Many questioned whether Pep Guardiola could hack it in the rough and tumble of the Premier League when he became Manchester City’s manager a decade ago.

Could his brand of beautiful “tiki-taka” football, refined in Barcelona and developed at Bayern Munich, cut it on a cold Tuesday night in Stoke?

Ten years on and his record speaks for itself: six Premier League titles, including one secured with over 100 points and another as part of a historic treble; the Champions League; three FA Cups; five League Cups; the Uefa Super Cup and Fifa Club World Cup. It makes him the second most decorated manager in Premier League history behind Sir Alex Ferguson. Now, with rumours of his departure at the end of the season, the question of his legacy has arisen.

‘Level of tactical complexity has soared’

As his mentor Johan Cruyff did as manager of Barcelona, Guardiola has “created a legacy that has changed the face of football at every level in England”, said BBC chief football writer Phil McNulty.

During his time at City, Guardiola “has not just shaped elite football and the game in the league’s pyramids” but “has had an impact at every level down to grassroots, where even junior coaches adopt his strategies”.

“His success goes beyond just the many wins,” said The Sun. “It is embedded into the very foundation of the game in England now.”

Even semi-professional teams now play out from the back. Goalkeepers will pass into danger rather than go long. The rigid formations of old are gone. Defenders sometimes play as strikers. “Kids are growing up with these roles more defined than ever” and “the level of tactical complexity has soared”.

To understand the extent of Guardiola’s impact you need only glance around at the other elite managers working in the game today. Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, who this season delivered the club’s first Premier League title in 22 years, cut his teeth as Guardiola’s assistant at City, as did former Chelsea boss and likely successor at the Etihad, Enzo Maresca. PSG boss Luis Enrique worked under him at Barcelona, as did new Chelsea manager Xavi Alonso in Munich. Current Bayern boss Vincent Kompany was City’s talismanic captain for years under Guardiola.

‘Lingering question’

There is no doubt City’s Abu Dhabi ownership “more than got its money’s worth”, said The Independent’s Miguel Delaney, but there is “another way to think about Guardiola”.

Whether it was having Lionel Messi in his prime, taking charge of already Treble-winning Bayern, or the immense resources he was handed at City, “the one purely football caveat in Guardiola’s sensational record” is “he’s never really had to work anywhere where he’s had to compromise”.

The other “lingering question” concerns City’s “bludgeoning power” and how, “Guardiola’s prodigious gifts aside, they were able to acquire it in the first place”, said Oliver Brown in The Telegraph. The seemingly never-ending Premier League investigation into 115 charges of financial irregularity has hung over the club, and “for years Guardiola has had to deny suggestions of an asterisk being placed alongside their achievements”.

As for the future, replacing Guardiola “will be no easy feat”, said The Athletic. He has “set the standard so high, both for fans of Manchester City and for those of us judging from the outside, that anything short of sustained brilliance could easily seem underwhelming. Mediocrity would feel like disaster.”

Bruising brushes with financial markets have been the fate of Labour “down the ages”, said William Keegan in The Observer. Back in the 1960s, Harold Wilson complained about “the gnomes of Zürich” – a derogatory reference to international bankers then going “short on the pound”. This time, the threat is closer to home – in London’s febrile government bond markets.

‘The risk of some kind of accident is real’

Before this week’s escalation of the leadership fight, economists were playing down the political angle. “For all the noise, politics isn’t what’s driving yields higher right now,” James Smith of ING told The Times. “The overwhelming driver is still the energy crisis, oil prices and the impact on BoE interest rates.” But as a dramatic sell-off got under way, it became harder to discount the sense that debt markets are indeed badly rattled by Labour’s leadership woes. The 30-year gilt yield, which hit 5.81% on Tuesday, is at the highest this century. Yields on 10-year gilts (the benchmark for mortgage rates), at 5.13%, are at their highest since 2008.

It’s “a rubbish time” to be having a political crisis, said Daire MacFadden in the Financial Times. “Sadly, that’s precisely what we have.” Any leadership challenge is “all but certain to herald a move to the left and potentially an increase in government borrowing”. To some extent, the gilt market had already priced this in, but “the risk of some kind of accident here is real”.

It doesn’t help that Andy Burnham – who last year observed that government shouldn’t be “in hock” to the bond market – “keeps talking about bond markets as if they are some sort of entity he can bamboozle with jargon”, said John Stepek on Bloomberg. The view from his camp seems to be that renationalising various sectors of the economy will inherently make them more productive – so gilt markets “will be happy to fund the borrowing”. That’s a somewhat “courageous” assumption.

‘Bond vigilantes’ on the rise

“It seems like the only supporters that Keir Starmer has left are the so-called bond vigilantes,” said Robin Wigglesworth in the FT. As they point out, higher borrowing costs are already chipping away at the chancellor’s £24 billion of fiscal headroom, which forecasts suggest could halve. But for how long “can the gilt market act as the UK’s political police”?

Among Starmer’s rivals, Burnham is perceived by traders as the biggest threat and Wes Streeting as the least risky. We must hope he prevails and persuades investors to lend at “a lower premium” to Britain, said Adam Smith in The Telegraph.

The “intriguing paradox” of Labour politics is that the leader most distrusted by the Left may ultimately be the “most capable of financing the expansive social-democratic state that they all crave”.

Chinese-made EVs are cheap and increasingly popular around the world but not in the U.S. market where imports are mostly banned. American automakers and their allies in Congress want to keep it that way.

Congress is pushing to “lock Chinese cars out of the U.S. market,” said Autoweek. Michigan Reps. John Moolenaar and Debbie Dingell this week introduced a bill to entrench and expand a Biden-era block on “smart” cars with Chinese-made software systems the lawmakers say is a national security threat.

American automakers are also alarmed by what they see as unfair competition from Beijing-backed companies like BYD, Nio and Geely that have made “steady market share gains in ​Europe and Mexico,” said Reuters. Geely sells its EX2 EV for $22,500 in Mexico, while the average sale price of a new car in the U.S. is $51,000. Chinese carmakers have “some level of government support, or else they couldn't transact at that price,” Toyota’s David Christ said to the outlet.

‘Common sight in border towns’

Lifting the block on Chinese EVs “could devastate the U.S. auto industry,” Sandy K. Baruah and Glenn Stevens Jr. said at The Detroit News. China has “cunningly” built its carmakers using “vast state subsidies, uncompetitive labor practices and the monopolization of raw materials” to “dominate the global market.” Those practices have created an “unfair playing field” in which Chinese companies now make 62% of all new EV sales globally. “We must not allow that here.”

It is a question of “when, not if” Chinese cars will hit U.S. roads, Katrina Hamlin said at Reuters. The vehicles are “cheaper” and “often snazzier” than what American brands offer, and U.S. drivers “seem ​keen to buy Chinese cars” as “budget models become increasingly scarce” at home. BYDs purchased in Mexico are already a “common sight in American border towns like El Paso and San Diego” though they cannot be registered in the U.S. The change “looks increasingly like it’s just a matter of time.”

Congress is not buying

“Are cars the next TikTok?” Matthew Choi and Dan Merica said at The Washington Post. Lawmakers are concerned camera, sensor and trip data collected by Chinese smart cars could be shared with Beijing, similar to the fears that forced the sale of TikTok’s American operations to U.S.-based Oracle. President Donald Trump has suggested he would welcome Chinese automakers as long as their cars are “built by Americans in the U.S.” So far, though, “that is not a caveat Congress is buying.”

Chinese carmakers should be allowed “if they agree to conditions,” Bruce Stokes said at Roll Call. They should “hire American union labor” and “buy American-made parts.” They should also share “most advanced Chinese battery and other technologies” with U.S. partner companies and store the “vast amounts data” generated by their cars on U.S.-based servers. The U.S. must strike that deal or risk “being hopelessly shut out of the world market.”

England’s first-past-the-post electoral system has long been regarded as “a friend of the Conservative and Labour parties”, said political scientist John Curtice on the BBC. Under FPTP, the candidate with the most votes in each constituency is elected, and this has always made it difficult for small parties, whose votes may be geographically spread, to take seats from the big two.

But last week’s local election results confirm that Britain has entered “an unprecedented era of multi-party politics”. Labour and the Conservatives jointly got 34% of the vote share – “a record low”. Far from “helping to insulate” them, FPTP “served to exaggerate” their loss of support.

‘Distorts voter choice’

Our “archaic” voting system is “no longer fit for purpose”, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. The traditional argument was that it delivered stability but we have “hardly had stable governments in the 10 years” since the EU referendum, and these recent local election results suggest that “the next general election will be unpredictable and chaotic”. We now have five parties in England, and six each in Scotland and Wales, with nationalists “on the march in both”. It will be very difficult for anyone to win a majority, leading to “post-election horse-trading” between parties in a coalition or “pacts for key Commons votes”.

Nigel Farage used to “bang on about the need for proportional representation”, the voting system used for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd. But – “surprise, surprise” – he “seems to have cooled” on that, now that FPTP offers him a chance of becoming PM. “He was right first time: Britain needs electoral reform, not Reform UK.”

In a multi-party landscape, FPTP “distorts voter choice”, said political scientist Vernon Bogdanor in the Financial Times. Voters must guess “how to keep out” the party they most dislike, making casting a vote seem like “participating in a lottery”. In 2024, Keir Starmer’s Labour won 411 of 650 seats with just 34% of the vote share – lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s 40% in 2017. “How can a government be democratically legitimate when two-thirds of the voters do not want it?”

A proportional representation system of transferable votes, in which second and further preferences count, is now “an essential safeguard”, said the FT’s Martin Wolf. We need to protect Britain from the “tyranny of the minority”, in which “a small plurality secures overwhelming power”. FPTP has “become suicidal”.

‘More horse-trading, not less’

Sorry, I’m not convinced, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. For decades, FPTP has “done a sterling job of keeping extremists out”, while the far right “surged across Europe”. Proportional representation “doesn’t guarantee that we could all just vote for what we want instead of endlessly against what we fear (ask the French)”. It also doesn’t mean “an end to the grubby deal-making”. The choice is simply between “cutting deals with rival factions inside your own party (more common under FPTP) or with rival parties in the coalition governments produced more frequently under PR, which often means more horse-trading, not less”. PR might create parliaments “roughly reflective of how people actually voted” but that proportionality “doesn’t always survive the messy process of forming governments”.

We could introduce a fairer system “with minimal change”, said Labour peer Jeff Rooker on PoliticsHome. A “practical diluted” FPTP would be better than an “impractical pure” PR system. We should introduce regional MPs, as well as constituency ones. Voters would still mark ballot papers with one X, choosing a candidate as a constituency member, but votes for parties would then be “aggregated on a regional basis” and regional MPs would be chosen from “the highest runners-up”. In this “Mixed-Member Proportional System”, the electorate would feel they could “vote for what they want”, removing the “temptation for tactical voting”.

“In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws”, the new Renters' Rights Act “must be up there with the worst”, said Tim Briggs on CapX. The legislation, which came into force last Friday, has been sold by Labour as a “moral crusade” that will drive rogue landlords out of England's private rental sector, protecting tenants from abuse.

It abolishes Section 21 “no-fault” evictions, whereby landlords can evict tenants without giving a reason. Instead, they must rely on specific legal grounds – rent arrears, antisocial behaviour, an upcoming sale – to regain possession, which will mean “more lawyers” and more litigation; those who wish to sell must give four months' notice. Fixed-term tenancies have been abolished, replaced instead with rolling contracts with no end date. Rent increases are limited to once per year; these can be appealed at tribunal.

Together, the measures represent “a regulatory avalanche” – sending a clear message to small landlords: get out. “Fewer landlords mean fewer rental homes. And fewer rental homes mean higher rents.”

I'm a landlord, and I welcome the new law, said Rebecca Tidy in The Independent. If your business depends for its profitability on no-fault evictions, “it's safe to say that the sector – and society – is better off without it”. Up until now, renting a property has been a “terrifying lucky dip where you have no idea what kind of landlord you will get”. I've heard “endless stories” of people booted out of their homes in favour of more lucrative tenants, or for complaining about black mould that is affecting their children's health. This legislation will end all that.

It's hard to overestimate how draconian “no-fault” evictions are, agreed Oliver Edwards on Inside Housing – and how precarious they make renters' lives. As a housing lawyer in Manchester, I see cases like this all the time. My recent clients have included a family of seven, with older parents and a severely disabled adult son; and a single mother with an autistic son who had “finally settled into school”. They've all been moved on, with just a few weeks' notice.

Many in the industry think that the Renter's Rights Act will force out rogue landlords and improve standards, said Emily Braeger in The i Paper. But it will also become more difficult for landlords to evict problem tenants, and the burden of compliance may become too much for many of them. Research by the lender Pepper Money suggests that there will be 220,000 fewer homes to rent in England by the end of the year. The long-term impacts of the legislation will not become clear for years, but this is certainly the most significant reform to the sector since the Thatcher era.

A series of European leaders have been singled out for criticism by a frustrated Donald Trump over recent months, said The Guardian. Currently, it's Germany's chancellor who “finds himself in Washington's crosshairs”.

Friedrich Merz provoked the president's wrath last week by telling a class of schoolchildren in his home region of Sauerland that America lacked a clear strategy in Iran and was being “humiliated”. Trump swiftly hit back, calling Merz “totally ineffective” and threatening to shrink America's military presence in Germany. Two days later, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of 5,000 of the more than 36,000 US troops stationed in Germany. Trump subsequently suggested that many more could be pulled out. He has also threatened to raise tariffs on European car imports from 15% to 25%, a step that would hit Germany hardest.

Awkward timing

This row arrives at a terrible time for Merz, who is struggling in the polls, said The Economist. However, it remains to be seen whether the troop withdrawals actually happen. Trump threatened to pull out 12,000 troops in his first term, but that plan was later cancelled. German bases such as Ramstein are “crucial hubs for American power projection, not least in the Middle East”. German officials are more concerned by the decision to cancel the deployment of a US intermediate-range missile unit to Germany.

This deployment, agreed in 2024 by President Biden, was “explicitly intended to send a message of strength to the Kremlin, a tangible signal of deterrence”, said Hubert Wetzel in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Trump's cancellation of the plan last week, after yet another long phone call with Vladimir Putin, could “almost be interpreted as an invitation to the Kremlin”. Nato's credibility ultimately depends on the belief that the US would come to Europe's aid in a crisis, but how sure can anyone be of that now?

Political misstep

Given how much Europe depends on America, its leaders really need to stop provoking Trump, said Wolfgang Munchau on UnHerd. Merz was of course right that the president entered the Iran war without a strategy, but it was foolish of him to talk of America being “humiliated”. More careful language is required. For all the talk of creating strategic autonomy, the reality is that Europe is miles away from being able safely to decouple from the US. It hasn't even agreed a joint defence strategy. The Europeans are in “dangerous denial”, always quick to criticise the US while persistently failing to address their own powerlessness. “Now Trump has called their bluff. No wonder they hate him.”

