UK inflation has hit a two-and-a-half-year low thanks to a drop in the prices of food items, including pork, crumpets and chocolate biscuits. The rate at which consumer prices rose fell to 3.2% in the year to March – a touch above the 3.1% forecast – down from a peak of 11.1% in late 2022. The prayer ban at London’s Michaela Community School has been declared lawful by the High Court. Judges rejected a Muslim pupil’s claim that the policy was discriminatory, concluding that the ban is “proportionate” to the goal of preventing segregation. Headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh described the decision as “a victory for all schools”. Parts of Dubai are underwater after more than a year’s worth of rain fell in a single day. The downpour flooded homes, metro stations and shopping malls, and caused severe disruptions at the desert city’s airport.

Sorry Liz, you’re as deluded as Labour in the 1970s

Liz Truss remains utterly convinced that she is not responsible for her political downfall, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. In her new memoir, the former PM argues that the blame really lies with the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, for producing an overly pessimistic forecast that spooked investors. It’s a strikingly similar argument to the one made by the hard left in 1976, when Britain had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a loan – the then chancellor, Denis Healey, complained for years afterwards that the whole crisis was down to the Treasury overestimating future government borrowing. Both claims are nonsense. Everyone who uses forecasts knows they might not be accurate – that’s the name of the game. Besides, you can hardly borrow money and then “complain about the lenders’ fear that they might not get their money back”.

That may be so, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian, but Truss’s wider vision – a “fundamentalist concept of liberty” based on minimal taxation and “horror of state interventions” – is the most fully-formed worldview on offer from the Conservative Party. What’s Rishi Sunak’s alternative? “A country where smoking gets a bit more illegal every year.” After Truss’s premiership collapsed, he was brought in as PM to try to fix the Tories. But “the patient hasn’t revived”. When the party is removed from power, those who can confidently blame the defeat on the high-tax establishment will have a head start in taking it over. The Conservative “advocates of reality” – the moderates, the One Nation liberals, the “queasy centrists” – simply don’t have an argument. “Next they could end up without a party.”

“Tribalisation does funny things to people,” says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. If you’d told me a decade ago that Republicans would be opposed to Ukraine defending itself from a Russian invasion, and that Democrats would be “pulling the Full Churchill” to oppose the Kremlin, I’d have “gently asked what sativa strain you were smoking”. Likewise if you’d told me that Republicans would regard the CIA and the FBI as part of an evil “deep state”; that Democrats would go “all-in on Big Pharma” with Covid vaccines; and that Republicans who “long carried little copies of the Constitution in their suit pockets” would lead a riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. “You live and learn.”

To get around the fact that TV audiences often change channels during ad breaks, some Chilean marketing whizzes had a novel idea: edit the adverts into the programmes themselves. A 2003 broadcast of the Star Wars film A New Hope featured Cristal beer. In a sequence that has recently done the rounds on the internet, Obi-Wan Kenobi reaches into a truck to give Luke Skywalker a lightsabre – and instead opens a crate of Cristal bottles on ice. The tongue-in-cheek trick went down well with viewers, and the same technique was repeated across the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as films like Gladiator and Notting Hill.

Iran and its allies think “their moment is coming”

The key question about Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel, says Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic, is why now? Why, after decades of targeting its sworn enemy in the shadows – through Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxies – is Tehran willing to “wage war in the sunlight”? The most likely answer is because the mullahs are now in an informal coalition with other non-Western powers: Russia, China and North Korea. All four nations are becoming increasingly willing to use “open violence” against those that get in their way – namely Ukraine, Israel and the Philippines. They are united by the growing conviction that “their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight”.

Many have hailed the failure of Iran’s attack – almost every projectile was shot down – as proof of the West’s technological superiority. But anti-missile defence is, in the long term, “a mug’s game”. If each defensive missile costs vastly more than the one it is sent to destroy, then “even the richest countries are going to bankrupt themselves”. Besides, no defence system is 100% effective. Some missiles will eventually get through, and the knock-on effects will be significant: shipping companies will avoid certain routes; businesses will stop operating in targeted areas. Iran and the others know all this. They’re looking at the bigger picture: the overthrow of the American-led world order. And unless the West sticks up for itself, by making Tehran pay a “visible and heavy price” for its behaviour, “the problem will only get worse”.

It turns out that pyrite, known as fool’s gold, may actually be worth something, says Quartz. An analysis of 390-million-year-old samples of the mineral has found that they contain lithium, which is currently in high demand to make the batteries that power everything from computers to electric cars. The researchers who made the discovery say it could be worth mining pyrite from America’s Appalachian basin if the lithium “proves economically extractable”.

It’s the proposed design of a train station in the Chinese city of Nanjing, which has attracted attention online for its striking resemblance to a sanitary pad. The 14-square-mile, £2.2bn project has been approved by the authorities – which insist that the structure is actually inspired by the plum blossoms the city is known for – and construction is scheduled to begin within months.