More than 150,000 people waited over 24 hours for an A&E bed last year, according to new data – 10 times more than in 2019. Around 40,000 patients a month wait 12 hours, a 50-fold jump from pre-pandemic levels and a 600-fold increase on 2015. The total solar eclipse over North America this evening should be partially visible in parts of the UK. From 7.55pm, residents of much of Wales, Cornwall and northern England could see the moon cover up to 10% of the sun, while parts of Northern Ireland and western Scotland will see a partial eclipse of around 20%. A Briton has become the first person to run the length of Africa. Russ Cook, a 27-year-old from Sussex nicknamed “Hardest Geezer”, reached the Tunisian coast yesterday (pictured) after covering more than 9,940 miles across 16 countries over 352 days. “I’m a little bit tired,” he said.

Israel has “jumped headfirst” into Hamas’s trap

Hamas’s October 7 atrocities were, like 9/11, “cunningly designed to provoke an over-reaction”, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. The terror group was perfectly happy to “sacrifice tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children” in a potential Israeli reprisal, as it knew such a response would hurt the country’s international standing. Israel jumped “headfirst” into this trap. Rather than emphasise the need for restraint to IDF soldiers, who were “understandably filled with shock and anger” about Hamas’s massacre, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “did the opposite”. Five hundred 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on Gaza, turning it into “a Hiroshima of the Middle East”. Israeli soldiers have been filmed mocking their victims and “celebrating the destruction of mosques and buildings”.

The recent strike on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy got attention because foreign nationals were killed, but it only demonstrates the “bomb first, ask questions later” policy that has killed so many innocent Palestinians. Recent reporting has suggested that the IDF used AI programmes – one sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?” – to coordinate the first bombings of the war. They were permitted to kill 20 civilians per junior Hamas operative and 100 per senior one – 300, in the case of one Hamas commander. This is far beyond the usual bounds of “collateral damage”. Israel has been drawn into a kind of “brutal tribal warfare where the line between civilians and soldiers is all but erased”. This is what Hamas hoped for when they launched their wicked attack. “Those still alive must be staggered at how successful they have been.”

Too many politicians prioritise “soaring rhetoric” over pragmatism, says Trevor Phillips in The Times – local election candidates pontificating about Gaza, say, rather than telling us how they’ll fix the area’s potholes. But can you blame them? Richard Nixon, “no one’s idea of a heroic leader”, remains “reviled” in the US despite enacting minimum wage and anti-discrimination laws that did more to transform life for America’s minorities “than any other political act in the 20th century”. Barack Obama, by contrast, is still “revered” among liberals, even though his legacy consists of “the betrayal of Syria, an aggrieved and impoverished Middle America, bungled health reforms, and the disaster named Donald Trump”.

Mount Etna has been putting on a show for tourists and locals by blowing near-perfect smoke rings into the Sicilian sky. The 11,000-feet-high volcano is one of only a few in the world that produce the circles, which consist of condensed gases and water vapour, says The Daily Telegraph. But scientists say the latest batch, caused by a new vent that formed last week, are “exceptional”.

Get off that sofa and go to your local Italian

“I don’t want you to think I’m being apocalyptic,” says Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times, “but I have seen the harbinger of the end times.” It was the news last week that Britons are eating 50% more takeaways than before Covid, which is making it harder and harder for independent restaurants to survive. It’s hardly a surprise. When I go to the little Italian I like in Kilburn, north London, I’m often the only person there, bar the “constant stream of delivery drivers zooming in and out”. Industry experts say the result will likely be more chain restaurants, because of their economies of scale. As George Orwell didn’t quite put it, “if you want a picture of the future, imagine eating in Pizza Hut, for ever”.

We’re better than this. Don’t tell me it’s about saving money – delivery is just as expensive as eating out, only the food isn’t hot and you have to put it on a plate yourself. “Takeaway food is to restaurants what pornography is to sex.” Yes, it satisfies the same basic need, “but there’s an awful lot more dignity in one than the other”. People always moan about the death of the high street, and the lack of independent outlets. But if we want these places, “we have to buy what they are selling”. And look, I’m as guilty of all this as anyone else – I get Deliveroo sometimes, and order things on Amazon. But we should at least be aware that all our little choices add up. And that there’s more to life than “slumping on the sofa, slurping congealed moped-borne pasta”.

The complaint young people have when they move to London – “everything is so expensive” – is not a new one, says The Guardian. A set of letters about to go on display in Cumbria, written by the trainee clerk Ben Browne in the early 1700s, is full of requests for funds from his family in the Lake District. He says he needs the extra cash to pay his rent and to buy stockings, breeches, wigs and other items. “My Cloaths which [I] have now,” he explains to his parents, “are but mean in Comparison [with] what they wear here.”

It’s John Tinniswood, a 111-year-old from England who has become the world’s oldest living man. The great-grandfather, who lives in a care home in Southport, Merseyside, took the title after the previous official record-holder, a 114-year-old Venezuelan, died last Tuesday. Born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, he has been retired for 52 years and still eats his favourite meal, fish and chips, every Friday. But he says his longevity is “pure luck”. “You either live long or you live short,” he told Guinness World Records, “and you can’t do much about it.”