Donald Trump says negotiations on a new deal with Iran will begin this afternoon, after he confirmed that Gulf allies had talked him down from launching the “biggest attack” since World War Two. The US president said he’d called the military action off after being told the “perimeters of a deal”, regarding Iran’s nuclear threat and the Strait of Hormuz, had been agreed. Around 98% of the estimated 50,000 migrants who illegally entered Spain’s north African territory Ceuta last week have now been returned to Morocco. Seizing on the unrest, Nigel Farage pledged that if Reform UK were to take power the party would use the Royal Navy to intercept all migrant boats in the Channel and escort them back to France or Belgium. Spider-Man: Brand New Day brought in a near-record $927m worldwide on its opening weekend. The movie, starring husband and wife Tom Holland and Zendaya (below), is second only to Avengers: Endgame, which took $1.2bn in its 2019 opening weekend.

There’s a joke doing the rounds that Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because “he has already ended the Iran war eight times”, says The Wall Street Journal. “Will the ninth time be the charm?” The US president called off his planned military escalation on Saturday, saying Tehran was back at the negotiating table. But it seems unlikely the Iranians have agreed to anything of substance. And Trump has admitted he backed off at the request of the Saudis, who were fearful their oil facilities and tankers would be hit in retaliatory attacks – another sign that Iran, which knows all too well that he is desperate to end the war, has “escalation dominance”. So much for the idea, put forward by JD Vance in June, that Iran is turning over a “new leaf”.

What Western analysts tend to get wrong about the Iranians, says Matthew Gould in The Washington Post, is that their approach usually isn’t driven by geopolitics or statecraft. It’s about preserving their grip on power, and “internal regime dynamics”. And good luck trying to figure out those dynamics from the outside. When I arrived in Tehran as a British diplomat in 2003, Ayatollah Khamenei used a Friday sermon to savage Britain. I asked a regime-allied think-tank boss what had prompted this outburst, and he “looked at me as if I were stupid”. What was important, he explained, was what Khamenei hadn’t said – the sermon had actually signalled a softening in his approach to the UK. It was hard enough to decipher the regime’s “endlessly shifting” power structures back then. Today, with Khamenei dead, his son and successor still nowhere to be seen, and a “viper’s nest” of groups competing for power in Tehran, it’s almost impossible.

I’ve long been advocating for more devolution, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, so I’m desperate for Andy Burnham’s measures to work. One big barrier will be that Labour is “deeply allergic” to what actually makes devolution work: competition. Regional rivalry is the “secret sauce” of American growth. Just look at the recent worker migration from high-tax, high-regulation states such as California and New York to the likes of Texas and Florida. Britain used to have this back in the “glory days”: big cities set their own business rates, infrastructure was controlled locally rather than nationally. But now Labour – and, sadly, Britain as a whole – see the words “postcode lottery” as a curse.

Matt Damon had a surprising stunt double for one of the most pivotal scenes in The Odyssey, says Alisha Haridasani Gupta in The New York Times: a 4ft 6in woman. Diminutive Canadian Devyn Dalton, 35, stepped into the A-lister’s shoes for the battle sequence against the man-eating Laestrygonians. It’s the first time the stocky stand-in has done stunts for a male star – a rarity in Hollywood – but she was considered the perfect choice for that scene because Odysseus and his group needed to appear “miniscule”. Plus, as Damon told an interviewer last week, she’s got “the greatest arms I have ever seen”.

One of the main reasons we’re struggling to control wildfires here in Britain, says Matt Ridley on Planet Normal, is that we’re not creating enough firebreaks. To do that, you need to burn heather – and that is considered verboten among those who follow the cult of “rewilding”. All of the major fires that have broken out in recent weeks – in the Peak District, the Cairngorms and Dunwich Heath in Suffolk – have occurred on land managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) or the National Trust. Unlike most private landowners, these organisations refuse to do any controlled burning because of climate change. The irony, of course, being that this leads to much greater fires when a blaze gets under way.

Rewilding isn’t the cause of Britain’s worsening upland wildfires, says Ben Goldsmith in The Spectator. “It’s the answer.” The reason there is so much highly flammable heather on these moors is because centuries of deliberate drainage have left our once-vast bogs desiccated. Blocking up these ditches to restore the natural hydrology would raise the water table to the surface almost immediately, slowing heather growth and making it harder for the peat to fuel “unkillable” fires. There are several examples of this working. At Wild Haweswater in the Lake District, where nearly 30 miles of drainage ditches have been blocked, there has been a “dramatic” reduction in wildfire risk. When a blaze raced across the managed grouse moor above Saddleworth near Manchester in 2018, rewetted areas nearby proved “noticeably resistant”. So why the pushback? Simple: rewetting the moors would reduce heather, the preferred food of the grouse, which would mean fewer grouse for people to shoot. But if we want proper fire resistance, that’s the price we’ll have to pay.

Colour Guess is a fun online game in which players are given a brand logo – such as Rolls-Royce, Kellogg’s or Domino’s Pizza – where one of the colours has been changed, and have to work out what the original was. There’s a daily challenge, as well as a plentiful archive if you fancy more than one pop at it. Click here to give it a go.

Private jet companies are going to extraordinary lengths to win over their uber-rich customers, says Sheila Yasmin Marikar in Air Mail. Some throw in luxury experiences, such as high-end bazaar-hopping trips in Marrakech or tickets to the Masters. One company, VistaJet, allows parents to relax or work when flying by offering “immersive classes” for kids, and has even put on an in-flight Alice in Wonderland-themed birthday party. They’ll also supply vitamin-infused water to passengers and their pets – whatever the species. “We’ve had a chameleon,” the company’s president says, and “falcons are frequent guests on our flight to and from the Middle East”.

It’s the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge, says Lanre Bakare in The Guardian, who has become embroiled in a plagiarism scandal. Sociologist Jason Arday, who was 37 when he joined the university in 2023, is alleged to have cribbed another student’s work for his dissertation. He is also facing scrutiny over his claims that he ran 600 miles in six days for charity; that he appeared as a child in the TV show Seven Up, which began 21 years before he was born; and that a severed pig’s head was once delivered to his parents’ home. Arday says he is the victim of a “co-ordinated campaign to unseat me”.