The Bank of England has cut interest rates from 4.75% to 4.5%, the lowest level since June 2023. The bank also halved its growth forecast for the UK economy in 2025, from 1.5% to 0.75%, and predicted that inflation will rise to 3.7% later in the year – almost twice the government’s 2% target. The White House has walked back the most controversial parts of Donald Trump’s proposal to “take over” the Gaza Strip, which has been widely condemned as a violation of international law. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that the idea was to relocate Gazans “temporarily” while reconstruction took place, and that the US had no plans to put “boots on the ground”. Jackson Pollock’s paintings may be full of “camouflaged images”, including drunken monkeys, a hatchet-wielding soldier, a Picasso-style rooster and the outline of Lauren Bacall (pictured). A team of researchers exploring the artist’s bipolar disorder have discovered dozens of hidden figures in his drip paintings, although they don’t know whether it was intentional.

Is there a case for Trump’s “Gaz-a-Lago” plan?

Donald Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” has one minor defect, says Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic: it’s a non-starter for pretty much everyone required to make it work. Still smarting from failed forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would balk at getting involved in one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Trump says Jordan and Egypt could house the displaced Gazans, but both regimes would “rather swallow glass” than absorb a desperate population dotted with Islamist terrorists. And while many Gazans would gladly seek a new life elsewhere if offered the chance, many others would not. Forcing them out would constitute ethnic cleansing.

Yet as flawed as Trump’s “Gaz-a-Lago” proposal is, “it does identify a real problem”. Everyone claims to care about Gaza, but in the decades since Israel withdrew its troops and settlements, the international community has participated in a “perverse cycle”: shovel aid money in; watch that money get snatched by Hamas to bankroll its messianic war against Israel’s existence; tut as the terror group’s constant rocket attacks produce ever-more hawkish Israeli governments; send more aid to “rebuild Gaza” every time those governments retaliate; then act appalled when the cycle repeats. With “significant revisions”, Trump’s proposal contains a semblance of a workable solution. Temporarily housing Gazans elsewhere while the devastated territory is rebuilt “under the watchful eyes of America and its allies” would provide the Gazan people with much-deserved relief, while also depriving Hamas of its source of power and income. The Gazan people could then return to a home “no longer hostage to either Hamas or Israeli blockade”. It’s a long shot, but it’s a hell of a lot better than “rerunning the old playbook and expecting a different result”.

Celebrities don’t have a “stellar reputation” when it comes to queue-jumping, says Popbitch. One exception is Noel Gallagher. At Glastonbury last year, the 57-year-old was spotted dutifully standing in the long line for drinks behind The Park stage. A well-meaning Oasis fan at the front shouted back: “Noel, what do you want?” His reply, which he presumably churns out every time this happens, was: “Thanks mate – 40 pints of lager please”. The fan sensibly left him in peace.

Mowing curved lines into your lawn boosts the abundance and diversity of wildlife, says the journal Science. Boffins in Belgium found that fields with meandering mowing had roughly 50% more bees after two years than fields with block mowing, and bee and butterfly numbers continued to increase every year thereafter. The logic is that by wiggling your mower you miss tiny patches, where insects can thrive.

A historic miscarriage of justice

This week, at a press conference in Westminster, something became very clear, says Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail. At some point in the next 20 years, Lucy Letby will stand on the steps of some grand courthouse, “blinking in the TV lights”, finally free to begin what remains of her “blasted, ravaged life”. The press conference was organised by Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian doctor whose research was used to help convict the neonatal nurse for murdering seven babies. Lee thinks the jury got it totally wrong. So he put together a panel of world-leading neonatologists to assess the evidence independently. Their unanimous conclusion? That not a single one of those babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital was murdered or deliberately hurt.

The more likely explanation, Lee said, was “poor treatment”. Needles were inserted in the wrong place. Antibiotics were either not given or given too late. Infections were missed. The panel dismissed the theory that Letby tried to poison some babies with insulin as unfounded and “more or less absurd”. The claim that she switched off bedside alarms to cover up her crimes was shown to be “plainly wrong”. You might ask why, given all this, the jury convicted Letby and why the decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal. But for some reason her defence team never called their own medical expert, instead relying on challenging the prosecution experts. So the jurors were never given the full picture. No one but Letby can know for sure that she is innocent. But is she guilty of those crimes “beyond reasonable doubt”? Not in a million years.

🇨🇦 🚜 Lee’s intervention is “one of the most movingly selfless acts I have seen for some time”. He is retired from medicine, and spends his time on his farm in Alberta. But when he heard about the conviction, and learned that Letby could only be freed if the Criminal Cases Review Commission could be convinced to reopen the case, he took it upon himself to act. Nobody paid him to do any of this. “He even bought his own air ticket to come to Britain.”

If you’ve ever tuned in to PMQs and got the feeling parliamentary speeches aren’t what they once were, says The Economist, you’re quite right. In 1938 the average Commons oration was 1,000 words long. In 1965 James Callaghan delivered a budget speech that was almost 19,000 words: “less a speech than a novella”. Until 1970 the average was still almost 900. Then speeches started to shrink – dramatically so after 2015, when videos first appeared on Twitter (now X). Last year the average was 460: “less a novella than a few Tweets”.

Europeans born in the late 1990s have seen their standard of living “not merely stagnate but decline”, says John Burn-Murdoch in the FT. But in America “Gen Z are motoring ahead”: US living standards have improved by an average of 2.5% per year since the cohort entered adulthood. In fact, this US generation is blessed not only with “far more upward mobility than their millennial elders” but are outpacing even boomers when they were the same age. In America at least: “Zoomers by name, zoomers by socio-economic nature.”

It’s the Dune Express, says Texas Monthly: the second-longest conveyor belt in the world. The 42-mile machine was built to carry fracking sand all the way from an oil field in west Texas across the state border into New Mexico. It has taken around two years and cost roughly $400m to build, and can shift 13 million tonnes of sand each year – enough to build “a couple of dozen” sandcastles the size of Buckingham Palace, “with more than enough left over for a Taj Mahal”.