Rachel Reeves has ditched her manifesto-busting plan to raise income tax in the forthcoming budget over fears it would aggravate mutinous MPs and anger voters. Instead, says the FT, the chancellor is expected to rely on a “smorgasboard” approach of increasing a range of narrowly-drawn taxes. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will announce the most radical asylum reforms since World War Two on Monday in a bid to end what the Home Office calls Britain’s “excessive generosity”. The Denmark-style policies will aim to increase deportations and reduce the “pull factors” to the UK by, for example, making it easier to remove families if conditions in their home country improve. Globetrotting Keir Starmer will have spent a sixth of his premiership abroad by the end of this month and completed six laps of the planet. The PM has travelled more and further than any other British leader in history, including almost double the distance covered by Tony Blair, in the same period in office.

Invading Venezuela would be no walkover

Venezuela hawks in Washington love to remind doubters of America’s 1989 invasion of Panama, says Carlos Ruiz-Hernández in Foreign Policy, pointing to the toppling of dictator Manuel Noriega as proof that “swift, surgical operations can get the job done”. It’s a bad comparison. Panama is a tiny isthmus that already had 13,000 US troops permanently stationed in the country, pre-positioned and intimately familiar with their targets. Major combat with the country’s 4,000 active soldiers was wrapped up within five days. Venezuela is twice the size of Iraq – which was also invaded partly due to spurious comparisons, specifically the earlier US success in the 100-hour liberation of Kuwait – and encompasses vast savannahs, the Andes mountains, the Amazon rainforest and multiple major urban centres.

The Venezuelan military is massive and arranged in parallel layers to avoid rapid collapse. The main army includes around 130,000 combat-ready troops, and a further 1.6 million reservists can be called up at a moment’s notice. So too can 100,000 pro-government paramilitaries known as colectivos, who are decentralised, ideologically committed to Nicolás Maduro’s regime, and already operating expertly in urban neighbourhoods as “rapid-response enforcers” against the opposition. On top of that are the countless guerrilla groups – including multiple battalions of highly armed Colombian revolutionaries – who run drugs and illegal minerals through the border regions. Panama had no air defences, allowing the US air force to operate freely; Venezuela has batteries of long-range surface-to-air missiles and portable air defence systems. Venezuela’s relationships with China, Iran and Russia complicate unilateral US action, and Latin American governments, even those hostile to Maduro, remain “deeply sceptical” of military intervention. Venezuela is not Panama. “Pretending otherwise isn’t strategy – it’s nostalgia.”

🇵🇦🎸On Christmas Day 1989, says BBC News, Noriega holed himself up in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City and refused to surrender. The US special forces tasked with capturing the dictator – mission codename: “Operation Nifty Package” – decided to smoke him out using psychological warfare. A fleet of Humvees mounted with loudspeakers surrounded the embassy and began blasting rock music. Songs were chosen for their “irony value”, including Panama by Van Halen; All I Want Is You by U2; and Bruce Cockburn’s If I Had a Rocket Launcher. The spoilsport Pope complained, and the music stopped after three days, but it likely helped. By 3 January, the opera-loving strongman had surrendered.

The real winner of this week’s Labour chaos – in which No 10 or someone close to it briefed the press that Wes Streeting was on leadership manoeuvres – was Wes Streeting, says Jonn Elledge in The i Paper. The health secretary got to spend a whole day touring broadcast studios denying the claim, demonstrating that he is everything Keir Starmer is not. He is funny, he can stick to a line, he can pivot from expressing irritation about factional battles to the real issue. And, attractively, he can promote policies without attacking his critics or pretending everything’s perfect. Almost makes you wish the rumours were true.