The Trump administration has lofty expectations about the state of the pharmaceutical industry, but not everyone appears to be a believer. Recent data from the White House predicted that the administration’s deals with drug companies could save the economy more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade. While Republicans are lauding this estimate, many Democrats are taking it with a grain of salt.

‘Touted his drug pricing deals as transformative’

The White House predicts that Trump’s deals could save $529 billion over the next 10 years, according to an analysis of data obtained by The Associated Press. The administration also estimated that federal and state governments could “save a combined $64.3 billion on Medicaid during the next decade” because of Trump’s agreements, Josh Doak said at the AP.

Trump administration officials have touted the president’s “drug pricing deals as transformative and urged Congress to codify their principles into law” as part of “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing, said Doak. The White House has “reached voluntary agreements with 17 pharmaceutical companies,” and it appears the administration’s “goal is to bring manufacturers of sole-source brand-name drugs and biologics into comparable arrangements,” Colleen Cabili said at Quartz. Details on the deal specifics remain unclear.

The president has “sought to position his pharmaceutical pricing push as a winning issue with voters,” said Cabili. Given his plummeting poll numbers over affordability, Trump has been “focusing on his efforts to cut deals with companies so that the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. would no longer be dramatically higher than in other affluent nations,” said Doak.

The mechanism ‘remains a black box’

Despite the White House’s optimism, many across the aisle are skeptical of the Trump administration’s potential cost savings. Just prior to the White House’s analysis, 17 Democratic senators introduced legislation that would force Trump to provide details of the drug deals. If “these deals are actually lowering costs for patients, show us,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said in a statement. “Americans deserve transparency.”

If “these deals are so great, why is the Trump administration afraid of showing them to the public? Because Trump is a giant fraud when it comes to lower drug prices,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a parallel statement. The “scope of the savings claimed by the Trump administration are likely to intensify the scrutiny by Democrats,” said Doak at the AP. One of their primary concerns is that “pharmaceutical companies have increased their profit margins while working with the administration.”

The “exact mechanism” for these savings “remains a black box,” said Angus Liu at the biopharma news website Fierce Pharma. Beyond the price of the drugs themselves, the White House “has yet to define how commercial markets, such as employer-sponsored insurance, will access those discounted rates.” The “math for these massive savings only adds up if the administration can expand its circle of agreements beyond the 17 Big Pharma firms initially targeted” by Trump. Many biotech companies are also wary of “MFN’s impact on their business models” and “argue that they lack the diverse portfolios of pharma companies that can absorb revenue hits from pricing pressure.”

Plans for a summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were underway before America went to war with Iran. That war delayed the meeting, now set for next week, and will overshadow other issues the two leaders planned to discuss.

The war has “significantly altered” the agenda for the Trump-Xi summit and could be a “major obstacle” to resolving trade issues between the two countries, Lyle J. Goldstein said at Responsible Statecraft. The “tensions are palpable” in part because China has reportedly shared weapons and intelligence with Tehran, but both countries want to keep the world economy “from careening off the looming cliff.” Trump and Xi may be forced to work on “pragmatic compromise in order to keep their rivalry under control.”

Trump “may want to temper his expectations” for the summit, Jacob Dreyer said at The New York Times. China once saw presidential visits as “global validation” for its rise but now has “begun to chart its own course” as its leaders realize their country has “learned all it can from America.” Trump wants to improve the U.S.-China relationship but “maintaining a tense stability is about all he can hope for.”

‘A creditor-debtor dynamic’

The president has “fewer cards to play” at the summit, Brahma Chellaney said at The Hill. His choice to go to war against Iran has “boomeranged” into a “global energy shock,” with the result that a meeting intended as a “show of strength” for the U.S. president may end up being more about “damage control.”

The war has depleted American munitions and weakened the economy, accelerating a shift in the U.S.-China relationship from a “rivalry of near-peers” to “something closer to a creditor-debtor dynamic.” Trump’s question in Beijing is “not whether he can strike a deal,” but rather “what he will give up to get one.”

Trade issues “will take center stage at the summit,” Patricia M. Kim said at Brookings. Trump and Xi likely will continue the “trade truce” between their countries, with the U.S. getting Chinese exports of rare earth minerals and sales of American farm products, while China gets tariff and regulatory relief from Washington. A summit “focused on stability” could lead to more cooperation on security and trade or could turn the Washington-Beijing relationship more frosty if “Trump walks away dissatisfied with the results of the trip.”

Breakthroughs unlikely

The number of Americans with favorable views about China has “ticked up,” said Pew Research Center, nearly doubling since 2023 to 27%. Fewer Americans say China is an enemy, but most “still see it as a competitor.”

The summit is “unlikely to deliver decisive breakthroughs” between the U.S. and China, Yingfan Chen and Dingding Chen said at The Diplomat. Its significance will not be a “transforming” of the dynamic between the two countries but instead “maintaining a minimum level of predictability” in the relationship so the competition between China and America can continue “within constraints the system can absorb.”

“No company is more unapologetic about its controversial goals than Palantir Technologies,” said Brett Shafer on The Motley Fool.

The AI powerhouse has “rocketed to become one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalisation”, by selling its analytics software to governments and big business; yet it is rapidly becoming “a political football”.

‘Ramblings of a supervillain’

Opponents cite the rumoured use of its tech in the Iran conflict, and the confirmed use of its tracking software in President Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown – as well as the “aggressive” political stance of two of its co-founders: CEO Alex Karp and chairman Peter Thiel.

Karp’s recent release of a 22-point “manifesto”, based on a book he co-authored last year, has unsettled minds further. The book’s central claim is that the survival of US civilisation depends on the technological revitalisation of the military-industrial complex. Even Palantir insiders are becoming disturbed by the rhetoric, reported Wired, and belatedly “starting to wonder if they’re the bad guys”.

Palantir’s reputation in Britain is on an even sharper descent, said Robert Booth in The Guardian. One MP compared the manifesto, which “implied some cultures were inferior”, to the “ramblings of a supervillain”.

Indeed, more than 300,000 Britons have signed petitions calling for Palantir to be dropped from UK contracts, which include a £330 million deal to process medical data for the NHS and a £240 million Ministry of Defence deal. A contract to process criminal intelligence for the Metropolitan Police is also under discussion.

‘Blackening’ NHS values

Palantir’s pitch is that it performs essential “plumbing” – joining together scattered, often incompatible, sets of data to be analysed and searched easily. But is this really a company we should trust with “our most sensitive data”, asked Faiza Shaheen in The New Statesman. By funding Palantir, “we are blackening the very values” of the NHS. Even the way it obtained its contracts seems shady. It got its toehold in the NHS during Covid by offering assistance for a token £1. Later deals were helped along by Peter Mandelson, and his lobbying firm Global Counsel.

Palantir, which is run in the UK by Louis Mosley, has become “the Left’s favourite conspiracy target”, said Matthew Field in The Daily Telegraph. Green party leader Zack Polanski has made rooting out the company a rallying call. “The tech giant, meanwhile, has embarked on its own PR blitz, seeking to portray the fears of its critics as concocted and political.” There’s everything to play for: next year, Palantir’s NHS deal “runs into a break clause”. The US firm had “better be ready” for a fight.

Until a few months ago, most voters couldn’t have picked Zack Polanski out of a line-up. Now, the Green Party leader – who was elected in September – is so mobbed by crowds, he travels with a bodyguard, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. He gets stopped by teenagers in the street, and at the club nights he hosts, people cheer his name. It is strikingly “reminiscent of the Corbyn mania of 2017”. His life has been transformed, and his party has been too. His message, mixing hope with a “heavy dash” of left-wing populism, has gone down a storm.

The party’s membership has grown from 80,000, when he became leader, to more than 226,000. The Greens won their first by-election in February, and are now on course to make big gains in next week’s local elections in England.

Equal threat

Keir Starmer has long been alive to the threat posed by Reform UK, said Chloe Chaplain in The i Paper – and in response, Labour has shifted to the right in some areas. But there is a growing realisation that the Greens pose an equal threat.

Reform is still expected to win the biggest vote share on Thursday, but by focusing on issues such as Gaza (where it accuses Labour of being complicit in a genocide) and “affordability”, the Green Party has won over many ethnic minority voters, young progressives and Corbynistas. In London, the party is set to win four councils – including Hackney and Lambeth – that have been Labour-run for decades.

Yet Polanski’s brand of Corbynism is risky, said Daisy Eastlake in The Times. Several of his candidates have been exposed for “incendiary views” (one shared a video saying that a synagogue attack was “not antisemitism” but “revenge”); and he has caused alarm by suggesting that British Jews might be experiencing a “perception of unsafety”, not real danger.

Riding high

Have the people planning to vote Green any idea of the chaos the party would wreak, wondered Danny Cohen in The Telegraph. As well as legalising hard drugs and reducing income inequality by enforcing a maximum 10:1 pay ratio for organisations, it wants to remove many barriers to immigration.

Polanski is riding high now, but soon he will come up against the challenges facing Reform UK, said John Rentoul in The Independent – including novice councillors who struggle to get the basics right, let alone deliver on their “impossible” campaign promises; and national policies that are treasured by members but unpopular with the broader electorate. Polanski might be pragmatic enough to drop these, but there is a problem: in the Green Party, it is the members who decide policy.

Thanks to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “the visually and spiritually ugly Queen film that won four Oscars and earned $910 million worldwide”, we’ve had a spate of “soulless, estate-approved” biopics of famous musicians lately, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. “Michael” is the latest of these.

‘Ghoulishness’

It seeks not to understand Michael Jackson, nor to explore his legacy, but simply to deliver content for fans – the scenes from the star’s life that they hope and expect to see. In that respect, it is not unique; but there is a “particular ghoulishness” in giving this treatment to a figure as complicated as the late King of Pop. “Michael” ends in 1988 – long before child abuse allegations surfaced against Jackson. It makes no mention of his accusers, or his tendency to share his bed with young boys. Instead, it depicts him as a man with no real agency: he is just a kindly dreamer, destined to “spread love and heal”.

Sanctifying bullshit

In this film, Jackson positively glows with Christ-like goodness, agreed Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, which makes sense when you look at the credits. Six of its executive producers have the surname Jackson, as does the film’s star: Jaafar Jackson is Michael’s nephew. The film opens in Gary, Indiana, in 1968, where the Jackson children are being screamed at by their strict father Joe, and little Michael (the poor “Lost Boy” who will one day buy his own Neverland) consoles himself by reading “Peter Pan” in bed. From then on, it plods through the familiar beats of his life, from the Jackson 5 to solo stardom. The music scenes are brilliant, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The rest is pretty disgraceful, two hours of weird, sanctifying bullshit. Surely, the genre has reached its nadir.

Two summers ago, the Scottish National Party was in a sorry state, said Annabel Denham in The Daily Telegraph. It had lost 38 Westminster seats in a punishing general election, and the party was “mired in scandal”, with its chief executive being investigated for embezzlement. It was haunted by policy failures – including a “stagnant education attainment gap”, poor health outcomes and “deteriorating public services” – that remain a problem today.

A recent poll found that 58% of Scots disapprove of the party's record in government. Yet bizarrely, the SNP is set to come top in next month's Holyrood elections, a result that would secure it its fifth win in a row.

Lure of independence

There are two main explanations for this, said Ian Swanson in the Edinburgh Evening News. One is that the party can always count on a solid base of support among pro-independence Scots. The other is that the rise of Reform UK as a political force in Scotland has fragmented the opposition vote. The result is that the SNP, like Labour in 2024, is on track to win a “loveless landslide”.

Under John Swinney, the SNP is doing its best to woo voters by sticking with its strategy of making Scotland the home of “free stuff”, said Chris Deerin in The New Statesman. Having already delivered free university tuition, eye tests and prescriptions, and baby boxes for every new parent, it's now promising a free school bag of stationery and books for every new primary school pupil. The SNP also plans to cap prices for essential food items in supermarkets. Then, of course, there's the lure of the independence issue: Swinney insists that a vote on breaking up the UK could be held as early as 2028.

‘Political panto’

On this issue, Swinney has got himself in a bit of a pickle, however. When he declared last year that the SNP would push for “Indyref2” if it won a majority in the Holyrood election, he no doubt assumed that he had set the bar safely high, said Andy Maciver in The Herald. The party is weakened, and it doesn't feel confident of winning a referendum now. It would rather leave the fight until the end of the decade, by which time it can hope to have a stronger record in government to point to – and the divisive Nigel Farage might be in No. 10.

The timing is not right for the SNP, agreed Robert Shrimsley in the FT. But it can still safely demand a new referendum because it knows Labour will veto any such effort. Swinney can then act all aggrieved. Everyone will play their part in this “political panto”, knowing full well that nothing will come of it. “The starting gun for the break-up of the union? Oh no it isn't.”

The United States has backed Israel since its founding as a modern state in 1948. That alliance is looking fragile these days, with recent polls suggesting American public support for its longtime ally has cratered amid deadly wars in Gaza, Iran and across the Middle East.

The number of Americans who now hold a “very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel” is 60%, said Pew Research Center. That’s up seven points since last year, and “nearly 20 points since 2022.” There was once bipartisan support for Israel among U.S. voters, but 80% of Democrats now disapprove while 58% of Republicans approve. There has also been a departure from 25 years of polling, which long reported that “Israelis consistently held double-digit leads in Americans’ Middle East sympathies,” said Gallup. Americans now view Palestinians more sympathetically than Israel, by a margin of 41 to 36%.

‘Heavy-handed militarism’

The United States is “falling out of love” with Israel, Edward Luce said at Financial Times. Fewer Americans remember Yitzhak Rabin, the “courageous prime minister of Israel who sought peace with the Palestinians” but was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli extremist. Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dominated Israeli politics since then, wielding a “heavy-handed militarism” in Gaza, and Americans have noted his role in persuading President Donald Trump “that it was a good idea to attack Iran.” Rabin lost his life for peace. “What will posterity say of Netanyahu?”

Netanyahu may be remembered as the “prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally,” Michelle Goldberg said at The New York Times. The country’s faltering reputation is mostly a “consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians” and particularly the “mass killings” in Gaza during its war with Hamas. But the growing split is also the result of Netanyahu’s “aligning Zionism” with Trump’s “American authoritarianism.” U.S. views of Israel “could still have much further to fall.”

The United States “must stand with Israel,” Alex Tokarev said at The Detroit News. Like the U.S., Israel “values liberty” but is “surrounded by tyrants and terrorists determined to annihilate it.” A West that will not support its ally against such enemies “will not defend its own liberty.”

An ‘ominous turn’

Netanyahu has “torched U.S. support for Israel for a generation,” said Axios. The collapse can be seen among Democrats in Congress, where “lawmakers who started out staunchly pro-Israel are becoming increasingly vocal critics” of the U.S. ally. American leaders must “have a discussion about how to normalize” the relationship with Israel, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said to Axios.

An “unprecedentedly overwhelming majority of Democrats” last week voted against failed Senate resolutions to block weapons and bulldozer sales to Israel, said The Times of Israel. Americans are “sick and tired of spending billions of dollars to support Netanyahu’s horrific wars,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said to reporters, per the outlet. The votes to deny arms to Israel are an “ominous turn that will encourage Iran, Hezbollah and their terrorist allies around the Middle East,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial.

