IRAN - Donald Trump is trying to toughen the terms of a draft peace agreement with Iran and has sent back revised proposals to Tehran.The US president has asked envoys to strengthen provisions on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear material, sources told the news site Axios. Mr Trump reportedly also wants to amend the wording on the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which one US official claimed on Sunday was under American control. He was also concerned about parts of the potential deal that would unfreeze Iranian funds, the New York Times reported. Washington and Tehran were said to be close to a deal late last week that would extend the current ceasefire for 60 days and launch talks on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme and its enriched uranium stocks. The framework could allow “unrestricted” passage through the Strait of Hormuz and give Iran 30 days to remove mines from the waterway, according to reports.

AUSTRALIA - A plague of mice is devastating fields and invading homes in parts of rural Australia. Farmers are reporting infestation levels as high as 3,000 to 4,000 mice per acre, as they scramble to lay down poison to save their grain crops. The plague sweeping across parts of western and southern Australia is costing farmers large sums of money as they replant crops that have been eaten, and lay down bait to kill the vermin, the BBC reported. The infestation is the second in five years and has been triggered by a record harvest last year, as well as wet weather. Belinda Eastough, 59, who has a 14,000-acre farm 50 miles north-east of Geraldton, said: “Last year, we had a record-breaking harvest, so that gives the mice a lot of food.” Officials define a mouse plague as 320 mice per acre, and Ms Eastough estimates her fields currently have more than 10 times as many.

USA - In the US TV drama For All Mankind, settlers on a future Mars revolt against a scheme by an oligarch to replace all but 2 per cent of them with machines. This may be one case where science fiction captures a current angst. People across the West increasingly fear the tech oligarchs, people who run companies with stock market valuations larger than the GDP of most nations. By some measures, Apple alone is worth twice the GDP of Mexico; Microsoft is as large as Italy. Even people obsessed about their devices believe the tech overlords have overreached, enticing the enmity of Right, Left and pretty much everyone in between. Globally, trust in tech firms has been heading down for years, and is particularly low in Japan, France, and the US. In America, notes Pew, barely 10 per cent of people – Republican, Democrat or independent – see social media in a positive light.

UK - Britain is giving up on babies. Figures from the Office for National Statistics last week showed that the birth rate continues to fall, from 1.41 children per woman to 1.39 in 2025. This is a problem, and a problem that is going to get worse. Already, the state is starting to struggle with demographic change. Primary schools are closing. The growing costs of services for an ever-larger older population fall on a shrinking group of working taxpayers. In time, the impact of demography will grow. It could fundamentally undermine economic policy. Despite the sky-high stakes, political parties are quiet about the collapse in births. Only Reform UK has really engaged directly with the issue, and largely as a social policy issue rather than an economic one. Across countries and over time, the pattern is clear: as women gain more education, economic independence and control over reproduction, fertility tends to fall.

POLAND - On a wet and windy Saturday morning, Wojciech Krol, a father of two, is learning how to enter “stealth mode” in the forests of southern Poland. As rain dribbles off the hood of his windbreaker, the 33-year-old computer programmer digs two holes in the lawn connected by a small tunnel to ignite a fire that is hot enough to cook on but emits very little smoke. The lesson is being held inside a Polish military base, but this is no corporate retreat: Mr Krol is learning how to keep his family alive if they need to hide from Russian troops and drones. Mr Krol, who has sons aged one and five, told The Telegraph: “I decided to take part because there’s a war over the border [in Ukraine] and I have a family, so it’s important for me to learn how to take care of them. As Europe rearms against Russia, the concept of civil defence – training and protection of civilians in wartime – has become just as important as the ability to draft recruits or churn out weapons. It is the first time in a generation that nations across Europe, some of which still carry scars from the 20th century, are bracing for war. Yet Britain appears to be sleepwalking into potential disaster.

RUSSIA - As AI becomes part of everyday learning, educators face a growing challenge: how to use technology without weakening critical thinking. “Would you like me to help with the other problems on the list?” That was the sentence a physics teacher recently found at the end of a pupil’s homework assignment. The solution itself was elegant and correct. Unfortunately, it was not produced by the child. It was generated by artificial intelligence and copied so carelessly that the pupil left in the chatbot’s question. A video on this went viral because it was funny in the uneasy way bad news can be funny. Today’s schoolchildren, it seems, are not only forgetting how to think, but some are forgetting how to cheat properly.

NEPAL - Mount Everest’s highest campsite is strewn with abandoned tents, empty oxygen bottles and human waste, footage has shown. A social media video clip of Camp IV, the highest campsite on Earth, shows battered tents flapping in gale-force winds and mounds of rubbish left behind by people on climbing expeditions. The camp is situated at around 26,000ft and is the final place to rest before mountaineers attempt their push to the 29,032ft summit of Everest. “What should be one of the most extraordinary places on the planet has, in many ways, become one of the ugliest faces of Everest’s commercialisation,” Everest Today, an account dedicated to climbing the mountain, posted on X. Drone footage of long queues of climbers making their way in single file towards the summit revived the debate about overcrowding and commercialisation on the mountain. The traffic jam of climbers was caused, in part, by Nepal issuing a record 492 permits this season. Thousands of mountaineers have climbed the peak since it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

GERMANY - The number of Germans who believe Russia may launch a military attack on their country has fallen sharply since last year, according to a recent poll. In recent years, senior German officials have repeatedly claimed that Moscow could pose a direct military threat to NATO by the end of the decade. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this month, Germany’s top military officer, General Carsten Breuer, asserted that Russia could be ready for such a confrontation by 2029. However, only 38% of Germans now consider an attack from Russia to be a plausible threat – down 14 percentage points from September of last year, Bild am Sonntag reported on Saturday, citing an INSA survey. Half of respondents said they “are no longer afraid of a Russian attack at all,” according to the newspaper. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly dismissed claims that Moscow plans to attack NATO as “nonsense,” accusing European leaders of using the narrative to distract their citizens from domestic problems.

ISRAEL - Benjamin Netanyahu is seething as Donald Trump edges closer to striking a peace deal with Iran, leaving the Israeli prime minister wishing Barack Obama were back in the White House, according to a new report. Netanyahu privately views the looming US-Iran pact as an unmitigated catastrophe and lays the blame squarely at Trump's feet, a senior political source revealed to Al-Monitor. 'This time, the prime minister’s hands are tied. He is completely paralyzed and knows that he will not be able to do anything, even if the agreement signed between the United States and Iran remains the disaster he now defines it as,' one of Netanyahu’s close associates told the outlet. So deep is Netanyahu's despair that he now yearns for the days of Joe Biden and even Obama, who he famously clashed with, the insider said. The Israeli leader, however, is now forced to fall in line behind Trump.

VATICAN - Pope Leo XIV has delivered a stark warning on artificial intelligence, claiming that the technology is aiding the “normalization of war” and transferring powers of life and death to unaccountable “technological actors.” The American-born pontiff presented his warning on Monday in an encyclical titled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (Magnificent Humanity). In the 42,000-word document, Leo highlighted how the “growth of the military-industrial complex has become a defining feature of the current political landscape,” leading to “a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics.” Since his election last May, Leo XIV has repeatedly warned of the destructive power of technology, describing AI as a potential threat to “human dignity, justice, and labor” in an address to cardinals last year. His encyclical goes a step further, calling for a global treaty to “disarm” the technology in order to prevent it from “dominating humanity.”