Israel has begun an operation to capture Gaza City, according to the IDF, who say they have already taken control of the outskirts. Thousands of Palestinians have been advised to leave the area, and the Israeli military has called up 60,000 reservists, who will report for duty in September. Around 80 UK councils are poised to take action against migrant hotels in their districts. As well as dozens of Conservative and Reform-led councils, Labour-run Wirral and Tamworth are also considering their legal position following the landmark High Court ruling over the Bell Hotel in Epping. Almost every activity is more enjoyable if you do it with others, according to an 11-year study of more than 40,000 people. Activities including eating, banking, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, reading and even “thinking” were improved by company, say the researchers. The only exception was “kitchen and food clean-up”, which people were fractionally happier doing alone.

Is Trump being cleverer than his critics think?

Donald Trump’s ambiguity over Ukraine gives us the “worst of all worlds”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. If the US president were clear and consistent that he was abandoning Kyiv, as well and Europe and Nato, we in the old world would have no choice but to “become militarily self-sufficient as soon as possible”. If, on the other hand, Trump made it plain that he stands with democratic Europe “to the death”, there would be no problem. The danger is that Europe has enough of a US commitment to grow complacent, but not enough to be safe from its enemies. Rich and mature democracies struggle to make painful reforms except in a crisis. By blowing hot and cold, Trump is keeping us fatally “just short of that”.

Actually, Trump is pursuing something “extremely clever”, says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. Vladimir Putin’s red line is no Nato membership for Ukraine. So before Zelensky arrived in Washington, Trump announced on social media that there would be “NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE”. What he has offered Kyiv instead are “Nato-like” security guarantees, that a US-backed European force will defend Ukraine from future Russian aggression. In other words, Putin gets what he wants – no Nato on his border – and Ukraine gets the benefits of Nato membership, without joining. This plan gives Zelensky the muscle he needs to negotiate with Putin, and it puts Putin in a bind: if he objects to these “common-sense security guarantees”, then he will bear the blame for the failure of Trump’s peace process. “I hope President Putin is going to be good,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday, “and if he’s not, that’s going to be a rough situation.”

A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults have drunk alcohol in 2025, says Matthew Gasda in UnHerd. Drinking among conservatives is in especially rapid decline, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they’ve had a drink this year, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) It may have something to do with the prevailing political winds: Donald Trump, RFK Jr and Tucker Carlson are all teetotal.

Four former presidents of Peru are now in jail, says Marcelo Rochabrun in Bloomberg: a record for the country, “if not the world”. The latest addition came on Wednesday, when ex-president Martín Vizcarra was handed five months of pre-trial detention on corruption allegations and sent to the country’s purpose-built “presidential prison”. The facility – already home to Alejandro Toledo, sentenced for taking a multi-million-dollar bribe, Ollanta Humala, there for money laundering, and Pedro Castillo, awaiting trial for allegedly attempting a coup to retain power – now “risks overcrowding”.

Closing the asylum hotels won’t solve the migration crisis

When the High Court ruled this week that the Bell Hotel in Epping could no longer be used to house asylum seekers, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian, the triumph of the anti-immigration crowd looked a little “premature”. The decision was technical – the hotel’s owner had not notified the council of a change in its use – rather than a general endorsement of the proposition, memorably articulated by Robert Jenrick, that “men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally” pose a threat to the nation’s daughters. But the truth is, even ardent supporters of the asylum system don’t think hotels are a sound and humane way to accommodate refugees. “Liminal, often squalid, eye-wateringly expensive for the Home Office”, they hardly scream “welcome”. As more councils challenge the presence of asylum hotels in their neighbourhoods, the government is going to need to come up with a better way, and fast.

There are ways to deal with our recent surge of asylum seekers, says Patrick West in The Spectator. But they’ll take some stomach. The Rwanda scheme was fraught with difficulties, but when it briefly came into law last April, many illegal immigrants fled to Ireland (so many the government in Dublin complained). “This principle of deterrence must be revisited.” A government that really wanted to stop illegal migration would impose more stringent measures, like automatic deportation of those arriving illegally, and those with criminal convictions languishing in our prisons. The ultimate tough policy is the “unsayable” one: stop picking migrants up from their boats in the first place. It’s often forgotten by those who lazily argue for friendlier asylum policies that Britain’s illegal immigrants can easily be returned directly to where they came from: France.

ChatGPT uses the word “delve” at a far higher rate than people do in ordinary speech, says Adam Aleksic in The Washington Post, likely because the low-wage employees of AI firms who check the results of Large Language Models often live in countries like Nigeria and Kenya, where “delve” is more common. Other examples include “commendable”, “meticulous” and, for some reason, “tapestry”. In the two years after ChatGPT was released in 2022, uses of “delve” in academic papers increased tenfold. And as Scientific American reported last month, even normal folk have started saying “delve” more in spontaneous, spoken conversations.

To The Times:

In his autobiography Life’s Rich Pageant, Arthur Marshall recalls that, when he was a housemaster at Oundle, he wrote regularly to his mother. One extract recorded how, after he had explained to two new parents that if their son fell ill the school would write every day to report progress, the mother said: “Oh please don’t bother about that. Just send us a postcard if he’s dead.”

Jon Pettman
Eastbourne

It’s Isabelle Boemeke, a “nuclear power influencer”, says Madison Malone Kircher in The New York Times. Boemeke, who posts on social media under her persona “Isodope”, is a cheerleader for atomic energy, deftly explaining fiddly topics to her non-scientific audience – using Lego to explain fusion and fission, for example, and comparing uranium pellets (which she calls “magic spicy rocks”) to gummy bears. She often uses familiar “influencer tropes” such as “get ready with me” videos, fitness regimes and beauty routines, all while extolling the many virtues of nuclear power.