It was not a joke. The shoe company Allbirds announced last week that it is pivoting to artificial intelligence, a sign that the AI bubble is about to pop. Or maybe the tech optimists are right and everything is AI now.

The company was “once the maker of Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe,” said The New York Times. Allbirds was previously valued at $4 billion, but the company earlier this year closed all its stores and sold its assets for a mere $39 million. Now the brand seeks a fresh start: The business is rebranding itself “NewBird AI” and announced it had received a $50 million influx to buy up advanced computer chips that will let it enter the AI infrastructure business. That investment is a “drop in the bucket” for an industry spending billions to build data centers, but Wall Street loved the news. NewBird’s stock immediately rose nearly 600%.

The market’s reaction proves “AI excitement is alive and well — but as silly as ever,” Noah Weidner said at The Street. The move might make sense, though. Artificial intelligence requires a “massive volume” of computing power, and companies able to furnish it “will drum up excitement” — even if that company once sold shoes.

AI is creating wealth

Will AI spending hold up?

The shoe company’s “flailing AI embrace” is “not a horrible idea on the surface” given that it fills a “real business need,” Nitish Pahwa said at Slate. But the AI spending that has “propped up the economy” might not persevere, and communities are “successfully obstructing the data centers” needed for further expansion. Indeed, Allbirds’ stock started to drop after the initial surge, said Bloomberg. The market roller coaster ride gives Allbirds the feel of a “meme stock,” said 50 Park Investments’ Adam Sarhan, in which “emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window.”

In May 2025, Ye – formerly Kanye West – released a single called “Heil Hitler”, which contained a lengthy sample from one of Hitler’s speeches, said Dan Hancox in The Guardian.

Around the same time, he started selling swastika T-shirts on his website. As a result, the musician, who has frequently been accused of racism, homophobia and sexism, was sued by his own talent agency, and denied entry to Australia. So news that he had been booked to headline the three-day Wireless Festival in north London was, shall we say, “a little surprising”. It brought condemnation from Jewish groups; sponsors withdrew; and a week later the Home Office barred Ye from entry into the UK, prompting the cancellation of the entire festival.

Notoriety sells

Industry insiders were shocked by this sudden unravelling of a major event, said Eamonn Forde and Sarah Walker in the same paper – but were also puzzled as to why its organiser, Festival Republic, had risked booking Ye in the first place. Well, festivals are big business these days, said Zing Tsjeng in The i Paper – and notoriety sells. Festival Republic must have looked at Ye’s still-healthy streaming figures, and his ability to court outrage, and seen dollar signs.

Their own defence, however, was that Ye’s antisemitic actions could be overlooked because they were attributable to his bipolar disorder, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. In January, the rapper had taken out an ad in The Wall Street Journal, in which he explained that he had been in the grip of a long manic episode, and insisted that he loved Jewish people. He sounded sincere, but he placed the ad shortly before announcing a world tour; and it made no mention of his long history of spewing antisemitic hatred.

In 2022, he publicly praised Hitler, and tweeted that he’d be going “death con 3” on Jews. He apologised then too – yet neither he nor his staff seem to have taken steps to prevent a public recurrence. He didn’t record and release “Heil Hitler” alone. He wasn’t printing his swastika merchandise in his shed. A manager with power of attorney could have stopped it.

‘Glamour of the censored’

I don’t really buy the mental health defence, said Ella Whelan in The Telegraph. If Ye doesn’t hate Jews, he uses Jew hatred to get attention. But I still think the government was wrong to ban him. That only lends him the glamour of the censored.

Many Britons will have applauded the decision that Ye’s presence would not be “conducive to the public good”, said Sarah McLaughlin on UnHerd; but do we really want ministers to filter visitors to the UK on the basis of their opinions? Banning them won’t make their offensive ideas go away; and it’s a power to limit free speech that could easily be misused.

Deep-fried food will be banned, high-sugar items restricted and desserts will have to contain at least 50% fruit under plans to overhaul school dinners.

Schools will no longer be allowed to offer unhealthy “grab-and-go” options like sausage rolls and pizza every day but not everyone is convinced it’s a good idea.

‘Innocent pleasures’

“What a loss!” said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in The Telegraph. Treacle sponge – “or ‘stodge’ as it was known”, did “give me the fuel I needed to get through the gruelling 90 minutes of being screamed at by the hockey mistress”.

Typically, this government is “trying to force us to be more healthy”, but in doing so is “imposing a blanket rule” that denies us “some of life’s greatest, and surely quite innocent, pleasures”.

There is much “hysteria about spiking childhood obesity”, said William Atkinson in The Spectator. “But even if our little darlings were rapidly becoming larger darlings, taking the fun out of school dinners is no way to solve the problem”.

Look at the French. They have guidelines too but they ban vending machines, so unlike our schools where lunches are “too often topped up by tuck from shops or machines”, the French “put time and emphasis on lunch” to make sure pupils “aren’t supplementing their diets with what they can acquire outside the canteen”. So “jam roly-poly and chicken nuggets are perfectly fine if pupils aren’t also gorging on crisps, pop and Kit-Kats”.

When I was at school I had a “diet limited to around half-a-dozen ‘safe’ foods” and I would have been “branded a ‘fussy eater’”, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. Decades later “I discovered I was neurodivergent” and had a “need for safety and predictability”, particularly with “consistency of taste and texture”.

My nine-year-old son “is also Send” (special educational needs and disabilities) and when “safe foods” aren’t available for a neurodivergent child they “don’t eat at all”. The government’s plans are “upsetting for parents like me” because they might become “another way Send kids can be demonised, stigmatised and singled out”. It’s “not as simple” as saying “if they’re hungry, they’ll eat” for Send kids, who number 1.7 million in England – one in five of all pupils.

Horror stories

The plans “don’t go far enough”, said Rosie Taylor in The i Paper, and they are “unlikely to make a difference when school caterers so often seem to fail to meet the basic standards of cooking food properly”. My son had a burger that was “overcooked” and there are “plenty of other horror stories of raw, stuck together pasta and hard jacket potatoes”.

The government’s aims are “laudable” and the Unison union supports them, said Leigh Powell, Unison’s national officer for private contractors. But members working in school kitchens fear that the new standards “will be imposed on hard-working kitchen staff without tackling the systemic problems”.

Too many schools have contracted out food services to private companies, which are “laser-focused on ensuring that profit margins are healthy, rather than the food they serve”. Resources have been “cut to the bone”, so it’s important that school kitchen staff, who will be “most affected by these changes”, have their “views recognised”.

Schools “aren’t responsible” for obesity and the poor dental health of our children, said Darren Lewis in The Mirror. “Healthy eating” has been the policy at my children’s school “for many years”, but at home many parents have “a choice between heating or eating”.

Hopefully the new rules will “steer children” towards a “healthier weight and better teeth”, said The Times. “Slices of melon and bowls of berries make a fine pudding”, but some “joy” may be lost and “school memories” may be a “little less rich” without treacle tart.

People across the United States are making their opinions known as the war in Iran enters its seventh week, and perhaps none more so than military members. Active-duty soldiers and veterans are experiencing an array of emotions connected to the conflict, with some in support and others vehemently against it. The differing feelings come as tensions in the Defense Department grow.

‘Powerful motivator’

Some soldiers are angry that the Iran conflict has been run with “strategic incoherence” because the “president hasn’t really been able to say with clarity to the American people what exactly this war is about,” Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman said to WBUR News. The war “leaves this question, okay, ‘So is this tool we have, the U.S. military, is that a tool that we can use to create that better future for our country and for Iran?’” It is important to “articulate a very clear plan if we’re going to put American service members’ lives in jeopardy.”

The number of people looking to leave the military had already been increasing, and the “war against Iran has been a powerful motivator,” Kat Lonsdorf and Tom Bowman said at NPR. Many soldiers are “airing their concerns and frustrations,” Bill Galvin, who helps run the GI Rights Hotline for military discharge, said to NPR. Most of the callers are “asking how to apply to become a conscientious objector,” and nearly all of them “mention the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran on the first day of the war.”

Many veterans also remember the effects of years-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to the war in Iran, the “U.S. is creating a new generation of anti-American sentiment in Iran and across the region,” Chris Sarson, who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said to WBUR News. Soldiers who served during these conflicts became “acutely aware of the heavy costs that civilians pay for war.”

‘Many acknowledge the role Iran played’

Though many in the Armed Forces feel the conflict might become another “forever war,” others have more complex feelings. Some soldiers are largely against war but “also acknowledge the role Iran played behind the scenes” assisting other regional nations in Middle East wars, Jeff Schogol and Patty Nieberg said at Task & Purpose. Wars in the Middle East have “caused a lot of moral injury and PTSD amongst the veterans’ community,” but “at the same time, Iran again has been a party to this conflict over the last 25 years,” Alex Plitsas, a former Army staff sergeant and Iraq veteran, said to Task & Purpose.

Some veterans feel that the war means Iran is “finally being held accountable,” said Schogol and Nieberg at Task & Purpose. “I’ve flown combat missions against the very terrorists funded and directed by the Iranian regime, and I’ve seen firsthand the threat Iran poses,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), an Air Force veteran, said in a press release when the war began. The conflict has been “coming for the ayatollahs, who have no regard for human life or peace.”

Many younger soldiers are also “excited to deploy” to Iran because the war is “what needs to be done,” Army veteran Juan Munoz said to The Associated Press. Other soldiers support the war thanks to their positive feelings about President Donald Trump. There “had to have been some reason” for Trump “to bomb them,” Army veteran Edward Bauman told the AP. “I don’t think he would have just went out of his way to just, ‘I’m going to bomb these people.’”

Might the war in Iran “do what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up the North Atlantic Treaty alliance”, asked The Wall Street Journal. It’s “no longer an idle question”. Last week, President Trump vented his deep frustration with Nato, dismissing it as a “paper tiger” and declaring he is now “strongly considering” pulling the US out. If he does, it would be the “dumbest alliance breakup in modern history” – and it would be Europe’s fault.

‘Two-way street’

Spain and Italy blocked US military flights from their bases and Emmanuel Macron prevented use of France’s airspace. “Add its reluctance to help clear the Strait of Hormuz, and Europe is playing into every Maga stereotype about a one-sided Western alliance.” Europe’s reluctance to get involved is understandable, given Trump’s erratic policies and his failure to consult allies about the war. But it could have been more helpful. After all, it has its own interests to protect in the Middle East, and it would have shown that the alliance is “a two-way street”.

Our so-called “allies” have spent decades “free-riding on the US security umbrella”, said Josh Hammer in Newsweek: Trump is just saying so plainly. The “imbalance is staggering”: US defence spending accounts for 60% of Nato’s total. It’s clear that the “status quo is no longer defensible – and deep down, everyone knows it”.

Despite America’s frustrations, maintaining the alliance is still in its interests, said Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. Nato gives the US access to a large network of naval, air and ground force bases – Nato’s top commander in Europe, an American, has gone so far as to say that US power projection depends on its European allies. Nevertheless, European leaders must convince the Trump administration that it is in Washington’s interests to stay in.

Damage is done

The severity of the threat should not be underestimated, said Roland Oliphant in the same paper. The US is not just the biggest member, it is “the lynchpin”, around which the whole edifice is constructed. It has capabilities, in satellite and signals intelligence, in missile defence, that the rest rely heavily on. If it abandons the alliance, the chances of Putin taking a gamble on attacking Europe “would increase substantially”.

“In literal terms, it would be near-impossible” for Trump to leave Nato, said The Independent. In 2023, Congress passed a law that means the US can only leave with the approval of the Senate, and there is little appetite among Republicans for this. But that wouldn’t prevent the US from “quiet quitting”. It could withdraw troops from Germany or simply “ignore its Article 5 duties to defend, for example, Estonia”.

The damage is already done, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Trump hasn’t just undermined Nato’s collective security guarantee; he has betrayed Ukraine and threatened to invade Greenland. “Trust is gone.” Europe must build up its own security arrangements immediately. There is no guarantee that Europe “will have an ally across the Atlantic” again any day soon.

Space programmes cost billions. By 2028, when the fourth mission in its current Artemis programme lands astronauts back on the Moon, Nasa will have spent $105 billion (£78 billion) – which is “a chunk of change”, said USA Today.

Spending so much seems puzzling “when 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 got bigger issues right now, 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”.

The current Artemis enterprise “reeks” of Elon Musk: his SpaceX Starship will have increasing involvement as the missions progress and, although the details of the deal are “shrouded in mystery”, it’s “safe to suspect that some quid pro quo is involved”. We know that SpaceX has received $17 billion (£12.6 billion) in government funding already.

Images to ‘catch the breath’

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” for what appears to be “a few rocket launches” and some “charming zero gravity footage of bulky astronauts surrounded by floating pens” 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 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”.

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 “kickstarted the modern environmental movement”.

Artemis II is “one small step towards living in deep space”, said evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon in The Washington Post. I see parallels between “establishing an enduring human presence” on the Moon (and, ultimately, Mars) and “the processes by which animals and plants” arrive on Earth’s islands and “evolve into new species”. Future generations living on other planets will “gradually become different from people on Earth”. And that will be “a giant leap for all humanity”.

From his podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump reminded his base how he differed from past presidents. “It turned out that I was able to stop wars from happening,” he said.

That was in 2024, said Natalie Allison at The Washington Post. A year later, the newly installed president was back at CPAC, boasting about being “a peacemaker, not a conqueror”.

Notable absences

This year, Trump skipped the jamboree for the first time in a decade: he was too busy managing the war with Iran he’d launched a month earlier. And he wasn’t the only high-profile no show, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. At the last event, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio spoke, and Elon Musk ramped up the carnival atmosphere by brandishing a chainsaw on stage; this time, one attendee noted that there were more journalists present than politicians. That the event was rather more subdued than usual was due to several factors – including its relocation from DC to Texas; but the lack of buzz was indicative of the troubled state of the GOP as it gears up for the midterms.

A little over a year into his second term, Trump is discovering that for all his efforts to extend his authority, there are still constraints on what he can do, said Gerard Baker in The Times. Public revulsion has forced him to temper his migrant deportation policy; the Supreme Court has struck out his signature tariffs policy; the markets are squealing about the war in Iran. And even in his own backyard, the voters are restive: in late March, a Florida Democrat seized a red seat that takes in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Base betrayal

The die-hards remain intensely loyal, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic, but polls show that Trump is losing support among the coalition of younger Americans and Latinos that gave him his victory in 2024. Many already felt betrayed by his attempt to block the Epstein files and by the impact of his Big Beautiful Bill on the deficit. Now, they’re furious that he has taken the US into a war that is costing billions and further driving up the cost of living.

In the manosphere, prominent voices who rallied behind his “anti-woke” rhetoric in 2024 are complaining that Americans were duped. The podcaster Joe Rogan has called the war “insane, based on what [Trump] ran on”. There is dissent within Maga too, some of which has veered into antisemitism: Tucker Carlson and others have been peddling the line that Israel manipulated Trump into the war. Disenchanted Trump fans are unlikely to vote Democrat in November; but they might easily just tune out of the election – and so inadvertently deliver a “blue wave”.

