The cost of Britain's deal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has more than doubled to £290m, says The Guardian. A letter from the Home Office to MPs reveals that on top of an initial payment to the African nation of £140m, it handed over £100m in April, with another £50m expected next year. The revelations come ahead of a parliamentary vote on the scheme on Tuesday. Joe Biden's son is facing new criminal charges related to his tax affairs, which could land him in prison for 17 years. Hunter Biden is accused of evading $1.4m in federal taxes between 2016 and 2019, on top of his indictment for federal firearm charges earlier this year. BBC News presenter Maryam Moshiri has apologised after cameras cut to her jokingly raising her middle figure at the start of a live news bulletin. Moshiri swiftly withdrew the gesture and began reading the headlines, saying later it was a "private joke with the team". |
The fruits of boredom: Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939) |
"Don't just do something, sit there" |
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." This famous reflection of the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal has "not aged a bit", says Kévin Badeau in Le Point. In the digital age, who ever resists the temptation to check their inbox or social media, to "escape the boredom of a metro ride, a doctor's waiting room, or even a work meeting"? The "almost systematic" search for an escape from boredom says a lot about our times. "We are afraid of doing nothing," says psychologist Marie-Estelle Dupont, "because our societies value 'acting'." |
In small doses, "boredom has many virtues". In the young, it stimulates the development of the imagination. A child deprived of a screen will be "bored for five minutes", says Dupont, "but then he will use his imagination: he will invent a game, a story, build a cabin, or whatever". In adults, boredom boosts creativity. In 2013, British psychologists asked volunteers to copy out numbers from a phonebook for 15 minutes. When they were then asked to list "everything that can be done with two cups", their ideas were far more creative than those from people who hadn't done the phonebook task. An absence of stimuli can also yield "remarkable works". The novelist Margaret Mitchell started writing Gone With the Wind when she was immobilised by a broken ankle; Victor Hugo wrote some of his most "illustrious texts", including Les Misérables, while stuck in exile on Guernsey. To quote the meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein: "Don't just do something, sit there." |
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South Korean artist Dain Yoon uses an unconventional canvas, says CNN: her own body. The 30-year-old paints surreal self-portraits on to her skin, leaving people wondering "where she ends, and the background begins". Some of the "mind-bending" illusions take up to 12 hours – but there's no Photoshop. "It's just her, a mirror, a camera and body paint." See more of her work here. |
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Marine Le Pen's campaign to detoxify her National Rally party seems to have paid off, says Le Monde. For the first time, there are more people who think the far-right party isn't a danger to French democracy (45%) than think it is (41%). Back in 2002, 70% thought it was a danger and 26% didn't. More people now believe it is capable of governing (43%) than don't (39%), and 51% see it as the main opposition force to Emmanuel Macron. Sacré bleu! |
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If you really want to be on trend this Christmas, says The Daily Telegraph, you'll need a tree "laden with miniature ramen bowels, popcorn and mushrooms". Foodie baubles were so popular at Selfridges last year that they sold out in early November. This year, the department store has doubled its range, which includes miniature cheese boards, Corn Flakes boxes, and a pastel pink tin of anchovies. Liberty's bestselling bauble is a handbag with marmalade sandwich. John Lewis's coveted air fryer decorations have already all been snapped up, but shoppers can still grab a cone of fish and chips or a Quality Street fudge. |
No chance. Andy Soloman/UCG/Getty |
Why Britain won't rejoin the EU |
Plenty of people still "nurture the hope" that Brexit will be reversed, says Larry Elliott in The Guardian. For that to happen, voters would have to be convinced that the UK economy has become a "basket case" and that the EU is thriving. Neither is true. Sure, Britain's economic performance since 2016 has been "mediocre". But the "full-on horror show" predicted by Remainers – crashing house prices, mass unemployment and so on – hasn't materialised. Instead, there are "signs of the economy adjusting": Nissan is investing more than £1bn in its Sunderland plant; Microsoft is pouring £2.5bn into the UK's growing AI sector. |
Brexit Britain has also managed a better recovery from the pandemic than either France or Germany. Since long before Covid, in fact, "the EU's economic performance has been woeful": 15 years ago, its economy was the same size as America's; now it's two-thirds the size. There is "no European tech giant to match the behemoths of Silicon Valley", and the US and China are "streets ahead" in AI. And politically, "aggressively right-wing" politicians like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are prospering all over Europe – but not in Britain. That, too, can be chalked up as another benefit of leaving the EU: one reason the UK hasn't witnessed the "nasty nationalism" seen across the Channel is because Brexit "provided a safety valve" for voters who felt ignored. Unless any of this changes, rejoining is "just a pipe dream". |
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The secret to a superlative espresso could be as simple as sprinkling water on your coffee beans before you grind them. New research, partly inspired by the way magma behaves during volcanic eruptions, has found that damp beans produce less friction when ground together. US scientists discovered this leads to a weaker electric charge and therefore smoother ground coffee, resulting in a stronger flavour. 💦☕️ |
Viagra was invented entirely by accident, says The Daily Telegraph. In 1993, a researcher trying to develop a treatment for angina conducted a clinical trial for a drug on a group of miners in south Wales. When they were asked at the end whether they'd noticed anything worthy of mention – a question that is usually met with a blank – one of the men tentatively raised his hand. With "admirable candour", he reported having "a lot more erections during the night than normal". The others smiled, and one by one they confessed: "So did I." |
It's George Santos, a Republican politician who was booted out of the House of Representatives for fraud and other crimes last week – and who is now making a ton of money recording personalised video messages online. The 35-year-old New Yorker, only the sixth congressman in history to be voted out by fellow lawmakers, charges just under £400 a pop to read out messages on the celebrity video platform Cameo, says Semafor. In his first 48 hours on the site, he lined up work that will earn him more than his $174,000-a-year Congressional salary. |
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"A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car." Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan |
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