Oil prices have dropped sharply after Donald Trump sent Tehran a 15-point ceasefire proposal and said the Iranian leadership was “talking sense” in negotiations. Iran says it has re-opened the Strait of Hormuz to “non-hostile” ships, but denied Trump’s claims about talks, saying the US is “negotiating with itself”. Rachel Reeves is expected to limit energy bill support to those on benefits, calling the £40bn universal package announced by the previous government after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 a “mistake”. Sources tell The Times the handouts will go to around six million people who claim welfare payments like universal credit and pension credit. A hospital patient who talked a terrorist out of blowing up St James’ Hospital in Leeds will receive the George Medal for bravery. Stepping outside the ward one night in January 2023, Nathan Newby met Mohammad Farooq, who revealed he had a home-made bomb and wanted to “kill as many nurses as possible”. After a two-hour chat on a nearby bench, and several hugs from Newby, Farooq agreed to turn himself in.

An Iran-linked terror group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s arson attack in north London, and while two men have been arrested nothing is confirmed. Whoever it was, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, their motivations are obvious. A Jewish ambulance service in a Jewish area next to a Jewish synagogue – “it’s not hard to imagine what was going through their minds”. Keir Starmer was right to call it a “horrific anti-Semitic attack”, but we Jews aren’t surprised, “not any more”. More than 1,000 anti-Jewish hate crimes have been reported in London in the past year; a Manchester synagogue was attacked on Yom Kippur; a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach was shattered by gunfire, killing 15 people including a little girl. None of the victims had anything to do with Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF, but to today’s anti-Semites, as always, it doesn’t matter. “Jews are Jews.”

Life is changing fast in the Jewish diaspora, says Ben Judah in UnHerd. Cities like New York, London and Paris now have “fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews”, and growing numbers of Hispanics and Muslims. These minorities are more anti-Semitic, younger and more likely to get their news online and from foreign TV like Al Jazeera. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call “Western civilisation”: a world of nation states and print culture, with a “clearly defined attitude towards Jews”. Its successor is a “globalised internet civilisation” that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where mega-influencers on X play as big a role as the Archbishop of Canterbury. By its nature, this culture of “ephemeral, emotive social media posts” rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear, “will not prove kind to the Jews”.

The idea that unpopular leaders can win over the public with foreign adventures is for the birds, says Julian Zelizer in Foreign Policy – even when they win. After Desert Storm ended in 1991, George HW Bush seemed “invulnerable” – his operation had achieved its single objective of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Heavyweight Democrats were so convinced that his 1992 reelection race was a done deal, they didn’t bother running. Then the economy turned south, Bill Clinton stepped into the void and Bush was finished.

The left’s relentless promotion of Mary Seacole – whose name the government wants to use for one of its new towns – is one of the “great curiosities of our age”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. She is invariably described as a “pioneering black nurse”, but as Lynn McDonald noted in her 2014 book Mary Seacole: The Making of the Myth, that’s tosh. Seacole’s main job during the Crimean War was running a restaurant catering service for officers, not nursing. She didn’t identify as black, as she was mixed race and “light skinned”. And in her memoirs she repeatedly used the n-word – not unusual language in the 19th century, but the sort of thing modern progressives tend to take a rather dim view of.

Donald Trump’s playbook on Iran has been in plain sight for almost 40 years, says Alex Barker in the FT. During his “short-lived flirtation” with a presidential run in 1987, the then businessman took out full-page adverts in three newspapers to publish an open letter to the American people. The world, he declared, was “laughing” at US leaders over the Gulf crisis triggered by the Iran-Iraq war. Escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz was an attempt to “protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help”. What the White House needed, he said, was “a little backbone”.

At a rotary club event in New Hampshire a few weeks later, Trump dismissed the Iranian navy as “little runabouts with machine guns” and asked why US forces couldn’t just “go in there and take some of their oilfields”. In an interview he said that if “one bullet” were fired at US vessels or personnel, he would “do a number on Kharg Island”. He stuck to this line even after his first presidential ambitions fizzled out, reportedly saying in a 1989 speech that the US should flex its military muscle and issue Tehran with an ultimatum: “Folks, you have one week to give us back all our hostages or all bets are off.” His instinct then, as now, was to assume that the party willing to use the most power would prevail. If the current conflict doesn’t end well, we may see a return of the second big leitmotif of Trump’s 1980s campaign: “blaming allies for free-riding on US power”. Last week, he pointedly promised to remember how Nato’s “cowards” refused to heed his call for help. Don’t be surprised if, on this, “the president is true to his word”.

🇮🇱🇺🇸 All this is a reminder that it is Trump, not Israel, who bears ultimate responsibility for the war, says Max Boot in The Washington Post. Benjamin Netanyahu has long agitated for an attack but it wasn’t until Trump came to power that the US agreed to it. As for claims that Netanyahu forced the US president’s hand by saying he was planning to assassinate the Ayatollah, Trump could easily have told him not to and threatened to withhold military aid if he did. Any suggestion otherwise is “absurd”.

To The Guardian:

I was surprised to read this headline online: “Sex garden to ‘break taboos’ at Chelsea flower show as gnome ban ends” (19 March). Dare I ask what the gnomes will be doing?

Talia Hussain
London

If you think Donald Trump is unpopular, says Noah Smith on Substack, spare a thought for the Democrats. One recent NBC poll put the party’s net favourability rating at -22%, below that of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (-18%), the Republican Party (-14%) and Trump himself (-12%).

It’s a Kākāpō, says Elizabeth Anne Brown in Scientific American, a preposterous-looking parrot native to New Zealand that is heroically shagging its way back from near-extinction. The introduction of predators to the country’s delicate ecosystem had whittled the population down to just 51 in 1995. That slowly rose to 236 by the start of this year, and a huge crop of rimu berries – bright red fruits that make the Kākāpō randy as a sailor on shore leave – has resulted in an impressive 240 eggs, a small but crucial proportion of which will hatch.