All 20 living Israeli hostages were released by Hamas this morning after 737 days in captivity. Donald Trump arrived this morning in Tel Aviv, where he addressed Israel’s parliament; he will later meet the families of hostages before travelling to Egypt for a peace summit with other world leaders. Nigel Farage will break with his manifesto pledge of £90bn in tax cuts in a bid to bolster his party’s economic credibility, says The Times. The Reform UK leader will promise next month that before cutting any taxes, his party will reduce spending, slash the civil service and implement a ban on borrowing to fund government expenditure. Trigger warnings have little to no impact on whether people view offensive content. In a new study, 90% of participants happily ignored warnings that they were about to view distressing material – irrespective of whether they had previously suffered from trauma. The most consistent response was to be intrigued.

Young people are giving up on democracy

France is mired in its “most serious political crisis since 1968”, says Sylvie Kauffmann in the FT. Four days after the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu – the country’s third prime minister in 12 months – Emmanuel Macron revealed on Friday that the new prime minister would be… Sébastien Lecornu. “Again.” With a new poll putting Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally on 36% – probably enough to scrabble together a parliamentary majority – the mainstream parties may be willing to agree a compromise on pension reform that would avoid another dissolution of parliament. But that would only be a temporary reprieve. After his disastrous snap election last year strengthened the far left and far right, Macron assumed he could still “muddle through” to the end of his term in 2027. Even some of his allies now wonder whether that’s possible.

France isn’t the only “ungovernable” democracy, says Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. The Czech Republic has just followed Poland, Austria and other EU states in “lurching towards the populist hard right”. Several countries have experienced upheaval and anti-government protests in the past couple of years, including Nepal, Morocco, Kenya, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and Madagascar. Polls in the UK and the US show that more and more voters think democracy “isn’t working”. There are myriad reasons for this, such as cost of living, de-industrialisation, wealth inequality and mass migration. But underpinning it all is a fundamental shift in thinking: people, young people in particular, no longer believe the post-Enlightenment idea that “human progress is constant”; that everything ultimately gets better over time. Their lives aren’t improving, and they haven’t been for decades. Unless something changes, democracy itself is in danger of “being jettisoned”.

🤏⏰ Lecornu’s initial resignation came after just 27 days, says The Spectator, but even that wasn’t enough to earn him the title of Europe’s “shortest-lived PM”. That honour goes to Magdalena Andersson, who, after being elected Swedish leader back in November 2021, resigned just seven hours later when her coalition partners dropped out. (She did later return as PM and lasted a more creditable nine months.) Putting them both to shame is Pedro Lascuráin, who took over as president of Mexico as part of a coup d’état in 1913 for a crisp 45 minutes.