The head of the Israeli military has apologised for the airstrike that killed seven aid workers, including three from Britain, in Gaza on Monday. Amid growing international condemnation, Herzi Halevi said the drone attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy was a “grave mistake” following a “misidentification”. Taiwan has been hit by its strongest earthquake in 25 years, which has left seven dead and more than 700 injured. The 7.4-magnitude quake on the island’s east coast led to building collapses, power outages and landslides. The royal apartments in Balmoral Castle are to be opened to the public for the first time. Guided tours taking 40 people a day will operate throughout July, in a trial to see how the 170-year-old building copes with an increase in visitors. It won’t come cheap, though: adult tickets are £100, with afternoon tea another £50.

The shadow war with Iran is now out in the open

On Monday, says Marc Champion in Bloomberg, a targeted airstrike on Iran’s consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus killed a group of senior Iranian military commanders. The attack was attributed to Israel, but bears little in common with the war in Gaza because of its “extraordinary precision”. The pilots had to hit the building where these commanders were meeting “without at the same time also destroying the Iranian and Canadian embassies next door”. And the most senior of the targets “had a reputation for extreme operational security bordering on paranoia”, meaning that the operation relied on top-quality intelligence. He was Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, responsible “for supplying the increasingly sophisticated missiles that Hezbollah fires at Israel”.

The assassination has “brought into the open a shadow war that was already escalating”. Israel has long been under attack from Iran’s “wrist-length” proxy forces – including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemen’s Houthis – but now, PM Benjamin Netanyahu has sent a message to Tehran that he will stop at nothing, “including a regional war”, to fight back. The ball is now in the court of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who has pledged “harsh punishment and revenge” for the strike. But “this is a fight that he picked”, and although it has so far cost him little, that’s starting to change. If he overreacts, this proxy conflict will become “a much larger war he could lose”.

“Back when I had police protection,” says George Osborne in The Spectator, “one of the officers told me a story.” When Margaret Thatcher was living out her final months in the Ritz, the police guarding her would have to sit on chairs outside her room all day. Their only perk was a free breakfast from the hotel. One morning, the two officers headed off to the dining room as usual for a full English, when one of their phones went off. “How’s Lady Thatcher doing?” asked their supervising officer. “Just fine, thanks,” the one with the phone replied. “Oh right, because on the TV it says she’s dead.” Without missing a beat, the protection officer said: “Yes sir, we know. The doctors have been coming and going all morning and swore us to secrecy.” Then they rushed back to their post.

The kiwi fruit has become synonymous with New Zealand, says Country Life, but it’s actually indigenous to the forests of southwest China. Specimens were sent from China to Britain and the US at the turn of the 20th century, but neither country realised its potential. New Zealanders didn’t make the same mistake. They established commercial orchards, and in 1952 exported the fruit for the first time – 13 tonnes of it, to England. They originally called it a “Chinese gooseberry”, but later settled on kiwi, on the basis that it “looked vaguely like the flightless brown bird that the country had adopted as its national symbol”.

The “essential difference” between Brits and Americans

If you want to understand an essential difference between Brits and Americans, says Yascha Mounk in The Spectator, look at how their university essays are graded. At Harvard, you are taught to answer questions in “the most thorough and reasonable way” – to get the top grade, all you really have to do is “regurgitate the dominant view” in a competent manner. At Cambridge, such earnest and methodical fare only gets you so far. To earn a first-class degree, you have to be “brilliant”, which generally means arguing for deeply counter-intuitive positions. The answer is often plain wrong, but that’s not the point. As long as you argue with flair and panache, you have a shot at gaining that “coveted first”.

This difference is equally apparent in journalism. Opinion pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post tend to be “painstakingly logical” – and “utterly uninspiring”. In the UK, columnists are free to float half-baked ideas or go off on fun tangents. “For American journalists, the cardinal sin is to be wrong. For British journalists, the cardinal sin is to be boring.” Each approach has its flaws. America’s system has helped create a “deeply conformist elite”, full of people like Hillary Clinton – fluent in received geopolitical wisdom yet totally unable to read the pulse of the nation. In Britain, “charismatic amateurs” like Boris Johnson are prized over earnest professionals. It’s fashionable to argue that the UK should take things more seriously, but I don’t agree. There’s something inherently admirable about Britain’s allergy to “highfalutin rubbish”, and its “instinctive preference for the thought-provoking over the reasonable”.

The term “Wi-Fi” is not, as you might expect, “a shortened version of some highly technical description” for wireless internet, says Gizmodo. It’s just “a snappy name invented by marketers”. The agency Interbrand, which had named the anti-depressant Prozac and the computer company Compaq, was hired in the late 1990s to come up with a slightly sexier moniker than IEEE 802.11, the technical term for the technology. So it just changed one letter of “Hi-Fi”, the then-ubiquitous term for high-fidelity audio systems. This led to a persistent myth that Wi-Fi stands for “wireless fidelity” – of which “there’s no such thing”.

It’s London’s new “super sewer”, which has been completed after eight years of construction, says The Independent. The £5bn Thames Tideway Tunnel runs for 16 miles under the capital, from Acton in the west to Stratford in the east, and is wide enough to fit three buses side by side. It will take on waste from 34 of the outflow pipes that discharge raw sewage into the Thames when it rains, hopefully cutting the river’s sewage pollution by around 95%. Assuming testing goes well, the tunnel should come into operation next year.