The Week 1546

Trump’s strikes on Iran: a “spectacular success”? “He came, he bombed, he ended the war.” That’s how Donald Trump would sum up the events of the past week, said The Economist, but the reality was a little more complicated. Last Saturday, 48 hours after giving Iran a two-week deadline, the US president launched the largest-ever strike by B-2 stealth bombers. Seven of the planes undertook a 37-hour surprise mission during which they dropped 14 bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump hailed the operation as a “spectacular military success”, saying the bombs had “totally obliterated” the sites. The next day, in what was seen as a token response, Iran fired 14 missiles at a US base in Qatar. All but one of the missiles were intercepted and there were no…

The world’s biggest digital camera telescope has started to capture extraordinary images of the cosmos, including of new stars forming in clouds of gas thousands of light years away. These images were the result of ten hours of test runs. Over the next ten years, the telescope, at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, will repeatedly scan the entire southern sky, to create – with its 3,200 megapixel camera – an Ultra HD film of the universe called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Hundreds of turtle doves are being released across the country this summer in an effort to save the species from extinction in England, reports The Guardian. Owing partly to habitat loss, numbers of the birds, which mate for life, have plummeted 98% since the…

As bombs rained down on Iran last week, said Denis Staunton in The Irish Times, one question hung in the air: where were the regime’s “powerful friends”? China and Russia are meant to be Tehran’s close allies. Both have bilateral agreements in place with the Islamic Republic. Moscow’s contains provision for “joint military exercises and intelligence sharing”; and Beijing’s includes a promise to invest $400bn in Iran’s economy over 25 years. But for all that, neither of those allies was anywhere to be seen as Iran was battered by the brutal force of the American and Israeli militaries. Russia and Iran never were “truly allies”, said Mark Galeotti in The Spectator – more like “frenemies”, with overlapping interests and shared antagonists. For almost a decade, they worked together to prop…

Controversy of the week The assisted dying bill “It is done,” said The Times. “In perhaps the most consequential legislation so far this century, the relationship between the state and the individual has now been fundamentally altered.” The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which will allow doctors to administer fatal drugs on request to adults with a terminal diagnosis of six months or less, passed the Commons by 314 to 291 votes last Friday. Introduced by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, it is a “flawed and dangerous” bill that is hazy in principle – terminal diagnoses are often proved wrong – and lacks necessary safeguards: an amendment refusing the “service” to those who fear being “a burden” was rejected. Britain is “a less civilised country today”, said The Daily…

British adults now spend more time on their mobile phones than watching TV. The gap between the two had been steadily decreasing for years, but according to The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, watching telly had retained the edge until this year. Its survey revealed that adults use their phones for three hours and 21 minutes a day, on average, up from 1 hour and 17 minutes ten years ago. They watch TV for three hours and 16 minutes a day – seven minutes less than in 2015. Supermarkets are reporting soaring sales of “functional” health drinks, as younger consumers swap alcohol and caffeine for matcha tea, kefir, mushroom “shots” and kombucha. Ocado says its sales of such drinks are up 54% year on year.…

The Uffizi Gallery, after a visitor posing for a photo tore a hole in a 17th century painting of a Medici prince. The Italian man wanted to create an amusing image of himself striking the same pose as the prince; but as he stepped back, he stumbled over a low barrier and put his hand through the canvas. Uffizi director Simone Verde said that tourists coming to the gallery in Florence to create social media content were a growing “problem”. Shoot-’em-up video games, with news that the most popular game on the Roblox platform, with 17 million active players globally, is about gardening. Subscribers to Grow a Garden buy seeds and watch them grow on a little virtual plot of previously barren land. About a third of players are believed…