The UK terrorism threat level has been raised to “severe”, indicating that attacks are highly likely, after the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London on Wednesday. Essa Suleiman, 45, has been charged with their attempted murder, while Keir Starmer has promised a “bigger fight” against anti-Semitism. Donald Trump will scrap tariffs on British whisky exports to the US, saving the industry an estimated £3m a week, to mark the end of the King and Queen’s state visit. The US president called Charles “the greatest King” and said the royal couple “got me to do something that nobody else was able to do”. Buckingham Palace said the monarch will be “raising a dram to the President’s thoughtfulness”. A new Banksy statue featuring a man with his face covered by a flag was erected in central London on Tuesday night. The elusive artist, recently outed as Bristolian Robin Gunningham, confirmed it as his work with a video of the statue being installed in Waterloo Place in the dead of night.

Strange as it sounds, says David Ignatius in Foreign Policy, visiting Ukraine these days is “uplifting”. The good guys are winning – “or at least holding their own” – and they’re enjoying the help of a “stalwart” Europe, not trying to win back a “retreating US”. At last week’s Kyiv Security Forum, European defence leaders stoutly voiced their solidarity with Ukraine in a war against Russia they now see as a “common fight”. And they’re right to feel emboldened. Ukrainian troops held firm against Russia’s ferocious assault on their front lines last autumn, and its cities have survived a terrible frigid winter despite a Russian blitz on energy infrastructure. Now, spring has arrived: it’s warm again, and the power is still on. In the comparatively upbeat words of Volodymyr Zelensky’s normally taciturn top aide and former intelligence chief Lt Gen Kyrylo Budanov: “We are definitely not losing.”

What appears to be dawning on Europe’s military leaders is that, in confronting the growing threat from Vladimir Putin, they need Kyiv as much as Kyiv needs them. Not merely as a physical buffer, but as the world’s most advanced practitioner of drone warfare – both offensive and defensive. Europe is already getting “buzzed” by Russian drones, and its traditional weapons are no use. Ukraine’s elite Azov Brigade credits drones with 92% of its targeted kills, and just 3% to artillery. And its remarkable pace of military innovation is nurtured by constant interaction between front-line soldiers and agile defence tech firms. The founder of one of these companies spoke at the conference having returned the previous day from the front line, and was going on to his factory to “retool”. European defence firms take two years to solve a problem, he said. “We can do it in a month.”

🇪🇺🚿 One speaker who hit a particular nerve was Major Illia Samoilenko, who lost a hand fighting with the Azov Brigade. Europeans “forgot how to fight”, he said. “Decades of inaction put them in a very disadvantageous position. They should take a cold shower.”

In the company of royalty, even the most confident, accomplished people can descend into an “unstoppable stream of gibberish”, says Craig Brown in The New York Times. Elizabeth II once asked President Nixon’s ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, where he and his wife were living. His reply: “We’re in the Embassy residence, subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of the needs for elements of refurbishing and rehabilitation.” The Queen, naturally, maintained a fixed smile throughout.

Ukrainian troops have used a robot to rescue a pensioner who was fleeing Russian shelling, says Antonia Langford in The Daily Telegraph. After drones spotted the 77-year-old struggling to walk down a crater-scarred road in the Donetsk region, the 60th Separate Mechanised Brigade sent in an unmanned ground vehicle, equipped with a blanket and a note reading “Grandma, hop on!” The machine drove her to an evacuation point, where she was greeted by soldiers and helped to a nearby shelter.

One day the British commentariat will cotton on to the fact that the “special relationship” doesn’t exist “and has never existed”, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. The term is of no more use today than it was when Winston Churchill coined it immediately after a war that had installed America as the world’s top nation, and shoved Britain, “penniless and exhausted”, down to about eighth. America only joined that conflict not out of some altruistic love for a fellow democracy, but because it had been humiliated by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour. That fact hasn’t stopped Americans – including, recently, Donald Trump – from believing the old myth that “if it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German”. No, Donald, it was the RAF and the Red Army, “in that order”.

Even after Pearl Harbour, the special relationship was defined by American “deceit and chicanery”. Take the 1943 Quebec Agreement, which guaranteed the sharing of information on nuclear weapons and nuclear power between the US, UK and Canada. Pretty much the moment the war ended, America declared no information would be shared with the UK, despite the fact that 60 of our countrymen, led by the Nobel laureate James Chadwick, had worked on the Manhattan Project. For the past 80 years, America has demanded unwavering British support: in Korea; Vietnam (moral support anyway); two Iraq wars (one disastrous and illegal); and most recently in Iran, which Keir Starmer mercifully had the sense to refuse. And what has it done for us? Ensured our humiliation at Suez, equivocated about the Falkland Islands; invaded the British commonwealth country of Grenada without telling us; funded the IRA and refused to extradite a single terrorist. Does that make you feel special?

As soon as you learn the word “skeuomorphism”, says Deborah Ross in The Times, you’ll start noticing it everywhere. It describes features of new technology that are left over from old technology, even though they no longer serve a purpose. The “click” your phone camera makes is one – there’s no mechanical shutter, but we like the sound so we’ve kept it. Electric cars don’t need front grilles, but they all have them. Even the ancient Greeks did it. When they shifted from building temples out of wood to using stone, they carved the new ones as though they were made of timber, “rafters and everything”.

When political violence strikes in the US, says Ali Breland in The Atlantic, the perpetrator generally turns out to be someone radicalised in the internet’s “dark crevices”. What’s disturbing about the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner last weekend is that the alleged attacker, Cole Tomas Allen, seems a totally normal guy, unknown to the authorities and with no apparent interest in fringe ideology. It was the same with Luigi Mangione, who allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024. We may be entering an era of “normie extremism”.

It’s Lazare, says Eleanor Mann in the Daily Mail, a tiny French continental toy spaniel whose owners claim he is the oldest dog ever. The rescued pet – which suffers from arthritis, partial deafness, partial blindness, and a dodgy tongue that permanently lolls out of his mouth – is alleged to have been born on 4 December 1995, making him 31, or more than 200 in “dog years”. The SPA, France’s RSPCA, has contacted the Guinness Book of Records for validation. If verified, the pension-age pooch would swipe the title from Bluey, an Australian cattle dog (not, as it turns out, connected to the popular children’s TV show) who lived to 29 before dying in 1939.