The death toll from the Iranian regime’s crackdown on anti-government protests has risen to around 2,000, an Iranian security official has told Reuters, with the victims including protesters, civilians and security personnel. Donald Trump says he will slap 25% tariffs on any country doing trade with Iran and has reportedly been briefed on military options for a potential US intervention. Britain will this week make it illegal to create non-consensual sexual deepfakes after digital “undressing” by Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok prompted widespread concern. Ofcom has also launched an investigation into whether X has broken the Online Safety Act by allowing the AI bot to create the intimate images on its platform. Same-sex sexual behaviour is a common way to strengthen social bonds among primates. Researchers from Imperial College London found that 59 non-human primate species, from lemurs to Japanese Macaques, regularly get it on with their own sex, likely because it improves social cohesion and therefore increases their chances of survival in tough conditions.

A year and a half after winning a vast parliamentary majority, says Sarah Ditum in The i Paper, Labour has no signal achievements and there is serious talk of a leadership challenge. So far, the political pundits prodding the corpse of Keir Starmer’s government have failed to finger the real culprit: Ed Miliband. Not only has the secretary of state for energy security and net zero overseen an increase in energy bills – rather than the £300 cuts he promised – and made only “sclerotic” progress on nuclear power, he is also responsible for a deeper rot. It was Miliband who entrenched Labour’s lethal habits of self-loathing and internal schism. And it was Miliband who, after dismally losing a general election as party leader, ushered in the Jeremy Corbyn years, from which the party has never fully recovered.

Miliband should never have been Labour’s leader. When he announced his candidacy in 2010, after just five years in parliament, his highly experienced brother, David, was the front runner. For many Labour members, Ed’s lack of experience was an advantage: he was a “clean skin”, untainted by Iraq. He clinched victory by running against the record of Labour’s previous government – in other words, by “repudiating the most successful social democratic government that Britain has ever had”. He also opened his party’s membership to any dilettante with £3 who fancied voting in a leadership election. That led to the party’s electoral – “and moral” – suicide under Corbyn, including rampant anti-Semitism; a lasting purge of talent; pathetic, lukewarm opposition to Brexit (Corbyn was always Eurosceptic); and now dreary, failing Starmer. He beat his big brother, and wrecked the country. Cheers, Ed.

For all the European hand-wringing, says Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde, Donald Trump has “no interest in abandoning Nato”. After all, it keeps Europe at heel and fills the order books of the US military industrial complex. But he does appear to be turning the Western defence alliance into its erstwhile Soviet counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. In this coercive treaty bloc, the dominant power – Russia – “imposed its will by force” on other members, including sending Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia (a Warsaw Pact member) to end the 1968 Prague Spring. The sovereignty of member states only existed to serve the dominant state. To Greenlanders, this may be sounding all too familiar.

To The Guardian:

The curse of the ring-necked parakeets so vividly described in your report certainly struck a chord with me and, no doubt, with many more Londoners. Whether the green beasts escaped from the set of The African Queen or from Jimi Hendrix’s garden matters not to me but I did object most strongly to the flashmobs that descended on my bird tables and whose rapacious greed drove away many of the native species. However, all was not lost when I calculated that the parakeets were of tropical origin and held within their DNA an atavistic fear of snakes. Draping my feeders with realistic rubber serpents achieved an almost instant absence of the greedy greens.

Stephen Pound
London

The Trump administration has suggested that the extradition of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is the first in a series of dominoes to fall, says Vivian Salama in The Atlantic. Up next, they’ve hinted, is Cuba – a nation so intertwined with Venezuela that when US forces raided Maduro’s Caracas safe house some 32 of the roughly 75 bodyguards killed were Cubans. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio following the intervention, “I’d be concerned.” But predictions about the imminent demise of the Cuban regime – afflicted as it is – are “greatly exaggerated”.

Cuba is not Venezuela. One of the main attractions of ousting Maduro for Donald Trump was accessing the country’s 300-billion-barrel oil reserves. Cuba’s offshore reserves pale in comparison, standing somewhere between four and nine billion barrels. Venezuela also has an established political opposition, which the US worked with to pile pressure on Maduro, and which will now, it is hoped, start working to restore its previously “vibrant democratic society”. Cuba has no such thing, and has been a one-party communist state for almost 70 years. Moreover, Russia and China, though “chastened by their inability to protect Venezuela”, remain deeply invested in propping up Havana. Moscow has recently “revived its Cuban partnership”, docking warships and nuclear-powered submarines at its ports in return for mercenaries to bolster troops in Ukraine; Beijing offers military and intelligence support. As one Cuba expert put it: those hoping for dramatic change are “engaging in a kind of magical thinking”.

Normie Club is a daily 10-question quiz in which players must guess which of two options is more popular with the majority. It’s based on US data, says Matt Muir in Web Curios, which makes the odd question a little baffling to those of us who can’t believe there’s a type of food called “Ranch Dressing”. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting and fun. See how normal you are, by clicking here.

Back in 2009, says The New York Times, Venezuela announced “with great fanfare” that it was spending billions of dollars on one of the world’s most advanced anti-aircraft systems to protect its skies amid rising tensions with Washington. Yet when US helicopters swooped in to snatch Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, the much-vaunted, Russian-made S-300 and Buk-M2 air defences, heralded by Hugo Chávez as a “deterrent to American aggression”, were completely ineffective. Analysts say the explanation is comically simple: they basically hadn’t turned them on. The system wasn’t hooked up to radar, and some components were still in storage.

It’s Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled former crown prince, who is spurring on the country’s anti-government protests. The 65-year-old, whose father – the last Shah – was ousted in the 1979 revolution, called for mass protests last week and has since encouraged US intervention. By no means all Iranians are in favour of restoring the monarchy, says The Wall Street Journal, but the fact that so many answered his call is notable. “Someone has to yoke the memory of Iran’s pre-1979 past to a live possibility of a better future.” If Pahlavi can do that, “the regime is in more trouble than it knows”.