Politics

To the Commons, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is speaking to the Liaison Committee before the House rises for Easter recess. The PM has spent much of this afternoon fending off questions on growth, healthcare and British industry – but it was on his government’s recently proposed welfare cuts that the Labour leader went on the attack, hitting out for the first time at the Office for Budget Responsibility. Defending Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall’s benefits reforms announced last month, Sir Keir took at pop at the OBR over the way it scores the impact of the Labour lot’s welfare cuts. Speaking to the committee, Starmer insisted: It is

A biotech company claims it has facilitated the first howl of the dire wolf (an extinct canine) heard for 10,000 years. And there’s a video. A scientist holds up two white-coated cubs in his arms. Although their howling, really, is more like a series of yelps, they are meant to be the first of something big. They’re called Romulus and Remus, Colossal Biosciences, says. And they are the beginning of a new project to bring back from the grave a long-gone wolf species. A species that is often in fiction, often in fossil, but not often live and in colour. The de-extinction (which is what Colossal, never notably underselling, calls

Labour has evidently not learned from its recent troubles with the Sentencing Council over guidelines which risked undermining the very foundations of the criminal justice system. The government now has plans to create a new enforcement body to tackle ‘pay discrimination’ against ethnic minorities and disabled people. The equalities minister, Seema Malhotra, has set up a call for evidence which will search for advice on the planned formation of an equal pay regulatory and enforcement unit – a proposed quango that would work with the trade union movement to strengthen the implementation of equal pay rights. In a statement plucked straight from the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ playbook, Malhotra declared that