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Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Keir Starmer of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”. In a video addressing the murder of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC yesterday, Israel’s PM said that by demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, Starmer – along with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Mark Carney – “effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power”. Annual energy bills in Britain will fall by an average of £129 from July. The regulator Ofgem has reduced the price cap limiting gas and electricity tariffs by 7%, cutting a typical household bill to £1,720 a year. A Norwegian man woke up yesterday to find a giant container ship in his garden. The 443ft vessel ran aground at 5am, narrowly missing Johan Helberg’s house. “Five metres further south,” he told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, “and it would have entered the bedroom.”

Has the “Chinese century” already begun?

For years, theorists have discussed the possibility of a “Chinese century”, says Kyle Chan in The New York Times: a world in which Beijing finally harnesses its vast economic and technological potential to surpass the US. “That century may already have dawned.” And historians may look back on this period as the moment when China “pulled away and left the US behind”. Donald Trump is “taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation”: endangering access to vital supply chains and markets with tariffs; slashing research funding and gutting universities; undermining industries of the future like green tech and semiconductor manufacturing; and wiping out American soft power. “China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different.”

The Chinese already lead global production in multiple industries: steel, aluminium, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, wind turbines, drones, phones, bullet trains. And Beijing is “laser-focused on winning the future”. In March, it announced a $138bn national venture capital fund to make long-term investments in cutting-edge tech like quantum computing and robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development. The release of the DeepSeek chatbot in January showed the world that China can already compete in AI. The Chinese EV firm BYD was once the butt of Elon Musk’s jokes; now it outsells Tesla. China is charging ahead in drug discovery – especially cancer treatments – and installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. And thanks to recent breakthroughs by Huawei, Beijing is on its way to being self-sufficient in crucial semiconductors. Unless something changes, China is on course to end up “completely dominating”, while the US crumbles into a national-scale Detroit.