Israel has cut the quantity of aid allowed into Gaza by half, accusing Hamas of being slow to release the remains of the dead hostages. The terror group handed back four more bodies last night – one of which Israel says is not that of a hostage – leaving 21 unaccounted for. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has warned that if Hamas don’t disarm, “we will disarm them”. Vets in the UK could be forced to publish price lists and cap prescription costs at £16, following a two-year inquiry by the competitions watchdog. The investigation found that vet prices rose at nearly twice the rate of inflation over a seven-year period, and concluded that the £6.3bn market was “not fit” for purpose and should be modernised. Wim van den Heever has been awarded Wildlife Photographer of the Year for his shot of a brown hyena standing beside an abandoned diamond mining settlement in Namibia. It took the South African ten years to track down the elusive animal, which he managed to photograph after spotting fresh tracks in the ghost town of Kolmanskop. Click here to see other winners.

Hamas aren’t finished – and nor are Israel’s settlers

If the past is any guide, says Matthew Levitt in Foreign Affairs, Hamas will fight tooth and nail to oppose the prospect of peace. In the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords, senior Hamas leaders in the US decided to woo Iran, which went on to provide the group with tens of millions of dollars, weapons and training. Today, a weakened Tehran is once again helping Hamas tool up to stay in the fight. Weapons are being stockpiled in Sudan for future smuggling into Gaza, and arms continue to reach terrorists in the West Bank (including Hamas). Just days before the ceasefire, Israeli security forces intercepted a large shipment of weapons, including Claymore mines, drones and anti-tank rockets. Hamas, in other words, is not giving up without a fight.

The other major impediment is on the Israeli side, says Gilles Paris in Le Monde, specifically the “most aggressive form of religious Zionism”. This is the ideology that has, since 1967, been hell-bent on settling the West Bank and burying any chance of a two-state solution. The once-niche subsection of Israeli society has been steadily – and intentionally – infiltrating the major institutions of state for years. One notable coup is the recent appointment of former general David Zini, who is closely aligned with the settler movement, as the head of the country’s Shin Bet security force; another is the continued political success of the Jewish supremacist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. There are also special military programmes in the West Bank preparing young settlers to advance swiftly in the army, with a view to steadily shifting the ideological make-up of the officer corps, elite combat units and high command. These ideologues, who are pursuing a “greater Israel” at any cost and want to replace the country’s democracy with a theocracy, are a threat to everyone.

A new book claims Margaret Thatcher had two extramarital affairs, says Peter Chappell in The Times. The first – according to Tina Gaudoin’s The Incidental Feminist – was early in her political career, and the second is said to have been with the handsome but not-terribly-bright MP Humphrey Atkins. “The joke about Atkins,” one MP told Gaudoin, “was that for someone who was not very good, he kept getting promoted. Now why was that?” There was also a rumoured “extracurricular friendship” between Thatcher and her head of PR Lord Bell. “One of her favourite things,” Gaudoin claims, was when, during dinners, Bell would put his hand on her leg. “And other stuff.”

Stradivarius violins aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, says Thomas Laqueur in the London Review of Books. In a famous 2012 experiment in Paris, researchers asked 10 world-class violinists to play with six old instruments, five of which were made by Stradivari, and six high-class modern ones. In the players’ list of favourites, new beat old by three to two, and by far the most popular instrument was a new one. In a similar match-up for cellos in 1990, an audience of 140 musicians listened to a blindfolded colleague playing six new instruments and six old ones. The top-ranked cello was an old one; the second, third, fourth and fifth were new instruments.

What Trump’s really up to in Venezuela

The Norwegian Nobel committee chose well, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times, when they awarded this year’s peace prize to María Corina Machado, the 58-year-old Venezuelan opposition leader now in hiding from the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro. In doing so, they condemned that brutal regime and its “26-year record of ruin”, carried out in the name of “Bolivarian” socialism with the credulous support of many Western progressives. For more than 20 years, Machado has been agitating for democratic rights for Venezuelans, first under Hugo Chávez, who repeatedly charged her with treason, and then his successor Maduro, who she was forced to flee in 2024, fearing for her life.

The catastrophe of “Chavismo” is now unmistakable in skyrocketing murder rates, widespread hunger and starvation, millions of ordinary people fleeing the country and leaders accused of enriching themselves through drug trafficking. But everything that has been tried so far has failed. Elections have been stolen; sanctions and bounties have been ineffective. Machado’s Nobel will bring some much-needed attention, but recent winners from Russia and Iran can attest this is liable to be “short-lived and slight”. That leaves “regime change”. This seems to be the real aim of Trump’s recent gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean – “induce enough fear and the bad guys might run”. Machado agrees. Maduro, she told the BBC last week, “won’t go unless he realises that there is a credible threat” (and can be persuaded to take the Bashar al-Assad option of luxury exile in a friendly state, probably Cuba). Whatever you think of the US president’s chances of winning the Nobel next year, Machado was right to dedicate her prize to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support”.

💣🧐 We owe the existence of the Nobel Prize to a “mistakenly published obituary”, says Nikita Mohta in The Indian Express. When Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludwig died in 1888, Le Figaro accidentally published its obituary for Alfred, whose major achievement was inventing dynamite. After reading the write-up – which described him as a war profiteer and “merchant of death” – Alfred promptly changed his will, leaving 97% of his considerable fortune to endow international prizes for extraordinary achievements in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace.

John Gurdon, who has died aged 92, never showed much promise as a scientist – at least not at school, says The Daily Telegraph. He came 250th out of 250 in biology at Eton, earning a scathing report. “I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist,” his teacher wrote. “On his present showing this is quite ridiculous.” Undeterred, Gurdon took private lessons, secured a place to study zoology at Oxford, and in 1962 made a breakthrough in stem-cell research that won him a Nobel Prize half a century later. He kept the 1949 report card framed on the wall of his lab.

Here’s a fun trivia question, says Brian Klaas on Substack: what’s the difference between a hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone? “The answer: there is none.” The different names just refer to where they happen – hurricanes in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Northeast Pacific, typhoons in the Northwest Pacific, and cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.

It’s a green turtle, says Helen Briggs on BBC News, which has been brought back from the brink of extinction in what scientists are calling a “major conservation victory”. The delicious marine reptile was once hunted extensively for turtle soup, for its eggs as a delicacy and for its decorative shell. Conservationists say the decades-long effort to protect eggs and hatchlings on beaches, and to minimise accidental capture in fishing nets, should be considered a “cause for optimism” about our ability to reverse environmental harms.