Plans to allow airlines to consolidate flight schedules are being finalised by the government, in a bid to stave off a summer of travel disruption caused by a shortage of jet fuel.

How bad is the shortage?
Refineries in the Middle East usually supply around 75% of Europe’s jet fuel, but production is “basically now almost zero”, Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency said last Thursday. The week before, he warned that the continent had “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”. European countries are trying to replace supplies from the Gulf with imports from the US and Nigeria, but if they cannot do so in sufficient quantities, energy experts predict shortages at some airports, resulting in flight cancellations. 

Many airlines had already secured much of their summer-season jet fuel before the Iran conflict doubled the market price. But others are now having to take emergency measures to counter spiralling fuel costs.

What is the UK government doing?
The British government is trying to get ahead of any peak-season flight disruption by giving airlines “rare freedoms to change flight schedules” well in advance, said The Times. The plan is to temporarily relax laws that require airlines to operate part-full flights from UK airports, or risk losing their lucrative take-off and landing slots. Allowing airlines to consolidate flight schedules now, “before any potential fuel shortages”, is intended to minimise disruption and last-minute cancellations in the summer. Of course, it “may mean fewer available flight options than normal”, but those flights are “less likely to be cancelled”.

When will the threat to air travel end?
Should US-Iran hostilities restart or the Strait of Hormuz remain completely blocked to shipping through the summer, the landscape will completely change, said Politico. In this “worst-case scenario”, there would be outright fuel rationing, and many more flights would be cancelled.

“Dying people in California could soon get support from a familiar face,” said The Times, after Nicole Kidman revealed she was training to become a death doula. During her mother’s final days before she died in 2024, the Oscar-winning actor said, she had realised there was “only so much the family could provide”.

“That’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care’,” Kidman told an audience at the University of San Francisco.

Bridging the gap
A death doula works in a “similar capacity” to a birth doula, said PhD candidate Syman Braun Freck on The Conversation. Instead of assisting a mother during pregnancy and childbirth, a death doula is a “community partner offering support to the dying”. They act as a “neutral third party”, inhabiting a space between family, medical professionals and funeral directors.

Death doulas aren’t medically trained. They provide practical, spiritual and emotional support for clients, helping them “navigate fear and uncertainty about death and what might come after it”, said The New York Times. They also assist people expressing their wishes for end-of-life care, help to facilitate “meaningful conversations with their families”, and provide guidance for loved ones left behind.

Meaningful ends
There has been a “rapid” rise in the number of people training to become death doulas in recent years, Dr Emma Clare, chief executive of End of Life Doula UK, told The Times. And the service isn’t only used by those with terminal illnesses: since the pandemic, some “healthy 30-somethings” have also been seeking death doulas to plan a meaningful end to their life when the time comes. 

“I wasn’t surprised” that Kidman chose to embark on her new venture after losing her mother, said death doula Anna Lyons in the same paper. “People often enter into this line of work following grief. You suddenly understand what kind of support is needed.”

It is a “lovely thing that everybody should have the opportunity to utilise”, said Eva Wiseman in The Observer. And the “true benefit” of a celebrity doula could lie not in helping people to find peace in their final days, but instead in bringing “distraction from it”. 

The world’s longest ever tiramisu is displayed at Chelsea Old Town Hall in London. Around 100 Italian chefs used 3,000 eggs and 50,000 ladyfinger biscuits to make the 440.6-metre dessert, toppling the record of 273.5 metres set in Milan in 2019. 

Muhammed Yaylali / Anadolu / Getty Images

“There are few better ways to immerse yourself in the great outdoors than to forage,” said Connor McGovern in National Geographic. As the countryside springs back to life with an abundance of edible plants, now is a great time to start keeping an eye out for ingredients during walks.

April is “peak nettle season”. Packed with minerals and vitamins, the herbaceous perennial is surprisingly versatile and can be added to soups or used to make tea. Best harvested “sooner rather than later”, make sure you wear gloves to avoid getting stung, and only pick the “top few leaves”.

Also keep an eye out for wild garlic, which “often grows in dense clusters on the floor of damp woodland and along shaded hedgerows”, said Helen Keating on the Woodland Trust. The leaves and flowers of the native bulb have an “unmistakable” garlicky smell, and can be used to whip up a “wild garlic pesto”, or mixed with butter to make a “delicious version of garlic bread”.

Cow parsley, also known as wild chervil, is an “excellent all-round” ingredient. The perennial herb features tiny white flowers in “umbrella-like clusters” and “fern-like” leaves, and can be used in the same way as parsley when cooking. A word of warning: be careful not to confuse it with poison hemlock, which has distinctive purple blotches at the base of its stems, and an unpleasant musty odour.

Now is also the time when dandelions “explode across fields, verges, scrubland and any patch of your garden they can set down roots in”, said Carys Matthews on BBC Countryfile. The petals of the bright yellow wildflower can be used to make desserts and “look lovely sprinkled on a cake”.

Zombie politics is the new norm and Starmer’s dying premiership is the latest instalment
Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
Keir Starmer was once “sanctified as the Labour saviour”, writes Nesrine Malik. Now, “the broad conclusion” is that the PM “is beyond rehabilitation”. But the lack of an obvious challenger for the Labour leadership, and the drifting state of our “aimless, scandal-beset government”, is pushing us into a “zombie era”. Our prime minister remains in post out of sheer “inertia”. And “distracted, listless, unambitious and uncreative” leaders fuel “broader political paralysis, and public frustration and disengagement”.

The Scottish election is becoming a farce
Chris Deerin in The New Statesman
Scotland needs a “smack of hard-headed leadership” and “a show of intellectual rigour”, writes Chris Deerin. Instead, the SNP is offering “nutty policies”, including a cap on supermarket food prices that are “already among the cheapest in Europe”. The Holyrood election “has become a bidding war of giveaways” from rival parties, even as economists warn that “a crunch is coming”. With such “momentous challenges” ahead, for party leaders to indulge in “fantasy politics” is a “dereliction of duty”.

The joy of the London Marathon shows it’s possible to outrun the memory of school PE
Kat Brown in The Independent
Watching the London Marathon is an “annual exhale”, writes Kat Brown. For people like me who were put off exercise for life “by enforced school PE lessons”, it’s a reminder that “sport is for everyone”, including “the lopers, the loafers, the ungainly, those without the right trainers”. There’s “no one type of runner” – “blind, in a wheelchair, amputee, thin, fat, tall, small, black, white or brown”, thousands lace up their trainers each year, united by “the determination to do it”.