Donald Trump says the special relationship between the US and Britain has changed because Keir Starmer has “not been helpful” in the war on Iran. America advised its citizens in numerous Middle Eastern countries to evacuate immediately after Trump warned that the biggest strikes are yet to come. Israel struck Beirut overnight and has launched a ground offensive into southern Lebanon. Rachel Reeves said in her Spring Statement this afternoon that she has “the right economic plan” for our increasingly uncertain world, and that fiscal stability in Britain is now “even more important” to withstand the shock of the Iran war. New OBR forecasts show the chancellor’s £22bn fiscal buffer little changed, though they don’t take into account the surge in oil prices triggered by the war. Left-handed people are more likely than right-handers to be “hyper-competitive”, according to a new Italian study of more than 1,100 people. This supposed competitive edge may help explain why lefties, who make up just 10% of the population, are over-represented in sports such as tennis and boxing.

One of the first things the Iranian regime did after being decapitated on Saturday morning, says Yaroslav Trofimov in The Wall Street Journal, was to strike all six of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states, as well as Jordan, Iraq and Israel, unleashing a “truly regional war”. The calculation seems to be that by causing direct pain to America’s allies, and by making it impossible to ship oil through the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran could force Washington to pack it in. This strategy basically worked in last year’s 12-Day War, when an attack on a US base in Qatar put an end to hostilities. This time, the reverse. The Gulf states, which were initially against American action, are now united in the view that the Islamic Republic can’t be allowed to get away with this “unprecedented onslaught on its neighbours”.

There’s no help coming from Iran’s supposed allies further afield either, says Alex Vatanka in Foreign Policy. Tehran’s political class is being forced to accept that its major foreign policy flex of the past decade – that deeper alignment with Russia and China would provide “strategic insulation” against Western coercion – has been a bust. Just last spring, Tehran and Moscow ratified a “comprehensive strategic treaty”. But since then, despite the odd strong word against American aggression, zilch. Russia has failed to deliver advanced Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air defence systems. (Moscow, it was noted in Iran, has offered them to India, despite Delhi’s close ties to Washington.) It’s been the same with China: happy to buy $400bn worth of oil and offer “rhetorical opposition” to escalation, but no interest in falling out with the US over a mere client.

🇪🇺💤 The past few days have also accelerated the collapse of the transatlantic partnership, says Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. The Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen described Westminster’s dilly-dallying over whether to let the US use its bases as a sign the special relationship was “dead”. And the fact that the EU’s “security college” only met on Monday, two days after the strikes began, confirmed the suspicion in MAGA circles that Europe is “an unserious actor” – even in war, they don’t work on weekends.

With the release of her new asylum reforms yesterday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood put paid to the nonsensical idea that Labour should respond to their defeat in Gorton and Denton by lurching to the left, says John Rentoul in The Independent. The new Denmark-inspired laws, which replace permanent asylum with temporary status, deliver the “firm but fair” immigration controls that the majority of the country want to see. While Angela Rayner waffled on about Labour needing to be “braver”, Mahmood – courageous, charismatic and can-do – took action. “That is what leadership looks like.”

Styscraper is an extremely silly but highly enjoyable game where you have to build a tower from pieces of farmyard rubbish – old tyres, oil barrels, washing machines and so on – without any of it falling into the pigsty below. You are given five items at a time, the last of which is always a pig. Try it here.

For decades, says James Schneider in The New Statesman, British leaders have hailed stability in the Middle East while helping to create the opposite. Intervention is always sold as deterrence, and the outcome is a region left “more fractured and more combustible”. This time is no different. Keir Starmer’s position on the war in Iran is characteristically murky. He has seemingly ruled out joining the US and Israel in “offensive action” but stopped short of condemning them for launching it. He denied the US access to British bases, only to reverse course days later with waffle about “specific, limited and defensive” operations. Britain, once a major player in the Middle East, is now merely an “auxiliary in someone else’s wars”.

For once, I agree with the prime minister, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Given Donald Trump has begun this war with “neither a destination nor a road-map”, it could easily prove as perilous as Iraq or Afghanistan. That gives Britain, with “no activated alliance to honour”, a rare and unexpected advantage: the ability to “wait and see what happens”. And when the missiles first started to fly, that’s exactly what Starmer did. The Tories, who seem ideologically convinced that “war is always a good thing”, have derided his approach as “weak”; Reform have accused him of being “gutless”. But our national interest depends not upon the neurotic idea that we must be involved in whatever is going on abroad, but upon doing what is to our own, carefully considered benefit. Past adventures in the region were a disaster. Starmer is wise to “look before we leap”.

As more and more US schools introduce phone bans, students are turning to retro tech to get their music fix, says Callie Holtermann in The New York Times. Devices making a comeback include iPods, portable CD players like the Sony Discman, and even the Walkman and other cassette players. Reddit forums for iPod enthusiasts have become “flooded with students”, and an eBay seller hawking refurbished kit has seen sales more than treble. “It’s definitely a good loophole,” says Adaly Nolasco, a student in Houston who uses her mum’s hand-me-down MP3 player. “Hopefully they don’t ban this, too.”

As Iranian missiles rain down across the Middle East, says Chris Blackhurst in The Independent, the smug, sun-seeking yuppies, non-doms and influencers who quit Britain for Dubai have found themselves “swapping tax shelters for bomb shelters”. For a blissful moment, social media is free of all those tacky “bikini-clad, pouting shots” in gleaming kitchens, by swimming pools, on jet skis and all the rest of it. Gone are the braggy posts about leaving rainy London behind for a place where you can safely wear your Rolex in public, eat nightly at the Salt Bae steak restaurant and send your kids to cut-price offshoots of famous public schools. Suddenly dear old Blighty isn’t looking like such a dump after all.

It’s Vision of Zacharias in the Temple, says Jo Lawson-Tancred in Artnet, which has been confirmed as a genuine Rembrandt six decades after being dismissed as a fake. A two-year investigation by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum involving advanced imaging and material analysis concluded that the Dutch master was the authentic creator of the painting, likely bumping its value into the tens of millions of pounds. The 17th-century work – which depicts the father of John the Baptist from the point of view of the Angel Gabriel – has been in private hands since it was given the thumbs down by curators in 1960. Worth the wait.