Markets rallied and the oil price briefly fell below $100 per barrel this morning after Donald Trump said the US would end the Iran war within “two or three weeks”, regardless of whether Tehran signed a deal. Iran says it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to non-US vessels willing to comply with its “new laws”, thought to be a reference to the £1.5m select vessels are paying to pass through the waterway. The NHS will offer weight-loss drugs to more than a million people in England to cut their risk of heart attacks and strokes. Semaglutide is already available to obese patients and will now also be given to those who are overweight or at risk of serious cardiovascular problems. A crewed spaceship is scheduled to blast off towards the moon this evening for the first time since 1972. Nasa’s Artemis II, which will carry four astronauts around the moon on a 10-day test flight, is set to launch at 11.24pm UK time, weather-permitting. Click here to watch.

Watching Donald Trump “flip-flopping” on Iran is becoming embarrassing, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. One minute he is claiming the surviving Iranian leaders have pretty much agreed to his every demand; the next he is admitting he has no idea how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and telling Europe to do it for him. This, unfortunately, is what happens when you elect an “impulsive, unstable” president who surrounds himself with a cabinet of handsome yes-men. He is like a child “playing with matches – the world’s most powerful military – in a gas-filled room”.

Trump’s best option now is to cut his 15-point peace plan down to two points: Iran hands over its 450kg of “nearly bomb-grade” enriched uranium, in exchange for the US giving up on regime change. Both sides could then end all hostilities. No more US and Israeli bombing, no more Iranian and Hezbollah rockets, no more blockading the strait. And, “for darn sure”, no US boots on the ground. The logic of this is simple. What the US and Israel most want is for Iran not to have the bomb, and what the Iranian regime most wants is to stay in power. So both sides get their top aim, while giving up any secondary objectives. Yes, that would leave “a million problems” unresolved, and whether the mullahs would be willing to hand over their enriched uranium – and all the future leverage it provides – is far from guaranteed. It’s a measure of the US president’s strategic incompetence that “they now hold his fate in their hands”.

🧐🔮 It’s amazing how many commentators are already so certain about the outcome of the war, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The Economist, having “scrutinised the battlefield” from its vantage point just off The Strand, declared last week that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing”. On the other side Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W Bush, said the war would go down as possibly the greatest military campaign “since the American Revolution”. Move over Dwight D Eisenhower! Step aside, Ulysses S Grant!

The global panic over microplastics being found everywhere from Antarctic ice to the human brain may have an awkward explanation, says Jake Currie in Nautilus: the samples were contaminated by the scientists’ plastic lab gloves. A new study by researchers in Michigan shows that the protective handware can shed tiny residues known as stearate salts, which are easily mistaken for the plastic polyethylene. In experiments, mere contact with gloves produced “false positives” of around 2,000 particles per square millimetre – so a surface can appear to be covered in plastic when in fact it has simply been handled.

America is dangerously unprepared for the new age of drone warfare, says Brynn Tannehill in The Atlantic. Last month, more than a dozen unmanned aerial vehicles flew in waves over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, some loitering for as long as four hours at a time. These were highly sophisticated drones, reportedly resistant to jamming, which must have been launched from within around 30 miles of the base. And nobody knew what to do about them. What makes this particularly worrying is that Barksdale is home to Global Strike Command – which controls the Air Force part of America’s nuclear deterrent – and is very likely somewhere nuclear weapons are stored.

The idea that having children makes you miserable has become something of a media obsession, says Joanna Williams in The Spectator. A recent BBC investigation into “women who regret being mothers” featured one interviewee who described motherhood as a “trap you can’t escape”. “I’m fed up of being a slave,” said another in The Daily Telegraph. “I love my kids but I regret having them,” said someone in The Guardian, while The i Paper went for “I regret becoming a father – the children are ruining our marriage”. I pity the boys and girls who google their parents a decade hence and find what misery they caused. But now these gloomy headlines are backed up by research: an attention-grabbing new study has found that modern parents are no happier than non-parents, despite older research consistently showing mums and dads living happier, more meaningful lives. What’s changed?

I’ll tell you what’s changed, says Giles Coren in The Times. Today’s parents are a bunch of selfish, craven panderers to the “toxic 21st-century obsession with happiness”. What on earth do these boffins mean, “children don’t make us happy”? That’s not their job. It’s OUR job to make THEM happy. To look after them, pass on what we can of our material and intellectual wealth, and then die to make room for them. And that’s it. The great gift of children, to us parents, isn’t some measurable happy feeling like the little dopamine bump you get after a run or buying a new pair of shoes. If you want to be happy, get therapy and eat better. What children provide is far richer: freedom from the “endless, narcissistic and frankly exhausting pursuit of happiness” on our own behalf, as we try to secure it for others.

Google has dramatically shortened its deadline for what cybersecurity experts call “Q Day”, says Dan Goodin in Ars Technica: the day quantum computers are able to break the encryption that currently secures decades worth of secrets belonging to banks, militaries, governments and nearly every individual on earth. The running joke in the world of quantum computing is that Q Day has been 10-20 years away for the past 30 years. For reasons it hasn’t quite specified, Google now believes that date is some time in 2029 and is urging the tech industry to adopt “post-quantum cryptography” that quantum computers can’t crack.

To The Times:

Further to Timothy Martin’s letter (Mar 27) about gaining admittance to the Athenaeum, I remember as a young medical student being taken to dine at the RAC in Pall Mall by a member of the club. Just as we got inside the entrance, I was informed that ladies were not admitted wearing trousers. To which I replied: “OK, I will take them off.” I still smile at the memory of the amused and also disconcerted expressions of staff and members. Of course I was allowed in to dine, still wearing my trousers.

Dr Jeannette Josse
Cambridge

It’s an April Fool’s ad by Dyson, announcing their – entirely fake – new pet beauty range. It’s one of many practical joke products rolled out this morning, says Benedict Tetzlaff-Deas in the Mirror, including a Terry’s Chocolate Orange phone case, containing a single “emergency segment”; a “meat lollipop” by Ikea; and a “brain rot festival” at the Royal Festival Hall aimed at Gen Z, including “doomscrolling in concert” and an “evening of ragebait”. One lunchtime newsletter editor almost fell for a piece in the Telegraph claiming Ed Miliband wanted us to see out the oil shock by drinking cold tea.