The world in brief

The fighting in Gaza was expected to come to a four-day stop on Thursday, per a hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas. However, on Wednesday an Israeli official said that at least part of the deal—the release from Hamas of around 50 of its more than 200 hostages—was delayed until Friday. Another Israeli official reportedly said that the temporary truce would also be delayed. The deal also includes Israel releasing roughly 150 Palestinian prisoners and allowing more aid into the enclave. Any respite, when it comes, will probably be short-lived, though the truce could be extended: each time Hamas frees an additional ten hostages, it buys 24 more hours of calm.

But Israel will resume fighting eventually. Some officials were reluctant to agree to a truce, lest it give Hamas time to regroup and bring pressure for a permanent ceasefire. The group’s leaders and many of its fighters are thought to have fled to southern Gaza, where Israel has yet to start a serious offensive. When the truce ends, the next phase of the war will begin.

America’s holiday season has kicked off. This year’s Thanksgiving period will be the busiest in recent times. Airlines in America predict record air traffic. The Transport Security Administration is expected to screen nearly 30m passengers—the highest number since its formation in 2001. The boom is partly caused by the rise in remote working that began during the pandemic, which makes it easier for people to stay with their families during the holiday.

But for airport staff a busy Thanksgiving brings more than regular holiday stress. On November 15th the Federal Aviation Administration published a report saying that out-of-date technology and a shortage of air-traffic controllers have become safety problems and put American aviation under serious strain. Although the country has had no major crash in almost 15 years, a number of close calls have made the news this year. Passengers and crew may be extra-thankful if their journeys are smooth.

On Thursday President Vladimir Putin is expected in Minsk to attend a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a defence alliance that comprises Russia and five other former Soviet countries. His host, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, hopes to foster renewed co-operation within the group. That will be a challenge.

Belarus supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the group’s Central Asian members—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—are wary of endorsing it. They know that Russia’s imperial impulse poses risks to them, too. Armenia feels betrayed by the Kremlin after it failed to intervene in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave that was mainly populated by ethnic Armenians before Azerbaijan (which is not a CSTO member) launched a short offensive in September, which sparked a mass exodus. Armenian troops pulled out of recent CSTO military exercises, and the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, will not attend the summit. The Kremlin may want to re-establish Russia’s empire, but its influence on the post-Soviet world is weakening.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tolerance for conventional monetary policy is being tested. Ahead of an election in May the Turkish president, a self-described “enemy” of interest rates, forced policymakers to make credit cheap. As a result, annual inflation rose to a high of 85%. Since winning that vote Mr Erdogan has performed an about-face to soften a currency crisis. Since June he has permitted the central-bank to raise the benchmark rate by a cumulative 26.5 percentage points to 35%, the highest level in two decades.

Now Turkey’s $900bn economy is starting to sputter. But the annual inflation rate is still more than 60%. On Thursday the central bank raised rates by five percentage points, to 40%. That was twice as much as economists had expected. But the bank also promised to stop raising rates soon. That should satisfy Mr Erdogan, who does not want the economy to weaken ahead of nationwide mayoral elections next spring.

On Thursday “The Irreplaceable Human”, an exhibition exploring human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence, opens at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital.

Among the show’s themes are worries about the effects of AI on children. An older version of that concern is expressed in Tetsuya Ishida’s “Mebae” (“Awakening”, 1998), a surreal painting of schoolboys who do not realise that their classmates are morphing into microscopes. Also on display is Andrea Büttner’s beautiful “Phone Etchings” (2015), based on the movements of her fingertips on a screen.

AI sparks anxiety and excitement in equal measure. Among the jobs it threatens are those in creative industries. Three-quarters of Americans who responded to a poll by YouGov said that they worry that AI will sap human creativity. But 83% of respondents to a recent survey published in It’s Nice That, a magazine for commercial artists and designers, already use machine-learning tools for work. The new relationship between man and machine may be tense but creative.

We will serve you a new question each day this week. On Friday your challenge is to give us all five answers and, as important, tell us the connecting theme. Email your responses (and include mention of your home city and country) by 1700 GMT on Friday to [email protected]. We’ll pick randomly from those with the right answers and crown three winners on Saturday.

Thursday: What was the name of Niles Crane’s (largely unseen) first wife in the sitcom “Frasier”?

Wednesday: Which US state is home to the “Craters of the Moon” national monument?