| | Rishi Sunak has announced a new law to ensure victims of the Post Office scandal are "swiftly exonerated and compensated", including an upfront payment of £75,000 to 555 sub-postmasters who brought a group lawsuit over the issue. Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells announced yesterday that she would hand back her CBE. Ecuador is under a nationwide curfew after armed gangsters stormed a TV studio during a live broadcast. Police said all the gunmen were arrested shortly after the incident, which took place the day after the South American country declared a 60-day state of emergency in response to a gang leader escaping from prison. A fake moustache, a crocodile's tooth and a Saddam Hussein calendar are among more than 1,700 items that have gone missing from England's museums over the past 20 years, says BBC News. Other absent artefacts include an aircraft navigation computer and a photo negative of the late Queen's wedding to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947. | | |  | Gabriel Attal, left, with Emmanuel Macron. Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty |
| Macron's bright new star | Emmanuel Macron has just appointed the youngest-ever prime minister of France, says Solenn de Royer in Le Monde: 34-year-old Gabriel Attal. Macron – who is himself the youngest president in French history, having been elected at 39 – is desperate to reinvigorate his "embattled political mandate". By appointing the highly popular Attal, who also becomes the first French PM to have "made no secret of his homosexuality", Macron is breaking with his previous habit of elevating functionaries and treating them as "mere assistants". It is also an admission that he needs "young Gabriel" to breathe new life into his tired administration. | Since joining the French government in 2018, Attal has enjoyed a "faultless career": government spokesman, budget minister, then, as of last summer, minister for education. After less than six months in that highly exposing job, Attal was polling higher than anyone else in government. Though he rose from the left, he has won acclaim on the right for his ban on the abaya (a robe worn by some Muslim women) and his experiments with imposing school uniforms. When voters started approaching him for selfies last summer, he admitted "it's tempting to imagine a destiny, to start believing in it", though he added: "You can't let yourself get carried away." That's something he may have to remember in the coming months. | 🚚🥲 Attal was raised in one of the poshest neighbourhoods in Paris, and attended one of the city's fanciest private schools. His mother is from a family of Russian émigrés; his father, a successful Tunisian Jewish film producer, died suddenly when Attal was 26. Since joining the government, Attal has taken his father's desk wherever he goes, "moving it from ministry to ministry". | | | | Few hairstyles have "garnered more column inches" than "The Rachel" – the choppy cut worn by Jennifer Aniston's character in Friends, says The Daily Telegraph. Now, 30 years since the sitcom first aired, 54-year-old Aniston has revived the famous do. The "new Rachel" is an "altogether more grown-up take on the Nineties version", with lighter layering and subtler highlights. Aniston didn't actually like the original look: she said it was a "pain in the butt" to maintain, as she had to visit her hairdresser every six weeks to keep the "darn thing up". |
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| | | Xi Jinping's "sweeping military purge" in China was sparked by several corruption scandals, says Bloomberg. According to US intelligence, these included "missiles filled with water instead of fuel", and vast fields of rocket silos with malfunctioning lids that would prevent a proper launch. They added up to a significant erosion of the People's Liberation Army's ability to fight a war, prompting Xi to launch a crackdown that has claimed the careers of more than a dozen senior officials. Washington believes Beijing is now "less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case". | | | | When ChatGPT recently released an update allowing people to enter prompts for more detailed images, users soon began to "push the chatbot to its limits", says The New York Times. One user on X (formerly Twitter) posted an AI-generated picture of a goose, with the caption: "For every 10 likes this gets, I will ask ChatGPT to make this goose a little sillier." The first update was relatively modest, giving the goose a birthday hat and a big smile. By the sixth prompt, the digitally bolstered bird had "grown a second pair of eyeballs, donned roller skates and been bathed in a collage of wavy light, brass instruments and ringed planets". | | |  | The bad old days: Blair with Bush at Camp David in 2001. Cynthia Johnson/Liaison/Getty |
| A second Trump term could be good for Europe | Europe's current relationship with America is an unhealthy one, says Richard Vinen in UnHerd. "We are like adult children who live with their parents, sulking and complaining but assuming that someone else will do the laundry." So for all the dangers of a second Donald Trump presidency, his anti-Nato attitude might be just what Europe needs to start looking after itself. After all, though America has been the world's richest country since the late 19th century, its hegemony in Europe only began after World War Two. This was to counter the Soviet Union, but modern Russia is much smaller, has far fewer European allies, and holds little allure, compared to communism, among European elites. | Trump isn't wrong when he says the US "bears a disproportionate share of Nato's military burden". And an all-European alliance would be perfectly capable of containing Russia on its own. Trump's "America First" rhetoric also reminds us to stop looking at the US as some sort of "beacon of democracy", as Joe Biden describes it. Europe must work with America "in the same way that we deal with China or Russia" – putting our own interests first. In the decades following World War Two, PMs like Harold Macmillan recognised the value of the US alliance but "felt little emotional attachment to the country". Contrast that with Tony Blair and David Cameron's "gushing excitement" when they visited the Camp David presidential retreat. America deserves "wary respect", but not our trust or blind loyalty. | | |  | The coveted marquinha de fita. Douglas Magno/Getty |
| On Rio de Janeiro's rooftop tanning salons, sunbathers are opting for an "unorthodox adornment", says The Guardian: bikinis made entirely of electrical tape. The unusual get-up is designed to create "tan lines so perfect they are almost fluorescent". Now a "Rio fashion trademark", the coveted marquinha de fita ("little tape mark") has spawned an industry of tanning specialists who stick the tape on to clients. According to one 29-year-old salon owner, "the dream is to have a mark like a neon light". | | | Because renewables like wind and solar produce lots of energy when it's sunny and windy, but nothing when it isn't, scientists are always looking for ways to store excess green power to use later. Far better than normal lithium-ion batteries are "water batteries", says the FT: giant facilities that pump water uphill when power is plentiful, then let it run back downhill through an electricity-generating hydroelectric turbine when it isn't. So-called "pumped hydro" already makes up 90% of global electricity storage – the century-old technology enjoyed a boom in the 1960s, when it was used to store excess nuclear power. But as our reliance on renewables grows, much more will be needed. | | | | | | It's a Stanley Quencher Cup, an oversized water bottle that has become an "all-consuming craze" in the US, says The Washington Post. Demand for the cheerfully coloured tumblers, which range in size from a tiddly 400ml to a whopping 1.8 litres, has soared because of social media. A TikTok video from New Year's Eve showed customers swarming a display at Target to get their hands on a special Valentine's Day edition. When the chain released "winter pink" cups last week in a collaboration with Starbucks, shoppers began queuing outside stores as early as 1am, and fights broke out at some outlets. You can order the 1.2-litre TikTok favourite H2.0 FlowState Tumbler, for £44.99, here. | | | | | "It is not length of life, but depth of life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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