Parents should limit children under five to no more than an hour of screen time a day, according to new government guidance. The recommendations also include not allowing under-twos to watch screens alone and banning TV during meals for toddlers. The average two-year-old in England currently spends more than two hours a day looking at a screen. Oil prices rose to around $110 a barrel this morning after Donald Trump’s announcement that US-Iran talks were going “very well” failed to allay fears over global energy supplies. The US president said he was postponing his threatened strikes on Iran’s power plants for a second time, for 10 more days, “at the request of the Iranian government”. A baby monkey in Japan who went viral after being abandoned by his mother and taking comfort in a soft toy from Ikea appears to have found love. Punch, a seven-month-old macaque in Ichikawa City Zoo, has been filmed cuddling up to a female nicknamed Moe, or Momo-chan, and defending her from other monkeys.

Tucker Carlson, America’s most influential podcaster, gave an interview last week that was “as illuminating as it was chilling”, says Melanie Phillips in The Times. It was with the editor of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, who asked the former Fox News host if he agreed with Israel’s right to exist. This prompted an “interminable” back and forth in which Carlson repeatedly and disingenuously said he didn’t understand the question – semantic chaff that clearly demonstrated he thought the answer was no. This is no “mere crank”. Carlson has huge influence over millions of Americans, who treat his “poisonous opinions as near holy writ”. JD Vance, the favourite to succeed Donald Trump, appears to be one of them. His son works for Carlson, and the vice president has pointedly refused to denounce his old friend’s insistence on platforming “eyewatering anti-Semites”.

This is the big danger the Republican Party’s hawks have missed, says Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. These old-school establishment figures – pro-Israel, anti-Russia, opposed to anti-Semitism – are cock-a-hoop that Trump has overcome his apparently isolationist tendencies in favour of obliterating the Iranian regime. But if the conflict goes pear-shaped they’ll be totally discredited, and it’ll be the likes of Carlson and Vance who’ll steer the party’s future – with all the toxicity and anti-Semitism that entails. The idea that Republicans will sour on Trump may seem unimaginable now. But remember that George W Bush also had “bottomless support” from his party even after the Iraq War turned sour – it was only when Trump came along that they turned against him. And once they did, they never looked back. This time, with Carlson and co tapping into a deep desire to blame the world’s ills on Israel and a “Jewish cabal”, the populist turn will be “far uglier”.

🕵️🙈 One reason the war isn’t going to plan for the US, says The New York Times, is because Mossad’s claim that it could galvanise the Iranian opposition has fallen flat. David Barnea, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, told Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Trump administration officials before the conflict that his men could spark riots and other acts of rebellion, potentially triggering the collapse of the regime. So far, no such luck.

Around 15 minutes before Donald Trump announced on Monday that he was postponing his threat to bomb Iranian power plants, a number of traders unexpectedly placed more than half a billion dollars’ worth of bets on oil prices and stock markets. The obvious explanation, says Paul Krugman on Substack, is that the people making the wagers knew what the US president was about to say, and knew it would send oil prices down and the stock markets up. There’s a name for profiting from non-public information: insider trading. And when there are national security implications – our enemies might be tipped off by market movements – there’s another word for it. “Treason.”

Cracked is a “safe-cracking word game” in which users must rotate five concentric dials so that the letters are arranged to make five words, when reading from outer to inner. The trick seems to be to focus on one word, and let the others take care of themselves. Give it a go here.

You have to feel for Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, says John Crace in The Guardian. For years, the right-wing media has been telling us that London is a “hellscape” where using your phone is an “invitation to be mugged”. Yet when it emerged last weekend that McSweeney rang police in October to tell them his work phone had been snatched out of his hand by a guy on a bike, conservatives cried foul. Due to the “curious” timing – a month after McSweeney’s pal Peter Mandelson had been sacked as US ambassador, and shortly before No 10 agreed to release all messages relating to his appointment – the Tories have decided that McSweeney’s is “the only phone in London not to have been nicked”.

It isn’t just the timing that’s fishy, says Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail. Why didn’t McSweeney inform police he was the prime minister’s chief of staff? He told the call handler he had already rung his office to get the device disabled, but this was “one of the most sensitive phones in the British government”. No 10 and MI5 would surely have wanted to look into whether this was just a random theft and not, say, a targeted operation by the Russians or the Chinese. Yet the government’s security team reportedly didn’t even bother to contact the Met, and when the police twice tried to follow up with McSweeney in the following days, he didn’t respond. Maybe the theft really did happen, and he was trying to hide his identity so that the story didn’t hit the headlines. Maybe it really was all just a “massive coincidence”, which Mandelson and Starmer chose to keep to themselves for five months. But it’s a pretty tough story to swallow.

If you’re wondering whether your job will still exist in five years or if it will be swept away by AI, says Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, ask yourself: “Am I coal, or am I a horse?” In 1915, American farms employed around 26.5 million horses; a hundred years later, the number was 700,000. With tractors and other machinery, there just wasn’t a role for horses. But demand for coal, which many predicted would fall as steam engines became more efficient, rocketed. The more you could do with it, the more valuable it became. If you can work out how, be coal.

Ed Miliband thinks the best way to get Britain growing is with reindustrialisation via clean power, planning reform and the electrification of domestic heating and cars. The quicker we can get off the “fossil fuel rollercoaster”, as he calls it, the better. Whether that’s true is obviously up for debate, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. The Tories and Reform want to make North Sea oil and gas “the new dividing line of British politics”. But most Labour MPs think the energy secretary’s view is being vindicated by the global energy shock triggered by the Iran war. And no one else in government is articulating an alternative approach. For better or worse, “Milibandism” is here to stay.

It’s Jessica Foster, says Drew Harwell in The Washington Post, a “beautiful army blonde” whose Instagram account racked up more than a million followers after she began posting photos and videos depicting the “patriotic life of the MAGA dream girl”, including posing with a fighter jet and walking the tarmac with Donald Trump. Except she doesn’t exist. She was generated using AI, as part of an increasingly prevalent strategy for winning attention online: mixing patriotism with attractive (made-up) people to score political points. While some commenters called her out for being AI, many just “celebrated her looks, sent her heart-eyes emojis or cheered her on”.