| Rishi Sunak faced the largest rebellion of his premiership last night, as 60 Tory MPs voted for amendments seeking to toughen up his Rwanda bill. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned as deputy party chairmen to do so. This evening's vote, on the legislation as a whole, is expected to go more smoothly. Iran has launched airstrikes and drone attacks in Pakistani territory, apparently aimed at militants seeking independence for the cross-border Balochistan region. Pakistan says two children were killed in the strikes and that Tehran will face "serious consequences". Temperatures fell to -14C in parts of Scotland last night, and tonight they could hit -15C. The cold snap has led to school closures as far south as Liverpool. | | | |  | Taiwan's president-elect William Lai. Annabelle Chih/Getty |
| Why Xi may hesitate over Taiwan | William Lai's win in Taiwan's presidential election on Saturday was a "victory for democracy", says The Wall Street Journal. Lai, the current vice president, was the candidate "most disliked by Beijing". The Chinese did everything they could to scare the Taiwanese into voting for the main opposition party, the more pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) – even sending spy balloons over the island ahead of the ballot to "intimidate" locals. But these efforts backfired, increasing support for candidates who projected "the strongest sense of Taiwanese identity". While Lai won't have a "blank check" – his ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its legislative majority – his success is welcome proof that the Taiwanese people still believe in "democratic self-government". | The big question is whether Lai's win makes a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely, says Gideon Rachman in the FT. It may make Xi worry that he is running out of time to fulfil his long-held dream of reunifying Taiwan with the mainland. After eight years of DPP rule, this was meant to be the election where the pendulum swung to the KMT. But the "catastrophic costs" Russia has paid for its invasion of Ukraine will "surely give Xi pause". Chinese officials argue that their own forces wouldn't struggle in the same way because they are much larger and more formidable than those of Russia. But an amphibious invasion is much harder than a land incursion. And Putin's troops were "battle-hardened" from operations in Syria, Georgia and Chechnya. "China has not gone to war since 1979." For all his bluster, Xi may conclude that an invasion is simply "too risky". | | | | These "exquisite images", says New Scientist, are of starlings swirling and swooping as one in "dramatic, cloud-like flocks known as murmurations". They were taken by Søren Solkær, a Danish photographer best known for photographing musicians like Paul McCartney and Björk. He witnessed murmurations as a child growing up in southern Denmark, and has travelled around Europe taking photos of the phenomenon for his new book Starling. |
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| | | When children were asked for their word of the year a decade ago, they "opted for something predictably childish", says The Times: "minion", a small, yellow creature from the animated film Despicable Me. But in recent years the chosen word – determined by an Oxford University Press survey – has become increasingly gloomy. In 2020 it was, inevitably, "coronavirus"; the following year yielded "anxiety"; and in 2022 it was "Queen", after the monarch's death. Last year's pick? "Climate change", followed closely by "war". 😱 | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share |
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| | | | | Boris Johnson still appears to be pining for Downing Street, says the Daily Mail, so much so that he has apparently put in a bid for the £30,000 life-size replica of the No 10 door used in The Crown. The former PM reportedly put his offer in for the 13ft prop – which comes with the lantern, railings and boot-scrapers – "as soon as the lot went live". To submit your own bid, click here. | | |  | An awkward encounter: Angela Merkel and Donald Trump in 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty |
| Trump is already shaping the future | World leaders are waking up to the fact that, a year from now, "Donald Trump could actually be returning to the White House", says Graham Allison in Foreign Affairs. Some are starting to delay negotiating with the US in the hope that better deals will soon be available. Others are beginning to search for a "Trump hedge", to minimise the ways in which his return will leave them worse off. Take the Ukraine war – if Vladimir Putin can drag the conflict out for another year, he may have a much friendlier Washington to deal with. Kyiv and Europe have the opposite problem. Germany, in particular, remembers Angela Merkel's conclusion after her bruising encounters with the then US president: "We must fight for our future on our own." | Trump's possible return also had a strange effect on the mood at the recent COP28 climate summit in Dubai. Proceedings stretched "even further into fantasy" than they normally do – including an agreement to "transition away from fossil fuels" – in part because delegates know that if Trump returns, his promise to "drill, baby, drill" will render such pledges redundant. And the Biden administration is increasingly "handicapped" in negotiations with everyone from China's Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, as foreign leaders weigh the likelihood that they will be dealing with a "very different government" a year from now. Like it or not, the next US president will also be the world's "most consequential leader". | | | | | | If you're a Wordle fan, says Digg, you'll enjoy Typeshift, a word game created by the online puzzle platform Puzzmo. To play, you move columns of letters up and down until they create a word horizontally. This turns the letters in that word black – the aim is to do the same for every letter on the grid. Have a go here. | |
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| | Britain's gas network is still reliant on aircraft engines stripped from fighter jets that were operating in the Cold War, says The Daily Telegraph. The UK's conversion to North Sea gas in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the decommissioning of the RAF's Lightning fleet, so engineers "snapped up" their Rolls-Royce Avon engines and repurposed them to pump gas. | | | | | | It's "Tim-Houthi Chalamet", a young Yemeni man who bears a striking resemblance to the Hollywood star Timoth̩e Chalamet. The wavy-haired Rashid Al Haddad recently posted TikToks of himself approaching, and then on the deck of, a cargo ship seized by the Houthis in November. He may not actually be a militant Рthe boat has become a tourist attraction since its hijacking Рbut that hasn't stopped social media users from lusting after him. As one said: "He can board my ship any time." | | | | | "Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell."
American astronaut Frank Borman |
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