Tory MP Mark Menzies has been suspended by the party over allegations that he misused campaign funds. The MP for Fylde allegedly called an elderly party volunteer at 3.15am in December saying he’d been detained in a flat by “bad people” demanding cash; his campaign manager paid him £6,500 the following morning from her savings, and was subsequently reimbursed from campaign funds. Menzies denies the allegations. Young middle-class women are the only demographic group who smoke more today than a decade ago, a UCL study has found. Researchers say financial pressures are probably to blame, as those women suffered disproportionately high job losses during the pandemic. A fossil found on a beach in Somerset may have come from the largest marine reptile ever to have lived. Scientists think the 202-million-year-old jawbone belonged to a giant ichthyosaur around 25 metres in length – longer than two buses put together.

Deterrence is nothing if you don’t back it up

“Don’t” is a word that America’s enemies pay little heed to when it comes from Joe Biden’s lips, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. The Taliban ignored the president’s warnings when they “launched their final push” in 2021, while US forces were still in Afghanistan. Six months later, Vladimir Putin dismissed Biden’s injunction not to invade Ukraine “and marched right in”. Now Iran has attacked Israel, our closest Middle Eastern ally, in a “massive and wholly disproportionate” missile strike. And Tehran may well get away with it scot-free, given Biden is trying to stop Israel from responding. He doesn’t seem to understand that the concept of deterrence, which has kept America and her allies “largely safe for three quarters of a century”, needs to be backed up by action. China must be thinking another four years of this diffident administration represents an “unmissable opportunity”.

The only proper response to Iranian aggression is “rational, controlled escalation”, says Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. If Joe Biden “were a serious president”, he would state that the Iranian regime “must be treated like the global pariah that it has become”, and that all of its proxies must be destroyed. “He would impose extreme sanctions. He would allow Israel to finish off Hamas. He would help hit Hezbollah.” If all else fails, he would use American military power to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. Instead, Biden’s approach “has been to suck up to Tehran since he was elected”. He handed over billions of dollars in ransom payments, and has permitted Iran’s oil output to surge to a five-and-a-half-year high by failing to properly enforce sanctions. America’s commander-in-chief should remember that “those who seek peace at all cost inevitably end up at war”.

🇮🇷 How dangerous is Iran? Read our explainer by clicking here.

Economic forecasting is “nine parts art to one part science”, says Andy Haldane, former chief economist of the Bank of England, in the FT. In my early years at the bank, the then head of forecasting once walked into my room clutching a piece of paper. On it were two lines on a graph: the inflation forecast painstakingly produced by his team over the preceding weeks, and an alternative projection “hand-drawn in pencil by the then governor”. Only the latter “forecast” ever saw the light of day.

The Daily Beast is hiring a full-time reporter to cover Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, says Axios. The news site, which is under new ownership, wants to return to its roots as a “smart tabloid” – and that apparently means covering tech moguls as “apex predators”. Its other plans include “aggressive coverage” of the royal family, in a bid to “show up ink-stained Brits”.

A “tragedy” of modern British politics

People tend to forget that for most of its history, Britain was “disproportionately energy-rich”, says Ed Conway on Substack. “Stinking energy-rich.” It began in the 1800s with coal. England was the first country to exploit the fossil fuel in vast quantities, delivering extraordinary gains in productivity, living standards and incomes. By the turn of the 20th century, Britain was the world’s largest exporter of energy – the “Saudi Arabia of 1900”, as historian David Edgerton put it. Then came the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s and 1970s. This, again, made the UK a “considerable force” in global energy exports: we were the world’s fifth biggest oil producer for a period in the 1980s, and the fourth largest gas producer for much of the 1990s.

All this was an enormous boon for the Treasury. In the mid-1980s, tax receipts from North Sea oil production accounted for about 3% of GDP – “enough to finance the entire transport and housing budgets”. Today, the government still receives a whopping £10bn a year from the industry, more than it gets from inheritance tax. The problem is that our leaders never did anything useful with all those billions. Whereas Norway sensibly invested its surplus oil revenues to build up an enormous sovereign wealth fund, Britain frittered its loot – roughly half a trillion pounds in today’s money – on “day-to-day” spending. No notable long-term infrastructure projects; no industrial legacy to speak of; no national oil company like Norway’s Statoil (now Equinor). Our failure to make the most of our geological good fortune is “one of the great tragedies of modern politics”.

Other languages have some “delightfully bizarre” idioms that get lost in translation, says Mental Floss. In Sweden, att glida in på en räkmacka (“to slide in on a shrimp sandwich”) is used to describe someone who hasn’t worked hard for what they’ve achieved. Daydreamers in Spain are said to be pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo (“thinking about the immortality of the crab”), while those pushing their luck in France might be told: faut pas pousser mémé dans les orties (“don’t push granny into the nettles”).

It’s Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who’s getting a taste of her own medicine. In recent years, Oyler has become infamous for her harsh reviews, says The Independent. “I have always hated Roxane Gay’s writing,” begins one memorable hatchet job; a 5,000-word takedown of writer Jia Tolentino got so much attention it “allegedly crashed the London Review of Books website”. And reviewers of Oyler’s new essay collection, No Judgement, have returned the favour: The Washington Post describes it as “predictable and facile”, while a “jaw-dropping” piece by Ann Manov in Bookforum has lit up social media. “The book was originally to be called Who Cares,” Manov concludes, “and perhaps that title should have been retained.”