US vice president JD Vance says there is a good chance of a “great” US-UK trade deal. “The president really loves the United Kingdom,” Vance tells UnHerd. “He loved the Queen. He admires and loves the King.” Helpfully for tariff negotiations, he says, Britain has a “much more reciprocal” trade relationship with the US than our European neighbours. UK wage growth rose by 5.9% in the three months to February, according to the Office for National Statistics. The figures, however, don’t reflect the impact of the newly introduced rise in employers’ national insurance or the increase in the national living wage. Humans could soon “speak dolphin”, says The Daily Telegraph. DolphinGemma – a new AI model powered by Google DeepMind – has been trained on the world’s biggest collection of dolphin vocalisations to pick out patterns from the animals’ complex clicks and whistles. The hope, says Wild Dolphin Project founder Denise Herzing, is to figure out “what they are talking about”, and eventually talk back.

America has abandoned “due process”

A month ago, US federal agents rendered 238 men to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador, alleged to be the site of “human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial killings”. Among them, says Heather Cox Richardson on Substack, was 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland father of three who has never been charged with any crime. The government admits this was an “administrative error”, and the Supreme Court has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to “facilitate” his return. But Trump says García can’t be retrieved because he’s no longer under US jurisdiction. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele – in Washington for a state visit yesterday – said he wouldn’t send García back.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. Trump is claiming the power to declare someone a criminal with no evidence (and none of the due process guaranteed by the US constitution), kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country then claim there’s no way to get them back. García is not a citizen, but that should be no comfort. Trump says he would “love” to send US citizens to prison in El Salvador, and people in his team are looking into the practicalities. Remember that just days ago Trump said a former government employee who wrote a book about the president’s first administration was guilty of “treason”. Here’s the crucial thing: “Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game.” You have given approval to authoritarian government, and all you can do is “hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you”.

🇨🇳🤝🇸🇻 Bukele got the star treatment at the White House yesterday, says Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal. But he is “no friend of the US”. In 2023 he issued 60,000 visas to Ecuadoreans and 32,000 to travellers from India – a “crucial assist” to organised criminals who smuggled most of those “tourists” through Guatemala to the American border. And since Bukele visited Xi Jinping in 2019, China has built a glitzy new national library in old San Salvador and a modern fishing pier with an amusement park on the Pacific coast, and is now working on a brand-new football stadium in one of the capital’s fanciest neighbourhoods. All three as “gifts” to the Salvadorean people.

All those waiting for Congress to step in and curb Donald Trump’s worst impulses are liable to be disappointed, says Philip Bump in The Washington Post. At the end of his first term, when Trump triggered a violent effort to block the inauguration of Joe Biden, just 17 old-school Republicans voted to impeach him. Only five of those 17 are still in Congress, and more broadly, the turnover has been huge: today just 43% of Republican congressmen were in office before “DC’s Trump era”. For the other 57%, Trump’s Washington is all they’ve ever known.

French tourists are turning their backs on the US, says Jessica Gourdon in Le Monde. One travel agency – Voyageurs du Monde – says the “political context” has caused a 20% drop in trips to America, with people instead “flocking to Canada and Mexico”. Bookings with another company are down 11%, after many who had started planning a holiday dropped the idea when Donald Trump re-entered the White House. The CEO of a third travel firm said Trump’s Oval Office spat with Volodymyr Zelenksy had coincided with a particular dip in interest. Au revoir Amérique!

“Putting the ass in astronaut”

Well, I watched every second of the build-up, flight and aftermath of Blue Origin’s first all-female space trip, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. You’ve heard of one small step for man. “This was one giant leap backwards for womankind.” Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez – who organised the trip, including Oprah’s best friend Gayle King and the pop star Katy Perry – made an 11-minute visit to space sound like “brunch with the girrrrrls”. Tickets, normally $28m each, were covered by Bezos and Sánchez. As the reporters on Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel kept explaining, unlike when men used to go to space in the past, “this mission was all about emotions”.

Those emotions turned out to be “hardcore gibberish”. Perry served up a barely comprehensible word salad about the “feminine divine” and “taking up space”. (Imagine going to actual space and coming back talking about “therapy-speak” space). “I’m so proud of me right now,” said King. When Buzz Aldrin beheld the surface of the moon, he described its “magnificent desolation”. I know how he felt. The main focus this time seemed to be how the women looked. In an Elle magazine interview before the flight, Sánchez showed off the “hot space suits” she’d personally commissioned. “Who would not get glam before the flight?” she asked, rhetorically. “Space is going to finally be glam,” agreed Perry. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” A civil rights activist, who had also been invited, chimed in: “I’m going to be wearing lipstick.” I always thought space travel was futuristic. This felt more like time-travelling back to the “most ludicrous inanities of 2010s girlboss feminism”.

Purists have long decried the “creeping influence of American slang” on language in Britain, says Nicola Woolcock in Air Mail. But new research shows that, thanks to the extraordinary success of TV shows like Love Island and Adolescence, the English are getting their revenge. “Queue” is gaining traction over the more American “line”, as is “maths” over “math”. “Cheeky” is increasingly used to mean a small indulgence, as in a “cheeky pint”. And more Americans than ever are using “cheers” to mean “thank you”. Other British words that have slipped into American parlance include “wonky”, “nutter”, “bonkers”, “trousers”, “bugger”, “kerfuffle”, “posh”, “flummox” and “banter”.

Last week, Nigel Farage told journalists that Kemi Badenoch “doesn’t know what hard work is”. Nobody could say the same of Farage, says Private Eye. In the past six months, the Reform leader has made £219,000 from GB News; £189,000 as an “ambassador” for a firm flogging gold bullion; £2,800 as an influencer on Facebook; £11,000 from YouTube; £5,000 from X; £54,000 from selling personal video messages on Cameo; £65,000 for various public speaking engagements; and £24,000 from The Daily Telegraph – a side-hustle total of around £570,000. Unlike “One Job” Badenoch, Farage works incredibly hard for all manner of paymasters. “Except, possibly, for the people of Clacton.”

It’s one of Royal Mail’s swizzy new “postboxes of the future”, say Zoe Wood and Joanna Partridge in The Guardian, complete with a built-in barcode reader, a large hatch to accept parcels, and a solar-paneled lid that looks like a “jaunty beret”. The prospective pillar boxes – in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire for now – are an attempt by Royal Mail to adapt to a world where almost nobody sends letters anymore, but the success of second-hand selling sites like Vinted means Britain has a “roaring parcel trade”.