Rachel Reeves faces a £51bn black hole in the public finances, a respected think tank has warned. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research says the Chancellor will need to raise taxes in the Autumn Budget if she is to meet her spending pledges and stick to her self-imposed fiscal rules. Nasa is fast-tracking plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030, as part of its long-term ambition to create a permanent base for humans to live there. With China and Russia working together on a similar plan, an official from the American space agency tells Politico, this has become “the second space race”. Female gorillas seek out old female friends even when they’ve spent years apart. Scientists who tracked multiple troops of the primates over 20 years in Rwanda found that when female apes came across a different group, they gravitated towards the females they had previously interacted with or grown up alongside.

“Defeating Hamas does not require starving a single child”

I definitely consider myself a “friend of Israel”, says David French in The New York Times. But the time has come for Israel’s friends to “stage an intervention”. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has “engineered” a staggering humanitarian crisis that cannot be allowed to continue. When the Israelis blocked aid shipments to Gaza in March, the amount of aid entering the territory fell from more than 200,000 tons a month to “virtually nothing”. Even after the blockade was lifted in May, only a tiny fraction of previous shipments was getting in. And because this aid is being distributed in very few places, thousands of Palestinians are having to travel long distances to get it, often crossing military lines guarded by “heavily armed soldiers” on high alert. Hundreds have been killed. “So there is less aid, and it’s harder and more dangerous to obtain.”

The Israelis bear full responsibility for all this – after removing the UN from the aid distribution network in May, claiming Hamas was gaining control of the supplies, they failed to set up an effective alternative. Yes, Hamas should lay down its arms and release every hostage, but the terror group’s war crimes “do not relieve Israel of its own moral and legal obligations”. And yes, nations with far worse human rights violations receive far less scrutiny – think of North Korea’s gulags and China’s oppression of the Uighurs – but Western hypocrisy doesn’t eliminate Israel’s responsibility to do the right thing. I don’t expect the Israelis to heed criticism from their opponents, but there’s a chance they’ll listen to their friends. And their friends need to “speak with one voice”: end the famine in Gaza and drop any talk of annexation. “Defeating Hamas does not require starving a single child.”

You can see why Joe Biden’s inner circle were so reluctant for him to drop out of last year’s presidential race, says Alex Thompson in Axios. Mike Donilon, the former president’s top political aide, told congressional investigators last week that he was paid a whopping $4m for his work on the campaign – and he would have trousered another $4m had Biden won.

Convertibles – the “ultimate status symbol” of the 1990s, beloved by everyone from James Bond to Princess Diana – are increasingly a thing of the past, says Ben Clatworthy in The Times. Almost 70% of the UK’s top car manufacturers no longer offer a soft-top in their range, compared with just 20% two decades ago, and the number of new convertibles registered has plummeted from almost 95,000 in 2004 to just over 12,000 last year. Britain was once known as the “convertible capital of Europe”, but our love for them appears to have hit “the end of the road”.

From Cleopatra’s milk baths to Sydney Sweeney’s jeans

The online uproar over American Eagle’s new ad campaign – tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” – shows no sign of abating, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. Women, “and it is mostly women”, are churning out TikTok reels denouncing its supposed connotations of white supremacy, and complaining that the use of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Sweeney enforces “19th-century imperialist ideals of European beauty”. It’s certainly the case that colonisers imposed “grotesque, racist” beauty ideals across the world. But the “rather awkward” truth is that white women have been widely perceived as “more desirable” not just since the days of empire, but for “all of recorded history”.

As long ago as 3000BC, ancient Egyptian love poems praised women’s pale skin. Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk, and upper-class Greek women used toxic white lead as face paint. Women in ancient China drank “pearl powder”, and an enduring Japanese proverb says “white skin covers the seven flaws”. Even the Quran’s promise that dead jihadi warriors will get “72 virgins in paradise” emphasises that these fragrant houris will have skin so translucent you can “see the marrow in the bones”. Explanations for this widespread preference vary: darker skin has historically denoted outdoors toil and thus poverty; some evidence suggests female skin darkens with age, so paleness perhaps equates to youth and fertility. None of this is to deny the very real harm these rigid beauty standards inflict, not least from the damaging skin-lightening creams used across Asia and Africa. But “white woman equals beautiful woman” is a concept so deeply entrenched that it is “probably ineradicable”.

If you want to find the best “dark sky” locations for stargazing, says Matt Muir in Web Curios, have a look at the Light Pollution Map. Click on pretty much anywhere in the world and it’ll show you how much light pollution there is at that location, how visible the Milky Way is, and how many stars you’ll be able to see from there: less than 200 in London, for example, and more than 6,000 in the Outer Hebrides. Click here to have a look.

Chinese academics and students at British universities are facing harassment and surveillance from Beijing, says Eleni Courea in The Guardian. One academic involved in “sensitive research” told the UK-China Transparency charity that they had stopped teaching after a visiting scholar from China had whispered “we’re watching you”. Others reported that their Chinese students had said they’d been asked to spy on campus events by Chinese police, and interviewed by officials on their return to China. The charity says surveillance is so entrenched that “the situation in China itself has been partially replicated in the UK”.

It’s a mermaid statue in Denmark that is being removed from public view for being too “pornographic”, says Bryony Gooch in The Independent. The 4x6 metre Den Store Havfrue (The Big Mermaid) was originally erected near the more famous – and less busty – Den lille Havfrue (The Little Mermaid) at Langelinie Pier in Copenhagen in 2006. But the 14-tonne structure was removed in 2018 after complaints from locals and relocated to the city’s former sea fortifications – and now the government has requested its removal from there, too. The work’s sculptor, Peter Bech, is unrepentant, saying the figure’s breasts are “of a proportional size” to its scale.