Former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has announced he is standing down at the general election – the 64th Conservative to do so. The MP for Stratford-on-Avon was sacked as Tory chairman last year for failing to tell the party he was being investigated by HMRC over almost £4m in unpaid tax. In his resignation letter, he said “my mistakes have been mine”. Joe Biden has warned Benjamin Netanyahu that America will halt shipments of heavy bombs and artillery shells to Israel if it goes ahead with its invasion of Rafah. The US president insists his support for Israel is “ironclad”, but said that if the assault continues, “I’m not supplying the weapons”. A British girl who was born deaf can now hear after becoming the first person in the world to receive a groundbreaking gene-therapy treatment. Opal Sandy was treated shortly before her first birthday – six months on, she can hear sounds as soft as a whisper.

This new Tory defection makes me despair

It’s easy to imagine the “glee” felt by Keir Starmer’s inner circle when Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke told them she wanted to defect to Labour, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. After all, she’s hardly a “Tory wet” – for the uninitiated, the better-known Jacob Rees-Mogg or Priti Patel “would not be unfair comparisons”. If a hard-right Tory who cut her teeth “scaremongering about refugees and migrants” and denounces “militant unionism” wants to sign up, then nobody can accuse Starmer of harbouring some “secret lefty agenda”. Elphicke says she won’t stand again as a Labour MP, but her gesture is significant. “Someone as right-wing as Elphicke would not be defecting to Labour if she seriously believed the party was committed to meaningful, progressive change.”

It has long been clear that Starmer led “the most dishonest campaign for the leadership of a major political party in British history”. He’s gone from promising a programme of nationalisation, tax hikes for the rich, scrapping tuition fees and lauding free movement to “welcoming a hardcore Tory MP into the fold”. And it was hardly necessary. Conservative chaos meant Labour was already on track to “handsomely win” the general election. Elphicke’s defection may be a harbinger of why it will all unravel for a Starmer premiership. Many who have worked closely with him observe “how little politics he seems to have”. He has compensated for that by surrounding himself with what former Tony Blair adviser Jon Cruddas describes as “the most right-wing, illiberal faction in the party”. Ditching his signature £28bn-a-year green investment fund was just the start. What Elphicke’s defection tells us is that “Labour is now a political party with contempt for the views of millions of progressive British voters”.

The apple may fall further from the tree than previously thought, says The Times. Researchers at Edinburgh University compared the character traits of thousands of parents and their children – including how neurotic, extroverted, open, agreeable and conscientious they were. The results found that more than 60% of children were in a different category from their parents for any given personality trait, making mums and dads only slightly more likely to be similar to their kids than to random people.

Inflation is badly hitting one of Germany’s favourite dishes, the doner kebab, says The Guardian. Every year, Germans get through about 1.3 billion of the tasty wraps, which were introduced to the country by Turkish immigrants. The far-left Die Linke party claims that prices have rocketed from €4 to €10 in some cities over two years – and thus are proposing a Dönerpreisbremse, or “doner price cap”, of €4.90 for adults and €2.90 for young people.

Netanyahu is making the Gaza war unwinnable

The proposal currently on the table for a ceasefire in Gaza “largely corresponds to Israeli demands”, says Daniel-Dylan Böhmer in Die Welt. It could save the lives of dozens of Israeli hostages and “possibly thousands of Palestinians”. So why has Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an invasion of the southern city of Rafah? The sticking point is that Hamas wants a permanent ceasefire, while Israel will only agree to “pause the fighting”. Though some argue that Hamas “cannot be destroyed politically and socially”, Netanyahu believes there will be no lasting peace unless it has been.

The Israeli PM is finding it ever harder to convince allies to back him up. He has repeatedly called for “moderate Arab states or the USA” to take a peacekeeping role in Gaza – but none want the responsibility, in part because of the Israeli PM’s apparent lack of a plan for what comes after Hamas’s defeat. Israel’s “style of warfare” is also scaring away potential partners: even the US, its steadfast ally, is publicly “calling for moderation”. It’s not hard to see why. Israel has tightly restricted the movement of essential supplies into Gaza; only recently has the aid started flowing more quickly. True or not, it’s hard for allies to ignore the accusation that Israel is “waging war with hunger”. Netanyahu has “squandered the moral capital that the global horror of October 7 gave him”. And though it makes sense that he prioritises Israel’s security over foreign opinion, the lack of foreign partners may end up being precisely what undermines that security.

If you’re jet-setting this summer, don’t expect any of your flights to have a row 13, says Mental Floss. For superstitious reasons, planes owned by Ryanair, Lufthansa and America’s United Airlines omit the nefarious number altogether. Because dodgy digits differ around the globe, aircraft from Italy and Brazil might skip row 17 instead, while the Chinese prefer to avoid 14.

It could be the deepest “blue hole” in the world, says the New York Post. The oceanic abyss, located in Chetumal Bay off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is at least 420m deep, but divers have still not reached the bottom. It’s the deepest known example of these “sprawling sapphire sinkholes”, which are actually vertical caves carved over thousands of years by glacial runoff during the Ice Age. Scientists believe the base might form an “intricate and potentially interconnected system of caves and tunnels” that could house undiscovered lifeforms.