The pound rose to a two-month high against the dollar after Shabana Mahmood emerged as the frontrunner to become Andy Burnham’s chancellor. The PM-in-waiting said yesterday that he will likely have to “ask for a little more” from taxpayers and refused to rule out a wealth tax. Ukraine’s popular defence minister has been sacked without explanation after just six months, prompting thousands of Ukrainians to protest in Kyiv this morning. Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, vastly improved Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, with many touting him as a future president. Keir Starmer, who is visiting Kyiv today for the final time as PM, says Britain’s “cast-iron” support for Ukraine will continue. “Our wait goes on,” says the Daily Express, after England’s 2-1 defeat to Argentina in the World Cup semi-final last night. Anthony Gordon gave the Three Lions an early second-half lead but Lionel Messi’s side fought back with two late goals. The world champions will face Spain in the final on Sunday at 8pm.

I know first-hand how terrifying politics can be, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. When my then husband, Michael Gove, was in government, my daughter received a birthday card for her 18th. Inside, in letters cut from magazines and newspapers, was a chilling message: “Tell your dad that if he doesn’t [I won’t specify this bit, for security reasons] he won’t live to see you turn 19. Do not make this public.” It chilled me to the bone. Separately, after the David Amess murder in 2021, police told us that Michael had been the Islamist killer’s original target. This psycho had made six separate trips to scout out our family home and written detailed plans for an attack. Politics has never been entirely risk-free. But after the tragic murder of Ann Widdecombe – along with the killings of Amess and Jo Cox – it feels “especially perilous”.

Every MP I’ve interviewed in the past 20 years has their own “horrific story”, says Alice Thomson in The Times. They are hounded or abused or stalked, sent violent messages telling them they’ll have acid thrown over their face or be “butchered by a machete”. Labour’s Jess Phillips “once had 600 rape threats on Twitter in a single night”. They all take the obvious precautions: panic buttons by their bed, door chains and multiple locks on their front door. Some go even further. One told me she wears a flak jacket, another always wears flat shoes so she can “sprint from danger”. Heidi Allen stood down as MP for South Cambridgeshire because she couldn’t take it any more, having already seen one stalker jailed. “You’re not treated as human,” she told me. “There comes a point when you think this can’t be worth it.”

The language-learning app Babbel recently surveyed the 1,500 members of the Poetry Society of America to see what words they deemed most beautiful. In third place, says Eugene Smith in The Times, was the rather apt “mellifluous”, which is generally used to describe a voice or sound that is smooth and sweetly flowing. In second place was “ethereal” and the winner was “diaphanous”, meaning “light, delicate, and translucent”. The rest of the top ten includes “halcyon”, “susurrous”, “lithe” and “effervescent”. See the rest here.

Anyone losing sleep over the existential threat AI poses to civilisation should steer clear of Anthropic’s website, say Madison Mills and Maria Curl in Axios. The AI giant’s current employment openings include 32 “very scary” jobs designed to prevent the technology being used to build everything from explosives to chemical weapons to nuclear bombs. Though if you think you might have what it takes to be the company’s next “Biological Safety Research Scientist” or “Safeguards Enforcement Analyst, Radiological & Nuclear Harms”, do your bit for humanity by applying here.

Parents across the country are hatching plans to get children off their phones for the summer. And of course they’re right, says Lenore Skenazy in The Guardian. Nobody wants to see kids staring gormlessly at their phones in restaurants, in parks, and so on. I even saw one girl on a swing – a swing! – glued to a screen. But it’s not just phones. A classic British study, How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations, makes the case neatly. An 88-year-old grandpa recalls how, aged eight, he had regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing spot without bothering to tell anyone. His great grandson, by contrast, is driven the few minutes to school and to a safe place to ride his bike, and never leaves his home unsupervised. And that was back in 2007, before people had iPhones.

As bad as screens are, children’s gloriously independent, “wind-in-their-hair” afternoons began disappearing long before it was even possible to give them a smartphone. A generation or two of 24-hour news created a mass delusion that a paedophile in a white van lurked round every corner and that even an unsupervised turn around the block was sure to end in kidnap or worse. This is mad. Readers over a certain age will remember the thrill of waking up and going out to explore the woods, or a half-built construction site, or anywhere really, usually at an excited run. You knew it was perfectly safe to talk to strangers, but not to go off with them. Parents today can easily teach these same lessons. For children to feel the thrill of true independence once again, parents must take away phones, yes, but also “open the front door”.

🏕️⚽️ Kids won’t take any convincing. A Harris poll asking children how they’d like to spend free time with their friends – in unsupervised, unstructured, real-world play; or in an adult-organised activity like a sports class; or online – kids overwhelmingly chose in-person free play. “Online came in dead last.”

I once walked into a pub just off Kensington High Street, a reader tells Popbitch, and saw Harrison Ford sitting there on his own, “full lycra running gear on”, enjoying a half pint. I nervously said hi and briefly told him what a hero of mine he was, then left him to his drink. Five minutes later, he walked out of the pub but left his wallet on the table, so I grabbed it and chased after him. As I handed it over, he looked at me and said: “I guess you’re my hero now.”

The failure of the US-Iran ceasefire was inevitable, says Keith Johnson in Foreign Policy. What really warrants concern is the “belated entry” into the conflict of the Houthis. This week, the Iran-backed terror group launched strikes on Saudi Arabia, but the real threat is that Tehran could use its Yemeni proxy to close off another vital waterway – the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is the gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Some 10% of all seaborne oil and gas flows through the narrow channel, which has become a critical workaround for getting oil out of the Gulf during the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s Cara Delevingne, says Mollie Quirk in The Sun, who has become the first lesbian to grace the cover of Playboy. The model, actress and musician, 33, “transformed into a sultry rock chick” for the raunchy shoot, wearing a racy latex corset and no knickers, and lighting a cigarette with one hand while (just about) protecting her modesty with the other. Delevingne, the first supermodel to be on the magazine’s cover since Kate Moss in 2014, said the experience felt “really fun and different”.