As Donald Trump’s war wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that he has no “overarching strategy” and is now fighting a war of attrition, said The Guardian.

America is still striking at Iranian targets while building up troops in the region. Iran, in turn, keeps attacking Israel and the Gulf states. Last week, it hit a US airbase in Saudi Arabia, injuring 12 US personnel and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Tehran’s allies in Yemen have now entered the fray. The Strait of Hormuz remains shut. And while his officials talk about peace being “weeks, not months” away, Trump is still warning of far worse to come as he “searches for leverage”.

This week, the president said that the US could capture or “obliterate” Iran’s oil export hub, Kharg Island, and possibly even target Iran's energy and water systems – “war crimes by another name”.

Miles apart

Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure last month, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, only to row back, saying there would be no strikes for ten days to allow time for talks. That deadline elapses on Monday, but all the evidence suggests that he had no plan and was simply “playing for time”. And while he claims that Tehran is “begging for a deal”, the Iranians seem to think they have him “on the run”, and deny talks are even taking place.

Even if meaningful negotiations were on the horizon, the two sides are miles apart, said Richard Spencer in The Times. Iran is demanding not only an end to sanctions, but “an end to all attacks, including Israel’s, on Hamas, Hezbollah and other arms of the ‘resistance’”. It also wants reparations, and “sovereignty” over the Strait of Hormuz – a hint that it plans to charge for access, as Egypt does with the Suez Canal. The US, in turn, insists that Iran end its nuclear programme; give up its enriched uranium; and cut off support to its proxies.

When it comes to Trump’s rhetoric, a pattern is emerging, said Emily Maitlis in The i Paper. He reserves his most bellicose threats for the weekend, when the financial markets are closed, then starts talking up the possibility of peace so that the outlook seems more positive by the time traders are back at their desks. The markets, though, are getting wise to this tactic.

‘Escalate or talk’

As for Tehran, it seems unmoved by Trump’s threats. The fact is, Iran is far more capable than the US of both withstanding and inflicting pain, said The Economist. While the world counts the economic costs of this war, the regime is “making a mint” from sanctions-busting oil sales. Domestically, its hardline Revolutionary Guards remain in control. And overseas, its proxies continue to do its bidding: last Saturday, the Houthis provided a stark reminder of their capacity to ramp up the chaos when they fired missiles at Israel.

Trump, by contrast, is flailing. “Despite operational successes and his nonsensical claim of having already changed the regime in Tehran, he has yet to win any substantive gains from the fighting.” His choice now is to “escalate or talk”.

Given the risks of escalation, Trump will probably seek a deal to reopen Hormuz, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. But any outcome that leaves Iran with practical control over Gulf energy exports would be deeply unpopular with those states. It has even been suggested that the UAE and Saudi Arabia could “join the conflict rather than accept that outcome”.

‘The regime is hurting’

Trump will find the Iranians to be very tough negotiators, said Matthew Gould in The Times. The regime has shown its capacity before to withstand “repeated blows”, and is determined to stay in power no matter how much pain it causes its people. By contrast, Trump will be worrying about popular opinion ahead of the midterms. He is reportedly already “bored” with the conflict. And if it chooses, Tehran can use its trigger-happy proxies to derail the talks at any moment. That said, Iran has a habit of overplaying its hand and, “for all its bravado, the regime is hurting”.

Pakistan, in its role as mediator, has intensified its diplomatic efforts over the past week, said Saeed Shah in The Guardian; but Tehran is so far refusing to engage in face-to-face talks with US officials. Trump began the war confident that it wouldn’t take long to topple the Iranian regime, said Steve Bloomfield in The Observer. Its nuclear programme had been weakened, its allies had been hobbled, so the US and Israel seized the moment. Yet in the past five weeks, the mullahs have actually tightened their grip on power; and it’s the ordinary Iranians, who Trump promised to save, who will pay the price for this war. If it ends soon, other economies will bounce back. Iran could feel the impact for generations to come.

The Iran war follows on the heels of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on allies and threats to take Greenland from NATO partner Denmark. Now, the president is demanding that other countries reopen the Strait of Hormuz closed by the war he launched. And critics say he has transformed the U.S. from the so-called leader of the free world into a rogue superpower that threatens global stability.

Trump has driven “deep and perhaps permanent wedges” between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia, said Robert Kagan at The Atlantic. The Iran war was launched with “no public debate, no vote in Congress” and no consultation with “allies other than Israel.” Europeans must now wonder if the war signals that the president is “more or less likely” to “take similarly bold action on Greenland.” American global leadership survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it may not survive this.

Weaker, lonelier and less effective

The fallout from Iran demonstrates the administration “either didn’t understand how its actions would affect other states or simply didn’t care,” said Stephen M. Walt at Foreign Policy. That leaves “every country in the world” trying to determine how to work with an “increasingly rogue” U.S. For now, its ostensible friends have to weigh whether U.S. power “could be used to harm them either intentionally or inadvertently.”

Every post-Cold War administration has taken on actual “rogue” states, said Matthew Kroenig at The Wall Street Journal. U.S. presidents have waged a “de facto campaign of toppling anti-American dictators” such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. And Iran is the “biggest prize” on the list. Even if the Islamic regime does not fall under the weight of U.S. attacks, it will be “too weak to pose a serious threat for years to come.” That puts Trump “on the verge of eliminating the world’s rogue states.”

A swaggering superpower “could be a collective asset for the democratic world,” said Hal Brands at Bloomberg. But Trump’s approach could transform the U.S. into an “out-of-control hegemon” at risk of being “weaker, lonelier and less effective than before.” Success in Iran might “create a new Middle East with a U.S.-led coalition at its core,” but failure will serve as a “damaging rebuff of U.S. power.”

Allies look to Beijing

The U.S. “had to do it ourselves” because other countries would not join the “decapitation of Iran,” said Trump in a Wednesday night prime-time address to the nation. The president has threatened to leave NATO over the issue, but there are “few signs that’s happening,” said Politico.

Polling shows residents of Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. now “believe it’s better to depend on China” than the U.S., said Politico. The U.S. “no longer works in partnership” with its old allies, said former Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Lambert to the outlet, and is “only focused on itself.”

“This is gutter politics,” was Armed Forces Minister Al Carns’ reply when quizzed about the theft. “We’ve got two wars on, one in the Middle East, one in Ukraine, and we’re talking about someone’s phone.”

But like it or not, the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s work phone is a big political issue, said Alex Glover in The Spectator. In October, when he was still Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney was walking down a street in Pimlico, phone to his ear, when a man on a bicycle snatched it from his hand and pedalled off with it. Or so McSweeney told the police.

But that phone held text messages to his friend Lord Mandelson, messages that could have cast light on how the latter got to be appointed our US ambassador, and which would now have to be disclosed as part of the inquiry into the Mandelson/Epstein scandal.

Holes in the tale

To many, the theft sounds too convenient to be true. Not to Starmer, though. As he puts it: “The idea that somehow everybody could have seen that some time in the future there would be a request for the phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched.”

I don’t know the exact fate of the “stolen” phone, said Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail, but I know this: “Starmer is lying his posterior off about what happened.” The phone was reported stolen over a month after Mandelson was sacked as ambassador, by which time everyone, Starmer included, knew the huge significance of his chief of staff’s phone messages. Indeed, meetings were held in Downing Street to “game-out” how to proceed should the government be forced, as it now has been, to release documents relating to Mandelson.

Understandable reaction

And there are huge holes in the tale McSweeney told police, said Amy Gibbons in The Daily Telegraph. He did say that it was a “government phone”, but he never mentioned that he worked for Starmer and that it contained sensitive information. He even gave them confusing details about where the theft took place. Amazingly, the stolen phone wasn’t reported to the intelligence services, nor did No. 10 make any attempt to recover it.

I’m confused, said John Crace in The Guardian. For years, right-wing hacks have been going on about London being “a hellscape ... where simply using your phone is an invitation to be mugged”. Yet instead of cutting McSweeney some slack, they’ve convinced themselves that his is “the only phone in London not to have been nicked”.

Not getting details right just after you’ve been mugged is understandable behaviour for anyone in shock, but not in McSweeney’s case it seems. “After all, it’s a well-known fact that men with ginger hair and a beard can’t be trusted.”

Italy “woke up ⁠angry and disillusioned” after their play-off defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina meant they missed out on a third consecutive World Cup, “prolonging a sporting nightmare for ⁠the football-mad country”, said Al Jazeera.

Italy have won the tournament four times but are now suffering from a “World Cup curse”, said Corriere della Sera on its front page. The last time the Azzurri “actually won” a knockout match on the game’s biggest stage was “before the first iPhone was released”, said Politico.

‘Outrage across the country’

“The Italian catastrophe has now lost its sense of shock,” said Luigi Garlando in Gazzetta dello Sport. “Rather than being unpredictable, it seems to be the norm.” So for the first time an “entire generation will have grown up” without seeing Italy at a World Cup.

The “influx” of overseas players that headed to Serie A in the late 1990s “came at a cost”, said the BBC, because “homegrown talents” then found “opportunities” in the top flight “increasingly hard to come by”.

The Italian league is suffering from financial problems, so as Premier League clubs “benefit from ever-increasing TV deals” and other European leagues “attract heavy investment”, Serie A has seen that type of revenue “stagnate”.

The play-off defeat “triggered outrage across the country”, said Al Jazeera. “It’s clear that Italian football needs to be rebuilt from the ground up,” said Italy’s sports minister Andrea Abodi. Gabriele Gravina, president of the Italian Football Federation, has ⁠quit in the wake of the defeat, after he initially “lashed out” at a “perceived lack of support” for football from the government.

‘In need of tearing down’

The problems go beyond the national team. A 98th-minute penalty earned Atalanta a place in the last 16 of the Champions League – but they are the only Italian club left in the elite European competition. The “giants” of Serie A have “fallen”, said Sky Sports.

The “lack of investment” in Serie A clubs has seen a “dip in player quality”. The top division is “relying more and more” on older players and there’s “a lack of promising Italian youth coming through”. There’s also a “lack of tactical innovation” at the “heart of Italian football”.

Even if “the state of Italian football in 2026 isn’t alarming”, there are bells “sounding anyway, right now”, said Mark White on Four Four Two. The “colosseums” of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, famous stadiums like the San Siro, Delle Alpi and Olimpico, are “either crumbling, torn down or since abandoned altogether”. Italian football itself is “in need of tearing down and starting again”.

Meanwhile, there’s “still a chance” that Italy will end up at the 2026 World Cup finals, said Give Me Sport. With “uncertainty” over whether Iran will compete at the tournament, it’s thought that Italy could be Fifa’s preferred choice to replace the Middle Eastern nation if necessary.

Public satisfaction with the NHS has increased for the first time since 2019.

But although 26% of British adults questioned in the British Social Attitudes survey were satisfied with the health service – an increase of 6% from 2024 – the majority, some 51%, said they were dissatisfied with their experience. That “sounds more like a cause for concern than celebration”, said The Guardian in an editorial.

Puzzling findings

“The public appears inclined to accept the government’s narrative of a broken system being painstakingly put back together.” But hospital waiting lists are “still huge”, NHS dentistry has “probably never been in a weaker state” and there’s “justified impatience” on lagging social care provision. So “having pronounced the NHS ‘broken’”, Wes Streeting and his Department of Health and Social Care colleagues must “hurry up with their repairs”.

Still, the survey results, published by The King's Fund think tank, suggest the health service is “finally on the long road to recovery”, said The Mirror. The “gold standard assessment” found that the Labour government’s first full year in power “saw the greatest fall in dissatisfaction” in the NHS since “New Labour’s first full year in power in 1998”.

“Puzzlingly,” said Joseph Freer, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation, “overall satisfaction rose”, but there was “no corresponding rise in satisfaction with each individual NHS service: GPs, A&E, dentistry and hospital care”.

This might be because services “did genuinely improve”, but the survey “simply did not poll enough people about each individual service to reliably detect small improvements”. Or perhaps the “political context” has “shifted”: a European study found that how people “feel about” the health system is now “influenced by things outside it”, such as “the political climate and what they see in the media”.

Skill shortage

While “debate” on the NHS “typically focuses on funding, waiting lists and plans for reform”, said Chris Day, chair of the Russell Group, in The Times, the system’s “most fundamental constraint” is that it “does not have enough skilled people”.

There are more than 100,000 vacancies across the wider “health ecosystem” and “demand for staff is rising faster than the system is able to meet”, thanks to “an ageing population, rising chronic illness and growing expectations”. So the “real solution” to improve the NHS experience is to increase “training capacity” and support a “range of alternative career paths into healthcare”.

Everyone should care, because the fate of the NHS is “a question that matters even to those who rarely use” it, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times. Its budget of £200 billion “dwarfs any other public service” and will hugely “determine” whether Rachel Reeves imposes more tax rises.

The issue is also “central” to Labour’s “tenuous hopes of political recovery”; if Labour can’t convince voters it’s “fixing the NHS”, it “will have little else to offer”. But if it can “demonstrate tangible improvement” it will have a “powerful argument” against Nigel Farage, who has “repeatedly questioned whether the NHS funding model can survive”.

Israel and the US went into this war together, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. But as the conflict drags on, some members of Maga’s “isolationist wing” are starting to complain that Israel “led” the US into it, in pursuit of its own agenda.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lent credence to that theory some weeks ago, when he said that the US had struck Iran because Washington “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would prompt a retaliation. And only last week Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, told Congress that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons, undermining any claim that Iran posed an “imminent threat”.

Convenient claims

It is pretty clear that it posed no such threat, said Donald Macintyre in The Independent – and it is well known that Benjamin Netanyahu had been trying to persuade the US to join in such a war for 25 years: successive US presidents blocked it. But that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump was lured into a war by Israel, even if he sometimes finds it convenient to claim that the Israelis are acting without his knowledge.

For Netanyahu, this war is not just about destroying a hostile regime, said Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. This autumn, he will face his first electoral test since the 7 October attacks. For the past two years, his poll ratings have been “stubbornly below levels that would return him to power”. Victory for Israel in this conflict – which has the support of 90% of Israelis – would do much to turn that around.

‘Draining support’

But in going to war with Iran, the PM is gambling with his country’s long-term security, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. For decades, the single biggest guarantee of that security has been the “strong bipartisan support” Israel commands in the US. “But the Netanyahu government’s actions – first in Gaza and now in Iran – are draining that support away.”

If this war turns into a costly “quagmire”, it’s “entirely conceivable” that both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2028 presidential race will propose curtailing support for Israel – an outcome that would be a “strategic disaster for the Israelis”.

The thousands of people who crowded into Club Chemistry in Canterbury on the nights of 5, 6 and 7 March had no idea they were attending meningitis super-spreader events, said Lara Wildenberg in The Times. But it is now clear that as these youngsters shared drinks and vapes, kissed and danced, MenB was passing between them.

Cautiously optimistic

On 13 March, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) was notified by a hospital in Kent of a confirmed case of meningitis in a patient who had been admitted two days earlier. It started contact tracing, but local students were told nothing and so continued to mix.

