The vice president’s ascent is a lesson against underestimating women, but she is likely to be met by Donald Trump aiming low and dirty

The speed and single-mindedness with which Kamala Harris secured the Democratic presidential nomination following Joe Biden’s sudden decision last weekend to step aside was astounding. Few expected the vice-president to attract a sufficient number of delegates and political endorsements prior to the party’s Chicago convention on 19 August, if then. Instead, Harris soared into an unassailable position within 48 hours of the White House announcement. Potential rivals tamely fell away. Now, even former president Barack Obama, who was said to have reservations and loves to meddle, has thrown his weight behind her.

Harris’s candidacy is of historic importance, and her feat has united the Democratic party, which many had thought impossible. It has also dispelled one of the main criticisms of her: that she lacks necessary drive and focus. After becoming vice-president in 2021, Harris was routinely dismissed as short on charisma and basic political skills. The conventional wisdom in Washington was that Biden selected her because she is a woman with black and Asian American roots, not on her merits. Her chances of attaining the Oval Office were widely, though not universally, discounted.

Cutting public spending to satisfy an arbitrary financial rule conceived in opposition will confine the UK to sluggish growth

Britain’s public finances are in a desperate state. That is the key message the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will deliver in a speech on Monday, which she will use to draw attention to a £20bn black hole in the tax and spending plans bequeathed to her by the last government.

Critics will say that this should not be news; it was patently obvious that the Conservatives cooked the books before the last election, baking in impossible-to-achieve spending cuts in order to make their plans for the next five years seem plausible. That did not stop Labour adopting the Tories’ projections as its baseline, because it suited the party politically. However, Reeves would be entirely correct in arguing that the unenviable inheritance is as much a product of Conservative neglect and incompetence as it is of external shocks, and that Labour could not know the full extent of the fiscal gap until it was in government and had the opportunity to examine the books carefully.

Helen Pitcher has shown no contrition for the failings of the watchdog, which blundered in the case of Andrew Malkinson

Our criminal justice system is rightly loaded in favour of letting those who are probably guilty walk free to avoid locking up the innocent for crimes they did not commit. Juries are directed to convict a defendant only if they are sure of their guilt. But terrible miscarriages of justice can and do happen.

There are supposed to be safeguards in the system to help expose these. Yet a new independent review of the Criminal Cases Review Commission’s handling of the case of Andrew Malkinson – who was imprisoned for 17 years for a violent rape he did not commit – shows just how threadbare that safety net really is.

Error that caused a global standstill reveals fragility of a networked world that has been created for efficiency rather than resilience

One bit of good news about the “epic IT crash” that brought the western world to a temporary standstill is that it was a product of human error rather than a Russian cyber-attack like the SolarWinds hack of 2020 that had a similar modus operandi.

Last week’s outage was caused by an update that a big US cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, pushed to its corporate clients early on Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices inoperable – with predictable consequences, given that virtually every large organisation in the world is using Microsoft Windows.