The rules of war are under scrutiny following Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus and Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out a civilisation.

Reports from Human Rights Watch that Israel has targeted southern Lebanon with “notorious” white phosphorus munitions are “reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war”, said The Guardian. Legal experts have also challenged Trump’s threats against Iran, pointing out that “collective punishment on a population and the targeting of protected civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law”, said ABC News. 

What constitutes a war crime?
War crimes are “violations of international humanitarian law” that, unlike genocide and crimes against humanity, “always take place in the context of an armed conflict, whether international or not”, said the UN. These crimes include cases of murder, torture, pillage and intentionally directing attacks against civilians and non-combatants such as humanitarian aid workers, as well as the deliberate targeting of religious and educational buildings, hospitals and, in some cases, vital infrastructure such as power stations and key transport links. The use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as chemical weapons or cluster munitions, can also be considered a war crime.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949, and their Additional Protocols introduced in subsequent decades, are international treaties that serve as the “most important rules limiting the barbarity of war”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. 

What happens to those who break the rules?
The International Criminal Court (ICC), established under the Rome Statute in 2002, states that it “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community”.

“Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities,” said the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank. Yet it has also “faced criticism from many parties” and has been fundamentally weakened by the refusal of several major powers to join. As well as the US, Russia and China, non-signatories include India, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. 

Recent arrest warrants for national leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have “generated mixed reactions from Washington and raised questions over the future of the court”.

The cost of space programmes is truly astronomical. By 2028, when the fourth mission in Nasa’s Artemis programme lands astronauts back on the Moon, the agency will have spent $105 billion (£78 billion). That’s quite “a chunk of change”, said USA Today. Spending so much is controversial, especially after “we already did” the Moon thing. Are “science, exploration and the possible value of moon materials” really worth it, or would that all public money be better spent on ”healthcare or tax cuts”?

‘Futile pursuits of prestige’
“It’s absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless,” said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. And the more crises there are “besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes”. The US, “of all nations”, has bigger issues to deal with, so “seriously, Nasa, can you not just knock it off”?

Ordinary Americans are tired of “these absurd expressions of vanity, these futile pursuits of prestige”, said space historian Gerard DeGroot on UnHerd. Even the Apollo missions in the late 1960s “were not as popular as Nasa pretended”: opinion polls showed “support was consistently below 50%”, with women, people of colour and the poor, in particular, questioning the “obscene cost”.

‘Effect on our collective imaginations’
I’ve always thought the so-called “choice” between “advancing to the stars and solving problems back on Earth” to be “a false one”, said Séamas O’Reilly in The New Statesman. Yes, the Artemis budget “may seem hard to justify”, but “this elides the truth” of the “titanic boost to science, technology and economies back home”.

Nasa’s Apollo programme “returned around $7 to the US economy for every $1 spent”. In all of our homes, we can see “developments made at the bleeding edge of space”: if you have a laptop, a camera phone or a memory foam mattress, “you have Nasa to thank”. The same goes for advancements in water purification, landmine removal and artificial limbs – “not to mention the invention of ear thermometers and CAT scans”.

And if those images beamed back from the Artemis II this week didn’t “catch the breath” in your throat, you can’t “be fully alive”, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. “The experience of seeing the Earth photographed from space” has “an effect on our collective imaginations”. The Apollo 8 “Earthrise” image, for example, is widely thought to have “kick-started the modern environmental movement”.

A woman pauses beside an open-air market stall decorated with the Djibouti flag in Djibouti City. The East African nation is holding a presidential election on Friday, when incumbent Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, in power since 1999, is expected to secure a sixth term. 

Luis Tato / AFP / Getty Images

The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was so “relentlessly bleak” that I had to stop watching, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now, the showrunner behind the original series, Bruce Miller, has brought Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning sequel to the small screen. “Brace yourselves.”

“The Testaments” picks up a few years after the events of the first book, when we meet the “next generation of Gilead women”. Agnes (Chase Infiniti) (pictured above) is the daughter of a Commander, attending an “elite preparatory school” run by the formidable Aunt Lydia. “Yes, that Aunt Lydia.” Ann Dowd resumes her “The Handmaid’s Tale” role as a “genuinely savage Miss Trunchbull”.

Agnes is put in charge of new student Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a “Pearl Girl” brought to the school by Gilead missionaries and “generally suspected by the other pupils” of spying for the teachers. The two girls’ increasingly “close and complicated” relationship forms the “backbone” of the series.

Like its predecessor, “The Testaments” is a “disturbing” watch, said Aramide Tinubu in Variety. An “exemplary” follow-up to the original show, this is both a powerful tale of “girlhood, survival, rage and friendship”, and a “magnificent coming-of-age” story.

Following her starring role in “One Battle After Another”, Infiniti brings “electric A-lister aura” to Agnes, said Ed Power in The Telegraph, and Aunt Lydia is the “same disturbing mix of contradictions” that she always was. Despite its dark subject matter, there is “fun to be had watching young people navigate the trials of growing up”. The school might be “hell on Earth, but it’s also ‘Mean Girls’ with a dystopian twist”.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” became “murky and frenetic”, but this sequel “pops” with the pupil’s jewel-coloured robes, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Yet while the tone is lighter and the pace quicker, the show continues to depict how a society can “backslide into regression and repression”. This is a “young adult epic for the ages”.

Graduates are the canary in the coalmine for a failing welfare system
Anne Strickland in City A.M.
The student loans “crisis” exemplifies “Britain’s fiscal model: a successful few carry the cost for everyone else”, writes Anne Strickland of The TaxPayers’ Alliance. “Pensions, healthcare, energy bills all depend on the same overtaxed cohort” – and then “politicians start demanding bailouts” when “geopolitical shocks” push bills higher. “This is how countries become bankrupt.” We must “start saying no to demands we can’t afford”, or “the productive people that the state has relied on” will “stop bothering or simply leave”.

The menace of extreme cats must end
Ariane Sherin for The Telegraph  
“Don’t purchase a pedigree cat,” writes stand-up comedian Arian Sherine. They are “too inbred for comfort” and come with “heftier vet bills, shorter lives and endless health problems”. While their “cuteness” makes them “massively popular”, their “extreme conformations” cause them “torment”. I wish “a lifetime of cat-related grievances” on their “snobby, status-fuelled owners”: “hair all over their favourite Jermyn Street shirts, long claw scratches in their Heal’s furniture” and “fur balls in their premium spaghetti bolognaise”.

The doctors’ strike is about more than money
Phil Whitaker in The New Statesman
The government is clearly deeply frustrated by “its inability to resolve the resident doctors’ dispute”, writes physician Phil Whitaker. But these strikes are “about something more fundamental” than pay. The “belief in policy circles” is that “what expensively trained doctors do can be delivered by lesser qualified and cheaper staff”. That means the “‘oncologist’ or ‘surgeon’ you see” in the future “might not have undergone medical training”. NHS bosses “think that will be OK”; most medics “emphatically disagree”.