Mark Carney has led Canada’s Liberal Party to electoral victory, overturning a 23-point lead held by the Conservatives just 100 days ago, with a campaign centred on defying Donald Trump. “America wants our land, our resources, our water,” the former governor of the Bank of England said in his victory speech. “President Trump is trying to break us so he can own us. That will never happen.” The power is back on in Spain and Portugal after yesterday’s widespread outages, though schools remain closed amid major disruption to travel networks. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez says the cause of the blackouts, which left the two countries without working trains, metros, traffic lights, phone connections and internet access, is still unknown. Champagne could save your life. Researchers from Fudan University in China found that a higher intake of bubbly is associated with lower risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Cheers.

Good riddance to Elon Musk

The world’s richest man is finally being “peeled away” from his role in Washington, says Ross Barkan in The New Statesman, and “good riddance”. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was the “worst of all worlds”: the measly savings were nowhere near the $1trn promised and have made no impact on the government’s “yawning deficit”. But more than 275,000 federal workers have been sacked, creating chaos and making it harder to collect taxes and fund scientific research. Cabinet secretaries are sick of Musk’s meddling, and more importantly, so are voters. When he invested heavily in a Wisconsin judicial race earlier this month, his candidate was soundly beaten. “All the Democrat had to do was invoke Musk.”

The Tesla boss’s return to selling electric cars may not be so glorious either, says Patrick George in The Atlantic. Last week, the world’s most valuable car company posted “abysmal” first-quarter earnings for 2025, with profits down 71% from the same time last year. On an investor call, a bitter-sounding Musk blamed the company’s misfortune on protestors agitating against his work at Doge and his boosting of far-right politicians. It’s hard to see how this problem gets solved. American EV fans, who tend to lean left, “don’t want to buy Musk’s cars any more”. In Europe, the billionaire’s overt support for Germany’s AfD has had a similar effect: sales have tanked by double digits. At the same time, competition from China is booming. Suddenly, Musk is up against dozens of Tesla-like companies that have taken his idea and run wild, with more advanced features, faster charging times and better autonomous driving. The great disruptor is beginning to look like a “legacy car company”, struggling to work out what’s next.

Donald Trump Jr has teamed up with a couple of Republican mega-donors – and the sons of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – to launch “Executive Branch”, says Mike Allen in Axios, an invite-only Washington members’ club with joining fees of $500,000. The lucky few, who’ll be “tightly screened for loyalty” to the US president, will enjoy unfettered access to high-fliers in the Trump administration away from the prying eyes of the press. The club already has a waiting list, and some people are offering to pay double to skip the queue.

The Belfast rap group Kneecap has apologised for old footage of one of its members saying “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” and “kill your local MP”. The trio have also been recorded appearing to shout “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” at a gig, and at the Coachella music festival in California last weekend the screen during their performance displayed the words “fuck Israel, free Palestine”. Everyone’s understandably very cross about all this, says Adam James Pollock in The Critic. But why is anyone surprised? The name Kneecap openly celebrates the popular paramilitary practice of shooting people in the leg; one member goes by the moniker DJ Próvaí, an Irish slang word for members of the provisional IRA; and they perform songs with endearing titles like “Get Your Brits Out”. What did we expect?

Why can’t we deport foreign criminals?

An immigration tribunal recently ruled that a jailed Congolese drug dealer, Mr X, could remain in Britain, says Jenni Murray in The Times. The reason? The tribunal decided that deportation would be “too harsh” on Mr X’s son, who is a haemophiliac and requires weekly injections. This is far from an isolated case. There’s the Pakistani paedophile who has been allowed to stay because deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his young daughters, and the Jamaican rapist who avoided being sent home because his long criminal record might prevent him rejoining a witness protection programme there. A jailed Somalian child rapist was even allowed to stay in the UK because he couldn’t be treated for depression in Mogadishu and “might be charged with dodging military service”.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has now announced that asylum seekers will be denied the right to stay in the UK if they’re convicted of sexual offences. But it’s long been clear that the balance between offenders’ rights and those of British citizens has “gone awry”. Fewer than 4,000 foreign criminals were deported in 2023, down around 40% from a decade ago. In the 13 years to 2021, 2,400 foreign criminals have been allowed to stay on human rights grounds alone, and another 3,600 have succeeded on a combination of arguments. It would be easy to praise the “hopefulness” of these decisions. But the police are stretched enough as it is – the crime clear-up rate has fallen from 29% in 2000 to less than 6% in 2023 – and these cases only further alienate the public over immigration. “Judges have become overly sympathetic to the individual in front of them,” a barrister told me, “and not enough to the public.”

Samuel L Jackson’s turn as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction is “one of the most iconic performances in the past 30 years”, says Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment. But he almost didn’t get the part. The American actor was such a small name at that point that his agent assumed he had only been called to the audition to read lines for bigger stars. When the producer called Jackson’s agent to say he was casting someone else, the agent realised the mistake and insisted on Jackson returning for a proper audition. So back he went, gave the “Ezekiel 25:17” speech everything he had, and that was that.

When Pope John Paul II first visited the US in 1979 to meet Jimmy Carter, says Edward Luce in The New York Times, he arranged to have dinner with the president’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The two men, both born in Poland, shared an obsession with the Soviet Union, and discussed how they could work together to weaken Moscow’s grip over its captive nations. Brzezinski was “stunned” by the pontiff’s geopolitical knowledge, joking that Carter was more like a religious leader and the pope was more of a world statesman. From that dinner on, the two became such “intimate allies” that Brzezinski’s White House speed dial had a P for “pope”.

They’re competitors in Germany’s annual finger wrestling championships, says Philipp Jenne in Associated Press. Fingerhakeln, which dates back to the 19th century, is gloriously simple: two lederhosen-clad competitors sit opposite one another, each with one finger hooked through a small leather loop, and try to pull their opponent across the table. Dislocated digits are common, but Georg Hailer, chairman of Germany’s oldest fingerhakeln club, insists it’s not dangerous. “Of course, there will be open wounds and small injuries on the fingers from time to time,” he says. “It looks worse than it really is, because there’s blood.”