NHS consultants will strike for two days next month in a fresh dispute over pay and working conditions. Despite receiving a £25,000 boost to average earnings over the past four years, to more than £150,000 a year, senior hospital doctors will walk out of their roles on 25 and 26 November. The British Medical Association says real-terms pay has fallen by 25% in the past 17 years. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a surprise fourth term in office. Despite having lost the first-round ballot three weeks ago, the left-wing incumbent secured 51.8% of the vote in yesterday’s run-off, compared with 48.2% for his right-wing challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, who has so far refused to recognise the result. The long-awaited pedestrianisation of London’s Oxford Street began this morning, as part of a £150m scheme to revive the country’s most famous shopping area. A 1km stretch between Selfridges and the Ikea just off Great Portland Street is now a no-go zone for all vehicles, including buses, taxis and bikes.

Whatever happens when Israelis go to the polls this week, says Ezra Klein in The New York Times, the election has played out on Benjamin Netanyahu’s terms. The opposition bloc’s main leaders have broadly accepted the prime minister’s militaristic world view, even running to his right: Gadi Eisenkot has said he will end Hamas’s rule of Gaza within 18 months, by military means if necessary; Yair Lapid has called for more bombing of Iran’s energy infrastructure. The fact that most Israeli Jews now see the world the way Netanyahu has long seen it is his “great victory”. But it is matched by his “great loss”: the rest of the world now largely sees Israel “the way Gazans see it”.

The “Palestinian question” is now a central cause worldwide, with more than 150 countries, including Britain, France and Canada, now formally recognising a Palestinian state. There is no near-term chance of an Israeli-Saudi accord. Israel is accused of genocide in the International Court of Justice and has basically already been convicted in the court of public opinion. “None of this was inevitable.” After October 7, Israel was the subject of an “outpouring” of global sympathy. But Netanyahu chose to “risk more to achieve more”. He flattened Gaza in search of a “total victory” over Hamas, decapitated Hezbollah and re-invaded southern Lebanon, and achieved his decades-long dream of persuading America to join him in attacking Iran. The results of all this? Israel is certainly regionally dominant. But Hamas, Hezbollah and the regime in Tehran are still standing. And most of the Jewish state’s allies – including, crucially, America – now see the country as a “brutal aggressor”. In the words of Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit: “We won the Middle East, but we lost the world.”

🇵🇸🇮🇱 It’s not just Netanyahu who has achieved a “catastrophic success”. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind October 7, achieved his goal of provoking Israel into a retaliation that would shift global perceptions. But Palestinians now live in “more misery and under more domination” than they did before, facing an Israel “ever more violently opposed to their self-determination and even to their existence”.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises, which was published 100 years ago this month, is the best food and drink novel of the 20th century, says Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. The characters may be “cruel and bored”, but they eat and drink with real spirit: sandwiches and Chablis on a train south from Paris; suckling pig “with an unrequited romance in Madrid”; wine with breakfast at the Hotel Montoya; fried trout freshly fetched from the Irati river; and white wine cooled in a natural spring. Bliss.

“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” is an old game in which players try and link any given actor to Kevin Bacon, based on which actors they have co-starred in films with. According to a new analysis by Owen Lacey in The Pudding, 1% of actors have appeared in a film with Bacon, 70% are just two movies away – meaning they’ve starred with someone who has starred alongside Bacon – 29% are three movies away and just 0.1% are four films away, meaning an average actor is 2.28 degrees from Kevin Bacon. At the epicentre of Hollywood is Samuel L Jackson, who is just 2.09 films from an average star. For the full breakdown, click here.

If you are a rich, acclaimed, “voice-of-a-generation” writer, says Janice Turner in The Times, there are infinite practical ways to help the hungry, injured and displaced people of Gaza. Instead, by pledging her UK royalties to the proscribed terror organisation Palestine Action and then removing her books from sale in the UK, Sally Rooney has chosen “pain-free public martyrdom”. And she’s found no shortage of celebrity support. Last week’s New Statesman featured an open letter signed by public figures from the actor Paul Mescal to the author Zadie Smith, insisting: “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”. Whoever thought otherwise? But what a frisson for the Irish novelist: “no longer a desk-bound sourpuss but a dangerous outlaw”.

If this were truly a matter of free speech, Rooney could have asked her publishers to “test the law”. Does anyone think the police would start stripping the shelves of Waterstones? It was dumb of the then home secretary Yvette Cooper to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation, producing an “I am Spartacus” effect that has jammed the courts with 3,000 OAPs, students and vicars arrested for wearing t-shirts and holding placards. It has made the government look authoritarian; aggrandised the anti-Semitic thugs of Palestine Action’s hard core (who have turned from attacking Israeli defence firms to defacing unrelated Jewish businesses); and turned Rooney, in the eyes of the New Statesman at least, into Salman Rushdie. What a joke. Rushdie spent a decade in hiding; his Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator stabbed and his Norwegian translator shot. Dozens were killed when Islamists bombed a hotel in an attempt to kill his Turkish translator. When Rushdie himself was stabbed in 2022, Rooney said nothing. How brave.

📚🧠 Rushdie himself, a lifelong supporter of a separate Palestinian state, hasn’t deigned to comment on Rooney, but he takes a nuanced view of Gaza. “If there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state,” he says. “Is this what the progressive movements of the Western left want to create?” Rooney appears not to have thought this far, instead declaring with “sweeping vacuity” that “the liberation of Palestine really does represent the liberation of the world”. Eh?

Elon Musk unveiled a “flying car” last week, says The Spectator. The concept goes back further than many imagine. The first was the Curtiss Autoplane – a three-seater car that could achieve a “short hop” if you bolted wings on – which was shown at the Pan American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917. Among the more serious commercial efforts was the AVE Mizar, a combination of a Ford Pinto and the back half of a Cessna Skymaster. Creators Henry Smolinksi and Harold Blake meant to start taking orders in 1974, but their plans were scuppered the year before when their prototype crashed in California, taking them both down with it.

The past decade saw the takeover of the “Posh Pub Snack”, says Tomé Morrissy-Swan in The Telegraph: olives, salted almonds and so on. But the “retro treat” is fighting back. Pickled eggs, pickled onions and Irish Tayto crisps are all on the rise, and pubgoers are going mad for Scampi Fries. The “Scampi Fries Challenge”, in which participants eat a packet as quickly as possible, went viral online; Andy Burnham put them third in a pub snack ranking; and people are buying Scampi Fries t-shirts, paintings and other merchandise. The novelty crisps are now the top-selling packaged snack in British boozers.

It’s the oldest pub in England, says Helena Horton in The Guardian, according to an archaeologist who carried out a “painstaking investigation” to find the country’s longest-serving boozer. James Wright used techniques including “dendrochronology” – counting the tree rings on wooden beams – to confirm that The George Inn of Norton St Philip, Somerset, was set up in the late 14th century. Numerous pubs, including Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, The Bingley Arms in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, and The Royal Standard in Beaconsfield, claim to be over a thousand years old. None of them, says Wright, is “even vaguely close”.