Israel launched a major attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites overnight. Benjamin Netanyahu says that Operation Rising Lion, which killed two of Iran’s top military commanders and several nuclear scientists, will continue for “as many days as it takes” to diffuse the Iranian threat. Tehran has launched around 100 drones against Israel in response. Vishwash Kumar Ramesh is the sole survivor of yesterday’s Air India plane crash in what is being called “the miracle of seat 11A”, says The Daily Telegraph. The British father-of-one says he has “no idea” how he escaped from what aviation experts have described as a “non-survivable crash”. He was visited by Indian PM Narendra Modi in hospital. The way we breathe is almost as unique to us as our fingerprint. Scientists in Israel were able to identify 100 young adults by their sighs, sniffs and puffs with 97% accuracy.

Why Israel attacked Iran

Israel’s attack on Iran last night marks the start of a “new era for the Middle East”, says Stephen Pollard in The Spectator. And about time too. There has long been “near-unanimous” agreement that Tehran cannot be allowed to build a nuclear bomb; the only issue was how to stop it. Diplomatic efforts have failed, from Barack Obama’s 2015 agreement to Donald Trump’s recent negotiations. And time was running out: yesterday, the International Atomic Energy Agency declared for the first time that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations, and the Iranians were thought to be only weeks away from having enough fissile material for several bombs. With Iran’s air defences still crippled from the Israeli attacks last October, this was the perfect chance to launch a devastating pre-emptive strike – not only to stop the mullahs getting the bomb, but to smash apart a “tyrannical” regime that has terrorised the Middle East for decades.

It’s far from clear how successful these strikes will be, says Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. First, there have always been doubts about whether the Iranian nuclear site Fordow, which is buried deep under a mountain, can be destroyed without America’s “bunker-buster” bombs. Second, the attack could strengthen Iran’s resolve to develop nukes – as hard-liners will argue it is further proof the country needs a nuclear deterrent – and lead ordinary Iranians to “rally around the flag”. Third, and of course most worrying, is the question of how Iran retaliates, and specifically whether any of the 40,000 or so American personnel in the region get targeted or caught in the crossfire. Trump, “to his credit”, has always been wary of getting into foreign wars. The risk is that we are about to enter a “cycle of escalation” that leads to a regional war “no one wants”.

🤫🚀 Last night’s attack has been years in the planning, says Lazar Berman in The Times of Israel. Security officials say Mossad agents set up a secret drone base on Iranian soil near Tehran, which it used to hit surface-to-surface missile launchers aimed at Israel. Commandos sneaked into central Iran and launched precision missiles at anti-aircraft sites. And vehicles carrying entire weapons systems were smuggled across the border, allowing the Israelis to take out Iran’s remaining air defences and give Israeli planes “air supremacy”.

The Treasury was handed £500m towards paying off the national debt in the last tax year, says Emma Agyemang in the FT, thanks to a fund set up by a banker almost a century ago for that purpose. The money, which was squirrelled away in 1927 by Gaspard Farrer, a former partner of Barings Bank, and wisely invested, helped make 2024/25 a record year for so-called “patriotic gifts”. The other 16 donors that made up the £585m total are all anonymous (as, initially, was Gaspard). Thanks, whoever you are.

When Jeff Koons’s 10ft-tall Balloon Dog (Orange) went for $58.4m at auction in 2013, it set a record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold by a living artist, says Rain Noe in Core77. Now the 70-year-old American has licensed French design house Lexon to turn the “iconic pooches” into household objects. Its forthcoming “Balloon Dog speaker” will deliver 360-degree sound and be operated by touch controls and an app; the “Balloon Dog Lamp” is fitted with LEDs offering adjustable colour and brightness. Limited edition versions of both products, which Lexon says took 50,000 hours to get right, will be released later this month.

The stupidest, “most 1984ish thing ever”?

George Orwell must be turning – or, more likely, laughing – in his grave, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. Last week it emerged that a 75th anniversary edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four has a trigger warning in the form of an introductory essay by US novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez. The book’s protagonist Winston Smith, she warns, is a “problematic” character with views on women that modern readers may find “despicable”. Sorry, but this must be “the most stupid, 1984ish thing ever”. With everything else going on – the rise of modern totalitarianism, technology spying on us, and so on – is Winston’s view of women really the most pertinent issue? Then there’s the cretinous idea that a “problematic” character is automatically a bad thing. Name me one successful novel, TV show or film that doesn’t feature a problematic character, “and I will show you something I have no interest in reading or watching”.

I usually side with the traditionalists in the trigger warning debate, says Giles Coren in The Times, “and in pretty much everything else”. But the idea that this essay is remotely similar to the sort of censorship Orwell was talking about is just balls. He was making a point about states “rewriting their history and language in order to suppress dissent and perpetuate totalitarian control”. This is just a modern woman saying what she thinks about a 75-year-old novel. “And I think it’s fair enough.” I recently recommended 1984 to my 11-year-old daughter – forgetting entirely about the scene where Winston fantasises about raping another character and slitting her throat at the moment of climax. When she told me afterwards that this was the scene that had really stood out, I was “utterly horrified”. A trigger warning might have been rather helpful.

Vinepair has compiled a list of 10 of the “most absurd drinking gadgets” throughout history. They include a $375 Tiffany straw made from sterling silver and vermeil; the “beloved beer helmet”, with its two beer can holders and tubes leading to the wearer’s mouth; bullet-shaped whisky stones that were, apparently, “pretty much useless”; the “better TV viewing angle” beer mug, which has a sloped edge so that the TV screen isn’t obstructed each time a sip is taken; and the “Gourmet Martini Tester” that supposedly told you how dry your martini was by the positioning of balls inside a small pipette. See the rest here.

Nearly every email – including this one – ends with some version of the invitation “Click here to unsubscribe”, says Heidi Mitchell in The Wall Street Journal. But clicking that link “might do more harm than good”. The web security firm DNSFilter has found that one in every 644 clicks on such links leads users to “potentially malicious websites” where scammers can see that your email address is a live one, making you a bigger target in the future. In some cases, it can lead you to an “authentic-looking” webpage where criminals will try to trick you into providing your log-in details or install malware on your device.

It’s an artist’s impression of a newly discovered dinosaur, says Riley Black in National Geographic. Scientists identified the new species from two 86-million-year-old skeletons in the collection of a Mongolian museum, having previously thought the fossils belonged to a different tyrannosaur ancestor. They have given it the name Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, meaning Dragon Prince of Mongolia, and say it would have weighed around 750kg, roughly eight times lighter than an adult T. rex. Study co-author Darla Zelenitsky, from the University of Calgary, says the discovery fills an important gap in the evolutionary record: “Khankhuuluu gives us the origin story of tyrannosaurs.”