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medical records, allowed its entire contents to be downloaded by Chinese research partners, whose access has now been revoked.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”.