Allies of Wes Streeting expect him to challenge Keir Starmer’s leadership within weeks, says The Guardian, despite the health secretary insisting that he backs the beleaguered prime minister. Starmer’s allies admit the PM is “too weak” to sack Streeting for plotting, but say doing so would only “uncork even more political chaos”. Volodymyr Zelensky is planning a spring election alongside a referendum on any peace deal to end the war with Russia, says the FT. The Trump administration has pressed Kyiv to hold both votes by 15 May or risk losing proposed security guarantees. A Norwegian Olympian has gone viral after tearfully confessing to cheating on his girlfriend just moments after winning a bronze medal. Biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid said the “love of my life” ditched him after he told her about his infidelity, and that he was “willing to do anything” to get her back. It doesn’t appear to have worked. “Even after a declaration of love in front of the whole world,” the unnamed woman told a newspaper, “it’s hard to forgive.”

As a “hard-bitten old Tory”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph, I find myself in the peculiar position of vehemently agreeing with Alastair Campbell. Speaking after the resignation of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, New Labour’s spinner-in-chief ranted that “because of the nature of our politics, the quality of people going into politics, the nihilism of the mainstream media, the anarchy of social media, with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale, we are becoming ungovernable”. Hear, hear.

Starmer took a “legitimate political gamble” in appointing Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the US, a decision he thought was in the national interest and which many commentators deemed a “political masterstroke”. Labour needed a “world-level” operator to navigate the perilous waters of Donald Trump’s Washington, and Mandelson was that man. Yes, the gamble failed, because the Prince of Darkness “deceived everybody”. But that’s not a reason to defenestrate a prime minister less than a third of the way into his term and to impose some “party hack” on the nation. Only in Britain would such a tenuous link to a foreign scandal set off a leadership crisis. And it’s the Tories who bear much of the blame for “normalising” Westminster coups. Whatever you think of Boris Johnson, he should never have been ousted over the “preposterously trivial” Pincher affair – a low-level scandal concerning a deputy whip accused of drunkenly “squeezing the bottom of two fellow gentlemen at the Carlton Club”. Global investors – in particular the bond markets – already worry that Britain has degenerated into an “intractable and feral condition”. We can only hope that Labour’s insurgents have learned the lesson of the Tories’ “self-destruction”.

📉😬 Starmer is Britain’s most unpopular prime minister since records began, says Mike Allen in Axios, with just 23% of voters saying they approve of his performance. But he’s still faring better than his European colleagues: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval rating is slightly lower, at 21%, while France’s Emmanuel Macron is down at 16%. Courage, mon brave!

Ever since curling appeared at the inaugural Winter Games in 1924, say Virgílio Franceschi Neto and Sean McAlister on Olympics.com, every single Olympic curling stone has been made from granite quarried from the tiny island of Ailsa Craig, off the west coast of Scotland. The uninhabited 240-acre outcrop – known as “Paddy’s Milestone” because it lies halfway between Belfast and Glasgow – has some of the “hardest and purest” granite in the world, perfect for maintaining its shape in the sport’s wet and icy conditions. As former Team USA captain Erika Brown says: “No other stone curls like an Ailsa Craig stone.”

Despite the rain-heavy start to 2026, says Holly Evans in The Independent, researchers at Spanish universities have found that Britain has become 4% sunnier since 1994. They say the main reason for this isn’t global warming, but government action aimed at cleaning up air, including embracing renewable energy and electric vehicles. The cleaner air causes clouds to form differently, bringing together larger water droplets that let more sunlight pass through to the ground.

In case there was any doubt, says Nathan Law in The Guardian, we now have full confirmation that “democracy is dead in Hong Kong”. On Monday, the pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai was handed a 20-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges of colluding with foreign powers – the harshest penalty ever given under Beijing’s notorious national security law, and effectively a life sentence for the 78-year-old British citizen. I fled the former British territory shortly before that noxious law came into force in 2020 to avoid this very fate. How unfathomably brave it was of Lai, who could easily have decamped to his properties in London, Taipei or Paris, to stay put and “stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of the Hong Kong”.

His sentencing is not just a “profound injustice”, says The Wall Street Journal, but also the “symbolic end of an era”. Lai was a peaceful protester who never supported calls for independence. What he wanted was for Beijing to honour the promise it made in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that the territory’s freedoms, rule of law and human rights would be upheld for at least 50 years from the 1997 handover. Instead, the media boss was denied his choice of lawyer by the Hong Kong government, his newspaper was shut down without a court order, and the judges presiding over the trial were hand-picked by the authorities. Former British Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption resigned from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in 2024, saying the territory’s rule of law had become “profoundly compromised”. Lai’s sentencing is stark proof that a city which was once a “beacon of hope and opportunity” is today “firmly under the iron boot of Beijing”.

🇿🇦🇭🇰 Britain has “allowed this to happen”, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The government formally complains about China’s continued non-compliance with the “One Country: Two Systems” arrangement, yet still “begs desperately” for Chinese investment. Were it serious about defending its own citizens, “and the principles at stake”, it would use Lai’s case as “a weapon in all dealings with Beijing”, as it did with white South Africa to demand the release of Nelson Mandela.

A large, long-term study has found that a particular type of brain training video game can protect against dementia “for decades”, says Akshay Syal in NBC News. Participants – aged 65 and over – who played up to 23 hours of “speed training” games over three years were found to have a dramatic 25% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia over the next 20 years. Speed training involves identifying objects on a screen and making quick decisions about them. Curiously, those who performed memory or problem-solving tasks didn’t see any protective benefits.

The South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb has had something of a shocker, says The Wall Street Journal. While trying to distribute the rewards from a promotional campaign worth 620,000 Korean won, or about $425, an employee accidentally sent out 620,000 bitcoins, worth more than $40bn. This meant that winners who should have been sent enough for a cup of coffee momentarily received the equivalent of more than $120m. The company quickly halted transactions and says about 99% of the misdistributed bitcoins have been voluntarily returned. But they’re still trying to claw back $9m from users who managed to sell up in time. Good luck with that.

It’s China’s planned “space carrier”, says Alexander Freund in Deutsche Welle: a giant aircraft that could deploy unmanned fighter jets capable of firing missiles from the edge of earth’s atmosphere. State media, which released the concept video of the futuristic Luanniao, says the carrier could become operational in 20 to 30 years’ time. Western experts are sceptical, however, pointing out a more-than-passing resemblance to that big spaceship at the beginning of Star Wars.