UK inflation fell sharply to 3% in January, its lowest level in almost a year, further boosting hopes of an interest rate cut next month. The drop, from December’s 3.4% figure, was driven by slowing price rises in airfares, petrol and food. Reform UK has pledged to keep the Office for Budget Responsibility and preserve the independence of the Bank of England in a bid to boost its financial credibility. On his first day as the party’s new “shadow chancellor”, Robert Jenrick criticised the OBR for overestimating the economic benefits of migration and the BoE for its handling of inflation, but said the two bodies would be retained and reformed. London’s pedicab drivers will be banned from blaring out music and ripping off tourists under a clampdown by Transport for London. The rickshaw riders will need a licence to operate, and prices will be capped at £5 for the base fare and £1 per minute after that.

There’s no shortage of volatility in the Middle East, says Shira Efron in Foreign Affairs, but the next front to explode may be one largely ignored by Western policymakers: the West Bank. Since the October 7 massacre in 2023, the Israeli government has used the cover of its assault on Gaza to mount a “de facto annexation drive” in the Palestinian Authority-controlled territory. It has sharply accelerated the approval of Jewish settlements, with twice as many in 2025 alone as in 2019 and 2020 combined. It has tried to confer legitimacy on unauthorised Israeli outposts by rebranding them as “security farms”. And Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has just approved an “extraordinary” new set of measures, including easing limits on land sales to settlers and assuming control over how land is used in two areas officially under Palestinian Authority rule.

The aim of all this, as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said, is to “kill the idea of a Palestinian state”. It’s true that Smotrich is a far-right extremist whose views don’t necessarily reflect those of the government as a whole. But as was the case with the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s political survival depends on nationalists who share Smotrich’s zeal for annexation. All this is already leading to more violence: in 2024 and 2025, Israeli settlers committed an unprecedented number of arson attacks, acts of vandalism and physical assaults, all with the tacit approval of their government. Last month, for the first time ever, Israel recorded more Jewish acts of terror against West Bank Palestinians than Palestinian acts of terror against Jews both there and inside Israel proper. We shouldn’t lose focus on rebuilding Gaza. But the West Bank is on “the brink of outright crisis”.

Before AI wipes out everyone’s jobs, says Parmy Olson in Bloomberg, there is money to be made in the “office worker gig economy”. The $10bn US startup Mercor pays around 30,000 professionals from a range of industries – lawyers, doctors, chefs, osteopaths – to help the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic train their AI models. Surge AI, which has contracted more than 20,000 professionals with doctoral degrees to do the same, offers as much as $1,000 an hour. One contractor says they’ll “never make as much money as they are now” – and no money at all, presumably, once they’ve taught the robots how to replace them.

The Winter Olympics has always been a great advert for quirky sports like curling and skeleton, says Bruce Handy in The New York Times. Arguably the greatest was “ski ballet”, or “acroski”, in which competitors paired ski tricks with showy dances moves as music blasted out across the slopes. The bizarre event, which was more “jazz hands and fly girl hip thrusts” than traditional ballet, was a demonstration event at the 1988 and 1992 Games but sadly never graduated to full Olympic medal status. Thankfully there is still plenty of archive footage knocking about – click here to enjoy the video above in full.

There is something missing in Britain that no one in our current political system is offering, says James Kirkup in The Daily Telegraph: optimism. That’s what all the transformational governments of the post-war era – Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – were built on. “If our people feel that they are part of a great nation and they are prepared to will the means to keep it great,” Thatcher said in 1980, “a great nation we shall be.” Ronald Reagan did the same in the US, turning sunshine and national self-belief into a “winning world view”, and securing his second term with a campaign promising “Morning in America”. Today, none of our would-be leaders seems to think “our best days still lie ahead”: they tell us the problems of “Broken Britain” are too big and deep to overcome. It’s nonsense.

Over the past 50 years, on pretty much every measure, “things have got better and better”. We live longer, healthier, safer and happier lives. Our incomes are significantly higher and a far smaller share of them goes on essentials. Food, transport and technology are all vastly improved, and nearly everyone today has access to services, entertainment and experiences that were beyond imagination back in 1976. Our universities are still the envy of all. The City has its challenges but remains a huge national asset, and our media and entertainment sectors make us a “cultural superpower”. To our credit, we’ve held on to our centuries-long tradition of openness to the international movement of capital, goods, ideas and people. And there’s every good reason to believe Britain will be better still in the next 50 years. We just need a leader to believe it, “and help the country believe it too”.

It must be agonising for Keir Starmer, after the scandals over Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle, to be denounced as a “paedo protector”, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But it’s “karma”. In the run-up to the 2023 May local elections, Labour ran a social media campaign with the tagline: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” It was nonsense, of course, and deeply offensive. Yvette Cooper, then shadow home secretary, made it clear she hadn’t approved the ad; the New Labour grandee Lord Blunkett said it left him “close to despair”. But No 10 was unrepentant. As one insider said at the time: “Nice doesn’t win elections.” What goes around comes around.

It’s not just British politicians and royals getting in trouble over the Epstein files, says The Washington Post. The list of prominent figures around the world who have resigned from positions because of their links to the late paedophile includes a former Norwegian prime minister; the head of one of the world’s largest logistics firms; a former US treasury secretary; a former president of the UN General Assembly; the chairman of one of America’s biggest law firms; a former French cultural minister; the former director of several prominent US art museums; and a former US senator who served as Bill Clinton’s envoy to Northern Ireland.

It’s a pink daffodil, says Ellie Gosley in Wales Online, which has become so rare that the Royal Horticultural Society has asked gardeners to send in the locations of any they come across in a bid to save the blush-toned bloom from disappearing. Named after the botanist who cultivated it nearly a century ago, the Mrs R O Backhouse is the oldest pink variety of Wales’s national flower and has been out of commercial cultivation for several years. Log your sightings here.