A Russian warship fired warning shots at a British yacht in the Channel yesterday. The Russian defence ministry said the Admiral Grigorovich, a 409ft frigate from Russia’s Black Sea fleet, fired in the direction of the 40ft Bright Future, crewed by a retired couple on a recreational voyage, because the yacht was following a “dangerous course” and there were fears of a collision. UK inflation unexpectedly held steady at 2.8% in May, defying expectations of a rise to 3% and suggesting that the Bank of England could hold off raising interest rates this week. The Office for National Statistics says continued pressure from higher petrol prices and increased air fares were offset by an easing in food inflation. Jeremy Clarkson has been diagnosed with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer. Sharing the news in the final episodes of the latest series of Clarkson’s Farm, which were released last night, the 66-year-old said the cancer was caught at a “really early stage” and that he’d undergone a procedure to remove part of it.

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday celebrations were very nearly derailed, says Edward Luce in the FT, when Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a Sunday evening strike on Beirut, potentially scuppering the US-Iran deal the American president so desperately wanted to “cap White House festivities”. A flurry of phone calls averted Iranian retaliation and the deal was saved, but Trump was steaming. “Why did Bibi have to do a f***ing attack?” he told Axios. “He has no f***ing judgment.” The answer to Trump’s question is simple: the Iran deal is likely to be a political death sentence for Netanyahu, so he has every incentive to “reignite Gulf War III”.

The Israeli PM sold the war to Trump, and voters back home, on the idea that, after 47 years, “Iran’s theocrats were finally meeting their Waterloo”. All Operation Epic Fury required, he said, was some lethal targeting, and the Iranian people would do the rest. “Rarely has a geopolitical roll of the dice gone so rapidly wrong.” Thousands of Iranian protesters were massacred and the regime’s hardliners remain in place. The agreement doesn’t deal with Iran’s nuclear or ballistic missile capabilities and does include an end to Israeli hostilities against Iran’s proxies, including Hezbollah. After running through an “extravagant list of war aims”, Trump has settled on one which does nothing for Israelis: “reopening the Strait of Hormuz”. The US president feels personally stung, Israel has burned allies in Washington, and the Israeli people – no safer than they were before the war – will have an election by the end of October. Netanyahu is often called Israel’s Houdini. Even he, however, will find this vice hard to escape. Should he try to jeopardise the Iran talks, “Trump’s reaction could be worse than mouthing off to a reporter”.

🕊️😬 There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of Trump’s “grand deal”, says Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. None more so, perhaps, than the fact that the US president made a point of describing JD Vance as “the architect” of the agreement. Clearly, he is setting up his dovish vice president as the scapegoat for whatever happens next. Vance has tried to lower expectations, saying it would take time for the Middle East “to learn the ways of peace”. Good luck with that. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the least popular vice president in history. “Almost.”

After critics and authors picked their top 100 novels for the The Guardian, readers were asked to submit their own all-time favourites. Top of the list was JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, followed by George Eliot’s Middlemarch in second and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in third. Others included The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Great Gatsby, Wolf Hall, The Remains of the Day, The Catcher in the Rye, The Secret History, The Handmaid’s Tale, War and Peace and, somewhat perplexingly, Ulysses. See the rest here.

The latest mad dating trend among the young, says Charles Trepany in USA Today, is something called “goblintimacy”. The idea, apparently, is to let your inner “goblin” – your weirdest private quirks, fixations and other normally hidden traits – all hang out on a first date. If the other person can stand the full version, the theory goes, they are likely to be a keeper. If not, they would have figured it out sooner or later anyway, so you’ve saved yourself a lot of heartache. “The part that I don’t like,” says dating coach Damona Hoffman: “who wants to date a goblin?”

If Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election tomorrow, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, all eyes will be on his efforts to unseat Keir Starmer in No 10. What will get lost, I think, is just how dismal a defeat this will have been for Reform UK. Nigel Farage could “hardly have hoped for a by-election in a more promising place”. Of the 89 constituencies where his party finished second to Labour in the 2024 election, Makerfield had the seventh-smallest winning margin and represented Reform’s second-highest vote share. Not winning such a juicy target seat would be a “very bad result indeed”.

Reform would doubtless respond that Burnham was an unusually tough candidate, which is true but “beside the point”. Defeat in Makerfield would be the second time in a few months, after the Greens’ victory in Gorton and Denton, when the party has been beaten by another candidate offering change. That would surely put into question their ability to win. While about half their supporters are true believers, the other half are attracted to Reform because they “look like winners”. For an insurgent party, losing momentum can be a “very serious matter”. A big problem for Farage is Restore Britain, which is widening internal divides in his party between those who want to go further right and those who want to attract more mainstream former Tories. As one Reform MP told a friend of mine after campaigning in Makerfield, people see the party as “either too racist or not racist enough”. The Labour story will “explode” once the results are in on Friday. Win or lose, Reform needs to “sit quietly away from the blast area and think what it is going to do next”.

👨‍🔧🤳 If Reform lose, some will blame their candidate, local plumber Robert Kenyon, and his history of sexist tweets. But Kenyon’s social media output is surely not the worst of the party’s candidate roster. And his floundering performance on Question Time prompted an interesting reaction from voters: they told pollsters that much as they don’t like politicians, they’d be “embarrassed” to send someone so amateur to Westminster. Another problem, like Restore, that “won’t just disappear”.

The FBI is going all-out to tackle cybercrime, says Zack Whittaker in TechCrunch: the agency has even built a 22,000 sq ft replica town to train its operatives for “real-world cyberattacks”. The “Kinetic Cyber Range” on the bureau’s Huntsville, Alabama, campus has buildings including residential homes, a supermarket, a courthouse and a hospital, all wired with functioning devices and systems so that real attacks can be simulated. One highlight is a dummy data centre where investigators can practise responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. As FBI trainer Dave Beachboard puts it: “They’re cold, they’re cramped, they’re noisy, they’re dark, they’re miserable.”

The G7 summit in France has shown just how far Keir Starmer’s authority has slipped, says Caroline Wheeler in The i Paper. A meeting about the future of Ukraine had been due to start at 9am yesterday morning, but more than half an hour later, Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky were nowhere to be seen. Starmer, stuck making small talk with the leaders of Canada and Japan, was overheard asking: “Are they... are they having a meeting?”

It’s a chunk of Arctic ice where scientists have “refrozen” sea water to protect it from melting, says Damian Carrington in The Guardian. Braving temperatures as low as -40C, researchers drilled holes in the ice then pumped 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up to the surface, where it froze immediately. This process, which required less power than a toaster, thickened the 1.5-metre-deep ice across a roughly 200,000 square metre area by about 50cm. Five months on, that extra layer appears to have protected the previously vulnerable ice from the start of “melt season”, offering hope that the technique could one day be rolled out at scale.