In the headlines

Iran says it will cease its strikes on Israel after the two sides traded attacks for the first time since a ceasefire was signed in April. The Israeli military said it had struck Iranian military targets after Tehran launched a barrage of missiles at northern Israel on Sunday night in retaliation for an earlier Israeli strike targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon. The White House is considering buying the Chagos Islands from Mauritius if Keir Starmer presses ahead with his plan to cede sovereignty of the territory. In an effort to retain control of Diego Garcia, the UK-US military base used by US bombers during the Iran war, American officials have drafted a proposal to strike their own deal with the Mauritian government. An influx of common octopuses off southwest England has seen scientists record the largest “bloom” since 1950. In December, Cornwall Wildlife Trust estimated there were 230,000 off Devon and Cornwall thanks to a succession of unusually warm years helping the cephalopods flourish.

Comment

JD Vance: why let facts get in the way? Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Henry Nowak and the assault on truth

The most precious Western value isn’t liberty or patriotism, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. “It is truth.” Take JD Vance, Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Donald Trump and the rest of the “grifters” using the tragic murder of Henry Nowak to make their nasty, politicised argument that Britain is “finished”, “broken” or a “hellhole” and that crime is rampant because of uncontrolled migration. Even those of us who agree about the dangers of open border policies and Islamic extremism know this is deranged: violent crime has halved over the past 20 years; NHS admissions for stabbing are at their lowest since records began. In JD Vance’s beloved America, of course, 44,447 died from gun violence in 2024 alone. But why let facts get in the way of stoking a good race war?

The reason these distortions find so many willing dupes is not, as some claim, because the West is full of racists. It is because of the assault on truth that long predates this current crop of digitally distorted ethno-nationalists: the woke ideology that equated feelings with facts, put racial sensitivities above the protection of young girls and promoted all the rest of that “pseudo-scientific gibberish” we wasted so much time arguing about. It’s crucial to understand how these two versions of unreality – woke ideology and ethno-nationalism – feed off each other in a “grotesque algorithmic waltz”. Each side has learnt that by making ever more incendiary claims they will trigger their most hyper-engaged opponents into a viral spat, leaving the middle ground a kind of “political no man’s land”. The answer is for those who care more about reality than virality – Kemi Badenoch, Tony Blair – to make common cause. The real fight isn’t left vs right, but truth against lies.

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Architecture

With Barack Obama’s presidential library opening in Chicago next week, Dezeen has looked back at the architecture of the institutions built for his predecessors. They include Franklin D Roosevelt’s relatively cosy library and museum in Hudson Valley, New York; Harry Truman’s in Missouri, the first “consciously modern design”; Dwight D Eisenhower’s blend of neoclassicism and modernism on a site in Kansas that also includes his childhood home; John F Kennedy’s daring, space-age structure in Boston on the banks of the Squantum Channel; LBJ’s unadorned brutalist block in Austin, Texas; and Jimmy Carter’s postmodern plot in Georgia, made of interconnected circles with a prairie garden. Click the image to see the rest.

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