“The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank – perpetrated by settler terrorists.”

With these words, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has delivered the “biggest reset in UK relations with Israel for decades”, said The New Statesman’s political editor Ailbhe Rea. His decision to introduce a ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is not without “political risk”, but it marks a determination to “inject values and politics into British foreign policy” that many at home and abroad feel has been lacking for years.

What did the commentators say?
“Ethnic cleansing” and “forced displacement” are often seen as acts of genocide, a word Miliband was careful not to use, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley. In this context, sanctions against settlers seem “disproportionately low and leave the State of Israel off the hook”, but the “effects of the new British legislation will be felt far more widely”.

Israel has reacted strongly and swiftly by announcing four “countermeasures” against the UK, including the closure of the British Consulate in Jerusalem. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, also hit back on X, saying that “the Brits have lost it” and the “Jew hate of their government knows no boundaries and knows no facts”.

Britain “risks moving from being a country capable of connecting Israel, the Gulf, Washington and Europe to one whose positions are increasingly predictable but whose involvement is decreasingly necessary”, said Labour peer Jon Mendelsohn in The Spectator. This could result in a “remarkable loss of influence in pursuit of policies which have yet to demonstrate that they have made peace, Palestinian statehood, regional security, the safety of British Jews or Britain’s national interests more attainable”.

Miliband will hope his Jewish heritage – his mother was a Holocaust survivor who fled to Israel – and “staunch support of Israel’s right to exist will reassure the Americans”, said Rea in The New Statesman. He “emphasises the difference” between targeted West Bank sanctions and the full boycott of all Israeli goods, which he opposes.

What next?
Miliband has told the Commons that he intends to use the UN General Assembly later this month to shine the “clearest and harshest spotlight on what is happening and what must change” in Gaza.

Andy Burnham is facing growing pressure from MPs, businesses and financial experts to scrap the state pension triple lock. The British Chambers of Commerce has called on the government to ditch the policy, introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010 to guarantee that the state pension rises each year by whichever is the highest of inflation, wage growth or a 2.5% baseline.

Triple lock ‘has worked’
Much of the debate around the triple lock suggests that “pensioners have never had it so good”, but the reality is “very different”, said former pensions minister Steve Webb in The Telegraph. Pensioner poverty has been “rising steadily” since the early 2010s. Although it’s “undoubtedly true” that the triple lock will become unaffordable, “now is not the time to be taking our foot off the gas”. Requiring that the decision be taken by Parliament “once every five years” is the most sensible course of action.

Axing the triple lock would have to save the nation “a good chunk of money” to justify the resultant “wave of retiree rage”, said Will Dunn in The New Statesman. But while it may work in the long run, scrapping it won’t raise much money in the present – only £3.3 billion in two years. And for all the opposition, the triple lock “has worked” in providing British pensioners with greater benefits and security, particularly when measured against the cost of living.

‘Blunt instrument’
The triple lock remains only because “no one is willing to risk the wrath of British pensioners”, said Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg. If we lived in a “rational world”, at least one mainstream leader would be “brave enough” to admit the “self-evident truth” that scrapping the triple lock would provide fairness and affordability. 

Since its establishment, the triple lock has become “something of a holy writ” despite its “financial and moral justification” being long gone, said Simon Kelner in The i Paper. The mechanism fails to account for the income differences between a “pensioner on the poverty line” and a retiree “with a large, mortgage-free home and a private pension pot”. It is a “blunt instrument”.

American tennis star Ben Shelton celebrates during a US Open five-set epic against Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz that stretched into the early hours. Shelton finally defeated the defending champion in the quarter-final at 3.33am, the latest-ever finish in the tournament’s history.

Patrick Smith / Getty Images

“What a challenge,” said Liz Else in New Scientist: penning the “first major biography” of Stephen Hawking with the theoretical physicist’s estate and the “whole scientific world” all “watching closely to see the result”. But science writer Graham Farmelo has pulled it off. “Kudos all round.”

Farmelo paints a “comprehensive and accessible portrait” of Hawking as an “extraordinarily determined man” who had a darker side to which the public and scientific community “mostly turned a blind eye”, said Philip Ball in The Guardian. The “uncomfortable but unavoidable truth” is that Hawking’s refusal to give scientific credit to others, and his sexism and “controlling behaviour”, were largely “ignored because of his disability”. “I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.”

Farmelo first covers the science, which offers a “genuinely inspirational tale”. Hawking’s work on black-hole thermodynamics would have been “impressive by any measure”. But achieving it while living with “debilitating and ultimately paralysing” motor neurone disease is remarkable. The “problematic stuff” emerges from “those closest to him”. Hawking’s friends at Oxford found him “lazy and entitled”; his youngest son said his father never let him win at board games as a child; and his “unsparing ridicule” of the religious beliefs of his first wife, Jane, contributed to the unravelling of their marriage.

Farmelo gives non-scientists a “good sense” of why Hawking’s work matters, including “succinct discussions of how black holes evaporate”, said John Gribbin in Literary Review. But this book also puts the facts into “context”. The result is an “absorbing and informative account of the life of the most interesting physicist of the second half of the 20th century”.

Russia is raining death on Ukraine’s women and children. Our hands shake, but we keep going for love
Alina Sarnatska in The Guardian
“Enduring daily death and the violence of Russia’s attacks has changed us irreversibly” here in Kyiv, writes author and war veteran Alina Sarnatska. “The skin of Ukrainian women has thickened into armour.” When resilience is vital because “there is still work to do”, every “trembling hand starts to feel like a personal failure”, but “I do not want survival to take away my tenderness towards other people, or towards myself”.

Innovation is the answer to Britain’s elusive growth problem
Gordon Brown in the Financial Times
“Many think of Britain’s inventiveness in the past tense,” writes Gordon Brown. But if we support the next generation of startups, we could become “internationally competitive” and “lay claim to be the innovation nation”. Innovation “should be at the heart” of the next Budget. If we connect our “scientific potential to investment and open competition, Britain can go from being a country that invents the future to one that develops it, scales it – and owns it”.

Rudeness isn’t the only way to deter scammers. Panting also works
Carol Midgley in The Times
Scammers “try to rob us blind” by exploiting the “British tendency to be polite when answering a call from a stranger”, writes Carol Midgley. But “I must be innately rude”, because I “have no problem at all in telling them to ‘f*** right off, mate’”. And “rudeness isn’t the only way, folks”. I find that saying, “I’m 93 and not wearing any pants” also brings “any such call to a brisk conclusion”. So “be creative”.