Voting has begun in Russia’s presidential election, which is all but guaranteed to hand Vladimir Putin a further six years in office. If the 71-year-old stays in power until the end of his next term in 2030, he will have led the country for three decades – as long as Stalin. SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket disintegrated as it attempted to return to Earth yesterday, after an otherwise successful test flight. The hope is that the 120 metre-tall craft will eventually carry payloads of up to 150 tonnes into orbit and take Nasa astronauts to the Moon. A football covered in barnacles has won this year’s British Wildlife Photography Awards. Other category winners include a snap of a starling in flight in Solihull, a fox balancing on a branch in Nottinghamshire, and blue butterflies on a farm in Devon. See more winners here.

In the Middle East, no one is in charge

The ties that quietly developed between Israel and the Gulf states in the 2010s were based on one important thing, says Gregg Carlstrom in Foreign Affairs: “mutual fear of Iran”. That sense of shared interest led to the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw Israel establish formal links with Bahrain and the UAE, and kick-started a process of “normalisation” with Saudi Arabia. Desperate to escape the Middle East, Washington saw this as a great opportunity. There would be far less need for US troops to contain Iran, they reasoned, if Israel and the Gulf states could do it themselves. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Today, Israel and the US are fighting Iranian proxies in five places – Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – and the Gulf states are “nowhere to be found”.

The Kingdoms aren’t the only ones not turning up. Gulf leaders have long talked of a “multipolar Middle East”, involving not just the US but also Russia, which proved itself an “effective ally” by saving the hide of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and China, a “seemingly bottomless” source of investment, weapons and tech. Yet with the region facing its “worst crisis in decades”, Moscow and Beijing are “all but invisible”. They have offered nothing, and no one has looked to them to “conduct diplomacy, supply aid, or shore up regional security”. Washington’s power – and interest – is clearly on the wane, but who can fill the void? “Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity: the Middle East is nonpolar. No one is in charge.”

🛢️😬 One reason the Gulf Kingdoms are so keen to stay out of the conflict is because they know they are “soft targets” for their enemies – they are utterly reliant on oil exports, food imports, and vulnerable infrastructure like desalination plants. When the Iran-backed Houthis hit a Saudi oil facility with missiles and drones in 2019, it temporarily disrupted half the country’s oil output.

If you want to know how an economy is doing, says Leo Lewis in the FT, just look at sales of instant noodles. Developed in the 1950s to feed a ruined Japan after the war, the quick snack offers extremely good value for the calories provided – so when times are tough, people buy more of them. In recent years, sales have surged in countries suffering from particularly high inflation, such as Nigeria and Turkey. In 2022, humanity collectively bought a record 121 billion servings.

For decades, Chicago’s mobsters carried business cards, says DNA Info. The gangs used the paper rectangles to “assert their pride, recruit new members and serve as general tokens of affiliation”. Many were printed with boasts about the holder’s clan – a card for Thee Almighty Miniature Villa Lobos reads: “Masters in crime/Killers of slime/And loving the fine/Young ladies all times” – while others plumped for jabs at rivals. The cards were so popular, they were briefly traded like sports memorabilia.

The Church has become “embarrassed by its own existence”

Is the Church of England about to “apologise for Christianity”, asks William Moore in The Spectator. According to a report by some internal body called the “Oversight Group”, the Church ought to “say sorry, publicly”, not only for indirectly profiting from slavery through an investment in the South Sea Company, but also for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems”. Having apologised, the Church should apparently then encourage all Africans to discover the “varied belief systems and spiritual practices of their forebears and their efficacy”. In other words: spreading Christianity was wrong and should be reversed.

This is all absurdly muddle-headed. But if you are stuck in an “anti-imperial, anti-colonialist mindset”, then even spreading the Gospel doesn’t get a pass. It doesn’t matter, apparently, that most missionaries opposed slavery. Nor that by the 20th century, “most missionaries were also African”. The continent’s first Anglican Bishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was a former slave who converted at 16 and brought his own translation of the Bible to tribes along the Niger river because he saw it as his calling to “make all men wise unto salvation”. Who are today’s Church leaders to “apologise” for him? Besides, many of the beliefs Christian missionaries persuaded people to abandon were well worth abandoning: idolatry, witchcraft, cannibalism and human sacrifice, “to name some of the most extreme”. Of course the Church should apologise for historic abuses where it finds them. But it seems to have become “embarrassed by its own existence”.

The phrase “last-ditch” was invented by William of Orange, says The New York Times. During a “seemingly hopeless defence” against English and French attackers in 1672, the Dutchman was offered terms he shouldn’t have been able to refuse: to capitulate in exchange for becoming his country’s “sovereign prince”. But he said no. Instead, he vowed to “lie in the last ditch” – meaning he would dispute every inch of ground with the enemy, and finally die “defending the liberties of his country”.

It’s a “strange 10ft monolith” that was discovered in Wales this week, says The Independent. The shiny silver monument was found on Tuesday morning on a remote hillside near Hay-on-Wye by hiker Craig Muir. He says there were no visible tracks leading up to the other-worldly object, which looked like “some sort of UFO”. The steel structure has captured media attention around the world, calling to mind similar objects that have appeared in recent years in the US, Romania and Turkey.