Far from China being on track to supplant the US as the world’s largest economy, says Craig Singleton in Foreign Policy, more and more signs point to Beijing being woefully unprepared for the competition. The Chinese economy is in freefall thanks to Xi Jinping’s “mismanagement” – this year, the US is forecast to grow faster than China for the first time since 1976. Even more surprising is the fact that Xi, in an attempt to stabilise China’s finances, has abandoned ambitious plans to switch the country’s economy from sweatshop manufacturing to “quality growth”.

Just last week, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph, I joked with fellow parents that teachers would surely soon be banned from marking schoolwork. How, after all, could those traumatic “red ticks and crosses” survive in our “we’re all winners” culture? Well, turns out it’s already happening. According to a survey of 6,250 teachers on the Teacher Tapp app, only 42% feel obliged to mark their pupils’ work – down from 61% in 2018. The decline was particularly sharp among secondary school teachers, from 71% to 41%. The main reasons? Teachers say they’re concerned about “upsetting pupils” – and that correcting work is “too much of a burden”.