Keir Starmer is braced for the biggest rebellion of his year-long premiership this evening, when MPs will vote on his changes to disability benefits. Despite the PM watering down the reforms with a £2.5bn U-turn last week, says Politico, Labour whips are still “frantically trying to shrink the scale of the revolt” after a fresh bid to stop the draft law was signed by 39 Labour MPs. Three bosses at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked have been arrested on suspicion of “gross negligence manslaughter”. All three worked in senior positions at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2015 and 2016, the period of “increased fatalities” that led to the former neonatal nurse being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more. Cheshire Police say the arrests do not affect those convictions. The King will decommission the royal train by 2027 in a cost-saving measure announced by Buckingham Palace. The annual publication of royal finances shows that a two-day journey on the luxury locomotive in February, travelling from Gloucestershire to Staffordshire and then London, cost more than £44,000.

We can’t ignore Israel’s “theocratic terrorists”

Whatever happens with Iran’s nuclear programme, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack, “Israel is now the undisputed regional superpower”. And that means they have “carte blanche” in the occupied territories. Last week, for example, Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Taybeh in the West Bank: masked men showed up, set fire to homes and cars, and shot at residents. In the nearby village of Kafr Malik, more houses and cars were set on fire; three locals were killed. The aim of these “theocratic terrorists” is simple: to immiserate Arab locals so much that they are forced to leave, just as their ancestors were forced to leave in 1948 in the so-called Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). This is a “rumbling, low-level Nakba II”.

Almost every US administration has been against the Israelis building or expanding settlements in the West Bank. Yet despite everything we have given them – the unsurpassed aid, the billions for the Iron Dome missile defence system, the UN vetoes, and now the “big, beautiful bunker busters” – they have, without fail, “told us to go jump in a lake”. And the problem is getting worse. In 2022, the Israelis authorised 4,427 new housing units on the West Bank. A year later it was 12,349; this year it’s expected to be around 50,000, the highest number since 1993, 40% of which will be entirely outside Israeli border areas. Benjamin Netanyahu certainly won’t stop this: his finance minister, the openly racist Bezalel Smotrich, lives in an illegal settlement himself. Nor, presumably, will Donald Trump, who has proven himself a “solid, pro-settlement president”. So by all means celebrate Israel’s recent successes – everyone is better off with a nuke-free Iran. But remember that “this is the Israel we have gone to war for”.

🇮🇱🇵🇸 Meanwhile “the horror in Gaza continues”, says The Economist. According to the Hamas-run health ministry, more people were killed in the Palestinian territory during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran than were killed in Iran itself. Whereas once people were dying in air strikes, the deaths are now concentrated around the four aid hubs Israel has set up. It’s unclear who bears responsibility – Israel doesn’t allow foreign journalists into Gaza unsupervised – but the hungry keep coming. As one local puts it: “The choice is between dying seeking food or starving to death.”

When Michael Gove got divorced in 2021, the then Tory minister tried his hand at dating apps, he tells Janice Turner in The Times. His experience, he says, was likely fairly standard, “except for the aspect of being the notorious Michael Gove”. He had to prove to one woman it was really him by holding up a copy of the day’s newspaper, “hostage-style”. Asked what the adverts that appeared on the apps revealed about what the algorithm assumed about him, he says it must have thought he was “loaded”. “Sadly”, he adds, “that isn’t true.”

Kung Fu Chess is a fast-paced version of the ancient strategy game, in which players don’t take turns – they just make moves, with a small delay before pieces can be moved again. Play against AI, or a friend, here.

We Democrats are in danger of mirroring Trump

We Democrats rightly deplore the Republicans for capitulating to Donald Trump, says William M Daley, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, in The Wall Street Journal. Now our own party is creeping worryingly close to an agenda that’s “equally outlandish and radical”. The latest sign is the victory of left-winger Zohran Mamdani in last week’s Democratic primary for New York mayor. Mamdani is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that wants, in its own words, to “defund the police” and “free all people from involuntary confinement”; to nationalise the utilities, big tech companies and financial institutions; and to withdraw from Nato, end all immigrant detention and, just for good measure, “abolish the Senate”. Mainstream Democrats say there’s no way the party will ever embrace such a radical agenda. But that’s exactly what establishment Republicans said about Trump.

Mamdani’s victory is a reminder that capitalism is in “dire need of able defenders”, says Matthew Hennessey, also in The Wall Street Journal. Socialism has a long record of failure. “Misery follows wherever it’s tried.” Yet each generation produces “naïfs” who are led to believe that “collectivism is the true longing of the human heart”. In a way, you can’t blame them. All they’ve ever been told – by teachers, professors, TV and TikTok – is that markets are “inhumane”, that capitalism is “rapacious”. This is a failure of education, but it’s also a “failure of public relations”. Free markets have made life “better, healthier and more prosperous” in clearly demonstrable ways for billions of people. Yet we capitalists, from Jeff Bezos down to the guy who runs your local corner shop, have become complacent. We assume the product is so good it will sell itself. “Mamdani’s victory shows otherwise.”

After decades of gym culture “prioritising biceps and six-packs”, says Hannah Singleton in GQ, male bums are “finally having their time in the spotlight”. In 2023, more than 400 American men got “Brazilian butt lifts”, and plastic surgeons say interest in male “glute enhancement” is growing. Clothing firms are rolling out bum-enhancing leggings, underwear, and even chinos. Popular fitness influencers speak directly to men about how to “build a shelf butt”, and guys are showing up to workout classes that prioritise glute strength. “It was once laughed at,” says physical therapist and personal trainer John Rusin. Now, men are “standing in line” to use the hip thrust machine.

Benjamin Netanyahu is obsessed with Winston Churchill, says David Remnick in The New Yorker. When I interviewed the Israeli prime minister during his first term, he smoked enormous cigars and kept a portrait of Churchill in his office. His memoir makes “constant references” to the British PM. And when it comes to Tehran, Netanyahu has been talking about “gathering storms” for years. In 2006, he said: “It is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2011, he told Piers Morgan, “I admire Winston Churchill because I think he saw the danger to Western civilisation and acted in time to staunch the haemorrhage.”

It’s a 3D-printed baguette carrier, says Jane Englefield in Dezeen. Swedish designer Gustaf Westman designed the Barbie-pink spiral in Stockholm, where it was extruded using recycled plastic. The peculiar product launched on Saturday in Paris, appropriately enough, as part of Westman’s pop-up tour, which also includes curvy mirrors, “chubby plates” and amorphous vases, all made from the same vibrant, glossy plastic. See more of his stuff here.