World leaders are urging Israel to show restraint in its response to Iran’s drone and missile attack on Saturday. Joe Biden said Benjamin Netanyahu’s government should “take the win” from its success in foiling the strike, while Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the attack had revealed to the world that Iran is “the malign influence in the region”. Donald Trump’s landmark trial over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 will begin this morning in New York. The presumptive Republican nominee is the first former US president to face a criminal trial, which is expected to last eight weeks. A revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard won seven gongs at last night’s Olivier Awards, equalling the record for a musical. Succession star Sarah Snook took best actress for her 60,000-word monologue in The Picture of Dorian Gray, while Mark Gatiss won best actor for The Motive and the Cue.

The “malicious lies” of the pro-trans lobby

The publication of the Cass Report is a “decisive moment” in the trans debate, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. Written by Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s most respected paediatricians, the 388-page document takes a detailed look at gender identity services for children and young people. Its findings are as unambiguous as they are damning. Puberty blockers, the report concluded, are “irreversible precursors for a lifetime of medication” – not, as proponents argue, a harmless way to give kids more time to consider whether they want to change sex. It found that “gender incongruence” is perfectly normal among kids, and that they should be left alone to explore their identities. And it found no concrete evidence that sex reassignment for children reduces suicide rates – another “malicious lie” propagated by the pro-trans lobby.

Almost as striking as the findings is the omertà from those involved. Just one of the seven NHS gender identity clinics in England agreed to cooperate with Cass’s inquiries. When she asked to speak to former patients who were now adults, the doctors refused. “What on earth, one wonders, are they trying to hide?” The answer is pretty obvious. Having conducted sex reassignments for children – “sterilising them, removing their capacity for orgasm, and rendering them patients for life” – these doctors can hardly now admit that they had no solid evidence to back their decisions up. It’s the same with everyone else: the “Twitter mobs” who hounded the sceptics; the charities’ grotesque lies – “The Science is Settled,” ran one ad campaign in the US – and “ugly bullying tactics”. History will rightly be brutal to those responsible. “But almost certainly not brutal enough.”

Harold Wilson knew how to throw people off the scent of his alleged affairs, says Patrick Kidd in The Times. At a drinks party for Westminster reporters in 1974, talk turned to an MP accused of “goosing” a female colleague. Marcia Williams, Wilson’s private secretary and rumoured lover, asked: “What is goosing?” She then let out a yelp as the PM answered the question by grabbing her bottom. At the end of the night, one journalist was overheard telling another that Wilson clearly wasn’t sleeping with Williams: “You don’t goose your mistress in front of a dozen hacks.”

Liz Truss may have spent only 49 days at No 10, says the Daily Mail, but she found plenty to moan about. In her new memoir, the former PM complains that her Downing Street apartment was infested with fleas – possibly thanks to Boris Johnson’s dog Dilyn – and was “really noisy” because of protesters and a loud clock nearby. Her husband, Hugh, had a nightmare getting an Ocado order delivered. Most frustrating, she writes, was the lack of support. She had to organise her own hair and make-up appointments, and once had to send her diary secretary out to fetch her some cough medicine in the middle of the night, because “there was no one else to ask”.

It’s “bootlicking season” in British politics

Welcome to “bootlicking season”, says Bagehot in The Economist. Barely a day goes by without a “simpering” interview with Keir Starmer. When the Labour leader went on Lorraine Kelly’s daytime TV show recently, she “gushed” about his working-class roots for 10 minutes. “One newspaper published a 2,000-word interview with Sir Keir about the virtue of learning the flute.” When shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves gave a lecture about economics last month, one commentator said “its very dullness is rather exciting”, and Reeves was widely applauded for being “serious” – as if the former Bank of England economist “did well to resist the urge to start juggling”.

There’s an assumption that “scrutiny of Labour will increase as the election nears”. In fact, the opposite is happening. “Sycophancy, not scrutiny, has been the order of the day as journalists, wonks and lobbyists scramble to win favour with the future government.” Even traditional enemies are “smeared with boot polish”. Starmer spent a significant amount of time as director of public prosecutions trying to jail journalists from The Sun for phone-hacking. The tabloid is nevertheless giving him reasonably friendly coverage. Business leaders flocked to a £1,000-per-person Labour event at the Oval cricket ground. Of course, people always “cheer politicians on the way up and boo them on the way down”. But the Conservative government is in “such a dire spot” that the Labour honeymoon has essentially already started. “Tongue will meet leather for some time yet.”

Pretty much the entire computer chip industry relies on a single Japanese company best known for being the leading global supplier of MSG seasoning powder, says Walt Hickey on Substack. Back in the 1990s, Ajinomoto discovered that one of the byproducts of its MSG production process was a dielectric, a type of material used to separate and insulate the copper wires in chips. Since then, the company has had over 90% of the market share in the component – and “nothing whatsoever to do with making computer chips beyond this one thing”.

It’s a bank of phone boxes at the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, where – almost uniquely for a major sporting event – mobile phones are banned. It’s an “inspired rule”, says Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. At most other courses, people are so desperate to film every moment that they watch the whole thing through their six-inch screens. At the Masters, which was won yesterday by American Scottie Scheffler, they lose themselves “in the drama in front of their faces”. More events – sport, concerts, everything – should realise that a phone ban makes for a “more immersive, enriching experience”.