On 14 March, hospitals reported a surge in admissions of young people with symptoms of meningitis, and on the campus of the University of Kent the mood shifted, as a video clip of a student being wheeled away by paramedics circulated on WhatsApp. Finally, on Sunday 15 March, the UKHSA issued a public alert and launched a “full-scale response”. Over the next few days, thousands of people were given preventative antibiotics and MenB vaccines.

By the end of last week, there had been 20 confirmed cases of MenB, said The Guardian. All the patients had been hospitalised, and two had died: an unnamed student aged 21, and Juliette Kenny, 18, a local sixth-former. But with no cases reported since, health authorities are cautiously optimistic that the outbreak – the worst in the UK in a generation – has peaked.

Few youngsters are vaccinated

MenB can kill within hours of symptoms becoming apparent, said Laura Donnelly in The Telegraph, but these symptoms are easily mistaken for those of flu – or even a bad hangover. So why were students not alerted earlier?

What troubles me is that so few youngsters are vaccinated for this terrifying disease, said Camilla Tominey in the same paper. Aged 13 or 14, children are jabbed for other forms of meningitis, and since 2015, babies have been given MenB jabs. For everyone else, the only option is to get the jab privately (if they can – stocks are very low). There are reasons for this, said BBC News. Although a quarter of adolescents carry the meningococcal B bacteria, it is very rare that it causes disease.

The vaccine does not offer long-term protection: babies have it to protect them during infancy, when they are most vulnerable. And it doesn’t stop transmission, or work on all forms of MenB. Even so, there have long been calls for teenagers to be offered MenB jabs, and ministers have promised to review the policy. But even if teenagers are vaccinated, they won’t be totally safe, or safe for ever – so being alert to the symptoms of meningitis will remain vital.

“Amid the fog of war and the propaganda being pushed by all sides”, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with the Iran conflict right now, said Abubakr Al-Shamahi on Al Jazeera. On Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that Washington was speaking to the “right people” in the Iranian regime, which wanted a deal “so badly” and had given the US a “very big present worth a tremendous amount of money”. Tehran, however, insisted that the talks were “fake news” and accused the Trump administration of negotiating with itself. This confused picture followed days of conflicting messages from the US.

Last Saturday, Trump talked of “winding down” the war, but also threatened to attack every power plant in Iran in 48 hours unless Tehran fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz. The regime responded by vowing to strike power plants in Israel and across the Gulf region. On Monday morning, shortly before US markets opened, Trump declared that he would postpone the power plant strikes for five days, citing his claimed diplomatic progress.

‘Trump’s evaporating credibility’

It’s “a measure of Trump’s evaporating credibility” that even Washington insiders were sceptical about whether talks with Iran had taken place, said Simon Marks in The i Paper. The postponement of the ultimatum looks like another case of what Wall Street investors call “Taco”, or “Trump always chickens out”. It could be that, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. But it may indeed be a response to backchannel negotiations, or a piece of “dislocation” designed to sow doubt and confusion within Iran’s leadership. Trump likes to keep people guessing.

Some sort of diplomatic effort does now appear to be in motion, led by Pakistan, said Andrew Roth in The Guardian. The reported interlocutor of the US is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament. But this process may just be another way for Trump to buy time before launching commando raids in Iran: the US is “still moving marines and airborne soldiers into position”.

There’s no mystery here, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “The truth inside Trump’s tornado of piffle is that he wants to get out of the mess he created.” He never expected the attack on Iran to lead to this desperate standoff, despite everybody warning him that it would. He thought the regime would swiftly collapse in the face of US might. He now wants Tehran to surrender its ability to disrupt energy markets, but it will never do so, no matter how much Trump blusters and rages. “It does not take a seer to guess that at some point he will hint at using nuclear weapons.”

Winding down the war certainly won’t be easy, said William Hague in The Times. The Iranian leadership is now “more hardline” and will “drive a hard bargain”: its officials have reportedly outlined five conditions, including a halt to assassinations, assurances against further attack, and hefty reparations.

To win, Iran needs merely to survive

Tehran appears in no mood to capitulate, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It’s still launching drones at nearby Gulf states, and last week demonstrated its wider threat by firing two missiles at the British-American military base on the Chagos Islands, some 2,400 miles away.

To win this war, the regime needs merely to survive, said Ilan Goldenberg in Foreign Affairs. Trump should cut his losses, declaring that the US has achieved its main aim of degrading Iran’s military capabilities. The regime may reject such a ceasefire initially, but if the US keeps pushing for de-escalation, Tehran will come under international pressure to follow suit. Admittedly, this will leave the US “entangled in the region, managing a weakened but more aggressive Iran”, but to double down in search of a decisive outcome would risk “a far worse result”.

I’m encouraged by reports that J.D. Vance is involved in Iran negotiations, said James Ball in The i Paper. The US vice-president is a “committed American isolationist” who stands zero chance of succeeding Trump if the Iran war doesn’t end soon. If he’s surfacing now, he must think there’s a chance of a deal.

The warring parties will have to reach a settlement at some point, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. Iran’s regime can’t sustain an indefinite conflict. There must be some within it who are “rational enough” to realise this and understand the potential rewards of striking a deal with America. As things stand, Trump is demanding the freezing of Iran’s missile programme, zero uranium enrichment, and the decommissioning of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. The irony is that the US had all but secured agreement on these demands before Trump launched his “stupid, chaotic” war a month ago.

“Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government”; we are ruled by Ed Miliband, said Michael Gove in The Spectator. The man who “messed it up” as Labour leader a decade ago now has “real power and popularity” within the cabinet, the unions and the wider party membership, said Will Lloyd in The New Statesman.

The energy security and net zero secretary may be facing huge pressure as the Iran war sends price shocks through the global energy market but he seems to be doing so from an unassailable position in British politics.

‘Ventriloquist’s dummy’

“Almost everything terrible that could be said” about Miliband has been said already, said Lloyd in The New Statesman. Now I hear “the confidence of someone who had been torched so many times” he can no longer feel fire. “His beliefs have deepened, not changed” and they have “influenced his colleagues, too, perhaps without them realising”. If Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner were to become Labour leader, they wouldn’t “deviate from the script Miliband has written”. Nigel Farage has even “told friends privately” that he expects Miliband himself to become prime minister by 2027.

I have news for anyone who fears such a development, said Gove in The Spectator: this is already Miliband’s administration. Starmer’s foreign policy, economic policy, “political positioning” and “very quest for meaning” are “All. Ed. Miliband.” He has his hand up Starmer’s back “where a spine should be, controlling the ventriloquist’s dummy”.

We all know that in last autumn’s reshuffle, Starmer tried to move Miliband from his current brief, but Miliband said no “and that was that”, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph. Starmer “dare not even ask” Miliband about his role in “deciding whether to exploit new oil and gas fields in the North Sea”. Doesn’t he know his job is to lead the government, not to wait for Miliband to tell him what to do?

‘Clown prince of the soft left’

Miliband was the “leader who broke Labour – and in doing so, broke Britain”, said Sarah Ditum in The i Paper. “He entrenched” the party’s “worst habits of self-loathing and internal schism”, lost one general election, and “set the stage for even worse”. His “miserable tenure” promptly ushered in the Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour put up “only a vague shrug” of opposition to Brexit.

But by appointing him to the cabinet, Starmer has “treated Miliband as an elder statesman, rather than the clown prince of the soft left”. Handing the energy brief “to a man whose history as leader is a catalogue of incompetence” may well ensure a “catastrophic swing back to fossil fuels under a Reform government”.

The departures of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney mean Miliband has “finally won” the tussle between New Labour/Blue Labour and the soft left, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Starmer is “still quite likely to fall”, and any subsequent leadership battle “can only be held or won from the Ed Miliband position”. What Labour’s “lost leader” stands for is “irresistible within the party”. Miliband “will be its most important political force, whatever his formal job”.

There are three “all-time difficult gigs”, said Jonathan Maitland in The Spectator: prime minister, England football manager, and director-general of the BBC – a job that may just be “The Most Impossible In The World”. And unlike the other two, there are no “potential big wins”, only “potential catastrophes”.

Now we know the next person to be handed the poisoned chalice: Matt Brittin. The former president of Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as a former Great Britain rowing bronze medallist, is set to take the battered reins following Tim Davie’s resignation. Will Brittin’s reign “end with a similar catastrophe?”

‘Baffling to the point of idiocy’

Just what the BBC doesn’t need, another leftie, said Robin Aitken in The Telegraph. Brittin, 57, was appointed non-executive director of The Guardian Media Group last year. Twenty years ago, he was director of strategy and digital at The Mirror. You don’t end up in senior positions at Britain’s leftist publications without sharing “left-wing sympathies yourself”. Given that government-commissioned research by Ipsos found last year that 52% of people don’t trust the BBC to be impartial, and most of those will be “right-of-centre voters”, that should’ve “counted heavily against him”.

The appointment is “baffling to the point of idiocy”, said Jawad Iqbal in The Times. The BBC is “besieged” by “seemingly endless rows” about impartiality and bias, not to mention Donald Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit and its “recent howler”, broadcasting the N-word during coverage of the Baftas. The “root cause” of every crisis is its journalism and programming – things Brittin “knows diddly squat about”.

Yet the board seems to think the answer to this “calamitous” run is to give control to a “tech bro” who, just like Davie, has “no relevant broadcasting experience”. The BBC needs someone who can “reconnect it to its core values”, and argue its case for continued public funding, yet Brittin is a “product of the morality-free, algorithm-obsessed world of the tech giants”. “What could possibly go wrong, apart from everything?”

Inspirational team leader who can 'manage complexity'

But people within Google have “only good things to say about Brittin”, said the BBC’s culture and media editor Katie Razzall. They say he’s an “inspirational leader and a great team player”, who commands loyalty. They had “no concerns” about his lack of editorial or broadcasting experience.

And in fairness, Brittin always seems “positive and cheerful” – certainly “less arrogant” than the stereotypical tech bro, said Politico’s executive editor Anne McElvoy in The Independent. That might be one reason he impressed the BBC’s board, “browbeaten after an annus horribilis”. He is an “experienced team leader who can manage complexity”, and as a former champion rower, “naturally competitive and steely”. But the challenges – tying down the terms of the Royal Charter, working with streaming platforms like YouTube without “ending up trapped under the wheels of big tech interests” – aren’t abating. Brittin won the job from a “depleted field” from which “many industry players absented themselves”. As one leading broadcast figure put it: “the pay is not that good for the blood pressure damage.”

But these are also “seismic times for global media”, said Lionel Barber in the Financial Times. With Larry and David Ellison seizing control of CBS News, CNN and a slice of TikTok in the US, while tech firms spend billions on data centres, a “new age of disruption is upon us”. Brittin’s appointment “suggests the penny has dropped” in the UK. He understands how technology has “transformed media consumption”. Squabbles over the TV licence fee or the BBC’s perceived elitism “miss the bigger picture”. Russia, China and Maga ideologues are “spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in British institutions and democracy”. Yet the BBC, the world’s biggest and most recognised public service broadcaster, has suffered a 40% cut in real terms in its budget since 2010. Its governance needs a “radical overhaul”. Muddling through is “no longer an option”.

It clearly tickled Donald Trump’s fancy. The debut episode of live sketch comedy “Saturday Night Live UK” went down so well with the US president, he treated his Truth Social followers to a clip mocking Keir Starmer for being scared to talk to him about the war in Iran.

But British reviewers were not so amused – and several were not afraid to find fault with the UK version of the long-running US show.

‘Tepid cosplay’

That “laughter-free yawn” was “not a patch” on the US original, said Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye. “What is it?! Painful, that’s what.”

“I do not want to condemn this whole endeavour outright,” said Charlotte Ivers in The Times. “But the spark is not there yet.” We and “our US cousins” have “wildly differing senses of humour”, and, watching this, you feel it “like a physical ache”.

No one “cried” or “fluffed their lines”, said Alison Rowat in The Herald, but “you could almost smell the tension in the studio”. There was “good” but also “bad” and “so-so”. Nothing was “hilarious”, but “some sketches raised a smile”, like the “movie junket interviewer who dares to tell stars their movie sucks”.

Saturday Night Live “represents the quintessence of the American comedic establishment” but its name doesn’t have “much Clapham omnibus cut-through here in Britain”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. So “it’s a bit of a shame” that the team “plays it so safe” with the imported formula. It seemed like “tepid cosplay”.

British comedy shows used to be hammy and contrived like this, said Nicholas Harris in The New Statesman but they’ve become “more stylised, ironic”. I suspect the “failure” of “Saturday Night Live UK” has “more to do with the UK than ‘Saturday Night Live’”.

‘Stinging gags’

“It could have been a lot, lot worse”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. And it’s likely to become “a lot, lot better” as it settles in over the coming weeks. It was “refreshing” that “an ambition/piece of madness like retooling a legacy US brand for this septic isle” was “even being attempted”, so “let’s hope it can build towards real success”.

The first episode was “competent, untroubled by either annoying American-isms or annoying Americans – and occasionally hilarious”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Guest host Tina Fey was “effortlessly commanding”, thanks to her “visible ease with the format” but the “real highlight was the Weekend Update section”, with its “stinging and completely non-woke gags” about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Trump and the Strait of Hormuz.

The schadenfreude with which social-media users were predicting it would “crash and burn” was “wide of the mark”. I’d say it “was off to a flying start”.

“Just a few weeks ago, Nato marked the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with fresh pledges of solidarity and assistance,” said The Daily Telegraph. Today, that war “risks becoming the forgotten conflict”.

Advanced US-made weapons that Kyiv's allies could have bought to help it deflect Russian attacks are being fired at cheap Iranian drones instead – depleting supplies that could take years to restock. European leaders are distracted by threats to their allies in the Gulf region, and the potential shocks to their economies.

Feeding the war machine

To cap Kyiv's dismay, Donald Trump has suspended sanctions on Russian oil, said the Daily Mail. The deal – apparently struck during an hour-long call with Vladimir Putin – should “curb rising prices” on US forecourts, but at what cost to Europe's security? It was recently reported that Moscow might be forced to slash its non-military spending by 10%, owing to the spiralling cost of its war in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions. Now it can feed its “bloody war machine” with billions in extra oil revenues instead.

The war presents “political opportunities” for Russia too, said Mark Galeotti in The Sunday Times. Trump's broadsides against Keir Starmer, and Madrid's fury at Berlin for not backing it in the face of his attacks, have great propaganda value. The Kremlin is also looking at this as a case study for just how united Europe is likely to be against future challenges, “especially as America pivots away”. Still, any glee in Moscow will have been tempered by Washington's decision to strike Iran while nuclear talks were ongoing. This caught Moscow off-guard, and dented its confidence in its ability to read the US president.

‘Extremely triggered’

Tehran is not just an ally of Moscow, said Cathy Young on The Bulwark. It has also been a role model for it – showing the possibility of surviving both Western sanctions and popular discontent. Now the Americans have killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Putin has again been exposed as unable, or unwilling, to help an ally in trouble – a humiliating outcome for a man who liked to pose as the “leader of global resistance to Western hegemony”.

