Villain
Commander, one of Joe Biden’s dogs, who has bitten yet another Secret Service agent. The two-year-old German Shepherd has now nipped his master’s bodyguards 11 times in total, which the president’s press secretary blames on the stress of living at the White House. Major, an older Biden hound, was involved in so many “biting incidents” he had to be rehoused with family friends.
Hero
Tucker Carlson, at least for Russian state TV. The former Fox News host, who has long taken a Kremlin-friendly line on US aid to Ukraine, had a 20-minute excerpt of a recent interview with Texas’s attorney general broadcast on Rossiya 24, Russia’s leading news channel. Carlson dismissed the idea he had approved the move as “absurd”.
Villain
Pret, which appears to be doing all it can to exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Over the past year, the restaurant’s prices have shot up by five times more than the average industry increase. Its most popular item, the tuna and cucumber baguette, has risen by 42% to £4.25. The chicken caesar baguette has gone up even more, jumping 46% to £6.80.
Villain
Amateur cartographer and extreme pedant Eberhard Jurgalski, who got legendary climber Reinhold Messner stripped of two Guinness World Records. Messner’s titles – for being the first person to climb the globe’s 14 highest mountains, and for being the only one to do so without extra oxygen – were removed when Jurgalski successfully argued he had reached the wrong peak of Annapurna in Nepal: one that was a mere 8,083m, rather than the 8,091m peak 65 metres away.