NHS consultants will strike for two days next month in a fresh dispute over pay and working conditions. Despite receiving a £25,000 boost to average earnings over the past four years, to more than £150,000 a year, senior hospital doctors will walk out of their roles on 25 and 26 November. The British Medical Association says real-terms pay has fallen by 25% in the past 17 years. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a surprise fourth term in office. Despite having lost the first-round ballot three weeks ago, the left-wing incumbent secured 51.8% of the vote in yesterday’s run-off, compared with 48.2% for his right-wing challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, who has so far refused to recognise the result. The long-awaited pedestrianisation of London’s Oxford Street began this morning, as part of a £150m scheme to revive the country’s most famous shopping area. A 1km stretch between Selfridges and the Ikea just off Great Portland Street is now a no-go zone for all vehicles, including buses, taxis and bikes.

Netanyahu’s “catastrophic success”

Whatever happens when Israelis go to the polls this week, says Ezra Klein in The New York Times, the election has played out on Benjamin Netanyahu’s terms. The opposition bloc’s main leaders have broadly accepted the prime minister’s militaristic world view, even running to his right: Gadi Eisenkot has said he will end Hamas’s rule of Gaza within 18 months, by military means if necessary; Yair Lapid has called for more bombing of Iran’s energy infrastructure. The fact that most Israeli Jews now see the world the way Netanyahu has long seen it is his “great victory”. But it is matched by his “great loss”: the rest of the world now largely sees Israel “the way Gazans see it”.

The “Palestinian question” is now a central cause worldwide, with more than 150 countries, including Britain, France and Canada, now formally recognising a Palestinian state. There is no near-term chance of an Israeli-Saudi accord. Israel is accused of genocide in the International Court of Justice and has basically already been convicted in the court of public opinion. “None of this was inevitable.” After October 7, Israel was the subject of an “outpouring” of global sympathy. But Netanyahu chose to “risk more to achieve more”. He flattened Gaza in search of a “total victory” over Hamas, decapitated Hezbollah and re-invaded southern Lebanon, and achieved his decades-long dream of persuading America to join him in attacking Iran. The results of all this? Israel is certainly regionally dominant. But Hamas, Hezbollah and the regime in Tehran are still standing. And most of the Jewish state’s allies – including, crucially, America – now see the country as a “brutal aggressor”. In the words of Israeli political commentator Ari Shavit: “We won the Middle East, but we lost the world.”

🇵🇸🇮🇱 It’s not just Netanyahu who has achieved a “catastrophic success”. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind October 7, achieved his goal of provoking Israel into a retaliation that would shift global perceptions. But Palestinians now live in “more misery and under more domination” than they did before, facing an Israel “ever more violently opposed to their self-determination and even to their existence”.