Homes, cars and a bus were set ablaze in Belfast last night as violence erupted following a knife attack by a Sudanese immigrant in the city on Monday. Masked rioters hurled petrol bombs at police while chanting “foreigners out” in scenes First Minister Michelle O’Neill blasted as “disgusting cowardice” and “outright thuggery”. The US military has launched what it called “self-defence” strikes against Iran after Donald Trump claimed that Tehran had shot down a US army Apache helicopter. Iran responded by launching a wave of attacks against American targets across the Middle East, including US bases in Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait. By the end of the year, electric vehicle owners in Britain will be able to charge their cars in just five minutes. The world’s biggest EV maker, BYD, unveiled its new “flash charger” in west London yesterday and plans to install 120 of them across the country this year.

It’s hard to think of two human beings less alike than Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter, says Edward Luce in the FT. One was a frugal “citizen servant”, the other is Donald Trump. The one thing they have in common is Iran. Carter’s presidency was fatally hijacked by the Iranian hostage crisis, “a disaster he could never escape”. Trump walked blithely into Operation Epic Fury, but Iran’s theocrats are also defining his presidency. Trump can’t bear the sight of body bags; nor could Carter. The Democrat was conscience-stricken after losing eight Americans in his aborted hostage rescue attempt; so far Trump has lost 13 US servicemen in the Gulf. But what Trump fears most is the public backlash. Asked last week if he planned to seize Iran’s stash of highly enriched uranium, he said he’d thought about it and decided not to. “I didn’t want to be Jimmy Carter.”

Well, that’s exactly what he’s becoming. Once the idea takes hold that a US president is prisoner to the whims of others, the “scent of impotence” is hard to shake, and invites danger. Carter’s failure to free the hostages “fed into” the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan a few weeks after the storming of the US embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, Trump urged Israel not to retaliate against Iranian missile attacks but hours later Benjamin Netanyahu ordered strikes on Iran. Why would Iran negotiate with an America that cannot constrain Israel? To fix all this Trump will have to threaten to cut off US military aid to Israel, deploy all America’s expertise in haggling over the minutiae of a deal, and show he can stay the course on both. “Character U-turns are rare in people turning 80.”

🤝🤨 It’s been more than two months since Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, claiming the two were “close to a deal” to end the war, says Aaron Blake in CNN. Since then, the US and Iran have, in the president’s telling, been perennially on the verge of a breakthrough. If you include the period before the ceasefire, he has suggested a deal was right around the corner at least 38 times.

Danny Kruger’s Commons speech last year calling for a national renewal founded on the Christian faith made him an unofficial “chaplain to the Conservative Party”, says Matthew Parris in The Times. Now that he has defected to Reform, does he occupy the same role there? I only ask because of the lies Reform are peddling about Kemi Badenoch, taking out of context two comments – “I don’t want to hear about white lives matter” and “black lives do matter” – to make it look like she was saying the exact opposite of what she was actually saying. This, surely, is a chance for Kruger to do his Christian duty: “to stand up for the truth”.

Archivists at the British Film Institute are preserving online videos for their “cultural significance”, says Leo Sands in The New York Times. The 60 clips gathered so far range in length from an 11-second meme (a teenager’s funny reaction to getting slapped) to the Daily Star’s week-long livestream of a lettuce outlasting Liz Truss. Others include the autotune remix of Nick Clegg’s tuition fees apology; Andrew Cotter commentating on his labradors eating their dinner during lockdown; and of course the unimprovable Charlie Bit My Finger. Click here to give the archive a browse.

This year’s Hay Festival concluded with a strange spectacle, says Tim Wu in The Guardian. I was on a panel about the dangers of excessive tech power alongside the former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, who, on her lawyer’s advice, sat for the entire hour in silence. Since the publication of her book, Careless People, about her time as director of global public policy at Meta (then Facebook), the company has done everything in its power to silence her, including an arbitration order preventing her from promoting the book and legal threats to bankrupt her. These gag orders don’t just punish Wynn-Williams. They “send a warning to any future critic”.

Those who argue that this isn’t censorship because Facebook is a corporation rather than a government, or because she signed employee agreements promising not to criticise the company, are wide of the mark. We live in a time when the power of big corporations is regularly compared to nation states, and when private censorship, overseen by corporate CEOs acting like authoritarian leaders, is at least as dangerous as the public kind. These tech firms now wield undeniable influence over domestic and international politics that is clearly deserving of scrutiny. If there were ever a case for the sunlight that whistleblowers provide, Meta is it, with scandals ranging from harvesting Facebook profile data in order to influence elections, to suppressing internal safety research revealing severe harms to young people on its platforms. Wynn-Williams was brave enough to get her book out there. But if we don’t learn from her example, we risk never hearing from other would-be whistleblowers who may be “sitting in the wings”.

Welcome to the age of “Christian energy beverages”, says Lydia Bugg in The Guardian. Drink Yahweh, which claims to be the “first Christian energy drink”, offers flavours such as “Blessed Berry” and “Tropical Paradise” in cans with pictures of Jesus’s face on them. The drinks brand Agape’s “Preachin’ Peach” is apparently “for those who are bold in their faith” – each case comes with a cardboard giftbox designed to be used “directly for evangelism” – while 4gvn (pronounced “forgiven”) offers a “Gospel Gummy” flavour.

If you think tuition fees are expensive in Britain, says Jeffrey Selingo in New York Magazine, spare a thought for Americans. At least 16 colleges in the US – including Duke, Georgetown, UChicago and NYU – now charge more than $100,000 a year. And they’re hardly outliers: some 85 institutions were charging more than $90,000 last year, many of which will presumably soon be joining the six-figure club.

They’re the crew of Artemis III, says Josh Dinner on Space.com, who will be launched into Earth orbit next year to test various procedures, including docking manoeuvres with two lunar landers, in preparation for a planned moon mission in 2028. The all-male crew, made up of three Americans and an Italian, includes Frank Rubio, who spent a record 371 days on the International Space Station after his mission’s spacecraft sprang a coolant leak and he couldn’t get home, and mission commander Randy Bresnik, who once performed a six-hour spacewalk.