UK inflation unexpectedly dropped to 2.5% in December, down from 2.6% in November, driven by falling restaurant and hotel prices. The decrease eases pressure on Chancellor Rachel Reeves, says the FT, and clears the path for the Bank of England to cut interest rates next month. The government’s anti-corruption minister has resigned over allegations that she benefited from corruption. Tulip Siddiq was accused of living in properties linked to her aunt Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted as prime minister of Bangladesh last year amid claims of graft. Despite the prime minister’s standards adviser finding no evidence of “improprieties”, Siddiq said continuing in her role would be a “distraction”. The Princess of Wales is in remission from cancer. In her first solo engagement since her diagnosis, Catherine visited the hospital where she received treatment – the Royal Marsden in west London – and thanked staff for their “exceptional” care.

America would lose a war against China

Yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s unconventional pick for defence secretary, mostly focused on the former Fox News host’s boozy past and allegations of sexual assault. The more important question, says Max Boot in The Washington Post, is how he would go about getting the US military ready for a major war. Because right now we are woefully unprepared to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia. A devastating recent report by the Commission on the National Defence Strategy found that China has “largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific”, and that American forces lack “both the capabilities and the capacity” to prevail in a conflict with Beijing. “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago,” the report concluded. “It is not prepared today.”

The basic problem is that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has reorientated its military to fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq – and that has left it “utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power”. In a recent war game against China, the US used up all its long-range anti-ship missiles in a week and an important class of long-range cruise missiles in a month. The Defence Department currently has a “paltry” 19,000 drones; Ukraine produced 1.5 million in 2024, and was reportedly losing 10,000 a month in 2023. Shipping is just as dire: a single Chinese shipyard has more capacity than all US shipyards combined, and fewer than half of the Navy’s 164 surface ships are ready for deployment. For Hegseth, or whoever takes the reins, addressing these issues will be a “staggering challenge”.

Elon Musk’s bromance with Donald Trump reminds me of the relationship between Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Cummings, like Musk, is a visionary. I met him when he was still in No 10 and he explained, “compellingly”, what Britain was doing wrong: hopeless procurement, poor civil service hiring, and so on. When I asked whether the “cheerfully chaotic” Johnson was the right man to push these changes through, Cummings “smiled ruefully”. He was fired not long after. And that’s the problem. The reason Musk and Cummings pair up with the likes of Trump and Johnson is because Trump and Johnson are “disruptors”. But for these renegade advisors to push through their (very sensible) prescriptions for government, they need the leaders they team up with to be competent and driven and focused. Which, in general, they’re not.

The North Sea is returning to its glory days, says Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian. Centuries of overfishing, pollution, and oil and gas exploration “degraded” the sea between Britain, Scandinavia and western Europe. But thanks to new marine conservation rules, humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins and minke whales are all thriving, and grey seals – once at risk of disappearing from UK waters – are flourishing. Last breeding season, a record-breaking 4,000 seal pups were born.

The baffling decision to downgrade our schools

Over the past two decades, Britain has effectively been conducting an enormous “twin study”, says former education secretary Michael Gove in The Spectator: children in England have been educated one way; those in Scotland and Wales, another. In England, a majority of secondary schools and half of primaries have become academies, with the freedom to pay good teachers more and set higher standards than the law requires. The curriculum has been tilted away from generic “skills” towards the acquisition of knowledge. League tables allow badly performing schools to be quickly identified and fixed. Students in the most deprived areas now go to the best universities. In Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, there are no academies, no autonomy over pay and standards, and no official league tables. The result? In every international measure of educational achievement, England has improved relative to other countries. Scotland and Wales have “faltered or fallen behind”.

The extraordinary success in England is sometimes mistakenly seen as a Tory triumph, but it was in fact the work of politicians from every party, including: Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis from Labour, Nick Clegg and David Laws from the Lib Dems, and David Cameron and Nicky Morgan from the Conservatives. It’s a “cross-party, multi-year, many-starred triumph of public policy”. Which is why shadow ministers are crying “vandalism” over Labour’s new education bill, which sets out to undo all this fine work. But it’s worse than that: vandals are anarchic and opportunistic. This government is “chillingly precise” in seeking to destroy policies that have given English children the best education possible, merely because they’re associated with the previous government. It is Rome’s approach to Carthage – “a salting of the earth”. And it’s the poorest kids who will suffer most.

Since 1976, Lake Superior University in Michigan has published an annual list of “banished words” – typically new slang that has become intolerable through overuse. In 2025, forbidden expressions include: cringe; era (as in “she’s in her pottery-making era”); game changer; the acronym IYKYK meaning “If you know, you know”; the Gen Z phrase “skibidi” (“at this point, nobody even knows what it means”); and “100%”. See the others here.

It’s a newly identified species of the Sydney funnel-web, one of the world’s deadliest spiders. The awful arachnid, nicknamed “big boy”, is larger and more venomous than its more common relative, says Sky News. It was first discovered by Australian spider expert Kane Christensen in the New South Wales city of Newcastle in the early 2000s, but has only now been confirmed as a separate species, officially named Atrax christenseni in his honour. “I would not recommend touching them,” says Christensen, helpfully. “They do give copious amounts of venom.”