Donald Trump has chosen Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate. The former president made the announcement at the Republican convention in Milwaukee last night, wearing a gauze bandage over his ear in his first public appearance since the assassination attempt on Saturday. It came hours after a Florida judge dismissed Trump’s classified documents case, a huge win for his campaign. Vaughan Gething has resigned as first minister of Wales less than four months after assuming the role. The 50-year-old has been mired in scandal over donations to his campaign and the sacking of a minister for allegedly leaking texts to the media. Gareth Southgate has stepped down as England manager. The 53-year-old, who spent 102 games in charge, led the team to two consecutive Euros finals, in 2021 and 2024, and a World Cup semi-final in 2018. “It’s time for change,” he said, “and for a new chapter.”

Prepare for a “hot Keir summer”

The new Labour government has made certain female journalists “come over all peculiar”, says Kathleen Stock in UnHerd. Caitlin Moran documented her “current heightened arousal levels” in The Times, claiming that every middle-aged woman she knew felt “fruity” the day after Keir Starmer arrived in No 10. Then there was some “lady hack” in Metro breathlessly describing how the “new Daddy in town” – aka the Prime Minister – was “turning up the heat in Westminster”. And The Spectator’s Zoe Strimpel engaged in a forensic analysis of the “beefcake adjacent” leader and his “rugby player face”. Starmer, she marvelled, “looks like he could actually take someone on in a fight. He looks like if furious he could be dangerous. He looks, in short, like what one used to think men ought to look like.”

Reading all this, I had to look up some recent footage of the man to “check which one of us had lost the plot”. Sure enough, I found the familiar “stolid features and adenoidal vowels” of a 61-year-old chartered surveyor, and not, as I had momentarily been led to believe, Russell Crowe in Gladiator. I can’t help wondering if these pieces are aimed at “covertly establishing their authors’ fealty”, like apparatchiks in Pravda “rhapsodising over Khrushchev’s beneficence” or some toady on CNN insisting Joe Biden’s fine. Moran protests that her torrid feelings are really the result of a “competence kink”. It’s depressing that “capacities basic to human functioning are now being treated by some as a niche sexual fetish”. But it seems we’re in for a “hot Keir summer”.

Donald Trump isn’t the first former president to survive an assassination attempt while trying to win back the White House, says Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had barely begun a speech in Milwaukee when he was shot by a would-be assassin’s bullet that lodged in his chest. But Teddy was a “toughie”. Concluding that the slug hadn’t reached his lung – because he wasn’t coughing blood – he decided to finish the speech and continued talking for another 50 minutes.

Programmer Robert Alvarez has made an online game in which the player must escape increasingly complex traps using only a grappling hook. It’s surprisingly addictive. Try for yourself here.

From Never Trumper to running mate

Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate, JD Vance, is “undeniably talented and smart”, says The Washington Post. The 39-year-old was elected to the Senate just two years ago “with no prior governing experience”. He rose to prominence with his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a declining steel town with a drug addict mother, before serving in Iraq and graduating from Yale Law School. And for a long time, he was no fan of Trump. While promoting his book, he called himself a “Never Trump guy”, describing him as “noxious” and an “idiot”. In a private message to a friend, he mused whether Trump was “America’s Hitler”.

Since then, Vance has dramatically changed course to become one of the former president’s most ardent supporters. Like Trump, he has positioned himself as “socially conservative and economically illiberal”. He supported a national 15-week abortion ban when he ran for the Senate – later softening his stance in line with Trump’s own evolving position – and often decries the power of big business. He is adept at “weaponising” the MAGA base: he said recently that if he had been vice president on January 6 2021, he would not have certified the 2020 election. And he echoes Trump’s thinking on foreign affairs, saying in 2022: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” With the “unapologetically populist and isolationist” Trump-Vance ticket, Republicans are closing the book on Ronald Reagan’s view of America’s role in the world.

🧔‍♂️💈 Forget Vance’s politics, says Luke Winkie in Slate – one way in which he stands out already is his facial hair. Most veeps are clean shaven: the last vice president with any facial hair whatsoever was Charles Curtis, who sported a “neat moustache” between 1929 and 1933. More importantly, Trump apparently hates beards. But when asked if Vance’s facial hair put him off, the former president replied: “He looks good. He looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”

Two dogs have been trained to sniff out post-traumatic stress disorder with 90% accuracy, says Good News Network. In a pilot study at Dalhousie University in Canada, a Golden Retriever named Ivy and a German Shepherd-Belgian Malinois mix called Callie were trained to recognise smells associated with trauma and stress on human breath, allowing them to detect when someone was about to experience an oncoming PTSD flashback before it happened. They were then taught to help patients by interrupting episodes and providing support. 🐶🧠

It’s a 161-million-year-old stegosaurus skeleton set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York this week. Apex, as the dino is known, is billed as the most complete stegosaurus ever discovered, measuring 11 feet tall and approximately 27 feet long from nose to tail. Sotheby’s says the specimen, which was unearthed in Colorado in 2022, is one of only eight or nine near-complete stegosaurus skeletons in the world. The guide price is between $4m and $6m; put your bid in here.