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20 December, 2023

Colorado’s supreme court has banned Donald Trump from running for president in the state next year over his incitement of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. The decision, which his campaign says it will appeal, makes him the first presidential candidate in history to be deemed ineligible under a constitutional amendment that bars officials who have engaged in insurrection. UK inflation has fallen to its lowest level in more than two years. Prices rose only 3.9% over the year to November – a far smaller increase than economists expected – thanks largely to lower fuel costs. England goalkeeper Mary Earps has been voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The Manchester United star, who was one of the Lionesses’s standout players as they reached the World Cup final this summer, said she felt “very honoured and humbled”.

BBC Sport/Instagram

Navalny at a Moscow rally in 2019. Sefa Karacan/Getty

Where is the outrage for dissidents like Navalny?

You may have missed it, given everything else that’s going on, says Melanie Phillips in The Times, but the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has “vanished”. The 47-year-old activist, who is serving prison sentences of more than 30 years on trumped-up charges of fraud and extremism, hasn’t been seen since he failed to appear at a court hearing on 6 December. The week before, he was so ill that doctors put him on an IV drip. Some think he has been transferred to an “even harsher prison” in the run-up to the presidential election in March. But given his history – Kremlin goons tried to assassinate him in 2020 using a nerve agent – there are “serious fears for his life”.

When Navalny returned to Russia after the poisoning, he presumably hoped that international outrage over his treatment would offer him some protection. “That outrage hasn’t happened.” It’s a similar story with political prisoners elsewhere. There have been few government protests over the treatment of Jimmy Lai, the 76-year-old publisher and pro-democracy activist who has just gone on trial in Hong Kong for criticising Beijing (sorry, “endangering national security”). He has already been in jail for three years, most of it in solitary confinement, and now faces life imprisonment. The severe oppression of dissidents in Iran also largely flies “beneath the international radar”. The “astounding courage” of these people in “refusing to surrender to tyranny or terror” is something to behold. The least the free world could do is “hold their persecutors’ feet to the fire”.

If the eruption of the volcano in Iceland on Monday whet your appetite for all things lava, The Atlantic has a selection of the best images of the world’s volcanic activity over the past year. Snaps of some of Earth’s 1,350 active magma mountains include Chile’s Villarrica volcano beaming a circular orange glow into the night sky; bright red lava spewing out of the ground near Reykjavík, Iceland; a carpet of black and red molten rock in the crater of a volcano in Hawaii; orange jets coming out of a snow-covered Mount Etna; and an active lava flow pushing against a glacier in Alaska. See the rest here.

Joe Biden’s aides are increasingly worried about his “reluctance to acknowledge his physical limitations”, says Axios. Advisors say the 81-year-old always talks about feeling young for his age – a claim that can “draw eye rolls” – and pushes to do more travel and events than they think he should. This leads to a damaging cycle in which “he wears himself out, then appears fatigued during public events – which can increase concerns about his age”. But he does occasionally joke about the issue. At a fundraiser in September, he said: “I’ve never been more optimistic about our country’s future in the 800 years I’ve served.”

A relative slacker: the venomous Indonesian pit viper. Pujo Laksono/Getty

The world’s deadliest animals aren’t the charismatic predators you might expect, says Digg. Mosquitos are the biggest killers of humans, knocking off around a million a year, followed by humans themselves – thanks to an estimated 475,000 homicides – and snakes (a comparatively low 100,000). Freshwater snails kill 20,000, “assassin bugs” 12,000, and tsetse flies 10,000. And with 700 human scalps a year, tapeworms outperform hippos (500), lions (250) and sharks (5).

Pope Francis greeting the faithful in September. Franco Origlia/Getty

A “historic turning point” for Catholicism 

Even considering the scale of the Catholic Church’s centuries-old history, says Le Monde, the Vatican’s decision to authorise the blessing of same-sex couples constitutes a “historic turning point”. This “prudent theological evolution” doesn’t change the Church’s teaching on marriage, which it still considers to be the “indissoluble union of a man and a woman dedicated to procreation”. But it puts an end to “centuries of taboo and ignorance”, which have caused so much “ostracism, discrimination and suffering”. The compassion shown by Pope Francis stands in admirable contrast to the open “condemnations of homosexuality” by his predecessors. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will,” he said in 2013, “who am I to judge?” Absolument.

For those of us who converted from the Church of England to Catholicism “precisely because we sought a rock of stability in a sea of revolution”, says Tim Stanley in The Spectator, this whole thing “smacks of deja-vu”. The Anglican Church has been torn apart by “ceaseless debate about sexuality and gender”, which has “blunted its Gospel message” and “emptied the pews”. And it’s not as though the Pope has changed anything substantive – he has just given clerics permission to bless people who are in gay relationships, with the “confusing, patronising caveat that this little wave of the hand is not an endorsement”. If only Francis had “focused all his energy on the poor and marginalised”, his papacy might be remembered with fondness. Instead, by constantly “banging on about politics and vandalising tradition”, he has distracted from the “harder, greater work of getting on with being a Christian – of rolling up your sleeves and loving”.

TikTok has given us “a trend nobody asked for”, says The New York Times: terrifying videos of unruly waves. On a corner of the app known as “NorthSeaTok”, videos of bobbing container ships and rough open-water scenes set to “ominous sea shanty” music have been racking up millions of views. But while waves in the waters surrounding northern Europe can reach up to 65 feet, the hundreds of thousands of ships that cross the sea each year do so “mostly without incident”.

Old-fashioned London clubs get a bad rap, says Ben Schott in The Spectator. But they have certain advantages. In 1824, when members of the Stratford Club had “exhausted their patience” with the unclubbable antics of Major General Thomas Charretie, they “deployed the nuclear option”. The committee met, voted to dissolve the club entirely, and instantly formed a new establishment – the Portland Club – with an identical membership, bar one. “Try doing that with the 255,300 members of Soho House.”

It’s a Russian military truck, wearing a wig-like disguise of straw to try to conceal it from Ukrainian thermal imaging cameras. The low-tech outfit “has been ridiculed online for comparisons to The Magic Roundabout’s lovable dog Dougal”, says The Daily Telegraph, and military experts say it won’t be very effective. Both Moscow’s and Kyiv’s armies are having their night-time manoeuvres scuppered by drones equipped with cheap, Chinese night-vision cameras.

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

Matthew Arnold

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