Peter Mandelson has resigned from Labour to save the party “further embarrassment” after new documents released from the “Epstein files” suggested he received $75,000 from the late paedophile between 2003 and 2004. The former ambassador to the US says he has no recollection of the payments. Meanwhile, a second woman has claimed she was sent to the UK by Epstein in 2010 to have sex with the then Prince Andrew. Keir Starmer says he will reconsider joining an EU rearmament scheme in a bid to “step up and do more” on defence. Talks to join the Security Action for Europe fund (Safe), which involves the EU backing cheap loans to member states for defence projects, broke down last year after France and others demanded the UK pay an entry fee of €2bn. Bad Bunny became the first artist to win Album of the Year for an entirely Spanish-language record at last night’s Grammy awards. In a ceremony filled with anti-ICE sentiment, British singer Olivia Dean was named Best New Artist and Billie Eilish scooped Song of the Year for her hit Wildflower.

It’s become terribly fashionable to declare the death of the so-called “rules-based international order”, says Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy. These obituaries are premature. The current system is much stronger than we think, for the very simple reason that anyone even “marginally acquainted with human history” knows what would happen if it broke down: the decimation of international trade; a return to impoverishment through anarchy and isolation; and continual geopolitical instability driven by the ever-present threat of war. Aside from Donald Trump and a few rabid hardliners in Moscow and Beijing, no-one with half a brain wants to risk all that. Hence why the markets revolted against the US president’s pursuit of Greenland, and why global investors are increasingly souring on America.

Trump’s defenders argue that the system is basically defunct already because of China’s flagrant disdain for international trade rules. But, crucially, Beijing doesn’t want to tear up everything because it knows a peaceful global trading system is “critical” to its wealth and power. Another argument for not totally abandoning the status quo is the bulwark it provides against global economic meltdown. When the stock market crashed in 1929, before the postwar international system was in place, the consequences were catastrophic: world trade fell by about two-thirds; gold hoarding led to global deflation. In 2008, by contrast, the Fed and other central banks worked hard to prevent the problems spiralling, and the system just about held. Trump’s nationalist policies and the response in kind from other governments will make it harder to tackle the next financial crisis, whenever it comes. But there are enough people with enough skin in the game to ensure that international co-operation, not “crude multipolarity”, remains the norm.

Donald Trump’s father, Fred, died in 1999 aged 93, says Ben Terris in New York Magazine. The old man had a “heart that couldn’t be stopped”, the US president told me in an interview, and suffered almost no medical conditions throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt for the word he’d forgotten. “Alzheimer’s,” she said.

Geopolitics is changing so fast that writing spy novels has become a nightmare, says David McCloskey in The Spectator. I had several drafts of a book about the shadow war between Israel and Iran spoiled by the outbreak of actual war, and another wrecked by the invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin was in the story, so when mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a coup against him, “I was in the bizarre and uncomfortable position of hoping Putin survived, merely from the standpoint of plot continuity”. My next book is about suspicion creeping into the MI6-CIA relationship. I figured I’d need some “highly creative and perhaps downright implausible” plotlines to sink transatlantic relations to new lows… “oh, wait”.

I was 13, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, when I learned about the “child martyrs of the Ayatollah”. During the Iran-Iraq war, kids my age were trained to walk into machine gun fire to clear a path for the adult soldiers. Perhaps 20,000 children died this way, some as young as nine. “Evil” is a loaded term, but you might imagine, even in these politically polarised times, that we all agree it applies to the regime responsible. This same regime still funds terrorists, and rapes and tortures dissidents, and in recent weeks has murdered upwards of 30,000 of its own citizens. So why have we heard so little from our shouty progressive class?

This is not a criticism of the general left – progressives led the campaigns against apartheid and for gay rights and better race relations. But in recent years, particularly on social media, a strand of progressivism has “pulled free of its moorings”. Today, to this depressingly influential cohort, a crime only matters if it is committed by Westerners or Jews. I was amazed, speaking to Palestine Action protesters in Trafalgar Square last year, that they were so ignorant of other conflicts in which large numbers were dying – the Congo, Yemen, South Sudan. “Stop distracting attention from Gaza,” said one, when I asked about the 500,000 who died in the Tigray war. This “hyperprogressive” attitude frequently condemns victims of terrible crimes like genital mutilation and forced marriage to suffer in silence, because their persecution is merely a “cultural practice”. It’s why certain feminists can battle workplace micro-aggressions but wave away the burqa – “perhaps the most potent symbol of modern misogyny” – and why the victims of Pakistani rape gangs were ignored for so long. This isn’t about politics. It’s about “the difference between right and wrong”.

In 2024, says The Washington Post, the AI startup Anthropic ramped up an ambitious secret plan to gain an edge over the competition. “Project Panama,” they wrote, in oddly incriminating internal documents, “is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Within a year, the firm had spent “tens of millions of dollars” buying millions of physical books, slicing their spines off and scanning every page to feed into its model. Authors sued, and the firm settled for $1.5bn.

Fleet Street worked very differently back in the 1980s and 1990s, says Popbitch. When Kelvin MacKenzie was editor of The Sun, he returned from a short holiday to find that his team had begun a crusade against a corporate bigwig for no apparent reason. When he asked them why they were targeting this man, he was given a simple answer: “Because he’s a c***, Kelvin.” “Right,” said MacKenzie. “Let’s get him.”

It’s a genetically modified tomato, says Ben Spencer in The Times, which may soon be available for sale in the UK. The vibrant veg was invented in Norwich nearly two decades ago, but EU rules – and scaremongering against so-called “Frankenfoods” – mean it hasn’t been available on British shelves. The purple produce, which has been sold in America since 2023, Canada since 2025 and Australia since January, has been modified to increase the level of antioxidants, which may help ward off cancer. The scientists behind the fancy fruit are now hoping that changing attitudes, and post-Brexit freedoms, mean they may soon be approved for sale here.