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| | | More than 60,000 properties across the UK are without power after Storm Goretti brought heavy snowfall and winds of up to 123mph yesterday. A rare red warning for "dangerous, stormy" winds is in place for the southwest of England, while people up and down the country are facing travel disruption, school closures and power cuts. Rachel Reeves is set to announce a £300m bailout for pubs struggling with the planned removal of Covid-era relief from business rates. The support package is the 12th, and fastest, U-turn of this Labour government so far, says Politico, and is expected to include changes to licensing rules and regulations as well as short and longer term financial help. NASA is bringing back four astronauts from the International Space Station a month early because one is suffering from an unspecified "serious medical condition". It is the first evacuation of a crew from the ISS since it began operations in 2000. | | |  | Watson: the "most important voice in British policing". Ryan Jenkinson/Getty |
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| The old-fashioned copper showing us how it's done | Three shoplifters legging it through the Manchester suburb of Prestwich last November must have had the shock of their lives, says Sebastian Payne in The Times, to find themselves chased, tackled and handcuffed by Sir Stephen Watson, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police. But this hands-on style is typical of Watson, and a good indicator of why he has become the "most important voice in British policing". While other forces are busy engaging with local interest groups and social justice causes, he takes an old school, back-to-basics approach: new uniforms and stricter dress standards, to give officers a greater sense of pride; more officers deployed to neighbourhoods on spot patrols; a quadrupling of stop and search; and a demand that every crime, from break-ins to phone snatching, be investigated. "If you tackle the little things," he says, "the big things look after themselves." | That may all sound like the "bleeding obvious". But to get a sense of how remarkable this traditionalist approach is, consider the pathetic case of West Midlands chief Craig Guildford, who this week gave one of the worst select committee performances I have ever seen, trying to defend his force for bowing to loud local Islamists and banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Villa Park stadium. It's a similarly sad story with the Met, as it emerges that rulings by a diversity panel resulted in officers being hired who went on to commit rapes and assaults. Had the capital's police force stuck to traditional hiring standards, "scores of dangerous people" would have been kept out of its ranks. British policing faces a choice: old school justice by public consent, or more diversity schemes and prioritising special interest groups. There is much to learn from Watson's success. | 👮🏻♂️🙄 Watson was one of the first to conclude that "non-crime hate incidents" were a complete waste of time – an example of a good intention gone awry. In a lecture to the Policy Exchange think tank, he said: "What it morphed into was pretty much anybody with a protected characteristic who perceived themselves to be a victim of an incident, because of that, was automatically recorded." Six months later, the College of Policing recommended all forces end their use. | | | | Advertisement | | Escape to the Mediterranean this summer
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| | | | The winners and presenters at this weekend's Golden Globes will be given "the world's most luxurious gift bag", says Nicole Hoey in Robb Report. Recipients of the "premium suede" duffel can select from a range of extravagant experiences and items including a three-night stay at a beachfront villa in Mexico; a stay in the Royal Suite at a top Bangkok hotel; products from Brad Pitt's skincare brand Beau Domaine; and a year-long membership to the luxury hair brand Maison Devereux's "golden circle", which typically costs around $21,000. One particularly lucky recipient will get nine bottles of the world's priciest wine, a Bordeaux called Liber Pater, worth $210,000. Click on the image to see the full list. |
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| | | | | Aldrich Ames, who has died in prison aged 84, betrayed dozens of his fellow CIA agents to the Soviets during the Cold War, says The Daily Telegraph. He was driven entirely by money – Moscow gave him more than $2.5m over nine years – and did little to hide his ill-gotten gains. He stashed it not at some untraceable Swiss bank but in the same account he used for his CIA salary. He paid for a $540,000 house in cash and began turning up to work in a brand new Jaguar. At the time of his arrest in 1994, his second wife, Rosario, "owned 500 pairs of shoes". | | | | A wildcard entry into a professional tennis tournament in Nairobi has been dubbed the "worst tennis player ever", says Tamara Prenn in the Daily Mail. Hajar Abdelkader, 21, wore a casual black t-shirt and leggings and at times appeared unsure where to stand when serving. She was beaten 6-0, 6-0 by her German opponent Lorena Schaedel, racking up 20 double faults and winning only three points – two of which were double faults by Schaedel. Tennis Kenya says the plucky novice was given the wildcard following the last-minute withdrawal of another player, but says it will ensure that "such an extremely rare occurrence never happens again". | | | | |  | "Not tonight, darling. Or any other night." Getty |
| Will sex soon be no more than a "niche hobby"? | In one out of every three postcodes in Britain, says Simon Kelner in The i Paper, there are "more dogs than children". There are two causes: Britain's canine population soared from nine million in 2019 to more than 13 million last year; and young couples are having fewer children. With almost a quarter of new puppy owners aged between 25 and 34, no one should be surprised at the rise of the #dinkwad – "dual income, no kids, with a dog". Instagram is awash with disturbing posts from couples proudly extolling the virtues of a child-free life in the company of their canine "child". | It's not just that today's youth aren't having children, says Mary Wakefield in The Spectator. They're not even having sex. The proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds who do the deed has fallen from 67% in 2019 to just 43% last year. At this rate, by 2030 only a tiny fraction of the "young, fertile humans sex was designed for" will be doing it at all. By 2050, perhaps it'll be a niche hobby, "like playing the euphonium". But can you blame them? We Gen Xers had Jilly Cooper to fire our imaginations. These poor sods have been exposed to the most appalling pornography since before puberty while also being conditioned – in the interests of "removing stigma" – never to "kink shame", hence the gruesome rise of strangling during sex. Meanwhile, normal flirting has become taboo: a shocking 17% of Americans between 18 and 29 think asking a girl out for a drink is "always" or "usually" sexual harassment. In this "worst of all romantic worlds", perhaps a sex strike is a "perfectly reasonable response". | | |  | Getty |
| The New York Times's Cooking section asked chef Sohla El-Waylly for her tips to make you a better cook. Among the 11 she provided are working on the biggest chopping board that your counter can take; buying knives that can be sharpened ("a knife's only job is to be sharp"); looking for cues from your food – are the onions meant to be translucent or deeply browned? – rather than blindly following recipe timings; tasting your food as you go, "a lot"; and following recipes without pictures so you can enjoy your "stellar accomplishment" without comparing yourself to curated and enhanced photos. See the rest here. | | | | Nice work if you can get it | Someone made a packet betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro, says The Wall Street Journal. On 27 December, an unknown trader set up an account on the crypto-based betting platform Polymarket and began placing wagers that the US would invade Venezuela and that Nicolás Maduro would be ousted. Last Friday, less than five hours before Donald Trump green-lit the special forces operation, the trader doubled down on all the bets – ultimately yielding a $410,000 profit on just $34,000 worth of wagers. As one analyst says, with some degree of understatement, "it is more likely than not that this was an insider". | | | | | | It's Angus, says Annabel Keenan in The Art Newspaper, a young cow at the centre of the art collective MSCHF's "latest provocation". In August 2024, the group bought Angus and pre-sold 1,200 hamburgers and four leather handbags to be produced once he hit slaughtering age. The catch was that if half the buyers of these so-called "Angus tokens" cancelled their purchases by March this year through an online "remorse portal", Angus would instead be sent to live a peaceful life in a sanctuary. With just two months to go, his fate looks "bleak" – less than a third of buyers have so far opted to save the luckless livestock. | | | "Love is that short period of time when someone else holds the same opinion of us as we do of ourselves."
Polish writer Magdalena Samozwaniec |
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