The US has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in a major escalation of tensions between the two countries. Attorney General Pam Bondi released a video of troops descending on to the vessel, which was used in the illicit shipment of sanctioned oil from Venezuela to Iran. Caracas called the seizure an act of “international piracy”. Keir Starmer has appointed 25 new Labour peers in a bid to pack the House of Lords with loyalists who will help force through government legislation. The Conservatives accused the PM of having “no respect for constitutional norms” after they were allocated three peerages compared to five for the Liberal Democrats, the first time the opposition has been given fewer than a smaller party. Early humans may have learned to make fire some 350,000 years earlier than previously thought. In a new study, archaeologists from the British Museum say Stone Age Neanderthal humans struck a flint axehead against a nugget of iron pyrite in Suffolk 400 millennia ago, transforming human evolution and helping to repopulate the British Isles after a lengthy ice age.

The strange truth about modern conflict

Before he died in 2008, Samuel Huntington – who segmented the globe into “civilisations” and predicted they would clash – could justifiably have said “I told you so”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. But now, with the US establishment obsessing over Europe’s “civilisational erasure”, it’s worth pointing out: all the world’s major conflicts today are within civilisations, not between them. The war in Ukraine is Orthodox Christian Slavs vs themselves. China and Taiwan are at the epicentre of what Huntington called the “Sinosphere”. Sudan’s appallingly bloody civil war does not pit any one religious or cultural group against another, and even the conflict’s patrons (Egypt, UAE) are both from the world of Islam. Perhaps the reason people like caring about Gaza so much is that it’s a relieving exception – the sort of war that “should” happen.

Huntington’s most notorious claim was that Islam has “bloody borders”. On the evidence of the past decade, though – the Arab spring, continuing strife in Yemen, proxy violence between the Saudis and Iranians – the real target of Muslim violence seems to be other Muslims. And what about the US government? Their position is, effectively: “Europe isn’t Western enough, so let us embrace Russia and Saudi Arabia.” Whatever the moral implications of this autocrat-worship, “the illogic is what stands out”. How did Huntington get it so wrong? He missed that what fanatics hate most isn’t enemies, but apostates. Just as the woke movement reserved its bitterest vitriol for “garden-variety liberals” like JK Rowling, so Beijing can’t abide the Chinese but Western-facing Taiwan, and Moscow couldn’t handle Kyiv turning to Europe. This is the lesson: someone alien to our culture is easy to ignore; someone who deviates from it is unbearable.

Something very peculiar happened at the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping near San Francisco in 2023, says The New York Times. As the two leaders rose to leave after lunch, one of Xi’s bodyguards took a small bottle from his pocket and sprayed down every surface the Chinese president had touched, “including what remained of the almond meringue cake on his dessert plate”. The aim, US officials concluded, was to remove any trace of Xi’s DNA in case his hosts collected and exploited it. “This is the way they’re thinking,” says one attendee, “that you could design a disease that would only affect one person.”

The former high court judge Sir John Blofeld, who has died aged 93, was the unwitting inspiration for James Bond’s arch nemesis, says The Daily Telegraph. Blofeld – big brother of cricket commentator Henry – was a “notoriously fearsome” prefect at Sunningdale prep school, along with his contemporary Peter Scaramanga. Ian Fleming heard about them through his nephew Nichol, who was several years below them at Sunningdale, and decided to use their names for two of 007’s top baddies.

Whatever happened to those jolly fat men in red trousers?

Until last year, says Giles Coren in The Times, I tended to be the slimmest person at Christmas parties. “This year, I’m feeling like one of the fattest.” It’s the weight loss jabs, of course: provided you have £200 a month to spend on Ozempic or whatever, there’s no need to be fat any more unless you want to be. “And few people do.” Suddenly every fancy shindig is full of men and women who look like melted candles: “grey, withered socialites whose formerly bulbous jowls and bingo wings hang off them now like cheap hotel dressing gowns”. I honestly hadn’t realised my friends were so unhappy with their appearance. They always seemed so content, “chortling away in their heaving red trousers, their ruddy cheeks full of pie”.

But this won’t be the end of their struggles. New research suggests that if people on fat jabs don’t do strength training, they’ll suffer muscle wastage equivalent to up to 10 years of ageing. And we know they won’t do the weights, because the reason they were such porkers in the first place is because they had zero self-discipline. We’re allowed to say that now because Mounjaro and the like have given the lie to all that “it’s my metabolism” balls. “If they couldn’t keep off the choccies, why would they ever lift weights?” But it’s hard for us thinnies, too. Having kept my own weight down all these years through “painful dietary restriction”, I am now, as I age and sag, going to end up looking exactly the same as them. Before long, there’ll be no way to distinguish me from all those “jab-dependent losers”. There’s only one thing for it. In the new year, “I shall simply have to get fat”.

Bisexuality has plummeted among Gen Z in the past year, says Eric Kaufmann in UnHerd. According to figures published this week by the Office for National Statistics, the proportion of those aged 16-24 who identify as bi – which rose sharply during the woke era, alongside a much more modest rise in people identifying as gay – has fallen from a peak of 7.5% in 2023 to 5.1% last year. The data is especially stark among young women, whose claims of bisexuality rocketed from 0.8% in 2014 to an astonishing 9.2% in 2023, before falling to 6.7% last year.

The former consultant Tom Whitwell has released his always enjoyable annual list of “52 things I learnt this year”. Highlights include the fact that nearly 0.7% of US exports by value are human blood or blood products; that you can unlock the wheels on some shopping trolleys by playing sounds on your phone; that a gram of silica gel has almost the same surface area as two basketball courts; and that more than half the animals in farms around the world are shrimp. See the rest – some of which you may already have enjoyed in The Knowledge... – here.

It’s a £250,000 Rolls-Royce, says Isobel Williams in My London, which was towed this week by Westminster City Council in a crackdown on dodgy parking. The Saudi-registered supercar was one of several left illegally on the pavement outside Grosvenor Square’s chichi Chancery Rosewood Hotel. The council said issuing parking tickets didn’t work, partly because it’s so complicated to recover fines from foreign drivers, and partly because, to the owners of such vehicles, the maximum fine of £160 “barely registers”. Pedestrians shouldn’t have to “run a gauntlet of illegally and selfishly parked supercars”, says Westminster councillor Max Sullivan. “We will not tolerate dangerous pavement parking, whether it’s a Lime bike or a Lamborghini.”