Voting has opened in the Gorton and Denton by-election. With the polls predicting a near-perfect tie between Labour, Reform UK and the Greens, says Politico, for the next 24 hours, the Manchester suburb will be a “full-scale political circus”. Ministers could announce plans to lessen the burden of student loans on graduates as soon as next week after Keir Starmer pledged yesterday to look at ways to make the system “fairer”. The Treasury is thought to be considering several options, including increasing the threshold for loan repayments and cutting crippling interest rates. The UK’s first geothermal power plant was switched on this morning in Cornwall, providing a completely new type of renewable electricity for the country. The United Downs plant, which uses water that has been super-heated by rocks some three miles below ground, will generate enough electricity to power 10,000 homes, while also powering Britain’s first commercial-scale lithium plant.

I don’t say this often, says George Eaton in The New Statesman, but Kemi Badenoch has “done something sensible”: she has taken up the cause of university graduates. So-called “Plan 2” student loans are a shocking rip-off. Graduates start paying them off when their annual earnings hit £28,470, but the interest is so high that they have to be making more than £66,000 before their payments actually reduce the debt. Badenoch wants to lower those interest rates so that the balance never rises faster than RPI inflation, paid for by cutting 100,000 university places. Labour is at pains to point out that it was the Tories who introduced Plan 2 during the coalition years. But that’s a self-defeating argument. As one Labour MP says: “You can’t continue to defend a system that’s so broken even its architects want to change it.”

Student loans aren’t just a scam, says Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail – they’re “a conspiracy against young people by older ones”. The culprit-in-chief is, “of course”, Tony Blair, who made it his mission to double the proportion of young people going into higher education. Many benefitted, but the more unfortunate soon learned that “studying for Mickey Mouse degrees at souped-up former polytechnics is not the path to El Dorado”. Now Rachel Reeves has “twisted the knife” by freezing for three years the threshold at which you have to start repaying the loan. If a loan shark tried something similar, “he would receive a visit from the boys in blue”. And don’t forget that around half of graduates will likely never be able to pay off their loans, which will then be written off at taxpayers’ expense. “What a mess.”

🎓🇨🇳 Another flaw in the student finance system is the perverse incentives that it creates, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. It costs universities more to deliver all-important science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) courses than they can charge British students, so they’re stuffing their ranks with foreign students who can pay their way. Our top science hubs collectively enrol “about five Chinese Stem postgrads for every four Brits”. How is it in the national interest to train up the next generation of researchers for a “hostile regime”?

Ruling parties usually talk down their chances in by-elections, to manage expectations and give themselves the chance to claim a narrow defeat as a victory. But ahead of today’s all-important Gorton and Denton by-election, says Hugo Gye in The i Paper, Labour have been bigging themselves up. The reason is that Reform UK are doing well, and a sizeable chunk of voters will pick whoever they think can beat Nigel Farage’s party – so Labour want to seem a safer bet than the Greens. Reform campaigners whisper that Labour’s vote has held up surprisingly well, and Keir Starmer’s visit to the constituency this week is surely a sign that he thinks a victory is possible. We’ll see.

Dialed is a humbling online game that tests your ability to recall colours by presenting you with a specific shade for five seconds then asking you to recreate the hue, or as close to it as you can get, using a colour palette. Your tone is then compared to the original with a score out of 10 for closeness. Harder than it looks. Have a go here.

There is no shortage of reporting on what life is like for Ukrainians trying to defend their country, says Jade McGlynn in Engelsberg Ideas. Much less discussed is the plight of those living in the country’s occupied territories, which is, to put it lightly, “anything but normal”. Moscow is either unable or unwilling to provide the citizens it has claimed as its own with even the most basic services. Water levels across Russian-controlled regions are at record lows – last summer, some cities only had running water for a few hours every three to 10 days, and what did come through was “brown, foul-smelling and unsafe”. Residents resorted to collecting rainwater and scooping from puddles, while children filmed video appeals to Vladimir Putin, “begging for water”.

These shortages have aggravated food insecurity. Irrigation systems, silos, fertiliser depots and fields have been damaged or destroyed. Drought conditions – exacerbated by Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam – have devastated harvests, with grain yields in the Zaporizhzhia region reaching their lowest levels since 2003. Prolonged blackouts are the norm across occupied Kherson; in Luhansk and Donetsk, residents have endured several freezing winters without functioning boilers (and still been slapped with full-whack heating bills). Tens of thousands of locals are displaced or homeless, and even those who have been publicly supportive of Russia have found their property declared “ownerless” under new Kafkaesque rules, then taken off them and transferred to officials or Russian settlers. Unlike in free Ukraine, where outages and homelessness are the result of air strikes on civilian systems, the troubles in occupied regions are the product of “neglect, corruption and resource diversion”. Russia’s imperial ambitions have, once again, “proven far larger than its capacity to govern”.

“Weasel words” are phrases we use to loosely denote the chance of something happening, says Tom Whipple in The Times. These terms – “almost certainly”, “realistic possibility”, “probable” – often get lost in translation, as the CIA learnt the hard way. When John F Kennedy was presented with an assessment of a planned invasion of Cuba, officials told him it had a “fair chance” of success. What they meant was that the odds were “3 to 1 against”, but JFK understandably interpreted it as a good sign, and green-lit the plan. “The result was the Bay of Pigs fiasco.”

To The Guardian:

When I can’t sleep because my brain is too busy, I have my own method of “cognitive shuffling”. I choose a subject and try to think of an example for each letter of the alphabet. I’ve tried flowers, animals, birds and the periodic table. It sometimes works.

Melanie White
Reading, Berkshire

It’s a “singles wrestling night”, says Isabel Bekele in Dazed: a new alternative to the dire dating apps. The Brooklyn event is hosted by Grownkid, a social club known for its “Gen Z-coded events”, and guarantees 18-to-24-year-olds a round of wrestling with a partner of their choice. The catch is that you have to approach the partner yourself and ask them for a tussle. “The best way to know if someone is worth a second date”, say the hosts, “is to see how they feel on top of you, under you, and then get a good whiff of their scent.”