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”.