Donald Trump’s second term in office has seen the US president putting increasing pressure on multiple Latin American nations – including US allies.

Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on goods from several countries, threatened to seize the Panama Canal, and carried out mass – allegedly unlawful – deportations of Latin Americans. The US military has also sharply increased its presence in the southern Caribbean, deploying 10,000 troops and multiple warships and aircraft. At least seven Venezuelan vessels that Trump claimed were trafficking drugs – without offering evidence – have been struck, killing at least 32 people. Trump has also been waging a verbal war with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and admitted to authorising covert CIA operations against him.

And on Sunday, Trump escalated his feud with Colombia, one of America’s closest allies, slashing aid and increasing tariffs on its exports because, he says, it “does nothing to stop” cocaine production.

What did the commentators say?
A “lament often heard from Latin America” is that the US has “paid insufficient attention to the region”, said the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But those countries may now “regret getting what they wished for”. Trump is paying more attention to his neighbours amid expanding Chinese influence in the region, but he seems to be abandoning soft-power initiatives in favour of economic tariffs or military force.

Tariffs and cuts to aid will actually “make it harder” for Colombia to combat the cocaine trade, said Keith Johnson on Foreign Policy. Colombia is the primary source of cocaine in the US but, historically, “the biggest chunk” of US aid “has come in the form of counternarcotics and law-enforcement support”.

US military assets in the Caribbean “are not much use” in fighting the drug trade either, said The Guardian’s foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall – especially if their focus is on Venezuela, through which only small quantities of cocaine are trafficked to America. President Maduro claims the White House is attempting to “forcibly impose regime change” on his country and is waging “undeclared war”.

What next?
In Venezuela, Maduro is using the crisis to increase his grip on power. More broadly, Trump’s “bullying of other left-leaning Latin American countries”, including Colombia and Brazil, and his “presumptuous cheerleading for right-wing populists in Argentina and El Salvador”, is “spurring a regional backlash”, said Tisdall in The Guardian.

Trump’s efforts to “reprise the role of Latin American neighbourhood policeman” are ultimately “self-defeating”. Long-term, the “big winner” will be China.

The impending closure of more than half of Pizza Hut’s UK restaurants has elicited nostalgia and also hand-wringing over the future of the nation’s casual dining scene. But not everyone will be saddened to see the iconic red roof logo disappearing from 68 sites across the country.

‘Never very good’
“Let it die,” said Angus Colwell in The Telegraph. “From the very start”, Pizza Hut has “always been a strange thing” that “didn’t know what it was: a nice environment to have a pizza in with the family, or an adequate hangover-rescue service”. It “tried to straddle the two” but “failed”. The chain is a “legacy of those darker days” when we were happy to “consume whichever fast food had the best ads”, and its demise is a “sign of cultural maturity”. We’re a “nation that now has a higher standard for food” and is “less forgiving of the mediocre”.

Pizza Hut was “never very good”, said Alexander Larman in The Spectator. It was “too expensive and fancy” for diners who instead opted for Domino’s or Papa Johns, but “not middle-class enough” for the Pizza Express “habitués”. And its pizzas can’t “compete with the new vogue” for “Neapolitan thick-crusted delights” that arrived with Franco Manca.

‘More than places to eat’
Despite starting out at the “forefront” of the fast-food industry in the 1970s, Pizza Hut has struggled to compete as pizza dining “has become a lot more upmarket”, Zoe Adjey, a lecturer in hospitality at the University of East London, told the BBC. “There’s a lot more high-end pizza and they’ve taken a huge market share.”

But “it’s not just devotees of the Hawaiian Sizzler that should be worried”, said James Moore in The Independent. If Pizza Hut is “struggling”, it’s bad news for all the “casual, affordable restaurants that once formed the backbone of our eating-out culture”. Restaurants are “more than places to eat, they are how we connect as people”. Saving them will require “fairer business rates, support for training, and an honest reckoning with the real cost of feeding a nation”.

Kitesurfers show off their skills at sunset off a beach near Tel Aviv. Israel’s Mediterranean coast is a popular spot for the sport, a combination of surfing and paragliding.

Jack Guez / AFP / Getty Images

Many of us have become accustomed to punchy, “heart-pounding” television, said Chris Wasser in the Irish Independent. So when something “nice and simple and genuinely uplifting comes along”, we might approach it with “suspicion”. But this six-part adaptation of Rónán Hession’s charming novel “tells a refreshingly tidy tale”.

“Leonard and Hungry Paul” is peppered with “tragedies, big and small”. Overall, though, “it’s about ordinary, everyday people, with ordinary, everyday problems”, and the “funny little things we do to keep the soul ticking over”. The “craziest” thing about the show is that Julia Roberts is its narrator, but her voiceover is “warm and comforting”, and doesn’t distract from the action: instead, “it’s a lovely little bonus”.

The series is an “ode to introversion”, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. Reeling from the death of his “beloved” mother, 32-year-old ghost writer Leonard (the “sublimely idiosyncratic” Alex Lawther) “launches himself on a quest for emotional fulfilment” with his “slightly bolder” pal, Hungry Paul (Laurie Kynaston). Then, “into Leonard’s gentle world cartwheels Shelley” (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell of “Derry Girls”), a fiery new colleague who “cheerily offers to kill Leonard’s appalling boss”, and he finds himself developing a major crush.

“There are no raucous belly laughs in this mildest of comedies,” said Carol Midgley in The Times. “But it is strangely calming and immersive.” Written with “great charm”, it’s a “warming, relatable watch, and a paean to the non-sharp-elbowed”. There is something “reassuring” about there still being a place for this type of “gentle, unshouty TV”.

Am I the only one feeling sorry for Prince Andrew?
Annabel Denham in The Telegraph
Prince Andrew “seems to encapsulate everything our society detests in one podgy lump: boorishness, entitlement, arrogance”, writes Annabel Denham. He may have stopped using his titles but people “are baying for more” and some, “preposterously”, want him “exiled”. I find this “all slightly ghoulish”. He hasn’t been “charged, let alone convicted, of any crime under UK law”, and “bad taste and gormlessness are not illegal”. Our society takes “too much delight in the downfall of others”.

Say goodbye to betting shops
Jimmy Nicholls in The Spectator
Rumours that Rachel Reeves will increase duties on sports betting have prompted the gambling industry to warn that it may have to close “some of its tastefully decorated high-street outlets”, writes Jimmy Nicholls. Perhaps, but “I can’t mourn the death” of betting shops. They “have become a visible symbol of a Britain down on its luck” and are “infamous for being targeted by criminals”. Surely “we deserve more seemly ways of frittering away our money”?

I’m with Nick Clegg – millennials, stop bringing your ‘authentic selves’ to work
Sophie Heawood in The Independent 
Nick Clegg hates the “naff” concept of bringing your authentic self to work, writes Sophie Heawood, and “he has a point”. Younger generations may have been “raised to believe their feelings are paramount”, but “I don’t want to see your authentic self” and “I’m sure you don’t want to see mine”.  Better to be “the self who has taken on a job” but “saves their wider passions for home, their loved ones, the dancefloor”.