A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas announced last night has been delayed. A vote by the Israeli cabinet on the agreement to free the remaining hostages and halt the fighting was postponed this morning after Benjamin Netanyahu accused the terror group of reneging on one aspect of the deal. Keir Starmer has arrived in Kyiv to sign what Downing Street is calling a “100-year partnership” with Ukraine, formalising economic and military support already pledged to the country. It is the prime minister’s first visit to Ukraine since taking office in July, in an apparent show of solidarity before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, has sent a rocket into Earth’s orbit for the first time. The 98-metre-tall New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit the planet, John Glenn. The rocket’s booster, which failed to land as planned, was called So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance – seemingly a reference to a line from the 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber.

A victory for “Mad Man” diplomacy

The terms of the hostage and ceasefire deal that Israel and Hamas agreed yesterday have been “on the table for months”, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. What’s interesting is the way the agreement was secured: by Steven Witkoff, Donald Trump’s real estate billionaire buddy and incoming Middle East envoy, in a “blunt Saturday morning meeting” with Benjamin Netanyahu. Witkoff simply explained, “in no uncertain terms”, that Trump expected a deal. Things Netanyahu had previously called “life-and-death issues” suddenly vanished. Of course, Israel is in a “vastly stronger strategic position” than in previous rounds of negotiation: the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” has been “decimated in Beirut, overthrown in Damascus, flattened in Gaza and badly stung in Tehran itself”. But what made the difference, clearly, was Trump.

Above all, this is a huge victory for the “Mad Man” theory of diplomacy, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Joe Biden, a “creature of the liberal world order” and slave to institutional groupthink, failed to pile sufficient pressure on negotiators, particularly the Israelis, to get a ceasefire over the line. Trump, a “freewheeling narcissist”, gives the impression that he might walk away even from his allies. It helps that the president-elect has made no secret of his suspicions about Netanyahu, ever since the latter recognised Biden’s election victory in 2020. It’s the same “hint of imperial madness” that compelled Nato leaders to raise spending or Arab states to recognise Israel during his first term. Crucially, the Mad Man approach is neither “gung-ho” nor pacifist; Trump avoids military adventures yet spends big on defence. Rather, it threatens action in an unpredictable manner: “You don’t want to mess with me.” And by God it gets the job done.

🇮🇱🗓️ One nice detail from the negotiations, says Tim Stanley, is that when Netanyahu reportedly wanted to delay proceedings for the Sabbath, Witkoff replied that Jewish members of the US team were happy to work through it, so “why not the Israelis”? Arab officials say Witkoff did more to shift Bibi’s position in one meeting than Biden did in a year. “You can’t win against a real estate developer from the Bronx.”

The New York Times asked leading health specialists for their top advice for a better life. Answers included: don’t bother with multivitamins; eating dark-chocolate covered nuts (“almost a perfect food”); the 10-10-10 rule, in which you take a 10-second break every 10 minutes to stare at something 10 feet away; resisting the urge to rinse after brushing your teeth, to let the fluoride do its job; and incorporating small “movement snacks” into your day, such as brushing your teeth on one foot or reaching up to the top of the doorway when you leave a room. See the rest here.

The Guardian has revealed the answers to the fiendishly tricky King William’s College quiz, which featured in The Knowledge before Christmas. So we now know the city that gave its name to the tarboosh is Fez; that Maidenhead is “too snobby to be pleasant” (from Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat); that the hotel where the imitation pearl necklace was hidden in Célestine’s mattress was the Grand Metropolitan in Brighton (from the Agatha Christie story The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan); and that it was Oakham where three corgis were unveiled with their mistress in 2024, in a statue of Queen Elizabeth II. See all the questions and answers here and here.

The secret about UK growth: we don’t want it enough

Almost everyone in British political life names “growth” as their priority, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. “And almost no one means it.” There is always another consideration that takes precedence, whether “geopolitical, ecological, cultural or egalitarian”. The result is the worst of all worlds: “no serious drive for economic success”, but also no tacit agreement that we should “bed down for a life of low-drama stagnation”. A thousand newspaper editorials argue the problem is Britain lacks a “growth strategy”, but that’s balls. What we lack is a “growth preference”. Just look at America. The world’s most effective economy has no plan, but when growth comes into conflict with anything else – tax cuts against welfare spending, corporate expansion against antitrust concerns, fracking against local sensitivities – growth always wins.

This week Keir Starmer set out his new plan to boost growth by exploiting artificial intelligence. The moment it became clear he wasn’t serious was when he said he would make AI “work for everyone”. No government reform worth a damn works for everyone. He has already conceded, in effect, that the minute AI upsets some interest group, he will cave. If it is to be truly transformative, AI will result in massive public sector job losses, huge new demands on our energy infrastructure and a serious need to attract top talent. But when unions start moaning about their members getting sacked, the eco-lobby complain that greater energy use will undermine net zero, and some think tank produces a report arguing tax cuts for highly paid techies will exacerbate inequality, what will Starmer do? He says he wants growth, but how much?

The ideal spy should be no taller than 5ft 8in and look as “unlike a policeman as possible”, according to a 17-page guide on how to be an MI5 “watcher” which has been declassified and released by the National Archives. Other advice from the World War Two document includes: how to follow a target without being rumbled (pictured); dressing for the locality you are in; avoiding any facial disguise, despite what you see in spy movies (“a false moustache or beard is easily detected, especially under the high lights of a restaurant, pub, or in a tube train”); and promising your cabbie a good tip if you’re using a taxi to follow a suspect. See more here.

Part of Donald Trump’s rationale for wanting to buy Greenland, besides national security, is to access the island’s vast mineral riches, says Javier Blas in Bloomberg. Good luck with that. Yes, geologists have found at least 50 locations with mineral potential. But more than half are north of the Arctic Circle, making their exploitation “hard and expensive, if not impossible”, and most of those that are accessible are relatively small. The cost of rare earth metals would have to soar to make extraction there worthwhile, and even then it’d probably be cheaper to get them from elsewhere – including from the US itself. Sorry Donald, Greenland is no “commodity superpower”.

It’s a model Swedish house that is going to be planted on the surface of the moon, says ABC News. The so-called “Moonhouse”, which is helpfully described as “the size of a big hand”, hitched a ride with a Japanese lunar lander that blasted off on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday. The aluminium creation is part of an $800,000 art project dreamt up by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg over 25 years. “It’s small on this planet, but it will be big on the moon,” Genberg told The Associated Press. “There’s nothing like that in space.”