Astronauts are heading to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, after a Nasa rocket successfully blasted off from Florida last night. The Artemis II mission will carry the crew of four on a 10-day journey around the moon and back, hopefully paving the way for future expeditions to the lunar surface and beyond. “We have a beautiful moonrise,” said mission commander Reid Wiseman shortly after the launch. “We’re heading right at it.” Donald Trump promised to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the coming weeks, in a primetime TV speech that dampened hopes of an imminent end to the conflict. The US president, who claimed yesterday he was considering pulling the US out of Nato, also said allies would have to “take the lead” in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Cranes are continuing their remarkable comeback from extinction in the UK. Britain’s tallest bird disappeared around four centuries ago but wild recolonisation, backed up by wetland habitat protection, has seen numbers recover. Last year a record 87 pairs raised 37 young, bringing the total population to about 250.

It’s not just the Iran war that is going badly for Donald Trump, says Edward Luce in the FT. Domestic advisers like White House chief of staff Susie Wiles are “tearing their hair out” trying to schedule events in which the president can talk about his plans to lower the cost of living, only for events in the Middle East to make a nonsense of their efforts. And the truth is that even if Trump declared unilateral victory in the Gulf, he would still have less power over inflation than the Iranians do. Tehran has discovered it can “induce Taco” (“Trump always chickens out”) with its chokehold on global oil and gas markets, just as the Chinese discovered last year with rare earths.

It’s now common in Washington to speculate that Trump may try to cancel the midterms, but there’s little chance that’ll happen. Not once since the first US election in 1789 has a nationwide election been cancelled and, if Trump tried, there’s every reason to believe the courts would stop him. Until recently, he could at least bank on the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to uphold his agenda, but now they have started to push back: the justices struck down his main tariffs in February and look likely to reject his attempt to end birthright citizenship – a “double whammy” hitting two of the president’s four biggest political touchstones. The third was to avoid “stupid, senseless wars” in the Middle East. As for the fourth – the “war on woke” – that may have worked “a little too well”. In 2024, psephologists talked of a “realignment” in which Trump’s MAGA coalition included a “multiracial working-class base” who were sick of progressives. “There is no longer such talk.”

📉😬 The latest YouGov polling shows that Trump’s net approval has fallen to -23 percentage points, says The Economist. That’s worse than his previous low of -21, in 2017, and roughly matches Joe Biden’s nadir after his terrible presidential debate performance in 2024, “when many Americans concluded he was unfit for office”.