The Trump administration is withdrawing its Border Patrol chief from Minneapolis following bipartisan outrage over the second killing of a US citizen by immigration officers. Gregory Bovino, the pugnacious commander-at-large overseeing the crackdown, and some of his agents are expected to leave today, and Trump is sending in his border czar, Tom Homan, to oversee operations instead. China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, exposing their private communications to Beijing, according to The Daily Telegraph. The operation, known as Salt Typhoon, is thought to have targeted the phones of top aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024, and may still be going on. The NHS could soon be able to diagnose lung cancer “weeks earlier” using AI and robots. In a pilot scheme that has already helped 215 people begin cancer treatment sooner, the AI detects tiny and potentially malignant nodules before a robotic catheter is inserted to take a biopsy.

It pains me to say it, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, but Keir Starmer needs to go. He is a “good and clever man” and has had far more successes in No 10 than his dismal communications team has conveyed. But the left must do everything it can to see off the “Farage forces of darkness”, and it’s become clear to everyone that Starmer is “not the one to lead that fight”. The PM’s cowardly decision to block Andy Burnham from running for parliament was the final straw. His defenders argue that what the country needs now is not more Westminster melodrama, but 100% focus on the cost of living, the economy and public services. Yet it’s the government’s abject failure to persuade voters on those essentials that has brought us to this crisis. The party cannot simply “stagger on while vainly scanning the horizon for something to turn up”.

The problem, says Owen Jones, also in The Guardian, is that with Burnham out, the favourite to succeed Starmer is the “ultra-Blairite torchbearer” Wes Streeting. Beloved by the right-wing press and disliked by everyone else, Streeting will just offer “the same toxic political prospectus”. Not that the Labour establishment cares. They’d rather see the party sink under a centrist leader than stay afloat under someone more progressive. Morgan McSweeney and his No 10 gang have no genuine political convictions – they just define themselves against the left. Were they “capable of self-reflection” they’d ask themselves why, given Starmer “obligingly adopted” everything the Labour right was pushing, he secured only a third of the vote on a record low turnout? Or why, if competence is their USP, this government is “defined by U-turns”? No wonder so many on the left are turning to Zack Polanski’s Greens. Labour has been “overrun by soulless hacks”.

Suella Braverman’s defection to Reform UK yesterday certified the idea that Nigel Farage’s party is “filling up nicely with all the wrong Tories”, says Julian Glover in The Independent. Reform now has more members of Liz Truss’s cabinet than the current Conservative front bench does.

When I worked as a ski instructor in St Moritz many winters ago, says James Jung on Substack, among my students were Donald Trump’s children. One time, I took Don Jr and Ivanka to a restaurant where there were strict “Downton Abbey-type rules” – instructors (aka “the help”) had to eat downstairs while the rich clients enjoyed the fancy dining room upstairs. When they discovered this, Don and Ivanka immediately cancelled their reservation and came with me to the cafeteria instead, so that we could all eat together. “I remember laughing over fries and thinking how normal they were.”

During Donald Trump’s first term in office, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times, leadership of the free world passed, by general liberal consensus, to Germany’s Angela Merkel, who was cast as the “embodiment of internationalist virtue”. Then she and Trump left office, and it suddenly became obvious that her leadership of Germany had been “disastrous”. She paved the way for the far right by opening the door to Middle Eastern mass migration, and her excessive reliance on Russian oil left Europe simultaneously threatened by and dependent on the Kremlin. The lessons of the Merkel mess came to my mind this week watching those same liberals heap praise on Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, after his Davos speech declaring independence from the old American-led order.

Carney is right to identify a “rupture”, and his suggestion that middle powers like Canada should no longer feel constrained by their traditional American alliance is understandable. But as with Merkel, it’s worth thinking through where this logic leads. In crucial areas, it is not realistic for middle powers to work together against great ones, leaving them with an invidious binary choice between the US and China. Take the military. The likes of Canada and Europe are rich enough to rearm and form some kind of third force between Trump’s US and the “Sino-Russian quasi-axis”. In practice, though, it would be impossible to disentangle from the American alliance and there wouldn’t be enough cash left over to support an ageing population. In AI it’s even starker: the future will be defined either by “American nerd-kings” or “Communist scientist-apparatchiks”. There isn’t a third option, in Ottawa or anywhere else. It’s hard to ask America’s old allies to keep the faith, but they would be fools to leap without looking closely first.

🇪🇺😔 The only possible convener of a league of middle powers is the EU, says Martin Sandbu in the FT. But it will never serve as a “global anchor” until it takes seriously the effort that would entail, including offering more tightly integrated relationships to countries which still think a rules-based international order is a nice idea. Unfortunately, the EU is barely functional as it is. Just last week, the European parliament ordered a judicial review to delay a new trade deal with South American countries and the commission suggested abandoning the “Most Favoured Nation” principle that underpins the world trading system.

The jacket potato is making a roaring comeback, says Sammy Gecsoyler in The Guardian, thanks to savvy spud sellers showing off their tarted-up tatties to millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram. The SpudBros, whose Soho shop sells potatoes topped with garlic chilli chicken or their signature “spicy tram” sauce, have signed a sponsorship deal with Preston North End football club and teamed up with celebrities including Will Smith and Liam Neeson to promote their offering. Waitrose says searches for “jacket potato” on its website are up 178% from last year.

The Trump administration has boasted of its “120% Manpower Increase” in Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, says Nick Miroff in The Atlantic. But the rapid hiring spree – “no federal law-enforcement agency has ever expanded this fast” – is coming at a cost. The training course has been slashed from five months to just 42 days, and trainees are spending as little as four hours on vital “de-escalation” techniques. Even retired agents who have been rehired are having second thoughts: having spent their careers planning low-key “targeted enforcement” operations, they’re now “out in the streets wearing masks, with protesters yelling at them and video cameras rolling”.

It’s General Zhang Youxia, say Lingling Wei and Chun Han Wong in The Wall Street Journal, the latest victim of Xi Jinping’s ongoing military purge. Youxia was Beijing’s most senior general and was once considered Xi’s most-trusted military ally. He was placed under investigation on Saturday, accused of leaking information about China’s nuclear weapons programme to the US, accepting bribes for official acts – including the promotion of an officer to defence minister – and forming political cliques in an effort to undermine party unity. Xi’s crackdown on corruption and disloyalty in the armed forces is arguably the “most aggressive dismantling of China’s military leadership since the Mao Zedong era”.