The former Foreign Office head Olly Robbins has accused Downing Street of showing a “dismissive approach” to Peter Mandelson’s vetting process. Robbins told MPs his department was placed under “constant pressure” to clear Mandelson so that he could be sent to Washington “as quickly as humanly possible”. Donald Trump has called the former ambassador a “really bad pick” but added that Keir Starmer still has “plenty of time to recover”. The UK’s unemployment rate fell unexpectedly in the three months to February, underscoring the fact that the British economy was improving before the outbreak of the Middle East war. The rate of joblessness fell to 4.9%, down from 5.2% in the previous three months, meaning unemployment is now at its lowest level since last summer. King Charles has delivered a tribute to his “darling Mama” on what would have been her 100th birthday, praising her lifelong commitment to duty and her “legacy of hope”. Echoing Elizabeth II’s first ever public broadcast, aged just 14, the King urged that we strive together towards a “better, happier tomorrow”.

For more than a year after Donald Trump returned to the White House, says Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic, Ukraine held out hope of winning him over. Kyiv diligently took part in the US president’s peace negotiations, which were “tilted to reward Putin’s invasion”, and Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to minerals deals that promised to enrich Americans. Today, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States”. It is aggressively seeking new diplomatic and military partners, readily sharing its hard-won expertise in drone warfare with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and forging new arms-production agreements with Germany. Just last week, Zelensky openly condemned Trump’s decision to ease sanctions on Russian oil amid energy price spikes. “Russia played the Americans again,” he said, “played the President of the United States.”

Ukraine’s new confidence is the result of its vastly improving fortunes on the battlefield. After an extended period of supposed “weakness”, their now formidable homegrown drone industry and military structure have allowed them to regain the initiative. In recent months they have reportedly caused more casualties than the Kremlin can replace and taken back more territory than Russia has seized. They’ve gained greater abilities to launch long-range drone strikes on targets far beyond the front lines and continue to “bottle up” Russian naval power in the Black sea. They even claimed last week to have seized a Russian position, capturing a number of enemy soldiers, using drones and unmanned ground vehicles alone. Their ability to adapt, “even without US aid”, has been startling. Writing off America’s friendship might once have been a “sign of doom”. Not any more.

FBI director Kash Patel’s penchant for a drink has become a “concern” across the US government, says Sarah Fitzpatrick in The Atlantic. The security service boss reportedly often gets drunk in front of administration staff at the private club Ned’s in Washington (at weekends, it’s Las Vegas’s “Poodle room”). Meetings are regularly rescheduled for later in the day to accommodate his hangovers, and his security detail sometimes struggles to wake him up, on one occasion requesting “breaching equipment” normally used by SWAT teams to get into his room. Earlier this month he became so convinced he’d been fired when his computer log-in failed that news of his subsequent “emotional outburst” ricocheted through the bureau and even to the White House. Turns out, it was just a technical error.

A few months ago, says Derek Thompson on Substack, everyone was asking whether AI was a bubble. The answer, for now, is “surely not”. The theory was that companies were spending so much on chips, data centres and electricity – a whopping 2% of America’s entire GDP last year – that there wouldn’t be enough short-term demand for AI to make the numbers work. In fact, demand is so high that the AI giants are having to ration their customers’ usage. And these companies are growing faster than any others in modern history: since late last year, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue has nearly quadrupled, to more than $30bn.

Addressing MPs in the Commons yesterday over the Peter Mandelson vetting scandal, Keir Starmer repeatedly cited the former cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, to explain why he had done nothing wrong. It was a “quintessentially Starmer moment”, says James Kirkup in The Daily Telegraph. Sir Chris, of course, is no longer the cabinet secretary because the prime minister sacked him. So this was Starmer quoting an official he has already sacked, because he is in trouble for sacking another official, Olly Robbins, who he blamed for failing to stop him appointing an ambassador who he also went on to sack. Gone, too, is the chief of staff who convinced the PM to hire Mandelson, Morgan McSweeney, who only got the job because Starmer sacked his previous chief of staff, Sue Gray. There’s a pattern here. And the PM is “starting to run out of people to blame”.

Robbins should never have been given the boot, says William Hague in The Times. No 10 left him in an impossible position by announcing Mandelson’s appointment – against official advice – before the vetting process had been completed. The reason Starmer is so angry is because he “drifted into this mistake” and no one stopped him. He let McSweeney put forward the case for appointing Mandelson, allowed Mandelson to become excited about it, then didn’t want to disappoint either man. And this is where he keeps going wrong: he always takes the path of least resistance. Welfare reform was essential until it was abandoned. Defence spending is vital but “too difficult for now”. Endless other policies are set in motion, only for there to be a U-turn when opposition mounts. Starmer could sack all the officials in Whitehall and the drift would go on. “Because he, sadly, is at the heart of it.”

The next time a big musician like Taylor Swift releases a new album, says Adeel Hassan in The New York Times, you might want to stay at home. Researchers at Harvard have found that traffic fatalities in the US increase by nearly 15% on the days when artists like Swift, Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar drop new music, presumably because everyone is fiddling with Spotify rather than looking at the road.

The fall of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was undoubtedly a loss for Vladimir Putin, says Owen Matthews in The Independent. But his successor Péter Magyar is showing signs of cosying up to the Russian leader rather more than expected. He’s told Brussels that he will lift Hungary’s veto on a proposed €90bn EU loan to Ukraine only if they agree to the re-opening of the Druzhba pipeline, a Soviet-era pipe that funnels Russian oil through Ukraine and into Europe. That will enrich the Kremlin and directly contradict the bloc’s pledge to wean the continent off Russian oil before the end of 2027.

It’s the latest must-have fashion statement among the techie crowd, says Robbie Whelan in The Wall Street Journal: a top featuring the knitted face of a CEO. At Nvidia’s annual conference, jerseys with a cartoonish depiction of founder Jensen Huang (above) flew off the shelves, even at a steep-ish $178. Palantir sells a $75 t-shirt bearing the face of the company’s CEO Alex Karp, and when another defence tech firm, Anduril, sold a line of flower-printed Hawaiian shirts inspired by those permanently worn by their boss Palmer Luckey, they sold out.