The UK government is set to announce a trade ban on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank in response to Israeli plans to open tenders for the construction of 1,200 new settler homes in the territory. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, says Britain will “without a doubt” face repercussions over the sanctions and accused Labour of “discrimination against the Israeli government”. English pupils are among the best in the world for reading, mathematics and science, according to the OECD’s latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report. They ranked alongside those from Japan and Singapore, while Scottish and Welsh pupils fell behind, reaching a two-decade low in reading and maths. A pair of thieves stole two paintings worth millions from a Renoir museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera this morning. The picture-pinchers abandoned two other works – Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano (1910) and Jeune femme au puits (1886) – during their getaway, and are yet to be caught.

On 9 August, says Mairav Zonszein in The New York Times, an Israeli settler militia began to terrorise three Palestinian families in the West Bank village of Qusra. They set up a tent outside the homes, cut off access to water and electricity, and stymied the residents’ freedom of movement. Around three weeks later, another Qusra home was targeted, this time by masked settlers throwing stones. These are not “isolated extremists or hooligans”, as Benjamin Netanyahu likes to claim. They are organised groups of civilians operating as a de facto paramilitary force – like a neighbourhood watch group “but with military-grade weapons”. And they’re acting to advance a single, coherent and unchallenged Israeli goal: to claim “as much land for Jews with as few Palestinians as possible”.

Settler militias already existed when the current government formed in 2022. But in the past three years they have effectively been given free rein to intimidate and harass Palestinians so that their life in the West Bank becomes “unbearable”. This is all part of a broader pro-settler approach under Netanyahu, who leads the most far-right government in Israeli history. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, has expedited the demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of Israeli ones. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, has eased regulations for gun licences, enabling about an extra 7,000 firearms for settlers. On the rare occasions when the Israeli authorities in the occupied territory take action, it almost never leads to anything: just 3% of arrested settlers are convicted. That’s what you need to remember about these violent groups marauding around the West Bank. They are a “feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy”.

London’s reputation as a “hotbed for knife crime” is outdated, says The Economist. For six of the past eight years, New Yorkers have been more likely to be stabbed to death than Londoners. Knife-related homicides have halved since their peak and hospitalisations for “assault by sharp object” have fallen by a third. For this, you can “thank Sadiq Khan”. To address the spike in knife crime between 2017 and 2019, the London mayor set up a system of so-called “Violence Reduction Units”, based on a successful Scottish policy of bringing together police, schools, hospitals and sports clubs to identify at-risk children. It’s working.

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes – which celebrate silly but inventive scientific research – were handed out last week, says Ian Sample in The Guardian. Winners included American researchers who found that rich drivers are more likely to cut off other cars at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings; Canadian students who calculated the perfect angle for splash-free urinal use; and Brazilian academics who softly trod on different parts of venomous snakes to see what makes the serpents lash out. For the romantics out there, evolutionary biologists at Oxford came up with a scientific definition of kissing: “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, infraspecific oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”. Phwoar.

On one thing, at least, Donald Trump is right, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times: the US is being ripped off by its allies. Between 2010 and 2025, Russia and China almost tripled their defence spending. Over that same period the accumulated underspend of European Nato members – the deficit in relation to US spending as a proportion of GDP – runs to $8 trillion. “Not $8 billion, folks – $8 trillion.” That’s why our continent can be menaced by a country, Russia, with just 10% of our GDP. And it’s why when our politicians proudly talk about reaching US defence spending levels in five or ten years’ time, American officials think we’re gaslighting them. “It’s like allowing the foundations of a house to crumble and offering to give the interior walls a lick of paint.”

Centrist podcasters continue to laud the likes of Sweden, with its vast welfare state and high GDP per capita. Do they not realise that Sweden would have no welfare state, “indeed no state at all”, without the implicit security guarantee of the US? Had the Swedes spent their own money on deterring aggressors, the cost would have swallowed their welfare budget whole. The truth is that our ever-expanding welfare systems have effectively been subsidised by American taxpayers for so long that we’ve come to believe we deserve them. In the words of one Labour MP: “Welfare is a human right.” Do these people not realise that there are no human rights without the military muscle to resist those who would destroy them? People like to blame Trump for betraying the Western alliance. In fact that betrayal came much earlier, masterminded by “feckless” European politicians who preferred “comforting lies to hard truth”.

If your kids ever eat fish fingers, says Ed Conway on Substack, there’s a good chance they’ve “been around the world and back”. After cod is caught in Scottish waters, it is blast-frozen and loaded on to a shipping container bound for south Rotterdam. Here it boards an even bigger ship which sails out of the Channel, round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean to China, where the fish is semi-thawed, filleted, deboned, skinned and refrozen on the cheap. It is then shipped all the way back to the UK, ready to hit the supermarket shelves at a more affordable price.

On 9/11, says Garrett Graff in National Geographic, the Pentagon happened to be carrying out one of its biggest annual military exercises: preparing for Russian nuclear bombers flying over the North Pole. During the drill, an officer hurried into the command centre in Louisiana and told Lt Gen Tom Keck: “Sir, we had an aircraft hit the World Trade Centre.” The general was annoyed. Officers sharing “mock” intelligence were supposed to use a set prefix – “I have an exercise input” – to avoid confusion with real-world events. Keck began to correct him, only for the officer to point at the breaking news on the TV screens.

It’s Stanley the armadillo, says Emily Smith in The Telegraph, who is on the run somewhere in East Sussex. The armoured adventurer escaped from the Animal Magic petting zoo near Hailsham over the weekend after somehow forcing open his enclosure door. Co-owner Chris Coetzer has urged the public to contact him with any sightings, saying the 40cm-long fugitive is “quite friendly” and “loves a back scratch”. But he has also warned that Stanley may bite if he is picked up, and is, like all armadillos, “quite stinky”.