America’s military strikes on Iran have probably set the country’s nuclear programme back by only a few months, according to a leaked preliminary intelligence assessment by the Pentagon. Donald Trump dismissed the report as “fake news”, telling a press conference at the Nato summit in The Hague that the attack had put Tehran’s nuclear ambitions back “decades”. British fighter jets will carry nuclear weapons for the first time since the Cold War. The government has signed a deal to buy a dozen American-made F35A stealth fighter jets, as part of its new commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. Currently, Britain can only launch nukes from its four Vanguard-class submarines. Two million parents will take their children out of the classroom to go on holiday this term, according to a new survey which found that almost a quarter (23%) were willing to risk a fine of up to £2,500 to avoid the crowds – and vastly inflated costs – of travelling during the school holidays. Since 2022, British parents have paid £41m in fines for unauthorised school absences.

What Donald Trump really wants from Iran

We got a glimpse of the real Donald Trump this week, says Anthony Scaramucci on The Rest is Politics US, when the president angrily told a reporter that Iran and Israel “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. And you can understand his frustration. White House officials tell me the real, long-term aim behind Saturday’s strikes is to bring Tehran back into the “family of nations”. The Trump administration has mooted this idea to officials in Moscow and across the world, “adversaries and allies” alike. There is even hope – and “this is a wild thing to say” – that Iran can one day be signed up to the Abraham Accords, the landmark US-brokered agreement normalising relations between Israel and several Arab states. But first, Israel and Iran need to stop firing rockets at each other. Hence Trump dropping the F-bomb on the White House lawn.

The key to all this is Saudi Arabia, says Karen Elliott House in The Wall Street Journal. Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” has long terrorised what it calls the “small and puny Satan”: the mullahs covet not only the Gulf state’s oil, but also its guardianship of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. The Saudi foreign minister – still fearful of Iranian retaliation – this week reiterated his “great concern” for the Islamic Republic of Iran. But be in no doubt: “Riyadh is thrilled”. A weak Iran will bolster Saudi Arabia’s long-term aim of stabilising Syria – a goal shared by Israel – and make it easier for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to focus on transforming his country’s culture and economy. The Saudi leader isn’t one to miss opportunities. “If you don’t stand out, you might as well disappear,” he once told me. “If you see something to do, do it.”

It’s largely forgotten now, says Robin Wright in The New Yorker, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was an “accidental leader”. He was a mid-level cleric when he became president in 1981, his predecessor having been killed in a terror attack, and only stepped up to the top job in 1989 because the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died suddenly with no obvious successor. I met him in 1987 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, during his only ever trip to the West. He “lacked charisma, worldliness and intellectual depth”. As he mumbled his way through some “inflammatory rhetoric”, an aide bent over to cut up his breakfast – he lost the use of his right arm in 1981, after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder went off during a speech. “His hand dangles at his side.”

British Pathé has put together a compilation of “mesmerising manufacturing films” from the 1960s, including clips of English woodworkers hand-crafting electric guitars; artists painting bespoke wallpaper; and the careful process of growing willow trees and carving them into cricket bats. Click here to see the full video.

Why Britain’s big projects go wrong

The government quietly bunged another £590m at the planned Lower Thames Crossing last week, says George Monbiot in The Guardian, taking the total cost – once you’ve factored in all the road junction upgrades and so on – to an estimated £16bn. That’s more than all the new money (£15bn) trumpeted by Rachel Reeves for buses, trains and trams in England, outside London. It’s seven times more than the sum allocated to fix the country’s dilapidated school classrooms, and twice the amount earmarked for social and affordable housing. All for a measly 14 miles of road. National Highways estimates that the project’s benefit-cost-ratio is about six times worse than it is for fixing potholes and maintaining local roads. Why not spend the money on that instead?

One major problem with these big infrastructure projects is “British exceptionalism”, says Martin Robbins on Substack. Rather than learning from other countries – “boring!” – for some reason we insist on doing our own, supposedly “better” version. Take HS2. The “vast majority” of the world’s high-speed railway lines run at 300kph with only up to 10 trains an hour. For HS2, we inexplicably set a requirement of 400kph with up to 14-18 trains an hour. This created all sorts of problems: the line can’t bend as much, bridges and viaducts require different specifications, and so on. So HS2 became a “research exercise”, with all the costs and uncertainties that entails. This stuff matters more than Whitehall wonks realise. Voters see these failures and think: if these politicians can’t even finish a train line, how can they be trusted with bigger challenges like the NHS, immigration and net zero? And, frankly, who can blame them?

FedEx founder Fred Smith, who died on Saturday aged 80, wasn’t afraid to take risks, says Harrison Smith in The Washington Post. Not long after launching the delivery business in 1973, he began to run out of money. Rather than trying to find a loan or an investor, Smith took the company’s last $5,000 to a blackjack table in Las Vegas and won $27,000 – cash he used to help keep the business afloat. He said watching friends die in Vietnam had given him a different perspective. “Losing wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen to you,” he said. “I had seen that very clearly.”

It’s bad enough that the government can’t afford to provide basic services, says Jenni Russell in The Times. But do they really have to stop us doing the job ourselves? Five or six years ago, a lorry driver got stuck on a tight, bendy ford in my village, damaging an ancient stone wall. The council put up orange cones, and then did nothing for several years. Frustrated residents got an experienced stonemason to give them a quote, and told the council they would pay for the work themselves. But the council forbade it, instead commissioning an ugly repair at a much higher price, which used no local materials and collapsed in less than a year. “That’s how it remains today.”

It’s a never-before-seen ceramic plate decorated by Pablo Picasso, says David Mouriquand in Euronews. Seven of the unique dishes – created between 1947 and 1964, featuring birds, fish and goats – were sold at auction in Geneva for around €290,000. Designed in the Madoura Pottery Workshop in Vallauris, near Cannes, the top-notch tableware had been in private ownership for almost 40 years. The buyer didn’t get a bad deal. In 2013, the prototype for Picasso’s ceramic Grand vase aux femmes voilées sold in London for a whopping €1.149m.