What happened
Donald Trump has abandoned a plan to impose a 20% levy on cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz just one day after announcing it, but has pushed ahead with renewing the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. The US military said the blockade had begun last night as American forces launched fresh strikes across Iran.

Who said what
The US president said Gulf leaders had convinced him to abandon the proposed shipping charge in favour of investment. “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the Strait,” he told reporters. He also warned that Iran would be “hit very hard” over the coming week.

“In Iran, Trump has found an opponent he cannot easily dominate,” said Peter Baker in The New York Times. “The president is accustomed to forcing other countries to bend to his will. But he is struggling to come up with a strategy to extract Iranian concessions as the ceasefire he brokered collapses.”

Trump now has “no good options for reopening the Strait of Hormuz”, said The Economist. “Yet the stand-off has costs for cash-strapped Iran, too.”

What next?
There is “no end in sight for the new Iran war”, said Politico. The White House is “not really sure where this is headed,” an unnamed former US official told the publication. “This could go on for some time.”

What happened
Australian police have released previously unseen images from the investigation into the 2001 murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio (pictured above with then girlfriend Joanne Lees), whose body has never been found. They hope that the images will lead to new information as the case reaches its 25th anniversary.

Bradley John Murdoch was convicted of the murder – committed near Barrow Creek, a remote town in the Northern Territory – in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison. He died last year, having never revealed the location of Falconio’s body.

Who said what
Northern Territory Police Commissioner Martin Dole said Murdoch’s “cowardly silence” had denied Falconio’s family and friends “the closure they deserve”. He added that the investigators’ commitment to finding Peter and “delivering answers” had “never wavered”.

The mystery of Murdoch’s motive and the absence of a body have long “attracted conspiracy theories and online gossip”, said The Times. “Several prominent investigators have also gone to the scene in pursuit of answers.”

What next?
A reward of up to $A500,000 (£260,000) has been offered for any information that leads to the discovery of Falconio’s remains. “No piece of information is too small,” said Dole.

Astronomers have detected a type of sugar that’s found in raspberries and self-tan lotions near the centre of the Milky Way. A study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy revealed evidence of erythrulose, a simple sugar, in interstellar gas and the dust clouds between stars.

The discovery may conjure up images of a “civilisation of pale, safety-conscious frugivores” in outer space, said The Guardian’s science editor Ian Sample, but for astronomers it is significant because “it shows that compounds important for life can form in the frigid expanse between the stars”.

“Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts,” said The Associated Press. “Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA,” so scientists are “itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it.” Erythrulose itself “isn’t essential for life, but can easily convert to a form that’s thought to be crucial to kick-starting life on Earth”.

It is “especially tantalising” to think that erythrulose might have acted as a “feedstock” for the more complex sugars that evolved into nucleic acids – the “building blocks of modern-day DNA and RNA”, said Nature.

“That’s why the detection of erythrulose is so relevant for the origins of life,” study co-author Dr Izaskun Jiménez-Serra told Live Science. And, if we can discover even more complex sugars in the Milky Way, more light could be shed, astrophysicist Dr Anthony Remijan told Nature, adding: “An actual building block of RNA and DNA: that would be the next big thing.”