The White House has described plans for negotiations between Iran and the US as “fluid”, after reports that US diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff has held preliminary conversations with the regime’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. Witkoff is preparing to travel to Pakistan, which has offered to host talks, possibly accompanied by Vice President JD Vance. Menawhile, Israel says it is taking control of southern Lebanon as part of its efforts to destroy Hezbollah. Counter-terrorism police are investigating claims by a group thought to be linked to Iran that it was responsible for yesterday’s arson attack on ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer service in North London. Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (The Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand) previously claimed responsibility for attacks on Jewish sites in Belgium and the Netherlands earlier this month. The Northern Lights were visible across the UK last night, after a weekend of spectacular displays. The sun is now sending fewer blasts of energy towards Earth, reducing the likelihood of sightings tonight, but the Met Office says there is a chance of a “glancing blow”.

Western countries always attribute to their enemies extraordinary degrees of “cunning and farsightedness”, says Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic. So it has been in the war with Iran, which has been credited with thinking dozens of moves ahead and having a strategic patience “akin to the years of effort required to manufacture a Persian carpet”. Don’t fall for it. In reality, the regime has a half-century record of “consistent folly”. In the 1980s they picked repeated and unnecessary fights with the US, which responded by sinking Iranian vessels and destroying Iranian bases. During the so-called “tanker wars”, when the US Navy escorted convoys through the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic was “humiliated”.

No less self-defeating is Iran’s fight against Israel, the so-called “Little Satan” to America’s “Great Satan”. Tehran spent billions assembling a “crushing array of proxies” to terrorise the Jewish state. Today? Hamas has been ground down, Hezbollah shattered, the Assad regime in Syria ousted and the Houthis silenced, for now, by the US-Israeli attacks. The result has been “economic misery”: before the 1979 revolution, Israel’s GDP was a quarter of Iran’s; today, with a tenth of the population, it is larger. While the final outcome of the current conflict is unknowable, some results are clear. Iran’s air defences and navy have been obliterated, its ranks of senior leaders decimated, its military infrastructure and industry destroyed, its nuclear programme badly damaged, and its relations with Gulf neighbours perhaps permanently ruined. America deserves plenty of criticism for its own failings. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that Iran’s leaders are, strategically speaking, “idiots”.

One of the biggest obstacles to the US agreeing a peace deal with Iran will be finding someone to negotiate with, says the Institute for the Study of War. Hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp have expanded their influence in the regime since the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, especially with the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, still reportedly injured and unable to exercise full authority. So at the moment it’s unclear who, if anyone, is making final decisions about strategy – and therefore who has the authority to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The actor Chuck Norris, who died last week aged 86, was famous for his hard-man image, says The Times. Internet users used to swap satirical “facts” about the former martial arts champion – that, for example, he had once been bitten by a snake and “after 10 minutes of agony the snake had died”. But his reputation was well-earned. When two men tried to mug him in 1994, Dallas police arrived to find the pair with “broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly nearby”. Trying not to laugh, the cops asked the pair if they’d known who Norris was. “We knew,” they said. “We just figured all that stuff on TV was fake.”

The Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen said last week that he doesn’t believe in introspection, says Jemima Kelly in the FT. Which is a shame, given how often the billionaire’s firmly held beliefs are proven wrong. This is a man who went from devoted Democrat to Trump adviser, who bet big on something called Web3 (remember that?) and NFTs (remember them?), and who once described criticism of the metaverse – the shared virtual world that Mark Zuckerberg very briefly thought was the future – as “reality privilege”. Today, Andreessen can be found explaining to credulous podcast hosts that the very idea of the individual was invented only a few hundred years ago, and that it wasn’t until the early 20th century that we started to believe in guilt and self-criticism.

Even his criticism of introspection is wrong. “Great men of history”, he declared, never used to “sit around” being introspective. Is this cod-philosopher somehow unaware of Socrates’ dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living? Or that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which he frequently cites, is literally a journal of self-examination? The point of introspection, unlike mere navel-gazing, is that it helps liberate us from repetitive, negative thoughts, by consciously working out how they got there in the first place. But Andreessen’s real sin is not his factual wrongness, it’s that he is so confident about it. We seem to have swallowed the lie that wealth, influence and confidence can be equated to wisdom. Silicon Valley tech bros aren’t sages. They’re enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb, and trying to make sure we never stop scrolling for long enough to reflect on why we’re wasting our lives on their platforms.

Old mariners’ stories about whales ramming ships – one of which inspired Moby-Dick – have long been treated with scepticism, says Jake Currie in Nautilus. No longer. Thanks to new drone cameras, researchers have for the first time documented sperm whales around the Azores headbutting each other at high speed. In one case, the force of the impact was estimated at around 200 kilonewtons, apparently enough to lend credibility to those old seamen’s tales.

China’s ambassadors used to have an innovative way of identifying foreign spies, says Jeremy Dicker in International Intrigue. They would invite over an entire Western embassy for a slap-up lunch, and then make a big show of introducing their own team one by one, explaining in “great and flowery detail” what each diplomat did. The hope, of course, was that their counterpart would feel obliged to follow suit for his or her colleagues – skipping or stumbling over anyone who was a spy working under diplomatic cover. The correct response, as any smart ambassador knows, is simply: “Thanks, we’re pleased to be here, pass the xiaolongbao.”

It’s England’s largest rhododendron, says The Daily Telegraph, which is now as wide as 10 double-decker buses. The red and pink colossus was planted 120 years ago in the grounds of what is now South Lodge Hotel in Horsham, West Sussex. Thanks to a warm, wet winter, which head gardener Paul Collins says has led to “thick growth all the way round”, the so-called “bushzilla” is a whopping 80ft wide, 125ft long and almost 40ft high. “Out of all the plants in the grounds that we have, we do the least to it,” says Collins. “We just let it go.”