Hero
Dillon Helbig, an eight-year-old from Idaho, who deposited his handwritten book, The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis, at a public library. The tale, in which Helbig puts an exploding star on his Christmas tree and is catapulted to the North Pole, has become a hit with other library members: there are now 55 people on the waiting list to borrow it.
Villain
Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, which ran 21,000 entirely empty flights over the winter. These so-called “ghost flights” take place because airports insist that airlines use their much sought-after landing slots. Lufthansa is the only one to provide figures; Greenpeace estimates that in Europe alone the practice emits as much carbon dioxide as 1.4 million cars.
Villain
Royal Holloway, University of London, which has issued a trigger warning for the “child abuse”, “domestic violence” and “racial prejudice” in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. It won’t make any difference, says Giles Coren in The Times: “Oliver Twist is just one of those novels that undergraduates have always written about without bothering to read.”