The Tory leader’s appearance on the Today programme was sheer madness – and comedy gold

Cast your mind forward 10 years or so. Long after Kemi Badenoch has been sacked as Tory party leader without even getting to contest an election. Long after she has been fired from a sinecure in an HR firm for falling out with all her colleagues. Long after she was dismissed from a Tory thinktank for being unable to think. Long after she was forced to take early retirement.

You might think Kemi’s name would be long forgotten by then. But you would be wrong. Because her name will live for evermore. Six years from now a group of psychiatrists and psychotherapists will gather in May for what will become the most oversubscribed symposium in the history of medical and therapeutic science. Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians, cognitive behaviourists, psychodynamic and systemic therapists. The lot. Everyone will be there. Trying to make sense of the most intriguing problem to have troubled shrinks everywhere. Who or what is Kemi? More importantly, why is Kemi?

The problem here is not the interim manager, it’s the ad hoc interim ownership and the short-term sense of identity at this ghost town club

Tudor is to do. To do is to dur. Something like that anyway. With the clock reading 45+8 at the end of the first half the air inside the Tottenham Hotspur stadium had already begun to curdle and turn strange.

In the space of 18 minutes, 1-0 to Spurs had become 3-1 to Crystal Palace. The crowd had begun to turn in on itself. Boos were directed at the players. Boos were directed back at the booers. Birds flew backwards through the sky. The clock struck 13. Beer glasses filled from the bottom up. “You killed the club,” man in a quilted coat shouted at the directors’ box, with genuine feeling, as though this was not a figure of speech, the club actually was dead, before stamping off towards the thrillingly alive empanada and artisan pickle outlets of the vibrant new retail concourse.

The Swedish flight tracking tool, spun out of a price comparison portal, is tracking the travel chaos sparked by the US-Israel war on Iran in real time

Mikael Robertsson and Olov Lindberg did not set out to build one of the pre-eminent monitors of global airspace. In a bid to draw more eyes to their Swedish flight price comparison portal, the entrepreneurs added a page charting air traffic.

That page became Flightradar24, the portal that people around the world now turn to when there is chaos – and drama – in the skies.

Harris’s 2024 campaign lacked authenticity and conviction. We can’t afford to repeat the mistakes of the past

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you today. The bad news is, well, everything. As you may have noticed, the world is on fire. The good news, however, is that a savior may be at hand. Kamala Harris, a politician who has never won a presidential primary and lost the popular vote to Donald Trump in 2024, hasn’t ruled out running for president again.

Harris has kept a fairly low profile since November 2024, focusing most of her energy on promoting 107 Days, her account of her truncated presidential run, and appearing as the guest of honour at the 2025 Australian Real Estate Conference. But she has also made it clear that she still has an eye on the White House: in an interview with the BBC last October, Harris said she was “not done” with politics and strongly suggested she might run for president again. Harris echoed these sentiments in a conversation with the podcaster Sharon McMahon last week. “I might,” she said when asked if she will run again.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Sam Ruthe, 16, was the youngest person to break the four-minute mile in 2025 and this year the ‘remarkable’ running talent extended his record streak

Before the teenage New Zealand runner, Sam Ruthe, took to Boston University’s famous indoor track in January, he told his father he was aiming to run a 3.48-minute mile.

The 16-year-old had already stunned the athletics world in 2025, when he became the youngest person ever to break the four-minute mile barrier – aged 15 – but his father, Ben Ruthe, raised his eyebrows over his son’s aspirations for his next race, which if achieved could mean he will be considered for New Zealand Commonwealth Games selection.

Slow-burn office crushes that left you weeping, sitcoms that made you fall in love and vampire shows that changed you for ever: Guardian readers pick their ultimate television romances

A mark of a true romance is that the couple are closer than anyone else in the world. As Emily Brontë said, “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” This is true for Miss Piggy and Kermit. They’ve had a longer relationship than most TV couples (since 1976), although it has been tumultuous. No matter what universe, from Dickensian London to Treasure Island to their various TV shows and movies over the years, they find each other – even after their official separation in 2015. Did Ross ever say to Rachel: “You don’t need the whole world to love you, you just need one person”? I don’t think so. Michelle, 19, Manchester

US issues 30-day waiver to allow Indian refiners to buy Russian oil; IDF says it is striking Dahiya neighborhood in southern suburbs of Beirut

• Tell us: how have you been affected by the latest events in the Middle East?

Persian Gulf states have fended off a wave of Iranian missiles, amid reports of growing frustrations within the nations the US is not providing its partners with enough warning or support.

The Qatari defence ministry said air defences thwarted a drone attack targeting the US air base at Al-Udeid, Washington’s largest military facility in the Middle East on Friday.

Qatar Emiri Air Defense Forces successfully intercepted a drone attack targeting Al-Udeid Air Base.

PM defends decision not to join initial US-Israeli strikes and says UK is doing ‘everything we can’ to de-escalate situation

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Keir Starmer has said the conflict engulfing the Middle East could continue “for some time” as he insisted the best way forward in the longer term was a negotiated settlement with Iran.

The prime minister said the UK was doing “everything we can” to de-escalate the situation, a clear contrast to the US president, who is focused on regime change and has said it was “too late” for Tehran to negotiate.

F-35 pilot based in Cyprus becomes first to destroy a target in combat – and celebrates with a single beer

In the clear skies above Jordan on Monday night, a British F-35 pilot made a small piece of history. Flying for four hours alongside two Typhoons, the radar picked up two Shahed drones. The squadron tactics instructor – whom the Guardian is not naming – hit the drones with two Asraam missiles.

In doing so he became the first pilot of the Royal Air Force’s stealth fighter jet to destroy a target in combat. It was, he said, very high stakes. In those scenarios, it is easy to hit a friendly target by mistake.

A nationless ethnic group of more than 30 million people, their homegrown militia has a reputation as an effective fighting force

The Kurds are one of the biggest ethnic groups in the world without their own nation. Numbering between 30 and 40 million worldwide, most live amid the peaks and valleys straddling the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

Though they link their history to that of the Medes, an ancient Middle Eastern people, the Kurds were left stateless a century ago when the borders of the modern Middle East emerged from the collapsing Ottoman empire. Repeatedly caught in the bloody political competition of a volatile region and often forced to rely on their homegrown militia, the peshmerga, for defence, the Kurds say their tough and often bloody history has taught them that they have “no friends but the mountains”.