Events in Iran may shake Putin in other ways, too: he is said to be “extremely triggered” by the assassinations of dictators elsewhere. And while Ukraine being pushed down the agenda would be a win for him, this war could also leave Trump too busy to force Kyiv into a bad peace deal with Russia. Similarly, if the war drags on, it might boost Putin, or cost the Republicans the midterms, and so empower Kyiv's allies in Washington. In the fog of war, future-gazing is a mug's game.

Three weeks into this war, “it is clearer than ever that Donald Trump miscalculated”, said The Independent. “If he was warned that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz, he ignored it.” The president seems surprised that the odious Islamic regime has still not fallen; and America's allies in the region are bearing the brunt of its furious response. Trump seems to have no realistic policy for dealing with the resulting global oil shock.

‘Another forever war’

He is “a man without a plan”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, and “hasn't the foggiest what to do next”. The costs for the US – 13 dead, 200 wounded, $11 billion spent in the first week alone – are mounting. Trump sought a “swift, painless victory from the air”; instead, “another forever war” looms.

Even with its leadership decapitated, “the Iranians fight on”, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. But then they have spent 20 years preparing for this moment. Their strategy, the Decentralised Mosaic Defence, is built around a “single brutal principle” – the “body” keeps fighting even if the “head” is cut off. Local commanders can “launch missile strikes, drone swarms, and even harass ships without seeking approval from above”.

The idea was to never “give the enemy a single target whose destruction can end the fight”. To some degree, it is working. Iran continues to deploy relatively cheap drones, which are expensive to intercept. Meanwhile, the US and Israel have burned through years' worth of munitions.

‘Remarkable progress’

If, as seems likely, the regime survives, it will only become more militant and hostile, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian – with “every reason to double down on its nuclear ambitions”. Iran's increasingly paranoid leaders are cracking down even harder on internal dissent, said Tom Ball in The Times. The Basij paramilitary unit has been deployed into residential areas of Tehran. Thousands of people are thought to have been arrested or “disappeared” since the campaign began.

The broad consensus seems to be that the US intervention is “unwise, unjust, is going very badly and certain to fail”, said Gerard Baker in The Times. But consider the facts. In just a few weeks, the US has achieved “remarkable progress” in wreaking “destruction on the capacity of a mortal enemy to wage war”. The strikes have wiped out an estimated 60% of Iran's missile launch facilities. Tehran's rate of missile and drone fire has been drastically reduced. Its navy and air force have been effectively destroyed. Iran's desperate decision to lash out at its neighbours and close the Strait of Hormuz has left it isolated. Key leaders – including security chief Ali Larijani, seen as Iran's day-to-day ruler – have been killed.

Trump's critics behave as if “the costs of inaction were zero”, said Muhanad Seloom on Al Jazeera. “They were not.” The regime is drenched in blood. Left unchecked, it would certainly have developed nuclear weapons, making it capable of holding the region hostage “indefinitely”. War is never clean, and the execution of this one has been far from perfect. “But the strategy is working.”

For his latest Netfix documentary, Louis Theroux travels to Marbella, Miami and New York to meet content creators operating at the extreme end of the “manosphere” – a loosely connected network of misogynistic male influencers. What he finds, “as you can imagine”, is “extremely unpleasant”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.

A terrifying watch

“I like horror films,” but, as the father of two teenage boys, I was left “quivering behind the sofa” by this, said Wilson. I was “gobsmacked” by how this “regressive spiral” of masculinity is being sold through “international tech platforms that should know better”.

Among the figures Theroux meets, said John Nugent in Empire, are Myron Gaines (author of the charmingly titled tome, “Why Women Deserve Less”) and Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old Brit known as HSTikkyTokky, who refers to his girlfriend as his “dishwasher” and who openly professes to being “racist and homophobic”.

Neutral tone ‘falls short’

Theroux takes a “serious approach” to these encounters but sometimes his trademark neutral tone “falls short”. There is “disgusting rhetoric” that he fails to call out and, although he is supposed to be skewering the influencers’ views, they quickly start farming him for content, asking their followers to pitch in with questions for him, and then livestreaming his responses.

In some ways, the film is “classic Theroux”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times: “he holds unpleasant truths up to the light” by adopting a “faux-naive curiosity”. But, towards the end, Sullivan’s mother asks him why, if he so disapproves of what her son is doing, he is making money by publicising it. “It’s the documentarian’s age-old dilemma but it feels particularly pertinent here, and is never quite resolved.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982), is often described as his most personal book, and it has now been adapted to the big screen, said Kevin Maher in The Times.

Worth persevering

A “fascinating, often moving exploration of Japanese family life”, it is set partly in Nagasaki in 1952, and partly in 1980s Surrey. In the Nagasaki strand, Suzu Hirose stars as Etsuko, the unhappy wife of a boorish businessman, whose life of “meek, wifely servitude” is brightened only by her sparky friend Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), who plans to leave the city for America. Framing all this are the sequences set in Surrey, where Etsuko’s grown-up daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) grapples with her family’s troubled past while saying vapid things such as, “This house is full of memories.” It’s a pity these scenes are quite weak; my advice is simply to overlook them, as it is a “great film otherwise”.

‘Bland’ and ‘frustrating’

The Nobel laureate’s work has inspired “acclaimed adaptations” such as “The Remains of the Day” (1993) and “Never Let Me Go” (2010), said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, but this film demonstrates that there are “pitfalls” in tackling his work. It is visually elegant, but it lacks “narrative cohesion”; and key plot developments, including a late-stage twist, “land with jolting abruptness”. I found it “frustrating”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ishiguro is so good at delivering a kind of “distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy”, but this is just “bland”. It fails to carry over the “haunting, haunted spirit” of the book, agreed Guy Lodge in Variety: director Kei Ishikawa “never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page”. Still, the film “resists nostalgia”, and the story is “attractively and accessibly presented”.

The world-famous graffiti artist Banksy has finally been unmasked as Robin Gunningham from Bristol, following a months-long exposé by Reuters, which took investigators from Ukraine to London to New York.

His identity has been “debated, and closely guarded, for decades”, but the news agency said its story was in the public interest because it was vital to understand “the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse”.

‘The police could find him and arrest him easily’

The only problem is that Banksy’s real identity has been an open secret for nearly two decades, with Gunningham’s name first linked to the artist in the Mail on Sunday in 2008.

“If you google Banksy and Gunningham you get something like 43,500 hits”, said Steve Le Comber, co-author of a 2016 study at Queen Mary University of London that used geographic profiling to cross-reference 140 Banksy artworks in London and Bristol with the 10 names most commonly associated with the artist.

Because Gunningham’s name has been linked with Banksy for so long, there may be a temptation to respond to the Reuters report “with a shrug”, said The Telegraph. But his outing, and revelations he legally changed his name to the more common David Jones, “may have more serious consequences than providing titillation for the arts crowd”.

This is in part because his “uniqueness stems from the fact that his work is often done using subterfuge, under cover of night or with a team of operatives equipped with fake filming permits or disguised as builders”.

Much of his work could be considered as acts of criminal damage, said Will Ellsworth-Jones, the author of two books on Banksy and his work. This revelation “makes it much more difficult for him… He’d be easy to find now and easy to be charged,” he told The Telegraph. “The police could, if they wanted to, find him and arrest him easily.”

‘People want him to be anonymous’

It may not be new news but it’s still “big news, because Banksy is big news”, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. His work may not appear in any major art institutions but “his influence is pervasive”. The “fascinating thing” is that despite his true identity being public knowledge for close to two decades, “the public want him to be anonymous, covert, secretive”.

“They would rather believe his identity is a mystery than admit that their favourite anti-establishment art rebel is a shortsighted bloke from Bristol called Robin.”

Banksy’s lawyer Mark Stephens has said the Reuters investigation “would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger”, as “working anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests.”

The artist has chosen to keep his identity unknown as “a way of continuing to work without the constraints of fame” and “an anonymity which also served as a means of protection from police prosecution”, said David Mouriquand on Euronews. Additionally, “part of the appeal resides in the riddle” so once it is solved “you inadvertently dent the artist’s tantalising elusiveness and his/her/their sense of unpredictability, as well as endanger his freedom of movement and expression”.

“Giving a name to the most famous street artist of our time also means taking something away from the myth – reducing the distance between the work and its creator, transforming a nearly symbolic figure into a person that can be debated, mocked, or judged,” said Anna Frattini on culture website Collater.al.

“Every now and then, world events take a turn that exposes Britain’s decades of self-deception” on the subject of defence, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. On 1 March, the RAF’s main base in Cyprus was hit by a drone apparently launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon. It caused only minor damage; what was shocking was that the UK seemed unprepared for such an event, although Lebanon is just “a short drone-hop away”, and an attack like this had been anticipated for years.

Our response was to dust down HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer then undergoing maintenance at Portsmouth. (With a fair wind, she’ll arrive next week.) In a panic, Cyprus turned to Greece and France, “asking to be protected from the risk Britain’s bases had exposed them to”. Greek frigates and F-16s were on the scene within hours. A French warship and air defences followed. “Quite the humiliation” for Britain. And proof that “our commitments far outpace our resources. Holes are showing, in shocking places.”

‘Point of maximum weakness’

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, the attacks on the Gulf states, where around 300,000 British citizens live: this is exactly the kind of emergency that “would once have found the Royal Navy in its element”, said David Blair in The Telegraph. But for the first time in centuries, Britain does not have a single warship in the Persian Gulf or the eastern Mediterranean. Three of its six destroyers and both its aircraft carriers were out of action, undergoing repairs or refits.

After years of slow decline, the Navy has “reached its point of maximum weakness” at a moment when a crisis is exploding in the Middle East “and Russia threatens the whole of Europe”. Both Bahrain and the UAE have reportedly expressed concern about the UK response; Cyprus voiced its disappointment publicly. Britain could also only send a few extra fighter jets to the region because the RAF, too, has been “cut to the bone”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It has 130 active jets, down from 850 in 1989. The Army is “in no better shape”, with just 70,000 active personnel, a third of the number it had in 1990.

Our current malaise “is the result of politicians from all parties trying to outrun” the same question for decades, said Matt Oliver in The Telegraph. How can Britain be “a great military power” if it won’t pay for it?

At the start of the 1990s, Britain’s health and defence budgets both hovered at 4% of GDP. Today, health accounts for 8% and defence just over 2%. New Labour was often accused of failing to invest in the forces. But the “squeeze” was harder during the Coalition years: the budget fell by 22% in real terms from 2010 to 2016. Yet even today, the Ministry of Defence has one of the largest military budgets in the world, at £66 billion per year.

So taxpayers may wonder what has gone wrong. The answer lies in part in “a string of procurement disasters”, for which civil servants and top brass must share the blame. We have expensive platforms – aircraft carriers, F-35 jets, nuclear subs – but insufficient manpower, weapons stockpiles and all-round resilience. As ex-defence secretary Ben Wallace recently put it, our forces have been “hollowed out”.

End of ‘peace dividend’

The challenge is formidable, said Larisa Brown in The Times. Al Carns, the Armed Forces Minister, has said that, by 2029, “Europe could be at war with Russia”. Former senior military chiefs warned in a letter to the prime minister this month that Britain “is facing its 1936 moment”. Assuming that funding can be found, the UK and Europe’s defence industries will have not only to ramp up production, but also to cope with the transformation of the modern battlefield already seen in Ukraine – by drone technology, robotics, cyberwarfare and, increasingly, autonomous weapons.

Add to that the likelihood that Donald Trump’s America would not “fight for us”, said Edward Lucas in The Times – or certainly cannot be relied upon to do so. “Europeans may loathe Trump, but they’re not ready to fill the gaps... They lack the hi-tech weapons, high-end intelligence, logistics expertise and ‘mass’ (quantity) that the Americans have provided since D Day.” Filling these will be costly and difficult, “if we manage at all”.

Yet politically, defence remains a hard sell, said The Independent’s editorial board. Among voters, there is no clamour to build “new cyber-defence units in the way there is demand for, say, cutting NHS waiting lists”. Keir Starmer and his cabinet know that the era of the “peace dividend” is over, said George Eaton in The New Statesman – that Britain and Europe “need to go faster on defence”, as the PM put it last month. But nothing much is happening. Labour may or may not increase defence spending from 2.4% of GDP to 3%, as the Ministry of Defence wants, by 2029 – the year that Carns thinks we could be at war with Russia. The government shows no willingness to confront voters with the fiscal trade-offs that come with higher spending. Britain remains “in denial on defence”.

“I love a sunshine break as much as the next Sexy Beast,” said Colin Robertson in The Sun, but I have never holidayed in Dubai. Partly, this is because I have no desire to visit a “soulless sandpit” that’s hotter than hell, but mainly it’s due to the people who inhabit its “air-conditioned skyscrapers”.

I am not talking about the locals (precious few of them); or the immigrant labourers who keep the city running. No, I mean the “expats, celebs and ‘influencers’” who have spent years telling us – “via a thousand TikTok reels a day” – that their lives in Dubai are so much better than ours in rainy, crime-ridden Britain, and gloating that while we’ve been paying taxes, they’ve been lying on the beach, or cruising in their Lamborghinis.

Now, though, with debris from Iranian drones raining down, their lifestyles are looking rather less aspirational. Distressed that their dream has turned sour, these expats are desperate to get out. And guess what? We saps who paid our taxes are having to fund their evacuation.

Security shattered

The UAE worked hard to build Dubai’s reputation as a glitzy haven for a global elite, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, and the rich came in droves, to escape regulation, income tax or conflict. Workers in service industries followed, along with assorted tech bros and hustlers, and Reform-voting types too, who have railed against “broken” high-tax Britain from this sterile place – “a real-life Truman Show... sustained by stiff penalties” for those who dent its illusions.

Now, the UAE’s reputation for safety and stability risks being shattered instead by war. Tehran hopes its attacks – targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in Gulf nations – will persuade its neighbours to press the US to end its war. But they’re also a warning that if the regime falls, it will take Western-leaning Gulf states with it, by destroying their appeal to investors and tourists.

Fighting on

One real fear is that, in that effort, Tehran will seek to exploit a major vulnerability, said The Economist: the Gulf economies’ dependence on air conditioning for much of the year, and on desalinated water. Successful strikes on the region’s power stations and desalination plants could be “catastrophic”. But so far, most strikes have been intercepted, and the Gulf rulers are urging the US to fight on. They don’t want to be left with a “wounded, hostile regime on their borders”, especially not one that knows that it can alter Washington’s behaviour by pounding them.

As for Dubai, it is down, but not out, said Simeon Kerr in the FT. Many of its rich residents have opted to stay in this sunny, dynamic place where East meets West. And some of those that fled are already trying to get back, to secure their tax status.

The Bank of England’s decision to jettison historical figures, like Winston Churchill, from its banknotes and feature British wildlife instead has caused quite a stir.

The design change follows a public consultation during which animals and birds emerged as the most popular image choice. But critics are lining up to register their horror. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused the Bank of “erasing our history”, and an audience member on BBC’s “Question Time” said it was “surrendering to the radical left”.

