UK inflation fell more than expected to an eight-month low of 3.2% in November, down from 3.6% in October. The Office for National Statistics figure is below the 3.5% expected by City economists and paves the way for the Bank of England to cut interest rates again tomorrow. Britain will rejoin the Erasmus student exchange scheme from January 2027 as part of Keir Starmer’s reset with the EU. Britons will be able to spend a year studying at European universities as part of their degree courses without paying any extra fees and will be eligible for a grant to help fund their time abroad (and vice versa for European students). This year has officially been the UK’s sunniest on record. With two weeks to go, and largely thanks to an “exceptional” spring, the Met Office has already recorded 1,622 hours of sunshine, eclipsing the previous record of 1,587 set in 2003.

Sacré bleu! The Italians have turned the tables on us

When Italians look across the Alps at their old enemy, says Allan Kaval in Le Monde, “they can finally say the tables have turned”. France is “gripped by a series of political crises”; Italy is governed by a cohesive coalition led for a near-record three years by Giorgia Meloni. The fiscal story is similar: Italy has long struggled with a massive debt that undermines market confidence. But Meloni’s government has slashed the deficit, leading the credit agencies to raise Italy’s credit rating, just as Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s. And diplomatically, with France withdrawing from Africa, Meloni is charging in with plans of aid in exchange for the prevention of illegal migration.

What this reversal of fortunes reveals is how uneven the Franco-Italian rivalry has been. South of the Alps, seething Italians remember the devastating campaigns of François I, the plundering armies of Napoleon and the “imperialism” of French industry towards Italian companies. But France has hardly noticed. Polls reveal that 60% of Frenchies feel affection for Italy, though only 30% of Italians feel the same way about France (20% express strong antipathy). One sore point is Libya – the Anglo-French intervention in the former Italian colony to oust Muammar Gaddafi deprived Italy of an ally and opened new migration routes. Meloni, in particular, views the French as snooty neighbours with “hostile intentions”. She held her first ministerial position in Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which was “mocked by Nicolas Sarkozy”. In opposition, she “fought for Italy’s claim to the summit of Mont Blanc”. Today, for Meloni, Italy has “reclaimed its rightful place in the world”. And so has France.

Chinese billionaires are having dozens of American children via surrogate, says The Wall Street Journal. Thanks to lax US surrogacy laws (the practice is illegal in China), those with enough cash can simply pay American women to bear their children – shipping them sperm for the purpose – and then have the kids raised by nannies, without ever stepping foot in the country. One video game boss is thought to have more than 100 children who were born this way, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child. Another hired US models as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of “marrying them off to powerful men”.

Rob Reiner, who was killed on Sunday alongside his wife Michele, originally wrote When Harry Met Sally without its happy ending, says The Times. At the time, he was divorced and living alone. “I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get with anybody,” he said, “so I just had them walking in opposite directions at the end.” But during the movie’s production, he met Michele – whom he married as soon as the film had wrapped – and changed the storyline accordingly. “I thought, ‘OK, I see how this works’.”

Sorry lawyers – you’re toast

I recently sat down with a “clever, moderate, sceptical” old friend who works as a senior English barrister, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. In recent weeks, he has come to believe that AI will “completely destroy” the legal profession as we know it, making thousands jobless far sooner than most lawyers realise. What changed his mind was an experiment he ran with a real case he’d just spent a day and a half preparing. He redacted all the important details and fed it to Grok Heavy AI. What it produced was, he says, spectacular. “Actually staggering… it was much better than mine. And remember, I am very good at this.” It was, he says, the “best possible legal document”, done in seconds for pennies. “How can any of us compete?”

My friend, who asked to speak anonymously to avoid the “loathing” of his entire industry, believes those backroom brainiacs who produce legal opinions are “already completely f***ed”. And he thinks AI will rapidly work its way up the legal hierarchy – the gruntwork, then the drafting, the citation, the argumentation – until it’s just barristers performing AI-drafted scripts in a courtroom. Then people will wonder why they’re paying £200,000 for a barrister, “and they too will disappear”. The reason this is not better understood, he says, is that “lawyers are arrogant”. They run the country. For them to admit they aren’t so special is, psychologically, “torture”. My friend is sanguine: “A lot of lawyers deserve what’s coming.” Many are greedy and selfish, and introduce needless complexity to create more work for themselves. Activist lawyers, too, are a “curse which will soon be lifted”. The only danger is what they do next: “an army of penniless, pompous, progressive lawyers with nothing to do”. The horror.

It’s an Asiatic lion, says Philippe Alfroy on Phys.org, which has been brought back from the brink of extinction. The majestic beasts are slightly smaller than their African cousins and identified by a fold of skin along their bellies. They historically roamed from the Middle East to India, but were almost wiped out in the 19th century thanks to intensive hunting and habitat loss. The survivors reigned over a 735-square-mile expanse of savannah in India’s Gir National Park, which, following more than three decades of rigorous conservation efforts, has managed to increase numbers by a third in just the past five years, from 627 to 891.