Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are among the high-profile figures named in newly released court documents identifying associates of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. More records, which form part of a case against Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, are expected to be made public in the coming days. Iran's Supreme Leader has vowed a "harsh response" after 84 people were killed in a bomb attack on crowds marking the anniversary of General Qasem Soleimani's assassination by the US. Some Iranian officials have blamed Israel and the US for the blasts, says The Times, but "Isis is the more likely culprit". A 13-year-old from Oklahoma is thought to have become the first person to "beat" Tetris, 34 years after the video game's release. Willis Gibson took 38 minutes to reach level 157, whereupon the block-stacking classic crashed. |
Miriam Cates: "intellectual energy". Instagram/@miriamcates_mp |
The "trilemma" facing Western democracies |
It's striking how much Rishi Sunak has "bounced from one idea to the next" in No 10, says Tom McTague in UnHerd. He initially presented himself as a "safe pair of hands" who would clean up the mess made by Liz Truss. When that didn't improve the Tories' dire poll numbers, he lined up red-meat conservative policies, such as watering down Net Zero commitments, and styled himself as a radical who would break from "a failed 30-year consensus". And then he hired David Cameron – the epitome of that consensus – as his foreign secretary. Seemingly the one constant has been the PM's desperation to avoid handing power to the "lunatics" on the right of his party.
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Yet for all the madness on the Tory fringes, they boast far more "intellectual energy" than the likes of Sunak and Cameron. The MP Miriam Cates, for example, is "not anachronistic" in her concern about Britain's falling birth rate: it's a "distinctly modern problem" affecting almost all Western democracies. The issue no one in the party is properly addressing is what the economist Dani Rodrik calls the "trilemma" of the modern world: governments cannot have all three of democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration. The more you integrate your economy into the world, the less sovereignty your citizens will enjoy; the less you integrate, the poorer your citizens will be. With Brexit, Britain chose sovereignty over integration, but the trilemma does not go away – it only "emerges in different forms". Right now, the government is failing to answer it. |
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It's time "lettuce ware" made a comeback, says Mary Knapp in Vice. The cruciferous crockery first found favour in Europe during the 18th-century Rococo era, when people were into intricate trompe l'oeil dishware. Victorians loved its "novelty factor", and Jackie Kennedy was later an avid fan of designer Dodie Thayer's chic mid-century collection. The leafy look hasn't been in vogue for a while, but it's a great way to "make dinner less boring". And everyone deserves dishware that "looks like it dances when you leave the room". |
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Labour's lead over the Tories may not be as comfortable as it looks, says Jim Pickard in the FT. Keir Starmer's campaign chief, Morgan McSweeney, recently gave a "sobering briefing" to the shadow cabinet, referencing recent elections where commanding poll advantages have evaporated or even reversed: Australia in 2019, for example, when the Liberal party won despite trailing for more than two years, and Germany in 2021, when Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats "threw away a poll lead of 24 points". A year before the 1997 UK election, he noted, some polls had Labour 30 points ahead; a week before, it was 20 points. The party's actual margin of victory was a "much more modest" 13 points. |
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Queen Margrethe of Denmark, who is abdicating on 14 January, has long been known for her "vibrant, playful eye for clothes", says Vogue. Fashion highlights include "an armour-like gold brocade sari"; a flamingo pink taffeta dress with "jaunty propeller sleeves"; a fur-lined silk gown she wore to the wedding of one of her sons; and, most famously, a floral raincoat which she made herself from a waxy outdoor tablecloth. |
Wolfe in his Upper East Side apartment in 2004. David Corio/Redferns/Getty |
Where is today's Tom Wolfe? |
Tom Wolfe was the enfant terrible of New York's literary scene, says Nick Burns in The New Statesman. He sported a "dandyish white suit", and fired off fiction and non-fiction in "ecstatic, special-effects-laden prose" that satirised the hypocrisies of the liberal establishment – his 1970 essay Radical Chic was about a posh Manhattan party thrown in aid of the Black Panthers. A new biopic, Radical Wolfe, laments how no one today writes quite like Wolfe, who died in 2018 aged 88. Conservatives blame a censorious "woke left", but really it's satire that American liberals can't handle. In Wolfe's day they were on top – the Democrats had dominated government since the 1930s – and could afford to laugh at themselves. As their power waned in the 1980s, so did their sense of humour. |
Another problem is that right-wingers these days are just too angry to muster the wry detachment needed for effective satire. The dry wit of patrician conservatives like William F Buckley seems a world away. Tucker Carlson used to write "clever, outrageous" magazine stories skewering liberals – then he laid down his pen and found fame delivering angry monologues on Fox News. America's contemporary right has little interest in "novels of manners" or delicate social critique; they don't respect liberals enough to satirise them. But that's no reason to give up reading Wolfe – nor to stop hoping that some writer will emerge to dig into the "absurdities" of our own age. |
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A nine-month round-the-world voyage has become an unexpected hit on social media, says The Times. Royal Caribbean's 2,100-passenger Serenade of the Seas set sail from Miami on 10 December and will visit some of the world's most historic sites, including the Taj Mahal in India, Chichen Itza in Mexico, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef. On board are a curious mix of retirees and social-media savvy youngsters fervently documenting the experience on TikTok. The hashtag #UltimateWorldCruise has had more than 170 million views, as younger guests share everything from days lounging on a private island in the Bahamas to mundane visits to the ship's launderette. |
Body boffins are testing a "vibrating diet pill", says the journal Science, which works by stimulating nerve endings in the stomach to tell the brain it's full. The tiny capsules shake for around 38 minutes in the stomach, before passing on through the digestive system. When the tummy-tickling tech was tested on pigs, researchers found it slashed food intake by around 40% without causing obvious side effects. Unfortunately, the pigs can't tell scientists if it feels weird. |
It's a Dolphin, an electric vehicle made by the Chinese company BYD, which has usurped Tesla as the world's biggest seller of EVs. The Shenzhen-based firm, which is backed by Warren Buffett, shifted a record 526,000 battery-only vehicles in the final quarter of 2023, beating its American rival's 484,500. Although most of its sales are in China, the company is "sharpening its focus on new foreign markets", including Europe. |
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"It is hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well."
American author Thomas Harris |
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