‘Values under attack’

“For more than 50 years, we’ve chosen to honour our greatest citizens” on our banknotes, in tribute to their “genius, courage and creativity”, said Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat in The Telegraph. Swapping them for “badgers, puffins and red squirrels” shows we now “lack the courage to state publicly who we are”. Erasing Second World War cryptanalyst Alan Turing from the £50 note severs “the link between citizen and story” and suggests “we care less for codebreakers than cuddly carnivores”.

This is “not a neutral act”, said James Price on City A.M. It’s dangerous to flatten “our visual realm” and “erase the uniqueness of our national story”. Britain feels ever more “like an airport terminal with a welfare state attached”, rather than “a home”. No wonder there’s a backlash: the “penny is dropping that our history and our values are under attack. We should never, never, never surrender them.”

It’s goodbye to the “proud tradition of honouring our greatest Brits”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. “Charles Dickens, George Stephenson, the Duke of Wellington and Elizabeth Fry have all made appearances” on our banknotes over the years; “somehow, a red robin is never going to have the same resonance”. I think the Bank of England “is doing its best to kill off paper money”; certainly, rejecting tradition and favouring what will look “suspiciously like an emoji” will only help.

Silly controversy

I hear the “scoffs and cries of wokery” but I think “the move is a stroke of genius”, said Emily Watkins in The i Paper. “I’ll take a badger over Winston Churchill any day.”

“Our nation is too various to be represented by a handful of dead people stamped on notes – that’s something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned.” There is “no figure in history who can represent, let alone please, everyone”, so, really, the Bank is “saving us all endless grief”. By “representing no one, animals represent us all”.

I can’t think of a sillier public controversy, said Oliver Kamm in The Times. Depicting historical figures on banknotes “is not some hallowed tradition”; it only began in 1970. Presumably, the Bank was not “captured by forces of wokeness” for the 276 years of its existence before then.

Counterfeiters have more “sophisticated printing equipment”, so it is in everybody’s interests that the Bank “thwarts their efforts by regularly changing the appearance” of notes. It is more important to have a paper currency that “commands trust in the corner shop” than one “that bathes us in a patriotic glow”.

The government has said its new definition of anti-Muslim hostility does not restrict people’s freedom to criticise Islamism but gives “a clear explanation of unacceptable prejudice, discrimination and hatred targeting Muslims”. Critics say it will shut down debate about immigration and cultural assimilation.

Unveiling the definition this week, as part of a wider social cohesion plan, Communities Secretary Steve Reed said the government has a duty to act against record levels of hate crime against Muslims, and “you can’t tackle a problem if you can’t describe it”.

‘Privileged status’

The new three-paragraph definition, which is not legally binding, describes anti-Muslim hostility as engaging in, assisting or encouraging criminal acts directed at Muslims because of their religion, or directed at those perceived to be Muslim. It also encompasses prejudicial stereotyping to encourage hatred against Muslims, and unlawful discrimination to disadvantage Muslims.

I'm deeply concerned about introducing a definition like this, the government’s former anti-extremism tsar, John Woodcock, told The Times. It could be used by Islamist extremists to “deflect scrutiny from their quest to undermine our values and intimidate fellow Muslims”.

Giving Muslims “privileged status to shield them from ‘hostility’” is a “potentially divisive approach that is unlikely to encourage assimilation”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. It is also “inimical to free speech”, which is a “cornerstone of the culture within which integration is supposed to happen”. The “great debate of our times” is about the spread of “political Islamism and the terrorism committed in its name”. So why is the government “setting out to shut it down”?

The government insists that the definition is “no threat at all” to freedom of speech, said Andrew Gilligan in The Spectator, “but that’s not the only problem”. It’s “an obvious and open act of two-tier policy”. Hatred and discrimination against Muslims “is already illegal”, so “the only purpose” here “must be to create special protections for one faith which don’t apply to those of other faiths or none”. That will “stoke grievance” and “risks making Muslims less safe, not more”.

‘Right diagnosis’

Hate crimes against Muslims have risen by almost a fifth in the past year and polls show that almost half of Britons “believe Muslim immigrants have had a negative effect on the UK”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “Never have the effects of Islamophobia been so obvious, or so bleak.” Read the news and “you would think that no grooming gang had ever contained a non-Muslim”.

This is “the right diagnosis for this illness”, said health under-secretary Zubir Ahmed, one of only two Muslims in the government, pointing to an “extraordinary” shift in what people think is acceptable to say about identity and race. We “find ourselves in a space where” I can’t look at my children and confidently say that “their lives, in terms of living in society on an equal footing”, are better than mine was when I was growing up. “That’s a really sad thing to see.” This definition is telling Islamophobes “that there is an issue”, and it’s “validating” our “existence in this country”.

The definition talks of anti-Muslim hostility and “doesn’t use the word Islamophobia”, said James Renton, co-director of the Racial Justice and Migration Research Group, on Al Jazeera. I think that’s a mistake: it gives “carte blanche to those who attack Islam” for creating “potential terrorists, oppressors of women” and “sex predators”. To then “celebrate such attacks as the expression of ‘free speech’ is to glorify hatred”.

The Hollywood star Timothée Chalamet is facing the surprisingly hostile wrath of the ballet and opera communities after suggesting that “no one cares” about the genres.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore,’” he said in a live conversation with his “Interstellar” co-star Matthew McConaughey on Variety and CNN. “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

‘Disappointing take’

Ballet and opera fans “seem pretty pissed off about Chalamet’s tongue-in-cheek comments”, said William Hughes on AV Club. He’s “facing some fairly stiff punishments”, including “the possibility of actually having to go see an opera himself”, because the English National Opera gave him “an open offer of tickets” to “help change his mind on the artform”.

Some ballet and opera folk were not very “live-and-let-live”, with “many reminding” Chalamet that “their craft is insanely hard work” and it “doesn’t get any easier when film actors start punching down”.

The US opera singer Isabel Leonard said she was “shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow-minded in his views about art while considering himself as [an] artist”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Only a “weak person/artist feels the need to diminish” the “very arts that would inspire those who are interested in slowing down, to do exactly that”.

Deepa Johnny, the Canadian opera star, called Chalamet’s remark a “disappointing take” and said “we should be trying to uplift these art forms, these artists and come together across disciplines to do that”.

‘Clear-sighted’ and ‘practical’

“Of course, everyone threw a fit because everyone gets offended over every little thing”, said Sasha Stone on Awards Daily, but Chalamet is “100% right”. The actor “doesn’t want to see movies become a niche cultural event”.

I “hope” he just “lets it roll off his back” because “when they decide to come for you”, there’s “no fixing that. Don’t apologise. Be yourself. Be unique.”

Chalamet “isn’t the person you would expect to put down ballet and opera – especially ballet”, said Gia Kourlas in The New York Times. His mother and his sister “studied at the School of American Ballet” and “he wore a New York City Ballet baseball cap in Paris”.

His point “wasn’t that ballet and opera don’t matter”, rather that they aren’t “really part of mainstream culture”. The “value” of ballet and opera, and “people’s perception around their value”, are “two different things”. What Chalamet said “wasn’t untrue” – it was “clear-sighted” and “practical”.

“Still,” said Hughes, “at least people are talking about ballet and opera now, right?”

For the past week, oil and gas traders have watched as a long-feared “worst-case scenario” played out in energy markets, said Bloomberg. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas production flows, “has all but ground to a halt”, while Iranian missile and drone attacks have forced the closure of the world's biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia's largest oil refinery.

Real and present threat

It used to be thought that all bets would be off for the global economy in such a scenario. And yet, while prices have surged higher, the scale of the moves has been far smaller than in previous crises. “We're still a long way from ‘oil shock' territory,” said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The jump in prices to around $80/barrel is nowhere near the highs of $125 seen shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “A gas shock, however, looks a real and present threat.” European wholesale prices hit the stratosphere – jumping by 50% on two consecutive days, before falling back – as QatarEnergy halted production, taking “20% of the world's LNG offline at a stroke”.

UK gas (which hit 114p a therm) on Monday, would have to go to 250p – and stay there for a while – to match the intensity of the 2022 energy crisis, said Pratley. “But suddenly it is not unimaginable.” We may only import 2% of our gas from Qatar (Britain is mainly dependent on Norwegian pipeline imports and its own North Sea supplies), but a tighter market would see Asia and Europe compete more aggressively for LNG cargoes, pushing up prices across the board.

Guessing game

“The irony is that the US is largely insulated from a global gas price shock because of its own domestic production,” James O'Brien of D.Trading told Bloomberg. The pressure “hits allies first and hardest”. Trump won't feel the domestic energy pain he would with, for instance, a gasoline spike.

One reason why the reaction of the oil market has been comparatively tame is that traders are “second-guessing” Trump, said Malcolm Moore in the FT. “The White House has a strong incentive to keep a lid on inflation” ahead of midterm elections in November. Historically, oil shocks have often preceded recessions. “But the world has changed.” Developed economies are “far less oil intensive” than in the 1970s, “and much less dependent” on the Middle East. The US is the world's largest producer – and now has command of Venezuelan reserves too. What happens to prices in the longer run is contingent on “the biggest unknown”, said The Economist: how long the war lasts. It could yet cause “the biggest oil shock in years”.

It’s too early to tell how the military intervention in Iran is going to play out, said Emma Ashford in Foreign Policy, but we can already state one thing with certainty: this is not what Donald Trump’s “base or the American people wanted”.

Trump campaigned as a peace candidate. He promised an “America First” agenda that prioritised pocketbook issues and kept the US out of dangerous foreign entanglements. His adviser, Stephen Miller, depicted him as the opposite of Kamala Harris, whose team was, he said, made up of “warmongering neocons [who] love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves”.

‘Disgusting and evil’

But it seems Trump is not so different after all. Although only a quarter of Americans polled last week said they’d support military action against Iran, the president ploughed ahead with strikes without even bothering to make the case for war. Several Republicans, including former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, have condemned the attack on Iran as a betrayal. The populist commentator Tucker Carlson called it “absolutely disgusting and evil”.

Trump is hardly the first president to grow more hawkish in office, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. It has been the pattern with every US leader since Bill Clinton: they campaign on domestic issues, then get drawn into foreign interventions. Their previously expressed fears about military overreach tend to dissipate once power is in the hands of someone they trust completely: themselves. But they’re also more aware, once in office, of the gravity of the threats facing the US.

Military muscle

While the Iran strikes have upset some of Trump’s erstwhile backers, he has “calculated that he can strong-arm his base into line”, said Hugh Tomlinson in The Observer. As one Republican strategist noted over the weekend: “Maga is still whatever Trump says it is.” The important thing, said Jim Antle in The Daily Telegraph, is that Trump has so far limited his military actions to things that US forces are good at, such as killing enemies, rather than trying to emulate the neocon agenda of nation-building and democracy promotion.

As long as he can avoid a protracted conflict, he’ll be OK, said Mikey Smith in the Daily Mirror. Displays of US military muscle play quite well with his base: polls suggest that Maga supporters were not that averse to the idea of quick, punitive action against Iran. However, the second this military adventure “stops looking like a surgical strike and starts looking like a forever war”, Trump will find himself in a lot of political trouble.

Given President Donald Trump’s public opprobrium after the FBI uncovered troves of highly classified government documents on his Mar-a-Lago property, it’s hardly surprising that the White House’s staffing has come for those agents involved in the 2022 raid. More startling, however, are reports that among those fired by FBI Director Kash Patel this week were multiple agents involved in extensive counterintelligence investigations, including ones concerning Iran, a country with whom the government is essentially, if unofficially, at war. While the bureau has defended the firings as a routine non-issue, critics say the dismissals are a sign of partisan chaos at the FBI during a fraught moment of heightened national security.

‘Corruption’ or ‘boundless incompetence’?

Patel’s firing of more than a dozen FBI employees, “including agents, analysts and support staff,” comes after the director “lashed out” when he learned that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith had sought his phone records as part of Smith’s investigations into Trump, CBS News said. “Most” of those fired worked “in some capacity” on Smith’s investigation, including “many” who worked on cases “involving Iran,” such as a counterintelligence section chief who “handled espionage threats” and others from the DC-based CI-12 counterintelligence team.

Some former officials believe the firings are Patel’s way of distracting from “unflattering media coverage” stemming from his escapades at the Olympics, said The New York Sun. The “summary dismissal” of FBI staff, “especially those with experience in Iranian counterintelligence,” only “undermines” the bureau today, said Michael Anderson, the president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, to the Sun.

After having “hamstrung” CI-12, Patel’s firings have “added to concern” inside the bureau that investigations and operations in the wake of the regime’s attack on Iran could be “hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” CNN said. As of this week, FBI insiders have been “bracing for the possibility” that Patel would fire more counterintelligence agents and staff associated with CI-12, said MS Now.

“The only thing comparable to the corruption of this administration is its boundless incompetence,” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) said on X. “No lectures please,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on the same platform, from the “clowns” who “took down the counter-terror expertise of our U.S. government.”

‘Flimsy pretexts’ designed to ‘evade all oversight’

While Patel hasn’t commented on the specific agents dismissed, or their involvement in Iran-related operations, the bureau director has made clear that the firings are part of the Trump White House’s federal elimination of “weaponized” holdovers from previous administrations. Smith’s subpoenaing of Patel’s phone records was “outrageous and deeply alarming,” the director said in a statement to Fox News — part of his predecessors’ “flimsy pretexts” and administrative maneuvers “designed to evade all oversight.”

Administrative justification for turmoil at the FBI and other agencies has been ongoing, but it is not “weaponizing” the Department of Justice to “demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt this past fall. To that end, Patel has worked to frame himself as a “victim of a malicious effort to target” both the president as well as “those who supported him during his four years out of office,” The New York Times said.

Patel has been “struggling to mitigate the political damage he incurred” during his much-criticized Olympics excursion last month, where he was seen drinking with the U.S. men’s hockey team, said The Washington Post. This recent round of dismissals is merely the “latest example” of expunging agents who worked on Trump investigations, a process that’s been underway “since the start of the current Trump administration,” long before this latest episode. Broadly, Patel’s instinct to fire staff amid scandals “appears designed to ingratiate him" with Trump, MS Now said.

Without addressing these latest firings individually, the FBI said in a statement to CNN that it nevertheless “maintains a robust counterintelligence operation” with “personnel all over the country.”

The United States is now at war with Iran, but the rationale for that decision is still hard to pin down. President Donald Trump has offered a fluctuating series of explanations, creating confusion for Congress and the public.

The president’s rationale for war “keeps shifting,” said The Washington Post. His proffered reasons for bombing Tehran range from “regime change to preemption to eliminating its nuclear program and ballistic missiles.” If the U.S. had stayed its hand, Iran “would’ve had a nuclear war and they would’ve taken out many countries,” the president said Tuesday. But such assertions are “incomplete, unsubstantiated or flat-out wrong,” said The Wall Street Journal. Critics say Iran was not near building either a nuclear weapon or a missile that could reach the mainland United States. Trump and his administration have been “inconsistent and often inaccurate in explaining why we are at war,” said former National Security Council official Michael Singh to the outlet.

