An estimated 20,000 farmers have descended on Westminster to protest against the government’s changes to agricultural inheritance tax. Throughout the day, around 1,800 of the protesters will lobby their local MPs in person over the new rules, under which farms worth more than £1m will be liable to the tax at 20%. A Hong Kong court has sentenced dozens of pro-democracy leaders to years in jail for subversion in the biggest trial so far under the territory’s controversial national security law. A total of 45 prominent lawyers, scholars, journalists, activists and democratic politicians were imprisoned for up to 10 years over their involvement in plans to pick opposition candidates for local elections. Much of the UK woke up to their first snow of the season this morning. Scotland recorded its coldest early winter temperature since 1998 – a chilly -11.2C in Braemar, Aberdeenshire – while snow has also been falling across Wales, northern England and parts of the south.

Maybe we’re better off in echo chambers

It was “quite the flounce”, says Andrew Doyle in UnHerd: no sooner had Donald Trump won the US election than The Guardian intoned “with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet” that it would no longer be gracing us with its tweets. “X is a toxic media platform,” the paper declared, and so, along with many progressive users, the Grauniad is off to find somewhere more suited to its narrow ideological standpoint. It’s the same “safe space” mentality that led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to set up a “self-care suite” after Trump’s victory, so students could “process their trauma” by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies. What cowards. “Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.”

These “grandiose statements of leave-taking” are, of course, hilarious, says James Marriott in The Times, as though switching the website you use to air your banal political opinions makes you a kind of “Rosa Parks of cyberspace”. But it’s part of a broader trend: the age of the “pullulating and rambunctious” digital town square is over. In future, liberals and conservatives will gather in different online spaces. This is a good thing. Online rage comes not, as most people think, from “echo chambers”, but from normal people being exposed to their maddest political opponents. The Telegraph and The Guardian peacefully co-existed for more than a century – readers could go about their lives blissfully unaware of what nonsense the other paper contained. But on X, Guardian types are forced daily to reckon with the looniest right-wingers, and Telegraph readers with the nuttiest lefties. “Neither side has been made much calmer by the experience.”

It’s a pressing time for Europe, says Simon Tisdall in The Observer: Russia is “devouring Ukrainian territory”, China is leveraging its trade surplus to “divide-and-rule”, Donald Trump is “itching for a fight”. And what is the EU doing? “Haggling over who gets which well-padded seat in the European Commission.” Five months after the European elections, the EU’s top leadership still isn’t in place – they’re currently trying to work out whether Hungary’s Olivér Várhelyi can be “trusted with animal welfare” – and it may not be “at work” until next year. In a chaotic and predatory world, Europe is like a “tethered, bleating goat surrounded by wolves”.

In Number Dash, players are given a randomised grid of numbers and must click on them in ascending order as quickly as possible. There are three levels to choose from: easy (25 numbers), medium (50) and hard (100). Test your speed here.

Long-range missiles for Ukraine: too little, too late?

Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to launch long-range US missiles at targets inside Russia has been met with “palpable” relief in Kyiv, says Robert Clark in The Daily Telegraph. The hope is that the change will help Ukrainian forces achieve some sort of breakthrough across “various stagnant fronts”. But the reality is much more depressing. There are just six weeks until Donald Trump takes office, whereupon he’ll presumably ramp up peace talks. That’s simply not enough time to reverse any of Russia’s recent advances. Lifting the ban earlier in the war could have been a game-changer, by allowing Kyiv to damage Russia’s supply lines. This is “too little, far too late”.

It’s true that the decision won’t “dramatically change Ukraine’s flagging fortunes on the front lines”, says The Economist. Reports suggest Kyiv will initially only be permitted to use ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) in Russia’s Kursk province, and many of the “juiciest Russian targets” are elsewhere. But it might encourage Britain, France and Germany to allow Ukraine to use their long-range missiles on Russian territory, too. It will also “send a message” to North Korea: Western officials are worried that Pyongyang’s initial deployment of an estimated 10,000 troops to Russia might turn into a steady pipeline, and they want to “nip that in the bud”. And it should strengthen Kyiv’s hand ahead of negotiations when Trump does take over. The danger, of course, is that Moscow responds aggressively: on Sunday, its forces crippled Ukraine’s power grid with their largest air strike since last year. Prepare for a “tumultuous two months”.

The Instagram account Your Music Education has put together a video showcasing every UK No 1 from the 1990s, with each song given one second for every week it topped the charts. Watch the full nine-minute masterpiece here.

If you’ve ever wondered how many press-ups you should be able to do, American fitness boffins have the answer, says The Manual. According to Mayo Clinic research, 25-year-old men should be able to manage 28, for 35-year-olds it’s 21, and 45-year-olds should be aiming for 16. The target drops to 12 for 55-year-olds, and at 65 it’s a nice round 10.

It’s a new hotel in the Philippines that has won the Guinness World Record for the largest building in the shape of a chicken, says The Architect’s Newspaper. The 114-foot rooster at the Campuestohan Highland Resort was dreamt up by owner Ricardo Tan, who said he wanted to build something with “wow factor”. The colossal cock pays homage both to the local agricultural sector and the country’s controversial cockfighting industry. It has 15 rooms at around $100 a night, although they don’t have windows in order to maintain the rooster’s “aesthetic integrity”.