Joe Biden says he will respect the jury’s decision after his son Hunter was found guilty of lying about his drug use when buying a pistol in 2018. Hunter faces up to 25 years in prison, though sentencing guidelines suggest he’ll be given a maximum of 21 months or a non-custodial sentence. President Biden, who has ruled out pardoning his son, said he was “proud of the man he is today”. Britain’s economic growth fell flat in April, after rainy weather kept shoppers away from the high street. The slowdown comes after the first three months of 2024 saw the fastest growth in two years. Hungarian hogs have been deployed in Devon to create the perfect habitat for the UK’s most endangered butterfly. Curly-haired Mangalitsas rootle around in a way that improves the soil and encourages the growth of dog violets – the sole plant eaten by the caterpillars of the rare high brown fritillary. 🐷🦋

Why Europe’s so-called “far-right” are winning

Europe’s elites have spent months “huddling in a defensive crouch”, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, shielding themselves from the “catastrophe” of a second Donald Trump presidency. From their “chancelleries, newsrooms, academic common rooms and plush corporate and bureaucratic corner offices”, they have watched with horror as Americans veer away from Joe Biden’s “green revolution, vast increases in state spending and further devotion to the modern religion of diversity, equity and inclusion”, towards the man these continentals regard as the “greatest threat to democracy ever”. And then came last weekend’s EU elections.

The results provide the clearest evidence yet that large numbers of European voters are sick of the smug consensus under which they have been governed for so long. France, Germany, Spain, Italy and others saw “huge advances” by parties that oppose mass immigration and reject extreme climate measures. Much of the media has reacted with “predictable alarm”, describing these as victories for the “far-right” – an implicit association with Nazis. But while a few of these parties undoubtedly espouse an “ugly extremism”, the majority simply want to cut migration and put a brake on the mad dash to net zero. The exception, for now, is the UK, where the Conservatives are about to be crushed by a “thoroughly green, woke and globalist” Labour. But this drubbing will owe as much to Nigel Farage’s Reform party – which is winning fans by “flaying” the Tories on, you guessed it, immigration and net zero.

🗳️ 22 days to go...
Nigel Farage likes to portray himself as a diehard patriot, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. But the Reform leader is more of a nationalist – specifically, an English nationalist. He raises no objections to a united Ireland, and says he understands the “emotions behind” the movement for Scottish independence. He clearly admires the nationalists on the rise in Europe, and once described Vladimir Putin – the ne plus ultra of nationalists – as the politician he most admired. There’s a word for all this: “unBritish”.

Donald Trump really hates sharks, says New York Magazine. The porn star Stormy Daniels said that when she met him in 2011, he told her: “I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.” In 2013, he tweeted: “Sharks are last on my list – other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!” And at a recent campaign event, Trump for some reason mused what he’d do if he were “on top of a battery” on a sinking ship, and saw a shark. Given the choice between a shark or electrocution, he said, “I’ll take electrocution every single time”.

The future of the electric car is Chinese

People used to say Elon Musk would be “the Henry Ford of the electric car”, says Ed Conway on Substack. Instead, it seems, that accolade will go to some chap in China. As recently as 2020, China was a “relative non-entity” in car manufacturing, with fewer than a million units shipped abroad. Since then, it has leapfrogged the US, South Korea, Germany and Japan to top the rankings, exporting almost five million cars in 2023 – many of them electric. These models are made by companies you’ve probably never heard of: BYD, CATL, and so on. But they’re insanely cheap – many costing less than petrol cars – and they’ll soon be flooding Western markets.

China isn’t just dominant in making the EVs themselves. It also controls about 80% of global battery production, and a similar proportion of the manufacturing of the materials that go into those batteries. “We’re talking here about dominance all the way down the supply chain.” As a result, American and European carmakers basically can’t make EVs without at least some parts or components coming from China. Beijing has achieved all this through government subsidies: Xi Jinping has poured vast sums of money into the EV industry. The good news is that Chinese-made batteries and EVs will help Western countries decarbonise their economies. The bad news is that China’s dominance is leaving Europe’s car industry in “serious trouble”. Given cars are the bedrock for the continent’s manufacturing industry, that could become a very big problem indeed.

There’s nothing wrong with the odd white lie, “if by being truthful you will rob another person of their self-confidence”, says Mary Killen in The Spectator. If you don’t recognise someone at a party, quickly say, “let me update my contacts before we go any further”, fish out your phone and ask them to put their name in. If you have to sack someone, say that “their presence in your office is making you uncomfortable – pause – as they are clearly far too talented for the position they are in”. And for failing to show up to anything informal, try: “I couldn’t risk coming because my husband has some explosive gossip and I knew he would be unable to resist telling everyone at the party.”

It’s the front of a plane that was badly damaged in a hailstorm, says The Times. The Austrian Airlines flight was travelling from Mallorca to Vienna when it accidentally flew into a thunderstorm that wasn’t visible on its weather radar. The cockpit windscreen shattered, and the nose cone was torn off by hailstones, but the pilot still managed to land safely. One passenger said later: “I only realised afterwards that it was bits of the nose cone that I saw flying past.”