Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.

I spent a week at a London jobcentre. Those I met were smart and eager to work – and now they have a government willing to help them

Labour did it before. Can it do it again, with things being so much harder now? New Labour’s new deal for the young unemployed levered large numbers of people into work, but in 1998 the economy was on the upswing. Now, economic stagnation has resulted in falling vacancies and rising unemployment. And Donald Trump’s war threatens much worse in the future. Today the Department for Work and Pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, promises “life-changing opportunities to young people” to “significantly reverse the increase we inherited in those not in education, employment or training”, now numbering nearly a million.

A major boost will be the greatly extended youth jobs guarantee, offering six-month-long subsidised-wage roles for unemployed 18- to 24-year-olds. And a youth jobs grant will offer employers a £3,000 subsidy to hire young people who are on benefits and have been out of work for six months. It mirrors the Future Jobs Fund that Labour brought in, after the financial crash, in 2009 – one of its most successful programmes, which boosted participants’ chance of employment by 27%, with a net gain per participant of £7,750 in increased wages and tax receipts and reduced benefit payments. (David Cameron scrapped it in 2010 without waiting to see those results.)

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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

Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary

“I hated it,” Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the 1970s. Powell is 78 and now lives in a very different world compared with when he was a husband, the father of two young daughters and Norwich’s player of the season in 1979.

Powell is not a demonstrative man and, having been forced to bury his true self for decades, does not make a fuss about the pain he endured. But there is an ache in his English accent, which remains intact after 45 years in America. “I just wanted to be who I am, but at that time it was not a good idea to come out.”

In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you’re checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here’s how to navigate it all

In an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect … or to offend everyone around us. Many of today’s most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided.

Ditched washing machines, a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head … the Oscar-nominated director talks us through his new photography show in Athens – made with his darkroom assistant Emma Stone

In the centre of Athens, a brand new temple has popped up. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you’ll eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctum. It might not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon but it does hold a unique kind of treasure: the personal photographs of director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Taken over the last few years as he wandered his home country, they offer a glimpse of Greece through the auteur’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin resting against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees. A roadside memorial is shown underneath a sign warning of danger ahead – the wiggly road symbol points directly upwards, as if suggesting the route to the next life for the poor victim. This last image is poignant, strange and funny, eliciting the same awkward clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’s films.

A Norwegian film-maker takes us through grief in Storyville. Plus: launching a rocket in French Guiana. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
A joyous yet tragic introduction to a film by its Norwegian maker and narrator, Gunnar Hall Jensen, as he explains that the little boy in the home video clips we are watching – his son, Jonathan – is now dead. Jensen went on to capture their relationship on camera for more than 20 years, which he candidly reflects on here, until Jonathan started to become withdrawn and distanced from his father before being killed at 21. Hollie Richardson

If confirmed, death would make Larijani the most senior Iranian figure to be killed since Ali Khamenei on first day of war

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel says it has killed a linchpin of Iranian politics, the national security chief, Ali Larijani, in overnight strikes, a claim that if confirmed would make him the most senior Iranian figure to die in the war since the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on its first day.

Iran has yet to comment on either claim. If confirmed, Larijani’s death would remove a pivotal figure at the heart of the regime’s political and security establishment at a moment of acute crisis and represent devastating blow.

Emily Thornberry is the latest figure to call on the king’s visit to the US to be delayed, citing the ongoing war against Iran

Funding for community radio stations will double (to £1m per year) and the government will spend more of its advertising budget with local media (including “hyperlocal news titles”), under a local media strategy being announced today. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, will speak about it at a conference this afternoon. In a news release, she says:

This strategy will provide unprecedented funding for local media outlets to invest in innovation and infrastructure, almost tripling the size of funding for community radio, harnessing the power of local and national government and giving more young people access to high quality journalism and the opportunity to pursue careers in it.

Because local media was and always has been a ladder of opportunity to help new voices break into journalism. This is not a nice to have. It is essential to a cohesive country. Our debate is too narrow and too small. We will change that. The strategy we publish today is the start – not the end point – and we recognise there is more to do. But it is the start of a new approach to local media, which nurtures it and places it directly at the heart of our government’s support for our country. Because the future of news is local.

The UK and Ukraine are set to agree a new world-leading partnership to boost global defensive capability against the the proliferation of low cost, high tech military hardware, including drones …

As part of the agreement, the UK and Ukraine will also look at opportunities for increased defence industrial and technological cooperation with third countries, boosting international security and ensuring the latest defence technology is in the hands of those who need it most.

Exclusive: Early US assessment suggesting missile was Iranian was almost immediately dismissed, sources say

Donald Trump’s attempt to blame Iran for the deadly strike on an elementary school stemmed from an early US intelligence assessment that initially suggested the missile was Iranian but was almost immediately dismissed, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The CIA initially told the president that they did not believe the missile that struck the school was a munition used by the US because the fins appeared to be positioned too low for it to be a Tomahawk cruise missile.

UKHSA says strain involved in outbreak that has killed two people is one that most people are not vaccinated against

Government scientists have identified the type of meningitis behind a fatal outbreak in Kent as a strain that most people have not be vaccinated against.

Gayatri Amirthalingam, the deputy director of immunisation and vaccine preventable diseases at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said tests showed it was the bacterial strain B of the disease.