Hero
Ashley Dalton, Labour’s new health minister, who is on record bravely saying that people should be able to identify as llamas. I’m told she has asked for her office to be “moved to a higher location and bedded with straw”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. A civil servant describes Dalton as “gentle and calm, though if agitated, she will sit down and refuse to move”.

Hero
Pamela Hemphill, who refused a pardon from Donald Trump over January 6, saying: “We were wrong that day.” The 72-year-old retiree, nicknamed the “MAGA granny” by social media users, served 60 days in prison for taking part in the violence. “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty,” she told BBC News. “Accepting a pardon would only insult the Capitol police officers, rule of law and, of course, our nation.”

Villain
A Parisian who accidentally left his wife at a petrol station in France at 4.30am and drove almost 200 miles before realising he had forgotten her. The unnamed 62-year-old, whose adult daughter was also in the car but slept through the incident, called police in a panic at 8.30am, unable to remember where he’d left his chérie.

Villains
Musicians, says Giles Coren in The Times, for spoiling the “annual anti-Semitism festival” at Glastonbury. These beautiful Somerset fields should be a place for “the vociferous attacking of Jews”, not catchy pop ballads. Talented and up-and-coming Jew-bashers like Kneecap rely on the exposure of Glasto to “publicise their important racist opinions”. They should not have to sit idly by while the likes of Olivia Rodrigo (pictured) and Neil Young brazenly undermine the good vibes by “openly singing pop songs in broad daylight”.

Hero
Gavin Bourne, a golfer in Worcestershire, who managed to hit two holes-in-one in a single round. The 47-year-old heating engineer, who plays off a highly impressive 0.4 handicap, struck the two aces 12 holes apart in the final of Droitwich Golf Club’s matchplay championship – which, unsurprisingly, he won. England Golf says the odds of hitting it straight in off the tee twice in one round are about 67 million to one.

Villains
Road-builders in China who, when a stubborn grandfather refused to sell his house to them, constructed their planned two-lane highway right around his property. Huang Ping, whose two-storey home in the town of Jinxi is now completely surrounded by the elevated expressway, acknowledges that he may have been better off accepting their £180,000 compensation offer. “It feels like I lost a big bet.”

Villain
Astrid the rhino, who gored to death a zebra called Ziggy at Colchester Zoo. Officials claimed that Astrid was merely trying to move Ziggy out of the way, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, but how do they know it wasn’t intentional? “How do they know Astrid wasn’t thinking, ‘That stripy tosser has wandered in here for the very last time – mark my words.’”

Hero
A French farmer who took on a group of travellers squatting on his land by spraying them with manure. At least five tractors pulling slurry tanks drove around in circles on the field in Hautes-Vosges, near Strasbourg, as some of the trespassers desperately tried to stop them. The angry agriculturalist, who said he took matters into his own hands because the police wouldn’t help, said the travellers left the presumably stinky site a few days later. To watch the full video, click here.

Heroes
Millennial women, who are apparently increasingly embracing “heterofatalism” – giving up on romantic relationships because they’ve concluded that all men are rubbish. You might expect me, as a man, to be scandalised by such a sweeping generalisation, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. But actually I’m all in favour of this trend. Why? Because it will take the world’s “whiniest, most melodramatic and most insufferably self-absorbed” young people out of the gene pool. My message to heterofatalists: “Please do stick to your vow of abstinence. The world is right behind you, all the way.”

Villain
Sarah Jessica Parker, for being such an insufferable bore over her role as a Booker Prize judge, says Emma Brockes in The Guardian. The Sex and the City actress wrote a New York Times piece documenting how extremely seriously she took the process: never watching TV with her family in order to get through all 153 entries; heroically grappling with the “traffic light” rating system; occasionally texting the panel chairman to ask whether she was wrong to dislike a particular book. It’s essentially the story of how one brave woman “managed to pull off being a famous actor while also reading some books”.

Villain
Keir Starmer, for killing off the name “Keir”. Data released by the Office for National Statistics reveals that while there were four Keirs born in England and Wales in 2023, there wasn’t a single one in 2024. Find out how popular (or unpopular) your name is by clicking here.

Hero
James Harrison, an Australian blood donor known as “The Man with the Golden Arm”, who died in February aged 88. Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which is used to prevent a potentially fatal condition in newborns called rhesus disease. He began giving blood as soon as he turned 18 and didn’t miss a single fortnightly session until he hit the maximum donation age of 81. Doctors say he likely saved the lives of 2.4 million babies.

Villain
Francesca Gino, a highly paid behavioural economist at Harvard Business School specialising in honesty and ethical behaviour, who had her tenure revoked after being caught falsifying data to get the results she wanted. Gino, whose high-profile work on cheating, lying, and dishonesty made her one of the best-remunerated members of the whole Harvard faculty, was the first professor to lose tenure at the university since the 1940s.

Heroes
A colony of beavers which saved the Czech government almost £1m by completing a stalled dam project themselves. The nature restoration scheme in the Brdy region was on pause because of building permit issues when eight of the industrious rodents felled trees in almost exactly the same places as the manmade barriers were planned. “Well, they don’t have endless meetings,” says Carol Midgley in The Times. “Might they consider coming here to run the railways?”