Andy Burnham has been formally named leader of the Labour Party, and will become prime minister on Monday. The Makerfield MP says his government will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected”. Speaking to Radio 4 this morning, his longtime ally, Liverpool City mayor Steve Rotherham, said that anyone expecting Burnham to offer Starmerism in casual clothing is “in for a very rude awakening”. Donald Trump used a primetime address last night to sow distrust in America’s electoral system ahead of the November midterms, claiming there was evidence of “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference”. The US president revived previously debunked claims that China interfered in the 2020 election, saying the “deep state” had downplayed the extent of Beijing’s “sinister election meddling”. A beaver known as Steve McQueen, who captured hearts when he repeatedly escaped from his Northumberland enclosure supposedly in search of love, has become a father. Steve, named after the star of The Great Escape, welcomed his first kit with Doris, who he met after being moved to a farm in Wales.

After weeks of speculation that Andy Burnham would make his old friend Ed Miliband chancellor, says Rosa Prince in Bloomberg, those close to him say he has seen the light and will instead appoint the self-described “fiscal hawk” Shabana Mahmood. This is “the right call”. Though a partnership with Miliband would have been “simpatico”, reminiscent of the 2010 Cameron-Osborne alliance, the energy secretary is clearly the “least market-friendly choice”. Overlooking his longtime ally in favour of a woman he barely knows demonstrates exactly the “pragmatism and ruthlessness” that will serve Burnham well in No 10.

Chancellor Mahmood is a good idea in theory, says Tom Harris in The Telegraph: she’s one of the highest-performing members of the Cabinet and possesses all the “grit and determination” needed to endure the challenge of No 11. But it would be a disaster for the Home Office. Mahmood is the first home secretary in years – “including most of her Conservative predecessors” – to have grasped the twin nettles of illegal and mass immigration and to make a “positive impression” with voters. Her replacement will almost certainly be less committed to her much-needed reforms, which include plans to increase waiting times for indefinite leave to remain and to charge asylum seekers for the support and accommodation they receive. With migration figures already falling, now is the time to deliver on Keir Starmer’s repeated promise to “smash the gangs”. Mahmood is seemingly the only one able to see this through and stand up to the absurd demands of Labour’s “open door” backbenchers. Losing her would be “catastrophic”.

Left-wing splinter group Your Party has managed to splinter yet again, says Emilio Casalicchio in Politico. After dividing into a Jeremy Corbyn camp and a Zarah Sultana camp, the Corbyn-backing Central Executive Committee (CEC) has now backed a no-confidence motion in three of its senior members over their decision to suspend three fellow CEC members for attending a socialist conference. The vote didn’t hit the two-thirds threshold needed, but the CEC has asked the group to respect the result anyway. This may be one factional war too many for Your Party: weary insiders claim the latest row has left the movement “effectively dead”.

A German man known online as @Germanbreadcutter has amassed more than 100,000 followers on social media thanks to a singular mission, says Miles Klee in Wired: hand-cutting the perfect slice of bread. Using either a German Piklohas knife or a Japanese Hoshanho, he attempts to cleave a slice of totally uniform thickness each day, measuring it around the edges with a digital caliper tool and tracking it on his “breadsheet”. When he manages to get within a millimetre of a flawless slice – 0.08mm in June, for example – the fans go wild. “Best performance in sports history,” wrote one. See more here.

Lindsey Graham, who died on Saturday aged 71, was the epitome of our political age, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Along with his fellow Republican senator, John McCain, he spent the first half of his political career devoted to the cause of strong American leadership abroad. When the seemingly isolationist Donald Trump emerged, Graham was initially uncompromising, calling the former Apprentice star a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who should “go to hell”. But then Trump won. And like most Republicans, and so many others who have lived under political occupation, Graham abandoned his previous ideals and became a “loud, opportunistic collaborator”. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television and supported the president as he “slowly destroyed the alliances Graham had defended all his life”.

That’s the cynical version, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Whenever ambitious people are confronted with a revolutionary change, they tend to do one of three things. Some refuse to accept the new regime, others shamelessly hop on the bandwagon. But most do something in between, offering the necessary amount of submission in order to preserve their important pre-revolutionary ideals. This, I think, is what Graham was trying to do. Through his “assiduous sycophancy”, he remained an influential advocate in Trump’s inner circle for America’s alliances with Israel, in Europe and in Asia. His efforts to keep an otherwise sceptical administration engaged in Ukraine have, in the long run, borne fruit. No, he wasn’t always successful in tempering Trump’s isolationist instincts. But he was dedicated, to the last, to “the freedom he knew only his country could ultimately achieve”.

🤷🙄 There is, of course, an argument for compromising on one’s principles to achieve some greater good, says Lexington in The Economist, but the challenge is choosing where to draw the line. “Mr Graham never did.” He came close to abandoning Trump after rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, saying on the Senate floor that day: “Count me out. Enough is enough.” Yet within a few weeks, he was promoting Trump for re-election in 2024. In his bid to promote democracy abroad, Graham “helped corrode it at home”.

If an American airline has ever lost your suitcase, says James Draven in The Telegraph, the chances are it eventually wound up in Alabama. In Scottsboro, a small town in the north of the state, is a 50,000 sq ft shop called “Unclaimed Baggage”, where all the merchandise – clothes, shoes, books, jewellery, iPads, laptops and the rest – has been recovered from lost luggage. Unsurprisingly, it’s full of the weird and wonderful. Among items recovered last year were a bag of gold-plated golf clubs, a set of diamond-encrusted dental grills, two samurai swords and a prototype bionic knee.

The British Foreign Office has revealed some of the most unusual requests for consular assistance made by hapless Brits abroad. A tourist in Jordan asked for a recommendation for where to get blonde highlights, and in Paris, one wanted the embassy’s help finding their parked car near the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, a disgruntled holidaymaker wanted the embassy to intervene over the temperature of their hotel’s showers, and in Nigeria, a tourist asked if the embassy could help them secure a refund for an unsatisfactory meal. One Brit in an undisclosed location asked how they could get in touch with their postie back home.

It’s the “Croc Ness Monster”, says Alessio Perrone in The Times: a mysterious creature lurking in the murky green waters of Masiano, a Tuscan hamlet northwest of Florence. The theory is that it’s a juvenile crocodile that escaped from someone’s property during the floods that battered Tuscany two or three years ago. At the lake in Masiano, the waters are deep and well-stocked with fish, and have steep banks and sturdy fencing, providing the animal with ideal conditions to thrive but no way out. “It does no harm,” says a local nursery owner. “We should leave it where it is.”