It watched the broken pieces of a comet crash, one after another, into the clouds of Jupiter. It peered at a dark patch of sky no bigger than a grain of sand at arm’s length for 150 orbits and spotted so many galaxies that cosmologists had to double their estimates of the size of the universe.

Two suicide bombers struck in Iraqi towns on Monday, claiming at least 27 lives, in a return to the grim familiarity of insurgency just a week after millions of Iraqis flocked to the polls. It was the most violent day since the January 30 elections and signals that after a brief lull the attacks and kidnappings have restarted in earnest.

Israel and the Palestinians are to announce a deal to end more than four years of bloody intifada, which has claimed more than 4 500 lives, with ceasefire declarations on Tuesday. On Monday night the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said both sides were close to finalising the wording of a deal.

An enduring mystery of the 1946 Nuremberg trials was apparently solved on Monday when an American former prison guard claimed it was he who, as an unwitting accomplice, passed to Hermann Goering the cyanide capsule with which the Nazi number two cheated the noose.

Kenya’s top anti-corruption official resigned on Monday amid mounting international criticism of the government’s failure to take a firm line against high-level corruption. In a statement, John Githongo gave no reason for his decision, saying only he ”was no longer able to continue serving the government of Kenya”.

Here is the truth about global warming: it is an anti-capitalist agenda, a Machiavellian political plot and a convenient rumour started by bungling Japanese pineapple farmers. It is a front for paranoia about immigration, an incitement to civil war, and the reason that the world’s attention was distracted from the risk of a tsunami. Welcome to Britain’s first meeting of climate-change sceptics.