Joe Biden says a ceasefire deal in Gaza is on “the brink” of being finalised after a breakthrough in negotiations between Israel and Hamas in Qatar. The US president says the draft of the agreement would free the remaining Israeli hostages, halt the fighting and allow “significantly” more humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory. Donald Trump would have been convicted of trying to overturn the 2020 election had he not been re-elected, according to the prosecutor who was investigating him. Special counsel Jack Smith dropped the charges after Trump’s election win in November, but says his evidence was “sufficient” to obtain a conviction. In bad news for sun-seeking Brits, Spain is planning a tax of up to 100% on properties bought by non-residents from outside the EU. Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez has proposed the levy to combat the country’s housing crisis. Turns out mi casa no es tu casa.

European elites are fighting a losing battle

There’s an old joke on the old continent, says Wolfgang Münchau in UnHerd: “when a European referendum delivers the wrong outcome, the country votes again until they get it right”. It turns out there’s some truth to that line. Romania recently cancelled its presidential election after the first round was won by Călin Georgescu, the largely overlooked (but popular online) far-right candidate, on the grounds that the result had been skewed by Russian misinformation. Thierry Breton, the French former European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset in a rather damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania,” he said with regards to enforcing misinformation laws, “and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.” The classic elite refrain is that the “far right wants to destroy democracy”. Today it’s the centrists saying: sod democracy, “if you can’t beat the far right, ban them”.

I am grateful to Breton for stating his case with “such revealing clarity”. As he made clear, Europe’s aim isn’t to save public discourse but to suffocate far-right parties by depriving them of the oxygen of publicity. The German media had a “collective breakdown” when Elon Musk tweeted an endorsement of the AfD and interviewed party co-leader Alice Weidel on X, then endorsed her in an editorial in Die Welt. Mainstream German journalists operate inside a “narrow centrist political consensus” that effectively ignores the AfD. But the party thrives on TikTok, where it has a large following. This is what irks the German media: their “censorship cartel” is no longer functioning. Social media means efforts to censor populists are now failing everywhere. It’s time to stop trying to sweep them under the rug and hoping they’ll disappear.

With fires still raging across Los Angeles, rich residents are hiring private firefighters to guard their homes, says the LA Times. Outside the house of property developer Rick Caruso are a fire engine, multiple trucks filled with extra water and about a dozen mercenary firefighters, hired to protect the property and the surrounding neighbourhood. Caruso is one of many landowners in the city shelling out for extra protection from specialist firms, which typically employ full-time firemen on their days off.

Noreen Riols, who died earlier this month aged 98, was one of the last surviving women from the wartime Special Operations Executive, says The Daily Telegraph. One of her jobs was to pose as an “old friend” of an officer when he was taking a trainee spy out for dinner. The officer would then take a lengthy fake phone call, allowing Riols, “looking seductive and sipping a cocktail”, to lure the wannabe spook out on to the balcony, ply him with booze and “charm him into indiscretions”. The morning after one successful dinner she sat in on the interview of the man she’d hoodwinked, who recognised her and shouted: “You bitch!”

The literary landscapes we should fight to preserve

Last week I was struck by a story about a small town in Hampshire called Alton, says Martha Gill in The Observer. Its residents are objecting to the building of 3,000 homes on the basis that Jane Austen sometimes used to walk in the area, making it an “important part of our literary heritage”. Sure, this is partly nimbyism. But it speaks to a broader point about our “stark hierarchy of heritage”. Historic England protects 500,000 buildings, and countless artefacts are safely preserved in museums. Yet culturally important landscapes, trees and rivers are left comparatively “undefended”.

Campaigners like those in Alton are increasingly pushing to preserve “literary heritage”. The Woodland Trust is seeking to protect “old and noteworthy trees”, such as the 300-year-old Kilbroney Oak that sits within the landscape believed to have inspired The Chronicles of Narnia, and the roughly 1,000-year-old Major Oak bound up in the legend of Robin Hood. Villagers in Dorset are protesting against a development on land where Thomas Hardy set Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Given we “fetishise” anything touched by famous literary hands – portraits, letters to friends, tiny scraps of paper bearing their autograph – why not also preserve the natural landmarks that inspired them? Besides, Britain’s countryside needs all the help it can get: the UK was recently deemed one of the most “nature-depleted” countries in the world. Our obsession with buildings and relics is “blinding us to the value of nature”.

Doom Captcha is a tool that lets users play a short level of the classic 1993 video game Doom to prove they’re human, instead of completing one of those boring “select all images containing motorbikes” puzzles. Players must kill three enemies to pass the test – which, as you can see above, is harder than it looks. Try for yourself here.

Dovid Efune, a prospective buyer of the Telegraph, has complained that the paper isn’t being very nice to him, says Semafor. His would-be employees have called the New York Sun owner a “minnow”, and described his latest prospective partner, Leon Black, as a “Wall Street billionaire ousted over Epstein links”. In another move that “the hardened Londoners see as a bit naive”, Efune has told associates he sought guidance from Times owner Rupert Murdoch – the Telegraph’s biggest rival – on whether he was overpaying for the title. “Murdoch assured him $550m was a great price.”

On the left is a pair of Birkenstock sandals and on the right is a cheap knock-off. The German footwear company is suing three competitors for breaching copyright, on the possibly optimistic basis that its cork-soled slip-ons are “works of applied art”, says The Guardian. Its lawyers have cited shonky versions of four of its models, including the classic Arizona (pictured) worn by Margot Robbie in Barbie. The case has wound up in Germany’s highest court after two previous judgements clashed over whether footwear could actually be “applied art”.