More than 600 legal experts have urged Britain to halt weapons sales to Israel, on the grounds that the exports risk breaking international law. The letter, signed by the former Supreme Court justices Lady Hale, Lord Sumption and Lord Wilson, says the government needs to “avoid UK complicity” in “potential violations of the Genocide Convention”. Major airports will miss the 1 June deadline to lift the 100ml liquid limit for hand luggage, after failing to install new scanners. The government has extended the deadline for the laggards – thought to include Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester – by up to a year. A tiny Italian island is giving away its goats, after a population explosion has left it overrun by the horned herbivores. Alicudi, off the coast of Sicily, has at least 600 goats crammed into its five square kilometres – the mayor doesn’t want to cull them, so has given outsiders until 10 April to take them off his hands. 🐐🎁

For boomers, “the good times are coming to an end”

“The 1950s were a good decade to be born in Britain,” says Bagehot in The Economist. A newly minted welfare state cushioned your early life; university cost nothing; and during your peak earning years, “taxes plunged thanks to Margaret Thatcher”. Rocketing house prices and generous pensions didn’t hurt either. Baby boomers have paid in less and taken out more from the welfare state “than any generation before or since”. Because there are so many of them, they have had outsized political power: the bulk of those born in the 1950s have “been on the winning side of every election” they’ve voted in.

“Now the good times are coming to an end.” As inflation pushes people into higher tax brackets, the relief Jeremy Hunt has offered is a cut to National Insurance, only paid by those under 66. A new government scheme to pay for childcare is worth a “strikingly generous” £8bn a year, or about £6,500 per infant. And politically, older voters are faltering: the Waspi campaigners, who want compensation relating to historic changes in the state pension age for women, are being all but ignored by both main parties. If Labour get into power – against older voters’ wishes – they will have to raise taxes. Naturally, they will target boomers, who are wealthy and don’t vote for them anyway. Millennials, who “overtook the boomers in size in 2020”, will use their political influence to gradually accrue perks and shift financial burdens onto other generations – just like the boomers did. After all, “everyone turns into their parents eventually”.

In local elections in Turkey on Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party was routed, says Ozan Demircan in Handelsblatt. The main secular opposition party, the CHP, won the mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara, and outpolled the AKP across the country. This could have consequences beyond Turkey’s borders. Previously, Erdoğan’s power as an international statesman came from his tight grip on domestic politics. Now that he is “losing this aura”, the likes of Europe, the US and Russia “will have an easier time demanding concessions”.

“The White House wants Nasa to figure out how to tell time on the moon,” says The Guardian. America’s space agency has been given until 2026, when a series of astronaut missions to the lunar surface is scheduled to begin, to come up with a “moon-centric time reference system”. As there’s less gravity on the moon than on Earth, time moves 58.7 microseconds quicker a day, presenting a potential challenge to the “extreme precision” needed for lunar missions. Kevin Coggins, a top Nasa official, has already confirmed that “the moon will not have daylight saving time”.

Israelis hate Netanyahu, but they support his war

Many Israelis want Benjamin Netanyahu ousted from office, says Mairav Zonszein in Foreign Policy. They haven’t forgiven him for the security lapses that allowed October 7 to happen, and think he is dragging out the war in Gaza “for his own political survival”. But that doesn’t mean the Israeli public is opposed to the military campaign. On the contrary, 88% of Jewish Israelis told pollsters in January that the Palestinian death toll – 25,000 at the time – was justified. The following month, two-thirds of Jewish Israelis said they shared Netanyahu’s opposition to establishing an independent, demilitarised Palestinian state. Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets not to call for a ceasefire, but to protest against Netanyahu’s failure to “seal a hostage deal”.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Almost none of Israel’s Jewish political parties endorse a two-state solution, and the ones in government “actively reject it”. The Israeli media rarely shows the suffering in Gaza or challenges the IDF’s version of events. This all means a change of leadership would make very little difference to the course of the war. Netanyahu’s likely successor, Benny Gantz, once released a campaign video boasting of “sending parts of Gaza back to the Stone Age” during his tenure as head of the IDF. He backs Netanyahu’s plan to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and rejects unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. So by all means criticise Netanyahu – he deserves it. But remember that the conflict in Gaza is not just Netanyahu’s war. “It is Israel’s war.”

🇮🇱❤️‍🩹🇺🇸 Biden and Bibi: how it all went wrong – for our in-depth look at their decades-long friendship, visit our new site, The Knowledge Premium, by clicking here.

Most people know that undergraduate university fees almost tripled in 2012, from £3,375 to £9,000 a year. What few appreciate, says The New Statesman, is that the interest rate on loans for these fees also increased, from “inflation plus one percentage point” to inflation plus three percentage points. And this rise in borrowing costs has been astonishingly punitive. Assuming they haven’t repaid any of their loan, a student who began a three-year university course in 2011 now owes £12,100 – while one who began just a year later owes £48,900.

It’s a very dedicated vet in Virginia wearing a fox mask to feed an orphaned kit. The idea, says USA Today, is to fool the tiny cub into thinking it is being fed by its mother, so that it doesn’t get used to human contact. Staff at the Richmond Wildlife Centre also gave the tyke a stuffed fox toy to cuddle.