Blaze which killed Jennie Logan, 30, Martyn Sadler, 38, and David Chester, 57, reminder of ‘courage and sacrifices’ made by firefighters

Tributes have been paid to the three people, including two firefighters, who were killed in a fire at a business park in Bicester.

Firefighters Jennie Logan, 30, and Martyn Sadler, 38, were killed at the former RAF base in Oxfordshire. David Chester, 57, a father of two from Bicester, who worked at the site, also died.

Russian peace negotiator invokes Peter the Great’s 21-year struggle to defeat Sweden, as Putin is fond of doing

Peter the Great’s long war against Sweden – a grinding conflict that claimed countless Russian lives – is rarely held up as a model for modern diplomacy. Yet behind closed doors on Friday, during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, cited it as an explicit warning: Moscow was prepared to fight for as long as it took.

Just like when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the Great Northern War in the early 18th century began with humiliating defeats for Moscow. The tsarist Russian army was ill-prepared, poorly armed and easily outmanoeuvred. But instead of backing down, Tsar Peter I dug in. He conscripted peasants by the tens of thousands, poured resources into rebuilding his army, and waited. Twenty-one years later, he emerged victorious.

Labour members from Leeds West and Pudsey to write letter to chancellor over plans to reduce Pip payments

Rachel Reeves’ local Labour party will call for the chancellor to abandon her plans to cut disability benefits as rebellion among MPs over the policy grows.

The Leeds West and Pudsey constituency Labour party (CLP), which campaigned to return Reeves to parliament last year as its MP, has agreed to write to her “as soon as possible” to make clear it does not support the cuts.

From Georgian grandeur in York to a detached home with slope-defying garden in Lewes, properties to make you smile
• The Guardian’s happiest places to live in Britain revealed

Magpies can steal second from the Gunners on Sunday and Eddie Howe says club has ambitions to kick on this summer

Assumptions can be inaccurate, unfair and sometimes downright dangerous. Eddie Howe and Newcastle have had their fair share of often lazy theories – about the manager’s future and the limits of the club’s potential – but they travel to the Emirates Stadium on Sunday having trampled all over assorted hypotheses.

Should Newcastle win, Arsenal will have been beaten an unprecedented four times by one team in a single season and St James’ Park executives should feel sufficiently confident to start sprucing the stadium up for Champions League combat in early autumn.

A new book has fueled controversy over press handling of the ex-president’s decline. But that distracts from a bigger problem

With a new book out about Joe Biden’s failed re-election campaign, a media reckoning is in full swing.

It goes something like this: mainstream journalism failed the voters. Reporters were complicit; they didn’t tell us how much the elderly president had declined. They didn’t dig beneath the surface of what Biden aides were doing as they covered up the physical and cognitive decline of the leader of the free world.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

The writer and poet on reimagining rivers as living beings, the ecological crisis near and far and why copyright laws should protect nature

Robert Macfarlane has been called the “great nature writer and nature poet of this generation”. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive? , was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written.

Q: Your book is poignant and inspiring, but one part that made me laugh is where you first tell your son the title and he replies, “Duh, of course it’s alive. That’s going to be a really short book.” So, I should first congratulate you on stringing it out for more than 350 pages!

Robert Prevost’s maternal grandparents came to US from Caribbean and at one point identified as Black

Evidence that the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV ’s bloodlines reflect the US’s legacy of immigration – and complicated relationship with race – has continued to emerge since he recently became the first American ever elected to lead the Roman Catholic church.

The family history service Ancestry recently announced that a team helmed by senior genealogist Kyle Betit had determined Leo’s paternal grandfather, John R Prevost, immigrated to the US from north-eastern Sicily.

What makes for a great place to live? Access to nature, a sense of community and culture on your doorstep can all help. So which towns make the cut?
• Homes in happy places to buy or rent in England and Scotland – in pictures

What makes a place somewhere good to live? Where might we be happiest if we had the choice of going anywhere? It’s an almost impossible question, as we do not all thrive on the same things, but there are some that are universally agreed to be conducive to cheeriness.

When we tried to work out the happiest places for Guardian readers, easy access to countryside and parks, sea, lakes and rivers were high on the list of ingredients, as studies have shown that getting out and about in nature can help improve your mood.