Donald Trump said yesterday that the conflict in the Middle East was “very complete, pretty much” and would finish “very soon”. The US president also said, after a call with Vladimir Putin, that he would waive oil sanctions on “some countries” and warned that Iran would face “Death, Fire and Fury” if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed. Tehran vowed not to let “one litre of oil” pass through until US-Israeli attacks stop. Dozens of Labour MPs are expected to abstain from today’s vote on the government’s plans to curb the right to a jury trial. Rather than voting against the entire Courts and Tribunals bill, rebel MPs will seek to make changes to its jury proposals when it returns for a further debate in the Commons later this month. Taking a daily multivitamin slows down ageing in the over 70s, according to a new study of nearly 1,000 septuagenarians in the US. The supplement, which contained vitamins A, B, C and E as well as lycopene and zinc, added around four months to longevity when taken over two years.

Winston Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump’s trick is to “douse it in gasoline, set it on fire and drop it in a dumpster in the middle of his own parade ground”. Whatever you think of the US president’s war on Iran, its effectiveness is being totally undermined by his administration’s communications. Trump spent almost no time explaining why he thought military action was needed. Then came the “haphazard and conflicting justifications”: regime change; nuclear threat; Israel was going to strike anyway. Add to that the “cringe-making puerility” of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the nation’s “PT instructor-in-chief”. Much of his breathless oratory – “death and destruction from the sky all day long” – would be “rejected by the cartoonists at Marvel Comics”.

This verbal profligacy has already resulted in a war that’s unpopular at home, which could be dangerous if things go south. The confusion over Israel is particularly damaging when “siren voices on the right and left want to blame the Jewish state (and the Jews) for all our woes”. Meanwhile, Trump needlessly alienates allies. Spain is “terrible” and the US should stop trading with it. The UK is no longer a special friend. We’ve seen this pattern elsewhere, most obviously on immigration: sound policies undermined by conveying them to the public in a way that “makes enemies for no obvious reason”. But it matters most in war. And the unseemly spectacle of administration officials representing necessary battle as “some sort of video game” corrupts our culture. We can’t raise our eyes to the shining beacon of our ideals if we can’t see through “the acrid smoke of our leaders’ intemperate, incontinent, infantilising verbiage”.

🎬😞 The social media video the White House published last week was particularly “obscene”, says Sam Leith in The Spectator. Captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY 🇺🇲🔥”, it intercuts fragments from action movies and video games – Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Russell Crowe in Gladiator and so on – with real footage of explosions in Iran, all set to a pounding dance beat. Nothing links the characters featured, and there is no note of solemnity for the enemies killed: the burned bodies, the drowned sailors, the terrified civilians. The only message is that “blowing stuff up is cool”.

The idea that the Americans could choose Iran’s next supreme leader reflects a profound ignorance of the country’s political culture, says Ali Hashem in Foreign Policy. Martyrdom carries “deep symbolic weight”, drawing from the central narrative of Shiite Islam: the death of Imam Hussein at the seventh-century Battle of Karbala, which represents the “ultimate act of resistance against tyranny”. Seen through this lens, the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father – which might otherwise be surprising, given the Iranian revolution was at least in part about ending hereditary rule – takes on a powerful significance, tying him to the legacy of the old man’s martyrdom. For the mullahs, “moral victory lies in sacrifice rather than survival”.

Members of the online manosphere – the web of influencers and self-help gurus spreading toxic masculinity on social media – are becoming obsessed with their “sexual market value”, says TM Brown in The New York Times. Once a niche term used only by online misogynists, the increasingly popular idea is that each person has a specific worth, based on their height, jawline, income, social status and so on. Last year, a short-lived dating app called Bidsy tried to put a dollar value on attractiveness by having users bid to date potential partners; influencer Austin Dunham sells a “calculator” which rates men on a scale of 1-10.

Two months after the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, and with American missiles still pummelling Iran, Donald Trump is eyeing up his next target, says Sara Kozameh in The Guardian: Cuba. The US president has declared a national emergency against the Cuban government, ruling it an “unusual and extraordinary threat”, and all but choked off the island’s oil imports by threatening to impose tariffs on any country that supplies it. Cuba now faces a crisis “not seen since the fall of the USSR”. Power outages last around 18 hours a day, forcing many to rise during the night, when pockets of power are more common, to prepare meals, charge devices and do chores. Food prices have surged, driving up inflation, while school hours have been cut and large events postponed. It’s an “evident bid for regime change”.

Trump hardly denies this, says Vivian Salama in The Atlantic. Recently he floated the possibility of a “friendly takeover” of the 11-million-strong nation and confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose parents were Cuban immigrants – was in “very high level” discussions about cutting a deal with Havana. One reason Trump is so keen to oust the country’s communist regime is that it’s something US presidents from both parties have been trying to do for 70 years. Ronald Reagan named Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982; both Bush administrations leaned heavily on sanctions; Bill Clinton launched a covert democracy-promotion programme; Barack Obama sought a thaw in diplomatic relations. “None of it worked.” If Trump can see through what his predecessors never managed, he will “cement his legacy”.

Donald Trump is obsessed with leather Oxfords from the American shoe firm Florsheim, says Alex Leary in The Wall Street Journal. The US president has taken to guessing men’s shoe sizes in front of them, from agency heads to White House advisers and VIPs, before ordering an aide to send them a $145 pair. All his top officials now have them, including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and Howard Lutnick. “It’s hysterical,” says one female staffer. “Everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” One cabinet secretary has been overheard grumbling about having to “shelve his Louis Vuittons”. Get yours here, if you can – the website appears to have been overloaded with demand.

An AI agent has been caught going rogue during a training exercise and launching a secret side hustle mining cryptocurrency, says Herb Scribner in Axios. A research team affiliated with the Chinese tech giant Alibaba say the agent they were creating, called ROME, took the entrepreneurial action without any instruction or authorisation, and also opened a “hidden backdoor” from the inside of the AI system to a computer. Definitely nothing to worry about.

It’s a large tortoiseshell butterfly, says Patrick Barkham in The Guardian, which has become a resident species in Britain for the first time in decades. The “elusive and enigmatic” variety was declared extinct in the UK in the 1960s. But rising temperatures have led to growing numbers migrating from Europe and a flurry of spring sightings in the south of England has led Butterfly Conservation to designate it Britain’s 60th native butterfly species. “It’s not well-established enough yet to say it’s definitely back for good,” says Richard Fox, head of science at the charity. “But there are exciting signs.”