Monday

The one upside to a rolling international crisis is that it can give backroom people a rare chance to shine. Witness, this week, the breakout stars of the Iranian diplomatic corps, who from two different diplomatic missions managed to poke fun at Donald Trump while maintaining the base-level decorum that so eludes the American president.

In Pakistan, the Iranian ambassador, Reza Amiri Moghadam, responded to questions about the ongoing blockade of the strait of Hormuz by the US with an elegant and irony-laden reference to Jane Austen. “It’s a truth universally acknowledged,” said the ambassador, in a reference that was almost certainly lost on his antagonist in Washington, “that a single country in possession of a large civilisation, will not negotiate under threat and force.” Oh, well played, sir!

Meanwhile, from the Iranian embassy in Ghana, a steady stream of trolling social media posts designed to turn Trump’s mockery around and send it back at him. After the US president’s recent spat with the pope, an excitable social media manager at the Iranian mission to Ghana posted a satirical note addressed to, “Dear Italy,” in which it offered itself as a replacement friend for the US.

“Your PM just defended [the] Pope and lost an ally in Washington, the Commander in Grief, yet the most ‘powerfool’ man on earth,” ran the post, which made up in rough energy for what it lacked in polish. “We’d like to apply for the vacancy,” it went on, and while some of the material could do with a tune-up, the subsequent list of Iran’s qualifications as a premium ally, including “7,000 years of civilisation, a shared love of poetry, architecture, and food that takes longer to prepare than Trump’s attention span” – absolutely landed.

There was also a decent gag about Iranian versus Italian ice-cream, and the onslaught continued this week with a reference to Trump, after his endless reversals on Truth Social, as “a one-man WhatsApp chat group”. Solid stuff and let’s not spoil the gesture with any pettiness about the reality of life under a theocratic authoritarian regime.

Tuesday

It’s finally hot(tish) out and the sun is shining, so it’s time to have our annual conversation about coffee. Do you enjoy an iced beverage which, after 10 minutes in your sweaty little hand, primarily consists of melt water? Do you enjoy a cup filled almost entirely with ice, so that you are paying approximately 40p per sip? As with one’s position on clowns or pineapple on pizza, there is no middle ground in this debate; you either despise iced coffee or are a wrong-headed fool, and I refer you for reference to a piece published last week on the website Gothamist, in which the writer James Ramsay went out into Manhattan in search of other summer hot coffee drinkers.

His position: that ice coffee neither refreshes, like a proper cold drink, nor energises, like real coffee. He shared with us the detail that cold drinks now make up 75% of all sales in Starbucks, a fact that, when we turn to look back on this period, might turn out to be the canary in the coalmine of where it all started to go wrong. Most of those cold drinks aren’t coffee, of course, but the iced matchas and strawberry refreshers that push up towards £7 a cup and fall into a category with what Larry David once referred to as “vanilla bullshit” drinks. So before you order it on ice, think about that.

Wednesday

Nike, the sportswear behemoth, would like those of us who go for a run and end up walking to, if not hate ourselves, exactly, then at least feel slightly bad about our underperformance. Since the launch of a new slogan in Boston timed to coincide with the city’s marathon – “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated” – a sizeable palaver has kicked off from runners who like to take a break, or walkers who occasionally break into a run, or anyone whose fitness level is such that they feel “shamed” by the “elitist” slogan.

This week, Nike pulled the ad and replaced it with the more inclusive, “Movement is what matters”. This is a better sell, to my mind, but as ever with this kind of dispute one is left with an impression of a wild overreaction, with participants in running clubs thousands of miles away from Boston claiming to feel undermined and embarrassed by Nike’s slogan. Ignoring it is, apparently, not an option, anyway Just Do It (But Only If You Feel Like It; Otherwise Don’t Worry).

Thursday

The fifth and final season of the HBO hit show, Hacks, is under way and the best thing about it is Robby Hoffman. While the two leads limp towards the finish, the breakout star of the show since the previous season has been the actor and standup who you may or may not have been obsessively watching on YouTube, and who came to prominence a few years ago in the underrated FX show Dying for Sex.

The 36-year-old Hoffman, who grew up the seventh of 10 siblings in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, first in Brooklyn, then in Canada, has the flat delivery of an earlier generation of comics and I would urge you to Google her routines hingeing on the words “no backsies”, and also “hard towel”. That the rest of this season of Hacks is as flat as a pancake is sad, but it’s been a good run and all good things etc, and we wait with excitement to see what Hoffman does next.

Friday

Madonna’s corset, at the time of writing, remains unrecovered, after the singer lost her wardrobe at Coachella off the back of a golf buggy. The vintage costumes were being transported from the stage to the car park after Madonna’s set with Sabrina Carpenter and included “archival” pieces that the singer is so keen to get back she launched an online appeal urging anyone with information to email her team.

While this definitely won’t solicit thousands of weird and unrelated messages to the email address she shared, I find myself thinking more about whoever was in charge of driving that golf cart. I very much hope they enjoy their time off and are familiar with how to launch a GoFundMe to make up for the sudden loss of income.

Jeffrey Epstein housed some of his alleged abuse victims in flats in London after police in the UK decided against investigating him, according to reports.

The BBC said it had uncovered evidence of four flats in Kensington and Chelsea in receipts, emails and bank records contained within the Epstein files. Six women who stayed in the properties have since accused the late financier of sexually abusing them, the broadcaster said.

