The US could review its position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands as punishment for not helping with the war on Iran. A leaked internal Pentagon email shows that America is looking at options to “hold Nato countries to account” for their perceived lack of support, including reassessing US backing for longstanding European “imperial possessions”. British ministers are facing calls to ban the sharing of British citizens’ personal information with China after the DNA and healthcare records of hundreds of thousands of people were found for sale on the Chinese website Alibaba. The breach occurred after the UK Biobank, a pioneering database of British medical records, allowed its entire contents to be downloaded by Chinese research partners, whose access has now been revoked. Newly discovered fossils suggest that a colossal “kraken-like” octopus the length of two London buses dominated the oceans during the late Cretaceous period around 86 million years ago. While the T-rex reigned on land, the 19-metre-long Nanaimoteuthis haggarti was the apex predator of the sea, using its long, flexible arms and formidable jaw for the “dynamic crushing of hard skeletons”.

Britain’s political classes are increasingly convinced that the country is “ungovernable”, says Bagehot in The Economist. Not least Keir Starmer himself, who said recently his main experience as prime minister was of “frustration”. This, from a man who commands a 165-seat parliamentary majority in “the least constrained executive anywhere in the democratic world”. Granted, the PM could have done little to stop Donald Trump attacking Iran. But “what Sir Keir can control, Sir Keir has blundered”. Hitting businesses with economically damaging taxes, backing down on crucial welfare reforms, and so on. Most Labour MPs now acknowledge that Starmer is toast, which will make it even harder to get anything done. “Why try to win points with a prime minister who may not be there long?”

Something has shifted after the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. “The cabinet has had enough.” Ed Miliband spent much of Tuesday’s cabinet meeting rolling his eyes; another minister was “privately despairing” to the PM’s chief whip this week. What’s the point in “defending the indefensible” when you know your leader would “summarily dismiss you, traduce you as a liar and explode your entire life in pursuit of self-preservation”? So it is hard to see how Starmer will survive the inevitable bloodbath for Labour in the May 7 local elections. A “new consensus” is taking shape: the PM should be forced to set out a timetable for an “orderly transition”, with a new leader installed in time for conference in September. It would be a “fittingly mild flavour of regicide” for Starmer’s Labour party: “procedural, bloodless and probably too late”. But the “mushy middle” of the cabinet is, finally, climbing out of what one member has decried as the “warm bath” of denial.

🙄👎 Starmer’s dismal treatment of Olly Robbins hasn’t just damaged his own credibility, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. It may also have poisoned “any remaining hope of Labour achieving radical change in power”. If civil servants know they’ll be blamed the moment something goes wrong, they’ll retreat more than ever into “foot-dragging, back-covering obstruction of anything too bold”.

Asia looks set for a “summer of discontent”, says Karishma Vaswani in Bloomberg. Most of the issues that provoked recent Gen Z-led demonstrations – bleak job prospects, lacklustre growth, government corruption – have seen little improvement, and they are now being exacerbated by the shock of the Iran war. There are already signs of turmoil. Transport workers in the Philippines recently launched nationwide strikes; Pakistanis have rallied against climbing petrol prices; and the young in Sri Lanka and Nepal, which were at the forefront of recent protests, are facing renewed strain from surging food and energy prices.

The Ukraine war has a new front, says Tom Newton Dunn in War & Peace: “WiFi towers”. Since Elon Musk withdrew his Starlink satellite internet service from Russia at the beginning of the year, the Russians have been busy installing WiFi extenders on towers near the frontlines to guide their drones. Clips like the one above show that the Ukrainians are “equally busy uninstalling them”.

I’ve been on more than 80 royal tours, says Robert Hardman in Tatler. Those with Queen Elizabeth II, who would have turned 100 this week, were in a class of their own. She was Britain’s “number one diplomatic asset” so every country pulled out all the stops. Gifts ranged from an elephant to a baby crocodile in a biscuit tin, two jaguars, caskets of diamonds, a portrait made from banana leaves and “five tons of dried fruit”. While those around her could – “and would” – work themselves into a terrible flap, she remained unflappable. On a trip to Pakistan in 1997 she was whisked straight from the airport to the Faisal Mosque, only for advisers to realise they’d forgotten her “mosque-visiting stocking slippers”. Undeterred, Her Majesty slipped on a pair of British Airways cabin socks, toured the mosque and “the matter was never mentioned again”.

The Queen diligently did her homework before trips. Her favourite files to read were the “Topics to be Avoided” and “Personality Notes” – pen portraits of anyone likely to surface in a greeting line. They didn’t mince words. French cabinet minister Robert Frey’s description in 1972 read: “There is something about the softness of his manner and the cold blue of his eyes that inevitably recalls the more sinister visions of the lan Fleming novels.” Grenada’s leader Eric Gairy was “unbalanced at times to the point of apparent derangement” and a “ladies’ man with a particular liking for blondes”. Ahead of Queen Margrethe II’s 1974 visit to Britain, Elizabeth was advised, perhaps unnecessarily, not to mention Denmark’s reputation as the “pornography capital of Europe”.

A McDonald’s cheeseburger is, by one measure, cheaper today than it was in 1948, says Faith Bottum in The Wall Street Journal. Back then the burger cost 19 cents, while the federal minimum wage was 40 cents an hour. Today, it’s roughly $3.89, while the average hourly salary for a McDonald’s worker is around $12. So they can now afford 3.1 patties for every hour worked compared to 2.1 in 1948.

Among the correspondence sent in to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s centenary, an anecdote from one letter seemed especially timely, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. When Vladimir Putin visited Buckingham Palace in the early 2000s, the cabinet minister David Blunkett’s guide dog started barking and wouldn’t stop. Blunkett apologised profusely, but the Queen merely said: “Dogs have interesting instincts, don’t they?”

It’s a rare “split-colour” lobster, which was caught off the coast of Cape Cod earlier this month, says Liesel Nygard in MassLive. Known as chimeras, the colourful crustraceans resemble two individual lobsters cut lengthwise and spliced together. They occur when two zygotes fuse, developing into a single individual with two separate sets of genes – a roughly one-in-50-million possibility. The fishing crew who caught the dichromatic decapod took it to Cape Cod’s Wellfleet Shellfish Company, who are donating the “rare beauty” to a local aquarium.