The prime minister wooed the president with the offer of a state visit to Britain

• You can buy a copy of this cartoon

Backing of Glencore angers campaigners who have highlighted firm’s environmental breaches in South Africa

One of the world’s biggest banks, JP Morgan, has promoted ­environmental and “sustainable” funds to customers which have invested more than £200m in the mining giant Glencore, it can be revealed.

Ethical investing has become big business for JP Morgan and other financial giants, with worldwide “sustainable” investing expected to surpass $40tn by 2030. But the industry now faces scrutiny over the rules around investments focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

The New York-based Irish author on being compelled to write about the big issues, his fear for friends in the Middle East and why Frankenstein is a metaphor for our times

The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and worked as a journalist before moving to the US and turning his hand to books. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, which won the 2011 International Dublin literary award, and 2020’s Apeirogon, which took a kaleidoscopic view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last year he co-wrote the memoir American Mother with Diane Foley, whose son, US journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in Syria in 2014. In his latest novel, Twist (published on 6 March), an Irish journalist on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa is confronted by questions of environmental destruction, information overload and colonialism. McCann lives in New York with his wife Allison and their three children.

Undersea communications cables are underexplored in fiction. What prompted you to write about them?
In the early part of the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the notion of repair, because things were shattering around us fairly frequently. Somewhere I fell upon the story of the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship out of South Africa. Like everybody else, I thought that [digital] information went up from our phones and hit these satellites and came back down. I was really taken by the notion that it all happens in the bottom of the deep black sea. Bizarrely, since I started writing it, undersea cables are now being cut left, right and centre – the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Russians and Chinese in the Baltic. We’re going to be talking about it a lot more in the years to come.

Flamboyant singer helped point his city’s music scene towards punk, before a successful solo career and eye-catching acting roles

David Johansen, the swaggering, peacocking frontman with glam rock band New York Dolls, has died aged 75.

Last month he had announced he was living with cancer, and recently suffered a broken back. “David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers,” reads a statement on a website created to raise funds for his medical care.

Peer argues that national ‘trickledown’ approach will fail to benefit those in most need

Keir Starmer’s government must strictly target the delivery of its core “missions” at areas of maximum deprivation or lose huge numbers of votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, an independent commission led by a former Labour cabinet minister will suggest this week.

The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON), chaired by Labour peer Hilary Armstrong, a former party chief whip and housing minister, will say the government risks “wasting billions of pounds in higher public spending while failing to transform the places that need it most” unless it adopts the targeted approach.

Fredi Reviro was attacked in Islington on Thursday night, and died in hospital the following day

Three teenage girls, aged 14, 16 and 17, have been charged with manslaughter after a 75-year-old man died in north London.

The Metropolitan police said the man, named as Fredi Reviro, was attacked on Seven Sisters Road in Islington at about 11.35pm on Thursday, and died in hospital the following day.