If POTUS can really bomb peace, stability and women’s rights into the Middle East, I’ll take my hat off to him. Judging by his role in Gaza, I won’t hold my breath

Donald Trump says Keir Starmer has damaged the special relationship by not helping him more in the US-Israel war on Iran. But you have to remember that when you do help, Trump pretends you didn’t anyway, and also pisses on your war dead. Still, what could be more enticing than the Americans trying to sell you a timeshare on a war in the Middle East?

And so to Iran. “War is the realm of uncertainty,” said Carl von Clausewitz, who – and not to be a bitch – I still think of as a more impressive military theorist than Pete Hegseth. Certainly, Carl had fewer Crusades tattoos than the US defence secretary. Hegseth is 100% certain about all his nailed-down positions, even the ones in apparent conflict with each other. And it feels like a great sign that he, Marco Rubio and JD Vance already seem to have different rationales for why this war was launched. This is an administration that came to power on an explicit “no more wars” ticket – but look, as Pete keeps saying, this isn’t a regime-change war. If that seems confusing, given he first said it about 10 minutes after US-Israeli strikes had just cratered the ayatollah’s compound, Hegseth has since been on hand to scoff that what’s going down in Iran is “no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise”.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

It’s easy to let your credit card balance mount up – and hard to admit you have a problem. But help is at hand. We talk to four people who worked their way back into the black

Abbie Marton Bell, a National Debtline adviser, is often the first person her clients will speak to about their debt, after years of carrying the weight of their financial worries alone. Most of the time, they haven’t even told their partner or family, she says, and “you can literally hear the relief in their voice”.

Debt carries a lot of shame, but it’s more common than people might think. In the UK, 84% of adults had some form of credit or loan in the year leading up to May 2024. The average household holds about £2,700 in credit card debt, and it’s only getting worse. Borrowing has been rising at its fastest rate for almost two years, with those hit hardest by the cost of living crisis increasingly using credit to pay for essentials.

As Angela Rippon’s Let’s Dance campaign aims to get the nation moving this week, older dancers share how they overcame nerves to relish the benefits

In retirement, Suzanne Tarlin heard herself saying: “I need to move.” The former solicitor, then 71, learned from a friend about senior ballet and contemporary dance classes at a community centre and decided to give it a try. “Terrifying,” the Londoner remembers, 10 years on. “But the teachers who do this stuff are incredibly patient and good-humoured. People come with all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. The classes are clearly important because some people go week after week, sometimes twice a week.”

Tarlin went on to do senior contemporary classes at Rambert, then added over-60s classes at the Place, home to London Contemporary Dance School, and sessions in German tanztheater at Morley College for adult education. She also signed up for creative workshops and performance groups, especially enjoying the intergenerational projects – even performing in a large-scale public event with dancers from Rambert and the Ballet National de Marseille at the Southbank Centre (she commandeered an industrial road cleaner in one scene and slid off the roof of a beat-up limousine at the finale). At the Place, she crawled around the stage in a costume made of cables. Growing old gracefully has clearly not been a dance goal. “I suppose the dreaded word is ‘wafting’,” she says. “You know, being a bit pretty, drifting around waving a scarf or something.”

With more than 350 establishments closing last year, social media accounts such as Proper Boozers and London Dead Pubs have rallied to fight their sticky-carpeted corner – and bring the ‘old-man pub’ a new clientele

The Calthorpe Arms on Gray’s Inn Road is a fairly atypical central London pub. With patterned red carpets, brass fittings, leather bar stools, a pool table and Christmas tinsel still hanging in early February, it feels very much a “local”, although on a Thursday evening it’s busy with the post-work crowd.

It’s the fifth time Niall Walsh, who works nearby and runs the Proper Boozers Instagram account, has visited in recent months. “It’s just off the beaten track, but easy to get to,” Walsh says over a pint of Harvey’s. “You can get a real, authentic pub experience.”

