Israel has accused Hamas of breaking the terms of the ceasefire agreement by not releasing all the remains of hostages after the peace deal was signed in Egypt yesterday. The Israeli government has reportedly given the terror group, which has so far handed back four bodies of a possible 28, until the end of today to return the rest. Almost all the external wall insulation fitted under the previous government’s energy efficiency scheme was installed so badly it needs to be repaired or replaced. Some 98% of the roughly 23,000 homeowners who took advantage of the programme have been left with shonky cladding that is likely to cause damp and mould. This season’s fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris showed that the “body positivity” movement is over, with 97% of models on the catwalks a UK size 4 to 8. Vogue, which tracked the sizes of models across 198 shows, found that only 2% could be categorised as “mid-size” (a UK 10-16) and less than 1% were “plus-size”.

The real lesson of the Gaza deal

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, says William Hague in The Times, John F Kennedy received two different messages in 24 hours from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the second of which left markedly less hope of peace. Rather than panic, JFK completely ignored the later message and replied only to the earlier, more positive one – and the following day Khrushchev backed down. Ten days ago, Donald Trump did something similar. When Hamas responded to his 20-point ceasefire proposal without mentioning whether it would disarm – a key element of the plan – Trump just ignored the oversight and treated the whole ceasefire as a done deal. Like Kennedy, he understood the importance of “maintaining momentum”.

It wasn’t Trump’s “sheer personal will” alone that got the agreement over the line. It was also his use of America’s “hard power”. Arab states were willing to play ball because they need US tech and military protection; Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to stop bombing Gaza because Israel is heavily dependent on American arms. Britain did contribute to the process, through Tony Blair’s longstanding efforts to find solutions and Jonathan Powell’s tireless diplomatic support. But recognising Palestine as a state did nothing to help. All those pro-Palestine marches contributed “precisely zero”. That’s the real lesson of this breakthrough, regardless of whether the next, “far more difficult” stage can be executed: it is “power, not posturing” that gets big deals done. Britain needs to remember that the role of a nation in foreign affairs ultimately depends on its economic prowess. “Without that we are just shouting in a room where the audience is leaving.”

🇵🇸🪧 Here in Britain, the Gaza deal should really take the wind out of the sails of the Islamists, the far left and the Greens, says Paul Goodman in The Daily Telegraph. For these groups, campaigning against Israel has become a “fanatical obsession”: it is this year’s trans rights or Extinction Rebellion or Black Lives Matter. And they need the conflict to continue to keep their supporters engaged – the deaths and displacements, the “war porn” pumped into our social media feeds. Without the “oil of public outrage”, they may well struggle to “keep their electoral machine ticking over”.

Cocaine is everywhere, says Mattha Busby in The New Statesman. The global supply of coca – the Andean plant which is the drug’s main ingredient – increased by 35% from 2020 to 2021, flooding the market with cheap, high-quality bugle. And the rise of encrypted messaging apps like Telegram has made it easier than ever for the average good-time Charlie to have a quality gram delivered to his doorstep for as little as £50. Britons are now the world’s second-biggest cocaine users, with 117 tonnes of packet sniffed in England, Scotland and Wales in 2023 (it’s estimated to have risen since then). The only bigger gak-heads are the Aussies, which makes sense.

You might imagine everyone loves national parks, says Livia Rusu in ZME Science. But a trawl of Yelp reveals some surprising one-star reviews. One complaint about the mountainous, forested Yosemite reads: “Trees block the view and there are too many grey rocks.” Moans about Yellowstone are similar: “In the end, it’s all just water and rocks” and “You’ve seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all”. Saguaro National Park is apparently “ok if you like cactus”. Perhaps most literal of all is this entry for the Grand Canyon: “It’s a hole. A very, very, large hole.” See the rest here.

Ignore the headlines – university is still a joy

When I saw a picture of my goddaughter heading off to university recently, I felt both “very, very proud” and “very, very old”, says Sam Leith in The Spectator. What I wasn’t expecting to feel was “warm towards universities”. Whenever we hear about tertiary education today, it’s overwhelmingly negative. Campuses, we’re told, are “seething hives of ‘woke’”, full of students who can no longer read or write and who spend their time harassing visiting speakers and calling for the annihilation of the State of Israel. When they do bother to turn up to lectures, they are duly “indoctrinated in postmodern anticolonial Marxism” by dodgy dons. Among all this hysteria, we seem to have forgotten what going to university is actually like.

Student life is still, as it has always been, a blessed hiatus: three years “suspended between childhood and the adult world”, in which young people get the chance to shed the teenagers they were and try out the adults they might like to be. “This is a valuable thing.” They can have run-ins with love and argument and intoxication, and begin to figure out how to cook and budget. They can work out the sorts of bargains you get away with when it comes to deadlines and tests, and, before it really matters, they can make idiots of themselves and “learn from their idiocy”. Of course, there’ll always be the odd “keffiyah-wearing professor” or loudmouth radical in the student body, but it was ever thus. Universities haven’t suddenly become “Marxist madrassahs”, and it’s silly to imagine they have. Most students are cracking on with exactly what students have always done: drinking, showing off and “trying to climb into bed with one another”. Quite right, too.

The website of the encyclopedia firm Britannica has a fun and simple daily puzzle in which players must guess the subject of a short entry that has had all its key words redacted. You can reveal up to seven of the blacked-out words and – if you’re really stuck – up to four of the letters in the answer. Give it a go here.

Hostile states have apparently come up with an “ingenious” way of phishing civil servants, says Tom Newton Dunn in War & Peace. They send a duplicate of Politico’s Playbook newsletter – a must-read for Westminster wonks – containing a fake story about their target’s department or boss. When the recipient then clicks on the embedded link, “they’re into the government’s system”.

It’s “graffiti-style art” in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, says Gabriella Swerling in The Daily Telegraph, which has drawn the ire of figures including JD Vance and Elon Musk. Cathedral Dean David Monteith says the temporary exhibition, which opens on Friday, is intended to build bridges between “cultures, styles and genres”. Vance wrote on X that the slogans – including “God, what happens when we die?” and “Are you there?” – had made a beautiful building “really ugly”, while Elon Musk called them “shameful”. One cathedral-goer compared the vibe to “an underground car park in Peckham”.