Shamima Begum has lost her latest appeal against the UK government’s decision to strip her of British citizenship. Begum, who left her home in east London nine years ago aged 15 to join Islamic State in Syria, can still challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court. From April, the average household energy bill will fall by £238 to £1,690 a year. Ofgem is lowering its price cap because of a sustained fall in wholesale gas prices, which has made bills the cheapest they’ve been since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. An American spacecraft has touched down on the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Houston firm Intuitive Machines successfully landed its Odysseus rover (pictured) near the lunar south pole, becoming the first private company to put a craft on the moon.

Was the Speaker out of order?

This week’s parliamentary shenanigans were embarrassing for all concerned, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. It was grubby of the SNP to call for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza merely as a ruse to trap pro-Palestine Labour MPs into voting against their party line. And it was very odd of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle to break with convention to let Labour, “his old party”, off the hook. But it’s still worth considering Hoyle’s explanation: that voting against a ceasefire might have put MPs at risk of violence by extremists. This is, gruesomely, believable. The 2021 murder of David Amess at the hands of Ali Harbi Ali has “permanently changed the mood” in parliament. Threats of violence on social media, which many MPs receive daily, now have real weight.

Tory backbencher Paul Bristow, who previously lost his government job after calling for a ceasefire, has received repeated threats against his wife and children because some idiots misunderstood his position, and took him to be pro-Israel. Mike Freer, a Tory MP in north London who was also tracked by Ali Harbi Ali, has decided to stand down after being targeted by a group calling themselves “Muslims Against Crusades”. There are MPs in all parties scared for their staff and families. So it’s easy to see why Hoyle acted as he did. But it sets a dangerous precedent. To bend Commons procedure as a result of threats of violence is to “let democracy be shaped by intimidation”. Rather than making MPs safer, he may have done the opposite, by showing extremists that bullying works.

An NHS Trust in Sussex has claimed that breast milk produced by trans women, with the help of special medication, is just as good as milk produced naturally. It’s fantastic news, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. But I can’t help wondering why the NHS isn’t also giving this special medication to fathers. It seems only fair that the job of breastfeeding should be “split 50:50 between the mother and the father” – for the health service not to facilitate this seems “appallingly sexist and unjust”. Unless, of course, breast milk from a biological male isn’t actually as good as breast milk from a biological female. Which would raise the question of why on earth the NHS Trust claimed it was.

Let’s hear it for the “rollicking” Edwardians

Most people think of Edwardian Britain as an “endless summer of cricket matches and seaside holidays”, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Times. Not so. As Alwyn Turner writes in his new “rollicking history” of the early 1900s, this was an era of “swindlers and murderers, populists and charlatans, imperialist fantasies and saucy innuendos”. On stage, “nubile performers” calling themselves “living statues” scandalised strait-laced local councillors. On the roads, new-fangled motor cars raced at speeds of over two miles an hour, causing great alarm among the pedestrian public. At Rhyl seafront in Wales, crowds of people squeezed into the gents’ lavatory to watch soft pornography (Should Ladies Wear Bloomers?) on a groundbreaking motion picture device called a mutoscope. At the Edinburgh Empire, a dustman paraded his five-year-old son, who had a 42in waist and weighed more than 10 stone, as the “Fat Boy of Peckham”.

One figure who captures the spirit of the age is Horatio Bottomley, arguably the “most entertaining rogue in British history”. Born in Bethnal Green in 1860, he worked as a court reporter before setting up the publishing company that launched the Financial Times. He owned racehorses, consorted with chorus girls, promoted gold-mining shares and embezzled millions – “and ordinary people loved him for it”. Once, at a shareholders meeting, he was asked what happened to £700,000 missing from the accounts. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replied, and sat down to applause. Later in life, he went bankrupt, lost a libel case and was imprisoned for fraud. “He ended up, inevitably, on the music-hall stage.”

Little Englanders by Alwyn Turner is available here.

The Interlace in Singapore is a “pizza delivery person’s worst nightmare”, says Daniel Holland on X (formerly Twitter). The intricate 1,000-unit complex (pictured) was designed as a “vertical village”, with 31 apartment blocks stacked diagonally, each arranged in hexagonal formations around eight main courtyards. Each block is six levels tall, and some spots are four blocks high – all connected by a maze of passageways.

The Marvel films have done a lot of work with the Pentagon, says Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment. It’s a common arrangement in Hollywood – the movies effectively promote the US military in exchange for using lots of its kit and know-how. But at a certain point, “the Pentagon stopped co-operating”. They couldn’t work out where SHIELD, the franchise’s fictional law-enforcement agency, would come in the US military hierarchy – and concluded that the Pentagon “might actually have to answer to SHIELD”. At that point, “they were out”.

It’s a Q1, the world’s first desktop computer, says Interesting Engineering, two of which were recently found by a cleaning company clearing out a house in London. When Q1s were launched in 1972, they were “all the rage”, with their “distinctive orange screen” and typewriter-like keyboard. With the two recently discovered, the total number of Q1s in existence has tripled, to a grand total of three.