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22 December, 2023

Britain is on the brink of recession, with new figures showing that the economy contracted by 0.1% from July to September. The Office for National Statistics has also revised economic growth for April to June from 0.2% to 0%, says the FT, while the Bank of England predicts “near-zero growth through next year”. Czech police are trying to find the motive behind the country’s worst-ever mass shooting, after a student killed 14 people and wounded 25 others at a Prague university yesterday. The 24-year-old gunman had no previous criminal record, and has been linked to the separate murder of a man and his infant daughter last Friday. The Colombian government says it will attempt to recover treasure from the so-called “holy grail of shipwrecks” next spring. The galleon San José, which sank in battle with British ships in 1708, is stuffed with coins and gems worth an estimated £16bn.

 Arnaud Finistre/AFP/Getty

Why all the fuss about Miss France?

Last weekend, a storm erupted on French social media when 20-year-old Eve Gilles was crowned Miss France, says Agnès Poirier in The Guardian. Some people were incensed about her short hair – that a “lithe, androgynous-looking woman” could be crowned France’s most beautiful. Some even claimed it was a victory for wokery. “Pardon?” Beauty à la française has always been incredibly varied, “a mélange of looks, measurements, curves and haircuts”. Think of the rebellious writer Colette during the Belle Epoque. She was “small, curvy, and athletic”; at a time when French women still wore corsets, she threw hers in the bin and wore trousers, which women were forbidden from wearing by law. She “drove men and women crazy” throughout her life – and ended up being the only French woman of letters to be given a state funeral.

Then in the 1920s, France fell for Josephine Baker, an African-American performer who charmed Paris with her short hair and “sense of fun and wit”, not to mention her Résistance activities during World War Two. “In the 1930s and 1940s, the tall, flat-chested, short-haired and androgynous Arletty was France’s biggest film star.” The 1950s gave us Leslie Caron, “who mesmerises Gene Kelly in An American in Paris”, and the “deep-voiced chanteuse” Juliette Gréco; in the 1960s it was Françoise Hardy and Jane Birkin, two tall and androgynous beauties “who cut their hair short whenever they fancied”. Gilles’s Miss France win continues a longstanding national tradition of “saying merde to conventions”. 

TikTok is increasingly being taken seriously as a source of interior design inspiration, says The Times. Some of the top looks from this year include “dark academia”, which is “moody but cosy” – a sort of “homely Hogwarts”; “cottagecore”, which romanticises English country homes filled with hand-me-down textiles and heirloom furniture; “coastal grandmother”, bursting with white linen sofas, marble kitchens and freestanding bathtubs; and “vanilla girl” which, unsurprisingly, centres on neutral tones and natural textures.

America is experiencing a peace wave, says The Atlantic. Quarterly data suggests that in 2023 the US saw one of the lowest rates of violent crime in more than 50 years. The murder rate plummeted at an “astonishing rate” – down by 13% across 175 cities – building on a 6% drop in 2022. FBI data for Q3 shows that since last year, rates of every kind of crime are down – except for car thefts, which, “in one of the weirdest data flukes you’ll ever see”, spiked thanks to a TikTok trend involving users showing how easy it is to break into Kias and Hyundais.

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Nervy pupils taking the Suneung. Lee Jong-Duck/AFP/Getty

A group of South Korean students are suing the government because their university admission exam ended 90 seconds early, says BBC News. The pupils are asking for 20 million won (£12,000) each to cover the cost of a year’s studying to retake the dreaded Suneung – an eight-hour marathon of back-to-back papers, widely considered to be one of the hardest exams in the world. To help students concentrate during the all-important exam day, flights are grounded, shops and banks are shut, and most construction work is halted. Students are even given a police escort to the exam hall if they’re running late.

LBJ making his shock announcement in 1968

Biden should quit to save his legacy

“What a shock it was,” says Justin Webb in The Times. President Lyndon B Johnson – “in two minds” even as he began his televised speech – reached the crucial line: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” That was in March 1968, with a presidential election just seven months away. The example of LBJ is on the minds of Democratic strategists today. They are panicked by a succession of polls that predict not just a narrow Trump victory, but a “solid, thoughtful change of heart” by a significant number of their base voters. Influential Democrats are asking: “Do we still want Joe as our man?”

Biden is furious. The economy is growing, unemployment is down – why does “Bidenomics” get no credit? A recent “highly comprehensive” survey of swing states by the Democratic strategy group Democracy Corps answered the question: voters don’t care about the high-level economy; they blame Bidenomics for inflation and the higher cost of living, a subject that “blows the others out of the water”. Legal attacks like this week’s court decision in Colorado to ban Trump from the state’s ballot add to the impression that the Republican frontrunner is the “victim, not the perpetrator, of electoral skullduggery”. And for all the Democrats’ howls about white supremacy, when the survey asked who was better at “opposing extremism”, Trump beat Biden by three points. If Biden wants his legacy to be keeping Trump out of the White House, he isn’t going to do that by running again. To many Democrats, his withdrawal from the race would “cement his place as their hero, the nation’s saviour”. 

📉😥 The picture for Biden is bleak right across the board, according to Democracy Corps boss Stan Greenberg. “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”  

Festive cheer in My Southern Family Christmas (2022)

The French are weirdly obsessed with American Christmas movies, says Le Monde. And not even the good ones – they love the stuff endlessly churned out by the greetings-card-company-turned-movie-studio Hallmark. One eager TV channel started airing this festive guff on 15 October; another broadcasts four in a row every Saturday afternoon. France’s most popular broadcaster, TF1, has a roster of 40 new titles in this genre, and the same number of repeats.

A cup of tea is always welcome, says The Guardian, but once upon a time “it truly was a lifesaver”. When import taxes were slashed in 1784, tea hit Britain’s mass-market – “and soon even peasants were slurping six cups a day”. That meant ordinary people were suddenly drinking boiled water, which, in an era before sewers, led to a sharp drop in deaths from waterborne diseases. So much so that the overall death rate between 1761 and 1834 fell from 28 per 1,000 people to 23.

It’s a rare African mask worth millions that was recently discovered in an elderly French couple’s attic, says BBC News. A second-hand dealer was helping the pair clear out their loft when he found the treasure, which is thought to be one of only about 10 in the world. He persuaded them to sell it to him for €150, and then flogged it at auction for a whopping €4.2m. The couple sued, arguing that he had misled them – but the judge disagreed, and the dealer has kept the dosh.

“The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe: eat cake.”

A sign outside a bakery in Berwick

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