| Humza Yousaf is facing growing pressure to resign, says The Times, ahead of a confidence vote triggered by his decision to scrap the SNP's power-sharing agreement with the Greens. The first minister's fate in the ballot appears to rest on the vote of Ash Regan, a former SNP minister who quit to join Alex Salmond's Alba Party in October. Doctors in Britain have begun a trial of the world's first personalised vaccine for skin cancer. The jab, which is based on the mRNA technology pioneered for Covid vaccines, has been shown to cut the risk of death from melanoma in half when taken in combination with immunotherapy. Conservation efforts are much more effective than many people think, a new study has found. Researchers who looked at hundreds of measures – to protect species such as Cuban crocodiles and saiga antelope – found that they had a positive effect in two out of every three cases. | | | | |  | On the way out? Ken Jack/Getty |
| A "laboratory for the nuttiest policies in the world" | At what may be his last press conference as first minister of Scotland, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, Humza Yousaf asked guests to consider his predecessors. They tell the story, he said, of the first quarter-century of devolution. He's right. But sadly for him, it's a story of "tragic, rapid and headlong political descent". Donald Dewar was "fundamentally decent", but his successor Henry McLeish was quickly brought down by an expenses scandal. Alex Salmond was acquitted of rape charges, but only after the court heard tales of "appalling behaviour" in office, and Nicola Sturgeon's husband has been charged in connection with the embezzlement of party funds. Which all leads to Yousaf, who has made Scotland into a "laboratory for the nuttiest policies in the world". | One such gimmick was free bus travel for all under-22s. No one quite imagined that this would lead to "child gangs running amok" on buses, but last week a nurse on her way home from a hospital shift was pulled by her hair and booted off the bus. A few months ago, a driver was killed in Elgin – "a 15-year-old was arrested". Scotland may be the only country in Europe where bus drivers are asking for "panic buttons, on-board policemen and 'de-escalation training'". Rent controls – another madcap scheme of the Yousaf era – have led to a massive new student flat complex in Strathclyde being abandoned, because it was no longer economic. The SNP's hare-brained approach is having real repercussions. Only yesterday, a World Health Organisation report ranked Scotland top out of 43 countries and regions for the proportion of 15-year-old boys who have used marijuana. A recent PISA report showed a decade-long slide in Scottish school attainment, despite "one of the highest levels of state spending in the world". What's Yousaf's excuse? "He has none." | | |  | Getty |
| The Atlantic has compiled a photo gallery showcasing Chile's stunning national parks. They include shots of a cluster of steep granite peaks in Torres del Paine; alpacas grazing on the shore of Chungara Lake; the Leones Glacier flowing into a lake in Laguna San Rafael; the volcanic Santa Barbara beach in Pumalín Douglas Tompkins; a volcano erupting beneath a starry sky in Villarrica; and cloud formations illuminated by the setting sun above the Cordillera del Paine. See the rest here. |
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| | | If you think those "pesky little puzzles standing between you and a website" are getting harder, you're not imagining it, says The Times. Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was developed in the early 2000s to stop cybercriminals using bots to access online platforms. But they have to be easier for a human to complete than for a machine – and the machines, in part thanks to AI, are getting much smarter. So Captchas have had to up their game, too. | | | | | | Advertisement | | Peter Sommer fell in love with travel in 1994, when he walked 2,000 miles from Troy across Turkey, retracing the route of Alexander the Great. An archaeologist by training, he began organising and leading historical tours in 1996, and set up Peter Sommer Travels in 2002. Twenty-two years later, Peter, his wife Elin and their team continue to run cultural and archaeological tours – including gulet cruises – for small groups, escorted by top experts. They have won the prestigious Tour Operator of the Year Award in six of the seven years it has been running, and received 750 independent reviews in the past decade – four rated "good", the other 746 "Excellent". To find out more, click here. |
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| | |  | Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondhalgh in Mr Bates vs The Post Office |
| ITV's agenda-setting drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office is the UK's most-watched TV show so far this year, with 13.5 million viewers. But it hasn't made the channel any money, says BBC News. Top executive Kevin Lygo revealed this week that the lack of interest from overseas channels and streamers has resulted in a £1m loss. "If you're in Lithuania, four hours on the British Post Office?" he said. "Not really, thank you very much." | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | The encampment at Columbia. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty |
| The uncompromising fury of campus protesters | Last Thursday, says John McWhorter in The New York Times, I had to abandon the class I was teaching at Columbia University. It had become impossible to concentrate because of the noise from the pro-Palestine encampment outside the classroom windows. The din is "almost continuous", not just during the day but into the evening, with constant drumbeats and "lusty chanting" of "From the river to the sea". Two of my students are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I didn't think it was fair to make them "sit and listen to this as if it were background music". | The protesters in the encampment – one of several set up on American university campuses in recent weeks – think Jewish students and teachers should be able to tolerate all this because they're white. They see the fight for Gaza as part of a larger battle against colonialist power structures, and justify the disruption as "social justice on the march". But imagine if these chants were "anti-black slogans". They would immediately be condemned as a "grave rupture of civilised exchange" and a "form of violence" – almost certainly by the very people protesting in the encampment now. Of course, disagreement won't always be a "juice and cookies" affair, and I myself think the Gaza war is no longer constructive. But the relentlessness of these protests – "daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric" – is debilitating. "What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse." | | | | | | South Koreans are adopting pet rocks to stave off loneliness, says The Wall Street Journal. The "kooky and best-forgotten fad of 1970s America" resurfaced in the Asian country in 2021, "when a popular TV actor showed off his domesticated stone". Members of K-pop groups have since showcased their pet pebbles on social media; when landscaping company Onyangsuksan introduced a "Rock companions" set last year, they sold out within a minute. "It might seem weird to others," says 39-year-old stone owner Choi Hye-jin. "But there is a sense of consolation that comes from giving affection to your rock." |
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| | | A 15th-century manuscript called The Book of the Hunt includes a list of more than 1,000 medieval dog names, says Mental Floss, and there are some absolute doozies. Some are complimentary: Amyable, Harmeles, Trusty, Joliboye, and Pretyman. Others less so, like Filthe, Oribull, and Badde. Some are inevitably related to hunting, like Bryngehome, Fyndewell, and Goodynowze, while others are more surreal, such as Argument, Feete, Garlik, and, perhaps strangest of all, Nameles. See a longer list here. | | | | | | It's the Tombaugh Regio, a 1,000-mile-wide, heart-shaped feature on the surface of Pluto. Scientists have long puzzled over what created it, but new research suggests it was formed by the dwarf planet slowly colliding with an object about 435 miles in diameter. This is thought to have created a plain filled with white nitrogen ice about 2.5 miles lower than the surrounding area. "Thanks to the angle of impact and the low velocity," says the University of Bern's Harry Ballantyne, "the core of the impactor did not sink into Pluto's core, but remained intact as a splat." | | | | | | | "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear."
American philosopher Daniel Dennett |
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