Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” 50th birthday card featuring a drawing of a naked woman, according to The Wall Street Journal. The US president allegedly wrote “may every day be another wonderful secret” in the note, which he has claimed is fake. He has since asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to release transcripts of the grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. Diane Abbott says it is “obvious this Labour leadership wants me out” after the party suspended her for a second time. The veteran left-winger had the whip withdrawn yesterday for saying she didn’t regret the comment she made in 2023 – that Jews experience racism differently to black people – which led to her first suspension. A married CEO and his chief people officer have been caught in a suspected affair after the pair tried desperately to swerve the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert in Boston (pictured). “Oh look at these two,” said singer Chris Martin. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”

Liberals may miss Trump when he’s gone

When Donald Trump bombed Iran last month, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, “Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon revolted”. A president elected to end America’s Middle Eastern misadventures was turning into a “third President Bush”. Another crack in the MAGA movement opened up over Jeffrey Epstein – many believe the sex offender, who killed himself in 2019, had dirt on high-profile individuals, who had him murdered. After fanning the flames of this conspiracy for years, Trump has now tried (unsuccessfully) to convince his followers to “move on”. Perhaps most explosively, the president is warming to Ukraine and Nato and has become newly critical of Vladimir Putin. The many “Kremlin-admirers” on the US right must be wondering what happened to the man who ambushed Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office a few months ago.

These tiffs will pass, but they expose an important truth: “Trump and MAGA are no longer the same thing.” His movement – the intellectuals, the donors, the more-online grassroots – have “intense beliefs”. Apart from a lifelong misapprehension that running a trade deficit with another nation constitutes “losing”, he doesn’t. Trump is uniquely able to paper over these differences with charisma, electoral success and “dutiful enactment of key MAGA priorities” like vaccine scepticism. But unless the Republicans can find another candidate whose star power “overwhelms all philosophical reservations” about him or her, the next leader will be truer to the cause. That means “more Christianist, more nationalist, more paranoid”. In other words, we may very well look back on Trump as a “moderating influence” on a movement that will become “much more doctrinal” when he’s gone. On the plus side for liberals, such a movement will also be far less electable.

Outside Israel, says Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic, commentators have said Benjamin Netanyahu’s successful campaign against Iran will trigger his “political resurrection”. Inside Israel, “the reality could not be more different”. This week Netanyahu’s coalition lost two of its parties over the removal of an exemption for ultra-orthodox citizens from conscription, effectively leaving it with just 50 of the parliament’s 120 seats. And the other group Bibi has long relied on for votes – the far-right nationalist parties – are now at odds with him over Gaza because they don’t want the war to end. Elections might not be until early 2026, but make no mistake: if they were today, “Netanyahu’s coalition would lose”.

A comprehensive data analysis of children’s literature reveals a curious finding, says Melanie Walsh in The Pudding: animals have set genders. Of all the creatures that appear in more than 10 popular children’s books, just three – birds, ducks and cats – are consistently female. Pigs and mice are more likely to be male, but roughly equal. Rabbits, bears, dogs, monkeys and elephants are boys around 75% of the time, while for foxes and wolves it’s 80%. And frogs are almost always male.

Is Israel guilty of genocide?

I have no ideological position on the conflict in Gaza, says the former UK Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption in The New Statesman. “I approach it simply as a lawyer and a historian.” And I have come to believe “there is a strong case that Israel is guilty of war crimes”. The mass destruction of private property, the bombing of hospitals (even if terrorists hide beneath), the mass death of civilians and the use of hunger as a weapon of war all contravene well-established international conventions. It’s easy to dismiss such principles as the “dreams of unworldly professors” and the “misplaced idealism of lawyers”. That would be a mistake. These principles are written into the military manuals of most civilised states, “including Israel’s”, on the recognition that while war cannot be avoided, it can at least be partly humanised. This is a major achievement of our world, and should not be disregarded lightly.

Israel has, of course, the right to defend itself. But the stated war aim of wiping out Hamas is self-evidently impossible. Beyond its most visible leaders and installations, Hamas is “an idea” – a paramilitary movement dispersed among the civilian population like needles in a haystack. “It can be destroyed, if at all, only by burning the entire haystack.” No doubt there are millions in Israel who would be appalled by the idea of doing that, but the country’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – a “long-standing advocate of ethnic cleansing” – is not among them. He recently boasted: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”. The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that it aims to induce Palestinians “as an ethnic group” to leave Gaza by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain. “A court would be likely to regard that as genocide.”

Camera traps hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest have discovered an “unexpected animal friendship”, says Clarissa Brincat in The New York Times: ocelots and opossums. Researchers in southeastern Peru were baffled to see the pair – a spotted wildcat slightly larger than a house cat, and a small marsupial it normally preys on – chumming around “like two old friends walking home from a bar”. They were even more surprised to find a second pair following each other on another camera in a different part of the jungle. Theories abound – perhaps they mask one another’s odours, or gain some other collaborative edge while hunting. Or maybe they’re just pals.

Billy McFarland, the convicted fraudster who spent three and a half years in prison over the disastrous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, has somehow managed to sell the rights to the brand on eBay for $245,300, says Amanda Silberling in TechCrunch. It’s not yet clear who the buyer is, “or what they plan to do with such cursed IP”. The original event was a catastrophe, and a recent attempt to stand up “Fyre II” – with tickets ranging between $1,400 and $1.1m – evaporated after the Mexican town advertised as the location said they’d never heard of it.

It’s Courtney Wright, a 12-year-old girl in Warwickshire who was excluded from her school’s “Culture Celebration Day” for wearing a Union Jack dress. The student was separated from her classmates and told by staff at Bilton School that her outfit was “unacceptable” for the event, which was supposedly meant to foster inclusion and diversity. It’s this sort of rubbish that made Pol Pot send the teachers to work in paddy fields, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. That may seem rather extreme, but this “pseudo-progressive mindset” is so rampant I’m not sure “what alternative will do the trick”.