Russia hit Kyiv with a barrage of missile and drone strikes overnight, killing nine and injuring more than 70 in its deadliest attack on the Ukrainian capital since last summer. Donald Trump yesterday accused Volodymyr Zelensky of “harming” peace talks by refusing to accept the loss of Crimea, saying he “can have peace or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country”. India has closed its main land border with Pakistan, expelled several Pakistani diplomats and suspended a critical water-sharing treaty, as the fallout from Tuesday’s terrorist attack in Kashmir intensified. Delhi says Pakistani elements were involved in the atrocity, in which gunmen killed 27 people, a claim Islamabad has denied. Adults with severe peanut allergies can be desensitised by daily exposure, according to a first-of-its-kind trial. After three months of being given steadily increasing doses of peanut flour, 67% of participants were able to eat the equivalent of five peanuts without reacting.

Trump’s blundering incompetence

Most commentators see Donald Trump as either “a saviour or a tyrant”, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. But it’s increasingly clear, whichever side you’re on, that he and his team are also “strikingly incompetent”. In their first 100 days they have taken on, “in no particular order”, the courts, leading universities, the media, the legal profession, the bond markets, the currency markets, the equity markets, the world’s second-largest economy, the global system of alliances and the global economic system. The theory behind this “blitzkrieg” approach is that it will keep enemies demoralised and off balance. “But you do have to execute.” And so far, the war is “less Blitzkrieg than Blunderland”.

Yes, Trump’s reduction in illegal immigration has been a success. But on everything else the impression is of “escalating failure alongside escalating overreach”. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been a bust. “The effort to revive American manufacturing is harming American manufacturing.” The reordering of the international economy is a work in progress, to put it kindly – we wait in vain for those “vaunted trade deals from supplicant foreigners”. And we’ve alienated “just about every partner we have” over Ukraine, without yet managing to end the war. Trump’s goals are undeniably ambitious. But achieving them would be a stretch even for a team of brilliant strongmen “with the political genius of Machiavelli and the ruthless efficiency of the Spanish Inquisition”. This lot are nothing of the sort.

🍌😱 Trump is “trashing the brand” of conservatism, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. Everything we conservatives hold sacred – free trade, democracy, the rule of law – the US president seems committed to destroying. Even where we instinctively agree with his aims, it’s impossible to support his methods: using illegal means to shut down government departments; applying border policy “in the manner of a banana republic”. Some conservatives feel duty-bound to support a Republican president. They should be more concerned about “being tarred with his brush”.

Labour’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on trans rights has been truly “woeful”, says Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. It took Keir Starmer six whole days to say he was “really pleased” with the “clarity” the judgement provided, and he still hasn’t condemned the protests that followed the decision (sample placard: “Bring back witch burning”). Even more embarrassing are the attempts to “rewrite history”. One Labour source told the Telegraph the ruling was a validation of Starmer shifting the party back to the centre, even though the PM himself once chided the then Labour MP Rosie Duffield for saying that “only women have a cervix”. Why can’t these politicians just “admit they got it wrong”?

Forget pub crawls, says Chris Marshall in The Guardian – it’s all about “bakery crawls” now. So-called “bakery pilgrims” travel thousands of miles to taste twists on classic pastries, such as the “kimchi and egg danish” at Manchester’s Long Boi’s Bakehouse, or the “miso bacon escargot” at London’s Arôme. Edinburgh’s Lannan bakery has had travellers from New Zealand and Canada plan their trips around a visit to the shop, while in Korea people take overnight trains to ensure they don’t miss the morning’s limited supply of rare treats.

A licence to trash England’s countryside

Those of us who spend our time trying to defend wildlife are “horribly familiar with bad laws”, says George Monbiot in The Guardian. But the government’s new planning and infrastructure bill is on a different level. At present, developers are obliged to follow a four-part “mitigation hierarchy” to protect the environment: “avoid, minimise, mitigate, offset”. Under the new law they’ll be able to skip “straight to option four”, paying a “nature restoration levy” that will effectively give them free licence to trash whatever protected habitats stand in their way: woods, meadows, wetlands, you name it. Never mind that some of these ecosystems “simply cannot be replaced”. The bill pretends that everything is tradable – that it’s fine to tear down ancient woodlands as long as you stick up a few saplings in plastic tubes.

Almost worse than the bill itself is the way it was created. The views of most environment organisations were completely disregarded during the drafting process. And Keir Starmer has been bizarrely open about who the government listened to instead, saying the changes stemmed from his “conversations with leading CEOs”. Does he not realise this is “the bit you are not supposed to say”? The truth is that many of the delays developers bemoan are actually self-inflicted, because they only commission ecological surveys at the last minute. That £100m HS2 bat tunnel everyone goes on about? Had ecologists been brought in earlier, they’d have foreseen the problem and made sure the route didn’t bisect the ancient woodland. We environmental types were always wary of Starmer’s Labour, but we didn’t think they could be worse than the Tories. How wrong we were.

The New York City subway relies on some astonishingly shonky kit, says The New York Times. On around 85% of the network, the signals are still manually operated by hand, with a transit worker pulling levers into place to send trains along the right tracks (pictured). Much of this equipment was installed almost a century ago, and replacement parts have to be custom-built because they’re no longer manufactured. The shonkiness has even become a point of pride for the workers who operate it. “If you had a car from the 1930s and drove it every day,” says signals chief Salvatore Ambrosino, “you’d be lucky if it was still working like this, right?”

During the last 18 months of his life, Pope Francis had a “nightly routine”, says The Independent: calling the only Catholic church in Gaza. For the 450 or so Palestinian Christians who took refuge in the Holy Family Church, these daily video conversations with the pontiff were an enormous source of hope and strength. George Antone, head of the church’s emergency committee, says Francis would call even when sick or hospitalised, making sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone in the room. “He used to tell each one: I am with you, don’t be afraid.”

It’s Denmark’s Princess Isabella, in an official portrait released to mark her 18th birthday, says James Rothwell in The Daily Telegraph. In a break with protocol, the modern royal, dressed in a formal gown and glitzy tiara, is pictured holding her iPhone. The photo immediately went viral on social media, with one person commenting: “Love everything about it. The big, beautiful smile, the fantastic dress and all the jewellery – and then a typical teenager’s indispensable companion: an iPhone.”