Kemi Badenoch has pledged to scrap stamp duty if the Conservatives return to power. Speaking at her party’s conference in Manchester, the Tory leader also said she would introduce a new “economic golden rule” that would ensure half of all government savings – including a promised £47bn of spending cuts – are put towards reducing the country’s deficit. The Crown Prosecution Service has said a case involving alleged Chinese espionage in parliament collapsed after the government repeatedly refused to provide evidence that China was a threat to national security. Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry were accused of spying on MPs between 2021 and 2023, but the charges were unexpectedly dropped last month shortly before the planned trial. Kind men are less likely to find love, according to scientists who assessed the personalities of 3,800 people. Guys who were “agreeable” – empathetic, co-operative and patient – were slightly less likely to have a partner than their more cutting counterparts, while for women, kindness had no impact on the likelihood of having a lover.

What’s Trump planning for Venezuela?

You could be forgiven for thinking Donald Trump was about to invade Venezuela, says Edward Luce in the FT. Putting three US destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, a nuclear-powered attack submarine and a squadron of F-35s under President Nicolás Maduro’s nose “certainly looks that way”. Trump’s pretext for this vast mobilisation, which includes 6,500 troops, is drugs. But no drugs seizure requires this kind of back up. And when US forces blew up yet another boat in the Caribbean last weekend – the fourth in the past few weeks – and Trump claimed that bags of fentanyl and cocaine were “splattered all over the ocean”, no evidence was provided.

Venezuela is “nowhere close” to being America’s leading narcotics supplier. “None – repeat none – of America’s fentanyl has been found to originate from Venezuela.” Almost all of it comes from Mexico, while Colombia is, of course, the main source of cocaine. The US government’s true motives appear to be muddled. Trump himself finds Venezuela “irresistibly tempting” as a foe, casting it in his mind as the “chief instigator of turmoil in America’s urban ‘war zones’”. A military raid on a tenement block in Chicago last week targeted the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump says is secretly run by Maduro. The Venezuelan president is a “thuggish kleptocrat”, but there’s little evidence he’s a kingpin too. Others in the Trump administration have different motives – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, is an old-school neo-con who sincerely believes in regime change. And it’s surely no coincidence that Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Whatever the precise reasoning, Trump’s attorney-general has doubled the bounty on Maduro’s head to $50m. The stage is set.