The US and Iran agreed a two-week ceasefire deal last night that will see the Strait of Hormuz temporarily re-opened. Donald Trump, who had threatened to destroy “a whole civilisation” if Tehran didn’t re-open the waterway before his 8pm deadline, said a 10-point plan submitted by Iran was a “workable basis” for negotiations on a permanent agreement. Israel said the ceasefire didn’t include Lebanon and has continued to target Hezbollah today. The announcement triggered a plunge in oil prices and a surge in stock markets, with Brent crude down 13% to under $95 a barrel and European stocks up almost 4%. Keir Starmer is heading to the Gulf today to discuss the agreement with regional leaders. Nasa has released images from the Artemis II mission showing views of the far side of the moon that had never been seen before by human eyes. A photo of “Earthset” (below) captures our planet slipping behind the lunar surface, showing the “terminator line” where daylight meets darkness. Browse the pictures here.

The Iran ceasefire deal looks, on the surface, to be a vindication of Donald Trump’s long-held belief that his real estate negotiating tactics work in geopolitics as well, says David Sanger in The New York Times. By escalating his rhetoric to “astronomical levels” – threatening that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” – he found the diplomatic off-ramp he had been seeking for weeks. And this is certainly a “tactical victory”, which should get oil, fertiliser and other crucial products flowing again, calming markets that feared a global energy shock. But as always, the devil is in the detail.

Tehran hasn’t actually ceded control of the Strait of Hormuz – it has said vessels can pass through via “co-ordination with Iran’s armed forces”. That, clearly, was not the case before the war. The country’s theocratic government remains in place, albeit “under new management”. So too its nuclear stockpile, including the 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade material that was supposedly the casus belli of the entire conflict. And the hard part is still to come: trying to forge a final agreement to end the war. The gap between what Iran wants from a deal and the US view is so wide it’s hard to imagine a settlement in two years, let alone two weeks. And if Trump fails to get the Iranians to give up those 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, he’ll have accomplished less with his “billion-dollar-a-day-war” than Barack Obama managed with his 2015 nuclear deal – the deal Trump tore up during his first term. This ceasefire is obviously to be welcomed. But it resolves “none of the fundamental issues that led to the war”.

To The Times:

I was interested to read David Scowcroft’s letter about how much he and his wife are enjoying sex in their eighties. My wife and I are both in our eighties and when she recently asked if I’d like to go upstairs to have sex I replied that she’d have to choose one or the other as I couldn’t manage both.

Mike Flint
Burton, Dorset

American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson has won a prestigious 120-metre race in Australia despite starting 10 metres behind some of her rivals, says The Daily Telegraph. The Stawell Gift takes place around 145 miles west of Melbourne and has a staggered start based on athletes’ past race times and form. Richardson, who won silver in the 100m at the 2024 Paris Olympics, started with the largest possible distance disadvantage but edged ahead after the 90m mark to claim the 40,000 Australian dollar (£21,000) prize. Click here to watch the race.

If you want something to make your blood boil, says Ameer Kotecha in The Spectator, consider the case of Walker Smith. The 54-year-old, who has worked as a Waitrose shop assistant for 17 years, confronted a thief at the Clapham Junction store trying to fill a bag with £13 Lindt chocolate eggs. The bag split and the shoplifter – a “repeat offender” – got away, prompting Smith to fling a piece of chocolate at some trolleys in frustration. A few days later, despite apologising, he was sacked and “led out via the back door”. Smith acknowledges that he had been told not to approach shoplifters because they might be dangerous, but come on. He was exhibiting the sort of “personal responsibility and gumption” that deserves praise, not punishment.

If only this were an isolated case. We now live in a country where “steaks come in cages and bars of Dairy Milk carry anti-theft protection tags”. Shoplifting in England and Wales in the 12 months to March 2025 was up 20% on the previous year. Many of those responsible don’t even bother covering their faces anymore. And who can blame them? Pinching items with a value of under £200 has been effectively decriminalised, so there’s only a tiny chance of arrest or conviction. Security guards are often told not to intervene, in case of liability. It’s easy to dismiss all this as “fake news peddled by right-wing culture warriors”. That was certainly my father’s attitude – until he watched two men at his local Waitrose stuff a couple of large laundry bags with premium spirits, as the security guard just stood there filming them. It’s demoralising. You end up asking yourself: “What’s the point?”

Freefall 95 is a bizarre but enjoyable retro-style game in which you play an air passenger having nightmares of being the sole survivor of a mid-air disaster. You earn coins during the dream sequences by performing tricks and stunts as you plummet towards the ground, then spend those coins back on the plane to buy useful items and try to work out what’s causing your aviation nightmares. Give it a go here.

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced yesterday that the newest generation of its large language model, Claude Mythos Preview, will be released to only a handful of top tech companies, including rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft. The reason, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, is that Mythos is so advanced it has identified vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems, which run power grids, military systems, hospitals, and so on. The hope is that this limited early release will enable tech firms and big infrastructure providers to rectify those vulnerabilities before bad actors get their hands on the technology. “Holy cow.”

It’s a cardigan worn by Ryan Gosling in the hit sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary, which has become a must-have for fans. There’s just one snag, says John Jurgensen in The Wall Street Journal: it was handmade from a customised mail-order pattern from the 1950s, so “if you want one, you have to knit it yourself”. Mary Maxim, the family-owned company responsible for the original design, has had more than a thousand orders for the knitting kits, while the former British Olympic diver and celebrity knitter Tom Daley created his own version over 30 hours. Order your kit for £67 here.