Donald Trump could meet Vladimir Putin in the next few days to discuss a Ukraine ceasefire deal, followed by a three-way meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky. The US president claimed “great progress was made” in talks between Putin and his special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow yesterday. The Bank of England has cut interest rates from 4.25% to 4%, taking the cost of borrowing to its lowest level in more than two years. The drop is intended to stimulate the UK economy, says the FT, which contracted in April and May as businesses contended with tax rises and tariff uncertainty. Potato lovers can feel more “chipper” about eating their favourite food, so long as it’s boiled, baked or mashed, says The Times. A new study by Harvard and Cambridge experts found that eating spuds prepared in those ways doesn’t increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, contrary to previous research. Chips, unfortunately, do not fall into the same category.

Hiroshima still has the power to shock us

Eighty years ago yesterday, says Christopher Harding in UnHerd, the world’s first atomic weapon detonated around 600 metres above Hiroshima. Survivors in the Japanese city called it pika-don: a blinding flash of light (pika) followed by a thunderous explosion (don). Most of the industrial district “disappeared completely”; some 70,000 buildings were destroyed in total. People soon began pushing carts into the city centre in the hopes of carrying home the injured. What they saw reminded them of “images of Buddhist hell”: ghoulish figures staggering along the road, their clothes in tatters and their flesh dripping from their bodies; a set of steps bleached white from the explosion, save for a patch where someone had been sitting. The devastating effects of radiation sickness were still to come. By the end of the year, around 140,000 of the city’s 350,000 residents were dead.

The question of whether the US was right to use its new weapon remains as unresolved as ever. The most compelling rationale is that the planned Allied ground invasion would have resulted in “enormous loss of life” on both sides. Japan’s military hardliners were determined to fight to the last – they even argued after Hiroshima that if their country could withstand firebombing it could also withstand atomic bombing. A naval blockade might have forced a surrender, but how hungry would the population have needed to become before their leaders decided enough was enough? Whatever the answer, we can’t allow the horrors of the bomb to fade from memory. One reason we’ve enjoyed 80 years without nuclear conflict is that the extraordinary suffering visited on the people of Hiroshima, and subsequently Nagasaki, still has “the power to shock us”. Let’s keep it that way.

🇯🇵⚖️ I can never be truly objective on this issue, says David Blair in The Daily Telegraph. My grandfather, a man called Denis Bruce Soul, was a prisoner of war under the Japanese in Singapore. He was slowly being starved to death, and it’s unclear how much longer he could have survived – on his release after Japan’s surrender, he weighed just 6st 7lb. Like millions of others, “I owe my life to the atom bomb”.