The government has pledged £4bn for a “generational” overhaul of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) support in English schools. A new £1.6bn “Inclusive Mainstream Fund” will channel money directly to institutions, and a further £1.8bn will establish an “Experts at Hand” service, providing access to educational psychologists, specialist teachers, and speech and language therapists. Violence has broken out across Mexico after security forces killed one of the country’s most powerful drug lords. Mexican special forces used intelligence provided by the US to take out Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho”, yesterday, triggering suspected gang members to retaliate by torching vehicles and blocking roads. One Battle After Another dominated last night’s Bafta Awards, taking home six gongs, including Best Film. Britain’s Robert Aramayo beat Hollywood A-listers including Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet to win Best Actor for his role as the Scottish Tourette’s syndrome campaigner John Davidson in I Swear, while Jessie Buckley became the first Irishwoman to win Best Actress for her performance in Hamnet.

Keir Starmer’s obsession with handing the Chagos Islands to a country that has never governed them is baffling, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. There is zero support for raising taxes to pay Mauritius £100m a year for the next century, yet that’s what Starmer has agreed, seemingly out of fear of the International Court of Justice. But the ICJ has no jurisdiction in disputes between commonwealth states, and in any case allows exemptions for military bases like America’s one on Diego Garcia. Donald Trump hates the deal, as do Labour MPs, left-wing commentators and even Starmer’s own No 10 advisers. It’s madness. “Never again should we let the country be run by human rights lawyers.”

I worked on the deal, says Ben Judah in The Sunday Times. The reason we’re doing it is that after the ICJ’s 2019 “advisory opinion” against Britain, the US State Department and our Foreign Office became certain a binding judgement from another international body would follow. That would render all efforts to supply Diego Garcia unlawful, making the critical base far harder and more expensive to operate. Divulging the details of why the base is so important would break the Official Secrets Act, but put it this way: what goes on there is something we would never be able to build or afford ourselves, and it is only our tiny role as landlord that grants us access. So we must do whatever is necessary to retain access, and that’s that. Mauritius, meanwhile, is a “swing state” in the great game against China – if Britain pulled out of the deal, it could push Mauritius into the arms of the Chinese, who would be free to build listening posts and military installations on nearby islands. It’s complicated foreign policy, so it’s easy to attack as a woke fantasy by lefty lawyers or whatever, but it’s ice-cold realpolitik.

🇺🇸🇬🇧 One illustration of the American view came from Kurt Campbell, US deputy Secretary of State in the Biden administration. One day, when he was visiting the Foreign Office, Campbell took me aside and said: “The only way the United Kingdom can actually hurt the United States would be by not doing the deal.” This is Kurt Campbell, China hawk and co-founder of a national security think tank, not some zealous human rights lawyer from Amnesty International.

Nearly 6,000 owners of high-growth businesses have left the UK in the past two years, say Emma Dunkley and Emma Agyemang in the FT, around double the number who have moved here. Wealth manager Rathbones, which analysed Companies House filings, found that their top destination was the UAE, followed by Spain and the US. Overall, Britain saw a net outflow of 16,500 millionaires last year, a loss amounting to $91.8bn in investable wealth. Some 40% of respondents in the FT’s annual bonus survey said they were considering upping sticks because of high tax rates, despite expectations of a “bumper bonus season”.

Some of today’s beauty hacks may seem absurd, says Mental Floss, but at least they’re not deadly. In the early 20th century popular products included “arsenic wafers” advertised as being “simply magical” for the complexion, and a uranium-based skin cream that made the skin literally “radiant”. Until the late 1700s, a common cure for morning breath was a urine mouthwash, and Roman women used eyedrops made with the poisonous nightshade plant to achieve a supposedly seductive “dilated pupil”. Perhaps gnarliest of all is the centuries-old “tapeworm diet”: simply swallow some tapeworm eggs and “let the parasite do the work”.

Thank goodness for the Supreme Court, says The Wall Street Journal. In a “monumental” 6-3 ruling on Friday, America’s highest court struck down President Trump’s tariff regime. The Constitution makes it clear that Congress, not the president, is responsible for taxation, which obviously includes tariffs. Trump tried to bypass this by citing a decades-old law granting the commander-in-chief emergency powers to deal with foreign threats, claiming the fentanyl crisis and the trade deficit constituted “emergencies”. Thankfully, three of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices – including two appointed by Trump himself – sided with their three liberal colleagues in rejecting this ludicrous claim. The president has already used a different law to impose 15% tariffs across the board, but those can last only 150 days without Congress’s approval. Friday was “the real tariff Liberation Day”.

At the risk of sounding grandiose, says David French in The New York Times, this decision may help “save the Republic”. For years, presidents of both parties have used broad and vague language in federal statutes to engage in de facto lawmaking. Trump has taken this to extremes, and his “presidential power grab” on tariffs was so big and so bold that it threatened the very foundations of our constitutional system. The conservative-controlled court pushing back reasserts the separation of powers on which the entire Constitution is built. As Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch explained, the legislative process can be slow and frustrating, but that is by design – so that major decisions are made by the people’s elected representatives rather than just “one faction or man”. Credit to the Supreme Court for doing what the “sycophantic” Republican-controlled Congress has abjectly failed to do: stuffing the presidency “back into its box”.

🤬😬 Trump was predictably livid with the decision, says Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, denouncing the justices as “an embarrassment to their families”. The worry is that he will try to deflect from his troubles at home with an “overseas adventure” – namely striking Iran, in what would likely turn into a prolonged and bloody conflict. “Desperate presidents often do desperate things.”

To The Economist:

Regarding Bartleby’s column on management mantras, at the first company I worked for the staff talked about “insurmountable opportunities”. I later discovered that this came about after the following, possibly apocryphal, conversation:

Employee: “We have a problem.”
Chief executive: “Don’t consider it a problem, consider it an opportunity!”
Employee: “We have an insurmountable opportunity!”

Steve Cheng
London

It’s Mark Fischbach, says David Sims in The Atlantic, a shrewd YouTuber whose debut film Iron Lung, an adaptation of the video game of the same name, has become an unlikely box office hit. The 36-year-old American declined to make a deal with any traditional distributor, instead booking screenings at cinemas privately and encouraging his 38 million subscribers to reserve tickets. When devoted fans realised the film wasn’t showing in their city, they called local cinemas to complain. Before long, Iron Lung was booked on more than 3,000 screens – and it has now grossed a whopping $30m against a $3m budget.