The US and Russia have held bilateral talks in Saudi Arabia about ending the war in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky said his country wouldn’t accept the outcome of any negotiations in which Kyiv is not involved, while European leaders met in Paris yesterday to discuss the situation in what one former Trump administration official dubbed the “FOMO” meeting. All 80 people on board a plane which crashed and flipped over while landing in Toronto have survived. Eighteen people were injured when the Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis skidded along the runway and came to a halt upside down amid strong winds and snow. Men are “significantly more romantic” than women, says The Times. New research combining the findings of more than 50 studies found that men tend to fall in love faster and more often, while women instigate 65% of break-ups and are “relatively unsentimental in matters of the heart”.

Europe has been relegated to “the kids’ table of diplomacy”

Europe’s leaders weren’t exactly “singing from the same hymn sheet” after their three-hour emergency meeting in the Elysée palace yesterday, says Sam Blewett in Politico. Germany’s Olaf Scholz said talk of sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine – which Keir Starmer had said he was considering – was “completely premature” and left him a “little irritated”. Polish PM Donald Tusk made it clear he definitely didn’t want his army to contribute; Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – who arrived 50 minutes late, in what some saw as a power move to remind everyone that she alone has the ear of Donald Trump – apparently said sending troops was the option “least likely to be effective”. If Europe needs to work together to fill the America-shaped hole forming in its defence, this was an inauspicious start.

Is it really any surprise that Europeans have been “relegated to the kids’ table of diplomacy”, asks Wolfgang Münchau in UnHerd. The European media has been keeping up the “increasingly implausible narrative” that Ukraine can win the war, if only the West maintains its support. The British economic historian Robert Skidelsky has pointed out the striking uniformity of pro-war views in Britain; Keir Starmer was still peddling the idea of future Nato membership for Ukraine right up until the moment Trump announced it was a non-starter. This would make more sense if the West had gone all-in from day one. But it didn’t. For the Europeans, “war is a spectator sport” – all “principles and promises”, no concrete strategy. They have failed to heed an important lesson from the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz: don’t get involved in a war unless you know how to end it. Ukraine needed brave supporters. “It got cheerleaders instead.”

After the 2024 election, Nigel Farage delegated almost all operational control of Reform UK to the party’s new chairman, Zia Yusuf, says The Guardian. The millionaire entrepreneur got rid of “old hands” such as communications chief Gawain Towler, who had been “removed and reinstated at least twice before”, and moved Reform’s HQ from the sleepy Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Millbank Tower in London. Staffers say the former Goldman Sachs executive also caused “surprise” when he suggested introducing “key performance indicators” to spur on Reform’s army of canvassers. But it’s working: he has already helped the party grow from zero official constituency branches to more than 400.

In When They Died, players are shown five influential figures who snuffed it between 1950 and today. You have to guess which year each of them popped their clogs, with points awarded for how close you get. Give it a go here.

Britain’s energy policy is “all smoke and mirrors”

Britain is becoming an outlier on energy, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. Around the world, the tide is turning on net zero. Donald Trump has axed his predecessor’s vast renewable energy subsidies, pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement and “declared he will do everything to maximise hydrocarbon output”. And while China added record amounts of wind and solar capacity last year, its oil and gas output also hit a new peak and its coal plant construction surged. Some British companies have caught on – BP announced last week that it has completely stopped spending money on new renewables projects, a massive U-turn on its 2020 policy to reduce its oil and gas output by 40%. But our politicians remain unmoved.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband has already “ended North Sea exploration”, and remains doggedly committed to making the grid almost fossil-fuel-free by 2030. And where will that leave us? Our energy prices are already “higher than in the EU and around four times the prices in the US”. Rather than companies flocking to the UK to gain access to cheap green energy, as we were promised, Britain’s few remaining energy-intensive industries are heading for the exit. Besides, the claim that we are reducing global emissions is “all smoke and mirrors” – by switching from home production to imports, our domestic emissions but not the emissions of the stuff we import. Case in point: the equivalent of the entire New Forest is burnt at Drax power station each year, but because the wood is imported from across the Atlantic it’s counted as “zero carbon”. It’s pure lunacy.

♻️🤷 Both the Conservatives and Reform UK have positioned themselves firmly against net zero, says Megan Kenyon in The New Statesman, but voters really don’t mind it. As More in Common pollster Luke Tryl pointed out recently, public opposition to the climate policy is limited to around 16%, with “most people seeing renewables as a way out of the cost-of-living crisis, not as its cause”.

The Wikipedia page listing TV shows cancelled after a single episode is worth a gander, says Matt Muir in Web Curios. Top turkeys include Heil Honey I’m Home!, a spoof American sitcom in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live in matrimonial bliss until a Jewish couple move in next door; The Will, a CBS reality show in which family members and friends competed to be named the beneficiary of an estate; and Kookyville, an entirely unscripted 2012 Channel 4 show with the unpromising tagline: “These people are not actors or comedians, and there’s no script... they’re just real funny people”. See the full list here.

Elon Musk’s unsolicited $97.4bn bid for OpenAI is more than just “trolling”, says Matt Levine in Bloomberg. OpenAI is a non-profit, but it has a for-profit subsidiary that it is currently trying to hive off into a more traditional standalone firm. To do this, the newly formed company will effectively have to “buy” the non-profit’s stake, which was previously thought to be valued at around $65bn. But after the nearly $100bn bid from Musk – who, not coincidentally, owns rival firm xAI – the non-profit is effectively duty-bound to sell for at least that. His intention isn’t to buy OpenAI; it’s to “raise the price”.

It’s London’s new “super sewer” – back when it had a temporary “garden” during construction in 2023 – which has begun the task of sluicing away the capital’s sewage. The £5bn Thames Tideway Tunnel runs for 15 miles between Acton in west London and Abbey Mills in the east, and has already stopped 5.5 million tonnes of sewage from entering the River Thames. The term “infrastructure project” tends to elicit groans in Britain these days, says Jane Shilling in The Daily Telegraph. What a shame, then, that this stunning feat of engineering will remain unappreciated “by all but a few tunnel fanatics”.