Chancellor to tell party she is making steep cuts to avoid similar fallout to that which followed 2022 mini-budget

Rachel Reeves will raise the spectre of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in the lead-up to next week’s spring statement as she tries to persuade her Labour colleagues to accept the steepest departmental cuts since austerity .

The chancellor will tell her fractious party she has decided to cut public spending rather than increasing borrowing because of the risk of a similar fallout to that which followed the then prime minister’s disastrous fiscal statement in 2022.

Airlines and passengers likely to face days of disruption after fire at substation causes travel chaos

• Heathrow airport closed –live updates

Depending on whose fault it eventually turns out to be, this was a power cut in just the wrong – or right – place. As Britain’s biggest airport, Europe’s main gateway to the Americas, and the apple of Rachel Reeves’ eye for growth, Heathrow’s shutdown gave a supersized significance to a substation fire.

Some were quickly out of the blocks to question the creaking state of national infrastructure. Where were the back-up systems – or indeed the further failsafes when the back-ups went up in smoke? Should Heathrow be better prepared, given the critical importance of the hub airport – not least to the 250,000 or so international travellers who were expecting to fly in or out yesterday?

Dispute between Oxford and Cambridge proves even rowing can be a contact sport when it comes to blue boats

With almost 200 years of intense rivalry the Boat Race has already inspired several major films, and after an extraordinary week Hollywood producers now have plenty more material to go at.

What began last December as a disagreement between various alumni of Oxford and Cambridge over eligibility criteria for next month’s race exploded into a full-blown incident this week, with allegations of “slimy tactics,” academic snobbery and female rowers being viewed as collateral damage in a dispute between the male boat clubs.

President says plans for potential war with China would not be shared with billionaire due to his business interests

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Donald Trump said on Friday that plans for possible war with China should not be shared with Elon Musk because of his business interests, a rare admission that the billionaire faces conflicts of interests in his role as a senior adviser to the US president.

Trump rejected reports that Musk would be briefed on how the United States would fight a hypothetical war with China, saying: “Elon has businesses in China. And he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”

The Russian president is the impediment to US proposals for a ceasefire. But Europe knows that this administration is unlikely to act accordingly

As attention focused on diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine this week, the UN human rights office published a powerful reminder of its horrors. A new report on children’s lives since the Russian invasion was prefaced with a nursery director’s description of their response to shelling: “Some children fall to their knees – their legs do not move because they are afraid. There are no tears, no crying or screaming, the child just freezes. One child stood there holding a toy and did not let go of it all day.”

These are the survivors. Hundreds of children have been killed since February 2022. Hundreds of thousands are internally displaced, and 1.7 million are refugees, many of them separated from a parent. At least 200 have been forcibly taken to Russia. Ukraine matters – not just strategically, but humanely.

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A new prize recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issue of our time

No novelist should ignore the climate emergency, Paul Murray, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told the Observer last year : “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, this week the inaugural shortlist was announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include Orbital by Samantha Harvey , set during one day on the International Space Station and the winner of last year’s Booker prize; time-travelling romcom The Ministry of Time from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen; And So I Roar , about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s The Morningside . All the shortlisted authors are women.

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NTSB says there was ‘no excuse’ for missed safety check and calls for urgent assessment of 68 bridges across US

The top US transportation safety agency said this week that the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse last March, after a cargo ship hit a support pillar, had been 30 times above the acceptable risk of breaking up if a vessel struck it and there was “no excuse” for a vital safety check having been missed years before.

In its investigation of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge across a vital shipping channel in Baltimore, which killed six construction workers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that the Maryland transportation authority failed to complete a recommended structural vulnerability assessment that would have shown the bridge was extremely prone to a collapse.

David Heyman and Amy Pascal will take the roles long held by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson with the next 007 still a source of continual speculation

Amazon is lining up Harry Potter’s David Heyman and Spider-Man’s Amy Pascal to oversee the James Bond franchise for its studio MGM.

In news first reported by Puck , the two heavyweight producers are said to be the choice of senior Amazon-MGM executives Mike Hopkins, Jen Salke, and Courtenay Valenti and the studio is now negotiating deals with the pair.

First services will be repatriation flights with people still told not to travel to the airport unless advised to do so by airline

• Counter-terror police leading fire inquiry
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Airlines’ carefully choreographed networks depend on airplanes and crews being in specific locations at specific times. Dozens of air carriers will have to hurriedly reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around after the Heathrow closure.

“The other question is, ‘What will airlines do to deal with the backlog of passengers?’”, said travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt with Atmosphere Research Group. “It’s going to be a chaotic couple of days.”