Call for food price caps ‘completely preposterous’, says M&S boss

Seven-term incumbent had spoken out against Iran war, government spending and Jeffrey Epstein files. Plus, Trump’s ‘board of peace’ receives just $23m to rebuild GazaGood morning.Voters in northern Kentucky on Tuesday rejected the incumbent congressman Thomas Massie, who has been critical of Donald Trump, in favor of the president’s hand-picked candidate.Where else held primaries on Tuesday? Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, Oregon and Idaho. Georgia also delivered a defeat to a prominent Trump critic, while a Trump ally won in Alabama, too.How significant was Kentucky? Massie, a seven-term incumbent, has been an outspoken GOP opponent to Trump – repeatedly clashing with the president over Iran, government spending and the Jeffrey Epstein files. In response, Trump treated the primary as a personal vendetta.What is at the top of the agenda? For Putin, it is likely to be reciprocal trade and investment, as Russia’s economy continues to suffer over the cost of its war in Ukraine and related sanctions. China, Russia’s largest trading partner, buys almost half of Moscow’s oil exports.What about foreign policy? Xi said the world was in danger of returning to the “law of the jungle”, adding that further hostilities in the Middle East were “inadvisable”, and calling for a ceasefire, state media reported. Continue reading...

Ukrainians lament appalling toll of fighting on their country’s bird populationRussia sent kamikaze drones to attack the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in February. They hit buildings and killed several people. One unreported victim of the bombardment was a male long-eared owl, blinded in one eye and found with a badly broken wing. A passerby scooped up the stunned bird, put him in a box and took him to the city of Dnipro.The owl – nicknamed Sunny – is now recovering in a cosy room belonging to Veronica Konkova. No longer able to fly or hunt, Sunny instead hops around. Continue reading...

UK report argues people have greater control over longevity than widely understood, but others say claim is simplisticIndividuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for their ill health in old age, according to a report aimed at challenging the belief that physical decline is either inevitable or primarily the responsibility of the state.The report, launched at the Smart Ageing Summit in Oxford last week, argues that individuals have far greater control over their longevity than is commonly understood. The authors call on the government to take legislative action on alcohol comparable to restrictions on smoking. Continue reading...

Republican Congressman defeated by Trump-backed challenger in most expensive House primary in historySign up for the Breaking News US emailGood morning, and welcome to our live coverage of US politics. Donald Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican party after the independent-minded Congressman Thomas Massie was defeated in the Kentucky Republican House primary by the president’s hand-picked challenger.Massie lost by a vote of 55% to 45%, in what became the most expensive House primary in US history, drawing over $32m in spending. Continue reading...

Wife of former PM, who encountered Worboys in 2007, says parole refusal last week was ‘huge relief’Carrie Johnson, the wife of the former prime minister Boris Johnson, has said there could be “up to 1,000, if not more”, victims of the black-cab rapist, John Worboys.Johnson, who helped bring the serial sex attacker to justice, said she had been contacted by more women who believed they had been assaulted by him. Continue reading...

‘China has already eaten much of German industry’s lunch and is preparing to start on dinner,’ thinktank saysBusiness live – latest updatesGermany must stop admiring China’s success in the EU or it will sleepwalk into the kind of deindustrialisation the US experienced 25 years ago, a leading Brussels thinktank has said.With China’s surplus with Germany having doubled between 2024 and 2025 from $12bn (£9bn) to $25bn, creating a $94bn trade imbalance, the Centre for European Reform (CER) said Europe’s largest economy risked a repeat of what happened in the US in 2001 when a sudden surge in imports permanently hollowed out towns in the American midwest. Continue reading...

Ron Shinnick did not mention the firing of the Cohutta police force, which was later rehired, in resignation letterThe mayor of a small town in the US state of Georgia has resigned shortly after firing his community’s entire police department, a step that the local governing council ultimately reversed – but that he nonetheless took amid a political spat pitting him and his wife against members of the force.In a 15 May resignation letter that the Guardian reviewed, Ron Shinnick avoided mentioning his attempted termination of the Cohutta police department, word of which gained international media attention. The letter instead said Shinnick had opted to vacate the mayoral post he had held since 2014 due to “health concerns” faced by family members outside Cohutta. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Australia faces a ‘pronounced political fault line’, Giridharan Sivaraman tells Brisbane seminar on human rights Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastOne Nation and the federal opposition are “dehumanising” and “scapegoating” immigrants while drawing on a “deep vein of racism”, Australia’s federal race discrimination commissioner says.Giridharan Sivaraman made the comments as part of a panel discussion at a Brisbane seminar on human rights, hosted by the state’s human rights commission. Continue reading...

Chancellor’s planning shake-up would ‘reduce exposure from judicial review on all but human rights grounds’Rachel Reeves is ​preparing to announce a planning shake-up ‌that would fast-track clean energy ​and infrastructure projects by curbing judicial reviews, the ​Treasury said.The chancellor will propose that parliament should be able to designate and approve the most important clean energy projects as of “critical national importance”, as part of a wider package seeking to blunt the impact of the Iran crisis. Continue reading...

Incident comes just a day after Nato had to shoot down a suspected stray Ukrainian drone over EstoniaThe drone alert in Lithuania has just been lifted, with the country’s defence minister quoted by Reuters as saying that the drone flew by Lentvaris near the capital, Vilnius, before diverting in a different direction.We will no doubt get more details on this soon. Continue reading...

MEPs had twice frozen ratification process in protest at Trump’s threat of higher tariffs and Greenland threatsThe EU has finally agreed to implement its trade deal with the US after five hours of talks between members of the European parliament and member states in the hope of averting more tariffs threatened by Donald Trump.It means the agreement struck last July at the US president’s Scottish golf course can now enter into force, removing import duties on most US goods entering the EU. Continue reading...