Labour have made huge gains in the local council elections, putting the party on track for a larger general election majority than Tony Blair in 1997. "The Tories set expectations incredibly low," says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, but they "may not have set them low enough". With results still coming in, the party had already lost 237 councillors and ceded control of 10 councils. Ed Sheeran did not copy Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On when composing his hit Thinking Out Loud, a US court has ruled. The Grammy-winning Suffolk boy, who had threatened to quit music if he was found guilty, told waiting crowds: "It looks like I'm not going to have to retire from my day job after all." Tube and rail passengers across the country will hear a special message recorded by the King and Queen while travelling this weekend (listen here). "My wife and I wish you and your families a wonderful Coronation weekend," says Charles. "And remember, please mind the gap." |
Donald Trump after tearing up the Queen's lawn. Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty |
Why Americans love British royalty |
Many Americans will tune into the Coronation, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph, "albeit groggily" at 6am their time. It's telling of a curious phenomenon: that the "greatest admirers of the British monarchy" are often "foreign republicans". When Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838, a visitor to Philadelphia was shocked to find that hotels and boats had been renamed in the monarch's honour, and that tourists were "pestered to buy Victoria-branded riding hats, soup, soap and toothpaste". In 1860, Prince Edward attended a grand ball at New York's Academy of Music, where gate-crashing crowds caused the dance floor to cave in. By the time of George V's crowning in 1911, excited Americans could travel to London for the spectacle, easily distinguishable with their "pork pie straw hats" and exotic cocktail orders. |
As our monarchy gradually lost its absolutist power, it became "less of an existential threat" to Americans and more of a curiosity – "even a source of nostalgia". And in the years since, many US citizens have found royal Britain to be a place, in many ways, more equitable than the land of the free. In the 1840s, black Americans would board ships to seek "refuge from republican slavery in monarchical England". It's similar today, with the US ruled over by bolshy presidents with "overblown" powers: the dynastic Clintons, Bushes, and Kennedys "fight for the crown like 15th-century magnates". In 2019, when Donald Trump visited the late Queen, his "behemoth helicopter" tore up Buckingham Palace's lawn. Minutes later, the then Prince Charles "pootled up the drive in a jolly little car" that looked as though it was cranked by hand. "A republican monarchy encountered an imperial presidency." |
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Photographer Brad Walls has used aerial drones to capture dancers from the English National Ballet from a new perspective. Hovering his camera above the performers, he was able to hone in on harmonious shapes ordinarily invisible to ballet audiences. After the success of his first attempt, Walls is now snapping the New York City Ballet and the Australian Ballet from similar angles, to incorporate into a coffee table book. See more of his shots here. |
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An invitation for the public to swear allegiance to King Charles during the coronation has provoked significant controversy, says The Oldie – and not for the first time. At William the Conqueror's coronation on Christmas Day 1066, the "Norman goons" posted outside Westminster Abbey were "spooked by the noise of the Anglo-Saxon congregation noisily transferring their allegiance". Suspecting an uprising, they started setting fire to nearby houses, "smoking out the people in the Abbey and causing a riot". |
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Every hour, across the world, around 742,000 male chicks are born, says Vox. A few hours later, they're "tossed into a grinder, which kills them instantly, or gassed with carbon dioxide". The rationale for this poultry mass-murder – some 6.5 billion birds a year – is simple: males don't lay eggs, and the breeds used for egg-laying don't grow big or fast enough to be used for chicken meat. But new technology is allowing scientists to identify the chick's sex while it's still in the egg, so that the males can be disposed of before they hatch. Up to 20% of Europe's hen flock now comes from "cull-free hatcheries" that use this method. |
Our new overlords, as imagined by the Stable Diffusion AI image generator |
The real danger of AI is its power to tell stories |
Language is at the very heart of human culture, says Yuval Noah Harari in The Economist. Human rights, for example, are not inscribed in our DNA; they are "cultural artefacts" created by "telling stories and writing laws". Gods, too, have no "physical reality", but were invented through "myths and writing scriptures". Money is perhaps the greatest story of them all: banknotes are really just "colourful pieces of paper", valuable only because bankers and finance ministers say they are. So what happens when artificial intelligence begins to create its own stories? Or becomes better than most humans at writing laws and scriptures? AI has gained "remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language" – and in so doing, it has hacked the "operating system" of our entire civilisation. |
Previous tools like the printing press were fundamentally different to artificial intelligence, as they merely helped spread the ideas of humans. AI can take us "where no human has gone before", weaving its own stories, and thereby forging an entirely new culture. This means the end of history as we know it. No longer will we live "inside the dreams of other humans"; we will instead be "inside the dreams of an alien intelligence". This puts democracies in far greater danger than authoritarian regimes, because democracy is a "conversation" that relies on language. When AI hacks that language, we cannot have "meaningful conversations". Our only hope is regulation. We need to "regulate AI before it regulates us". |
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Mixologists at chichi cocktail bars are tinkering with the recipes of classic cocktails to include olive oil and vinegar, says Robb Report. Connoisseurs claim the unusual ingredients add "silkiness" to drinks like the sherry cobbler and the negroni, giving them a "velvety mouthfeel". One bartender at New York's swanky Jac's on Bond combines balsamic vinegar with tomato and basil-infused vodka to create a "caprese martini". "All the flavours in the drink harmonise so beautifully," he says, "the same way they do when it's plated as a salad." |
Remastered footage of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 shows the moment she was first crowned, as well as shots of her carriage and procession, in full technicolour. See the full clip here. |
It's a 30ft-tall phallic iceberg, spotted floating in the aptly named Conception Bay off the coast of Newfoundland. Canadian photographer Ken Pretty, who fittingly hails from the town of Dildo, snapped a shot of the chilly willy using an aerial camera. "Looking from the land, it wasn't quite clear," Pretty told The Guardian. "But once I got the drone out there, it was unreal how much it looked like – well, you know…" |
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"A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores." Terry Pratchett |
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