Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” has been widely condemned by countries including the UK, Saudi Arabia, France and Australia. The president suggested that Gazans permanently relocate to Egypt or Jordan, while the US clears the ruined city of unexploded bombs and turns it into a “magnificent area” for global visitors. Lucy Letby did not murder a single baby, according to an international group of neonatal experts who reviewed the evidence and concluded that all the deaths and injuries attributed to her were the result of “natural causes or just bad medical care”. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which examines potential miscarriages of justice, is reviewing her convictions. Things really will seem better in the morning. Boffins who tracked 50,000 adults over two years to see how happiness fluctuates say “life satisfaction” peaks between 6am and 8am, while sinking to its lowest around midnight, and that Mondays and Fridays are more joyful than Sundays.

What’s really preoccupying Team Trump

What Donald Trump’s critics miss about his proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada is the broader context, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal: namely, that this is part of a new focus on “the Western Hemisphere”. The US president had barely even “reinstalled his Diet Coke button on the Resolute Desk” when he doubled down on threats to take back the Panama Canal and strong-armed Colombia into accepting American deportation flights. Perhaps most tellingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first foreign trip is to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

This is partly about politics. Migration and drug trafficking are top priorities for MAGA-world. Picking a fight with Canada not only energises the culture warriors who see Justin Trudeau as “a poster child for wokeism”; it also reassures pro-Trump Hispanics that his agenda isn’t driven by anti-Latino xenophobia. In South America, where the Left is in retreat, Trump figures he’ll find common cause with less conventional leaders such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Yet what’s really underpinning this “hemispheric policy” is the belief that it will “shore up the foundations of American security”. With Europe waning, and China and Russia increasingly belligerent, Team Trump rightly believe that America must remain the dominant force in its own backyard – by carrot or by stick. Whatever happens on the trade front, Rubio’s trip to the region “won’t be his last”.

Most “latter-day Thatcherites” remember their heroine for ruthlessly cutting taxes, says Jim Pickard in the FT. But that’s a case of “selective memory”. Yes, Margaret Thatcher took an axe to income tax, cutting the top rate from 83% to 40% and the basic rate from 33% to 25%. But the Tory PM more than offset these cuts by whacking up VAT from 8% to 15% and hiking the national insurance rate from 6% to 9%. Tax expert Dan Neidle has calculated that over the course of her premiership Thatcher raised taxes by “almost exactly the same amount as the overall Blair/Brown rise from 1997 to 2010”.

Marianne Faithfull, who died last week aged 78, had a wicked sense of humour, says Mick Brown in The Daily Telegraph. When I asked the singer about all the people who thought she would die young, she told me a story. Lord Holland, she said, was lying unconscious on his deathbed in 1774 when the MP George Selwyn paid him a visit. This prompted much consternation among Lord Holland’s family, because Selwyn was a well-known necrophiliac. As they were discussing whether he should be allowed into the bedchamber, Lord Holland suddenly piped up from his bed. “If I am alive, I shall be very pleased to see him. And if I am dead, he will be very pleased to see me.”

Hapless victim or “co-conspirator”?

There was something “chilling” about Bianca Censori’s red carpet stunt at the Grammys on Sunday, says Olivia Petter in The Independent. After her husband, Kanye West, whispered something in her ear, the Australian model dropped her coat to reveal a “completely transparent” dress. This is the latest in a series of “sartorial stunts” the couple have performed, all of which, notably, involve her almost naked and him “completely covered up”. And it has increased speculation that the 30-year-old is “being controlled” by her husband. We rarely hear from Censori herself, who always appears like a mannequin beside West, “standing tall and silent”. Whichever way you look at it, this is a young woman who is increasingly known for nothing except her husband and her body. “I don’t think it gets more dystopian than that.”

I’m not sure I buy the “Bianca the victim, Kanye the monster” narrative, says Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. It’s surely just as possible that Censori is a “willing partner” in all this. Years before she started dating West, she did a photoshoot in a stocking dress made from a similar see-through material with little underneath. And she’s no “star-struck ingénue”: she went to a Baptist grammar school in Australia before getting a master’s degree in architecture and then setting up her own jewellery brand. (She started dating West after joining Yeezy, his brand collaboration with Adidas.) My suspicion is that Censori, a savvy businesswoman in her own right, is less “hapless muse” and more “co-conspirator” – and that the pair are playing carefully choreographed parts to shock the world “for fun, for thrills and for millions”.

Digital cameras are having a renaissance, says Nikkei Asia. Global shipments of the standalone snappers rose by 10% in 2024, after seven years of decline. Analysts say the revival is being driven by Gen Z users, who think their smartphone cameras aren’t good enough for the pictures they want to post on social media.

O2 has released recordings of its “AI granny”, Daisy, a talking chatbot designed to keep scammers on the line – and therefore away from real people – for as long as possible. In one call, the elderly-voiced bot tells a fraudster: “I see a triangle icon, but I’m not sure if it’s the right one – it could be a slice of pie,” before adding: “Do you have any lovely pastries in your area? I do adore a good scone.” When another hacker tries to get her to download the Google Play Store, she says: “Dear, did you say pastry?” She then moans that her screen has “gone black like the night sky”. Listen here.

It’s Rupert Murdoch, says Axios, sitting on a little chair in the Oval Office while Donald Trump signs executive orders and chats with the press alongside his proposed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Trump described the 93-year-old media mogul as a “legend in business”, but said he was “going to have to talk to him” about an editorial in The Wall Street Journal – one of Murdoch’s many newspapers – calling tariffs against Mexico and Canada “the dumbest trade war in history”.