Cabinet ministers are calling for Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, to be sacked over press briefings from No 10 accusing Wes Streeting of plotting a leadership bid. Labour chairwoman Anna Turley says the prime minister has ordered a leak inquiry and will “take action” against those responsible. A tranche of 23,000 documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate was released by the US Congress yesterday, appearing to confirm that the photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with his arm around Virginia Giuffre is real. Emails also show Epstein claiming a victim – later identified as Giuffre – “spent several hours” with Donald Trump at Epstein’s house. New analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA suggests the tyrant had a “tiny todger”, says The Sun. Researchers found that the Nazi leader suffered from Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that hinders the development of sexual organs. A previous study confirmed that the fascist dictator had an undescended testicle, lending gratifying weight to the wartime song about his “one ball”.

Trump’s Epstein nightmare is just beginning

As sex offenders go, says Edward Luce in the FT, “Ghislaine Maxwell is in a category of one”. Having been upgraded from a state penitentiary to a prison camp – “the equivalent of moving from a Travelodge to a Trump hotel” – Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking co-conspirator is being so “showered with benefits” that a senior official at the new jail says he is “sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch”. A commutation from Donald Trump may follow. Who can say what she has done to deserve all this. But with the US government shutdown over and Congress ready to vote on unsealing Epstein’s trove of videos and papers – in addition to the 23,000 documents lawmakers released yesterday – we may be about to find out.

The system that protected Epstein has still not been held accountable. Along with Maxwell, just two others have faced consequences: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson. “All three are British.” But there are scores of prominent Americans – including “former senators, presidents, chief executives, billionaires and academics” – who also travelled on Epstein’s “Lolita Express”. Even if they aren’t accused of having non-consensual sex with teenage girls, as Andrew was, they “sustained Epstein’s world”. Bill Gates’s ex-wife Melinda says her divorce was prompted in part by her husband’s friendship with the late paedophile. And it’s an issue the MAGA base cares deeply about, as ultra-Trumpian Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene understands. She is one of four Republicans willing to vote in favour of unsealing the Epstein files, and promises to use her congressional immunity to read out the names of any men accused of sexually abusing young girls. The president keeps saying Epstein is a “dead issue”. The man is dead, but the issue is “very much alive”.

More than 20 of Vladimir Putin’s relatives have been given plum roles in Russian government institutions and state-linked corporations, says Tom Ambrose in The Independent. According to a new analysis by the investigative outlet Proekt, which is banned in Russia, nepotism under Putin has reached levels unseen in Moscow “since the reign of Tsar Nicholas II”. For example, Anna Tsivilyova, the daughter of Putin’s late cousin, is deputy defence minister; her husband is energy minister; her son from a previous marriage manages several firms linked to a coal mining firm his mother’s family also runs; and her brother is a prominent executive at the state energy giant Gazprom. The list very much goes on.

Google was by no means the first search engine, says Donald MacKenzie in the London Review of Books. But its older competitors had been stymied by the canny antics of porn sites, which were the first to figure out that if they concealed within their pages words likely to appear in user queries, they would appear more prominently in web searches. “Skiing”, “beach holidays”, “best colleges” – all returned a “bunch of links to porn”. Google’s innovation was a rating system, “PageRank”, that judged the quality of a website by how many other pages, especially high-quality ones, linked to it.

The young ideologues wrecking the BBC

Every night, says Poppy Sowerby in UnHerd, Radio 4 signals the start of the shipping forecast by playing the 1960s waltz Sailing By. It is a song from the “deep past”, when BBC reporters wore thick glasses, spoke with clipped accents and conducted slow, intense interviews with a cigarette dangling from the hand. Almost every household had a radio or a telly, and the BBC was regarded, “and certainly saw itself”, as the best state broadcaster in the world. “This is not the BBC of today.” The present Corporation floods TikTok and Facebook with ghastly “behind-the-scenes” style videos of young reporters holding twee little mics explaining how they “combat misinformation” by “examining videos frame by frame”. Remarkable, then, that this “crack team of digital detectives” didn’t notice the glaring 50-minute splice in a video of Donald Trump that has tanked the organisation’s credibility.

It is young ideologues who have fed the rot of the BBC’s “queasy cultural revolution”. A new generation of “politically intolerant grads” – their laptops festooned with stickers declaring mindless slogans like “allyship is a verb” – have somehow picked up the idea that a state broadcaster reporting straight news must bend towards what they perceive to be “good”. They pester bosses to pillory sex-realist colleagues like Martine Croxall for a roll of the eyes and pollute work WhatsApp groups with tripe like “shouldn’t trans women qualify for maternity leave, though?” This is how we end up with seasoned reporters cowed into using the preferred pronouns of sex offenders, to avoid upsetting “non-binary striplings” fresh out of Bristol. “The deranged, flailing tail is wagging an old slumbering dog.”

📰😵‍💫 Last month, Have I Got News for You falsely accused Euan Blair’s company, Multiverse, of nabbing a contract to roll out digital IDs (an old hobbyhorse of his dad’s). Explaining the error, the production company’s founder Jimmy Mulville blamed the younger generation of producers, who are “marinated in social media”. So marinated, it seems, that they take everything they read online at face value. One of these bright-eyed dullards saw the fake factoid on a random freelancer’s X account and stuck it in the script with no further verification.

The trendiest embassy in London is “Casa Italia”, says Rosa Bertoli in Wallpaper*, the Italian ambassador’s freshly redesigned office building near Buckingham Palace. It’s a “sophisticated curation” of all things Italian, with a bespoke mosaic in the grand lobby created from marble only found in Italy; furniture by Italian designers; sculptures borrowed from Rome’s National Etruscan Museum; and modern Italian art by Gianpaolo Pagni, Paolo Scheggi and Michelangelo Pistoletto. In the ambassador’s office is an Antony Gormley sculpture, “representing an aptly harmonious bridge between the British and Italian cultural landscape”.

Donald Trump’s sanctions on Russia, imposed in late October, are already proving “shatteringly effective”, says Keith Johnson in Foreign Policy. China’s state-owned refineries have halted purchases of Russian crude oil, and big Chinese refiners in the northeast are not pencilling in any Russian volumes for the next few months. Two-thirds of the Russian oil that was headed to India now seems “without a destination”; and in Iraq, Russia’s Lukoil has handed control of its 75% stake in the vast Qurna 2 oilfield (which produces nearly half a million barrels a day) to two state-run Iraqi firms.

It’s Jack Schlossberg, grandson of former US president John F Kennedy, who has announced he is running for Congress in New York next year. The 32-year-old Democrat already has a high profile, says Victoria Bisset in The Washington Post, from dishing out political commentary to his 1.5 million social media followers and stridently criticising Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, his first cousin once removed. The political nepo baby has big – and many – boots to fill: since 1947, there have been only two calendar years in which a Kennedy did not hold some form of federal office.