Analysts fear Iran has played a weak hand well and the US has blundered into a defining strategic failure

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Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025.

Not only has the war failed to persuade Iran to agree to dismantle its nuclear programme in the comprehensive and irreversible way the US demanded in a 15-point paper that it tabled on 23 May last year, Washington is now having to negotiate to reopen the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that has been open ever since the invention of the dhow, with a short exception of a tanker war in the 1980s between Iran and Iraq.

The US court verdicts declaring Meta liable for getting people addicted and ruining lives must be just the start of a global fightback

Good news is so rare these days, you don’t quite know how to take it. You want to celebrate, but a rival instinct tells you it’ll be pulled back somehow, the same feeling you get when your team scores a late winner, but you’re filled with instant dread that the goal will be overturned on a video replay.

I confess that is how I responded to the double legal blow dealt this week to Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, when two US juries on successive days found against it in a pair of landmark cases. First came a verdict in New Mexico, fining the company $375m (£280m) for enabling harm, including child sexual exploitation, on its platforms and for misleading consumers about their safety. Twenty-four hours later, jurors in California awarded $6m in damages to a young user who had argued that Meta (along with YouTube) had deliberately designed addictive products that had hooked her from childhood, causing her grave harm.

Prepare for bouclé jackets, quilted chain-link bags galore and an outfit formula that is proving to be consumer catnip

Just six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his debut collection for Chanel, and a week after it landed in stores, excitement over the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been queues outside shops, grapples at the tills and dozens of social media posts bragging about purchases. Now, Blazy’s Chanel effect is coming for the high street. Prepare for bouclé jackets and quilted chain-link bags galore.

“It is a good sign that it has become immediately a reference point for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, a managing partner at the luxury advisory firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and new creative direction is successful it is copied by the high street. If not, it means it is not relevant or is only relevant for a niche set of consumers.”

Before he was Paddington’s dignified dad, the star nailed British awkwardness in Bafta-winning satire Twenty Twelve. Now he’s back as long-suffering manager Ian Fletcher, taking on Trump, the World Cup – and his foolish old intern

When Hugh Bonneville was first asked to reprise the role of Ian Fletcher – protagonist of John Morton’s Bafta-winning workplace satires Twenty Twelve and W1A – his feelings were mixed. “I was on the one hand absolutely delighted,” says the actor, now most famous for playing dignified patriarchs in Downton Abbey and Paddington. “On the other hand, I was terrified because it’s the most painful and horrible experience I’ve ever had on television.”

In Twenty Twelve, Fletcher flexed his managerial muscles as “Head of Deliverance of the Olympic Deliverance Commission,” guiding his team through the chaotic run-up to the 2012 London Games. In W1A, he landed a job as “Head of Values” at the BBC, where he waded through a series of absurd disasters. Nine years on, a weary Fletcher is back in back-to-back meetings as the “Director of Integrity” of a nameless international football organisation hosting a nameless international football tournament (its blindingly obvious real-world basis is never identified due to “an overabundance of caution on the production’s part,” says Morton).

Meet the influencers encouraging us to stop buying new

Anna Kilpatrick doesn’t have a bedroom. Or even a bed. The a 52-year-old content creator from East Sussex sleeps on a wide shelf in her hallway so that her two children, 21 and 18, can have their own rooms. And yet, she says, she has “enough”. She doesn’t hanker after a bigger house or shinier car. “Having fewer things is freedom,” she says. Kilpatrick, who shares such ideas with her 104K Instagram followers (@not.needing.new), is part of a small but growing community of “enough-luencers”. The concept is similar to deinfluencing – where content creators discourage followers from buying into trends – but is also about celebrating already having enough, and, crucially, feeling happier for it.

In her new book, Not Needing New: A Practical Guide to Finding the Joy of Enough, Kilpatrick lists the benefits of living with less: “An increased sense of calm, less anxiety through clutter, free time away from maintaining the home, a healthier bank balance and reduced debt, children who are learning how to manage delayed gratification.”

In Mexico and Spain, leaders who have capped public costs have been rewarded at the ballot box. As another cost of living surge arrives, it may be a policy our leaders are unable to resist

Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.

As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

US secretary of state, meeting G7 foreign ministers, also says Iran could set up a toll system for the strait of Hormuz

More now on India slashing taxes on diesel and petrol amid the global disruption in energy supplies: finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the move would “provide protection to consumers from rise in prices”.

The country is one of the world’s largest crude oil importers and relies on foreign suppliers for more than 85% of its oil needs, with Russia being the biggest supplier.

Narjis, one of 121 children killed in Lebanon this month, wanted to be a doctor and ‘was like a blossom’, her mother says

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Rana Jaber told her husband that if God blessed them with a daughter, she would be named Narjis, Arabic for daffodil. After having twin boys, Jaber wanted a little girl she could dress up.

Jaber got her girl and made good on her promise: Narjis was born in 2020. Her mother was delighted to find that just like her namesake flower, her daughter’s hair was light. Narjis seemed “wise beyond her years”, Jaber said, recalling how her daughter would comfort her whenever she would cry.

Comments from boss Allan Leighton come as squeeze on supplies drives average UK petrol price above 150p a litre

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The boss of Asda has warned of “temporary shortages’” at petrol pumps as supplies are squeezed by the conflict in the Middle East, which has driven up average UK petrol prices to above 150p a litre.

Allan Leighton, the executive chair of the supermarket chain, which is the UK’s second largest fuel retailer, said it had been experiencing high demand from drivers as fuel prices have jumped about over the past four weeks since the war started.

Experts see potential hallmarks of Iranian involvement in firebombing of four ambulances in Golders Green on Monday

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To some it was the moment the mask slipped. Wearing an open-necked white shirt, Mohsen Rafighdoost, former minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was filmed last March fondly reminiscing with an interviewer from the Tehran-based Didban Iran news website about the assassinations he had organised around Europe.

There was Prince Shahriar Shafiq, the last Shah of Iran’s 34-year-old nephew, who was shot twice in the head outside his mother’s home in Paris in 1979.