Kemi Badenoch has sacked Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, saying she had “clear, irrefutable evidence” that he was “plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible” to the Conservative Party. Nigel Farage says he has “of course” had conversations with Jenrick about him joining Reform UK. Donald Trump has claimed that “the killing in Iran is stopping” and that Tehran has “no plan” to execute anti-government protesters. The president is said to be wavering on military intervention in the Islamic Republic because his national security team were unable to guarantee that they could deliver a decisive blow against the regime. Four crew members from the International Space Station have successfully returned to Earth after an unspecified medical issue prompted the first ever medical evacuation of the facility. Crew 11 splashed down off the coast of California this morning following five and a half months in space.

Elon Musk has unexpectedly surrendered, says Hugo Rifkind in The Times: his AI bot Grok will no longer generate sexualised deepfakes. Not, one suspects, because the world’s richest man broke out in a cold sweat when he heard our Labour government was cross with him, no matter how much they’re trying to take credit. More likely it’s because no one, not even his friends at the White House – who usually cast European efforts to regulate social media as the “illiberal ravings of a continent gone mad” – wants to expend political capital defending AI-generated child sex abuse images. Besides, there’s no demand for this stuff. Last week, YouGov asked Brits whether AI tools should be allowed to generate sexualised images of children or adults. On the former 97% said not. On the latter, 96%.

The pushback against Musk matters because it illustrates where the head-on collision between states and social media has always been heading. Tech firms have tended to pose as “defenders of free speech”, as though they had principles, when really their only principle is that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. When this has brought them into conflict with state power, they have often been able to claim “nebulous popular support”. People like free media and easy online shopping and saying what they like about politics. The tech firms providing these services were, in their own telling, “siding with the little guy against the state”. Now, though, “anti-tech is becoming a mood”. Polls everywhere show vast numbers of people terrified of losing their jobs to AI and desperate to ban kids from social media. Lucky for him, Keir Starmer doesn’t need to be brave to take on Big Tech. He’s “pushing at an open door”.

In the dying days of the Biden administration, says CNN, undercover US agents spent more than $10m buying a device on the black market that they think could be the cause of so-called “Havana syndrome”, the mysterious illness that has afflicted American diplomats, spies and troops around the globe since 2016. The curious kit can fit in a rucksack and produces pulsed radio waves, which some officials and academics have long speculated could be the cause of the mystery ailments. The Defence Department, which has spent more than a year testing the possibly Russian-built machine, fears other countries could already have access to it.

Top CEOs and elite athletes are always banging on about the virtues of waking up at 5am, says Julie Jargon in The Wall Street Journal. But sleep experts say they’re wrong. Roughly 65% of us are “bears” – people whose performance peaks between 10am and 2pm. Only 15% are early birds, or “larks”. If you’re a bear trying to act like a lark – getting up at 5am on weekdays then catching up with lie-ins at the weekend – you’re only going to end up with a “feeling akin to jet lag”. Far better to hit snooze and get a regular eight hours.

With Russia watchers fixated on the war in Ukraine, many are overlooking the latest target of Moscow’s “imperialist ire”, says Edward Lucas in Foreign Policy: Finland. The invasion of Ukraine was prefaced by a broad “rhetorical escalation” from Kremlin mouthpieces, smearing Kyiv as a hotbed of Nazis and making obscure historical arguments undermining its sovereignty. What’s causing headaches in Helsinki is a near-identical escalation in recent months – this time with Finns seemingly in Vladimir Putin’s gunsights. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted on X on 2 January that the Bolsheviks’ recognition of Finnish independence from Russia in 1917 was a “blunder” and that the country must pay for its “vile Russophobia”. In September, Medvedev published a lengthy essay titled The New Finnish Doctrine: Stupidity, Lies, Ingratitude, stressing Finland’s closeness with the Third Reich and its involvement in the brutal siege of Leningrad.

The details might seem arcane: who cares about Finland’s tangled history in World War Two, let alone the legal status of the Grand Duchy of Finland within the old Tsarist empire? But history is not a dry academic discipline in Russia, it is an “instrument of power”. By joining Nato in 2023, in Medvedev’s telling, the “pro-American puppet authorities” in Helsinki “directly and rudely trampled” on the historical and legal basis for Finland’s existence as an independent state. Russia is therefore entitled to renounce the treaties under which it recognises Finland’s “independence, sovereignty and borders” and demand vast reparations for World War Two damage. This is all being coupled with a growing effort to whip up anti-Finnish sentiment on Russian state TV, and increasing “grey zone” conflict like the recent severing of an underwater cable. The lesson of Ukraine is that we should take these provocations seriously. “Russia clearly does.”

Spherical snake is an updated version of Nokia’s classic 1998 phone game. The principle is unchanged – guide the serpent towards the dots while avoiding its tail – except for the fact it’s played on a sphere. Use the arrow keys to direct and the spacebar to speed up. Gloriously addictive. Click here to play.

In medieval Europe, pigs were sometimes put on trial for their misdeeds, says Anne Ewbank in Popular Science. If the suspect swine – which back then looked more like a wild boar – had killed a child, for example, the authorities would investigate, “with the pig treated almost as a human defendant”. Sometimes another party might be to blame: often the owner, or in some cases the victim’s parents, for letting an “unwanted child” near the hungry porkers. But generally, the pig was convicted. In the 15th century, one homicidal hog had to spend five years in jail before being executed.

It’s “Mystic Veg”, a woman in Somerset who claims to be able to predict future events by tossing asparagus into the air and interpreting how it lands. The 69-year-old veg thrower – real name Jemima Packington – sometimes gets it right, says William Hallowell in Metro: she correctly called the Queen’s death, Brexit and Boris Johnson’s ascension to PM. Among her 2026 predictions are a UK general election; a former member of the Royal Household being arrested; a massive swing to the Democrats in the US midterms; some “very unexpected” deaths in the showbiz world; and, naturally, the British Asparagus Festival being “even more successful than usual”. See the rest here.