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.

‘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”.

If there is any consistency to Trump’s policy, it is a series of frantic attempts to justify his original blunder and extricate himself from its dire consequences

Donald Trump has lost his Iran war. He is the Iranian hostage. Unlike the US embassy personnel captured as hostages for 444 days, Trump threw himself into Iranian hands. Less than a month into his “short-term excursion”, his stated objectives have been scattered to the winds. There is no regime change, no uprising and no access to oil wealth along the Venezuelan model. The decapitation gambit – assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian leadership – has failed to destroy the regime. Despite the massacre, it is Trump who stands exposed to slings and arrows for the rashest military adventure since Custer at Little Bighorn.

Iran maintains a chokehold on the strait of Hormuz and, through its narrowest passage of 21 miles, on the global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts a spike of inflation to 4.2% in the US, a 40% increase since Trump returned to office. The stock market has dived into correction territory. Iran has also demonstrated its capacity to wreak existential destruction on the Gulf states whose rulers’ delusion of their invulnerability and US protection has been shattered. “I’m the opposite of desperate,” Trump declared on 26 March. “I don’t care.”

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.”

Aarti Holla-Maini of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs is primed to spot a potential planetary strike – and a year ago, she thought the moment had come

The UN official had trained for this moment. She had run drills and table-top exercises at her offices in Vienna, housed inside a grey and unassuming 1970s concrete tower complex next to the Danube River.

Aarti Holla-Maini, a British lawyer with a background in the satellite business, needed to have at least played out the scenario step by step. As the director of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), she was required to know exactly what she was expected to do if – and it was a big if – she were informed that a significantly large asteroid was on a possible collision course with Earth. Or, as she says with a laugh: “Armageddon.”

Judicial independence is under threat as populist politicians target judges and authoritarian governments attempt constitutional reforms

• Revealed: Five EU governments found to ‘consistently’ dismantle rule of law

In March last year, a Paris court found Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement and barred her from running in next year’s presidential race in France. The far-right figurehead took to the airwaves to slam a “political decision” and “denial of democracy”.

Le Pen, who has appealed, said she had been subjected to a “tyranny of judges” and a “political assassination”. The “system” had dropped “a nuclear bomb” on her. The presiding judge was then threatened by others on social media and her home address shared.

US president adds that he’s in discussions with a ‘new and more reasonable regime’ in a social media post

• Full report: Iran accuses US of plotting ground assault while publicly seeking talks

• Analysis: what the Houthis’ entry into the Iran war means for the conflict and the wider region

Donald Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds (454kg) of uranium from Iran, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing unnamed US officials.

The mission would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer, the report says.

But the president remains generally open to the idea, according to the officials, because it could help accomplish his central goal of preventing Iran from ever making a nuclear weapon.

The combined effect of both waterways being shut to commercial traffic from countries that neither the Iranians nor Houthis favour would be devastating.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s remark that “the policy of a state lies in its geography” has never seemed more apt.

The meeting of foreign ministers was, in a way, the opening ceremony of an initiative that is intriguing diplomats

• 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.