John Healey will deliver his first budget this afternoon, promising “breathing space” for households and targeted support for businesses. The chancellor will scrap standing charges on gas bills, and is expected to increase the minimum wage, flesh out Andy Burnham’s Your First Home scheme and raise taxes on banks. Dozens of people have been killed and scores more injured after two high-speed trains collided south of Madrid this morning. More than 500 passengers were travelling on the trains, and the region’s president has said the current death toll of 30 will almost certainly rise. Spanish newspaper El Pais quotes government sources blaming the crash on “human error” after a signal failure. An anonymous bidder has bought the skeleton of a Nanotyrannus lancensis for $47.3m, making it the second most expensive dinosaur fossil ever to sell at auction. The 67-million-year-old skeleton, named Jodi after the rancher who discovered it, spans 20ft from nose to tail and is made up of 191 bones.

Few would describe Zohran Mamdani as a shill for Israel, says Aaron Bastani in UnHerd. The socialist New York City mayor has consistently described events in Gaza as a genocide, and on his first day in office he revoked several pro-Israel executive orders signed by his predecessor. But for the radical left, that still wasn’t enough. When Mamdani attended a vigil marking the three-year anniversary of October 7, hundreds of protesters voiced their contempt for America’s most powerful left-wing politician. “Mayor Mamdani, you can’t hide,” they chanted. “We charge you with genocide!” The radical left are similarly deranged here in Britain. When senior figures in the Green Party questioned the wisdom of passing a motion that “Zionism is racism”, they themselves were accused of being Zionists.

Such intense internecine squabbling isn’t new, of course, nor limited to politics. Freud’s “narcissism of small differences”, where minor disagreements with those close to you assume outsize importance, is evident everywhere from bickering siblings to religious sectarianism. But the internet and social media seem to be making it worse. The cultural theorist Catherine Liu calls this “virtue hoarding” – where political activists aren’t trying to win power, but to display “an unbreachable moral superiority” over everyone else. It’s an inherently self-defeating approach. If virtue can only be hoarded when it’s a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you – as should surely be the goal – you have to shift yourself. And it makes “movement politics”, of the sort we on the left have been successfully pursuing for more than two centuries, all but impossible. “When you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?”

When Andy Burnham announced a crackdown on people playing loud music on public transport, says Ben Walker in The New Statesman, “the public took notice”. One poll found that 68% of Britons were aware of the announcement – not far off the 72% who were aware of Storm Austen, which killed one person and left tens of thousands without power, and more than double the 33% who heard about Phil Foden’s recent hat-trick for Manchester City. That’s football getting “half the level of attention” as “pedestrian announcements from the prime minister”.

A defence tech start-up in Texas is promising to give its customers “an edge on the battlefield”, says George Hammond in the FT, by developing a supply of “military working dogs”. Warhound, the $1.2bn brainchild of colourful drone entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, has raised $200m from top-flight investors to clone and finesse genetically enhanced pooches and equip them with bespoke technology including “body armour and cybernetics” to ensure they have “battlefield situational awareness”. Man’s best friend, says Luckey, “deserves man’s best tech”.

For many voters, says James Kirkup in The Telegraph, Andy Burnham’s proposal to consider some sort of return to the EU’s freedom of movement rules will seem “stark raving bonkers”. Open borders, after all, were the reason we ended up with the Brexit referendum in the first place. But it’s wrong to assume a reversal would trigger a repeat of the vast waves of European immigration seen in the early 2000s. Back then Britain was much richer than most of Europe, so a move here offered serious economic gains. Today, Polish wealth is nearly 90% of Britain’s. And those from poorer nations such as Romania and Moldova can already move to Germany, which is richer than Britain, with more ease. What freedom of movement would allow is for young Europeans to benefit from our universities – still the “social and economic jewels in our crown” – and vice versa.

But politically, Burnham would be mad to re-run the Brexit debate, says Ella Whelan in The i Paper. The prime minister has long painted himself as the archetypal “ordinary man”, a politician who understands the disaffected voters of the Red Wall – many of whom voted Leave. Getting Europhiles all hot under the collar over a “closer relationship” with Brussels will reveal his true colours as a long-standing member of the political establishment. Plus, it risks dragging Reform UK out of its current malaise. Support for Nigel Farage’s party has fallen in the past few months, but only because it has “lost its focus”. A fight for the spirit of Brexit is just what Farage needs to regain his mojo and position Reform as the only party that can defend the “largest and most consequential vote in recent British political history”. If Burnham keeps showing ankle to Remainers, he risks “getting it bitten”.

Tony Blair wasn’t always an assured statesman, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. He once recalled going to an international conference where a “rather well-turned-out” Dutch woman took him under her wing and guided him to the buffet. She asked who he was, and after replying, the Labour leader asked her the same question. “Well,” the woman said, “my name’s Beatrix.” So Blair asked: “And what do you do?” To which she politely replied: “I’m Queen, actually.”

The online “anagram solver” Unscrambler has released a list of America’s most mispronounced words this year. At the top is usual suspect Worcestershire sauce, followed by the Greek kebab gyro (yee-roh), Dachshund (daks-hund, obviously), niche and Porsche (por-shuh). Other frequently mangled terms include the Caribbean island Curaçao (kyur-uh-sow), the Vietnamese soup pho (fuh), and, incredibly, salmon. To see the others, click here.

It’s the most exciting food in Copenhagen, says Amelia Nierenberg in The New York Times: a slice of buttered bread with cheese. Called a bolle med ost (bun with cheese), or BMO for short, the stripped-back snack has become a calling card for top bakers. You can buy a BMO cookbook with 25 recipes, consult “50 best” BMO lists in newspapers, and scroll endless Instagram accounts dedicated to finding the ideal specimen. There’s even a right way to eat them – open-faced – and a wrong way. “If you see someone eating it like a burger,” says local Ophelia Ernland, “you know they’re not from here.”