Thousands of women born in the 1950s should be given compensation because the government failed to tell them about changes to the state pension age, an official report has concluded. A parliamentary watchdog says so-called “Waspi” women, who were caught out when the threshold rose from 60 to 65, should be entitled to up to £2,950 each. An AI tool has spotted early signs of breast cancer that were missed by doctors, says BBC News. The technology analysed more than 10,000 NHS mammograms and successfully flagged all the cases the humans had spotted – as well as 11 they hadn’t. A Polish tree nicknamed “Heart of the Garden” has been crowned European Tree of the Year. The common beech in the University of Wrocław’s botanical garden pipped others including Weeping Beech of Bayeux in Normandy; Sardinia’s Olive Tree of Luras, thought to be up to 4,000 years old; and a sweet chestnut in Wrexham. For more top trees, click here.

Labour’s Thatcher tribute act

When news broke this week that shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was going to make a speech to city bigwigs promising to be as radical as Margaret Thatcher, says Phil Tinline in The New Statesman, “it was no surprise that cries of outrage followed”. There is no modern politician more lionised by the British right, or more loathed by the left. But it was a canny move. Reeves and Keir Starmer know that while the Corbynistas may howl, they have no other party to vote for, and that wavering, business-minded former Tories might be persuadable. And she did a fine job, promising to “fashion a new economic settlement”, just as Thatcher had done at the end of the grim 1970s. She vowed to “drive innovation” and “mobilise investment” to foster much-needed growth, while putting the economic security of ordinary working people first. The only question now is whether she can muster “something of Thatcher’s steel”.

Sorry, but is anyone listening to what she’s actually saying, asks John Rentoul in The Independent. It’s nonsense – a “jumble of contradictory signalling” that conceals “thin policies” and a “desperate attempt to play it safe”. This is the sort of “presentational trick” you can only get away with when your party is 20 points ahead in the polls, and when even the Tory press is “looking forward to a change of government”. If the two parties were neck and neck, perhaps more commentators would be asking whether Reeves’s trademark “securonomics” means anything. The central theme of her lecture – boosting the economy – amounted to little more than a Liz Truss-style “dash for growth”, hopefully without the market meltdown. Could it be that her “blizzard of words and channelling Maggie” are ways of hiding the fact that she has no real plan?

The US has asked the aerospace firm Northrup Grumman to see if it can figure out how to build a railway on the moon, says Quartz. The idea, dreamt up by the government’s cutting-edge tech department Darpa, is to kick-start the transport infrastructure needed to create a “lunar economy”, which the consultancy PwC believes could be worth $170bn by 2040. Separately, Japanese researchers have proposed an interplanetary transport system called the Hexatrack, which would allow passengers to take a bullet train to the moon, though that’s rather more speculative.

Jianzi is a traditional Chinese sport similar to badminton, but with a heavily weighted shuttlecock and no rackets. Players have to get the projectile back over the net and into the court using any part of their body – except their hands. Watch a longer clip here.

The tragedy of Gaza: both sides are being “rational”

Many people see the seemingly intractable differences between the Israelis and the Palestinians as “irrational”, says Yuval Noah Harari in the FT. In fact, they’re anything but. For the Palestinians, the “founding event” of their modern identity is the 1948 Nakba, when the nascent state of Israel drove 750,000 of their people out of their ancestral homes. In the decades since, Palestinians have suffered “repeated massacres and expulsions” at the hands of Israel and other regional powers. Their perfectly rational fear is that, were it not for the international community, Israel would seek to “expel most or all of them” and establish a Jewish-only country. Numerous politicians and parties, including Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, have openly talked of creating “Greater Israel” – the expansion of settlements in the West Bank is viewed as part of this “abiding wish”.

For the Israelis, of course, the founding event of their modern identity was the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. In 1948, the Palestinians and their Arab allies sought to “annihilate” their new country; when those and subsequent efforts failed (in 1956 and 1967), Arab nations took revenge by driving 800,000 Jews out of their ancestral homes in countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Syria. “At least half of Israeli Jews are the descendants of these Middle Eastern refugees.” The Israelis’ perfectly rational fear is that the Palestinians would happily kill or expel them all – as their leaders have repeatedly advocated. The two sides, in short, both have good reason to believe that the other lot are an “existential threat”. Their decades-long impasse is the result not of “unjustified paranoia”, but of “a sound analysis of the situation”.

The #noshampoo movement – in which people indefinitely stop washing their hair with soap – is taking off on TikTok, especially among teenage boys. Good on them, says Matthew Parris in The Times. If you stop shampooing and start rinsing your hair thoroughly with warm water once a day, it will “grease up for a couple of weeks” before re-establishing the natural balance found in every other mammal “from poodles to rabbits to polar bears”. I haven’t washed my hair in 30 years and I’m “fluffy as a kitten” – at 74, my hair is my best feature.

It’s the largest golden nugget ever discovered in England, says The Guardian. The treasure was unearthed in the Shropshire Hills last year by veteran detectorist Richard Brock. It was a particularly serendipitous discovery: the 67-year-old had turned up to the organised expedition an hour late, and was using an older, faulty metal detector because his normal kit wasn’t working. The so-called “Hiro’s Nugget” weighs 64.8g, smashing the previous record of 54g, and is expected to fetch at least £30,000 at auction.