Nudity is becoming increasingly unacceptable in gym changing rooms, says Jacob Beckert in The Atlantic. Many newly built sports facilities no longer have communal showers; at my local gym in Seattle, undressing is only allowed in small private stalls. At the risk of sounding pervy, this strikes me as rather a shame. The only naked bodies anyone sees any more are their own, their partner’s or “those on a screen”. Gone are the “ordinary, unposed” figures you used to see towelling themselves down, hairy bits and all. In their place are the “curated ideals of social media posts”. No wonder the young so often “mistake common characteristics for flaws”.

Britain’s in better shape than you think

For all the “concocted negativism”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph, the stars are aligned for a “sweeping revival of Britain’s economic fortunes”. The main reason is AI, and the “electro-shock of productivity gains” it will hopefully yield. Era-defining technologies typically lead to a “J-curve”: an initial dip as people and companies recalibrate, followed by a sharp uptick as those investments pay off. That’s what happened with “steam, electricity and the internet”, and it should happen “on steroids” with AI. Britain is particularly well-placed for this. Last year we had the third highest number of newly funded AI companies, after only the US and China. Jensen Huang, head of $5trn chip giant Nvidia, predicts that the UK will become an “AI superpower”.

Even without AI, the UK economy is “not in crisis”. We’ve had the fastest growth in the G7 this year after the US, and either matched or outdone the eurozone in each of the past five years. Our public and private non-financial debt – a measure of the “real economy” because it excludes the financial sector – has fallen in the past five years from 318% of GDP to 222% – lower than the US (250%), China (290%), France (322%) and Japan (380%). Inflation has peaked at lower levels than feared and looks set to plummet in 2026. Goldman Sachs is predicting that the coming “global surge” of liquefied natural gas will halve European wholesale gas prices, which is especially good news for our gas-heavy grid. Of course, Britain’s economic resurgence depends on Rachel Reeves not making any more unforced errors. But there’s definitely reason to be hopeful – and to ignore those with a seemingly “irrepressible urge to run down the country”.

🇬🇧💪 Britain’s international reputation is as strong as ever, says The Economist. In PwC’s latest annual survey of 5,000 global business leaders, the UK was ranked the second most-attractive country for investment after America, “its highest ranking in the survey’s 28-year history”. US investors have pumped £11bn into British equities this year, more than into any other overseas market, and this year the FTSE is handily beating the S&P 500 even before you adjust for the weak dollar. In a recent survey of 100,000 people worldwide to gauge what they think of different countries, Britain’s “brand” came in third, behind only America and China.

The centrepiece of The Line – Saudi Arabia’s 500m-tall, 170km-long “linear city” – was meant to be a “hidden marina”, says Alison Killing in the FT. Cruise ships would glide through a gate “as tall as London’s Shard” into a new deepwater harbour; suspended above it, “like a chandelier”, would be a 30-storey glass and steel building. Sadly, the plans have been scaled back. One architect pointed out that sewage pipes run downhill, not uphill – a problem the Saudis were planning to solve with turd-collecting shuttle cars on retractable bridges. Another noted that because the earth is spinning, the hanging skyscraper could start swinging like a pendulum and eventually break off, “crashing into the marina below”.

The distinguished Cold War submariner Paul Abraham, who has died aged 64, didn’t like to waste time, says The Daily Telegraph. On one occasion, when he was the commander of HMS Vanguard, the nuclear-armed submarine’s departure after a long maintenance break in Scotland was delayed because there was no crane to remove the gangway. Abraham simply ordered the crew to cast off and “watched the gangway slide gracefully into the Gareloch”. Confronted by furious dockyard officials, he was unapologetic. “I’m ready, you’re not, why should that be my problem?”

It’s a pile of old rope, says Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper, which the Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley is selling for a whopping £1m (“plus VAT, to be precise”). The 10-tonne tangle, which is 20 miles long when laid out end to end, is made up of varying types of discarded rope that Shrigley’s studio has treated, cleaned and then tied together ready to be exhibited at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, opening today. Asked whether his work was good value for money, Shrigley replied: “You’ve got 10 tonnes of contemporary art. By weight I think it represents excellent value.”