Donald Trump is considering a military operation to seize the Iranian oil export hub of Kharg Island, telling the FT his preference is to “take the oil”. The US president is also reportedly weighing a special forces mission to seize and remove from the country around 450kg of uranium. The Pentagon has ordered the deployment of 10,000 US troops to the region, 3,500 of whom arrived on Friday. Ten private doctors in Britain have between them issued more than 800,000 prescriptions for medical cannabis since 2019, more than half the overall total. Marijuana was legalised for medical use in 2018 after a case involving epilepsy, but is now mostly issued to patients with mental health problems via around 40 private clinics. Four masked thieves have stolen paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth a combined £7.8m from an Italian museum. The works pinched in the three-minute heist on the Magnani Rocca Foundation villa, near Parma, were Renoir’s Les Poissons, Still Life with Cherries by Cézanne, and Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace.

There’s a lot of talk about Iran’s asymmetrical warfare: using cheap drones to cause expensive damage. But the US “enjoys its own kind of asymmetry”, says Patrick Foulis in the FT. Unlike in the first and second Gulf Wars, America is now a net energy exporter. It is comparatively insensitive to the global oil shock; its natural gas prices remain low and stable. Hence why its borrowing costs haven’t soared, and why the earnings hit to its biggest companies is expected to be relatively modest. The dollar has risen, a sign that the “safe haven” paradox is back: “the more America disrupts the world, the more the world purchases its safe assets”.

After the war, many US allies could end up even more dependent on the US. Countries in the Gulf, and perhaps Europe, will be queuing up to buy more American air defence systems. Governments keen to reduce their reliance on Qatari gas will go to the US, which has doubled its LNG exports since 2020 and is expected to supply a third of the market by 2030. The war will also give America’s enemies plenty to think about. China will be glad to see America’s alliances divided and its military drawn away from Asia. But despite a “gargantuan” stockpiling effort, the world’s largest oil importer has only enough of the black stuff to cover up to 150 days. The lesson is clear: if Beijing were to launch its own “war of choice” over Taiwan, it would be extremely vulnerable to an energy embargo and would not have the “safe haven” cushion enjoyed by the US. Much of the world still has “no clear alternative” to relying on Washington – and Beijing has a long way to go to replicate its “unique strengths”.

A 2024 Bible Society report claiming that large numbers of Gen Z had started going to church – prompting much excitement and commentary about a religious revival – has been withdrawn, says Kaya Burgess in The Times. Pollsters YouGov have admitted that the survey on which the findings were based was “not administered in the optimal way”, with “fraudulent” respondents creating “flawed” data. Regular surveys of churchgoing show a continuing decline.

Rather than trying to seize Kharg Island or reopen the Strait of Hormuz, says Clayton Seigle in The New York Times, the US should blockade Iranian tankers in the Arabian Sea. Tehran is currently exporting almost as much oil as it was before the war. The dozen-plus American destroyers in the area could easily intercept any Iranian vessels trying to leave – from a position beyond the range of most of Tehran’s weapons – and the confiscated oil could then be sold to alleviate global shortages. Iran has vulnerabilities to energy disruptions, just like the rest of the world. Time to exploit them.

Supermarkets are “a miracle of capitalism”, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. When Boris Yeltsin paid an unscheduled visit to a grocery store in Texas in 1989, the sight of shelves crammed with goods left him, he wrote in his autobiography, “sick with despair for the Soviet people”. An aide said that was the moment when the last shreds of Yeltsin’s faith in communism “shrivelled and died”. But with depressing inevitability, Labour’s response to the war in Iran has been – in its words – to “crack down on profiteering” and “haul in” the supermarket and fuel forecourt operators for Downing Street dressings-down. To which the response of those businesses should be simple: “get lost”.

Supermarkets are “ferociously competitive”. A competition watchdog investigation in 2024 couldn’t find a single example over the previous 10 years of one of the “big six” hitting a profit margin of 5%, which is usually the “bare minimum” for a successful company. The same probe found “zero evidence” of supermarkets profiteering during the pandemic, just as analysis by The Times last week on 6,245 petrol stations found no signs of price-gouging. The main reason food and petrol prices are rising isn’t hard to divine: oil and gas are more expensive, so it costs more to make fertiliser and packaging and, well, “anything that needs to be produced using energy”. The other driving force for prices is the growing regulatory burden – one company executive tells me a new environmental tax on packaging, introduced under the Tories, will add more to food bills than the Iran crisis. Rather than scolding and scapegoating supermarkets, the government should acknowledge what’s enabling those stores to keep prices as low as they are: “ruthless competition”.

The Western world has a curious obsession with drinking booze out of shoes, says Chelsea Thatcher in Mental Floss. In the late 19th century, avid fans of the Bolshoi Ballet were given the slippers of their favourite dancers filled with champagne or vodka; in Belle Époque France, cabaret dancers did the same. That tradition spread through Europe and the US, with celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead epitomising the connection between decadence, glamour and shoe-drinking. Today, Germany’s bierstiefel, a boot-shaped beer glass, is regularly brought out at Oktoberfest and the Australian “shoey” is routinely performed by athletes (and Harry Styles, at a recent gig in Sydney). Gross.

Assassination has always been a “routine tool of Israeli policy”, says Andrew Cockburn in the London Review of Books. In 1948, a militant Zionist organisation gunned down UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte after he drafted a peace plan deemed “too favourable to the Palestinians”. Yitzhak Shamir, who ordered the hit, later ran Israel’s first targeted killing squad before becoming prime minister in 1983. “I am so happy to meet you,” he once told UN official Brian Urquhart, greeting him warmly. “I have never dealt with the UN before.” “Oh but you have,” Urquhart replied. “You dealt with Count Bernadotte, did you not?”

It’s what is thought to be the world’s longest outdoor escalator, say Thomas Hale and Wang Xueqiao in the FT: a 1km moving staircase system on the steep banks of the Yangtze River in Wushan, China. Made up of more than two dozen individual escalators and lifts, the newly opened “Goddess” takes 21 minutes to ascend at a cost of 33p per hour of travel in either direction. Wushan is known for its sometimes bizarre architectural feats, including a train line that runs straight through an apartment building.