Marine Le Pen has been barred from running for public office for five years after being convicted of embezzling more than €4m from the EU parliament to finance her National Rally party. She will not be able to run in the 2027 presidential election unless she successfully appeals the verdict. Party leader Jordan Bardella posted on social media that French democracy had been “executed”. Donald Trump says he is “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin. The US president warned that if he decides the Kremlin is responsible for blocking a ceasefire deal in Ukraine then he will impose punitive tariffs on all countries buying Russian oil. A test rocket intended to kickstart satellite launches from Europe fell into the sea and exploded 40 seconds after it took off from Norway yesterday. Isar Aerospace, the German firm that developed the Spectrum rocket, called the failed launch a “great success” that produced useful data and an opportunity to check their “flight termination system”.

Why I believe Lucy Letby is innocent

I’ve come to believe that Lucy Letby is “probably innocent”, says former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption in The Sunday Times. The 35-year-old neonatal nurse was convicted of murdering seven babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016, and trying to murder six others, and as things stand will spend the rest of her life in prison. But those who question the verdict are now “too numerous and too well qualified” to be dismissed as mere troublemakers. The basic problem is that there is no “direct evidence” against her. No one ever saw her doing anything wrong, and she had “no history of psychiatric problems and no discernible motive”. Yet the jury was told there was “no other plausible explanation”.

The prosecution claimed each baby was “stable and healthy” before a “sudden and extraordinary collapse”. But a rigorous investigation led by neonatal specialist Shoo Lee, whose research was used to convict Letby without his knowledge, found that the babies were in fact “very weak”, and that every death was attributable to natural causes easily found in doctors’ notes. The “apparently damning chart” showing that Letby was on shift whenever a baby collapsed was a “statistical fallacy” – it showed only the collapses she was accused of triggering. A more likely explanation for the spike in deaths is that the hospital was “understaffed and under-resourced”. Letby’s only hope now is the Criminal Cases Review Commission. But they refer only 3% of the cases they review, because the Court of Appeal is “extraordinarily reluctant” to overturn convictions – it doesn’t want to reduce the criminal courts to a “dry run”. How horrifying that this young woman may be locked up until she dies, “simply because our system is too rigid”.