Investors are nervously waiting for the US markets to open after fears over a low-cost Chinese AI start-up wiped nearly $1trn off global stock markets yesterday. DeepSeek’s chatbot can perform some tasks at the same level as models released by the likes of OpenAI and Meta, despite reportedly being developed at a fraction of the price. Astronomers have discovered a “Super-Earth” that they believe could be a prime candidate for hosting alien life. Space boffins say the planet, which is around 20 light-years from our solar system, is among the closest “Earth-analogues” ever discovered and lies in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” of habitability. The idea that women are drawn to older men appears to be a myth. Romance researchers sent more than 6,000 men and women aged between 22 and 85 on 4,000 blind dates, and found that both sexes are – at least initially – more attracted to younger partners.

I’m no fan of Trump, but he’s “unravelling Biden’s insanity”

I could never have voted for Donald Trump, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. But I must admit a large part of me is exhilarated by his first week. “Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even.” The reason is simple: on the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is “a return to common sense” – a reflection of the sane views held by the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. On immigration, Americans have been so burnt by Joe Biden’s “open-borders catastrophe” – illegal crossings averaged two million a year from 2021 to 2023 – that 66% now favour mass deportations. In every major democracy, mass migration has “empowered the far-right”. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, “Biden just intensified it”.

Even more extreme were his executive orders on “equity”, which enforced the ludicrous view that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”, buttressed by mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender and queer theory. This was “authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination”. Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman, including in sports and intimate spaces. His administration backed the “irreversible transing of children” and lied about the science, “subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their ability to have kids or even an orgasm”. Biden was, in all these respects, an unremitting extremist. “All Trump is doing this week is unravelling this insanity.” I hate the man, but “my conservative soul is glad”.