Some of the women – including some from Russia and eastern Europe – were brought to the UK after the Metropolitan police decided not to investigate Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 allegation that she had been a victim of international trafficking to London, the BBC said. Giuffre was one of Epstein’s most high-profile accusers, alleging the convicted child sex offender abused and trafficked her.

She claimed in a 2021 US lawsuit that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor had sex with her at a home in London in 2001 when she was 17 after she had been trafficked by Epstein. Mountbatten Windsor has denied the allegations.

The BBC reported various details from the files dated around 2018 and 2019 – after Giuffre’s allegation – that show Epstein corresponding with women housed in flats in affluent areas of London.

In some of the exchanges seen by the broadcaster, Epstein uses aggressive language after the women apparently complained of the conditions. In one message, he reportedly swears at one woman, calls her “rude” and accuses her of “disgusting behaviour”, saying she was a “brat who has yet to accept responsibility”.

Another message seen by the BBC reveals pictures of “cute” models sent to Epstein by one of the women in London. Epstein also reportedly paid for at least five women – many of whom were in the UK on student visas – to study in London.

Millions of documents, images, videos and emails detailing the activities of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, have been released since December last year, including documents collected as evidence in the criminal cases against him and his associates.

The files were released after the US House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the Senate unanimously approved it, with Donald Trump signing the bill into law the next day.

The Met police have been contacted for comment.

In 2025, after a long and arduous journey in her attempts to gain Italian citizenship, including a pivotal genealogical research trip to a village in Calabria, US-born Sabrina Crawford was hoping to fulfil her lifelong dream of building a life in Italy as she edged towards the final hurdle of the bureaucratic process.

But her plans were scuppered when Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government enacted a law stopping access to Italian citizenship via distant ancestry. Since May last year, only those with a parent or grandparent who was an Italian citizen at birth, and who did not take on dual nationality, are eligible to apply.

Crawford, from the San Francisco Bay area, was waiting for one crucial document proving that her Italian great-grandfather had not become a US citizen before submitting her application when the new rules were announced out of the blue.

“It was as if the sky collapsed,” she said. “This horrible news really upended all of my plans, all of my hopes, all of my goals. It broke my heart.”

Crawford is now counting on Italy’s supreme court to deliver a favourable outcome to a legal challenge presented by two US families arguing that the law should only apply to those born after it was enacted. A supreme court panel is expected to make its decision in the coming weeks.

The legislation, which breaks with the longstanding tradition of welcoming the descendants of Italy’s huge global diaspora, was aimed at clamping down on those claiming tenuous links to the country in order to obtain a powerful Italian passport, and to clear the backlog in local councils and consulates, which for years have been overwhelmed by citizenship requests.

“We believe that granting citizenship is a serious matter and should be reserved for those with a genuine connection to our nation,” said Meloni shortly after the law was approved in parliament.

It appears to have stemmed from several contentious cases, including allegations in 2024 that the Italian consulate in Venezuela illegally granted citizenship to five members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia group and political party backed by Iran. The deputy prime minister, Antonio Tajani, also justified it by claiming that Black Friday-style discount deals were being offered on Italian citizenship in Brazil.

But the move has had serious consequences for thousands of legitimate requests, especially from the US, Brazil and Argentina, where millions of Italians emigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries to escape poverty.

In March, Italy’s constitutional court ruled that the law was valid, but the supreme court has the power to clarify its scope, said Marco Mellone, the lawyer representing the two US families in the case.

Mellone argues that the law should not apply retroactively and that his clients are invoking their rights enshrined in the legal principle of ius sanguinis, Latin for “right of blood”, which allows anyone who can prove ancestry after Italy’s formation in 1861 to seek citizenship.

“This is a crucial point, and the main reason we consider this law to be absolutely unconstitutional and unfair,” said Mellone. “It touches on a [citizenship] right at the time of birth and so it should not be applied retroactively.”

Citizenship has always been a thorny topic in Italy, and even though the number of children born in the country to immigrant parents has been rising sharply they are still denied birthright citizenship. A referendum last year on easing the rules failed because of low turnout.

Citing recent data from Eurostat forecasting that by the end of the century Italy’s population will fall to 44 million compared with roughly 59 million today, Mellone said neither of these obstacles to citizenship were helping the government tackle what Meloni has described as Italy’s “demographic winter”. “They say no to children born in Italy to immigrants and no to those born to Italian emigrants,” he said. “The demographic decline is dramatic. Who will be the Italian citizens of the future?”

Crawford, 50, who for several years lived and worked in Italy, albeit on temporary visas, started her citizenship procedure in 2018. She is Italian from her mother’s side but could not follow the maternal descent route through her consulate owing to an old law preventing Italian women born before 1 January 1948 from transmitting citizenship to their children. Instead, she had to trace an unbroken line of descent to her great-grandfather, who was born in the Calabrian village of Verbicaro.

That involved a trip to the village where, by a stroke of luck, a local priest and historian helped her dig through archives to confirm her ancestor’s name, which in turn enabled her to obtain his birth certificate. Many other bureaucratic hurdles ensued, but Crawford persevered.

If the supreme court ruling goes in her favour, she will be able to pursue her application through a court in Catanzaro, Calabria. “I hope there’s still a ray of hope for people like me who have invested so much time and energy into this,” she said, adding that she grew up surrounded by Italian relatives. “I always knew that I wanted to make my life in Italy.”

Jennifer Daley, a historian from Kansas whose case Mellone is also representing, has been through a similar ordeal over the past 10 years. “This has been a long journey, but I have hope that justice will prevail,” she said.