Israel has accused the UK government of “outrageous lies” and ordered the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem after Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband introduced a trade ban on Israeli settlers, saying they were guilty of ethnic cleansing. Ministers are also set to further restrict the sale of arms to Israel as part of what Miliband called a “new approach” to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Days of travel chaos are expected at UK airports after a fault with the air traffic control system yesterday grounded flights for nearly four hours, causing almost 2,000 cancellations. The National Air Traffic Services boss Martin Rolfe said a cyber attack had been “ruled out” but promised a “very, very thorough investigation”. Archaeologists have unveiled what they believe is the largest wall mosaic ever found from the ancient Roman world. The 10m-high, 16m-long work, which lies beneath the streets of Rome and is thought to have been created during the first century, depicts a bearded philosopher, half-centaurs, laurel-wearing poets and female muses.

It’s not often the House of Commons feels like “the cockpit of history”, says The Guardian. “On Tuesday it did.” By banning the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and accusing the Israeli government of turning a blind eye to “ethnic cleansing”, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband delivered “perhaps the toughest official British indictment of Israeli conduct in recent history”. Rightly so. International opinion has shifted since Israel approved the construction of 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement, a move that would cleave the occupied territory in two and “bury Palestinian statehood for good”. Miliband, who is Jewish and lost more than 60 relatives in the Holocaust, says he is a friend of Israel. He just thinks “friends should talk straight to each other”.

Europe has a history of “dressing up domestic political pandering as righteousness on the world stage”, says The Wall Street Journal. So it is here. The impetus for this virtue-signalling wasn’t the E1 settlement, it was the British government’s desire to appease the Muslim and hard-left voters threatening to abandon Labour for the Greens. If anyone has been “destroying the two-state solution”, it’s the Palestinians. When Israel offered them a state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2000-01, they said no and “launched a terrorist intifada”. When Israel removed settlements from Gaza in 2005, they voted in Hamas. Yet Britain – along with fellow sanctions-imposers Canada and France – have “only carrots” for the Palestinian side. While banning imports from Israelis in the West Bank, they continue to subsidise the Palestinian Authority, which awards “pay-for-slay” salaries to terrorists who murder Jews. Rather than targeting Israel, Miliband should listen to what the Palestinians have long been saying: “they won’t live in peace alongside a Jewish state”.

Britain’s “march up the rankings” in the PISA report, a global comparison of 15-year-olds’ reading, maths and science abilities, is largely thanks to one person, says The Economist. Under Education Secretary Michael Gove’s leadership 15 years ago, school reformers in England eschewed the modish “soft skills” and newfangled, untested teaching methods that other nations were adopting, and made curriculums more “knowledge-rich”. Exams became more rigorous, coursework was deprioritised and inspections toughened. And it’s worked. English pupils now rank in the global top 10, alongside the likes of Japan and Singapore.

The buzzcut is back, says Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. In the past few years, Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy and Michael B Jordan have all been spotted with shaved heads, and now two men famed for their long locks – Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie and Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland – have joined their ranks. Previously associated mainly with soldiers, the style has evolved to become “less severe”, with one barber saying most men want it to look “ever so slightly grown out”. Not everyone is convinced. Haaland’s former teammate Jack Grealish told him: “You look about 10 years old.”

Lenin probably never said the maxim often attributed to him: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” But it’s exactly Vladimir Putin’s strategy, says Max Boot in The Washington Post. Covert attacks on Europe are escalating, with Russian drones increasingly buzzing into European air space and numerous sabotage operations taking place across the continent. In the past six weeks alone, Russia has been blamed for an attempted attack on aircraft at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle airport, as well as fires and explosions at defence plants in Bulgaria, Italy, Estonia, Slovakia and Poland. Yet every time Putin probes, he gets mush.

Nato needs a steelier response. Following the Leipzig threat, Germany said it would close a Russian consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural centre in Berlin. “That won’t deter Putin in the slightest.” The American ambassador to Nato issued a pitiful statement about the US standing in solidarity with Germany “in the face of efforts to cause harm”, without any reference to where those efforts originate. Donald Trump refused to condemn the Kremlin, and recently said Canada was harder to deal with than either China or Russia. On Saturday, the US president’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were busy having a “chummy meeting” with Putin and cooing that when they retire their “incredible memories” of the Russian strongman would rank “right at the top of it all”. And both Europe and America are “curiously reticent” to provide Ukraine with $300bn in frozen Russian funds, a much-needed move which would send a strong signal that Moscow’s “terrorist assault” on Europe is out of order. If the West doesn’t start raising the cost of Putin’s aggression, there will be good cause to fear a “full-blown war”.

Catfishing is a testing game that presents a list of categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to and asks you to guess what the page is. One filed under “20th century musicians”, “21st century musicians”, “American folk musicians” and “people born in Minnesota”, for example, would be Bob Dylan. But be warned, says Linda Holmes in NPR: “many of the answers are far more obscure than that”. Give it a go here.

For all the talk of America’s booming stock market, says Mathieu Galtier in The Africa Report, some of the biggest gains this year have been in Africa. Indexes in Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Tunisia have posted rises of between 46% and 71% in 2026, compared to just 13% for America’s S&P 500.

It’s Soulful Sage, says Katrina Burroughs in The Sunday Times, which has been named the Dulux Colour of the Year after an “intense” three-day conference attended by global trend-spotters and industry insiders. While some will be surprised it took a team of experts three days of discussion to arrive at a classic, universally popular colour, the entire industry has in recent years “gone gaga for green”. Soulful Sage is a worthy addition: it’s “the colour of kitchen herbs and misty hills”, a hint of nostalgia with a dash of optimism. “Good vibes only.”