The government and health unions have agreed on a pay deal expected to put an end to months of strikes. If all goes to plan, more than a million nurses, paramedics and other frontline workers will receive a 5% wage rise plus a one-off payment of at least ÂŁ1,655. But itâs not all good news â more than 1,000 Passport Office workers have announced a five-week walkout starting next month. Chinaâs President Xi Jinping has confirmed he will travel to Moscow next week for talks with Vladimir Putin. Announcing the visit, the Kremlin said the two would discuss a âcomprehensive partnership and strategic co-operationâ. A famously virile Exmoor pony has been selected by scientists to help save his breed from extinction. Elsinore Alan Partridge will donate semen to a gene bank as part of a campaign to boost numbers of the iconic small horses. âHe is a brilliant, funny boy,â says breeder Madeline Haynes. âHis name suits him.â
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Elsinore Alan Partridge: top shagger. Michael Dewhurst/The Exmoor Pony Society |
Letâs pay mums to stay at home |
As every modern parent is âall too well awareâ, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, ânursery fees in this country are staggeringly steepâ. So it will no doubt be hugely popular that Jeremy Hunt has promised 30 hours of free childcare a week for children over nine months old, enabling both parents to get back to work earlier. But is this really how we want to live? And more importantly, is this really âhow we want our children to liveâ?
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Bestselling childcare author Oliver James has repeatedly urged parents to keep their children at home until the age of three if they possibly can, citing studies that suggest nursery kids are âmore aggressive and more insecure in relationshipsâ. And in any case, âmost mothers would rather be at home with their babiesâ. In a recent poll, 62% of mums said that if money were no object, they (or their husbands) would stay at home and look after the children. So why donât we âcut out the middle manâ? Instead of spending vast sums to help working parents pay exorbitant nursery fees, letâs just pay mums or dads to stay at home and do it themselves. I donât just mean measly child benefit. I mean âa proper wage, just for raising childrenâ, for at least the first two years. Of course, the government wonât do it because it believes a âmotherâs most sacred dutyâ is nudging up the nationâs GDP. But one day, I suspect weâll look back and decide we âgot our priorities wrongâ.
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This yearâs winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards include shots of a fox walking through woodland thatâs been hacked down to make way for pylons; a leafcutter bee peering out of its hole; a stag walking along the edge of a Scottish loch; and luminescent jellyfish feasting on tiny plankton. See the full list here.
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More and more of Chinaâs elite are getting educated in the West, says The Economist. Today, over 20% of Central Committee members â âthe 370 most powerful party officialsâ â have had some foreign schooling, mostly at Western universities. Thatâs up from 6% two decades ago. âEight of the 24 members of the Politburo have studied in Western countries, the most ever by far.â |
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Kanaya Kolong Parkepu, son of the 95-year-old warrior chief of a Maasai tribe in northern Tanzania, is a huge hit on YouTube, says MailOnline. On their Maasaiboys channel, he and a friend have racked up millions of views with their insights into the lives of 21st-century tribesmen: hyenas circling the camp; youthful stories of fighting off lions. But their most popular videos are pranks. In one, Kanaya gives his buddy a burger for the first time â then mocks him for turning it on its side. Watch more here.
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Tucker Carlson announcing DeSantisâs new stance on Ukraine |
Why Putin is stoking the culture wars |
Vladimir Putinâs best hopes of winning in Ukraine rest on one thing, says Ed Luce in the FT: the 2024 US presidential election. Both Republican front runners are now openly sceptical of providing more assistance to Kyiv: Donald Trump claims heâll âend the war within 24 hours of becoming presidentâ; Ron DeSantis said this week that further involvement in a distant âterritorial disputeâ was not in Americaâs interests. Those positions reflect the views of Republican voters, fewer than 40% of whom think the US should still be arming Ukraine. Tucker Carlson, the influential Fox News anchor, has described President Zelensky as a âdespotâ, a âcorrupt strongmanâ, and Joe Bidenâs âUkrainian pimpâ.
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Increasingly, the war is turning into a cultural divide for Americans. âMuch like wearing masks identified you as a liberal in the pandemic, the Ukrainian flag has become a symbol of woke culture.â And Putin is doing what he can to encourage this. Thatâs why, in what was surely this yearâs âoddest momentâ, he took time out from the war in Ukraine to have a pop at the Church of England â along with same-sex marriage in the US, the attempted cancelling of JK Rowling, and gender reassignment surgery. Clearly, he wants to cement the view on the Make America Great Again right that âRussia is the global champion of their anti-woke causeâ. That would make it even easier for whoever wins the Republican nomination to abandon Kyiv for good.
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At the 1939 Academy Awards, Walt Disney received an honorary gong for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It consisted of one normal-sized Oscar statuette, and seven miniature ones.
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A letter to The Guardian: |
I have an additional rule for our fridge, and that is to store my eclectic collection of out-of-date worldwide condiments on the top shelf, where my shorter wife cannot reach to cull them. |
Itâs Sumplete, an online puzzle created by ChatGPT. Dundee-based software developer Daniel Tait asked the AI bot to âinvent a logic puzzle similar to Sudoku that doesnât currently existâ. After a bit of back and forth, the computer complied â and even wrote the code for him. The game, which had more than 50,000 plays in its first week, involves removing numbers from a grid until each row and column adds up to a given total. Give it a go here.
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âMiddle age is when youâve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.â Ogden Nash |
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Thatâs it. Youâre done. |
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