Donald Trump says a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will begin at 10am ET (3pm UK time) after Iran rejected American demands to reopen the waterway and end its nuclear programme during weekend peace talks. The president said the US navy would stop “all ships trying to enter and leave” and that “any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!” Viktor Orbán conceded defeat in Hungary’s parliamentary elections last night, ending his 16-year grip on power. Voters handed opposition party Tisza a landslide victory after its leader Péter Magyar – once a senior figure in Orbán’s Fidesz party – promised to repair the country’s relationship with the EU and crack down on corruption. Paddington was the big winner at last night’s Olivier awards, scooping seven prizes, including Best New Musical. Rosamund Pike won Best Actress in a Play for her role in the legal drama Inter Alia, while Rachel Zegler was named Best Actress in a Musical for her run as Eva Péron in Evita.

Donald Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz “makes a kind of sense”, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg. Iran’s economy is massively reliant on oil revenue, so making sure they suffer as much as everyone else from closing the waterway should sharply increase pressure on Tehran. Yet that logic only works if you think the Islamic Republic won’t respond by striking more energy assets around the Gulf, and will fold under the economic strain before Trump does. Both propositions seem “vanishingly unlikely”. Iran has four deterrents against foreign military intervention: its nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, terrorist proxy groups and ability to disrupt the strait. For Trump to think they will give up all four is “delusional”.

US officials are obviously aware of the risk that Tehran will hit back militarily, says David Ignatius in The Washington Post. But they think there are two other possible scenarios. First, that the regime is overthrown in a popular uprising, an outcome they think is more likely after the bombing has stopped than before. Second, that some Iranian leader – such as parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has been leading the negotiations in Pakistan – decides to cross what the Trump team has pitched as a “golden bridge” into a new future. That’s why the US offered Tehran such a “glittering package” of economic benefits, including sanctions relief: to convince Ghalibaf and his colleagues to transition from being a revolutionary “cause” to a “real country” that can modernise quickly and profitably, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have done. It’s impossible to tell if Iran is anywhere near this tipping point. But historically, such moments of realignment have tended to follow wars. As Dwight Eisenhower apparently said: “If you cannot solve a problem, enlarge it.”

🇨🇳🛢️ The real pressure for Iran may come from Beijing, says The Wall Street Journal. China’s oil tankers have been given priority passage through the strait since the war broke out. If that’s no longer possible, the Chinese may start leaning on their ally to reopen the waterway entirely.

The FT ran a memorable correction last week: “Researcher Brené Brown was misquoted in an interview published on April 6. She described herself as ‘solidly in my fuck it era’ rather than ‘solidly in my fucking era’.”

Britain has almost 15 million breeding ewes that will need a haircut between May and July, says The Economist. The question is: who should do the shearing? The Home Office wants to close off a scheme allowing sheep-shearers from abroad, mostly Australia and New Zealand, to do the work each year without visas. The trouble is, we Brits are nowhere near as good at it. A competent British shearer gets through around 200 sheep a day, whereas their better practised antipodean rivals can manage a whopping 400. Cutting them out is like “insisting that everyone drive a car with a two-cylinder engine”.

Some admirers of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán have argued that his massive election defeat yesterday proves he was never an autocrat to begin with. What it really shows, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, is that after 16 years of illiberalism and corruption, opposition to his far-right Fidesz Party was so strong it was able to overwhelm all the structures Orbán had put in place to protect his rule, including wildly distorted voting districts; a captured media, judiciary and university system; state-sponsored propaganda; and widespread threats and intimidation. With little access to public media, opposition leader Péter Magyar toured the country’s towns and villages in person, promising to prosecute members of the Orbán regime who enriched themselves at public expense and beseeching crowds: “Do not be afraid!” After years of hiding their political feelings, the crowds chanted back: “We are not afraid!”

The geopolitical consequences could be profound, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Under Orbán, Hungary blocked billions of euros in EU funding for Ukraine and stymied sanctions on Russia. Magyar and his movement, by contrast, are explicitly hostile to Vladimir Putin – supporters at his rallies have taken to chanting a slogan their grandparents used in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution: “Russians, go home.” It’s a great reminder that the “assumption of inevitability” that pervades Putin’s speeches and much of the thinking of the MAGA movement – that illiberal parties are somehow destined to win power and then hold it forever – is a load of hooey. History isn’t like that. Yes, “real people” occasionally vote for strongmen, but they soon grow tired of them, especially as illiberalism invariably leads to corruption. “And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.”

Celebrity couples hosting lavish weddings often do so without actually ever getting married, says Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. Former Love Island star Olivia Attwood documented the run-up to her ceremony at London’s Bvlgari Hotel, which featured a £30,000 dress and 10,000 red roses, in a 12-part reality TV series, but never actually legally wed her now ex-partner Bradley Dack. TV personalities Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash had a “nuptial extravaganza” at home but still haven’t formalised the marriage. Plenty of others are flogging the image rights to their ceremonies, only to later admit that “none of it was legally binding”.

Venture capital firms are doing more than just investing in promising AI companies, says Kate Clark in The Wall Street Journal – they’re buying apartments and hiring housekeepers for their college-dropout founders. Link Ventures spent $5.4m on a block of flats near MIT, operates a 40,000 sq ft co-working space for the entrepreneurs it backs and has even considered providing them with cars and “weekend ski houses”. Defence tech entrepreneur Ben Rhodes-Kropf, 21, lives in San Francisco with 10 of his employees in a house where rent and a personal chef are covered by investor money. The logic is simple: “fewer responsibilities mean more waking hours for working”.

On the right is a picture taken in February of Antelope Reef, says Allegra Mendelson in The Daily Telegraph, China’s latest military outpost in the South China Sea. On the left is the same tiny atoll, which is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan, in December. Chinese workers transformed the obscure sandbar into a strategic military hub, smashing a hole in the reef to allow 22 sand dredgers into the lagoon to build up the usable land mass, making space for a number of visible buildings and a helipad. China has dozens of military outposts on contested atolls nearby, including Woody Island, which hosts warplanes, and the aptly named Mischief Reef.