Hero
Britain, whose low bar for female leaders is a win for feminism. Liz Truss seems set to be our next female PM, says Miriam Gonzalez Durantez in the Evening Standard – and like Theresa May before her, she’s hardly a first-class candidate. “At long last, the top jobs seem to be up for grabs by women with all levels of ability, a luxury that men have long enjoyed.”
Villain
Matteo Costacurta, a polo-playing Italian nobleman accused of being a mafia assassin. Costacurta, the wealthy, 38-year-old scion of Venetian nobility, has been arrested and charged with accepting €30,000 to shoot the gangster Alessio Marzani, who survived the hit job despite taking bullets to his chest and arm. “He has a really shitty-looking face,” Costacurta allegedly wrote in messages seen by police. “I can’t wait to carry out the mission.”
Hero
Will Smith – according to Gawker – for issuing a sincere-sounding, if slightly bonkers apology for slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. In the five-minute video, seemingly filmed in “the lobby of a wellness startup circa 2015”, a “borderline coherent” Smith says that “disappointing people is my central trauma”, and that the slap was not “an optimal way to handle a feeling of disrespect”.
Villain
Errol Musk, father of Elon, who is a tough parent to please. When asked on Australian radio whether he was proud of his billionaire tech titan son, Errol was dismissive: “Where he is now, he would have liked to have been there five years ago.” He also mistakenly said his first-born son was 50 – Elon is 51 – and remarked that he looked overweight in recent photos.
Hero
Elizabeth Johnson Jr, whose good name has finally been cleared after 329 years. Johnson is the last of those convicted during the Salem Witch Trials to be exonerated – most were cleared in 1711, though for reasons unknown, Johnson was not. Thanks to a modern-day campaign by schoolchildren in her hometown of Andover, Johnson is now free, at long last, of pro-Satanic insinuations.