Donald Trump is due to announce a trade deal with the UK today, making Britain the first country to reach a US trade agreement since the president’s sweeping tariffs came in last month. Whatever the details, says Andrew McDonald in Politico, the very fact that a deal has been struck surely vindicates Keir Starmer’s “softly-softly approach” to Trump. Migrants will have to reach a higher standard of English to obtain a UK work visa under new immigration reforms. The current level, equivalent to English as a foreign language GCSE, will be raised to the equivalent of a foreign language A-Level, which requires people to express themselves “fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions”. Today marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. Britain is marking the occasion with a service at Westminster Abbey followed by a live concert at Horse Guards Parade this evening featuring military musicians, along with performances by the likes of top nonagenarians Joan Collins and Mary Berry.

Why Kashmir will never be at peace

For the past eight decades in Kashmir, says Sophie Landrin in Le Monde, “history has been tirelessly repeating itself”. The region has been a tinderbox since the 1947 partition, in which the departing British broke up the Raj empire into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Kashmir, on the border between the two, had a mostly Muslim population but a Hindu Maharaja. When tribal bands armed by Pakistan tried to seize his newly autonomous princely state, the Maharaja joined up with the Indians, triggering the first of four wars between the two neighbours. After a bloody terrorist attack last month, India and Pakistan are “once again” on the brink of war.

The last time conflict between these two nuclear-armed nations broke out, in February 2019, the Trump administration was able to talk both Narendra Modi’s India and Pakistan (then under the leadership of cricket legend Imran Khan) into de-escalating. What’s striking is how radically the international context has changed since then. The Americans have given up their war in Afghanistan and therefore rely less on their “increasingly isolated Pakistani ally”. Internally, Pakistan has been weakened and destabilised by “political, economic, financial and security crises”. India, on the other hand, has strengthened its position on the global stage, and Modi has shown a “good rapport with Trump”. The danger is that the Republican’s return to the White House, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the general “weakening of international law” could encourage the Indian government to go beyond mere retaliatory strikes. Hindu nationalists would love to reclaim the part of the old Maharaja’s Kashmiri princedom that has been administered by Pakistan since 1949. Now they have a pretext to go and get it.