Chancellor John Healey is expected to increase taxes on Britain’s banks in his forthcoming budget to help offset the damage inflicted on the public finances by the war in the Middle East. One option under consideration is reversing the 2023 cut in the bank profits surcharge, which reduced the rate from 8% to 3%. This would raise a potential £2bn a year. Reform UK’s first female MP has been filmed telling an undercover ITV reporter that senior party officials are “so f***ing chauvinistic”. Sarah Pochin said women were “excluded” by the party’s “alpha males”. Separate footage shows Reform councillors describing Asian homeowners as “parasites”, black children as “animals” and one calling for the beheading of King Charles over rumours he was Muslim. International scientists have agreed to abolish the “leap second”, the extra second added every few years to allow clocks to catch up with the planet’s slowing rotation. For reasons unknown, the Earth’s spinning has accelerated, so a “leap hour” correction will be introduced instead, but probably won’t be needed for thousands of years.

In the past decade, says Lara Brown in The Spectator, a new divide has opened up in British education between those taught by teachers using whiteboards, pens and paper, and those being instructed by an avatar on a screen. Today, the “EdTech” industry squeezes a staggering £900m a year out of British schools. Years of marketing, promising “futuristic tech for the digital age”, and apps that keep kids quiet and minimise marking, have convinced many schools that digital is the only way. The trend accelerated during Covid, when screen-based learning was the only option, and now it has stuck. But the evidence is appalling. Schools that use more screens get worse results, and child psychologists report that EdTech platforms are shortening attention spans and badly affecting sleep. Some 150 clinicians recently wrote to Education Secretary Lucy Powell to warn that classroom screens have become a “crisis”.

The best schools are throwing out tablets and going “paper first”. Winchester recently abandoned laptops. Katharine Birbalsingh, who runs the successful Michaela Community School in northwest London, proudly declares: “We only have one computer room – and we don’t use it.” Parents are also pushing back. Globe Primary School in east London recently abolished screen-based maths homework and removed iPads and laptops from ordinary lessons after consulting parents. Eton is restricting iPad use after parents revolted. These schools will thrive, but spare a thought for the many children with no one to advocate for them. The government recently announced plans to introduce “AI-powered personal tutors” into English secondary schools, aiming to reach 450,000 disadvantaged pupils by the end of next year. The privileged will get teachers, tuition and parental help. “The poor will have chatbots.”

When I had breakfast with the ambassador of an EU country last week, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator, he asked me a tricky question: “What is the Burnham government’s foreign policy?” It seemed to him that for Andy Burnham, there was only “domestic policy conducted on the international stage”. Keir Starmer had “progressive realism”; New Labour’s Robin Cook sought to advance an “ethical foreign policy”. But as Brexit, the Middle East and Ukraine force the former Manchester mayor to consider international matters, what do we have? As one Labour peer puts it: “Andy’s vibes and Ed [Miliband]’s conscience.”

Elon Musk claimed to have unveiled the world’s first “flying car” yesterday, says Kelly-Anne Taylor in The Telegraph: an electric sports car with rocket thrusters that can take off, flip and accelerate from 0 to 60mph in under a second. The redesigned Tesla Roadster, built in partnership with SpaceX and supposedly set to begin production in 2028, can hit a top speed of more than 230mph. “I should say it’s not necessarily a safety-optimised car,” said Musk at the launch event, “but it takes the fun meter to 11.” One person pointed out on X: “This is going to make so many rich widows.”

Ukrainians are used to awful news, says Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. But even by their standards, it’s been a “dismal” week. Russian missiles are pounding Ukrainian cities; Donald Trump has signed a deal to buy Russian diesel and begun disrupting American support for Ukraine, including limiting access to Elon Musk’s Starshield satellite communication system. But there was a let-up in the gloom last Friday, when a swarm of Ukrainian drones forced the closure of all four of Moscow’s airports, leaving Vladimir Putin circling helplessly in his plane – the “Flying Kremlin” – unable to land on his way home from Turkmenistan. The incident was apparently just a happy coincidence, but to many Ukrainians it “tasted briefly of revenge” and showed that their military still has ways to hurt Russia even if Trump abandons them.

Since early September, Ukrainian drones have disrupted air traffic over Moscow “almost every day”. The operation, dubbed “M&Ms”, relies not on US technology or intelligence but on drones produced in Ukraine and equipped with homemade AI guidance systems. When Volodymyr Zelensky reluctantly (and temporarily) agreed to Trump’s demand to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, his military simply switched to other sensitive targets that could prove no less disruptive to Russia’s economy. The past week has seen a spate of attacks on Russian data centres – targets Kyiv previously avoided – knocking out online services including some of Russia’s most popular banking, delivery, map and taxi apps. (The strikes also appear to have caused a sharp and welcome decline in the activity of Russian bots.) Attacks have concentrated on Yandex, the local equivalent to Google, and many users have been posting furious rants about the outages on social media. Two architects of the plan tell me they’re “just getting started”.

🛢️🔥 Donald Trump has been criticised for telling Zelensky not to attack Russian oil refineries in a bid to keep US fuel prices down, says Dominic Lawson in The Telegraph. But it’s worth remembering that the Biden administration did exactly the same in 2024. The then defence secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly warned that the strikes would have a “knock-on effect in terms of the global energy situation”.

Mark Zuckerberg has been “mercilessly mocked” for his reaction to a swig of Guinness, says Jeylin Mehmet in The Sun. During an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, the 42-year-old Meta boss took a tiny sip of the Irish stout, swilling it around his mouth and trying not to grimace as he swallowed it. One Instagram user called his unusual drinking technique “reptilian”, while another wrote that the black stuff had “been in his mouth longer than it took to brew”.

The cancellation of the Pentagon’s plans to livestream the execution of Islamist terrorist Nidal Hasan has been widely welcomed. But the still-controversial decision to execute him by firing squad rather than lethal injection should also be applauded, says Alex Kozinski in The Wall Street Journal. Yes, firing squads can be messy. But the way lethal injection disguises death as medicine – the tubes, the gurney, the drugs – is “deeply dishonest”. We shouldn’t shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood. If Americans cannot “stomach the splatter” from a firing squad, we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.

It’s an artist’s impression of the first “green star” ever discovered, says Andrew Griffin in The Independent. Despite their name, so-called “white dwarves” – the collapsed core of a burnt-out star – were thought to look either orange, white or blue depending on their temperature. But University of Warwick astronomers have worked out that, if we could get close enough to see them, some white dwarves would actually look pink, cyan, yellow and purple – and green, which has never been seen before in any star, living or dead. They say the white dwarf in question, which is around 284 light-years from our solar system, would be a “ghostly green”, like the (delicious) liqueur Chartreuse.