View online

2 January, 2024

Rescuers in Japan working to free people trapped under rubble after yesterday’s earthquake are in a “race against time”, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has said. The 7.6-magnitude quake has killed at least 48 and destroyed hundreds of buildings. Ofsted has halted all school inspections following the suicide of a headteacher last year. The watchdog’s new chief inspector, Martyn Oliver, says assessors will be retrained after a coroner ruled last month that a critical report had contributed to the death of primary school head Ruth Perry. Shoppers have expressed shock after spotting Easter eggs in supermarkets on New Year’s Eve. Customers shared photos of shelves stacked with the festive confectionary in both Co-op and Tesco on Sunday, three months before the Easter break. 😱🐣

Biden and Starmer: what does the future hold? Getty

Are we wrong about Biden and Starmer?

Here are a couple of predictions for 2024, says Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. “First, Joe Biden will not run for a second term.” This is something he and his team know they cannot admit until “very late in the day” – it would “instantly render him a lame duck president”, which would be extremely dangerous given the critical wars under way in Gaza and Ukraine. But it will be easy enough, at the right moment, to blame Biden’s state of health for a “sudden” change of plan, and replace him with a candidate who can prevent the “moral catastrophe” of Donald Trump returning to the White House. “We have to believe that there are already steps to do so in operation.”

My second prediction is that Labour will not win a landslide in the UK general election. I say this as someone with an “uncanny ability to predict the most apparently unlikely outcomes”. I foresaw the Tories’ shock victories in both 1992 – a prediction considered “so preposterous” that the newspaper I worked for wouldn’t even print it – and 2015. After the latter, the successful Tory team even called me into Downing Street to ask the obvious question: “How did you know?” In both cases, “I didn’t know anything that anybody else didn’t know”. I simply couldn’t see the then Labour leaders, Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband, as prime ministers. And right now, Keir Starmer – a man with the “blank, startled gaze of a badger in the headlights” – evokes the same reaction.

Moss and Fog has compiled a list of the most futuristic homes around the world. They include a superyacht-style mansion in Moscow; a flowing “wave house” blending into the forest in Finland; a camouflaged crib in the Nevada desert; a home fit for a Bond villain in Germany; and a structure in Spain that looks like a space station. See the full list here.

Dominic Cummings held secret talks with Rishi Sunak about returning to government, says Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times. In December 2022, and again last July, the pair met in “utmost secrecy” to discuss a possible deal. Boris Johnson’s former svengali said he’d only take a job if Sunak agreed to huge tax cuts – including raising the 40p income tax threshold to £100,000 – and “put his authority behind radical Whitehall reforms”. The discussions came to nothing, and Cummings says on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d rather the Tories were “obliterated” than work with them without fixing Britain’s “rotting” nuclear weapons infrastructure.

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

French actress Marion Cotillard: “mdr”. Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty

Different cultures have very different ways of signifying laughter online, says Rest of World. Brazil uses “kkkk”, as do speakers of Zulu and other African languages. In Estonia, they write “h6h6h6”; in Spain, it’s “jajaja”. The French go for “mdr”, or mort de rire, meaning “dead from laughter”; Jamaicans say “dwl”, meaning “dead wid laugh”. Japan uses “www” – a repetition of the first sound in the word for laughter – but also 草, the character for grass, as that’s what a string of Ws looks like. So if you want to write about laughing really hard, you could type 大草原: “giant grass field”.

David Jonsson in Murder is Easy. Mark Mainz/BBC/Mammoth Screen

Has the BBC murdered Agatha Christie?

This year’s “dose of Christmas homicide”, Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy, has received a pasting in the likes of the Mail and the Telegraph, says Martha Gill in The Observer. The problem? A black actor, David Jonsson, has been cast in the lead role. This doesn’t affect the plot, which is still thick with vicars, hat paint and characters keeling over while playing tennis. But the BBC has still been accused of “walloping us round the head with a lecture”. What these critics miss is that all adaptations “tamper” with the classics, otherwise there wouldn’t be any point making them. And other “updates” – such as women grumbling about being underpaid – passed without comment. Anyway, Murder is Easy doesn’t “berate modern audiences for their values” so much as “reassure them of their superiority” – they are so much more enlightened, it tells them, than 1950s bigots. What could possibly be wrong with that?

The problem, says Philip Patrick in The Spectator, is that the BBC has “retrofitted” Christie’s novel to suit its own “obsession with racism and colonialism”. The corporation defends this “Orwellian” practice with the old “relevant to a modern audience” line. In its original Diversity and Inclusion Strategy document of 2016, then director-general Tony Hall declared: “We must make sure we tell stories that people all across the country will recognise, will understand and will relate to.” By making this mandatory, Hall was effectively announcing the death of the “reasonably authentic, respectful dramatisation”. Today, it seems, any drama that doesn’t promote the “approved message” must be substantially rewritten to fit the new morality – or “consigned to the memory hole”.

Drivers of electric vehicles in Detroit could soon charge their cars while on the move, says Axios. The city is home to America’s first prototype electrified roadway – a quarter-mile section of tarmac that can transfer electricity wirelessly through a magnetic field to suitably equipped passing cars, while remaining safe for people to walk on. The technology is being tested in several cities in Europe, Israel and China by tech startup Electreon, with hopes it could be made available to the public in the next few years.

It’s Crown Princess Mary, who will become Queen of Denmark in 12 days’ time. The 51-year-old was born to Scottish parents and grew up in Australia, before meeting Crown Prince Frederik (also pictured) in a bar in Sydney in 2000. Frederik’s mother, Queen Margrethe II, announced her surprise abdication after more than 50 years as monarch during her annual New Year’s Eve address.

“With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.”

CS Lewis

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