Firefighters in Los Angeles are facing a water shortage as they continue to battle the most destructive wildfires in the city’s history, which have left at least five people dead and forced more than 137,000 to flee their homes. The infernos, one of which is now spreading across the iconic Hollywood Hills, have destroyed at least 2,000 buildings and burned through more than 27,000 acres, an area roughly the size of Bristol. The pound has sunk to its lowest level against the dollar since November 2023, says the FT. The slide comes as UK long-term borrowing costs surged to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, amid fears from investors about the government’s heavy borrowing needs. Belgium’s food agency has warned people not to eat their Christmas trees, after officials in the city of Ghent recommended using them to make spicy butter. Spokeswoman Hélène Bonte pointed out that consuming pesticides and flame retardant could have “serious, even fatal consequences”.

The “broligarchs” who paved the way for Musk and co

Many are worried about the emerging US “broligarchy”, says former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in Le Monde: the group of male billionaires hovering around Donald Trump, hoping to extract as much wealth and power as possible from his second term. The likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have struck an extraordinarily good deal with an “unparalleled return on investment”: for a few hundred million dollars in campaign donations – “mere crumbs of their fortune” – they reaped, within minutes of Trump’s election victory, “hundreds of billions in additional wealth”. The value of Thiel’s data analytics company Palantir soared by 23%; shares in Musk’s Tesla jumped by 40%, making it worth more than the next 15 biggest carmakers combined. Now these business titans have gathered at Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring and “prepare to wield government power directly”.

This is the latest incarnation of an old evil. John D Rockefeller, one of America’s first robber barons, headed a dynasty that “makes Musk look like an amateur”, with a son who became a media mogul and a grandson who became vice president. Thomas Edison publicly electrocuted an elephant with his competitor George Westinghouse’s alternating current to convince authorities to favour his own direct current system. Henry Ford bought a newspaper to pressure cities to do away with streetcar lines, “thus making room on the road for Ford cars and buses”. More recently, Goldman Sachs made a gift to Bill Clinton’s administration of its own CEO, Robert Rubin, who, once appointed treasury secretary, swiftly eliminated the regulations on Wall Street’s worst excesses. Now it’s Musk and co – using the unprecedented powers of the internet to help shape our behaviour – who are up to the same old tricks.

📚🦹‍♂️ Thiel’s favourite book is said to be The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. “Without the slightest hint of irony”, the authors compare the ultra-rich to Olympian gods, arguing that their domination of the world is “both natural and just”. Thiel likes the book, he says, because it offers an accurate prediction of a “future that does not include the powerful states that rule over us today”.

The idea that Keir Starmer didn’t do enough as director of public prosecutions to address the rape gangs scandal is total bunk, says Andrew Norfolk on Times Radio. After I first broke the story for The Times back in 2011, Starmer met me to discuss how official guidelines were hampering prosecutions, and then changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. “That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.” What wasn’t examined in the original inquiry, which released its findings in 2022, was why “one very small sub-section” of Pakistani Muslim men were so “overwhelmingly, disproportionately responsible”. How can we address this problem if we don’t understand why it is happening in the first place?

Kate Winslet holds the record for the longest time a leading actor has spent holding their breath underwater, says The New York Times: seven minutes and 15 seconds. She achieved the lung-busting feat when filming the 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water, beating Tom Cruise’s six-minute hold for 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. To put that time in context, some US Navy Seals “never break three minutes”.

Britain’s “reverse-Goldilocks” problem

Perhaps one of the worst handicaps a nation can have in this century is to be “medium scale”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. Of the countries generally rated most efficient, some are democratic, like Finland, while others, like the UAE, are not. Some are Western, like New Zealand, and some aren’t, like Singapore. What unites them is that they are tiny. This is not just an advantage in the public realm. Nordic and Israeli companies are so successful abroad in part because executives have to think about global markets from the off. With 70 million potential buyers at home, French or German firms don’t quite have that impetus, but nor can they count on American or Chinese levels of domestic demand and capital. In a kind of reverse-Goldilocks, the conditions for a British tech startup, say, are “just wrong”.

We also appear to be re-entering a world in which “might is right”. The phrase “international law” is still dropped into conversation with “bizarre solemnity”, given it has no third-party enforcement mechanism. The pretence of a “rules-based international order” was nice, but today, brute scale is an advantage again, and there are only two or three giants who count. The silliest statistic in Britain’s public discourse is that we are the “sixth-biggest economy in the world”, failing to mention that the gap to number one is greater than that to number 20. You might as well claim to be the “third-biggest football club in Manchester”. There may be tricky decades ahead for the former superpowers of Europe, “caught in that awkward status between manageably compact and world-shapingly huge”.

Deodorant used to be a humble toiletry, says Ellie Violet Bramley in The Observer, “bought for a quid and used with little pleasure”. Not any more. To My Ships, a new brand apparently inspired by The Iliad, sells a 75ml roll-on for a whopping £35. Malin+Goetz, the beauty brand famous for its tomato candles, has a bergamot number for £22 (pictured); Le Labo’s £29 BO-basher offers “hints of violet and tonka bean”; and Salt & Stone’s £20 Santal & Vetiver is made with Hyaluronic Acid, a popular skincare ingredient. It’s an “armpit arms race”.

Everyone knows the “five-second rule”, the theory that if you pick up food you’ve dropped on the floor quickly enough then it’s probably safe to eat. Unfortunately, it’s balls, says Clarissa Brincat in Popular Science. When researchers in South Carolina tested the rule in 2006 by dropping some bologna sausage on to a salmonella-contaminated surface, they found that over 99% of the bacteria that transferred to the bologna did so within five seconds.

It’s a “raw milkmaid dress”, says Poppy Sowerby in UnHerd, which was released this week by Evie Magazine, a “Cosmopolitan for conservative babes” that specialises in articles such as “The four levels of manliness” and “15 practical ways to love your husband”. Designed in the French countryside, the £157 limited-edition frock is supposedly inspired by the “hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe” and capitalises on the current “tradwife” trend. But the sexy smock hasn’t been much of a hit with the magazine’s conservative audience. “So disappointed by the amount of cleavage shown,” wrote one prudish reader. “Waaaay too revealing for a modest woman.” Buy yours here.