Hero
Eva Green, who’s unafraid to say it like it is. Legal wranglings over an unmade film have made a cache of the French actress’s WhatsApp messages public – and they don’t hold back. Green describes one of the movie’s producers as “pure vomit”, another as “a f***ing moron”, and complains about having to work with “shitty peasant crew members from Hampshire”. I can’t help but admire her, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian: isn’t this exactly what we want in a movie star? Don’t we all, deep down, “want our children to be so well paid that they can toss around the word ‘peasant’ with abandon”?
Hero
The Conservative Party, for making sure prospective MPs are up to date on the latest diversity lingo. A training course is instructing election candidates in such concepts as “microaggressions”, “unconscious bias” and “white resentment”. “I’d be fascinated to know how often this issue crops up on the doorsteps of the shires,” says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Maybe voters bat away talk of energy bills and demand to know: “What are you doing to increase the cultural visibility of gender-fluid pansexual demiboys?”
Heroes
Ants, which have such a good sense of smell they can detect cancer. Boffins at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have discovered that the insects are able to differentiate between the urine of healthy mice and the wee from mice implanted with lumps of human breast-cancer tumour. The “sharp-antennaed” creatures may one day be trained to spot cancer “quickly and cheaply”, says The Washington Post, compared to current, more invasive methods.
Villain
The Guardian, which is institutionally racist, according to three people it hired to make a podcast. The trio were working on a project investigating the links between the paper’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and the slave trade. But they quit last year, and have now claimed they witnessed a culture of “colourism”, “bullying”, and “passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”.