Russia says its emergency alert app came under a “massive cyberattack” just hours after Ukraine reported a similar hack, in a suspected exchange of blows, causing citizens in both countries to receive false alerts. In Ukraine, residents were wrongly warned of a “chemical threat” and “street fights”, while in Russia they were falsely told that nuclear warheads had been launched at “all regions” of the country. Andy Burnham is open to increasing financial assistance for Commonwealth countries to help atone for Britain’s role in the slave trade, says The Daily Telegraph. The prime minister, who said over the weekend that he would consider making a formal apology for slavery, is prepared to open a “structured dialogue” about possible investment in affected nations but has ruled out paying a lump sum towards reparations. The British adventurer who has been walking around the world for 28 years will make it back to his mother’s home in Hull today. Karl Bushby, 57, will be greeted by his mum at the gate of her house as he completes his 31,000-mile journey home from the southern tip of Chile.

The arguments against Britain paying reparations for slavery are as sound as they are familiar, says David Blair in The Telegraph. The sums being discussed are absurd: £19.7trn, according to one study, or about £281,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Why should we be the only ones paying up, when countless other nations – in the Arab world, in Africa – profited handsomely from their own horrific slave trades? Besides, the whole notion of collective hereditary guilt is nonsensical. Should the Japanese be bunging me cash because they effectively enslaved my grandfather during World War Two?

More interesting is why reparations have become such a hot topic. They were never an issue in the 1960s or 1970s. The first time the Caribbean nations united to demand them was in 2013, and the African Union’s 55 nations only got round to it in 2023. The truth is that in the British, American and Caribbean universities where today’s leaders were educated, a “post-colonial” view of history has come to dominate. This blames current inequalities of wealth and power on colonial rule, rather than on the more recent governments and policies that created them, and neatly divides humanity between “oppressors and the oppressed”. Crucially, it’s not just Caribbean leaders marinating in these wrong-headed ideas: many Foreign Office officials and diplomats share the same views because they went to the same universities. Some will argue Andy Burnham’s suggested approach to all this – the PM says he is “open” to making a formal apology but not to lump-sum reparations – is a sensible middle ground. But not only would apologising create potentially ruinous legal obligations. It would also ensure that this “destructive issue” continues to “run and run”.

Those fretting about the decline of humanities degrees can take heart from Harvard, says Pamela Paul in The Wall Street Journal. The hottest class on campus is “Humanities 10”, which spans heavyweights from The Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses, with assignments in between on Shakespeare, Austen and Plato. Applications for the essay-heavy course, which bans digital devices and rigidly tracks attendance, jumped 40% this autumn, with 180 first-years competing for just 90 spots. As one 2025 grad said: “It’s the only class I took at Harvard where people would call each other out for not having done the reading.”

You’d never get “loudcasting” – playing loud music and so on in public spaces – in Japan, says Emily Bratt in The Guardian. A guiding principle there is meiwaku wo kakenai: the idea that you should avoid inconveniencing others. When I worked at a Japanese school I saw students as young as five diligently stacking chairs and clearing apparatus at the end of sports day, totally unprompted. Kids would regularly sweep the halls, wipe down desks, empty bins and even disinfect the bathrooms. It’s all part of a wider approach that teaches children personal responsibility for, and pride in, their environment. Perhaps we should all become a little more Japanese.

Andy Burnham has secured a polling lead and united a “previously fractious” Labour Party, says Jason Cowley in The Sunday Times, in part by re-opening the debate over Europe. But contrary to the fantasies of progressive rejoiners, the EU is not a haven of stability and growth but a crucible of potential conflict. Its dominant powers, Germany and France, have been destabilised by “civil unrest, economic stagnation and political fragmentation”. In both countries far-right parties are surging while Labour’s traditional centre-left allies have collapsed. Because of the giant surge in migration to Europe, and in particular Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to open the floodgates to more than a million refugees in 2015 alone, the Europe that existed before Brexit is gone. Across the continent, “open, borderless Europe” has faded. What matters to Europeans now is “sovereignty and the integrity of the nation state”.

Perhaps the most consequential moment on the road to Brexit was Tony Blair’s failure to introduce the maximum seven-year transition controls on freedom of movement when 10 new states joined the EU in 2004. Britain was one of only three countries not to impose controls, forecasting that as few as 5,000 to 13,000 migrant workers a year would arrive in Britain from eastern Europe. Instead, we had the “largest unplanned migration in British history” as 1.2 million people arrived over the next few years, allowing Nigel Farage, in his own telling, to re-open the immigration issue that had been closed down since Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968. Burnham’s politics are a strange fusion of “soft-left nostalgia for pre-Thatcher social democracy” and “Blair-era progressive orthodoxies”, so of course he wants to rejoin the EU. “He would be foolish to attempt to do so.”

Sharing internet memes may seem like a lazy way to stay in touch, says Julie Beck in The Atlantic, but a “surprisingly large” body of research shows that sending a gif from Austin Powers, say, can serve an important social function. According to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Adam Grant, sending memes can be a form of “pebbling” – a behaviour among gentoo penguins in which one presents another with carefully selected shiny pebbles. And just like sharing a gif of Homer Simpson reversing into a bush, “these aren’t trivial gestures”, says Grant. “Every pebble is a bid for connection.”

In the race to find electricity for its data centres, Google is experimenting with a “virtual power plant”, says Brad Plumer in The New York Times: a system where they pay homes and businesses to use less electricity at certain times, freeing up power the tech giant can then use itself. The reductions don’t individually provide much extra capacity, but aggregating them across thousands of customers makes a big difference. A company called Voltus is hoping to use the approach to supply Google with up to 1,070 megawatts when needed – “roughly as much as the output from a large nuclear reactor”.

It’s Daniel Oberlechner, says James Imam in The Times, an amateur mountain runner who dragged a long-missing beer keg down a glacier in Italy’s Alto Adige province. The stainless steel barrel fell from a helicopter transporting supplies to an alpine restaurant nearly half a century ago. Oberlechner, 42, used a goods trolley to haul the 40kg keg 2km down to the drinks firm where he works as a driver, and – naturally – gave it a try. “The beer was flawless,” said one of his fellow tasters. “The flavour, amber colour and even the carbonation level were still spot on.”