A failed asylum seeker has become the first person to relocate to Rwanda voluntarily under a government scheme separate to its controversial deportation policy. The man was given £3,000 for agreeing to go to the African country; Labour says the move shows the government was “desperate” to arrange a flight to Kigali before tomorrow’s local elections. Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters at New York’s Columbia University have been arrested after police stormed an occupied building last night. Hundreds of officers in riot gear broke into a hall that had been blockaded by students, and cleared the nearby outdoor encampment. Lab mice are learning to outsmart scientists, says The Times. In experiments where they were rewarded with food or drink for completing certain tasks, the rodents appeared to deliberately make “mistakes” to see what happened. 🐭🧐

There’s nowhere that can compete with London

Sadiq Khan might be a “less than competent” mayor, says Joel Kotkin in UnHerd, but the city he runs remains the pre-eminent “global powerhouse”. Where else can compete? America’s cities are crime-ridden and on the slide, with New York, Chicago and San Francisco “groaning” under record levels of vacant office space. Singapore and Dubai have overmighty governments; Mumbai and Delhi are choked with pollution; Beirut has fallen into “sectarian ruin”. The huge Asian cities – Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei — simply aren’t cosmopolitan enough. “All remain essentially insular, with few migrants and a culture that is less than welcoming to outsiders.”

The media might talk of a London crime wave, but in truth overall crime rates have steadily fallen this century and are “well below the national average”. Similarly, Brexit was supposed to “turn the City into a tertiary player”. Yet since then, finance giants Bloomberg and Citadel have moved in, and Microsoft has announced plans to open a London AI office. Ambitious immigrants are attracted by “the proximity of world-class universities”; immigration is actually lifting the performance of London’s state schools above the national average. And there are few ethnic ghettos along the lines of Paris’s banlieues. What explains this success? London’s “old advantage” is its status as a former imperial capital, which has welcomed and assimilated the world for centuries. It is, as Ford Madox Ford wrote in 1905, “the world town”.

I first appeared on Question Time back in 1987, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It was a very different affair back then. The presenter, Robin Day, would have dinner with all the panellists before filming began, which made us feel “friendly and relaxed”. Now it’s just a “dreary snack” in the green room, “sometimes not even seated”, and no one bothers to introduce the guests to one another. Still, one thing hasn’t changed in nearly 40 years: the fee, which remains a paltry £150. “Not much for quite a bleak experience.”

Bad news for arachnophobes, says The Guardian: “exotic spiders are flourishing in Britain”. Scientists say rising temperatures are making it easier for non-native species to arrive and settle here. A new type of jumping spider, the 3mm-long Anasaitis milesae, was recently discovered in Cornwall. Other recent arrivals include the false wolf spider, a Mediterranean species “thriving in houses across London”, and the green-fanged tube web spider in southern England.

Republicans are failing the “Hamilton test”

More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton “defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future”, says Charles Sykes in The Atlantic. Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson – as rivals in George Washington’s cabinet they argued bitterly over economics, the role of the state, and slavery. But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his own party (the Federalists) and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. The reason? Jefferson’s main presidential rival, Aaron Burr, was a “dangerous, narcissistic mountebank” who wanted “permanent power”. Hamilton managed to derail Burr, but it cost him his political career and then, in a duel with Burr, his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” Today, “Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did”: they have to decide whether “felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse and insurrection” are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty. The signs aren’t encouraging. Former attorney general Bill Barr, who acknowledges Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, says he’ll still vote for his old boss. Former vice president Mike Pence, says he won’t endorse Trump, but has also “ruled out voting for Joe Biden”. Even former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who previously called Trump “wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way”, cannot bring himself to betray his party. Just one prominent Republican, Liz Cheney, passes the “Hamilton test”. “I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies,” she says. “We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”

When World War Two broke out in 1939, says Colin Dickey in the LA Review of Books, Londoners “set about killing their pets”. Within four days, some 400,000 cats and dogs – 26% of the capital’s pets – had been slaughtered. Crematoriums were overrun with corpses; animal welfare charities ran out of chloroform. “None of this was done out of any real necessity.” Supplies weren’t yet scarce, and the government hadn’t ordered citizens to kill their pets “for the greater good of the Empire”. It was just a mass action that arose, seemingly spontaneously, in a population “terrified by the new reality of war”.

They’re snoafers – a cross between “a sneaker and a loafer”, says The Wall Street Journal. New Balance’s latest “frankenshoe”, the 1906L, is touted as a smarter version of the brand’s classic dad-shoe style. Comfortable but classy, and fit for any occasion, “it’s the footwear equivalent of a spork”. The hybrid isn’t due to be released until August, but it’s already causing a stir on the internet. As one Instagram user said: “I can’t wait to mow my lawn in these bad boys.”