Keir Starmer’s director of communications resigned this morning, putting further pressure on the PM after the departure of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, yesterday. Tim Allan, a veteran of the New Labour years, said he wanted to “allow a new No 10 team to be built”, while McSweeney claimed “full responsibility” for advising Starmer to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. A Hong Kong court has sentenced the pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison, following the 78-year-old British citizen’s conviction for colluding with foreign powers under the territory’s controversial national security law. Six of Lai’s colleagues from his now-shuttered newspaper, Apple Daily, were also sentenced to terms ranging from six to 10 years. The Met Office is launching a major upgrade to its forecasting system which will allow it to predict light rain showers with more accuracy. A new “supercomputer” will also be able to better forecast cloud coverage, which could help to reduce delays at airports where low clouds and fog can disrupt operations.

Morgan McSweeney’s resignation was inevitable, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, but that doesn’t make it any less of a political earthquake. Keir Starmer would never have been Labour leader or prime minister without his right-hand man. And while McSweeney is “far from blameless” in this government’s many failures, he did more than anyone else in Downing Street to get Labour to “come to terms with the views of the people they seek to serve”. Many among the so-called “soft left” in his party would seemingly rather “change the electorate than meet them where they are”.

McSweeney is “one of the half dozen best political minds I’ve come across in 25 years of writing about politics”. As good with polling as he was with message-making, he was, sensibly, always interested in what his opponents were up to and why. That’s not to say the Northern Irishman is a “candidate for sainthood”. He showed far too little interest in policy before the election and he was late to learn about the ways of Whitehall. But he chose to work with Starmer because he felt, rightly, that the former director of public prosecutions was the best man to defeat the hard left and make Labour a viable party for government again. Elevating this “adenoidal, uncharismatic, self-righteous, pedestrian figure” to Downing Street was McSweeney’s great triumph. The impossibility of giving the PM the tools and political instincts he needed to succeed is his great tragedy.

🤷‍♂😬 McSweeney’s departure should relieve pressure on Starmer, says Kiran Stacey in The Guardian, but only in the very short term. Leadership speculation is already at “fever pitch”. And with Labour facing defeat in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election and “heavy losses” in the subsequent local elections, the PM no longer has his lightning rod for backbenchers’ dissatisfaction. In the words of one MP: “Keir has nobody left to blame.”

ChatGPT is an avowed Guardian reader, says James Warrington in The Daily Telegraph. OpenAI signed a content licensing deal with the Guardian Media Group last year, and new research shows that its chatbot cites the newspaper in 58% of its responses – more than for any other news source. The next most-used news outlets are Reuters, The Independent and the FT.

The Daily Mail has compiled a list of the best adverts from last night’s Super Bowl, where a 30-second slot cost as much as $10m. They include Pepsi “trolling” Coca-Cola with a polar bear freaking out after a blind taste-test; Sabrina Carpenter building her dream man out of Pringles; Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper preparing to watch the game for Uber Eats; and home internet provider Xfinity’s retelling of 1994’s Jurassic Park, in which a technician fixes the computer problems and the dinosaurs never escape. Watch them all here.

Last week, says Gillian Tett in the FT, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin complained about White House actions that were “very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration”. He’s right – consider, for example, the Emirati royal who “invested” $500m in a Trump family crypto venture days before Donald took office. What’s remarkable is that, for all that America’s corporate elite might grumble in private, Griffin is the only one who has “stated the obvious”. Part of this “mood of weary resignation” is fear of repercussions, and part of it is greed. But there is a third, less discussed factor, too: the “normalisation of deviance”.

After the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, Nasa asked sociologist Diane Vaughan to study its causes. Most assumed it was a single malfunction, but what Vaughan found was that, over many years, engineers had gradually become inured to tiny breaches of safety protocol – like small gaps in rubber seals – and quietly ignored them because nothing bad had happened. “Their sense of ‘normal’ subtly changed.” They got so used to “deviant” behaviour that they came to find it perfectly acceptable. Vaughan’s analysis has since been adopted by sectors like aviation, chemical engineering and medicine, and can easily be applied to politics. Two decades ago, business leaders (and everyone else) would have been outraged if George W Bush or Barack Obama had accepted half a billion dollars from a Gulf royal days before taking office. Or if their wives had struck multi-million-dollar film deals with Amazon. But after Epstein, Trump – and the scandals that bubbled around Hunter Biden – such stories have been normalised. Like tiny gaps in rubber seals, each one we wave through adds to the risk of disaster.

Russian boffins claim they are developing “bio drones” by fitting pigeons with neural sensors, says Marc Bennetts in The Times. Neiry Group, a Moscow start-up with links to Vladimir Putin’s daughter, says the electrodes allow remote operators to steer the birds left or right. The avian cyborgs – which are also fitted with a tiny flight controller, solar panels and a video camera – can apparently travel up to 300 miles a day. “Our current focus is pigeons, but different species may be used depending on the environment,” says founder Alexander Panov. “For transporting heavier payloads we plan to use ravens.”

Intermittent fasting – from the “5:2 diet” to limiting your daily eating to an eight-hour window – has become an “international sensation”, says Sally Adee in The New York Times. But does it actually work? It definitely does in mice – going without food reduces blood sugar, which makes cells feed on fat stores and focus on self-repair. But the same effects haven’t been reliably shown in research on people. Much of the pro-fasting findings are based on “small, low-quality” studies, and the best evidence we have suggests that it’s no better than other diets. “The better the study, the less it finds.”

It’s Gruffalo Granny, the subject (and title) of the third instalment of Julia Donaldson’s best-selling children’s book series. The 77-year-old author says the new book will be published on 10 September, more than 25 years after the 1999 original and 20 years after sequel The Gruffalo’s Child. The story, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, will once again be set in the “deep dark wood” and will feature the usual supporting characters: Fox, Snake, Owl and Mouse. “I’ve had this idea for the best part of two decades,” Donaldson told the BBC’s Today programme. “Now of course I’m a granny myself, so maybe that’s what spurred me on.”