Donald Trump says a deal between the US and Iran is “complete” and will be signed in Switzerland on Friday. Under the agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be gradually reopened over the next two months without a toll charge, America will lift its naval blockade on Iranian ports, and the future of Iran’s nuclear programme will be thrashed out in a 60-day period of further talks. Keir Starmer has announced a social media ban for children under 16, saying he is “calling time on a system that’s failing our kids”. The age limit for access to platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat will be raised from 13 to 16 by spring next year and enforced through age-recognition facial scans and digital IDs. Chilled red wine is being hailed as the new rosé. Searches for chilled reds on Ocado are up 1,020% year-on-year, while sales of Chill Bill Spritzy red wine have soared by 827%. Will Hill, a senior buyer at the supermarket, says Gen Z are embracing a “European-inspired way of drinking”.

Donald Trump’s deal with Iran is everything people feared, says Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: a “capitulation” for America. Yes, Iran has suffered massive damage. But the regime in Tehran is intact; the nuclear question remains unanswered; the proposed lifting of sanctions would deposit billions of dollars into the mullahs’ coffers; and the reopened Strait of Hormuz will remain under the constant threat of Iranian attacks. Trump claims he will send the bombers back in if Iran doesn’t play ball. But the mullahs know he will be loath to ignite another conflict ahead of the midterms, meaning they’ll have the whip hand in negotiations. The US president began the war promising the Iranian people they’d be able to overthrow their tyrannical rulers and claiming he’d only settle for “unconditional surrender”. Four months on, “the United States has been defeated”.

This counter-productive conflict has been bad for America’s clout not just in the Middle East but across the whole world, says Jake Wallis Simons in The Telegraph. Before the war, the US had a “fearsome” deterrent. Trump was able to push Hamas into a hostage deal in Gaza through “apocalyptic rhetoric” alone. Who will take his threats seriously now? There was initially a US plan to unleash and support Kurdish fighters from Iraq, but Trump cancelled it after lobbying from Turkey’s Islamist leader, “leaving his weapon to go off half-cocked”. He disdained his allies in Europe, allowed the Gulf states to become “riven with disunity” and let Tehran drive a wedge between the US and Israel. As Henry Kissinger warned during the Vietnam war: “The word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Now that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire, says Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal, it’s worth trying to wrap your head around quite how large a number a trillion is. One way of thinking about it is time. Go back a million seconds ago and it’s only two weeks ago, a billion seconds and it’s 1994. A trillion? You’re back in the Ice Age. Another helpful visualisation is a stack of one penny coins. A million pennies would be about a mile high and a billion pennies almost 1,000 miles. A trillion pennies would go right up to the moon, and back. “Twice.”

A longevity start-up in Boston has dosed its first human patient with a highly anticipated gene therapy that aims to reverse ageing, says Isabella Ward in Wired. Life Biosciences will test whether an innovative technique – turning on three genes that can “partially reprogramme” old cells into behaving as though they’re young – could be used to treat disease, in this case a form of glaucoma. The “cellular rejuvenation” therapy, which has succeeded in testing on animals, is the first of its kind to be granted regulatory approval for human clinical trials.

There is absolutely no defence, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack, for the “intense, often baldly racist riots” that broke out in Belfast last week. Yes, the video of a Sudanese asylum seeker attacking a local man in north Belfast is “hard to watch”, as was the video of police handcuffing the dying 18-year-old Henry Nowak because his killer falsely accused him of racism. These are “separate, unrelated, unique violent crimes”. Nevertheless, it’s worth understanding why they sparked such violence, and the reason is simple: Britain has been utterly transformed by mass migration, and the elites continue to gaslight the public about it.

Just 37% of Londoners were “white British” in the 2021 census, and only 33% of Leicester, 43% of Birmingham and 49% of Manchester. On current trends, by 2063 white British will make up less than 50% of the whole population, compared with 95% in 1983. “And you wonder why many older Brits don’t recognise the country they grew up in.” America – a vast continent with 400 years of immigration experience – is struggling with a foreign-born population that hit a record high of 15.8% last year. In the UK – a tiny, overcrowded island with barely 50 years’ experience of mass migration – it’s an estimated 19%. Yes, the Labour government has cut net migration, but more than 800,000 immigrants still arrived here last year, 77% of them non-European. And in a “multicultural era”, assimilation is “optional”, leaving many living in parallel societies with almost no outside contact. This vast and rapid change after a thousand years of “remarkable demographic homogeneity” is bound to provoke revolt. The only question is why it took us so long to pay attention.

Whenever I met the former MI6 head Alex Younger, who died earlier this month aged 62, he performed the same schtick, says Ben Macintyre in The Times. “We are very cross with Ben Macintyre,” he would declare loudly to anyone in earshot. “He has revealed the entire story of Oleg Gordievsky, which is supposed to be secret.” I could never have written my book about the KGB-officer-turned-British-mole if Younger had forbidden his current and former officers from speaking to me. He and I knew that, but nobody else in the room did. It was the essence of spying: “forging covert complicities and secretly knowing a little more than anyone else, without letting on”.

According to the e-commerce platform Shopify, says Will Oremus in The Atlantic, the best e-commerce platform is… Shopify. On its blog, the firm has published at least 60 different rankings, including things like “10 Best E-Commerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026”, and “The 11 Best Cheap E-Commerce Platforms for Small Business (2026)”. At the top of the list is – always – Shopify. It’s a new swizz, in which companies trick ChatGPT into recommending them by publishing loads of stuff online about how great they are. Any human knows you shouldn’t trust Shopify to review Shopify. AI doesn’t know anything.

It’s the world’s first wind-powered underwater data centre, before it began operations off the coast of Shanghai last week, says Amy Hawkins in The Guardian. The facility, part of China’s efforts to address the energy challenges created by the country’s AI boom, is submerged 10 metres below the surface and powered by a nearby offshore wind farm. The Chinese government says the natural cooling effect of the seawater enables it to use 20% less power than land-based data centres, which have to pipe chilled water around the servers to stop them overheating.