Anthony Williams, a 32-year-old man from Peterborough, has been charged with 11 counts of attempted murder after allegedly stabbing passengers on a train in Cambridgeshire on Saturday. A train worker hailed as a hero for helping to save lives during the attack, which police say is not being treated as an act of terrorism, is in a “critical but stable condition”. Nigel Farage has said Reform UK is the party of “alarm clock Britain” in a major speech on his vision for the economy. He promised to “substantially” slash the benefits bill, raise the thresholds at which people start to pay tax, embrace the cryptocurrency boom, “get the North Sea operating” and scrapping all net zero subsidies. Sightings of giant frilly-mouthed jellyfish around Britain have more than trebled this year, to 310, thanks to milder waters drawing the species northward. Despite the enormous invertebrates’ imposing size – they can grow to nearly a metre wide and weigh up to 35kg – their sting is thankfully too weak to do serious harm to humans.

The Greens are becoming the Reform of the left

Zack Polanski is doing for the Green Party what he used to claim, back when he was a Harley Street hypnotherapist, he could do for a woman’s breasts, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. “Spectacular and rapid enlargement.” Since he took over as leader in September, the party’s membership has surged to twice the level of the Liberal Democrats; a YouGov poll last week put the the Greens neck-and-neck with the Conservatives and Labour, with a whopping 40% support from 18-to-24-year-olds. They are becoming for the left what Reform UK is for the right: a popular anti-establishment challenger at a time when “the system” is widely considered a failure. So it’s worth considering what Polanski actually wants to do.

He says he would impose a 1% wealth tax on the super-rich to pay for “air our kids can breathe”. He wants to nationalise all utilities (“cost unspecified”), abolish private property letting and create a state-owned housebuilder. He has even suggested a law that would mean the highest paid employee at any business couldn’t earn more than 10 times the salary of the lowest – good news for the tea ladies at Premier League football clubs, who would presumably have to be bumped up to £30,000 a week. Polanski angrily insists he is not part of the so-called “de-growth” movement, which argues that the only way to save the planet is to deliberately shrink the economy. But in reality his hard-left policies would do exactly that, albeit done in the name of “compassion” rather than the “overtly austere” agenda of the de-growth traditionalists. Don’t be fooled by this “political mesmerist”.

🍈🍈 When The Sun sent a reporter to try out Polanski’s breast-enlargement hypnotherapy in 2013, she was completely convinced. “I measure my bust after three days,” she wrote. “I’ve grown from a 32in chest to 34in. Three days later my chest measures 35in. Another three days and I’m 36in.”

Supporters of Britain’s two main right-wing political parties are “significantly more anti-immigrant and opposed to racial diversity” than those who back Donald Trump, says Peter Foster in the FT. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of those who voted for either the Conservatives or Reform UK at the 2024 election said they were “uncomfortable” hearing foreign languages in public, compared to fewer than half of Trump voters. More than 50% of British conservatives said society was “weakened” by being made up of “many different races, ethnicities and religions”, compared to less than 20% of MAGA Republicans. Interestingly, the British left is also far tougher on migration than its US counterpart.

Skijoring is a “high-adrenaline, low-temperature” sport, says Madison Dapcevich in Outside magazine, in which a horse rider pulls a skier through a snow-packed obstacle course at top speed. The once-niche winter pastime (largely confined to small cowboy towns in the Rocky Mountains) is booming – the first US pro tour is imminent and campaigns for Olympic status are under way. But it’s been around for centuries. In Scandinavia, people travelled on skis pulled by reindeer during the harsh winter months. And the technique was demonstrated, though not competitively, at the second Winter Olympics in 1928 in St Moritz.

We have created an “ignorant and incurious” elite

One of the more maddening aspects of wokeness was how the young responded to criticism, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. “Read a book,” they’d tell me – a man twice their age with relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard – and roll their eyes, as if the only possible cause of our disagreement was that I hadn’t “educated” myself. During the Black Lives Matter madness this response was “almost Pavlovian” if, for example, you challenged the idea – shared by 44% of liberals in 2019 – that US cops were gunning down “over a thousand” unarmed black men a year (the empirical answer was 29, compared to 44 white men). But was I not aware of the fact of white supremacy?

Now we know why. A new study analysing the curriculums of millions of university courses found that “very, very few” humanities students are exposed to anything other than “critical theory” – race theory, gender theory and so on – in all its “deranged permutations”. On American history, for example, there’s only one viewpoint: the US is a “white supremacist state that murders and imprisons black people as its core goal”. This is a perfectly legitimate point of view that should absolutely be taught, alongside liberal and conservative perspectives, as well as “empirical, historical” ones. Instead, the kids are being taught this single – highly contested – angle, as though it were incontrovertibly true (possibly because their teachers were also taught nothing but neo-Marxist theory, so don’t realise). It’s not so much indoctrination as a “completely closed system” in which all dissent is heresy. The result is that we now have one of the most “ignorant and incurious” elites just as populism is rushing in to fill the void.

When I got scratched by a dog in the park the other day, says Janice Turner in The Times, I suggested to the owner, a “middle-class dad type”, that he might want to keep it on a lead. “It?” he replied indignantly. “IT? What kind of animal-hater are you to call a dog ‘it’?” Suppressing a laugh, I asked him how I was supposed to know his dog’s pronouns. “You can clearly see from his undercarriage,” he harrumphed. I can’t work out what was stranger: “that a man ordered me to check out his pet’s testicles, or being chastised for misgendering a dog”.

It’s a chair designed by Robbie Williams, says Jane Englefield in Dezeen, which is meant to mimic the feeling of a hug. The Introvert Chair – the pop star’s first foray into furniture design, made in collaboration with Dutch design firm Moooi – has a gently curved shape and is covered in a “tactile blend” of virgin wool, alpaca and cotton, which was 3D-quilted and stretched over a generously padded seat. “In a world that rarely slows down, we often crave a place of respite,” says Williams. “And this chair is just that.” Order yours here, for £3,460.