Amid conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, airlines have been forced to divert around warzones while managing new threats to their systems

The first indication that something was wrong came when the clock on the flight deck began to go backwards. The aircraft was cruising thousands of metres above Israel and as the crew noticed the error, they checked their GPS signal. The plane’s internal instruments showed it was flying at just 1,500ft, well below the cruising altitude of 38,000ft it should have been at.

Seconds later, alarms began to sound and lights flashed throughout the cockpit.

Many held there are opponents of the repressive regime. Who is alive now? Who was killed? Were they just collateral damage?

• Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe denounces Israeli attack on Iran’s Evin prison

On Monday morning Israeli airstrikes struck the Evin prison’s gate, damaging the court adjacent to the prison and some of the wards, including the women’s political ward where I spent five years. The prison holds a large number of political prisoners and opponents of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Nobody seems to know what has happened to them.

Since the bombing of Iran started 12 days ago, I have avoided the news and all requests for interviews. It has felt too sad. But as I was sitting at my desk, I saw the news about Evin popping up on my screen. My hands froze and I felt a shiver down my neck, just as when bad news landed back when I was held. After a couple of minutes I contacted my former Evin cellmates who are now outside to check if they knew anything. They were as horrified and scared as I was.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a British-Iranian dual national who was detained in Evin prison for five years

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In 1971, a man held a plane to ransom for $200,000, then parachuted out in his suit and dress shoes, never to be seen again. What happened to him?

On the evening of 24 November 1971, Florence Schaffner, a flight attendant on a Northwest Orient flight heading to Seattle, Washington, from Portland, Oregon, was handed a note by a male passenger seated at the back of the plane. Schaffner assumed the note was a phone number – this wasn’t the first time a passenger had hit on her – so she stowed it in her purse without reading it. The man leaned towards her and whispered: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

Schaffner read it: “Miss – I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me.”

With its fun new series, Julian Fellowes’ preposterous ‘transatlantic’ Downton has morphed from joylessly pompous to truly joyful TV. Consider me a convert!

The Gilded Age is a curious, unwieldy thing. It is rich in qualities that I love, such as Broadway stars of a certain pedigree and truly extravagant hats. But, for a series that clearly takes a great effort to make, at what appears to be an enormous expense, it is oddly slight. The events of New York society in the late 19th century glide on by, as women dressed in fine, frilly clothing dip in and out of dramas that are sometimes important, sometimes entirely trivial, but almost always afforded equal weight, regardless of how much they matter. To watch it is to sink into a comfortable fugue, and think mostly about the hats.

The household of the sisters Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranksi) and Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon) has undergone a significant shift in power. After their nephew Oscar (Blake Ritson) almost ruined the family by losing Agnes’s fortune, the crisis of impending poverty was averted at the last minute by the revelation that Ada’s husband, the Rev Luke Forte, who died not long after they were married, was actually stinking rich thanks to a profitable textiles business, leaving Ada a fortune. Fancy that! The Gilded Age can be so soapy that the suds practically foam on the screen.

The heatwave media formula is still extravagantly weird: all stock photos of ice-creams and suns with their hats on. It is time we recognised this extreme weather for exactly what it is

I think I must be on someone’s Rolodex of killjoys, because whenever something good happens – schools break up, summer holidays start, the weather’s nice, it’s Christmas, it’s Easter – I get a call from a talk radio show asking if I’ll come on and explain why that’s bad, actually. Usually I say, in the nicest possible way, that I don’t want to: sure, kids are much more annoying when they’re not at school; yes, it’s irresponsible to fly; no, Christmas isn’t magic, it’s an orgy of overconsumption; yes, Easter was pillaged from pagans (probably?), and Christianity itself is the imperialist template (arguably?) – in which case, the last way we should mark it is with a Creme Egg. But I just don’t want to be that person. Let someone else ruin everything for a change.

On Friday, however, I agreed to make the argument the next morning on LBC that heatwaves aren’t a treat, they’re a problem. We have to do more than just ready our infrastructure for the more intense temperatures to come: we have to bring our narrative a bit closer to reality. The climate crisis isn’t tomorrow’s problem, it’s today’s, and its impacts aren’t better conditions for vineyards in Kent, they are a broad-spectrum enshittification, in which everything, from bus journeys to growing dahlias, becomes harder, and takes longer, and is worse. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of true, unlovely thing that I don’t like being the person to say, and I don’t know why I said yes – it’s possible that I was just too hot.

Ever since Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet in 2006, astronomers have been wondering whether Neptune really is the most distant planet from the sun. Now, a new telescope could uncover what lies in the farthest reaches of the solar system. The Vera C Rubin Observatory released its first images this week, and soon the world’s most powerful digital camera will be pointing across the whole of the night sky. Scientists are hopeful that if planet nine exists, the telescope will find it within its first year of operation. Ian Sample is joined by Dr Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, to find out how Pluto lost its planetary status, why scientists think there could be another super-Earth, and why planet nine has been so hard to find

Clips: BBC, NBC, CBC

First images of distant galaxies captured by ‘ultimate’ telescope

‘Israel has agreed to President Trump’s proposal for a bilateral ceasefire’, says statement after almost two weeks of direct military conflict with Iran

• Full report: Trump says Israel and Iran have negotiated ‘complete’ ceasefire

As dawn broke in Israel and Iran, confusion reigned as to whether the two countries were still at war. Israelis, who fell asleep to the news that a ceasefire had been agreed to, woke up to four consecutive missile warnings, heading back and forth to the shelters as a missile hit a residential building in Be’er Sheva, killing three, according to the Israel fire and rescue centre.

Iran experienced some of its most intense Israeli bombings yet overnight, with one social media users in Tehran writing “the bombardment tonight in Tehran was extremely intense. For a full hour the explosions wouldn’t stop. We are a completely defenseless people.”

It was unclear whether the attacks were simply growing pains of a ceasefire, or if hostilities were to continue. US President Donald Trump had announced the ceasefire a little after midnight on Tuesday, but neither Israeli nor Iranian officials have said they agreed to it.

The US president is more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors were and is also deeply suspicious of the CIA

When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran’s nuclear program had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.

That prolonged debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks ever since the height of the global war on terror.

British-Iranian dual national who spent five years in the jail says attack was a publicity stunt that endangered prisoners

• I spent five years in Iran’s notorious Evin prison but when Israel bombed it I felt horror and fear

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian dual national who spent five years in Evin prison, has denounced Monday’s Israeli attack on the jail as a publicity stunt that endangered the lives of prisoners.

Writing for the Guardian, she also criticised the Labour government for failing to describe the attacks on Iran as unlawful, saying it set a dangerous precedent.

Anahita, a Tehran resident in her 30s, tells of fears over retaliation to US strikes, regime arrests, and shortages

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The internet in Iran was down for a full three days [at the end of last week], and there was no way to communicate with others. This outage has added to people’s fear and anxiety, as we no longer knew which cities had been bombed or which areas were under evacuation orders.

If the internet outage continues, many jobs will be lost.