Donald Trump has blamed diversity hiring for the air collision that killed 67 people in Washington DC. The president claimed, without evidence, that under-qualified employees with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” had been hired as air traffic controllers as part of a diversity drive at the Federal Aviation Administration. Other reports cite staffing shortages on the night of the crash. China is building what US intelligence believes will be the world’s largest military command centre. Satellite images show a construction site in west Beijing roughly 10 times the size of the Pentagon, with deep holes that military experts suspect are designed to house hardened bunkers to protect Chinese leaders during conflict. Marianne Faithfull, poster child for the Swinging Sixties, died yesterday aged 78. The singer and actress, who was famously found by police wearing nothing but a fur rug during a 1967 raid on Keith Richards’s house, was a girlfriend of Mick Jagger, who paid tribute to his “wonderful friend”.

The return of “Blue Labour”

There has always been “something of the arranged marriage” about Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. His deputy, Angela Rayner, uses the metaphor herself. He was “hand-picked” as an appropriate suitor for the party membership and then elected by voters “less by love than necessity”. This has left the party – and the country – still unsure about what exactly Starmer wants from his premiership. “Who is the prime minister? Who is he for?” The lack of answers to those questions is becoming a growing worry inside No 10, especially with the success of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage – two men who can express their aims in a “powerful sentence or two”.

Hence the recent revival by Starmer’s strategists of “Blue Labour”, the post-Blairite group which felt that the party had ditched its “moral and ethical traditions” and abandoned the white working class. Fifteen years ago, this thinking was considered “dangerously countercultural”. Members of Ed Miliband’s office still “shudder at the memory” of Lord Glasman, Blue Labour’s founder, proposing an outright ban on immigration. But today the door to No 10 is “wide open” to Blue Labour and its ideas. Glasman and friends have quietly been tasked with looking at everything from the government’s foreign policy – specifically whether David Lammy’s “progressive realism” could do with less progressivism and more realism – to the failures of multiculturalism. The ultimate aim is to convince working-class voters that their natural political home is Labour rather than, say, Reform UK. That won’t be easy. But they are at least giving it a shot.

🇺🇸😔 Glasman was invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration by JD Vance, who consulted him years ago on whether he should bother trying to convince the Democrats to focus their attention on blue-collar workers. “The vice president made his own mind up on that one, clearly.”

A senior official from the first Trump administration recently told me, only half-jokingly, that what the president really wants is a succession of Trump presidents, says Katty Kay on The Rest Is Politics US. In his mind, he’ll lead for the next four years, Don Jr will run for governor of Montana before taking over the top job, “and then it’s Barron”. “He doesn’t want people talking about the Bush dynasty, he doesn’t want people talking about the Kennedy dynasty.” If he gets his way, it’s going to be all about “the Trump dynasty”.

Recently, I met a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, says Gary Shteyngart in The New Yorker. And now I understand why the dog-sized beasts have a “cultlike following” on social media. The creatures get hiccups; carry large oranges on their heads; let birds eat the schmutz out of their fur, bringing them almost “orgiastic levels of delight”; and in one case in a Japanese zoo, even adopted a cat into their social group. They’re so popular in Japan that you can book a 30-minute “coffee-and-carrot date” with one in a café – though as one aficionado noted, bagging a slot is “harder than getting Taylor Swift tickets”.

“Drill, baby, drill” is a gift to China

I understand that Donald Trump was elected in part to kill off identity politics, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. But his ideological decision to strip back government incentives for wind and solar power – because, essentially, renewables aren’t “manly enough” – is totally idiotic. Yes, of course the US should exploit its oil and gas advantage: under Joe Biden, America pumped more oil in 2023 than any country in the history of the world. But Biden also doubled down on wind and solar, hydrogen, fusion, nuclear and electric batteries, so we can own the future. Like Barack Obama and George W Bush before him, his policy was: “all of the above”.

Trump’s anti-renewable fixation is “the opposite of common sense”. Not only will it hurt his base: rural districts across the middle of America have the most solar and wind potential; the five states with the largest share of wind power are all solidly Republican. It will also hand China a massive advantage in the green transition. The Chinese aren’t so silly as to treat one form of electricity generation as “more conservative, liberal or Maoist than another” – all Beijing cares about is which is “most abundant, efficient, cheap and clean”. Trump’s all-in-on-fossil-fuels, “drill, baby, drill” rallying cry will not make America great again. “But it will definitely help make China great again.”

💨☀️ Whatever Trump does, says Christian Stöcker in Der Spiegel, he won’t be able to stop the “global transformation towards clean energy”. Analysts conservatively estimate that solar power will grow by 20% a year until 2030, and similarly rapid advances in battery storage and wind power mean 94% of new US power capacity in 2024 came from these three sources. Elsewhere, individuals in places like Pakistan and Indonesia are buying DIY solar kits from China in vast numbers. “Never in the history of mankind has a form of energy supply grown as quickly as renewables energies are now.”

If you’ve been on social media any time in the past week, says Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic, you may have come across a new word: “Eusexua”. Coined by the British singer FKA Twigs as the title of her new album, it is officially described as “the pinnacle of Human Experience”. More helpfully, Twigs has explained it to be “an ecstatic flow state, the feeling you get when dancing or making a really good cup of tea”. It’s perfect present-ness. Or, in other words, “not thinking about the internet”.

When he was at Eton, interior designer Nicky Haslam was “renowned” for the state of his study, says Bunny Guinness in The Daily Telegraph. “He wanted his life at school to be as sophisticated as his life in London”, so he decorated it with faux ocelot curtains, made ostrich plumes from card for pelmets, put artificial grass on the floor and hung a huge portrait of James Dean on the wall. The whole thing was lit by carriage lamps. “His housemaster was so impressed, he took guests there after dinner.”

It’s a Mount Lyell shrew, which has been caught on camera for the first time ever, says The Guardian. Three student scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, set up 150 traps high in the state’s eastern Sierra mountains to capture the tiny rodents, which hadn’t been seen for 20 years. The minuscule mammals are less than 10cm long and weigh as little as a gram and a half, about the same as two paper clips. “It was very different from holding a mouse or a hamster,” says Prakrit Jain, one of the students. “These shrews are almost the size of an insect.”