Prince Harry has claimed Prince William physically attacked him in 2019, says The Guardian. A leaked copy of Harry's forthcoming memoir Spare alleges that his brother "grabbed me by the collar" and "knocked me to the floor" during a confrontation in which William described Meghan Markle as "rude" and "abrasive". Keir Starmer has promised "a decade of national renewal" if Labour wins power, but warned voters his party won't be able to "spend our way out" of the Tories' "mess". It comes after Rishi Sunak yesterday revealed his five-point plan to fix Britain, which included promises to halve inflation, slash hospital waiting lists and stop small boats crossing the Channel. Heavy metal rockers Iron Maiden are getting their own Royal Mail stamps, says The Sun, with 12 designs featuring the group's members and their zombie-like mascot Eddie. "It's Iron Mailden!" |
Starmer is more radical than you think |
For the first two years of his leadership, Keir Starmer seemed "policy-phobic", says Michael Jacobs in The Guardian. Labour's strategy was "almost entirely" centred on presenting him as "neither Boris Johnson nor Jeremy Corbyn", with little insight into his own plans. But in recent months, Starmer has adopted a slate of policies "considerably more radical" than many imagined. Just look at his economic stance. For all his talk of "fiscal discipline", he has pledged to spend £28bn a year on climate action this decade – more than Corbyn promised – and to establish a huge state-owned energy company to drive a decade-long, £60bn efficiency programme to fix Britain's leaky homes. |
Then there are the plans for sweeping tax reforms: equalising the tax rates paid on capital gains and dividends with those paid on wages; charging national insurance on investment income; and abolishing non-dom status. Starmer has also promised to ban zero-hours contracts, raise the minimum wage in line with the living wage, and work with trade unions to set a floor for salaries in key public sectors. The idea that he's "opposed to nationalisation" is bogus: he has promised to take rail operators "back into public ownership when their franchises expire". These policies are "well to the left" of anything New Labour did, and closely resemble the "economic prospectus" set out in Corbyn's 2017 manifesto. "Don't be fooled by Starmer's conservative persona." His government will likely be "more radical than you think".
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😶🌫️🤫 Successful opposition leaders always play down their radicalism, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair kept schtum about major reforms, knowing that once victory is secured, voters are more willing to "let you finish what you have started". It's highly likely that, upon being elected, Starmer would similarly "return to something closer to his natural instinct", and govern to the left of every British leader "since he was in his twenties". |
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This video shows a mature rain tree in Singapore being carefully lifted out of the ground and replanted a few metres away. The fiddly transplant process, which is used when trees are in the way of development projects, involves digging a trench around the root ball, using special pipes to create a kind of raft, then hoisting it all into place with a crane. See how it works here. |
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Rishi Sunak's announcement that he wants school pupils to study maths until they're 18 will bring back classroom nightmares for many, says the Evening Standard – not least in Westminster. When 101 MPs were asked a simple GCSE maths question last year – "if you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" – only about half gave the correct answer of 25%. |
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A thread compiling a list of predictions made in 1923 about what 2023 would be like has racked up 10 million views on Twitter. Some are spookily accurate: the population of the US will reach "probably 300 million"; people will communicate via "watch-size radio telephones". Others remain a way off: cancer will be "eradicated"; life expectancy will be 300 years; and "all people will be beautiful". See the full list here. |
The Taking of Lvov (1914). Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty |
Why Ukraine is such a valuable prize |
That war broke out last year in Ukraine, of all places, isn't surprising, says Hal Brands in Bloomberg: the country has been central to "every great global clash of the modern era". Both resources and geography make it a valuable "strategic prize". Within its borders is some of the richest agricultural land in the world, which accounts "for 6% of all calories traded on international food markets". It is also the "hinge" connecting what the great geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder called the "Eurasian Heartland" with the economically advanced countries of Europe. Any European or Eurasian power looking to expand into the other sphere must pass through Ukraine. |
This meant that, in the First World War, conquering Ukraine was central to Germany's plans "to create a resource-rich Mitteleuropa from the North Sea to the Caucasus". In the Second World War, Hitler similarly dreamed of the "living space" and food supplies Ukraine could offer, making Germany "impregnable" against the British Empire and America. Later, Ukraine's decision to declare independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 helped seal the fate of that fragmenting bloc. As one former US national security advisor observed in 1994, Russia could only be an empire when it possessed Ukraine. That's why Vladimir Putin just couldn't leave the country alone – and why, even as so much in the world changes, "geography still matters". |
Twelfth Night, the last of the 12 days of Christmas, falls on 5 January, says The Oldie, and is "almost forgotten" in modern Britain. But it used to be "the climax of the festive season": Shakespeare named one of his comedies after it, while Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol mentions the "Twelfth Night Cake", a rich fruit pudding. Today, the pre-Christmas period is office party season, but for our ancestors it was a solemn time – they saved their revelry for later. |
It's the "mutalk": a hi-tech mouth covering that "quiets your speaking voice" in the real world, while acting as a microphone for conversations in virtual reality. The device, developed by Japanese firm Shiftall, is "one of the more bizarre inventions" on show at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas, says Wired. See more wacky new gadgets here. |
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"We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."
Former EU leader Jean-Claude Juncker |
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