View online

3 August, 2023

The Bank of England has raised interest rates for the 14th time in a row, to 5.25%. They’re now at their highest level in 15 years; inflation remains nearly four times the Bank’s 2% target. Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie are separating after 18 years of marriage. The 51-year-old is the second Canadian PM to announce a split while in office, after his father, Pierre, in 1977. “Just stop worrying” has been voted the most futile piece of advice you can give someone. Other contenders in the survey of 2,000 British adults included “fight fire with fire” and “forgive and forget”.

Special Counsel Jack Smith and Donald Trump

Why this indictment is the one that matters

Donald Trump’s third indictment, for trying to overthrow the 2020 election, is the “most consequential of them all”, says Luke Broadwater on The Daily. Federal prosecutors allege that for more than two months, the then president spread “knowingly false” lies about voter fraud. They’re clear that the issue wasn’t his initial conduct – he had a right to legally challenge the results, which he did, through 60 separate lawsuits. But after these failed and Trump knew the election had been fair, he didn’t have a right to launch a “criminal conspiracy” and push the vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify Joe Biden’s victory. “He didn’t have a right to lie.”

What followed, allegedly, was a slew of illegal actions. Trump’s lawyers put pressure on electors in states that had been won by Biden to sign documents saying the votes had been improperly counted. One Trump official fabricated a letter suggesting the Justice Department had uncovered evidence of fraud. The pinnacle, of course, was the January 6 riots, when prosecutors say the former president “essentially encouraged” supporters to physically block Congress from operating. If found guilty, he faces up to 50 years in prison. What’s more, the indictment is currently only 45 pages long, so it’s likely investigator Jack Smith has “more shoes to drop”. One possibility is a charge of insurrection, which could lead to Trump being constitutionally banned from holding public office. Just as likely is that he will be re-elected before any verdict comes down. That could lead to a truly bizarre scenario: the president pardoning himself.

🗳🇺🇸 It’s too early to tell how the indictment will affect Trump’s 2024 chances, says Nate Cohn in The New York Times. But no candidate who has led their nearest rival in the polls by 20-plus points at this stage has gone on to lose the primary – and before the charges were announced, Trump was leading Ron DeSantis by nearly double that. As for the general election, the first Times/Siena poll of the 2024 cycle put Biden and Trump tied, each with 43%.

Three humpback whales have been filmed jumping in unison off the coast of Massachusetts, in what one marine biologist described as a “once-in-a-lifetime” sight. The video was captured by Robert Addie, who was celebrating his 59th birthday on a fishing trip off Cape Cod last week. “When they launched from the water, I let out a loud expletive,” he tells The Washington Post. “It was just a whale ballet.”

Rishi Sunak is heading off on holiday to California today, for his first family trip abroad in four years, says The Times. The PM tried to get away last year, but came home after “about 15 hours” because Queen Elizabeth had died. He’s not the first leader to cut a trip short. Margaret Thatcher once went on a 10-day break to Corsica with her husband Denis, only to return home four days in because they felt they had “done” the island.

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

Temperatures were so high at Zion National Park in Utah last week that rangers managed to bake a batch of cookies on a car dashboard. In an Instagram video to highlight the dangers of extreme heat, they said the snack took about three hours to cook, and came out “a little crunchy”. It was at least 93C inside the car – once the mercury hit that level, the plastic thermometer placed alongside the cookies melted. Watch the full clip here.

A solar thermal power plant in Dunhuang, Gansu, China. Getty

Clinging to fossil fuels is like sticking to horse-power

Many British politicians are “stuck in an outdated mental universe” on green energy, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. Tony Blair recently warned of the “huge burden” of moving to Net Zero. Rishi Sunak’s government has imposed “a discriminatory and retroactive surtax” on renewable companies – one of our greatest recent success stories – and “surreptitiously halved” the UK’s carbon tax. It’s madness: clean tech “will entirely change the global economic system, not at some distant date but this decade”. Attempting to cling to fossil fuels is like “sticking to horse-power as others embrace the steam engine”.

The tired argument is that green energy is “a pious luxury for rich Western states while the rest of humanity belches out carbon”. But greenhouse emissions in much of the world have already peaked ­– it happened a decade ago in Latin America, for example. China, which is embarking on a vast expansion of wind and solar across the “empty deserts of Inner Mongolia”, will go into a “steep descent” of emissions from 2025 – and its dominance in battery production means it’s “running away with the great prize of the 21st century”. Largely thanks to dirt-cheap solar energy, a “rapid switch to clean tech” could cut average energy and fuel bills in advanced economies by almost 20% in the next seven years. “This is an unstoppable global juggernaut. It does not require lavish state spending.” Britain must hold its nerve and plough on with “green energy rearmament”.

To find out more about advertising and partnerships with The Knowledge, click here

Getty

Every year, several wooden skiffs set off down the Thames from west London to count the river’s swans and report their findings back to the king or queen. And this summer, says The New York Times, “the numbers were not good”. The “swan upping”, as the tradition is known, registered only 94 cygnets along the 79-mile stretch, down from 155 in 2022. The drop-off is due to avian flu, which the King’s Swan Marker, David Barber, says has been “quite disastrous” for the royal birds. On the plus side, the young swans that were counted were “all in excellent health”. 

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, says QI on X (formerly Twitter), it interrupted a prestigious three-day game of Go, the East Asian board game, taking place in the Japanese city’s suburbs. Despite some damage to the building, and a few injuries, the final resumed after the lunch break and was played to its conclusion.

It’s a Japanese man who has forked out $14,000 for a hyper-realistic Border Collie costume. Footage of the dressed-up doggy taking his first walk in public has racked up 2.8 million views on YouTube. “I remember writing in my grade school graduation book that I wanted to be a dog and walk outside,” says Toco, the man – or dog – in question. “I fulfilled that dream.” Watch more of his animalistic antics here. 

“We never find what we set out hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.”

Scottish poet George Mackay Brown

That’s it. You’re done.

To find out about advertising and commercial partnerships, click here

Been forwarded this newsletter?

Sign up for free to receive it every day

Unsubscribe from the newsletter