Donald Trump said it was “very dangerous” for the UK to do business with China, after Keir Starmer announced a series of economic agreements between London and Beijing yesterday. The US president threatened 100% tariffs on Canada earlier this week over economic deals struck by Canadian PM Mark Carney on his recent visit to Beijing, raising fears of similar levies for the UK. Homicides in England and Wales have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 50 years, according to the Office for National Statistics. The number of murders, manslaughters and infanticides fell to 499 in the 12 months to September, down 7% year-on-year. Police also recorded 9% fewer knife offences and 9% fewer firearms offences. Archaeologists have unearthed 450,000 objects during work on the HS2 train line, including a possible Roman gladiator’s tag, 19th-century gold dentures and a hand axe that may be more than 40,000 years old. The treasures are being stored in a secret warehouse in Yorkshire for further research.

The recent unrest in Minneapolis looks chaotic, says Robert Worth in The Atlantic, but much of it is in fact meticulously choreographed. Over the past year, 65,000 Minnesotans have received extensive civic protest training. In packed auditoriums, they are taught how to handle Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents: what facial-recognition systems they use, how to legally observe their raids. Some sessions focus on “direct confrontations”. Locals between 14 and 70 practise facing off against trainers acting as ICE operatives, receive tips on how to avoid being easily knocked to the ground, and learn how to react to a range of possible scenarios, such as an unexpected raid on a neighbour’s home.

The charities that run these sessions aren’t organising the anti-ICE protests. This is a “leaderless movement” that has been growing ever since the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Today’s protesters, who swarm ICE convoys and patrol neighbourhoods with cameras, organise themselves on the same encrypted Signal networks that formed in the “febrile weeks” after Floyd’s death. They have a livestream of the entrance to ICE’s base and use Signal’s audio chat to radio in live locations of ICE vehicles. Volunteers stand outside school gates with whistles around their necks each morning to ensure children get in safely. When agents in riot gear descended on an apartment building opposite a school earlier this month, teachers put the school into lockdown and parents rushed to block the entrance by linking arms. There is obviously “profound unease” about what’s happening in Minneapolis. But there’s also an “undertow of hope” that it can provide the rest of America with “a model of democratic resistance”.

Europe breathed a sigh of relief when Donald Trump backed down over Greenland, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. But all this flip-flopping will do is delay the existentially crucial task of becoming self-sufficient in defence. When the US president is waving his stick around, it’s easier for European leaders to tell voters that some luxury entitlements must be foregone, or taxes must be raised, and complex and coordinated procurement protocols must be put in place, in order to rearm. When Trump backs down, the enormous will required to do such a difficult thing fizzles out. Rich democracies, like people, don’t change until a crisis forces them to. The wolf must be at the door – “it’s not enough to hear the occasional growl from afar”.

Andy Burnham may be feeling hard done by, but he can console himself that he’s mayor of Greater Manchester and not the Filipino town of Maguindanao del Sur. His counterpart there, Akmad Ampatuan, was targeted in an assassination attempt on Sunday, in which a man leapt out of a white van and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at his bulletproof SUV. Incredibly, the direct hit didn’t cause the mayor any injuries, and the three suspected attackers were killed after a high-speed chase. Rather puts the Gorton and Denton by-election in perspective.

Two statistics published last week should terrify anyone with a care for the future, says Alice Thomson in The Times. Some 28% of the children who started primary school last year didn’t know how to open a book – many jabbed it with a finger as though it were a device – and 67% of 15-year-olds see no reason to leave home at the weekend, preferring to stay in their bedrooms online. Between these two cohorts is a generation of children hopelessly addicted to smartphones, tablets and social media. It is surely time to halt this “destruction of childhood”.

According to the UN World Happiness Report, schools which ban smartphones see better attainment, lower rates of depression and fewer victims of sexual harassment. The headteacher of one Hackney academy says imposing the rule has been transformational: “It feels like a completely different school with a completely different set of students.” At the Oxford boarding school St Edward’s, a blanket ban has driven a 10% increase in pupils’ reported happiness, a 33% uptick in library loans, and increasing numbers signing up for sport and music lessons. In Australia, where social media for under-16s has been outlawed altogether, teenagers are rediscovering bike rides and board games. For the UK to follow suit should be a no brainer, especially before AI overwhelms the next generation. If we don’t act now, the children starting primary school will soon be hugging AI-powered teddy bears that chat to them as a friend, play games with them and soothe them to sleep. Giving kids back some sense of childhood is the least we can do. After all, we let them get addicted in the first place.

The US economy is doing well, says Noah Smith on Substack, yet Americans are more pessimistic about it than they were during the post-2008 recession. Why? My theory is that social media is warping people’s perception. We used to compare ourselves to those around us – colleagues, friends, family, neighbours – with broadly similar incomes. Today, people spend their time watching influencers host lavish weddings, jet off to the Maldives and show off their fancy homes. This is creating “money dysmorphia”, especially among the young: when pollsters asked different generations what constituted a “financially successful” income, millennials and Gen X said about $200,000; Gen Z said $588,000. No wonder so many of them think they’re “losers”.

Much of the slang we use today dates back further than we might realise, says Paul Anthony Jones in Mental Floss. “Celeb” was first used to describe a famous person in 1907, and it was William Shakespeare, not MTV, who first used “crib” to mean a dwelling, in the 1590s. “Hang out” was being used in 1846, “OMG” was found in a 1917 letter to future prime minister Winston Churchill; American humourist Charles Farrar Browne wrote “Biz” to mean business back in 1862; and “confab”, meaning a short chat, dates back to 1701. Click here to see others.

They’re miniature bottles of vintage champagne that are being auctioned by Berry Bros & Rudd, says Nina Caplan in The Times. The wine merchant made the tiny tipples for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, built by Edwin Lutyens in the early 1920s to showcase the best of British production after World War One. The 2.9cm-tall bottles were delivered in tiddly Berry Bros crates and contain a few drops of genuine 1911 GH Mumm Cordon Rouge champagne. The online auction ends at 1pm on 3 February; click here if you can improve on the opening bid of £1,800.