Three men have been charged with “spying for Hong Kong”, says The Times. The suspects, who were among 11 people detained last week under the National Security Act, will appear in court today charged with foreign interference and assisting the Hong Kong intelligence service. Using the internet is good for you, unless you’re a young woman. A global study of two million people in 168 countries found that those who used the internet had better physical and mental health than those who avoided it, apart from women aged 15 to 24, who reported worse “community wellbeing”. Stargazers across the UK and Ireland caught sight of the Northern Lights this weekend after the biggest solar storm in decades. The aurora borealis, which is formed by charged particles emitted by the sun interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, was spotted as far south as Cornwall.

“I really ought to mow the lawn”

All over Westminster, wonks, journalists and lobbyists are “frothing at the mouth with anticipation” of the general election, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times. Every minister who doesn’t know the price of a loaf of bread or shadow cabinet member with a secret second home will be “pounced on with delirious glee”. And usually, I care about a general election. But this time you can vote for a party that is “useless by accident” or a party that will be “useless on purpose”. It really doesn’t matter who wins. “It won’t change your life in any way, shape or form.” The “woke civil service” means the Conservatives “won’t even be allowed to say what they want to do, let alone actually do it”. Meanwhile Labour will be prevented from doing what they really want by the world’s financial markets, “and common sense”.

Some hacks would have you believe what’s important is culture, but it all feels strained. When Keir Starmer implied last year that a woman could have a penis, the Westminster bubble went bananas: “HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A WOMAN IS.” And we all sat at home, sighing and thinking: “Yes he does. He just can’t say it, because unlike JK Rowling, he needs a job.” When footage emerged of Rishi Sunak saying he “doesn’t have any working-class friends”, the wonks were “spitting with fury”. Meanwhile, you and I were thinking: “I really ought to mow the lawn.” The truth is, whoever wins, the potholes will keep giving you punctures, the small boats will keep arriving, NHS waiting lists will keep growing, bills will keep landing on the doormat, “we’ll all continue to pay taxes and we’ll all continue to die”.

There was something odd about that photo of Keir Starmer welcoming Tory defector Natalie Elphicke to the Labour party, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph: “It was completely retro.” Elphicke was dressed in a dark blue twinset with metal buttons, with a red, white and blue silk scarf “neatly arranged around her neck”. If I didn’t recognise Starmer, I would have guessed the picture was from 1987 and showed a “junior transport minister in the Thatcher government giving some special privatisation award to the best British Airways air hostess”.

What possible good could come of bullying a young girl?

The older I get, says Sarah Vine in The Mail on Sunday, the more I think that humans – “as a species” – are going bonkers. Take the hysteria over Eurovision. The annual event is a “silly, kitsch, largely irrelevant music competition”, in which embarrassing regional acts perform “pale approximations of proper pop songs” against a background of “cheerful xenophobia”. Or at least it was until Greta Thunberg turned up with her “army of hate pixies”, and explained in her “characteristically sanctimonious manner” that the best thing we could all do was to bully and intimidate Israel’s entry, Eden Golan, whose only crime, “apart from her awful fake nails”, is her nationality.

The 20-year-old was “booed for performing a song about survival in the face of suffering” and forced to lock herself in her hotel room for fear of being attacked. Instead of sympathising with a young girl whose country was recently the victim of an appalling terrorist attack, we’re treating her as if she were “responsible for decades of conflict in the Middle East”. The madness doesn’t stop there: the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed a drag queen called Crystal who cancelled a screening event for 800 people because of Israel’s inclusion. “I’m sorry Crystal’s party was ruined”, but have we really sunk so low that this warrants a slot on Newsnight? I didn’t personally think much of Golan’s song, but I defend her right to perform it for the simple reason that “I believe in a world where young women with silly nails can dance and sing as much as they want without being afraid”. I will never understand the “derangement” of those trying to stop her.

Sperm whales may have their own alphabet, says The New York Times. Unlike the eerie melodies sung by humpbacks, the block-shaped leviathans rattle off click-clacking noises that “sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door”. A team of boffins analysed thousands of hours of recordings and found that the marine mammals have a far richer set of sounds that previously thought, with patterns that appear to form a “phonetic alphabet”. Next up: figuring out what they’re saying.

It’s a “portal” between Dublin and New York. The 3.5-ton public artwork livestreams the view from the Dublin installation, on O’Connell Street, to the New York one (above) in the Flatiron South Public Plaza, and vice versa. Portals.org, the company behind the project, says the screens are designed to help users “meet fellow humans above borders and prejudices”. But perhaps inevitably, passers-by on the Dublin side have also engaged in less wholesome displays. One woman had to be led away by police after drunkenly grinding against the screen for a good 20 minutes; another Dubliner held up a photo on his phone of the burning twin towers on 9/11.