Joe Biden says he is “more hopeful” of a ceasefire in Gaza after Israeli forces killed uncompromising Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a surprise battlefield encounter in Rafah. Benjamin Netanyahu said the killing of the mastermind behind the October 7 attacks “settled the score”, but that the war was “not over”. An army of 10,000 North Koreans is preparing to join Russian forces in Ukraine, according to Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president, whose claim hasn’t been confirmed by western intelligence agencies, says Pyongyang’s involvement in the conflict would be “the first step to a world war”. The Hunter’s supermoon lit up skies across the world last night, delighting stargazers with the brightest moon of the year. The celestial phenomenon happens when the moon is at its closest point to Earth.

Sinwar’s death means peace is finally possible

In 2008, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, when Yahya Sinwar was an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison, he developed a brain tumour. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Yesterday, “Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite”. It ended a year-long manhunt during which the Hamas leader was rumoured to have surrounded himself with Israeli hostages in case of attack. None died in this operation, but “tens of thousands of equally blameless Gazans” have been killed acting as his involuntary human shield. The architect of the October 7 atrocities saw their deaths as a desirable way to turn international sentiment against Israel. With his elimination, the last obstacle to sane negotiations has been removed.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of this moment, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. Sinwar’s death creates the conditions for the biggest step towards a two-state solution since the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. It also frees Saudi Arabia – and by extension “pretty much the entire Muslim world” – to restart the process of normalising relations with Israel. Sinwar and Hamas always rejected a two-state solution and were “committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish state”. No one paid a higher price for that genocidal fixation than the Palestinians of Gaza. With Sinwar gone, it is now up to Benjamin Netanyahu to go along with a scheme he has previously rejected. Cooked up by US, Saudi, Egyptian and Emirati diplomats, this would see an international peacekeeping force – including a Palestinian contingent from the West Bank – take over and rebuild Gaza, as the first step towards a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has long wanted to show he is a historic figure. “Well, this is his moment.”

Keir Starmer’s first 100 days in office were no walk in the park, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, but neither were Tony Blair’s. At the start of his premiership the New Labour leader lost a by-election in Uxbridge, triggered uproar by giving party fundraiser Michael Levy a peerage, and almost lost his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, after it emerged that he was having an affair. These stumbles are now mere “footnotes to history” because, as Blair found, “people are very forgiving when their lives are getting measurably better”. Plenty of time, Keir.

I love the phone feature that allows you to listen to voice notes at double speed, says Kate Reardon in Times Luxury. I just wish there was a x2 button for other moments in life. Those first 10 minutes of a party, when it’s all awkward and shuffly. Speech day when your kid hasn’t won anything. “Wagner.” The first day of a new job. Detailed descriptions of someone else’s dreams. Root canals, hair transplants, the first three sessions of therapy. “Any time between 2am and 4am when you’re involuntarily conscious.” What I’d pay to be able to fast-forward through all that.

There’s nothing more common than an etiquette expert

Apparently, fish knives are “common”, says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. So said Lady Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s former lady-in-waiting, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last week. It was a view shared by William Hanson, a self-styled etiquette expert (“a common job description if ever there was one”) who explained that fish knives were only introduced in the late Victorian period, so anyone who owned a set had probably bought their own cutlery rather than inheriting it. According to Hanson, another “common” indicator is owning a television larger than 46 inches. The Princess Royal, you see, was pictured during the pandemic sitting in front of an “antiquated” TV. “It shows that you’re not really that interested in television,” he explained. “Which itself is quite chic.”

What utter tosh. Hanson appears to think “out-of-date” automatically means smart, and that “modern equals common”. But if that were the case, posh folk would still be riding around on penny farthings. A big flatscreen TV is obviously much more enjoyable to watch than a stubby little one, and “there is nothing grand about pretending otherwise”. Far better to follow the approach of interior designer Nicky Haslam, whose annual list of “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common” is sharp and funny precisely because his choices aren’t stuck in the past or “bound up in class”. Examples include: going to the Maldives for Christmas, mouthing the words to a song when dancing, Garrick Club ties, farm shops, Henley Royal Regatta, knighthoods, swimming with dolphins, ordering lobster, and reading books about Winston Churchill. Next to all these, fish knives seem like “the peak of sophistication”.

To The Daily Telegraph:

Many years ago, our family gamekeeper was Charlie Bray, a two-time world conker champion. He looked magnificent dressed up in his kit, and he knew how to talk. His championship wins propelled him into the limelight and he was flown to New York to appear on television to encourage Americans to take up the sport. When asked what his secret was, he said that the best conker was one that had been naturally picked. The best way to do this, he said, was to “let it pass through a pig”.

Lady Gage
Brackley, Northamptonshire

The Monty Python team had a very simple writing process. “We would get together, read out what we’d written and if we made ourselves laugh then it was in the show,” Eric Idle tells Late Night with Seth Meyers. “And if it didn’t, we sold it to The Two Ronnies.”

It’s a Prada spacesuit, says Gizmodo, specifically the one astronauts will use on the first mission to the moon in over 50 years. Officially known as the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the snazzy suit includes a health monitoring system, a cooling device and a special coating to protect astronauts from the harsh sun and lunar dust. Axiom Space, NASA’s commercial partner, roped in the Italian designers to share their expertise on “high-performance materials” and “sewing techniques” – making sure the celestial voyagers will look smart when they blast off in September 2026.