Britain has agreed to give Ukraine classified blueprints for a long-range missile, as Andy Burham arrives in Kyiv today for his first overseas visit since becoming prime minister. Details of the British components of a French long-range missile will allow Kyiv to start producing the weapon itself, after Ukraine and France struck a defence deal last week aimed at boosting weapons production in the war-torn country. A cyberattack that shut down a small power facility in the UK last month has been described by security officials as a “warning shot” from Iran. Hackers affiliated with the Iranian regime disabled an undisclosed power plant for four days, in what is thought to be a threat from Tehran demonstrating its ability to attack critical British national infrastructure. Wild beaver kits have been born in Norfolk for the first time in more than 500 years. The pair of newborns (below) belong to two free-living beavers who mysteriously arrived at Pensthorpe nature reserve in December and have been spotted eating willow and water mint as well as learning how to dive into the river.

The government’s latest attempt to deal with the influx of mainly young men illegally landing on our shores is to issue them with guidance on how to assimilate into the country they’ve just broken into. The pamphlet is horrifying, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times: “Don’t rape women. Don’t mutilate their genitals. Don’t copulate with children.” If immigrants need such instructions, “it is rank betrayal of the British people not to instantly deport them”. Just last week, two Afghan migrants were convicted for raping a woman at knifepoint as she stargazed in a park. “Is she not right to feel betrayed?” What about the family of Rhiannon Whyte, stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a Sudanese asylum seeker, or the family of the 12-year-old girl from Nuneaton who was abducted and raped by an Afghan?

Opening our borders in the name of “compassion” to people who “hate our values and wish to destroy them” is to place elite ideas of virtue above our safety. Nigel Farage is not my favourite politician, but on this topic he has been “consistently and unequivocally right”. We must change all laws and treaties that thwart robust border control, detain new arrivals, sign return agreements with amenable nations and deport the rest to Rwanda or other nations willing to do a deal. The only way to smash the gangs is to smash their business model. “Nobody is paying £5,000 to a smuggler to end up back in Mogadishu.” Borders matter: without them, we’re nothing but scattered clans unable to defend what’s precious. How grotesque to see our civilisation, built on “rationality, patriotism and law”, now drowning in the quicksand of moral universalism, hyper-liberalism and other mush.

Despite the ongoing war in Iran, the price of oil is still hovering below $90 a barrel, says Javier Blas in Bloomberg. That suggests there is “more oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf than is commonly acknowledged”. As US Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently pointed out, many ships are leaving the waterway “covertly” meaning they aren’t counted in official figures, while most of the cargo flows now involve one, “or even several”, ship-to-ship transfers on the high seas, further complicating tracking. If you add that to the crude flowing via bypass pipelines, it’s possible that the total flows from the region are “not far below pre-war levels”.

Ahead of the midterms, Democrats appear to have a new strategy, says Avery Lotz in Axios: “bringing sexy back”. The party’s TikTok page is giving big names the “thirst trap treatment”, posting videos of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in tight-fitting T-shirts; clips of Senator Jon Ossof with captions like “I told my boyfriend I was busy”; and the permanently grinning New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. Elsewhere there have been Democrats flaunting unbuttoned shirts on CNN, and “exposed biceps on the rally stage”. Democrats have often been seen as “schlubby and… nerdy”, says one politico, but today, “rizz, for lack of a better word”, is everywhere.

America’s national debt has reached such extraordinary levels, says Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, “even folks who know about such matters struggle to grasp its scale”. At a whopping $40 trillion, US debt is now so large that even if every cent of this year’s GDP were spent paying it off, the country would still be “many trillions in the red”. But rather than trying to reduce it, the US government is “blithely” borrowing more and more with no sign of slowing down. And America’s insatiable appetite for debt pushes up the cost for everyone. Last week, as the global bond markets grew twitchy about America’s addiction to debt, borrowing costs for other major economies, including Britain, Germany and France, started rising too.

The problem is that the political culture in the US and Europe has become divorced from reality. Parties of left and right promise welfare, rearmament, bigger pensions, the lot. “Nobody has the guts to take away the punchbowl.” And as lenders conclude that the ruling classes have simply given up trying to balance the books, they are demanding higher returns for the money they lend. This is especially bad news for the UK, because we already pay more to borrow than any other member of the G7 club of rich nations. And we have a Labour governing class, “in office and on the backbenches”, that has absolutely no understanding of the trouble brewing. Looking back, when the financial crisis hit in 2008, we were actually in “pretty good shape” to handle it – the economy was strong, growth was good, debt was low, tax and spend were at reasonable levels. Today, with record debt, negligible growth, tax and spend at historic highs and a government of ignoramuses, “we’re pretty much defenceless”.

At least three influencers have been bitten by sharks in less than a year, says Michael Searles in The Telegraph. A growing number of people have been chasing the perfect shot of themselves up close with the marine predators – swimming alongside, touching and even riding them. A fishing influencer nearly lost his leg after being attacked by a reef shark while spearfishing in July, while a Chinese content creator was bitten in the Maldives in December. And in April, the 37-year-old Brazilian lawyer and social media personality Tayane Dalazen (pictured) was bitten on the thigh by a seven-foot nurse shark.

What struck me most about the death of Jason Arday, says Robert Colvile in The Times, was how polarised people have become, not just in opinion but in information. To many of those mourning Arday, like the campaigners at the Good Law Project, he is a victim of “baseless allegations” and “smear campaigns” who would be “fully exonerated”. To those denouncing him, he was a pathological fabulist who hired aggressive lawyers to squash legitimate questions about well-documented plagiarism. One of the key drivers of American-style factionalism is when people lose a sense of shared facts. “We are already perilously far down that road.”

It’s the “leaf sheep”, says Patrick Barkham in The Guardian, a neon green solar-powered slug that lives underwater and has just won what the paper calls its “increasingly popular” invertebrate of the year competition. Costasiella kuroshimae triumphed in the global ballot after hundreds of thousands of readers around the world voted for their favourite spineless species, narrowly beating the world’s largest bumblebee – the ginger moscardón or Bombus dahlbomii, and the blue-blooded horseshoe crab, which pre-dates dinosaurs. The common woodlouse came in a highly creditable fourth.