Styles is playing a record 12 nights at Wembley stadium and 30 at Madison Square Garden, as demand for big artists soars – and audience expectation along with it

Selling out a venue such as London’s O2 Arena used to be considered a high point of an artist’s career. Now, selling out just one night there might seem a bit underwhelming. Raye and Olivia Dean will play six nights apiece at the 20,000-capacity hall this year; Dave is playing four, Ariana Grande is playing a whopping 10. Harry Styles, never one to be outdone, last month announced a staggering 30 dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, with more than 11 million people applying for presale access, as well as a record-breaking 12 nights at Wembley stadium: the most on a single leg of a tour. Taylor Swift managed a mere eight.

Swift’s Eras tour, which made more than $2bn (£1.6bn), doesn’t seem a complete outlier any more: Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour has lasted four years and made $1.5bn, and the Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour is also four years deep and has crossed the $1bn mark. It’s even de rigueur for world leaders to get involved in the fight for tickets, with the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, asking the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, to help book more BTS shows in her country, just as the then Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, publicly asked Swift to come to Canada. Meanwhile, the Singaporean government paid for Swift’s six shows in the country to be a south-east Asia exclusive.

A wartime boom in Russia has given way to sluggish growth, tax hikes and squeezed public services. Will it affect the conflict in Ukraine?

Western leaders were bullish when they imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half,” said the then US president, Joe Biden, in March, a month into the war.

With three years left and a huge majority, Labour can govern with more humility and deliver real change. But with Starmer at the helm? I can’t see it

The smell of death is in the Westminster air. Labour’s King Rat Peter Mandelson has again cast his sulphurous odour of villainy around the palace, and contamination may drag a decent, well-intentioned Labour leader down with him.

That’s the tragedy. Nothing about Keir Starmer’s life purpose, attitudes, tastes, morals or values resembles Mandelson’s and his venal world of corrupted power, where mega-billions buy anyone anything. Not friends; they had nothing in common. For all Mandelson’s pedigree, reaching into the party’s past, he never seemed to have a single Labour value or egalitarian instinct. Labour was a vehicle.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat is Labour from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party?
Book tickets here or at guardian.live

In need of a last-minute gift? We’ve tested the most beautiful blooms, including sustainable, British-grown and same-day delivery options, for Valentine’s Day and beyond

• The best letterbox gifts

I pride myself on being an excellent gift-giver, and I truly believe the uplifting feeling of finding flowers on the doorstep is hard to beat (unless they’re from an ex who “just wants to talk” – never be that guy).

Flowers are such an easy win for the gift-giver, too. Whether it’s Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day or “just because”, there’s a plethora of online flower delivery services with a range of offerings. Some provide next-day delivery (great if you’ve forgotten an important date and are scrambling); some will deliver flowers monthly via subscription; some will even slip in a box of chocolates, a bottle of fizz or a candle in the delivery.

Best flower delivery overall:
Marks & Spencer

Best budget flower delivery:
Scilly Flowers

Jeff Bezos gives yet another powerful person an uncritical profile. The point of this one: if we’d listened to the king, there would be no climate crisis – even if some of his ideas are a bit woo-woo

We find ourselves at an interesting moment in the streaming wars; one where Amazon’s programming policy has apparently shifted to simply giving a massive platform to authority. Last week saw the release of the Melania Trump film (a grating vanity project it paid $75m for) and this week it’s our turn, with the platform releasing the King Charles documentary Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision.

Why Jeff Bezos would want to curry favour with the most powerful people on the planet by paying to air uncritical profiles of them is anyone’s guess. Either way, as a film, Finding Harmony is intensely frustrating to watch. It is ostensibly a relatively important climate crisis documentary, undone by its own innate sense of chippy entitlement. Perhaps a better title would have been King Charles: Needless to Say I Had the Last Laugh.

The actor Wagner Moura and writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho explain how the Brazilian thriller mirrors their experiences of political corruption and why they are compelled to speak out

Unusually for a political period drama that is not in the English language, runs nearly three hours and peppers its authentic portrayal of a military dictatorship with sight gags and gory shootouts, The Secret Agent has transpired to be quite the awards magnet. Best picture and best actor, for its star Wagner Moura (who recently won a Golden Globe), are two of the four categories in which it will compete at next month’s Oscars.

The nominations haven’t yet been announced when I meet Moura in a London hotel room, but it is unlikely they will have turned the head of this seasoned 49-year-old. He has years of experience: he headlined the Elite Squad thrillers, played Pablo Escobar in the streaming hit Narcos, and joined Parker Posey as husband-and-wife assassins in the TV version of Mr & Mrs Smith. He exudes relaxed, matinee idol charisma, as well as the same air of decency and humility as Armando, his character in The Secret Agent. A widowed academic hiding out in a refugees’ safe house in Recife at the height of the dictatorship in 1977, Armando is plotting to flee Brazil on a fake passport. To do so, he will need to outrun the hitmen hired to kill him by a vengeful industrialist.

Pressure continues to build on Keir Starmer to remove his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney

Meanwhile, the Labour MP Ian Byrne has “the red flags were there” at the time of Mandelson’s appointment, saying “it was well-known what he was”.

Speaking to Sky News, the left-winger said Keir Starmer “needs a miracle” to save his premiership.

I’m sure he is angry because I’d be angry if I was him. However, he should have listened to the people who were flagging up that this was a catastrophic appointment.

And he didn’t. And that’s why we are here today.

What he’s enabled by putting Mandelson in that job… and that may come out, we don’t know what he’s done while he’s been in there.

He wasn’t the vetting officer here. We do know that there were lies told during that vetting procedure. Now that’s not me saying putting any blame on anybody else.

The government ultimately oversees this and makes the decision. And that’s why the apology is really important.

Labour Together allegedly hired company to look at Sunday Times and Guardian reporters after article about donations

• UK politics live – latest updates

A thinktank previously run by a Labour minister and the prime minister’s chief of staff is alleged to have paid a PR firm to investigate journalists who were looking into its funding.

Labour Together, once run by Morgan McSweeney and then by Josh Simons, now a Cabinet Office minister, hired APCO Worldwide to investigate journalists from the Guardian, the Sunday Times and other outlets and to identify their sources, according to claims in the Substack publication Democracy for Sale.

Senior officials meet for indirect talks, amid a crisis that has raised fears of a military action between Iran and the US

• Analysis: Iran is betting Trump does not have a plan for regime change

• US and Iran talks brought back from the brink after White House relents on move to Oman

It is the first time the US and Iran have sat down for face-to-face negotiations since June last year, when Israel launched attacks on Iran that sparked a war marked by tit-for-tat airstrikes, with the US also joining the fray. It effectively ended the US-Iran talks that were held in the weeks prior to the conflict aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement.

More recently, Donald Trump has been threatening to strike Iran for more than a month and just last week warned that an “armada” of US warships had reached the Persian Gulf. This recent clash began after Trump said he would strike Iran if it killed protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations that swept the country last month. Human rights groups say thousands of people were killed during the brutal government crackdown on those protests.

Vladimir Alekseyev in critical condition after being shot several times by an unidentified assailant

Hundreds of protesters gathered in Milan on Friday to oppose the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the closure of schools and streets in the city ahead of the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Games.

Reuters reported that protesters – mostly students with signs reading “ICE out” – assembled in Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico University in the eastern part of the city.