Polls opened across England, Wales and Scotland this morning for today’s local elections, which look set to blast yet more holes in the old two-party system. Labour could lose more than half of its 2,557 councillors in England and end its 104-year winning streak in Wales, while Reform UK and the Green Party are hoping for record gains. Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide note has been released after years of being kept under seal as part of investigations into the sex offender’s cellmate. The letter says: “They investigated me for months – FOUND NOTHING!!!” and continues “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye”. Three dire wolf pups supposedly “brought back from extinction” are now healthy and ready to breed. The US biotech firm Colossal Biosciences, which used ancient DNA to alter the genome of modern wolves so that they resemble the lost species, says Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi have successfully reached breeding age, and that it will now create more wolf pups to expand the gene pool.

The great anti-Semitic wave means a question most people never consider is becoming impossible for Jews to ignore, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. “Do we, to be blunt, belong in Britain?” It’s striking how few people are willing to openly discuss the cause: the situation we are in is the direct result of the mass migration embraced by successive governments for at least a generation. Specifically, the mass migration of Muslims who disproportionately hate Jews and Judaism, and the now-unmanageably large number of them who are susceptible to the idea that it is “good and dutiful” to attack, harass and kill us.

It should go without saying that Islam is a deep and varied religion, whose two billion followers include every kind of person and believer. There is much to be said for the wonder and beauty of Islamic cultures and empires: Sufi architecture; Arabic translations of Aristotle; the sublime invention of algebra. No sane person argues that Muslims and liberal democracy cannot thrive together. “They must.” But that doesn’t mean we need to tolerate the fact that Britain’s Muslims harbour “much, much higher” levels of anti-Jewish hate than the rest of us. Polls suggest they are two to three times likelier to believe “Jews have too much power”; that a quarter of them support Hamas (just over a quarter oppose); and that a quarter say their top political issue is Gaza, a conflict we’re not involved in 2,000 miles away. Nor must we tolerate the imams who are such extremists that the UAE has stopped funding UK student visas for its kids, for fear of radicalisation. Britain’s religious tolerance has become a loophole for violent racists. We should stop importing them.

🚨🇮🇷 If Britain’s terrorism watchdog is right that anti-Semitism is the “biggest national emergency since Covid”, says Martin Ivens in Bloomberg, then our government has been slow to acknowledge the threat. They still haven’t decided whether to permit more pro-Palestinian marches with their chants of “globalise the intifada”. They are only now getting round to proscribing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, long after other European nations. And whereas Australia responded to anti-Semitic attacks reportedly directed by Tehran by immediately expelling the Iranian ambassador in Canberra, Iran’s man in London remains in post.

Largely unnoticed in all the fuss about Iran is the fact that Donald Trump’s peace efforts are not going at all well in Gaza, says John Haltiwanger in Foreign Policy. Key to the 20-point plan, which froze the conflict in October, is the disarmament of Hamas. But the terror group say they won’t disarm until Israel clears out of the two-thirds of the coastal strip it now controls, which the Israelis won’t do until Hamas disarms, to prevent them from simply re-taking control. Hamas fighters know the minute they put down their weapons they will be killed either by the Israelis or by their own rivals in Gaza. So don’t hold your breath.

Labour has pledged to strengthen protections for cohabiting partners, says Rowan Pelling in The Daily Telegraph, and last week some “angst-ridden” couples hit the headlines lobbying for legal safeguards should their other half die or abscond. Please. There’s already a legal framework to provide committed partners with that security. It’s called “marriage”. If you don’t want to pledge a sacred vow in a church, you can “scamper off to a registry office”. And if even that is too rigid for your “free-flowing rebel taste”, there’s the civil partnership. What more do these campaigners for “cohabiting rights” want? “The words ‘cake’ and ‘eat it’ spring to mind.”

When I moved to Shanghai in 2008, says Jacob Dreyer in The New York Times, “China still looked up to America”. Much of what China did, how it saw itself, what it strove for and its place in the world was measured against Meiguo – the “beautiful country”, as America is known in Chinese. Despite holding no qualifications beyond my degree, I walked into jobs teaching “Western culture” at top schools and universities. There was no real curriculum – all the students seemed to want was proximity to a person who came from the land of “wealth, cultural power and confidence” that the most ambitious felt was going to be a big part of their future. “Things are different now.”

When Donald Trump comes to China later this month, he will arrive a “more diminished figure” in Chinese eyes than perhaps any previous US leader. A presidential visit was once a “moment of global validation” for Beijing, but people here have watched with a mixture of “fascination and revulsion” as the US president – through his abortive tariff wars, the conflict with Iran and “callow allegiance to financial markets” – has accelerated America’s shift from “model to emulate” to “troublesome distraction to be managed”. Many smart young Chinese now view America more as a cautionary tale than the lodestar it once was, while Trump’s actions (and rock-bottom approval rating) have made Xi Jinping look much improved by comparison. Chinese friends no longer talk of emigrating; they return from work trips to the US with tales of “homelessness, dilapidation and political rancour”, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability. Deng Xiaoping said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” Not any more.

Vladimir Putin is terrified of assassination, says the FT. The Russian president and his family have stopped going to their residences in the Moscow region and elsewhere, and he largely manages his war on Ukraine from bunkers, with state media using recorded footage of him above ground to “project normality”. Staff in his immediate circle – cooks, photographers, bodyguards and so on – have been barred from taking public transport and using phones around him. There are even rumours that the recent internet shutdowns in Russia’s capital were in part related to Putin’s anti-drone protection.

Reform UK announced this week that they want to build migrant detention centres in Green constituencies and Green-controlled councils, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times. This, presumably, is intended as a threat – vote Green and your area will be turned into a “sort of mass prison”. Imagine if Labour said the same about Net Zero: wind farms on village greens if you don’t vote for them, and so on. Politicians in this country never used to “declare war” on voters, even when they voted for someone else. This is the difference, I suppose, between being divisive as a by-product and divisive by design. “What an ugly threshold to cross.”

It’s 50-year-old author Daniel Kraus, say Anastasia Tsioulcas and Neda Ulaby on NPR, who has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his World War One novel Angel Down, which, for reasons that haven’t been made adequately clear, is written entirely in the form of a single, 304-page sentence, in what has been hailed as a bold and daring new approach for a writer who has enjoyed a lengthy and varied career, encompassing 22 novels, some of which have been adapted for the screen – among them Trollhunters and The Shape of Water – and none of which, until now, has inexplicably, and possibly rather pretentiously, done away with basic punctuation.