPs who saw a draft of it over the weekend. The dam holding backbenchers from moving against the prime minister has broken. “Labour stands on the precipice.”

Starmer has entered what many of his former advisers call his “Willy Wonka phase”, says Patrick Maguire in The Times: a world of “pure imagination”. Labour figures have been counselling the prime minister for months, in public and in private, to pack it in. Instead, he seems insistent on offering weary voters “another eight years of nothingness”; of learnt helplessness; of “pained and empty stridency”; of Guardian pieces “collapsing under the accumulated weight of their own clichés”; of ponderously describing problems rather than “using Labour’s landslide majority to solve them”. As one “near-suicidal” Labour MP asked after the appointments of Harman and Brown: “Are they high?” No wonder so many pretenders look at all this and think they’re in with a decent shot. “The prime minister has all but taken himself off the pitch.”

😡😬 What’s striking about Starmer’s plight, says Samuel Earle in The Guardian, is not that he is “viscerally hated” by some people, which was also true of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. It is that he seems to be viscerally hated “across the board”. Not long ago, the spited Corbyn wing of the party was alone in its loathing for the PM. Now you’d be “hard-pressed to say which constituency hates Starmer the most”. For a PM who seems to value inoffensiveness above all else, that is “quite the achievement”.

When I made it to the summit of Mount Everest in 1996, says Jon Krakauer in The Atlantic, I was only the 621st person to do so. In the 30 years since, the world’s highest peak has been climbed approximately 13,000 times. From 1921, when the first serious effort was made, through to 1996, roughly one in every six climbers who attempted the ascent died. Last year, only five climbers died and 866 reached the summit – one fatality for every 173 successful ascents.

British Army medics have parachuted on to the world’s most remote inhabited island to help a British man suffering suspected hantavirus, says Lauren Turner on BBC News. The patient, formerly a passenger on the hanta-stricken MV Hondius, lives on Tristan de Cunha, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America. With oxygen supplies on the island running out, and no airstrip to land on, an RAF A400M transport aircraft dropped off six paratroopers – two of them jumping in tandem with an intensive care nurse and a consultant anaesthetist – and 3.3 tonnes of medical kit.

It wasn’t long ago that Javier Milei was fêted by right-wing politicians and commentators around the world, says The Economist. Today? Not so much. The Argentinian president’s net approval rating has plunged to around minus 30, the lowest since he took office in December 2023. One gripe for voters is corruption. In February last year Milei used social media to endorse a cryptocurrency that soared then crashed, making a few people very rich but wiping out $250m for ordinary investors. He insisted he had no connection to the venture, yet newly unearthed phone records show seven calls on the night the price spiked between him and one of its promoters. Then there’s the suspiciously lavish spending of his chief of staff: a trip to Aruba paid for in cash, a private jet to Uruguay, an apartment bought with a “curious” interest-free loan.

The other reason Argentines are turning on their self-proclaimed “Madman” president is the economy. Argentina’s GDP fell by 2.6% in February, the steepest drop in three years. The former economist has prioritised curbing inflation over promoting growth, mainly through high interest rates. Yet monthly inflation has been rising for the past 10 months, hitting 33% year-on-year in March. The good news for Milei is that there are still almost 18 months until next year’s presidential elections, and none of his rivals has so far capitalised on his cratering popularity. The bad news is that investors are so worried about the economically illiterate Perónists getting back into power that one really bad poll for Milei could panic the markets, triggering economic instability that further depresses his polling, setting off a damaging spiral. “He has no time to lose.”

If you’ve been on Instagram in the past couple of weeks, says Esquire, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the music video above, by director Romain Gavras. Featuring Swedish rapper Yung Lean, it shows a group of schoolboys getting up to all the usual larks: pushing people’s faces into loos, smoking nefarious substances in empty classrooms, and so on. The segment that’s gone really viral is an astonishingly choreographed class photo in which Yung Lean smokes, blazerless, in a sea of his dancing, blazer-wearing classmates. Click here to watch the full sequence.

BlackBerry gave up trying to compete with iPhones a decade ago, says Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal, but millions of people still use its technology every day. A division called QNX makes incredibly boring but massively important software that makes the tech stuff work in more than 275 million cars. And as cars become more and more like “computers on wheels”, the good times are here again: BlackBerry has logged four straight quarters in profit for the first time since bankers were whiling away the commute playing Brick Breaker.

They are, incredibly, real clouds, says Laura Baisas in Popular Science, which were spotted over Jonggol in Indonesia. These ultra-rare “iridescent clouds” appear only for a few moments, when tiny water droplets or ice particles scatter sunlight, diffracting it into a spectrum of colours. The rainbow effect is apparently most visible when the sun is partially blocked by something massive like a mountain or a thicker cloud. These ones are said to have stopped traffic, as onlookers rushed to capture footage of “candy-coloured clouds”.