Keir Starmer says any decision on the future status of Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark alone, and has condemned Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on the UK and seven other European nations as “completely wrong”. In a message to Norway’s prime minister, Trump said the country’s failure to award him the Nobel Peace Prize means he no longer has an “obligation to think purely of peace”. Labour’s U-turns have cost Britain £8.2bn, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Resolution Foundation think tank. The figure includes the government’s retreats on disability benefits, the winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap, but doesn’t cover recent climbdowns on business rates for pubs and inheritance tax for farmers, which are expected to cost another £300m and £130m respectively. The longest tunnel on the HS2 route has been completed. The twin-bore 10-miler passes beneath the M25 before descending 80 metres under the Chilterns, and will, one day, allow trains to travel through it at more than 200mph.

For more than 75 years, it has been Russia’s “fondest dream” to split the alliance between the US and western Europe, says The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump’s increasingly strident campaign to seize Greenland could make it happen. There are good reasons for Washington’s interest in the island – it’s in a strategically important position and has untapped reserves of rare-earth minerals. But the US already has “a high degree of access” and Denmark is happy to negotiate more. Trump’s “bullying imperialism” is totally counterproductive. It will imperil the trade deals he negotiated last year with the EU and the UK. It will drive America’s allies towards the Chinese: Canada’s Mark Carney “bent the knee” to Xi Jinping last week and Keir Starmer is heading to Beijing this month. And most important, of course, you can “say goodbye to Nato”.

Trump will win his battle for Greenland for the usual reason, says Wolfgang Münchau in UnHerd: Europe is too weak and divided. Can you really see Italy’s Giorgia Meloni ruining her relationship with the US president over “a few rocks of ice near the Arctic”? Will Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his fellow populists in the Czech Republic and Slovakia ride to the rescue of their “liberal friends in Denmark”? Besides, the US president still has plenty more cards to play: he could sideline the EU and impose his own peace treaty on Ukraine, say, or switch off US intelligence sharing not just for Kyiv but for European Nato members too. As ever, Brussels will be praying that “someone or something” – the markets, Congress, anything – will stop Trump and negate the need for them to make any truly tough decisions. They need to drop this “delusion”. The only sensible strategy now is to accept the inevitable and try to “drive up the price”.

The most popular download on China’s Apple Store last week was an app called “Are You Dead?”, say Joe Leahy and Wenjie Ding in the FT. The idea is simple: every day, users press a single button to “check in”. If they miss it for two consecutive days, a nominated emergency contact receives a notification. The app has gone viral as an increasing cohort of young Chinese are choosing to live alone rather than get married and have a family, and a growing number of oldies are living solo without relatives nearby to care for them.

The latest interior design must-have is an “analogue room”, says Nora Knoepflmacher in The Wall Street Journal, with clients increasingly asking architects to make special screen-free spaces filled with old-timey games and activities. Top “dumb” design choices include replacing the TV with a piano and devoting specific spaces to board games and vinyl records. “People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real-life interactions,” says Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, and now they’re making “design choices to create an alternative”. Bridge, anyone?

For some reason, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, many have accepted the political chancer Robert Jenrick’s description of his “journey” to the right. It makes sense, in this framing, for him to have joined Reform UK, which people persist in calling a “right-wing” party, even “radically right-wing”. Whatever you think about Farage, that description is silly. “Right” typically indicates a strong stance on immigration and borders, and Reform certainly has that. But it has also long signified specific ideas related to “sound money, fiscal restraint, a faith in markets and fidelity to law”. These are the qualities that fuelled the rise of the UK and much of the West. And they are miles away from anything Reform is proposing.

Farage isn’t right wing, in this sense, any more than is Donald Trump, who is adding trillions to the US national debt; orchestrating a sham investigation into the governor of the Federal Reserve to bully him into artificially lowering interest rates; and engaging in sector-by-sector dealmaking (to say nothing of tariffs) to direct the flow of capital not through the collective wisdom of market prices but by “presidential whim”. Farage, who leads a personality cult every bit as beholden to its leader’s quirks as MAGA is to Trump’s, is no better. Reform’s “Our Contract with You” – published at the last election – wasn’t so much a right-wing manifesto as “socialism in a smoking jacket”. Welfare giveaways, unfunded tax cuts, nationalisation, a contempt for fiscal rules, “you name it”. And crucially, immigration is plummeting, which will turn attention at the next election to the economy, where Reform is at its weakest. Trump’s approval ratings are already down, even among loyal Republicans. Don’t be surprised if Farage suffers a similar fate.

A decade after securing the Brexit referendum, says Ben Quinn in The Guardian, UKIP for some reason continues to exist. This week, the party sent a request to the Electoral Commission to adopt a new logo, featuring a cross pattée, a symbol historically linked to the Knights Templar. In more recent history, as some have pointed out, the black crucifix is more commonly associated with the Nazis, who used it for the Iron Cross. The association is unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on what they’re going for – strengthened by the party’s new slogan: “The New Right”.

In a bid to build some much-needed resilience, Gen Zs are now actively “seeking rejection”, says Daisy Jones in Vogue. TikTok is awash with videos of people on a mission to be “rejected 1,000 times”, from applying to attend a movie premiere to asking a stranger if they would like to share a dessert. The idea is that with every “no” they get, the more confident they become at seeking out opportunities. Sure, it all sounds a bit “self help by influencers”. But these guys do have a point: “the more you ask, the more you actually experience”.

It’s Ai, says Koh Ewe on BBC News, a female chimpanzee famous for her cognitive skills, who has died aged 49. Born in west Africa, the precocious primate arrived at Kyoto University’s Centre for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behaviour in 1977 and was given a special keyboard linked to a computer when she was 18 months old. By the time she was five, the brainy beast had mastered “numerical naming from one to six” and was able to identify 300 combinations of number, colour and object. According to local news, she once escaped with a fellow chimp – using a key to unlock their cage.