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The US and Iran agreed a two-week ceasefire deal last night that will see the Strait of Hormuz temporarily re-opened. Donald Trump, who had threatened to destroy “a whole civilisation” if Tehran didn’t re-open the waterway before his 8pm deadline, said a 10-point plan submitted by Iran was a “workable basis” for negotiations on a permanent agreement. Israel said the ceasefire didn’t include Lebanon and has continued to target Hezbollah today. The announcement triggered a plunge in oil prices and a surge in stock markets, with Brent crude down 13% to under $95 a barrel and European stocks up almost 4%. Keir Starmer is heading to the Gulf today to discuss the agreement with regional leaders. Nasa has released images from the Artemis II mission showing views of the far side of the moon that had never been seen before by human eyes. A photo of “Earthset” (below) captures our planet slipping behind the lunar surface, showing the “terminator line” where daylight meets darkness. Browse the pictures here. |
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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty |
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Did Trump’s apocalyptic threats work? |
The Iran ceasefire deal looks, on the surface, to be a vindication of Donald Trump’s long-held belief that his real estate negotiating tactics work in geopolitics as well, says David Sanger in The New York Times. By escalating his rhetoric to “astronomical levels” – threatening that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” – he found the diplomatic off-ramp he had been seeking for weeks. And this is certainly a “tactical victory”, which should get oil, fertiliser and other crucial products flowing again, calming markets that feared a global energy shock. But as always, the devil is in the detail. |
Tehran hasn’t actually ceded control of the Strait of Hormuz – it has said vessels can pass through via “co-ordination with Iran’s armed forces”. That, clearly, was not the case before the war. The country’s theocratic government remains in place, albeit “under new management”. So too its nuclear stockpile, including the 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade material that was supposedly the casus belli of the entire conflict. And the hard part is still to come: trying to forge a final agreement to end the war. The gap between what Iran wants from a deal and the US view is so wide it’s hard to imagine a settlement in two years, let alone two weeks. And if Trump fails to get the Iranians to give up those 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, he’ll have accomplished less with his “billion-dollar-a-day-war” than Barack Obama managed with his 2015 nuclear deal – the deal Trump tore up during his first term. This ceasefire is obviously to be welcomed. But it resolves “none of the fundamental issues that led to the war”. |
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Forget Aperol spritz, say Helena Horton and Hannah Al-Othman in The Guardian, the drink of the summer will be the Hugo spritz. Created in 2005 by an Italian bartender in South Tyrol, the elderflower cocktail had a breakout year in the UK in 2025 and has grown in popularity since. Waitrose says searches on its website for “Hugo spritz” have more than quadrupled year-on-year, with sales of the elderflower liqueur St-Germain up by nearly 30%, and Aldi is now selling a ready-to-drink version. Try it for yourself: add ice, a handful of mint leaves and a slice of lime to a glass, then pour in 40ml of elderflower liqueur, 60ml prosecco and top it up with soda water. |
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Today’s other big news |
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A robot hacking into a computer, as imagined by ChatGPT |
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You probably missed it yesterday, but there was a rather ominous development in AI. Anthropic announced that its latest large language model, Claude Mythos Preview, will be released to only a handful of top tech companies, including rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft. Why? Because Mythos is so advanced it has identified vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems, which run power grids, military systems, hospitals, and so on. Yikes. |
Seeing as we clearly don’t have long until either the robots take over or some wrong ‘un uses the robots to take over, why not enjoy yourself? A paid subscription to The Knowledge will bring you a little five-minute window of fun and joy and enlightenment, every day, for the insanely low price of just £4 a month or £40 for the first year. |
When the world is a fiery hellscape and your head is under the boot of some giant unforgiving robot, you don’t want to have any regrets. Not taking out a subscription – for just 80p a week! – would surely be one of them. |
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