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9 August, 2023

More than 40 million voters have had their names and addresses compromised in “the biggest data breach in UK history”, says the Daily Mail. The Electoral Commission has revealed that “hostile actors”, thought to be Russian hackers, are behind the cyberattack, which remained undetected for 14 months. In a similarly damaging leak, Northern Ireland’s police force has admitted it accidentally published the personal data of all its staff online. Wegovy, the much-hyped weight-loss drug, can cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes by a fifth, according to a study of more than 17,500 people. The treatment was approved for use on the NHS in March and may eventually be given to as many as 12 million Brits. Tarot card readers and clairvoyants are losing business to AI chatbots, which apparently “give more reliable predictions”, says the Daily Star. “They didn’t see that coming.”

Protesters wave Nigerien and Russian flags in Niger’s capital, Niamey. AFP/Getty

The Kremlin’s proxy war in Africa

The recent coup in Niger was essentially sparked by a “staffing problem”, says Andreas Kluth in Bloomberg. “A general heard that he might be fired and decided instead to oust the leader he was meant to protect.” But it could have far-reaching consequences. Since 2020, there have been more than half a dozen putsches in the Sahel, “the arid and wretched savannas south of the Sahara”. And if the coups in Burkina Faso and Mali are any guide, here’s what’ll happen next in Niger: the junta will kick out the French and American anti-terrorism troops stationed there, and throw itself into the arms of Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary army.

For years, Wagner “has been fighting for the worst kind of people in Africa, hawking its services in return for concessions to diamonds or other riches of the soil”. Now we have the prospect of a new proxy war to add to the one under way in Ukraine. The Economic Community of West African States, a bloc led by Nigeria, has stopped trade with Niger and shut off electricity exports; there have been hints of possible military intervention if the pro-American president, Mohamed Bazoum, isn’t restored to power. “On cue, the pro-Russian regimes in Burkina Faso and Mali answered that they’d then come to the aid of the new leaders in Niger.” If we’re not careful, we might move “another step closer to World War III”.

Freckles were once considered an imperfection to be covered up, says The Washington Post. But today, they’ve become so desirable that people are using digital “freckle filters” on Snapchat and Instagram to add “tiny sun-dappled dots” to photos of their faces. Meanwhile, increasingly popular freckle pens let you paint your face with dark dots, while “semi-permanent fake freckles”, applied with a tattoo-like procedure, can last up to three years before fading.

There’s a new internet acronym for laughter, says The New York Times: IJBOL. LOL (“Laugh Out Loud”), ROFL (“Rolling On the Floor Laughing”) and LMAO (“Laughing My Ass Off”) are old news. IJBOL, pronounced “eej-bowl”, stands for “I Just Burst Out Laughing”, and has been taken up by Gen Z because it “describes something people actually do: explode into an audible, full-belly chuckle”.

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An abandoned town of half-finished mansions near Shenyang in China has been reclaimed by farmers, says France 24. Cattle now wander among the “crumbling verandas and overgrown arches”, and the land that would have been manicured gardens has been ploughed up and planted with crops. These ghost towns, known as “rotten-tail” homes in Chinese, now “pockmark urban landscapes across the country” – stark symbols of China’s deflating housing bubble.

Swift: “the real heir to David Bowie”. Amy Sussman/Getty

A golden age for artists

We are in a golden age for artists, says Susie Goldsbrough in The Times – by the “longevity measure”, at least. Elton John, 76, just headlined Glastonbury; 85-year-old Ridley Scott is still producing blockbusters; Ian McEwan’s 16th novel is newly out in paperback. It makes me wonder who I’ll still be in thrall to in 30 years’ time. “Long-life artists” play an important role: they are the companions we’ll keep forever, “cleverer than friends, more durable than love”. And while obviously it’s still too early to know, I’m worried the current crop won’t have any creative staying power. Some are already struggling to live up to their early promise: Arlo Parks’s second album was “dull”; Sally Rooney’s latest feels “like a novel in search of a novel”.

My suspicion is that it’s harder to “keep creating” today, in a cultural atmosphere “so weighted towards the interior and the truthful”. Everyone has a personal story now, so “what does an artist do once they’ve told theirs”? Happily, there are exceptions, who don’t confine themselves to their own experience. Greta Gerwig has gone from directing a coming-of-age indie (Lady Bird), to a big-budget literary adaptation (Little Women), to a $1bn blockbuster (Barbie). Taylor Swift, with her constant reinventions, is “the real heir to David Bowie”. The Irish novelist Sebastian Barry, who has just notched his fifth Booker Prize nomination, has covered everything from his own family history to illness, war, and America. The key, surely, is being “as interested, perhaps more so, in what is outside you as what is inside you”.

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Mental Floss has gathered a list of some “brilliantly named” and highly specific colours you’ve probably never heard of. They include: Bastard-Amber, used in theatres to give the illusion of dawn or dusk; Drunk-Tank Pink, proven to have a calming quality when painted on the walls of police holding cells; Lusty Gallant, originally the name of a Tudor dance, then adopted as a colour by Elizabethan dressmakers; Pervenche, from the French word for periwinkle; and Sang-de-Boeuf, another word for the rich crimson of oxblood. See more here.

To The Times: 

If restaurants are worried enough about money to ban solo diners, perhaps they should extend their prohibition to teetotallers and people who don’t order dessert. It might make for a better atmosphere.

Samuel Casey, London 

It’s Chinese propaganda, in the form of graffiti, which appeared on London’s Brick Lane over the weekend. The etching comprises the Chinese Communist Party’s “core socialist values” – such as “equality” and “harmony” – which are regularly invoked by Xi Jinping’s regime. The display quickly became an “arena for competing narratives”, says BBC News: some people added messages criticising the CCP, while others said the lettering may have been intended as ironic.

“Never commit murder… A gentleman should never do anything he cannot talk about at dinner.”

Oscar Wilde

That’s it. You’re done.

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