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10 November

In the headlines

Suella Braverman’s political fate “hangs in the balance”, says The Times. Rishi Sunak is under growing pressure to sack the Home Secretary, after she defied No 10’s request to “tone down” a newspaper article in which she compared Saturday’s pro-Palestinian rally to sectarian marches in Northern Ireland. Israel will begin daily four-hour “pauses” in northern Gaza, allowing Palestinians to evacuate through two humanitarian corridors. An Israeli official says the breaks in fighting will take place in a different neighbourhood each day, with residents notified three hours in advance. A lost species of mammal named after David Attenborough has been recorded in the wild for the first time in 60 years, says The Guardian. Scientists found footage of the Sir David’s long-beaked echidna – which has “the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole” – on remote cameras in Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains.

Photography

The winners of this year’s Nature Conservancy Photo Contest, selected from more than 80,000 photographers in around 190 countries, include three Indian wolves leaping about; a surreal settlement in Poland in the middle of a yellow field; an ambitious orca shuffling up a beach towards two seals; and a bear shaking its sopping head free of water. See more here.

Global update

The “latest and most egregious example” of China’s attempt to wipe out Tibetan culture concerns boarding schools, says Josh Rogin in The Washington Post. Nearly 80% of Tibetan children board, compared to a 22% average across China. But these schools are not exactly Hogwarts. Locals describe them as “colonial” institutions in which Tibetan students are deprived of their native language, culture and religion, and taught strict “loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party”.

Gone viral

GoPro, the firm known for its high-resolution wearable cameras, has compiled a collection of the top 10 scariest moments captured on its kit, including someone tight-rope walking between two hot-air balloons (above), a stunt driver cartwheeling a car after trying to land the longest ever car-jump, a daredevil doing a handstand on the edge of a high rooftop, and a skier falling into a deep crevasse. See the full video here.

Zeitgeist

Gen Zs are obsessed with aesthetics, says Prospect – an umbrella term for sub-cultures and “vibes”. They even have their own Aesthetics Wiki, an ever-growing library that already chronicles 969 micro-styles. Browsing this “dizzying” encyclopedia, which receives thousands of visitors a day, is a bit like “squinting at a disco ball”. Wicker furniture belongs in “Coastal Grandmother”; rats are a staple of “Feralcore”; while “Lobotomy-Chic” is home to glassy-eyed and “utterly disassociated” women in pink and white dresses.

On the money

A lot has been made of the fact that the EU’s economy is 65% the size of America’s, down from 91% in 2013, says The Economist’s Stanley Pignal on X (formerly Twitter). But this isn’t necessarily a big story about the old world’s decline. GDP is measured in dollars, so when exchange rates change, so do the figures. If you instead compare “purchasing power parity” – how much you can buy with your money in the economy in question – the EU’s GDP has been roughly 70% the size of America’s for decades.

Snapshot

It’s an electric plane – a mode of transport which, after years of being no more than a fantasy among aeronautical geeks, is finally taking to the skies. Last month, a team of pilots from Beta Technologies flew the battery-powered aircraft down the full length of America’s east coast, from Vermont to Florida. They had to make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge the CX300 – which has never flown more than 386 miles on a single charge – but finally made it after 16 days.

Quoted

Quoted

“That men do not learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Aldous Huxley