The US House of Representatives has approved more than $60bn in military aid for Ukraine, after months of delay due to opposition from many Republicans. Volodymyr Zelensky said the new aid would give Kyiv a “chance for victory” against Russia; the US Senate is expected to approve the bill – which also includes funds for Israel and Taiwan, and a potential ban on TikTok – this week. Rishi Sunak claims the first migrant deportation flights to Rwanda will take place in “10 to 12 weeks”, acknowledging that he will miss his original target of the spring. The PM says the government has an airfield on standby and commercial charter planes booked, with the flagship legislation currently back in parliament for a final day of wrangling. Milan wants to ban the sale of ice cream after midnight in a bid to curb excess noise. Mayor Giuseppe Sala has rejected complaints from business leaders, saying: “we are not changing the rules of the universe but introducing slight limits, so let’s move forward”. 🍦🤌

Why do MPs take such foolish risks?

Why is it, asks Matthew Parris in The Times, that MPs take such crazy risks? The latest is Mark Menzies, a Tory backbencher who phoned an elderly aide in the small hours begging for money because “bad people” were holding him to ransom. Why do they do it? They know they’ll end up on the front page of the Daily Mail if they’re caught with “trousers down, fingers in the till, tractor porn on their laptops or (if male) running down the road in lipstick and high heels”. Yet the very people who need to tread most carefully, tread most dangerously. The reason is simple: “people who want to be MPs are not normal”. The job attracts those with an “enlarged appetite for status”, a diminished appreciation of risk, and a mad sense of destiny. That makes it a “magnet for the rash and reckless”.

What these scandals really show, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, is that any party in power for long enough becomes “enmired in complacency, arrogance and corruption”. Look at Scotland, where the SNP has ruled the roost for 17 years. Nicola Sturgeon’s husband has just been charged as part of an investigation into the misuse of £660,000 in party donations, and no doubt “wee Krankie will herself be fearing a morning knock on the door from the McBill”. Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf, is a “genial dimwit” whose odious hate crimes act is now occupying “every copper who is not already busy investigating the SNP”. Wales, long run as a kind of “fundamentalist satrapy” by Labour, now enjoys the “worst education and health service in the UK”. None of that absolves the Tories, but it goes to show: too long in charge breeds a contempt “not just for the voters but for even the vaguest notions of decency and probity”.

☃️🙃 Ten years ago, Mark Menzies was accused of trying to buy drugs from a teenage Brazilian rent boy. He quit his ministerial position, and the party later made him the government trade envoy to Colombia and Peru.

I’ve been writing a book about the Brexit negotiations, says Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times, and one key point stands out: it’s a myth that Brussels took an “irredeemably hard line and never wavered”. In reality, the “weary pragmatists” in the commission – president Jean-Claude Juncker (generally depicted in the British media as a drunk) and his sidekick Martin Selmayr (dubbed “the monster of Brussels”) – repeatedly went the extra mile for Theresa May. It’s also worth noting how “farcical” the negotiations could be. On one occasion, aides to the then Brexit secretary David Davis “sawed off part of the legs of a chair” so that the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, would be “at a disadvantage in a news conference”.

Zendaya knows how to use fashion to promote her movies, says Vanity Fair. After a winter wearing “tough jumpsuits and futuristic, desert-inspired gowns” to publicise Dune: Part Two, the Hollywood star is on a press tour for her tennis film Challengers – and her outfits “practically come with their own ball boy”. They include a cable-knit tennis jersey by Brunello Cucinelli; stilettos with the heel spiked through a tennis ball, designed by Loewe; a custom Thom Browne gown covered in tiny white tennis racquets; a vintage Ralph Lauren tennis dress worn by Cindy Crawford in 1991; and a bright green Celia Kritharioti gown, with a tennis ball stitched into the navel.

Britain’s economic overlords

Nowhere in the world has the US “asserted its economic dominance” more than in Britain, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman. American firms invest more in the UK than in the rest of Europe combined. In 2020, they earned $707bn in revenue here, 10 times what they made in the whole of Africa. This is not just the “obvious American outposts” on our high streets, like KFC and McDonald’s. The likes of Majestic Wine and Waterstones, those ostensibly British “middle-class temples”, are owned by US private equity firms; so too is Gail’s, “the blousy bakery from Hampstead”. We shop on American websites and unwind by watching American TV shows on American streaming services. No wonder teachers “increasingly observe children in the UK speaking with American accents”.

This is not just because we have a shared language and were “on the same team in World War Two”. Whereas France and Germany block foreign takeovers of strategically important companies, our political leaders have “actively courted” American buyers. In 2010, David Cameron proudly described us as the “junior partner” in the special relationship; our current prime minister worked for an American investment bank and a hedge fund based in California. All this “investment” comes at a cost. HMRC estimates that US multinationals underpaid UK tax by £5.6bn last year. Amazon’s main British division paid no corporation tax here at all in 2021 and 2022. It’s time to “see this relationship for what it is”.

It really is astonishing how much of an outlier the US is on guns, says Aeon. Americans own 400 million firearms, or around 1.2 per capita – double the proportion of the country with the next-highest ownership rate, Yemen. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population, but nearly half of its civilian-owned guns. And not coincidentally, it carries “the unfortunate distinction” of being the only country in the world where firearms are the leading cause of child and adolescent death.

It’s a study for an infamous portrait of Winston Churchill, which is being auctioned in June after seven decades in private hands. The final work, painted by the artist Graham Sutherland to mark Churchill’s 80th birthday in 1954, didn’t go down well with its sitter, who dismissed it as a “remarkable example of modern art” – the portrait eventually ended up being burnt on a bonfire. This oil study survived, however, and will be on display at Sotheby’s in London and New York before its sale.