It didn’t go very well for him last time, but the tech billionaire seems to have abandoned his plans for a third party and has renewed his bromance with the president

“You know, I’ve generally found that when I get involved in politics, it ends up badly,” Elon Musk mused on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast in November.

Oh, we know, Elon, we most definitely know. The world is still reeling from the tech billionaire’s little experiment in politicking last year. Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) slashed federal jobs, dismantled foreign aid programmes and left a trail of chaos in its wake. It’s not clear whether any taxpayer money was saved, but experts are warning a lot of lives will be lost. By one calculation, there could be about 14 million excess deaths across the globe by 2030 if the US fails to restore aid funding. Thanks, Elon!

The activist had held a sign written with my daughter’s crayon. Try explaining that to a four-year-old

It was 6am. London. A few days before Christmas. My four-year-old is singing at the top of her lungs and charging around my parents’ house on a hunt for the perfect crayon. There is nothing particularly unusual about this scene except for the fact that the crayon in question was for Greta Thunberg. The world’s most well-known activist needed a writing tool and my daughter, O, was on the case. (Remember this crayon: it’s going to be important later on.)

O, I should note, had absolutely no idea who Greta was. We’re not longtime chums or anything like that. Rather Greta was in London to support the Palestine Action-linked hunger strikers. She needed somewhere to stay and my dad, who is a Palestinian refugee, and appreciative of anyone speaking up about the place where he was born but can’t return to live in, keeps an open house for activists who need a bed or a meal. When the visit had been hastily arranged by a friend of a friend of my sister a couple days earlier, we’d tried to explain to O that Greta was a famous activist who tried to help people and the environment.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

The state has created the first registry in the US to track repeat domestic violence offenders

Let’s say you’re going on a first date and you want to make sure the person you’re meeting up with isn’t a registered sex offender. If you live in the US, you can find this out very quickly: there’s a centralized website provided by the US Department of Justice that lets you search a name or location in seconds.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist