Britain will offer European countries a youth mobility scheme as part of Keir Starmer’s reset with Brussels, says The Times. Under the plans, thousands of 18-to-30-year-old EU citizens would be allowed to live and work in the UK for two years, with young Britons allowed similar access to the EU. Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas of a “cruel and evil violation” of the ceasefire agreement, after forensic testing showed that one of the bodies returned by the terror group yesterday was not that of the hostage Shiri Bibas. A Hamas spokesman claimed the remains may have been mixed up with others after an Israeli airstrike. The James Bond franchise will now be owned by Amazon, after its long-time custodians, the Broccoli family, handed all creative control to Jeff Bezos’s company. With the iconic British character now in American hands, says the Daily Mirror, “will the Skyfall in?”

We Europeans know the perils of negotiating with Putin

Europeans watching Donald Trump negotiate with Vladimir Putin may be experiencing a certain déjà vu, says Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde. Those who have agreed ceasefires with Russia during his reign tend to have “not so fond memories” of the experience. The one negotiated by Nicolas Sarkozy after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 is a “model of its kind”. Moscow simply imposed terms on then-President Mikheil Saakashvili, and “never really withdrew from Georgia”. Today, Georgia’s two small separatist republics – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – are occupied by the Russian army and the country is “unable to function democratically” because of the influence of Moscow.

It was a similar story when Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, having already annexed Crimea. French and German officials painstakingly negotiated the “Minsk agreements” to end the conflict, but the first ceasefire collapsed after only a few days. “With the best of intentions”, Angela Merkel and François Hollande launched a fresh round of negotiations the following year. One night during the talks – which Putin slowed down as much as possible to allow his forces to gain ground – the Russian president sent for his chief of staff. In front of the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, Putin asked his man what would happen if his forces stormed a particular city. “Ten thousand dead,” replied the general. “Do you get it now?” Putin asked Poroshenko, “who turned pale”. The ceasefire was signed the following morning, on Russian terms. Who knows, perhaps the Americans can do better. But don’t count on it.

JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon was secretly recorded last week, says The Wall Street Journal, explaining in no uncertain terms what he thinks about remote working: “Don’t give me this shit that work-from-home Friday works,” he says, “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.” And when people can finally be dragged to meetings “on the fucking Zoom”, he continues, they’re reading emails, not reading their notes, “sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is”. And to those who think remote working is here to stay: “You don’t have to work at JPMorgan. It’s a free country.”

Saddam Hussein once tried his hand as a romance novelist, says the Messy Nessy newsletter. Originally published anonymously in 2000, Zabiba and the King is a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a “beautiful commoner girl” who he liberates from an abusive marriage. It is set in Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and is meant to be an allegory: the hero king represents Hussein, Zabiba is the Iraqi people, and her vicious husband is, naturally, the United States. The book was a bestseller, shifting an estimated one million copies, and was later adapted into a 20-part TV series and a musical.

The age of the prude is over

News that the raunchy restaurant chain Hooters is opening a 200-seat venue in Newcastle, employing at least 50 chesty “Hooters Girls”, has triggered the usual suspects, says Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd. Feminist academics and charity bosses complain that a chain which “treats women as objects to be served up alongside chicken wings and fries” has no place in the post-MeToo society. Hooters certainly holds its all-female staff to strict appearance standards. Its “infamous nose test” – in which would-be employees are told to stand against a wall to ensure their breasts protrude more than their noses – is just a myth. But everything else, “from hairstyle and makeup to manicure colours and bodyweight”, is tightly regulated.

For some reason, the grumbling feels a bit perfunctory. One wonders if, with woke on the wane and the broader vibe shift, this “battle over the breastaurant” represents a final, futile skirmish in a “fruitless war against human nature” that even feminists understand they were “always going to lose”. There’s something “absurdly self-defeating” in the idea that we shouldn’t celebrate the female form – something humans have been doing since the “first enterprising cave artist carved a figure with a great pair of bazongas into a limestone wall”. The return of Hooters is surely a sign that we’re living in a “brave new world” – one where people once again want to gather together, in person, to joke and chat and drink beer, served by a busty barmaid. Truly, the “age of the prude” is over.

College life in America is often portrayed as an “alcohol-fuelled, sexual free-for-all”, says The Economist. But the sex lives of the country’s university students are “surprisingly tame”. In 2024, one in five final-year undergraduates at Harvard told the Crimson student newspaper that they had never had sex. This “sexual slowdown” carries on after graduation, creating what experts call a “degree divide” in the bedroom: compared to non-graduates, those with a degree have, on average, one-and-a-half fewer shags per month. That’s 18 fewer bonks a year.

It’s rare to find good news about the NHS these days, says Sherelle Jacobs in The Daily Telegraph. But when it comes to preventative healthcare, our health service is truly “pioneering”. It’s the first in the world to routinely offer whole genome sequencing, which identifies potentially dangerous variations in an individual’s DNA. It’s leading the development and trialling of cancer vaccinations; “soon we will be inoculating people against large numbers of cancers that hit the lung, bowel, breast and brain”. And healthcare officials are using “cutting edge” techniques to target vulnerable groups, involving forensic data and risk prediction models.

It’s a cat figurine, nearly 500 of which have been pilfered from the new branch of Gordon Ramsay’s inaptly named “Lucky Cat” chain in London, says The Guardian. The millionaire restaurateur complained on The Jonathan Ross Show that 477 of the maneki-neko figurines, believed by the Japanese to bring good luck, had been half-inched in the past week from his 22 Bishopsgate restaurant, adding that “they cost £4.50 each”. This amount would mean the foul-mouthed foodie had lost a total of £2,146.50.