Donald Trump arrived at Chequers this morning for a meeting with Keir Starmer and a US-UK business reception, ahead of a much-anticipated joint press conference later. At last night’s state banquet in Windsor Castle (see Food and Drink below), King Charles praised his guest’s “personal commitment” to resolving the world’s “most intractable conflicts”, while Trump said of the “special relationship” that the word special “does not begin to do it justice”. Starmer will reportedly formally recognise the state of Palestine this weekend, having delayed the announcement until after Trump’s departure this evening. The US president is firmly opposed to recognition, having previously warned that the move would reward Hamas. Chimpanzees in the wild are consuming the equivalent of a pint of lager a day, a new study has found. Scientists in Uganda and the Ivory Coast measured the boozy beasts’ intake of ripe figs and breadfruit, which contain a dash of alcohol from fermentation. Much like us, says The Times, our evolutionary cousins are “steady boozers”.

The sobering truth about that “far-right” rally

In the few days since attending Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march in London, says Helen Pidd in The Guardian, I’ve been grappling with how best to describe it. There’s no doubt many of the speakers were openly racist, delivering variations on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “Every single Western nation faces the same problem,” Robinson told the crowd: “an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens.” But most of the roughly 110,000 marchers couldn’t see or hear the speeches, and I didn’t get the impression they were there for the speakers anyway. “This was about being heard themselves.”

The attendees I spoke to said they were “ordinary people” with “ordinary jobs” but that – and this phrase came up again and again – they’d “had enough” of a Britain they felt was no longer working. “We have potholes in the roads, we can’t get GP appointments,” one man from Norfolk told me. “This country is becoming a joke.” They blame all this on immigration, specifically illegal immigration – everyone insisted they had no problem with the hundreds of thousands a year who enter Britain legally. There are all sorts of counter-arguments one could make: that illegal immigrants accounted for just 4% of arrivals in 2024, so it’s a bit rum blaming them for the pressure on our services; that it’s unfair to say these people are “raping our kids” when only a tiny number have been found guilty of sexual assault. What’s striking, though, is that so many attended this march despite widespread media descriptions of it as a “far-right” event. They weren’t put off by that label. How have we got to this point? Until some of Britain’s underlying problems get fixed, “this movement is only going to get bigger”.

On Tuesday night, senior figures from the Conservative Party and Reform UK dined together at an event in Mayfair organised by the Trump-friendly US broadcaster Newsmax, says Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. The dinner was meant to be a “meeting of minds”. Instead, Tory heavyweights including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss engaged in an “open spat” with others over their party’s record in government, in part triggered by “forceful” criticism on immigration from broadcaster Andrew Neil. It was Jacob Rees-Mogg who eventually played peacemaker, making the case in a “witty and well-received” speech that the Tories and Reform need to work together.

In the first few months after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, says Ina Fried in Axios, its developer OpenAI estimated that as many as 80% of users were men. Almost three years later the gender balance has more than evened out – women now use the chatbot slightly more than men.

Why the “plan to save the world” fell apart

Just over 10 years ago, says David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in France and “hammered out a plan to save the world”. At first, the Paris Agreement really did look like a breakthrough. World leaders earnestly spoke in public – and, with me, in private – of their desire to curb climate change. Between 2019 and 2021, governments adopted more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year. Today it’s a very different picture. At last year’s UN climate conference the president of host country Azerbaijan praised oil and gas as “gifts from God”. Donald Trump has dismantled Joe Biden’s signature climate bill; Mark Carney’s first act as prime minister of Canada was to strike down his country’s carbon tax. “What changed?”

The short answer is “everything but the science”. The pandemic undermined any sense of “global solidarity”. Inflation triggered higher interest rates, ending the era where governments could basically borrow for nothing. The war in Ukraine precipitated an energy crisis and “exploded the fantasy” that the world was more stable. Instead of the post-Paris calls for a “World War II-style mobilisation” against climate change, we have a “real re-militarisation”. Yet despite all this, decarbonisation is “racing ahead”. Renewables provided more than 40% of the world’s electricity last year and attracted twice as much investment as fossil fuels. US solar power has grown 200-fold in two decades. The truth is that the sceptics were probably right: decarbonisation couldn’t be imposed from above; it had to be driven by market forces. “It’s not about climate politics any more,” says the UN’s Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of Paris. “It’s about climate economy.”

🇨🇳😇 Leading the way is China, says Noah Smith on Substack. Yes, the world’s second-largest country by population still releases more carbon into the atmosphere every year than the US and Europe combined. But through state subsidies and economies of scale it is also almost single-handedly driving down the cost of the green tech – solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries – the world needs to decarbonise. This is enabling developing countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines to grow their economies “without ever emitting a lot of carbon in the first place”.

Winfield House, the US Ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park, famously has the second-largest private garden in London after Buckingham Palace, with 12 acres, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. When I talked to Melania Trump during the US president’s first state visit in 2019, I asked her if the grounds were as beautiful as I had been told. “Well they were beautiful,” the First Lady said with a faint smile, “until Donald, he land in a helicopter. Now they a bit less beautiful.”

After a fact-checker at The New Yorker assiduously ran the rule over a piece by American humourist David Sedaris last year, he joked to his editor that the experience was “like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos”. When the editor mentioned this to the checker for his next piece, she considered the analogy and replied: “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

It’s Jan Marsalek, one of Europe’s most wanted men, who has been spotted wandering the streets of Moscow by investigative journalists at the Russian opposition website Insider. For years, the Austrian national led an extraordinary double life working as the chief operating officer of German tech giant Wirecard while also operating as a prolific Russian spy – in December, he was named in the Old Bailey as the ringleader of a network of six Kremlin agents in Britain. Marsalek, 45, is thought to have moved to Moscow after Wirecard collapsed in 2020, and appears to have undergone minor plastic surgery and a hair transplant.