Tehran says it has no plans for immediate military retaliation after a reported Israeli airstrike on Iranian soil. US officials say a missile hit the country early this morning, and explosions were heard near the Isfahan military air base, but Tehran insists no such attack has taken place. Nicola Sturgeon’s husband has been charged in connection with the embezzlement of SNP funds. Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive, was questioned by police for nine hours yesterday as part of the years-long investigation into the handling of £600,000 worth of donations. Taylor Swift has revealed that her new release, The Tortured Poets Department, is a “secret double album”, with 15 more tracks than fans were expecting. As usual, many of the superstar’s songs focus on her ex-lovers – one track thought to be about British musician Matty Healy is titled The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.

“A victory for all schools”

Katharine Birbalsingh is known as “the strictest head teacher in Britain”, says Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. She runs the Michaela Community School in Wembley, where pupils have a strict uniform policy and must walk in single file and not talk in corridors. This discipline produces stunning academic success: a quarter of pupils are on free school meals, yet in 2021, 82% “ended up at a Russell Group university”. But Birbalsingh also promotes what she calls a “robust yet respectful secularism”: Jehovah’s Witnesses must put up with studying Macbeth, Christians with revising on Sundays, and Muslims with having no access to prayer rooms. The balance has been carefully struck – every student, for example, eats vegetarian food.

In March last year, however, “a small number of Muslim students began to pray in the school’s playground, apparently spontaneously”. Pupils started pressuring one another into “increasingly ardent” displays of faith: fasting during Ramadan, wearing a hijab. When all prayer was banned in response, one Muslim pupil mounted a legal challenge. This week, the High Court ruled in favour of Michaela. Birbalsingh has declared the decision a “victory for all schools”, but it’s more than that. There is a “naive assumption among a certain type of liberal that tolerance is the factory default setting of British life”. It’s not. It must always be “actively pursued and maintained” – in the case of Michaela, with “top-down intervention” to prevent atomisation and intolerance between religious groups. This may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a brave attempt to deal with the contradictions of modern Britain.

The mayor of Brussels caused a stir this week by briefly trying to shut down the National Conservatism Conference, attended by the likes of Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. If only Belgian officials took as tough a line on Islamism, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. The Islamist terror cell that murdered 130 Parisians in November 2015 came from a suburb of Brussels called Molenbeek, or “Molenbeekistan”, as French media rechristened it. During the Islamic State years, “Belgium provided the terrorist regime with more personnel per capita than any other European nation”: 451 Belgian citizens went east to wage jihad, or 40 per million inhabitants. “Denmark was next with 27 per million and then Sweden with 19. The UK figure was 9.5.”

Boston Dynamics, known for the lifelike movements of its robots, has unveiled the new version of its humanoid Atlas model. It’s designed to offer “a far greater range of movement than its predecessor”, says The Verge – so appropriately enough, the launch video features Atlas “lying in a cadaver-like fashion on the floor”, before swiftly folding its legs backwards over its body and rising to a standing position “in a manner befitting some kind of Cronenberg body-horror flick”. See the full clip here.

Fighting back against the watermelons

Liz Truss’s memoir, Ten Years To Save the West, “is for whole chapters readable only in the most literal sense of the word, like the ingredients on a crisp packet”, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. “It’s time conservatives fought back against the watermelons,” she declares, in reference to green activists whose environmentalism supposedly conceals red, extreme-left politics. “It’s not much fun being in the Foreign Office during Covid,” she writes, “when drinks receptions are cancelled and travel is replaced by Zoom calls.” Woe is Liz. But the sections on her Tory leadership campaign and short stint in Downing Street are “colourful and gripping”. One vignette: minutes before her resignation, her daughter called from the school playground, “pleading with her to stay”.

The received wisdom is that Truss has only written this book to secure lucrative speaking gigs in Washington. But what American would read something so “relentlessly parochial”? It’s stuffed “with references to Line of Duty, sabbatical officers at the University of Oxford’s student union, Paddy Ashdown, Geoffrey Boycott, Ian Botham, Ben Stokes, Claire’s Accessories and fish and chip shops in Paisley”. In truth, this seems to be aimed at the establishment Truss says she despises. “Nothing delights her like the little affirmations of the powerful: congratulations from Prince Philip on the badger cull; an invitation to feed the koi carp at the Japanese foreign ministry.” Even in her acknowledgements, she thanks David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson “for giving me the opportunity” – as if “she were an X Factor contestant” leaving midway through the competition.

😔 Truss’s book has already sold out on Amazon, but her UK publishers clearly didn’t think it would, says the I newspaper. Her advance was a paltry £1,512.88 – “just 0.29% of the £510,000 deal Boris Johnson was paid by HarperCollins for his (still unpublished) Downing Street memoir”.

The Tories have effectively become the pensioners’ party, says Bloomberg. At the 2019 election, the age at which Britons were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour was 39. In a recent poll, it was up to 70.

It’s a hedgehog in Gloucestershire that has blown up to the size of a football. The spiky specimen was suffering from a condition known as “balloon syndrome”, where gas collects under the skin. She was taken to Wild Hogs Hedgehog Rescue, near Frampton on Severn, where manager Emily Harper inserted a needle to let the air out. “I have deflated her as much as I can,” Harper told the BBC. “She hasn’t re-inflated straight away, which is a good sign.”