WeekDay AM: 10 Things you need to know this morning
Biden's cancer diagnosis, an EU e-gates deal, and Argentina's Nazi past

 
today's international story

Biden diagnosed with 'aggressive' cancer

What happened
Tests have found that Joe Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. Despite the seriousness of the diagnosis, doctors believe the cancer can be effectively managed and Biden is currently considering the treatment options with his family.

Who said what
Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he and First Lady Melania Trump were "saddened to hear about Joe Biden's recent medical diagnosis" and "wish Joe a fast and successful recovery".

Information provided by Biden's personal office revealed that the former US president's cancer is a "more aggressive form of the disease", said the BBC, "characterised by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10". A Gleason score of 9 means the cancerous cells "look very abnormal" and that the disease is "likely to grow quickly", according to Cancer Research UK.

What next?
Biden was the oldest US president in history and his health was a "dominant concern among voters", said The Guardian. Since leaving office Biden has "largely kept a low profile", said The New York Times, spending most of his time in Delaware. His former vice president Kamala Harris said in a post on X that she and her husband Doug Emhoff were remaining hopeful following Biden's diagnosis. "Joe is a fighter," Harris wrote, "and I know he will face this challenge with the same strength, resilience, and optimism that have always defined his life and leadership."

 
 
today's politics story

Minister 'pushing' for deal on EU passport e-gates

What happened
The UK government is close to securing a deal that would let British passport holders use EU airport e-gates in a bid to reduce border queue times, a minister has confirmed.

Who said what
European Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (pictured above) said negotiations were in the "very final hours" ahead of a UK-EU summit today, calling the aim of reducing border queues a "very sensible objective". Asked on BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether the UK would need to follow more EU rules after cutting a deal, he said it would be "a sovereign choice" on "the common standards we wish to align".

It is "hard to exaggerate the significance of this concession", said The Telegraph editorial board. "At a stroke Labour will have sacrificed one of the biggest benefits of Brexit: taking back control of our own rules."

What next?
The UK and EU will hold their first post-Brexit bilateral summit today, which Keir Starmer has called a "really significant moment".

 
 
Today's elections story

Pro-Western candidate Dan wins Romanian election

What happened
The centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicuşor Dan, has won Romania's presidential election. With more than 99% of the vote counted, he holds an unassailable 55% to 44.94% lead over his far-right rival George Simion. As well as Romania, Poland and Portugal also held elections on Europe's "Super Sunday" of polls yesterday, which saw millions cast their vote.

Who said what
Dan (pictured above) had characterised the nation's second round vote as a battle between "a pro-Western and an anti-Western Romania". Simion, a self-professed Trump admirer, has disputed the results, but it is "unclear what steps the populist candidate could take to contest the outcome", said The Guardian.

What next?
As Dan celebrated with his supporters in Romania, over in Poland Warsaw’s liberal mayor Rafal Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of its presidential election, according to an exit poll on Polish TV. A "run-off now looms", said Politico. In Portugal, the centre-right Democratic Alliance party seems poised to triumph in the general election based on an exit poll, although it is expected to fall short of securing an outright majority.

 
 

It's not all bad

Once dismissed by American author Kurt Vonnegut as a pretentious flourish, the semicolon's use in English books has halved since 2000, a study has revealed. Yet despite reports of its demise, broader data shows that the reality is more nuanced. While 67% of British students rarely use the semicolon today, Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that while it went into decline in the early noughties, from 2017 onwards the punctuation mark that Abraham Lincoln once called a "useful little chap" has actually been staging a quiet comeback – one artful pause at a time.

 
 
under the radar

Argentina lifts veil on its past as a refuge for Nazis

The arrival of thousands of Nazis after the Second World War remains "an extremely uncomfortable period" in Argentina's history, said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. And Argentina has not been good at "reckoning" with it.

President Javier Milei, however, "appears to have changed tack". He has released 1,850 documents from the national archives containing details of "prominent Nazi criminals who escaped to Argentina", said the Buenos Aires Herald – including Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death".

The Nazis may be "long dead", but "their hunters insist their work is not done", said The Times. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a US-based human rights organisation, wants to "expose" the so-called "ratlines" – the networks, individuals and institutions that helped Nazis flee Europe and start new lives.

Most of the released documents, a mix of police and intelligence agency files, were declassified in 1992, but "remained almost impossible to access". After meeting with representatives from the Simon Wiesenthal Center this year, Milei pledged to "lift the shroud" with which Argentine governments had "concealed the level of assistance that their predecessors" had offered. The documents, now available to view online, confirm "a long-known dirty secret": the "ease" with which Nazis lived in Argentina. "At one point," said Defence Minister Luis Petri, "Argentina became a haven for Nazis."

Mengele, "notorious" for his inhumane experiments on prisoners, arrived in the South American country in 1949 and lived under "various aliases", said The Times of Israel. But the documents on his life there reveal for the first time that he filed a request to travel to West Germany in 1959 using his real name. This means that "several countries likely had more accurate information on Mengele than previously thought", historian Bogdan Musial told German public broadcaster MDR.

 
 
on this day

19 May 1536

Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, was beheaded at the Tower of London after being found guilty of adultery and treason. A multitude of books, shows, plays and films have since told her story. "Anne Boleyn The Musical" is playing at her childhood home, Hever Castle, this summer.

 
 
Today's newspapers

Talks on a "major reset" of relations between Britain and the EU went "down to the wire," reports The Guardian, but Keir Starmer has been warned he would "betray Brexit" if he put the UK back "under the control" of the EU, the Daily Mail says. A "new cast" of boutique banks is fuelling "fresh fervour" for blank-cheque companies, says the FT, after the trend raised $9bn in the first five months of this year. "You little beauties" says The Mirror, after former Little Mix singer Jesy Nelson gave birth to twins she's named Ocean Jade and Story Munroe.

See the newspaper front pages

 
 
tall tale

Grounds for divorce?

A woman in Greece has divorced her husband of 12 years after ChatGPT "interpreted the remains of his coffee mug as signs of infidelity", according to TechSpot. When asked to read his coffee grounds, the AI chatbot claimed that the man was "fantasising about an affair with a younger woman whose name began with E". His wife filed for divorce three days later. "Real" tasseography "traditionally looks at the foam patterns, the swirl and the saucer" – as well as leftover grounds.

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Arion McNicoll, Harriet Marsden, Sorcha Bradley, Ross Couzens and Chas Newkey-Burden, with illustrations by Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Kent Nishimura / Getty Images; Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty Images; Alex Nicodim / Anadolu / Getty Images; Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images.