Last March lots of sensible people, including me, agreed that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory, rather than directly from animals, was “pseudo-scientific nonsense”, says Matt Ridley in The Spectator. It seemed “almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster”. No longer. It has now emerged that US intelligence believes three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised in November 2019, just before the world first heard about the coronavirus. President Biden has announced an inquiry.

President Lukashenko has been waging war on ordinary Belarussians for almost a year, and now his “terror operation has gone global”, says Joerg Forbrig in Politico. The strongman of Minsk has stooped to “air piracy”, grounding a commercial Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania in Belarus’s capital last Sunday with the help of a Mig-29 fighter, a fake bomb threat and secret agents from the Belarussian KGB on board. His target was 26-year-old Roman Protasevich, a dissident blogger. “I am facing the death penalty,” Protasevich told one of his 170 fellow passengers before he was taken off the plane.

Computer technology is now freakishly adept at reading human faces, says Madhumita Murgia in the Financial Times. A computer camera can watch “unblinking” as “emotion detection” AI flags “micro-movements of muscles” and attempts to identify emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear – via eye tracking and voice tones.

Politicians have always liked a drink, says Jack Blanchard in Politico’s Westminster Insider podcast. In the Georgian era Parliament was filled with “three bottle men” who spent more time making merry in clubland than debating policy. William Pitt the Younger, who served as prime minister for 20 years, died aged 46 – probably because of the three bottles of port a day he drank on the advice of his doctors. Churchill’s alcohol consumption was the stuff of legend: he usually got through a bottle and a half of Pol Roger champagne a day, as well as a few whisky and sodas, and occasionally a glass or two of white wine with breakfast.

Report + Support, a Cambridge University website, invited students to anonymously “denounce” academics for “racism, discrimination and micro-aggressions”. These micro-aggressions, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, could include “raising eyebrows when a black member of staff or student is speaking”, “referring to a woman as a ‘girl’” and even giving “backhanded compliments”.