Keir Starmer says he’s “not going to walk away” after early English council results show Labour has so far lost more than 200 seats, including in former strongholds such as Wigan, Bolton and Hartlepool. Reform UK has seized more than 300 seats, in what Nigel Farage has hailed as a “historic change in British politics”, while the Green Party has won its first mayoralty, ousting Labour in Hackney. Most results will come in later today and tomorrow. Donald Trump says the fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran is still in effect after the two sides exchanged strikes in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. US Central Command claimed the American attacks, described by Trump as a “love tap”, were “self-defence” following “unprovoked” Iranian strikes. The US president also warned that if peace talks collapse, there will be “one big glow coming out of Iran”. David Attenborough says he has been overwhelmed by the messages and cards he has received for his 100th birthday today. The broadcaster, who will be honoured by the BBC with a star-studded concert at the Royal Albert Hall this evening, joked he’d rather thought he’d celebrate his centenary “quietly”.

However the local election results finally shake out, says Michael Gove in The Spectator, and whatever happens to Keir Starmer, the dynamic that will drive Labour for the rest of its time in government is clear: the party is moving “injudiciously but inevitably” to the left. It is “no longer a working class party”; any “emotional identification” with working class concerns has gone. Consider the vehement opposition from Labour MPs to the efforts of the cleverest Cabinet member, Shabana Mahmood, to tighten immigration rules. The move left may seem odd when Reform is doing so well, but losses to Reform sting Labour far less than losses to the Greens. Watching young, idealistic, pro-Europe, anti-billionaire, sourdough-baking creatives and public sector professionals abandon the party for Zack Polanski’s Greens has been like a dagger to the Labour soul.

What makes the leftward shift so remorseless is the massacre of the Labour right. Its principal “organising group”, Labour Together, is now in near-terminal disarray, its founder, Morgan McSweeney, having been summarily ejected from No 10. The effects will be grim. Rachel Reeves’s Treasury, which once made promises of deregulation and pro-market reforms, now talks about rent controls and subsidies for failing industries while the private sector buckles under tax increases, labour regulations and spiralling energy costs. Even grimmer will be the outcome for the nation’s Jews. How much worse will their fate be if it’s not just the Greens trying to globalise the intifada, but the British government? The Labour right stood firm against this malign trend, but the Labour left has always felt its “dark magnetic pull”. Watching councils in places like Hackney and Lambeth fall to the Greens may make it irresistible.

😵‍💫🇪🇺 The other issue Labour will be entirely unable to resist is Brexit, says Hugo Gye in The i Paper. Support for rejoining the European Union is around 65% among Labour voters, and 79% among Greens. The practicalities would be a nightmare: Brussels would no doubt demand a far higher price than our previous membership, be that in financial contributions to the Brussels coffers, or signing up (at least in principle) to joining the eurozone and open-border Schengen area. And the public debate itself would be both vicious and boring. But here, probably, it comes.

Reform UK are nothing if not persistent, says Cécile Ducourtieux in Le Monde. A month or so ago, someone called to ask if I’d be willing to be a candidate for the party in the local elections. I’m a French journalist, for a progressive newspaper, so I politely declined. But a week later I received an email thanking me for putting myself forward. I contacted the party and explained the error, only for a woman called Sandra to ring and congratulate me on standing. I repeated, this time more forcefully, that I wasn’t interested. Sandra rang back that afternoon. “We really need you,” she said. “Without you, the Greens will win in London.”

One of the many presidential norms Donald Trump has abandoned is seeking the counsel of his predecessors, says Peter Slevin in The New Yorker. The night Lyndon Johnson was sworn into office after JFK’s assassination, he called Dwight Eisenhower and said: “I need you more than ever.” Eisenhower, a Republican, visited the Democratic president in the Oval Office and advised him on what to say to Congress. Richard Nixon gave Bill Clinton his insights into the Russian leadership. George W Bush became a genuine friend to Barack and Michelle Obama. As Harry Truman said: “There is no conversation so sweet as that of former political enemies.”

For all the grumbling about Donald Trump’s muddled strategy in Iran, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, his administration’s approach to Ukraine gets far too little credit. Trump’s initial push for a negotiated peace reflected a previous view that Ukraine was running out of time and an eventual Russian victory was grindingly inevitable. Instead, Ukrainian bravery, resilience and ingenuity with drones have enabled Kyiv to keep the Russians in stalemate, to the point where Vladimir Putin looks more “unstable and paranoid” than at any time since the early days of the war. America has noticed, and reacted wisely.

Of all the areas of danger and crisis in the world, Europe’s eastern borderlands are “the place” where America should be able to rely on its allies as a first line of defence. Around Iran, the Gulf monarchies that grew rich under America’s security umbrella have little experience of war fighting. But Poland? France? Britain? These nations can handle themselves when they need to. The fact that Ukraine has held the line with more European support and less direct US aid is a sign that an obviously desirable rebalancing is possible and happening. And Trump, whatever his critics prefer to believe, hasn’t simply reduced American involvement while “yelling at the Europeans to do more”. Yes, he has scaled back US financial commitments, but he has also sustained or increased key forms of battlefield support. Today, Ukraine has access to certain advantages it lacked in the Joe Biden era, including the longer-range missiles and intelligence sharing required to strike deeper into Russia. Would it have been preferable to reach this balance with less chaos and more condemnation of Russia? “Of course!” But overall, in Ukraine, Trump’s “crude bullying” has been a geopolitical success.

When Christian Bale was filming the 2000 movie American Psycho, says Popbitch, he put up pictures in his trailer of 1980s figures he felt his psychopathic character, Patrick Bateman, would emulate. “One of them was Donald Trump.”

Grade inflation at Harvard really is out of control, says Joshua Greene in The Atlantic. The final-year undergraduate with the highest grade receives the Sophia Freund Prize, and for decades this award went to one student, or sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie – every one of these top students had perfect grades.

It’s an animation of a mega tsunami in Alaska last August, says Maya Yang in The Guardian. The seismic surge was caused by a massive landslide into the narrow Tracy Arm fjord, which produced the equivalent of a 5.4-magnitude earthquake. The waves were up to 481 metres tall – the second-tallest ever, some 150m higher than the Eiffel Tower – and were followed by a “seiche”, in which a standing wave bounces back and forth in a confined area, lasting 36 hours. Thankfully the landslide began at 5.26am, when the fjord was empty – during the day the area is typically visited by multiple cruise ships carrying hundreds or thousands of passengers.