MI5 has drawn up a package of “national security mitigations” designed to minimise threats from China’s proposed mega-embassy in London, which was approved by ministers yesterday. The plans include relocating critical internet cables that carry financial data between the City of London and Canary Wharf away from the planned site at the old Royal Mint. British households will be eligible for thousands of pounds worth of solar panels and other green tech to lower their energy bills. The government says its Warm Homes Plan, which will invest £15bn in households over the next five years, will create a “rooftop revolution”, tripling the number of solar-powered homes. Doing a greater variety of exercise can lead to a longer life, according to a new Harvard study of more than 110,000 people over 30 years. After accounting for the quantity of exercise, those with the broadest range of activity enjoyed a 19% lower risk of early death from all causes than those who stuck to a familiar routine.

When Donald Trump outlined a “more forceful” America First doctrine in his second inauguration speech, says Sylvie Kauffmann in Le Monde, Europe’s leaders didn’t dither. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared that the bloc would co-operate with “any country we share interests with”, and promptly jetted off to Delhi with a trade delegation. Next week von der Leyen is heading back to the Indian capital with “solid hopes” of signing a free trade agreement with the world’s most populous country. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has just spent two days in India; Emmanuel Macron will follow in February. And tellingly, Brussels has stopped complaining about the “autocratic drift” of Narendra Modi’s government. “The urgency lies elsewhere.”

It’s not just India, says Catherine Rampell in The Bulwark. The EU has just greenlit a huge South American trade deal, negotiations for which began 25 years ago but sharply accelerated because of Trump. And China is rekindling – or forging – friendships with US allies all over the map. Canada’s Mark Carney has just been in Beijing to unveil a “new strategic partnership” between the two countries, including an opening for Chinese EVs and reduced Chinese tariffs on Canadian rapeseed, peas and lobsters (plus visa-free travel for adventurous Canadians). Lee Jae Myung recently became the first South Korean president to visit Beijing since 2019, a few months after Xi Jinping went to Seoul for the first time since 2014. The two countries have now signed more than a dozen trade agreements. Later this month Keir Starmer will become the first British prime minister to visit China since 2018. (Merz is expected to follow in February.) Trump’s bullying is pushing America’s friends “into the arms of our adversaries”.

Since his return to the White House a year ago, says The New York Times, Donald Trump has trousered “at least $1.4bn”. That includes $23m from licensing the Trump name overseas; $28m for a forthcoming Amazon documentary about Melania; $90.5m in legal settlements (some would say shakedowns) from big tech and media companies; a $400m jet from Qatar; and $867m from various shady crypto schemes. How times have changed. When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he didn’t even own a car. “He and his wife returned to Missouri by train and lived for a time on his army pension.”

You may have seen newspapers – and occasionally daily lunchtime newsletters – featuring stories about runners and cyclists plotting routes that form fun or significant shapes on the map. If you fancy creating one yourself, a website called Routista lets you plot a shape and will then turn it into a route using roads and paths around your chosen location. Give it a go here.

It cost the British government £1.5bn to keep businesses in the Jaguar Land Rover supply chain afloat after a cyber attack took down its production lines last year, says Paul Mason in The i Paper. The fallout was so severe that GDP “took a tangible hit”. Online gangsters claimed responsibility, but nobody I know in the security and defence worlds believes it was anyone other than the Russians. It’s the same with the fire that took out Heathrow last March and the hacks in 2023 that made the British Library catalogue unusable. This is what professionals call “hybrid war” – MI6 boss Blaise Metreweli describes it as the “space between peace and war”. And because we don’t understand it, we are a “wide open” target.

This isn’t speculation. In 2013, the Russian general Valery Gerasimov outlined his doctrine for “New Generation Warfare”. Russia, he wrote, could destabilise “victim states” through psychological warfare and “low-level social and political interference”. And it works. When Russian bombers make regular practice runs for an attack on Britain, forcing the RAF to scramble fighters to intercept them, nobody really notices. But when Russia floods the extremes of British politics with disinformation, it can “shape conversations in every Wetherspoons and at every school gate”, weakening our capacity and resolve to resist. To the far right, Moscow isn’t the real enemy; it’s Muslims, trans folk and asylum seekers. On the left, Britain’s government and army are complicit in “genocide in Gaza” and Nato is a neo-colonial aggressor. Russia didn’t invent Tommy Robinson or George Galloway. But its agents are hard at work in their online communities, trying to undermine Britain’s greatest strengths: our collective identity and social cohesion.

With screen fatigue on the up, millennials and Gen Z are championing the so-called “analogue bag”, says Chloe Mac Donnell in The Guardian. The idea is that you keep a bag full of hands-on activities such as crosswords, knitting, books and cards, so that when you’re looking for something to do, you don’t simply reach for your phone. As one convert says, it’s essentially a “toy box for your attention span”.

It’s a 3,563-carat purple sapphire, says Bharatha Mallawarachi in AP News, thought to be worth “at least $300m”. The spherical gem – named “Star of Pure Land” and unveiled last week in Colombo, Sri Lanka – is the world’s largest natural purple star sapphire. Its owners, who have understandably chosen to remain anonymous for security reasons, say it was found in 2023 in a gem pit near the remote Sri Lankan town of Rathnapura, known as the “city of gems”.