The hard way?

“Why is Trump attacking Iran? He’s still figuring it out,” said S.V. Date at HuffPost. Days after the bombs started dropping, the president has “not given Congress or the American people a detailed explanation.” Trump’s conservative allies disagree. It was Iran that chose war by refusing to compromise on its nuclear program, said the Journal’s editorial board. By failing to deal, Tehran was “testing Trump’s patience.”

Trump’s “pitiful” case for war rests on two pillars, said Daniel DePetris at The Chicago Tribune. The first is that Iran is an “imminent national security threat to U.S. interests,” and the second is that Tehran “never wanted to find a diplomatic route out of the nuclear crisis.” Ultimately, that case is “flat-out wrong.” Before Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal, Iran’s nuclear program was “essentially under lock and key.” There is no evidence that Iran is close to a bomb. The president chose to fight “without a rationale that was even semi-convincing.”

Iran “chose the hard way,” said the National Review editorial board. The Islamic regime has been a “destabilizing force in the region and a leading sponsor of terrorism” for nearly half a century, and American presidents operated under an unwritten rule that “Iran could kill and maim Americans, and we could never directly hit back.” The war will degrade Tehran’s ability to “project its malign influence throughout the region.”

Mixed messages

The question is whether Trump can win this war “if he can’t explain why he started it,” Susan B. Glasser said at The New Yorker. The shifting explanations make it easier for him to “claim victory no matter what happens.”

Trump is “sending mixed messages” about the war’s endgame, said Bloomberg. The war could last “four or five weeks,” he said to one interviewer. “I will be talking to” Iran’s remaining leadership, the president said to The Atlantic. The public as yet remains unconvinced. “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove” of the decision to go to war, said CNN.

After months (if not years) of saber-rattling, President Donald Trump this past weekend made good on his longstanding threat to take military action against Iran, authorizing U.S. armed forces to partner with the Israeli military in a massive show of force against multiple Iranian targets. In this, his biggest military action to date, the man who ran for office on a platform of “no new wars” has shown the world an emerging new doctrine for the use of American military force. While there’s little question that Trump’s attack on Iran is intended in no small part as a message for the rest of the world, the specifics and logic of that message remain very much in question.

‘Coherent and prudent’ strategy

In many ways, Trump’s is the “anti–Powell Doctrine,” said Foreign Affairs, citing the policies established by then-General and eventual Secretary of State Colin Powell during the first Iraq war. While that philosophy held that war should only be undertaken as a last resort after exhausting other options and “in pursuit of a clear objective, with a clear exit strategy, and with public support,” Trump’s doctrine holds that military action is merely “one of several tools available” to be used to “increase leverage, maximize surprise, and produce outcomes.” The U.S under Trump appears “increasingly intent” on relying on “discrete yet disruptive military action” over “prolonged interventions,” said Responsible Statecraft. The administration operates to “secure advantage without costly military entanglements or the fatigue of colonial or quasi-imperial overreach,” even as it challenges the “post–World War II international institutional architecture.”

This new doctrine’s use of “tailored, overwhelming force to maximize deterrence and achieve long-term strategic benefits” marks a “coherent and prudent” strategy on the part of the president, said The Wall Street Journal. By “systematically pressuring exposed adversaries,” such as Venezuela or Iran, the “influence of strategic rivals is undercut.” And if the “military components” are “one part of its effectiveness,” it’s Trump himself who is “another” for having “proved to be the only U.S. president willing to wage a true war of attrition against Tehran.”

Trump’s ordering of military operations in Africa, Central America and the Middle East has been seen as an “escalating cycle of force,” stoking fears that are “understandable given the administration’s inflammatory rhetoric,” said the National Post. The “common thread,” however, is “not escalation, but political opportunism,” wherein force is applied solely when “political and military costs appear low” and in “pursuit of quick wins that serve a limited foreign policy agenda.” As the administration frames every military action for “maximum political effect,” this pattern “becomes clear” when combined with Trump’s “over-the-top rhetoric” and bluster: His is a doctrine designed to “project strength” while avoiding the “political costs of sustained engagement.”

National interests made ‘personal’

The new Trump doctrine is about “removing foreign leaders who threaten the U.S., without being drawn into a military quagmire,” explained Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to “Meet The Press,” per MS Now. But critics contend that Trump is “creating the worst of both approaches to intervention” by “using U.S. military force aggressively and recklessly” while simultaneously counting on his adversaries to “capitulate” as they have “in business and politics.”

Broadly, Trump’s moves against Venezuela, and now in the Middle East, are designed to “cement America’s status as the number one energy superpower,” as he said at a recent rally. In the wake of his attack on Venezuela earlier this year, Trump’s decisions were seen as more than just a “return to such de facto imperialism,” as outdated notions of “great spaces” of influence, said The Guardian. Instead, Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela on behalf of oil companies signals the “internationalization of one aspect of his regime — what has rightly been called the logic of the mafia state.” Here, corruption is not conducted clandestinely, but rather “public procurement is rigged,” with large companies “brought under the control of regime-friendly oligarchs,” who in turn “acquire media to provide favorable coverage to the ruler.”

Under this iteration of Trump’s rule, America is “not a state looking after itself” but rather “leadership, and in particular one leader” tapping national resources to “serve his very individual and selfish interests,” said Phillips O’Brien, an international studies professor at the University of St. Andrews, on Substack. This dynamic “destroys much international relations theory,” which assumes that “regime type/leadership matters very little” since they are all merely looking to “get as big and strong as they can in a chaotic world.” In other words, America’s war on Iran is a “war of choice, chosen by Donald Trump to meet some very personal needs.”

The US Supreme Court has finally stood up to President Trump, said David Frum in The Atlantic. Last week, it quite rightly struck down the tariffs that have been the signature initiative of his presidency. “A tariff is a tax.” A president who imposes them without Congress’s permission is “on his way to becoming a tyrant”.

‘Lashing out’

The move is “a long-run positive”, said Alan Beattie in the FT, but at the cost of short-term uncertainty all round. After the ruling, the US president behaved like “an enraged toddler lashing out after his favourite toy is taken away”, damning the Supreme Court justices and promising new tariffs.

The “smart play” after the legal defeat would be “to take an off-ramp”, said The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the White House “dusted off Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a work-around”, enabling Trump to impose tariffs of at least 10% across the board for up to 150 days (possibly rising to 15%). What happens after that is anyone’s guess, bar the prospect of an “unending Trump tariff mess”.

“Certain trading partners don’t look too clever right now,” said Beattie: principally the UK, whose 10% early deal with Trump may now be redundant. On the other hand, it was “an excellent day” for America’s most defiant partners, China and Brazil, whose imports to the US will now cost much less.

Endless litigation

The ruling certainly gives Beijing “a stronger hand” ahead of forthcoming high-stakes talks with Trump, said DealBook in The New York Times: “any decision that removes a tactical weapon from the Trump administration’s hand is welcome news in Beijing”. Potential refunds are another big issue.

Companies such as Costco, Toyota, Goodyear and Alcoa have already sought to reclaim levies; others will follow. Indeed, some economists reckon “a refund windfall” could kickstart “a huge economic stimulus”. Up to $175 billion is on the table, said Irwin Stelzer in The Sunday Times. But Trump is defiant – promising endless litigation for those claiming the tariffs back. The real winners in all this are lawyers.

Whether or not the refunds get paid, there are huge financial implications to this ruling, said Bloomberg. The US government’s fiscal calculations – already dubious – “have now been torn up”. Even the most “expansive” alternative measures are unlikely to bridge the $250 billion a year in expected tariff revenues. If Trump’s efforts to reimpose tariffs by other means are rejected by the Supreme Court – a clear possibility – who knows what he might do to intimidate the justices? In a worst-case scenario, Trump’s setback might become “a fiscal emergency (real, not imagined), an economic body blow and a constitutional crisis all in one”.

The Premier League has turned a “tactical corner”, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian. Corners and set-pieces generally are back in fashion, much to the annoyance of some fans who claim they are the antithesis of the beautiful game.

Clubs are employing specialist set-piece coaches, and players are celebrating winning corners, allowing them to perform their well-rehearsed routines in front of goal. After years of “strategy and technique”, and the dominance of patient, possession-based football, fans are concerned that packed penalty areas and the all-in wrestling between opposing players is ruining the spectacle of the English game.

‘It doesn’t feel right’

Most of what goes on from dead-ball situations “is not strictly against the rules per se”, but it’s a question of optics, said Football 365. Players can stand where they want, and have no obligation to move to allow others to challenge for the ball. The issue is that when “12-14 players” are all doing the same thing in such an enclosed space, it “jars with what the game is supposed to be. It doesn’t feel right.”

Tony Pulis, who managed Stoke City and Crystal Palace in the Premier League in the late 2000s and 2010s, was known for his “pragmatic” approach, he said on the BBC. “I was seen as a dinosaur for my focus on dead-ball situations and long throws”, but “I knew back then how important they were”.

Premier League leaders Arsenal have led the way in the resurgence of set-pieces. Their 37 league goals from corners since the start of the 2023-24 season far eclipsing the next-best 26 by German side Borussia Monchengladbach out of all teams in Europe’s top five leagues.

Some people are “snobbish” about the role of set-pieces in the game, said Pulis, but “the expectation, and the pressure they put on the opposition, is amazing”. Ignore the inevitable criticism, “what matters is winning”.

The “suddenness” of the change in approach from English teams has been “remarkable” but this “present trend will fade away”, said Wilson in The Guardian. The obsession with possession-based tactics, as well as widening financial inequality, has led to opposition teams defending in a compact “low block”, feeling unable to compete skill-wise. A “reversion to something more physical” in the game certainly poses a threat, but in a game of tactical cycles “this too will pass”.

‘Action is needed’

Some scenes in the recent game between Everton and Manchester United were an “absolute disgrace”, said Martin Samuel in The Times. We have grown used to a “melee of grabbing, holding, pushing, pulling, grappling, backing in” penalty areas. The game has become dominated by a “supposedly unsolvable wrestling issue” and fans are not happy about it.

Nothing is being done to safeguard the “beautiful game”. Governing bodies “obsess over trivia and the trivial”, exemplified by the International Football Association Board prioritising things like five-second countdowns for goal-kicks. “No group is less qualified to decide on football’s rules than Ifab”, and it has already made a “mess” of video replays, offside and handball rulings.

“Enough already,” said Graham Scott, a former Premier League referee, in The Telegraph. Corners are “ruining the spectacle” of football with all the “wrestling, grappling and holding”, but referees have a “nearly impossible job to decide who is truly to blame”. Occasionally, a clear pull or obstruction in the fracas around the six-yard box is “black and white, but there are more than 50 shades of grey in between”. With fans having little “appetite” for lengthy VAR delays, officials must “walk a tightrope” to decide what is “fair and foul”.

So “action is needed”. To try to fix the issue, “I would imitate hockey by forcing teams to place a certain number of players in the other half” to reduce congestion. In a “more radical move”, defenders could be inside the six-yard box and attackers outside it when a corner is taken, separating them entirely.

The BBC has apologised for failing to edit out a racial slur shouted during the Bafta awards ceremony by a guest with Tourette syndrome. John Davidson, whose condition causes involuntary outbursts and whose life story inspired the movie “I Swear”, yelled out the N-word while Black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.

‘Empty’ apologies

Shortly afterwards, ceremony host Alan Cumming apologised “if you are offended tonight”, and a BBC spokesperson later apologised for “any offence caused by the language heard” during the broadcast. “Can we stop making these kinds of apologies?” said Ava Vidal in The Independent. These vaguely worded hypotheticals “feel empty” and avoid the reality that “people were offended – Black people”. Jordan and Lindo were “violated in front of their peers” and then again “on almost-live TV”.

Grace is due to Davidson, too: “what some people have said about this disability campaigner is beyond disgusting”. Involuntary tics and outbursts don’t “indicate a person’s true feelings and are not a reflection of their character”, and he “will be absolutely mortified by his outburst”. Some Black commenters argued on social media that Davidson should have watched the ceremony from “a private, soundproofed box where he could not be heard”, but “people belonging to a community that knows about segregation should know better”.

Mind you, those who have signalled their support and sympathy for Davidson should now “extend the same courtesy” to Black people with Tourette syndrome and other similar disorders, who are often “victims of double discrimination”.

Big error

The moment was “shocking”, said Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco in The Herald, but so is the fact that “two hours later, the BBC inexplicably aired the segment on television, with Davidson’s shout audible in the background”. In the predictable subsequent “pile-on”, some people suggested Davidson should “wear a muzzle” or “tape his mouth shut”. “Rather than pick a side between racism and ableism, we should instead direct our ire towards the BBC,” which “failed” in its “duty of care to all parties involved”. This is “another indictment of a failing public institution”.

The “big” error was “in the editing, or the lack of”, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. “No one could have stopped” Davidson “yelling out the N-word” but, given that BBC editors found time to “judiciously remove Akinola Davies Jr’s shout of ‘Free Palestine’” from the broadcast, it “seems a perverse decision” not to edit out the “appalling racial insult”, too.

In the face of intense pressure from the US, Cuba’s communist regime has proved remarkably resilient, said Ani Chkhikvadze in the Washington Examiner: it has survived the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the pressure currently being exerted by the Trump administration may prove more than it can bear.

‘Politically isolated’

In recent years, Havana has relied heavily on subsidised oil from Venezuela, and that lifeline was cut last month, after the US seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, said the outlet. With Washington now threatening to impose tariffs on any other nation that supplies oil to Cuba, Havana’s stocks are fast running out. Airlines can no longer refuel in Cuba; petrol is rationed; tourist resorts have had to shut; rubbish is piling up because lorries lack the fuel to collect it; and power cuts are “omnipresent”.

Given Latin America’s recent swing to the right, Havana has never looked so “politically isolated” or so short of public sympathy, said Juan Pablo Spinetto on Bloomberg. There have been no mass protests in São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Mexico City against “a renewed display of American colonialism”. Washington holds all the cards, and could make things yet harder for Havana by, for instance, restricting remittances. It should tread carefully, though. The US doesn’t want to create a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. It doesn’t want a new wave of refugees to start heading for the coast of Florida. And it should not underestimate the capacity of Cuba’s regime to “embrace self-destruction rather than yield” to its enemy.

Trump wants to ‘work a deal’

This is a “golden opportunity” to push for change in Cuba, said Lizette Alvarez in The Washington Post. The communist leadership knows it’s out of options, and Donald Trump – who, unlike his Cuban-American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is no “hardliner” on this issue – says he wants to “work a deal”. He seems, in other words, open to the kind of “go-slow regime change” the US is working on in Caracas.

The US could lift the embargo on Cuba and offer aid in exchange for deadline-driven reforms: prisoner releases; the removal of barriers to private investment and free expression; and, eventually, the holding of open elections. Cuba is not oil-rich like Venezuela. But it has tourism potential and offers another, more tantalising prize for Trump: the chance to take credit for transforming an island that has “bedevilled the US since the Cold War into a free society”.