Donald Trump has rowed back on his threat to strike power plants in Iran if it doesn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by the end of today, saying there would be no such attacks for at least five days because the two countries had begun talks on the “complete and total resolution of hostilities”. Tehran had responded to the US president’s initial 48-hour deadline by threatening to hit energy facilities and vital water desalination plants in the Gulf. Four ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service were torched in Golders Green, north London, last night, in what the prime minister called a “deeply shocking anti-Semitic arson attack”. The capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, called the arsonists “cowardly” and urged anyone with information to come forward. The government will build seven new towns in England under plans to kickstart the biggest housebuilding push in half a century. The towns, which are scattered across the country, will provide at least 10,000 new homes, with names under consideration including Elizabethtown, Pankhurst, Attleeton, Athelstan, Seacole and, one assumes, Towny McTownface.

Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, has been criticised for objecting to a recent Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square as an “act of domination”, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. But he has a point. There are occasions when public prayer is appropriate: in St Peter’s Square, say, and round the Kaaba in Mecca. In most cases, though, the obvious motivation is to “seek converts” – an urge that, for both Christianity and Islam, has historically been distorted into seeking territory and power. In recent decades this “power urge” has been much stronger among Muslims, and particularly among Islamists. So in a Christian/agnostic country, a large number of Muslims praying in public may well be “showing some desire for domination”.

Sorry, says Fraser Nelson on Substack, but the whole point of an open iftar is for non-Muslims to join Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan – it is an attempt to “demystify the occasion and extend a hand of friendship”. That hand is being scorched, and “cast as that of the would-be oppressor”. Unfortunately, this all fits with the increasingly popular narrative on the right that our Christian civilisation is under attack by “the woke left and the Muslims”. The hypocrisy of these complaints is astonishing. Are Timothy and co also worried about the mechitza, the curtain or partition separating men and women in Orthodox Jewish synagogues? Or the Catholic church’s refusal to ordain women or marry gay couples? What has been heartening is seeing prominent Jews and Christians rally to the defence of the open iftar. As the Anglican Bishop of Willesden noted, religious freedom in Britain means the right to live out your faith “openly, visibly and without fear”.

To combat the threat of first-person-view drones, which have turned streets into war zones, Ukrainian military leaders are turning to a strikingly simple technique, says Eleanor Beardsley on NPR: netting. Strung across various cities are webs of tough, nylon mesh intended to stop the weapons, which now cause up to 80% of front-line casualties. In a café in Izium in eastern Ukraine, locals sip coffee under a blanket of the anti-drone apparatus while cars drive along roads inside a tunnel of the stuff.

Birds across the world have picked up a curious habit, says Lesley Evans Ogden in The New York Times: “they put cigarette butts in their nests”. In Britain, blue tits have even started nesting in outdoor ashtrays, of the kind found nailed to the wall outside pubs. A new study suggests this could be more than mere addiction: some of the 4,000 chemical compounds found in ciggies – which include nicotine, arsenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals – may ward off parasites that would otherwise harm birds and their chicks.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, says Hal Brands in Bloomberg. This is not, as many would have it, a president confused about what he wants. Running through everything he does – from his tariffs to his renegotiation of American alliances, from his sometimes-shocking demonstrations of military force to his dismantling of diplomatic norms – lies one consistent goal: maximising American power. Trump wants a world in which America is “both mightier and less constrained”. And while some aspects of this approach are ominous, others may prove more successful than the president’s critics allow.

The negatives are well established. The president’s “ready-fire-aim” approach to statecraft gets him bogged down by predictable problems: China responding to his tariffs with rare-earth export controls, for example, which forced him into a hasty retreat. And while his coercive approach fares well against “weak and dependent states” – European allies reliant on America’s market and protection, overmatched foes like Venezuela and Iran – he has less success in showdowns with China and Russia. But Trump has found ways to make life harder for Beijing and Moscow: by weakening their partners in South America and Tehran; by getting Europe and others to boost – or at least promise to boost – their own military capabilities. And the “uncomfortable, inescapable” truth is that a fading America would only help Presidents Xi and Putin “impose their own rules on the globe”. That’s the best argument for Trump’s “superpower strategy”. Would it be better for the US, and the world, if this “sharp-elbowed” approach wasn’t marred by rashness and ill-conceived risk-taking? Definitely. But that’s the “dual-edged nature of Trump’s hard-edged nationalism”. It is both weakening and strengthening America all at once.

The latest fitness trend is churning butter while out for a run, says Natalie Stechyson in CBC News. So-called “churning and burning” involves strapping a bag of heavy cream and salt to the torso and then heading out for around an hour’s jog, which mimics the typical churning movement that thickens the ingredients into a pat of the good stuff. “You may be asking yourself, ‘Why?’” says Libby Cope, an American running influencer, in a TikTok post that racked up more than 2.3 million views. “The real question is, ‘Why not?’”

The car park operator NCP, which has fallen into administration because of reduced demand since Covid, was built on a canny idea, says Megan Smith in the FT: buying up World War Two bomb sites in central London on the cheap and converting them into car parks. When the company was sold to a US firm for £800m in 1998, the deal almost broke down because one of the two owners, Ronald Hobson, insisted on keeping a single parking space for himself, just off Oxford Street. He wanted to maintain his weekend habit of driving there in his Bentley with a flask of tea and trying to predict where people would park.

It’s Louis Vuitton’s “Chocolate Egg Bag”, says Tianna Williams in Wallpaper*. The paschal purse – weighing just over 1kg, yours for a cool €250 – is made up of two dark chocolate shells filled with an assortment of roasted nuts, candied fruit and hazelnut praline. It’s part of a collection created by the design house’s award-winning pastry chef Maxime Frédéric, which also includes three chocolate chicks and a box of six mini chocolate egg bags in a range of flavours. Get yours in time for the Easter weekend here.