| UK inflation fell to a three-year low of 1.7% in September, raising hopes of further cuts to interest rates. News of the greater-than-expected drop, from 2.2% in August, came after reports that Chancellor Rachel Reeves is planning tax rises and spending cuts worth up to £40bn in this month's Budget, far more than previously expected. Terminally ill patients could be allowed to voluntarily end their lives under a proposed law being introduced in parliament today. The legislation, which would require a judge and two doctors to approve the decision, will be debated and voted on next month; of 312 MPs surveyed by the I newspaper, 54% expressed some degree of support for it while 35% were opposed. German football coach Thomas Tuchel has been named as the new England manager. Football's coming home, says The Sun. Or rather, "Fußball kommt nach Hause". | | |  | An abandoned mansion development in the northeastern city of Shenyang. Jade Gao/AFP/Getty |
| China's giant Ponzi scheme is a threat to us all | Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine dominate the headlines, says Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, but the next century will be defined by what happens in China. And right now the Chinese Communist Party is wrestling with its greatest challenges since the 1980s. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the government has created an enormous real estate bubble. As many as 90 million houses and apartments stand empty across the country. Local governments are "drowning in debt". And because ordinary Chinese have invested nearly 80% of their total savings in this giant "Ponzi scheme", they are reining in their spending. Youth unemployment is rising; industrial profits are down 17.8% in the past year. "Banks don't want to lend, and foreigners don't want to invest." | These problems could potentially be addressed with big structural reforms, but Xi Jinping is swerving the task. He has abandoned measures to gradually deflate the property bubble, replacing them with policies to boost housing demand. Efforts to reduce pointless infrastructure spending – building unneeded highways just to give people jobs, say – are also fizzling out. Xi and his cronies aren't stupid: they know they're heading down an "economic dead end". But they think getting on a more sustainable path is "too economically expensive and politically risky". This is bad news for the rest of us. Xi's best hope of getting the public to overlook the economic malaise is by "whipping up nationalist sentiment", primarily by being more assertive and aggressive on the global stage. Be prepared: "2025 is going to be an interesting year". | | |  | Harry Langdon/Getty |
| So fed up was the singer Dionne Warwick with the misogyny of 1990s rap music that she once summoned the genre's "big players" to her house for a telling-off, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Warwick dared them to call her a "bitch" to her face, and warned that if any of them ever had a daughter, "that little girl is going to look at you and say: "Daddy, did you really say that?" According to Snoop Dogg, who was present at the meeting, they were all stopped "dead in their tracks". "That day, at Dionne Warwick's house," he later said, "I believe we got out-gangstered." |
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| | Nice work if you can get it | Everybody knows traders make a few quid, says the FT, but New York firm Jane Street is taking things to another level. One listing on its website for a quantitative research intern offers a salary the equivalent of $250,000 a year – and it doesn't even require finance experience. For context, Keir Starmer makes $224,528 and Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, makes $203,500. So if you're just in it for the money, "you're better off with a Jane Street internship than leading the US central bank or chairing the world's ninth-largest island". Apply for the role here. | | | | | | Donald Trump's election campaign took a turn for the surreal at a town hall event in Pennsylvania on Monday, says The Atlantic. After two interruptions for medical emergencies in the audience, the former president appeared to get bored. "Who the hell wants to hear questions?" he said. "Let's just listen to music." And for the next 40 or so minutes that's what he did: standing on stage, swaying to a playlist of his favourite songs, including Hallelujah, Nothing Compares 2 U and Elvis's rendition of Dixie. "At one point, he asked his staff to play Pavarotti and display the immigration chart that he was about to discuss when an assassin tried to kill him this summer." | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge?
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Like many people, I was gripped by the video of Elon Musk's rocket being delicately caught by a pair of giant mechanical "chopsticks" as it landed back on Earth, says Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. The most tantalising moment comes at the end, when you think it's going to miss and then it rights itself with a neat little manoeuvre "like an Edwardian gent straightening his cravat". It really moved me. For much of my life, innovations have been piffling things. The most notable feature of the latest iPhone update, for example, is making text go "big or small or wobble or throb". But the Starship was a demonstration of true human excellence, "an achievement of pioneering spirit and vast ambition". I was blown away. | So why wasn't Musk – the richest man in the world and director of this momentous feat – invited to Labour's grand investment summit on Monday? According to party luminaries, it was "due to his social posts". What a load of rubbish. Snubbing Musk is a pose "worthy of the 1980s student union where the Prime Minister's puerile prejudices were incubated". And who cares about his tweets anyway? In the distant future, when humanity is spread far and wide across the stars, nobody is going to be worrying about the "edgy memes" that the man who got us there was posting on social media. Musk is a good reminder that we are "a deeply daft species" who create only moments of splendour. Sure, he's a kook, but why shouldn't he be? "Trivial human beings can do amazing things." | | | | A paste (pronounced "pah-stay") is a beloved Mexican snack comprising a small pastry stuffed with meat, potatoes and chilli pepper. If that sounds familiar, says The Independent, that's no surprise: the much-loved pastry was introduced to Mexico by Cornish miners in the 1820s. Locals loved the dish so much that it became a "culinary tradition" – today, there's a whole museum in the mining town of Real del Monte devoted to them. ¡Arriba! |
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| | | After decades of rising life expectancy, humans may be "closing in on the limits of what's possible for average life span", says The New York Times. According to a new study, eight of the countries with the highest life expectancy – Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – have all seen the increase in longevity slow in recent decades, tending to level off somewhere around 87. Life expectancy rocketed in the 20th century thanks to improved water sanitation and antibiotics, leading some to extrapolate that most children would live to 100 or more. But since then the gains have been marginal, even with mega swizzy tech, suggesting we may have reached a natural limit. | | | | | | | | The top image is of the Robovan, Tesla's newly unveiled self-driving people carrier; the bottom is a seemingly very similar vehicle featured in the 2004 film I, Robot. "Hey Elon," wrote the movie's director, Alex Proyas, on X, "can I have my designs back please?" However, other users have noted that the imagery in I, Robot was itself derivative – of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, for example – and that Tesla was hardly trying to hide the link: the launch event was called "We, Robot". | | | "I'm very careful to only predict things which have already happened."
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan |
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