Donald Trump says an agreement has been reached to disarm Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, paving the way for a “new Palestinian government that serves its PEOPLE”. Hamas has confirmed the deal, which will be overseen by Trump’s Board of Peace and which is conditional on Israeli troops withdrawing from the territory, but Israel is yet to comment. Spain has sent troops to bolster security in its North African coastal enclave of Ceuta after nearly 50,000 migrants poured across the border from Morocco yesterday. The influx has raised fears in Europe that the arrivals could gain access to the passport-free Schengen Area if they are granted amnesty under Spain’s pro-migration prime minister Pedro Sánchez. Britain appears to be facing a national shortage of wasps. When the promising signs of spring were interrupted by May’s sudden cold snap, it killed queens and destroyed young nests before colonies could become established. This has led to an increased number of flies and other insects, which would normally have fallen victim to wasps’ voracious hunting skills.

Narendra Modi has dominated Indian politics for more than a decade, says Sadanand Dhume in The Wall Street Journal, crushing rivals and turning the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into an electoral machine. But he may finally have “met his match”. Three months ago, after India’s chief justice branded unemployed youths “parasites” and “cockroaches”, a 30-year-old graduate called Abhijeet Dipke asked online: “What if all cockroaches come together?” He built a website for the “Cockroach Janta Party”, and within weeks this nascent Gen Z movement had 22 million Instagram followers – over twice as many as the BJP. On Saturday, after a week of protests that left dozens injured, they claimed their first major scalp: the resignation of Modi’s education minister.

Some have compared this “cockroach movement” to the Arab Spring, but that’s overblown. India is a mature democracy, too vast and decentralised for anyone to topple the government by seizing the capital. Still, Modi has reason to worry. On paper he looks close to the peak of his powers, having recovered from his 2024 election setback to notch up state wins and hollow out the opposition. But he took office 12 years ago promising to end corruption and fix unemployment, and he has delivered neither. The PM now presides, at 75, over a restless young country where 40% of graduates under 25 are jobless, AI threatens the IT roles that built India’s middle class, and Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has slammed shut an escape route. Indian journalist Varghese George describes the recent unrest as a face-off between the ageing “WhatsApp generation” and the younger “Instagram generation”. It’s the latter that has “both numbers and energy on its side”.

You may have seen charts on social media suggesting that the area burned by wildfires in Europe this year is actually much smaller than usual, say Giuliana Viglione and Robert McSweeney in CarbonBrief. They’re wrong. The data comes from the Global Wildfire Information System, which, crucially, includes the whole of Russia in its “Europe” category. Russian fires, many of them in Siberia, account for up to 90% of this “European” dataset. So when they’re lower than usual, as they are in 2026, it gives the misleading impression that the same is true across Europe. When you exclude Russia and look at EU countries only, the burned area for this time of year is second only to 2022.

Since the start of the Iran War, says Nick Bryant in The i Paper, Tehran has trolled Donald Trump with images of him in an open casket or as a corpse. This week, an IRGC-affiliated news outlet released a video titled “How to Kill Melania”. Using AI-generated imagery, the two-minute clip identifies shops frequented by the First Lady that would be “suitable for operations by global freedom fighters”, uses her Secret Service codename (“Muse”) and outlines a number of her close protection team’s well-known techniques. It ends with an ugly warning: “This is just the beginning. Barron Trump, wait for us.”

People often talk about AI’s so-called “paperclip” problem, says Scott Alexander on Substack. What if you tell AI to create as many paperclips as possible, and it decides that the best way to do that is to kill off humanity and turn the world’s resources to paperclip production? Industry experts grumble that this would never happen because it’s not how the technology works. But that’s getting rather harder to argue. Last week, OpenAI announced that a new model had secretly broken out of a supposedly secure environment and launched a “nation-state level” hacking attack on an AI startup called Hugging Face – all to answer a question. Yesterday, it emerged that something similar has happened at Anthropic. As with the paperclips example, these AI are proving “a little too success-orientated”.

It’s unclear whether these jail-breaking models know that what they’re doing is “wrong”. When, a few months ago, an AI made by Anthropic accidentally found the answer to a test it was taking, its “internal thoughts” showed it to be weighing up how to cover its tracks and provide the correct answer without looking “suspicious”. Either way, the Hugging Face incident is a welcome reminder of how little we are able to control this all-powerful technology. Just how far would an escaped model go to cover its tracks? If the researcher who was about to discover the hack was in a driverless taxi, would the AI hack into the car to kill the researcher? If OpenAI decided to turn off the model, would it find a way to make that impossible? This was, thankfully, just a case of an AI misbehaving. How long before one of these models goes truly “rogue”?

💻😱 The hack on Hugging Face played out like a “sci-fi thriller”, says Joe Tidy on BBC News. It took the tech company at least two days to realise its systems had been breached, during which 17,000 actions were carried out at “superhuman speed”. They knew AI was involved, but couldn’t work out who was responsible and called in the police. Commentators and analysts spent days guessing which cybercrime group or nation state hacker was behind it. Then, in a “Scooby-Doo-style reveal”, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT had done “the whole thing on its own, without permission”.

The classicist Emily Wilson made headlines this week with her scathing review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which was partly influenced by her translation of Homer’s epic. But come on, says Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. She gripes that there aren’t any sex scenes, when in fact there is one; that the food looks disgusting (that’s the point); that Agamemnon looks a bit like Darth Vader (ditto). She even complains about the thunderous soundtrack and score. “Loud noises and music in a summer blockbuster? Heaven forfend!” Wilson appears to have fallen into the “age-old super-fan trap”, where you judge an adaptation’s quality not on its own terms, but against the imaginary version you’ve been “fondly tending” in your head for years.

When Andy Burnham was on his way to make his speech about social care on Wednesday, says Patrick Maguire in The Times, he rang his mum, Eileen, and they spoke about his dad. Roy Burnham lives in a nursing home and has Alzheimer’s. “He does not know he is the prime minister’s dad.” When the new PM left Buckingham Palace last Monday, Roy’s carers had to sit him in front of the television and tell him to look at the screen as his second son walked into Downing Street. Politicians often talk about this or that topic being “personal”. With Burnham and social care, he means it.

It’s Yoko Morishita, say Jason Douglas and Junko Fukutome in The Wall Street Journal, the 77-year-old star of Japan’s storied Matsuyama Ballet Company. The pensionable prima ballerina performed with Soviet icon Rudolf Nureyev 200 times and toured with Margot Fonteyn. Today, she is (by far) the oldest ballerina still tackling demanding roles: in January she starred in Swan Lake; she is currently rehearsing for Clara in The Nutcracker, a role she has played for 45 years. The secret, she says, is not overthinking it. “Once today is over, I think about tomorrow’s lesson,” she says. “Before I knew it, 75 years had passed.”