Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will begin “direct negotiations” with Lebanon about disarming Hezbollah but continued to strike the militia overnight, maintaining that the Iran ceasefire doesn’t apply to Lebanon. Keir Starmer told an interviewer he was “fed up” with Donald Trump for pushing up energy bills, as the US president issued an ultimatum to European allies demanding military support in the Strait of Hormuz. Melania Trump delivered a surprise White House address yesterday condemning the “baseless lies” linking her to Jeffrey Epstein. The First Lady attacked claims that she had a relationship with the “disgraceful” paedophile, insisting she was not one of his victims and had no knowledge of his crimes. NASA’s Artemis II mission will splash down tonight off the coast of San Diego just after 8pm ET (1am BST). The spacecraft will travel through the atmosphere at 24,000mph – 32 times the speed of sound – with its exterior reaching temperatures of up to 2,800C. Watch it later here.

Donald Trump’s late-night social media posts ahead of his Iran deadline this week left friends and foes “slackjawed”, says Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. You know the ones: “A whole civilisation will die tonight”, “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”, and so on. This wasn’t the language of the common man, but “the language of sociopathy”. The remarks destroyed any US claim to moral seriousness, and bolstered the mullahs by justifying their animus and deepening their commitment. Plus, of course, they were “ineffective as a threat”. The whole point of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but “might be tripped into extreme behaviour”. Trump plays a madman every day. “His head fake would be sanity.”

Previous presidents haven’t always been blessed with “inner dignity”, but all of them did at least “fake it in public”. And rightly so. For one thing, dignity “enhances power”. British kings 500 years ago generally didn’t speak in public, “like a fishmonger or a street whore”, and presented themselves at an elevated height so that people would physically look up to them. Napoleon knew that “real menace shuts its mouth” – rather than issuing threats to his enemies, he wanted them “wondering what he’d do next”. Perhaps a more important reason to avoid coarseness in high office is the effect it has on everyone else. When you go into a cathedral, something about the art, the high ceilings, the sweep of the building makes you “unconsciously stand up straight”. Enter a darkened shack, on the other hand, and you instinctively crouch down. “The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.”

🇺🇸🇻🇳 What few people understand about the madman theory is that it was “designed by losers for losers”, says David Frum in The Atlantic. Nixon was facing a hopeless situation in Vietnam and wanted the North Vietnamese to think he’d “do anything” to stop the war. The goal of the intimidation was to create some “face-saving escape”.

Anthropic’s new large language model Mythos Preview appears to have learned some of humanity’s “most devious behaviours”, says Sam Sabin in Axios. During testing, the tool acted like a “cutthroat executive”, threatening to cut off supply to control pricing and keeping extra supplier shipments it hadn’t paid for. It occasionally used forbidden means to get an answer and then tried to cover up the deception. At one point it even built a workaround to gain access to the full internet rather than the limited access it was supposed to have. Anthropic says the researcher involved found out “by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park”.

Gentleman’s Relish, the intensely spiced anchovy paste traditionally spread thinly on hot toast and long served in the House of Lords, is disappearing from our shelves, says Olivia Potts in The Spectator. Created in 1828, the controversial fish paste (it knocked Marmite’s “love-it-or-hate-it” reputation into a cocked hat) was a British institution. James Bond enjoys it in For Your Eyes Only, Nigella Lawson put it on her list of the 10 British foods she couldn’t survive without, and Jessica Mitford chose it as her luxury item on Desert Island Discs.

Easter-holiday treats can be painfully expensive for families, says Michael Simmons in The Spectator. “For those on benefits they’re a breeze.” At the Tower of London, Universal Credit (UC) claimants pay just £4 for a family-of-four ticket, down from £111. London Zoo has an £82 discount, from £108 to £26. It’s the same story at HMS Belfast (£68 off), Westminster Abbey (£60), the Cutty Sark (£54) and Kew Gardens (£45). These price reductions, part of an initiative introduced by the Boris Johnson government, aren’t limited to family days out. Benefits claimants can also get money off gym memberships, broadband, council tax, utility bills, travel costs and even holiday provision. While some of this is covered by charities, the thinktank Onward says taxpayers foot a “hidden benefits bill” of £10bn.

Advocates argue all this is justified because our welfare system isn’t very generous. It’s true that, on its own, UC provides a single over-25 adult out of work with only £424.90 a month, relatively little for a developed country. But when you layer other benefits on top, the British system becomes “pretty lavish”. A family with three children in which one parent is claiming average UC, housing and health benefits will get £46,000 a year – a working family of the same size would need to earn around £71,000 before tax to take home the same amount. And the divide is only getting larger. This week the standard UC allowance rose by 6.2%, compared to the 4.1% average earnings increase for employees. Labour has guaranteed additional above-inflation increases for the next three years. Add it all up, and it’s hard to argue that those on benefits are enduring the cost-of-living crisis in the same way as the rest of us.

🤔🇩🇰 Denmark’s unemployment system is much better than ours. It operates more like insurance, with workers paying a monthly fee if they want protection. And it is designed to incentivise people to get back to work: payments are based on past earnings, get reduced after three months and “grind to a halt” after two years. Little surprise that the Danish unemployment rate is just 3.1%, compared to 5.2% here.

New York’s nightlife and dining scene have undergone something of a “Britification”, says Cami Fateh in Air Mail. There’s been a new wave of pub openings, Sunday roasts are available at all the top fashion-set haunts, and sticky toffee puddings have quietly taken over dessert menus. Even the pornstar martini, synonymous with a raucous night out in Essex or Manchester, is now a “staple” of Lower East Side and Brooklyn bars. This summer Dean’s, a new British pub in SoHo, will be serving Pimm’s and showing Wimbledon on a projector outside.

As China continues to eye up an invasion of Taiwan, says Simon Shuster in The Atlantic, Beijing will have paid very close attention to Donald Trump’s “pain threshold” with Iran – the way the world’s supply chains, energy prices and stock markets have influenced his willingness to fight. And the Chinese will have liked what they saw. If their military partially blockaded Taiwan, where more than a third of the world’s microchips crucial for producing computers, cars, smartphones, home appliances and countless other goods are made, then the resulting shock to the global economy would be “far worse” than the one we’re currently facing.

It’s the man who invented Bitcoin – maybe. The identity of “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the pseudonym used by the digital currency’s creator, has always been a mystery. After a year-long investigation, the New York Times reporter John Carreyrou says a trail of clues led to the man pictured above: a British computer scientist called Adam Back. The 55-year-old has been linked to Satoshi before, and Carreyrou says similarities he has found in their writing styles are clear evidence they are one and the same. Back denies it, but if he’s lying he’s a very rich man indeed: Satoshi’s online wallet holds around 1.1 million Bitcoin, currently worth around $79bn.