What happened
Lebanon says Hezbollah has agreed to a US-backed proposal aimed at reducing hostilities with Israel under which the group would stop attacks on Israel and Israeli forces would cease strikes on Beirut.

Who said what
The announcement followed intervention by Donald Trump, who said he had spoken with both Israeli and Hezbollah representatives and secured an agreement that “all shooting will stop”.

The US has “tried to separate events in Lebanon from the negotiations with Iran”, said Jaroslav Lukiv on the BBC. Trump has said peace talks with Iran are “very boring” and he “couldn’t care less” that they appear close to collapse. And yet for all his apparent disinterest, the US president “needs this war to end”, said Lukiv’s BBC colleague Jeremy Bowen. Israel’s “declaration that its bombers would return to Beirut has narrowed down Donald Trump’s options”.

What next?
Questions remain over whether the agreement to halt attacks can hold. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the arrangement yesterday, he also warned that military action would resume if Hezbollah kept targeting Israeli civilians and said Israeli forces would continue operations in southern Lebanon.

What happened
Sarah Wynn-Williams – author of the 2025 memoir “Careless People” – was forced to sit in silence during a panel discussion at the Hay Festival due to ongoing legal action instituted by Meta.

In her book the Facebook whistleblower detailed her time as a senior executive of the company for seven years until 2017. She alleged that Meta assisted advertisers in targeting vulnerable teenagers, among other claims. Facebook has denied the allegations.

Who said what
Wynn-Williams (pictured above) was in a “hostage situation”, said co-panellist and journalist Carole Cadwalladr at the festival. “Blink once if you can hear us, Sarah, twice if (Mark) Zuckerberg is an asshole.”

“This is censorship,” said academic and third member of the panel Tim Wu. “Some of the worst abuses in our time are not confined to kings, emperors, governments”, but “to a class of companies that have assumed the sovereign affect.”

Mike Harpley, Wynn-Williams’ editor at the publisher Pan Macmillan, said it was “deeply troubling” that Sarah could not speak “on the basis of an extrajudicial order from the United States, orchestrated by a trillion-dollar company”.

What next?
Wynn-Williams is “not allowed to promote the book after Meta filed a lawsuit against her” claiming that she broke a non-disparagement agreement, according to industry news site The Bookseller. “She faces a $50,000 fine each time she breaches the order.”

RCP8.5, a high-emissions climate scenario deemed to be the “business-as-usual” model under which no efforts are made to curb climate change, has been removed by scientists. This model represented what was thought to be the worst that climate change could get. But thanks to strides in renewable energy and emissions reductions, it is now largely considered improbable.

Scientists have been positing that the worst-case scenario for climate change was becoming less likely over time. Despite this, the “use of RCP8.5 in climate modeling has remained, in part, as a way to study what might happen under a ‘baseline’ scenario in which the world does nothing to tackle climate change”, said The Washington Post. However, using this model has also “provided fodder for attacks”, with sceptics arguing that “scientists, activists and the media have overstated the risks that actually exist and given outsized attention to the most extreme scenario”.

Yet making progress does not mean all is well. Along with RCP8.5, the update also “discarded some very low-emissions scenarios because nations are unlikely to slash their fossil fuel use as deeply as many world leaders had urged”, said The New York Times. Essentially, the “scenarios are becoming less pessimistic, but also less optimistic”. The new models show that it is no longer possible to limit global warming to the recommended 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels.