The Pentagon says American strikes on Iran are about to “surge dramatically”, and Donald Trump has ruled out a ground offensive because it would be a “waste of time”. The US president says he should be involved in selecting Iran’s new ruler and deems front-runner Mojtaba Khamenei an unacceptable “lightweight”. In north London, police have arrested one Iranian and three British-Iranian nationals on suspicion of spying on the Jewish community. Failed asylum-seeker families will be offered up to £40,000 to leave the country or face forced removal, under Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s new Denmark-inspired reforms. Some 150 families in a pilot scheme were notified yesterday of the financial incentive – £10,000 each for a maximum of four people – and given seven days to decide. A London surgeon has carried out the UK’s first long-distance robotic operation on a patient 1,500 miles away. Using a console to control the hands of a surgical robot in Gibraltar, Professor Prokar Dasgupta removed a cancerous prostate tumour from 62-year-old Paul Buxton, who said it was a “privilege to be part of medical history”.

Judging by the gloominess in much of the media, says The Wall Street Journal, you’d think America was losing the war in Iran. Financial markets are said to be in “turmoil”; the war is “engulfing” the region; the US is “running out of missiles”; the conflict is a “gift to Russia”; there is “no plan” for how it ends. Snap out of it. This war could hardly be going better. Iran’s evil leaders were dead within the first hour. Its army, navy and air force are shattered – witness the massive drop-off in missile and drone launches – and American might is now being turned on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and the paramilitary Basij. As for the markets, what’s striking is just how little they’ve moved. Plenty could still go wrong, but for now, here’s a crazy thought: instead of grousing, maybe “hope for American success”.

The problem, says The Economist, is knowing when to stop. Trump’s vagueness about what’s driving him – nukes, regime change, missiles, “a ‘feeling’ Iran was about to attack” etc – gives him room for manoeuvre politically but is no use as a strategy. To win a war, you need to know when it’s won. The risk here is that Trump won’t quit until the markets and the polls give him the “acclamation” he craves, and that could be a long time coming. Less than a third of Americans support the war, compared to 90% who backed invading Afghanistan, and almost all hate paying more for petrol. The president may be tempted to seek an “undeniable win” by bombing the regime out of existence. But that could prove impossible, even with America’s formidable firepower. Trump should obliterate Iran’s military capabilities, then stop. “He is almost there.”

Reform UK make no secret of their admiration for Donald Trump, says Hugo Gye in The i Paper, and the Conservatives are behind him all the way on Iran. Both are out of step with the electorate: some 81% disapprove of the US president and 49% are against his strikes on Iran (just 28% back the military action). Keir Starmer, by contrast, is on the same side as voters and the same side as his fractious MPs, who “hold his future in their hands”. Yes, he has had to take the odd zinger from the White House, but this war could be the PM’s “first lucky break in a while”.

If you haven’t tried “vibe coding” – getting AI to make you an app or website just by describing what you want – you really should, says Kevin Schaul in The Washington Post. I asked Anthropic’s Claude Cowork for something I could use to scan the barcodes on my books to keep track of them, and it produced an impressive-looking and fully functional website in five and a half minutes. A website to help parents keep track of gifts their children had received took one minute and 27 seconds. It basically allows anyone to become a coder. “What will you build?” Try it here.

The belief in China that moving to America guaranteed a better life once seemed unshakeable, says Lavender Au in The Atlantic. No longer. The chatter in Beijing and on social media is that life in the US has become remarkably precarious. Americans, they say, now live along the Zhanshaxian, a gaming term meaning the “kill line”, as they carry heavy debt and seem perpetually one illness or accident away from financial catastrophe. America’s halo has dimmed in part because home-grown industry in China has made certain comforts more accessible, and therefore living in the US less of a “clear upgrade”. But it has also dimmed from watching the Trump administration shirk its responsibilities to its people and abandon the American ideals that Chinese liberals once held in high esteem.

The disillusionment is perhaps most stark when it comes to education. Even before President Trump took office, the vast number of graduates returning to China from the US – some 495,000 in 2024, up around 15% on the previous year – had started to “dilute the value” of an American degree. Beijing, grappling with sluggish youth employment rates, had started excluding foreign graduates from certain civil service openings. Add to that the new uncertainty surrounding student visas – and stories of Chinese students fearing for their safety on American campuses – and it’s not hard to see why increasing numbers are staying put. America hasn’t lost its status as a “point of reference” for people in China. It’s just that its food prices, medical bills, guns, drugs and dwindling industrial dominance have shifted that reference to be “commonly negative”.

MapTap is a testing geographical game that involves locating five cities each day on a globe without borders. You can zoom in as much as you like, and after each guess you’ll be told how many kilometres out you are. Points are awarded for proximity, with double and treble scores for harder-to-find spots. Give it a go here.

A coalition of six Kurdish Iranian political parties – all with military wings – are reportedly massing in Iraqi Kurdistan to launch a major ground offensive against Iran, with significant backing from the US and Israel. But they should be careful, says Owen Matthews in The Daily Telegraph. Over the past 75 years, the Kurds have risen up, with US encouragement, on at least eight occasions. “Each time they have been betrayed.” When they were encouraged by George HW Bush to rise against Saddam Hussein in 1991, they were “brutally slaughtered”. And after they formed the “backbone” of America’s fight against ISIS, Donald Trump abruptly pulled out of Syria in 2019, abandoning them to the tender mercies of the Turks.

It’s a “diabolical” alarm clock, says Joe Pinsker in The Wall Street Journal, one of a new breed of devices designed to make hitting snooze a thing of the past. Among the most punitive doze destroyers is the “sonic bomb”, a super-loud alarm which comes with a built-in “bed-shaker”, and the Pavlok Shock Clock, a wristwatch-like device that wakes the wearer with a 300-volt jolt. Others demand payment for over-sleeping; require users to find a designated item, like a cat or a shampoo bottle; or can only be silenced after a complicated maths puzzle is solved. “I really do think,” says one devotee, “this is the reason I still have a job.”