Donald Trump has praised “brave” King Charles for pressing ahead with his visit to the US today, despite a gunman attempting to assassinate the president and other top officials at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night. The King and Queen’s four-day trip will continue with slight adjustments, while the 31-year-old suspect is expected in court today. HMRC is reportedly weeks away from concluding its investigation into Angela Rayner’s failure to pay correct stamp duty, potentially paving the way for her return to frontline politics. Labour sources claim the former deputy leader is eyeing up a pact with soft-left rival Andy Burnham, in which the Manchester mayor would return to parliament and replace Keir Starmer. Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe smashed the marathon world record in London yesterday, becoming the first to run a sub-two-hour time in official race conditions. The 31-year-old crossed the line in a crisp one hour 59 minutes and 30 seconds, followed by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who also broke the two-hour mark.

You often hear, says Jenni Russell in The Times, that Labour are “hopelessly ineffective” because their prime minister is a “dithering inadequate” whose useless ministers have “failed on every objective”. The truth is worse: Keir Starmer’s profound political weakness has created a vacuum, which is being filled by “zealous barons driving radical change”. Take Rachel Reeves, who cannot deliver improved living standards, but has been given free rein to hammer small businesses with a range of higher taxes. Hiking the minimum wage has ramped up youth unemployment – currently 16.1% – and created ferocious competition for the few remaining jobs. A graduate I know just beat 381 other applicants for a minimum wage role in a bookshop. Meanwhile a three-child family on average benefits takes home as much as a working family earning £71,000.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is adding to an already massively over-burdened system with her ideological obsession with “inclusion”. In practice this means forcing schools to keep problem children on site, no matter the harm to their peers; reversing the “Blair and Gove revolution” by curbing academies’ freedoms and tightening state control; and devastating the independent sector with VAT (Labour said 3,000 kids would leave private schools; by last autumn the figure was already 25,000). The most “driven and confident” of Labour’s ideological barons is Ed Miliband, whose plan to make Britain a world leader in clean energy turns out to mean plastering the countryside with ugly wind turbines and solar panels, and raising all our energy prices. What’s really worrying is that Labour still has three years left in power, and whoever replaces Starmer is likely to come from the left. “There is more destructive radicalism to come.”

The royal family long struggled to agree what its surname was, says Charles Moore in The Spectator. When Queen Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, the groom’s “tirelessly self-promoting” uncle, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, tried to make sure it would be Mountbatten-Windsor. But the family never really needed to use it. Only now, after the fall of Prince Andrew, has the name come into its own with the invention of a private citizen called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. So it will be “forever associated with disgrace”.

While most guests at the White House correspondents’ dinner dived for cover on Saturday night, says Tyler Pager in The New York Times, one man calmly continued eating his burrata salad. “I’m a New Yorker,” explains top talent agent Michael Glantz, adding that, with “hundreds of Secret Service agents hurtling themselves over tables and chairs, I wanted to watch”. Glantz also says he has a bad back – “if I did get on the floor, they’d have to bring in people to get me off the floor” – and is a “hygiene freak”, so there was “no freaking way” he was getting his new tuxedo on the floor of a hotel ballroom. “Not happening.”

The US-Israel war with Iran has been a punishing one for Saudi Arabia, says Steven Cook in Foreign Policy. Already squeezed economically, Riyadh is now slashing spending on some of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s flagship projects: its upstart golf league, LIV; the country’s prized Al Hilal football club. Worse, it has taken a public relations beating: The Washington Post reported in February that MBS had privately lobbied Donald Trump to attack Iran; The New York Times later said he was urging the president to “finish the job”. The Saudis denied both, and insist they want no part of the war. But they have come under repeated fire from Iran and its proxies in Iraq, doing little in response beyond saying they “reserve the right” to retaliate.

This is revealing: a country that styles itself as a rising power and the region’s most important player is “betwixt and between” while its neighbourhood burns. Riyadh’s overarching goal is regional stability – its “Vision 2030” project to transition its economy away from fossil fuels depends on attracting tourists. The fact that MBS hasn’t openly expressed support for the US-led mission suggests that he thinks the regime in Iran will survive, potentially bolstered by sanctions relief and continued control of the Strait of Hormuz. But this “duck-and-cover” diplomacy was supposed to be a thing of the past for Riyadh. MBS would be much better off picking a side – the US, of course – and accepting the risk that entails. Some Saudis would no doubt portray it as warmongering. But as things stand, all the leadership in Riyadh is doing is showing that they are “not in the same league” as the Israelis or the Iranians.

Plants appear to be able to “hear” the sound of rain, says Bioengineer. Researchers at MIT conducted a series of meticulously controlled experiments on submerged rice seeds and found that when they were exposed to the sound of falling water droplets, the dormant seeds began actively germinating. This suggests they are capable of sensing and responding to the acoustic vibrations produced by rainfall.

Two and a half centuries ago, Britain’s navy was “managed from a London townhouse bedroom”, says Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri in The Critic. In the summer of 1757, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, took to his bed. When William Pitt the Elder, his coalition partner and the minister directing the war against France, arrived to talk “blue water” strategy, Newcastle invited him to take the adjacent bed, and “the two most powerful men in the country thrashed out the direction of a global conflict from their pillows”.

It’s “blouge” wine, says Emma Russell in The Guardian, a drink made from both red and white grapes. The blended beverage was created in France by Italian winemaker Konrad Pixner, who discovered, after a bountiful 2023 harvest, that his biggest vat of white wine had overflowed during fermentation. He quickly pumped the white juice into a tank of red grapes, left it for 10 days and named the result “blouge”, a portmanteau of blanc and rouge. The experimental tipple is now seeing a “surprise boom”, and, according to one French vintner, is best enjoyed at “5pm or 6pm after work, in the sun”. Santé!