Presidential decisions can mean life or death for millions around the world, that’s why constitutional safeguards exist. But do they work in practice?

Donald Trump’s cognitive skills are amazing. So amazing! So great! So much better than any other dumb presidential contender you could mention, at least according to Trump himself, who bragged once again last week of how he had repeatedly aced what he calls “a very hard test for a lot of people”. (It’s thought he means a screening tool for mild cognitive impairment in elderly people.)

Sure, the 79-year-old leader of the free world recently interrupted a cabinet meeting in the middle of a war to ramble on at length about a conversation he supposedly had with the head of the Sharpie pen company over supplying bespoke presidential felt-tips, of which the firm said it could find no record. And made a baffling joke about Pearl Harbor during a press conference in front of an alarmed-looking Japanese prime minister. And called the strait of Hormuz the “strait of Trump”, before adding that that was absolutely deliberate because “there are no accidents with me”. But anyway, to be clear, his mental state is great. The greatest!

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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By far the biggest musician to have joined the membership-based platform, Dylan’s posts have so far been puzzling – and therefore entirely in character

A couple of years back, the august music writer David Hepworth came up with a great line about Bob Dylan. Dylan, he averred, “is like China: we can see what he’s doing, but never quite work out why he’s doing it”. That’s certainly true about the unexpected launch of the 84-year-old singer-songwriter’s Patreon. Everything about it is confusing.

For one, there’s the choice of platform. Plenty of major music stars have flocked to the newsletter provider Substack in recent years to share their thoughts or show their workings and, perhaps, earn a little cash on the side: everyone from Patti Smith and Dolly Parton to Charli xcx and Rosalía. But Patreon, where fans pay monthly subscriptions for exclusive content from all sorts of creators – podcasters, visual artists – has never really taken off with big rock and pop musicians: the biggest name it could boast, until now, was Ben Folds.

The looming oil crisis caused by the Iran war gives the Conservative leader a platform from which to jump to the wrong conclusions

Losing sleep over the war in Iran? Worried sick about the cost of living? Can’t pay your energy bills? Then relax. Because Kemi Badenoch has a displacement activity for you.

It’s becoming increasingly easy to understand the Conservative leader by viewing her as a hyperactive five-year-old at the back of the class who is constantly disruptive. Who can’t get through a lesson without some kind of attention-seeking behaviour. Who has a constant desire to be indulged even though her first reactions are invariably wrong. Who flies into a temper tantrum when anyone dares to challenge her.

Their shows caused mayhem. Now Tamm Reynolds – AKA Midgitte Bardot – is really going for the jugular, hitting back at prejudice with a wild new act

Most performers want attention when they’re on stage. Tamm Reynolds, however, gets it all the time – even when not dressed in fishnets and push-up bra as their alter ego, Midgitte Bardot. “I also like having my bush and ass out,” Reynolds adds. Before we meet at Woolwich station in London, where the artist has kindly agreed to pick me up in their car, they send me a text: “I’m assuming you know what I look like.” Sure enough, they are hard to miss. As a non-binary trans drag queen with dwarfism, Reynolds must be in a minority of one.

Yet to define Reynolds purely in those terms would be to do them a massive disservice, since they are also a writing and performance powerhouse. Three years ago, in Travis Alabanza’s queer cabaret revue Sound of the Underground, Midgitte climbed aboard a cherry-picker in order to sing a filthy blues rock tune called Hot Piss, brandishing a jug of frothy yellow liquid. The climax can’t adequately be described in a family newspaper, but it resulted in the loudest cheer I’ve ever heard at the Royal Court. Eat your heart out, Jerusalem.

‘Zombie filler’, or using cadaver tissue that’s been sterilized and branded as Alloclae, is the latest cosmetic surgery rage. Is it safe?

The residential block at 655 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is so storied it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has housed luminaries from bestselling romance author Danielle Steel to esteemed yachtsmen and the 20th-century heir William Kissam Vanderbilt II. A more recent resident, on the ground floor, is Alpha Male Plastic Surgery, a clinic offering a broad menu of elective procedures catering to the needs of the modern man.

On a coffee table in the waiting room, fanned-out brochures tout facelifts, non-surgical penile implants, and Tesamorelin – an FDA-approved peptide injection targeting stubborn visceral belly fat. Flatscreen monitors mounted behind the front desk shuffle through ads for a “Full Male Model Makeover”, proprietary procedures like BodyBanking® and the 360 TorsoTuck®, and for the gym rat who habitually skips leg day, even “Amazing New Calves”.

MAFS Australia fans are appalled that a horrendous dinner party wasn’t pulled – but it’s not without precedent. From nightmarish model makeovers to a grotesque fight night, here are the worst scenes that caused outrage

After so many years and such incontrovertible proof that the experiment never works, you have to assume that Married at First Sight now attracts a very specific type of applicant. Someone happy to put short-term notoriety over long-term emotional peace, maybe, or someone who would gladly become an object of scorn and ridicule if it meant people noticed them.

On the most recent episode of Married at First Sight Australia, this nightmarish mishmash of problematic personalities finally boiled over. A contestant named Brook Crompton, who had previously left the show, returned for a surprise appearance at a dinner party, with the apparent intention of bullying everyone else as unpleasantly as possible. Crompton tore a strip through the other guests, spewing arbitrary hatred at all the other brides. The whole thing was so hard to watch that Crompton ended up grovelling on Instagram that: “This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my core and I hope that Australia will one day see this.”

Oil prices on course for record monthly rise amid risk of further escalation and mixed messaging from US

Donald Trump has threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power stations and fresh water plants if Tehran does not agree to peace terms “shortly”, even as he claimed diplomatic progress in ending the war that was instigated by the US and Israel.

Tehran has remained defiant during the month-long conflict, describing US peace proposals as “excessive, unrealistic and irrational” and firing waves of missiles at Israel.

Unlikely grouping of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey steps up efforts to broker ceasefire and curb dominance of Iran and Israel

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The meeting on Sunday of the foreign ministers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in Islamabad not only represented the best hope for a ceasefire in Iran but was also the embryo for a new order designed to curb Israeli and Iranian dominance after the war.

Although the four nations have met as a quartet before, the one-day meeting of foreign ministers in Islamabad on Sunday was, in a way, the official opening ceremony of an initiative that is intriguing diplomats.

War is testing operating principle that has guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it

“Let me say, we’ve won,” he told a rally in Kentucky on 11 March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,” he promised a fundraising dinner on 25 March.

Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.

Prime minister says 7 May vote is coming at time of ‘war on two fronts’ as Labour braces for heavy losses at polls

• UK politics live – latest updates

The 7 May elections are taking place against a backdrop of “war on two fronts”, Keir Starmer has said, as he pledged action to tackle the resurgent cost of living crisis.

Launching Labour’s English local elections campaign in Wolverhampton on Monday, the prime minister said: “We’re facing a war on two fronts – the Ukraine war, now four and a bit years in … and now the Iran war, which I know is causing huge concern.