Police have arrested a man in connection with fires at two properties and a vehicle linked to Keir Starmer. The 21-year-old is being held on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life over blazes at the PM’s north London home, in a car parked on the same street, and at an Islington maisonette that the Labour leader owned in the 1990s. A court in Paris has found Gérard Depardieu guilty of sexually assaulting two women. The judge, who said the 76-year-old actor “clearly doesn’t understand the meaning of consent”, handed Depardieu an 18-month suspended sentence and ordered he be added to the sex offenders’ register. His lawyer says he will appeal. An MRI scan can identify people at risk of heart disease a decade before they experience a heart attack or stroke. Scientists at the University of Dundee looked at thousands of health records and found that a larger-than-usual left ventricle, detectable by the simple scan, was a “clear indicator” of future cardiovascular disease.

Sorry, Remainers, the EU’s not what it was

This time next week, says Larry Elliott in The New Statesman, Keir Starmer’s team will head to Brussels for a “fresh negotiation of UK-EU relations”. Up for discussion are natural post-Brexit priorities – deepening defence ties, improving cross-border trade, some sort of two-way youth mobility visa, and so on. But Remainer types, billing it as the “big Brexit reset”, are salivating at the chance of an “ever closer union” with a bloc they believe the UK never should have left. They should be careful what they wish for. “The EU of 2025 is not what the UK Rejoiner movement thinks it is.”

As last year’s election showed, Britain has not entirely lost faith in the centre-left. But Germany, France and Italy have witnessed a “true ascendancy of the hard right”, prompted in part by weak growth and flatlining living standards. True, the UK economy hasn’t performed brilliantly since Brexit, but certainly no worse than France, and better than “clearly struggling Germany”. What happened to the “economic Armageddon” promised by Project Fear? The whole premise of the EU’s “centralised, bureaucratic and de-politicised” model is in tatters. Instead of creating a super-powered United States of Europe, the EU has ended up undermining the very thing that once made Europe so successful: its loose confederation of countries “free to do their own thing and to respond to the demands of their own voters”. The election of Germany’s Friedrich Merz – who wants more power handed back to individual nations, including on borrowing and border controls – symbolises the shifting mood. Any effort to rejoin an EU that is “so clearly on the wrong track” would be an act of self-sabotage.