Keir Starmer has given doctors 48 hours to call off their planned six-day strike next week, or face losing 1,000 extra training places. The British Medical Association rejected an offer last week that would have provided resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors) with pay rises of up to 7.1% this year, and is seeking “full pay restoration” to 2008 levels, equivalent to a 26% raise. Donald Trump has told aides he is willing to end US military action in Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Officials tell The Wall Street Journal the US president has decided that if diplomatic efforts fail, he will leave it to allies in Europe and the Gulf to get trade flowing through the waterway again. The Treasury is set to receive a multi-billion-pound tax windfall thanks to levies on oil and gas firms. If fuel prices remain elevated for 12 months, says The Times, the government will pocket an extra £8bn.

The ruling in California last week that social media is designed to addict users has been hailed as the tech industry’s “Big Tobacco” moment, says James Marriott in The Times. But the most important factor in declining rates of smoking wasn’t lawsuits – it was its “eroding social status”. The key with the indoor smoking ban was that it forced smokers to “repeatedly ostracise themselves” from friends on a night out. Dread of social exclusion was a much stronger spur to action than the distant prospect of emphysema. If we are to cure our screen addictions, smartphones will have to go on a similar cultural journey “from high to low status”. And there are already signs of that happening.

When I was growing up, a smartphone was an “incontestably glamorous object”. Now everyone has one and not being on social media is considered far classier than being on it. Mindless scrolling is increasingly viewed as being rather “common”. Restricting your phone use has become a social signifier: you have will power; you’ve read your Jonathan Haidt. Same for your children. In the US, nannies to “upper-bourgeois” families can be sacked for so much as looking at their phone in front of the kids. Ostentatious self-denial has always been a feature of middle-class status – think of those prosperous burghers in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam dressed in “sober black”, or the vogue for veganism and marathons in our modern era of abundant calories. So it’s not impossible to imagine a world where the “statusful” middle-class activities of the future will be book clubs, maths olympiads and tech fasts. And that an aversion to screen time will become a habit that trickles down through society, like baby names or fashion. Here’s hoping.

Talk of a MAGA divide over Iran is overblown, says Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. Yes, Tucker Carlson and a couple of other prominent anti-war voices are getting a lot of attention. But people forget the dozens of other conservative radio, podcast and TV hosts with millions of their own loyal listeners: Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, to name just a few. A Politico survey last week found that 81% of self-identified MAGA voters support the war, with another 10% undecided. Just 7% were opposed.

In this enjoyable clip from a 1986 edition of That’s Life! Esther Rantzen and an Australian body language expert take to the streets of Mayfair to see if they can tell if strangers are upper class. Highlights include encounters with an American (“oh, you can’t be”), a very smiley chap who says the key is listening to how someone says ok (“aay kaay”) and another gent who tells Esther she runs “like an upper-class twit”. Watch the whole video here.

Donald Trump seems poised to invade Iran, says Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, most likely Kharg Island, the country’s primary oil export base. Marines could probably take the island. “We did Iwo Jima,” said Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, referring to the Japanese island captured by US soldiers in World War Two. “We can do this.” But 26,000 Americans were killed or injured at Iwo Jima. And not only is Kharg Island laced with booby traps, it’s also incredibly difficult to defend once you’ve taken it. The US has evacuated several of its hardened permanent military bases in the region. How can it possibly hope to protect troops on an Iranian island “day after day, week after week”, from drones and other attacks?

Western military planners are “very pessimistic” about the chances of re-opening the Strait of Hormuz by military means, says Gideon Rachman in the FT. No matter how many missile installations are bombed or naval escorts dispatched, a mullah with a drone will always be able to wreak havoc. This means a negotiated settlement is the most realistic outcome. And the Iranians are liable to demand a high price, most likely in the form of a kind of Hormuz “toll booth”. The regime is reportedly charging $2m a pop for safe passage through the strait. In normal times, 140 ships a day use the waterway, meaning this could easily add billions of dollars a month to the regime’s coffers. With their energy and desalination infrastructure in grave danger, the Gulf monarchies may well choose to pay up, as could the Asian economies who buy most of Iran’s oil, and who have no stomach for Trump’s war. Iran has suffered. But it may well emerge stronger than before.

🥵⏳ The reason the Gulf states are so jumpy, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, is that their all-important energy infrastructure is incredibly easy to destroy – it can’t run away or hide, and much of it is already explosive – and a nightmare to rebuild. So-called “hydrocrackers”, which heat and pressurise heavy oils to turn them into lighter fuel products, are made of metal that is a foot thick to withstand temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Only two or three foundries can make the castings for these vessels, and delivery times can be up to four years.

In Word Snake, you have to form words from adjoining letters on a 3x3 grid. You can find bonus words beyond the mandated list, and get hints – starting letters, missing letters – the more you do. There is also a 4x4 mode for more experienced players. Give it a go here.

Last week, the UN passed a motion brought by Ghana condemning the transatlantic slave trade and demanding a “good faith dialogue on reparatory justice”, including “compensation” and “satisfaction”. Britain – along with Australia, Canada and the EU states – abstained, which is pathetic, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. We of all people should regard such demands as “hostile acts”. Let’s slap sanctions on the “shake-down artists” who try to get away with them, and stop sending them foreign aid. Britain did more than any other nation to end the previously universal institution of slavery. Our ancestors spent masses of blood and treasure to stamp out slavery in Ghana. Perhaps we ought to demand restitution from them.

It’s a pod of sperm whales helping a newborn breathe by lifting it to the surface, says Catrin Einhorn in The New York Times. The drone footage, taken in the Caribbean in 2023, provides the latest evidence that humans aren’t the only species to give mothers some form of help during and after birth. Strikingly, half the whales involved in the procedure weren’t even related to the mother. “Whenever you say that something is unique to humans,” says Wenda Trevathan, a biological anthropologist at New Mexico State University, “we always find that that’s not the case.”