Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle says he reported Peter Mandelson as a flight risk to the Metropolitan Police, prompting the force to arrest the former US ambassador on Monday over his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson has described the claim that he planned to flee to the British Virgin Islands – which Hoyle reportedly caught wind of when he was there last week – as “complete fiction”. Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in history last night, declaring the US “bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before”. In his one hour and 47 minute speech, the president claimed an economic “turnaround for the ages”, lambasted Iran for its “sinister nuclear ambitions” and declared the Supreme Court’s recent tariffs ruling “very unfortunate”. The T-Rex was significantly faster than previously thought. New analysis of the deadly dinosaur’s footprints suggest the predator ran in a “toes-first” style, making it 20% faster than original estimates, and meaning it would beat Usain Bolt over 100m by a crisp 0.81 seconds.

Donald Trump looks poised to strike Iran. Good, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The Islamic Republic is a danger to its neighbours through its violent proxies; to global stability with its deep ties to Beijing and Moscow, persistent threats to maritime trade and backing for global terrorism; and to its own people, thousands of whom it slaughtered last month. Nothing else has worked: decades of economic sanctions immiserated ordinary Iranians while their despotic rulers partied on, enriching themselves through sanctions busting, cybercrime, drug dealing and other black market shenanigans. Institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency couldn’t curb Tehran’s dangerous nuclear ambitions; nor could years of diplomacy under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The Iranian people are already in the streets and Trump has a historic opportunity to support them in bringing down an evil regime. He should take it.

The idea that a limited strike could force concessions without igniting a wider war rests on deeply flawed assumptions, says Ali Hashem in Foreign Policy. Conflicts escalate fast unless both sides want to keep them contained, and right now “that shared interest may be gone”. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has moved away from preaching “tactical restraint” and started using the language of confrontation “through the lens of Karbala”. This refers to a battle in 680AD in which the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, Imam Hussein, chose martyrdom over submitting to an unjust ruler. In the political consciousness of Shia Islam this is no mere myth but a core component in an all-encompassing moral and political code. The idea of “dying on one’s feet and not living on one’s knees” is alien to the US logic of coercive diplomacy. But Iranian theocrats believe it in their bones. What Washington hawks don’t understand is that if the mullahs go down, they will gladly try to take the world with them.

Activists often claim the vast profits of slavery in the British Empire provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution, and that Britain’s economic dominance was thus “built on the backs of slaves”. This is wrong, says historian Lawrence Goldman in The Daily Telegraph. The West Indian slave economy accounted for only about 2.5% of imperial GDP until it was abolished in the 1830s. Its key product, sugar, made a smaller contribution to the economy than domestic raw materials like wood, wool, leather and even beer.

The latest wellness trend in Japan is kanoke, says Casey Baseel in Japan Today: renting a “cute coffin” to lie in for 30 minutes. At Meiso Kukan Knoke-in in Tokyo, customers can choose between an open or closed casket designed by Grave Tokyo, known for its snazzy sarcophagi, while they listen to “healing” music, watch a video or just close their eyes and relax. Satisfied snoozers, who pay around £9.50 for a half-hour slot, say they come out of the somewhat morbid experience feeling “unexpectedly positive and energetic”.

I was disappointed the police didn’t “max out the theatrics” during their arrest of Peter Mandelson on Monday, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. They didn’t even do that thing where they put their hand on the suspect’s head to “ease” him into a car. “Absolutely no sense of occasion.” Still, we should at least be pleased the fuzz are doing something – unlike their colleagues in the US. Even conservative estimates of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing for “literally decades” suggest that an awful lot of people must have been involved. Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick – who was in contact with Epstein as recently as 2018 – has described the late paedophile as “the greatest blackmailer ever”. Yet so far the only two people to have had their collar felt by America’s all-powerful law enforcement apparatus are Epstein himself and Ghislaine Maxwell. This “all-time epic blackmail enterprise” was, it seems, a real “mom-and-pop business”.

I don’t buy this argument that America is failing to hold the powerful to account, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The only reason Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have been arrested is because England has a “rather vague” common-law offence called “misconduct in public office”, and there are specific suggestions that both men passed confidential government information to Epstein. Where are the files showing similar potentially criminal behaviour by Americans? Besides, the way that Britain’s authorities are applying the law is troubling. Was the spectacle of half a dozen police vehicles descending on Andrew’s house in Norfolk really necessary? This, in the same country where police “stood by and did nothing” when thousands of girls were being raped by predominantly Asian “grooming gangs”. British coppers never used to need a media mob demanding arrests to go out and enforce the law. “Justice” pursued at the behest of tabloid editors and politicians “isn’t much justice at all”.

Britain’s chaotic court system has a new problem, says Patricia Clarke in The Observer: “vibe lawyering”. Rather than shelling out for a human lawyer, people are crafting their legal arguments themselves using AI chatbots – which have a habit of getting the law spectacularly wrong. One defendant tried to secure Covid support payments by presenting a mess of totally made-up case law; others have filed claims using US legal concepts that don’t exist in British law. Anthony Sendall, a barrister, recalls one case where a judge had to spend much of a one-hour hearing explaining to a defendant why his AI-generated discrimination claim was complete and utter rubbish.

How far back in time can you understand English? The Substack writer Colin Gorrie has come up with a first-person story where each passage is written in the style of a different century, starting in easy-to-understand 2000 (“Well, I finally got to the town everyone has been talking about lately”) and going all the way back to 1000, when it may as well be a foreign language (“Ac ƿe naƿiht freo ne sindon”). See how far back you can make sense of it here.

It’s the world’s first “megawatt-class wind power airship”, says Rory Bathgate in Live Science: a helium-filled blimp fitted with 12 mini turbines and a long tether to transmit the energy down to the ground. In its test flight in the skies above China’s Sichuan Province, the prototype produced enough energy to power the average US home for a fortnight. The plan is to use the devices – which benefit from the faster, more consistent winds higher in the atmosphere – to power remote facilities like border outposts.