He lasted just 11 days as White House communications director, before being fired from the Trump administration. The financier and broadcaster discusses working for the president – and becoming his biggest critic

‘If somebody walks into your office and says they’re friends with Donald Trump, they’re either exaggerating the relationship, or they don’t understand the relationship,” says Anthony Scaramucci. “Because nobody is friends with Donald. You’re a transaction in this guy’s field of vision.”

Scaramucci should know. He has been non-friends with Trump for more than 30 years, though these days he’s more an outright enemy. Just as the attention-devouring president once stalked Hillary Clinton on the debate stage, Trump looms large in Scaramucci’s story. The two men seem to haunt each other. When we meet in London during a stopover in his hectic schedule, the conversation rarely drifts away from Trump for more than a few minutes. Conversely, the 62-year-old financier and broadcaster has become one of Trump’s most vocal and penetrating critics. “We fight like New Yorkers,” Scaramucci says. “He doesn’t really come back at me, because he knows I’m going to come back at him.” Unlike Trump’s presumptive friends, Scaramucci does understand Trump, he claims. “There’s something called ‘Trump derangement syndrome’; I think I have ‘Trump reality syndrome’. I know what he is, I know what he does, I know what he’s capable of and I know the danger of him.”

I was a newcomer, negotiating all of usual classroom difficulties for the first time. Throwing AI into the mix felt like downing a coffee in the middle of a panic attack

Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English – to help young people become stronger readers, writers and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working as a freelance writer and as a novelist, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But the further I progressed in my training, the more uncertain I felt. One particular question taunted me for my lack of an answer. What to do about artificial intelligence?

The immediate dilemma: what does it mean for English instruction that all pupils now have access to free online chatbots that can produce fluid, fairly complex prose on demand? This question sits atop a teetering pile of timeless pedagogical quandaries: What are we actually trying to do in school? How should we go about doing it? How do we know if we’ve succeeded? I was a newcomer, negotiating all of this for the first time. Throwing AI into the mix felt like downing a coffee in the middle of a panic attack.

Israeli airforce attacking cities simultaneously with a ‘wave of extensive strikes’ as soldiers are deployed on the ground in southern Lebanon

• US strikes on Iran triggered by Israel’s plan to launch attack, Rubio says

• Anger with Hezbollah boils as war returns to weary Beirut

US secretary of state Marco Rubio has claimed the US attacked Iran after learning that Israel was going to strike, which would have meant retaliation against US forces.

“We knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he told reporters

The Air Force is now attacking Tehran and Beirut simultaneously

The Air Force has now begun a wave of extensive strikes against the Iranian terror regime and the Hezbollah terror organization.

Defence sources say deployment of HMS Duncan to better protect base on Mediterranean island is under discussion

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Middle East crisis – live updates

John Healey, the defence secretary, is considering sending a Royal Navy destroyer to Cyprus to help defend British bases there after several apparently hostile drones targeted RAF Akrotiri on the island.

Defence sources said a deployment of HMS Duncan, currently in Portsmouth, was under discussion as a way to better protect the base in Cyprus – though another said it was possible one of two other destroyers might be sent as an alternative.

US president says ‘relationship is not what it was’ after PM defends decision not to allow use of British bases

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• US-Israel war on Iran: what we know on day four

Donald Trump has criticised Keir Starmer again over the UK’s refusal to aid the offensive strikes on Iran, saying the “relationship is obviously not what it was”.

Starmer had issued his strongest rebuke yet of Trump’s action in Iran, saying the UK did not believe in “regime change from the skies” and defended his decision not to allow the use of British bases to conduct the strikes.

A strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh school during the US-Israeli bombing campaign killed up to 168 people. The Guardian has pieced together the incident and its aftermath using verified footage and images from the site

Above the pastel murals of trees, paintbrushes, crayons and microscopes, black smoke rises. The glass windows of the school have been blown out by the force of the blast, and its curtains hang shredded from the frames.

Against one burned-out wall, the remains of a playground lie scattered: a red plastic slide, a jumble of child-sized chairs. On an overturned bookshelf a pair of pink plastic sandals have been neatly placed, now covered in dust from the blast.