Russia attacked a power plant in Ukraine yesterday just hours after Donald Trump claimed he had brokered an energy ceasefire between the two countries. The US president said that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed not to attack one another’s energy infrastructure in a surprise announcement that Volodymyr Zelensky described as “news to me”. Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck Saudi Arabia’s main international airport in Riyadh twice over the weekend, killing at least 13 and injuring more than 300. After the attacks – the deadliest assault on the Gulf kingdom in more than a decade – Donald Trump said he was considering intervening in the fight against the Iran-backed militia. The Houthis say they are targeting Riyadh over its support for government forces in Yemen’s civil war. The Northern Lights illuminated skies across the UK over the weekend. The spectacular colours of the Aurora Borealis could be seen as far south as Devon, Hampshire and Kent, and are expected to light up the skies again this evening.

Pete Hegseth has been very clear about why the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, will be livestreamed, says George Will in The Washington Post. People “need to understand”, the testosterone-obsessed US defence secretary said last week, that there are “serious consequences” for such crimes. By “people”, he surely cannot have meant Islamist terrorists like Hasan, for whom mass murder is a religious vocation. So presumably he thinks the other 340 million Americans need to be “instructed not to commit massacres”. Why stop there? Why not sell the TV rights too, or make it mandatory for American children to watch? “Counterterrorism indoctrination cannot start too early.” What a revolting state of affairs. “Fill the government with barbarians, you get barbaric government.”

Hegseth’s desire to create “death porn” isn’t just repugnant, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. It’s also “unspeakably foolish”. Jihadists want to die publicly, with as many eyeballs watching as possible, to inspire more jihad. Hegseth is acting as “chief advertiser” to the very cause he wants to destroy. And there’s a reason why only the likes of Iran, the Taliban and Hamas carry out public executions nowadays. “I am solemnly convinced,” wrote Charles Dickens after attending a hanging in London in 1849, “that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin as one public execution.” George Orwell said his moral sense shifted, watching a hanging in Burma, when he saw the condemned man swerve to avoid a puddle: “I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” Hegseth’s proposed live stream is a “moral Rubicon”. I hope to my core that public pressure prevents this “wannabe Rambo” of a defence secretary from leading his nation across it.

Back when the Victorian Liberal politician John Lubbock created the bank holiday, says Patrick Kidd in The i Paper, Britain needed them. In the early 1800s there were just four holiday days – Good Friday, May Day, All Saints’ Day and Christmas – and most men worked a six-day week. In recent decades, the justifications for these days of “national lack of productivity” have been laughable: royal weddings; golden, diamond and platinum jubilees; England’s men winning the World Cup (if they’d actually done it). Though perhaps maddest of all was the one approved by William Gladstone back in 1872, to “celebrate the Princess of Wales recovering from typhoid”.

Jeremy Strong is “one of the great actors of the era”, says David Remnick in The New Yorker. And he takes the job very, very seriously. While playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, Strong routinely emailed the director “as Mark”. In another Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), he asked to be teargassed during a scene set at a protest. “You don’t want to act,” he says. “You don’t ever want to act.”

Visiting Sweden is like entering a “Topsy-Turvy world”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. Recent elections unleashed parliamentary “anarchy”: the left bloc won 176 seats, the governing right bloc 173. Yet there is little doubt about Sweden’s future. All agree on its new hard line on immigration: arrivals fell 95% between 2015 and 2025. Once-controversial policies like deporting foreign criminals and paying migrants to leave enjoy broad support. Authorities answered gang warfare in Sweden’s migrant-heavy suburbs with popular “shock and awe”, doubling law enforcement budgets and encouraging more “hands-on” policing. Defence spending is up massively, again with wide support, and sensible welfare reforms welcoming private providers into state provision haven’t been stymied by petty ideology. The left gets high spending, the neoliberals get an internal market in the welfare state, and the right gets border control. Everybody wins.

Britain’s ruling Labour Party, in sharp contrast, has enjoyed a “substantial majority” for two years and continues to “dither and delay”. Keir Starmer neutered his own premiership by abandoning modest welfare reforms after his own MPs rebelled; his defence secretary resigned because his department was being shortchanged; no British home secretary has come close to immigration reform as tough as Sweden’s. Even Shabana Mahmood is diluting her policies in the face of angry backbench revolts. Andy Burnham has more pizzazz than his predecessor, but he’s “equally lightweight on substance”, scattering promises around like confetti with no thought for cost, talking about gentler politics while demonising his opponents. His favourite tactics are delay and diversion, promising to tackle urgent issues like state pensions but only after the next election. Britain’s first lifelong Catholic prime minister is clearly a fan of St Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, give me chastity and continence. But not yet.”

Here’s a cheerful thought, says Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. It used to be that hacking into a website or executing a ransomware attack was a difficult, time-consuming business, so hackers mostly chose large targets with a considerable pay off. That kept most of us safe. But in the age of AI, it’s relatively easy to release a cheap, tireless “hacking agent”, meaning any organisation – or individual – is now worth targeting. Happy Monday.

It’s a steak produced by the American “alternative protein” start-up Offbeast that contains 50% beef and 50% plant-based ingredients, says Anay Mridul in Green Queen. A novel process weaves shredded soy and wheat fibres into a “continuous, muscle-like fibre structure” along with the meat, potentially increasing beef supplier margins by 400% and reducing prices for consumers. Remarkably, in a small blind taste test, 16 out of 20 tasters couldn’t tell the difference between the “blended meat” and the real thing.