John Healey, the defence secretary, says he is “unable to say for sure” whether anyone has been killed as a result of a 2022 data breach, which revealed the personal information of 19,000 Afghans who had supported British forces against the Taliban. The accidental leak, which was kept secret by successive governments using an unprecedented superinjunction, has resulted in thousands of affected Afghans being resettled in Britain. Donald Trump says his attorney general, Pam Bondi, should release “whatever she thinks is credible” from the Jeffrey Epstein files, despite previously urging MAGA supporters to drop their calls for transparency. The US president also repeated his claim that the files were “made up” by Joe Biden and Barack Obama. The Palm House at London’s Kew Gardens will close for four years while it undergoes a £50m renovation to reduce its carbon footprint to net zero. Starting in 2027, some 1,300 plants will be temporarily relocated, 16,000 panes of glass will be replaced, and the gas boilers which keep the building’s temperature at a steady 21C will be swapped for heat pumps.

Trump’s tariffs still don’t make any sense

Like a dog to a bone, says Martin Wolf in the FT, “Donald Trump always returns to tariffs”. The US president is now proposing a modified list of levies on a range of countries – including close allies and a number of desperately poor nations – to be imposed on 1 August. “Will he chicken out, yet again? Who knows.” But even if some deals are done, international trade is changing. Trump has already raised America’s average effective tariff level to an unusually high 8.8%, up from around 2.5%, and the new batch – strikingly similar to the “Liberation Day” rates proposed in April – means that figure will end up “much higher”.

It cannot be said too often that this is “nonsensical economics”. Trump seems to believe that bilateral trade should “balance”, and that if it doesn’t, the country with a surplus is “cheating”. This is crazy. For one thing, tariffs on some goods are a tax on producing others. High tariffs on imported steel or aluminium, say, makes everything more expensive for US firms that use those materials to make things, which would then become uncompetitive in global markets. And if the big geopolitical challenge is combating the rise of China as a technological superpower, how exactly do 25% tariffs on Japan and South Korea help? Trump’s 50% tariff on Brazil is explicitly a punishment for the trial of his “mini-me” Jair Bolsonaro – part of what the economist Paul Krugman calls his “Dictator Protection Programme”. And poor, tiny Laos (per capita GDP a tenth of America’s) is being threatened with a 40% rate despite a piffling trade surplus of just $0.8bn. This is the same Laos on which America dropped two million tonnes of bombs during the Vietnam war. “Have these people no shame?