The government has unveiled sweeping changes to fix England’s “broken” planning system and meet its target of building 1.5 million new homes in five years. The overhaul includes higher mandatory housebuilding targets for councils, which could force them to build on green belt land. Thousands of British veterans who were dismissed from the armed forces for being gay will be eligible for up to £70,000 in compensation. Those who fell foul of the ban on homosexuality between 1967 and 2000 can also now apply to have their rank restored and discharge reason amended. A humpback whale has made one of the longest migrations ever recorded, travelling at least 13,000km. Experts say the intrepid leviathan, which was spotted in the Pacific Ocean in 2017 before popping up in the Indian Ocean several years later, may be on an odyssey to find a mate.

Germany’s new refugee crisis

The “smoke in Damascus has not yet cleared”, says Stefan Kuzmany in Der Spiegel, but Germany’s politicians are already talking about how to “get rid of Syrian refugees as quickly as possible”. Within hours of President Assad’s fall, the far-right AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, said they should “return to Syria immediately”. Even Angela Merkel’s old party, the centre-right CDU, were saying the same: former deputy leader Jens Spahn suggested that Syrians could be encouraged to go home with €1,000 and chartered flights; his colleague Roman Poseck said he supported deportations. The speed and zeal of these demands has been “astonishing”. It’s like taking in your neighbours when their house is burning but moving them back in as soon as the arsonist is caught. We’ve no idea what the damage is, and “the next arsonist may already be pouring petrol into the kitchen”.

Germany is in a particular bind on this, say Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics. Thanks to Merkel’s decision to allow in a million Syrians during the 2015 refugee crisis – “Wir schaffen das”, she said, or “We can do this” – this has been a fraught issue in Berlin for almost a decade. But the Germans aren’t the only ones. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has already said, effectively, “Ok Syrians, we’ve put up with you for a while, but time for you to go home”. Britain has suspended the processing of Syrian asylum applications. This is, and will remain, a huge issue in Europe – some 14 million Syrians fled their homes during the Assad regime. It’s a reminder of “why global security matters”. Many politicians convince themselves that what happens in Syria or other seemingly far-off lands doesn’t affect us back home. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Keir Starmer has already made plenty of enemies as PM, says George Eaton in The New Statesman: pensioners, farmers, even teachers and nurses (who are threatening to strike over a pay offer). All successful governments have “a people” – the voters who define their project and stand by them in tough times. For Margaret Thatcher it was the aspirational class who benefited from the Right to Buy and share sales; for New Labour, it was those whose lives were transformed by tax credits and the Sure Start children’s scheme. Even during austerity in the 2010s, George Osborne was careful to protect pensioners and homeowners. So who are Starmer’s people? He has none. And the more enemies he piles up, the more of a problem that will become.

The cost of coffee is at an all-time high, says The Guardian, and rising. Arabica beans, the world’s most popular variety, now top £2.70 per pound, a hike of over 80% this year. Cheaper robusta beans, the bitter variety typically used for instant coffee, have almost doubled in price in 2024. The spike is the result of bad weather conditions in Brazil and Vietnam, the top global coffee producers.

Trump’s favourite foreign leader

Argentina’s Javier Milei is edging out Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as the “MAGA movement’s chief international inspiration”, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Donald Trump has called Milei his “favourite president”, and the wild-haired Argentine – known by his supporters as “the madman” – was the first foreign leader to visit Mar-a-Lago after the election. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, a global network of right-wing activists and politicians, held its first ever conference in Buenos Aires. Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, gave a speech lauding Milei’s relentless budget slashing, and vowed that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would do “the same thing in the United States”.

The rise of Milei in Trumpworld is a sign of an important ideological shift on the US right. Trump first ran for office railing against corporate America and rejecting the kind of budget cuts pushed by more traditional Republicans. In the first Trump White House Orbán became an icon to rising right-wing intellectuals like JD Vance, who were less interested in fiscal discipline and more interested in using the “power of the state to remake culture”. Milei is very different: he is an arch-libertarian, with four cloned mastiffs named after conservative economists, who has slashed government spending by 30% and “believes that drugs should be legal, as should the sale of organs”. His “defiantly vulgar, anarchically anti-establishment style” has helped build and maintain working-class support for economic austerity – “even as his policies start to bite”, his approval rating is a robust 55%. It’s no wonder the American right admire his philosophy: it’s “old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech bro form”.

Silicon Valley visionaries dream of making zillions from “cool, futuristic products that thrill consumers”, says John Thornhill in the FT. But the best returns come from boring bits of software – customer relationship management systems, payments processing platforms and the like – that companies use to deal with other companies. Over the past two decades, this Software-as-a-Service sector has produced an incredible 337 “unicorns” (start-ups valued at more than $1bn). For all the whizz-bangery of ChatGPT and co, the same is almost certain to be true in AI. According to the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator, the most promising AI founders follow a simple mantra: “find the most boring, repetitive administrative work you can and automate it”.

The Queen Mother was something of a technophobe, says The Times. Speaking at The Oldie literary lunch, Stephen Fry recalled the time her equerry, Martin Gilliat, had Harrods send over a new telly when her majesty’s was on the blink. “They forgot the buttons,” she complained. “No, ma’am,” Gilliat replied, and showed her how the newly invented remote control would allow her to watch the horse racing without having to get a footman in to fiddle around with the set. “Oh how clever,” she said. “But I still think it’s easier to ring.”

It’s a bottle of transparent Heinz ketchup that has racked up more than 113 million views on Instagram, says Wired – despite being completely fake. The ersatz sauce, posted by the account UK Snack Attack, is a “snackfish”, or made-up version of a popular snack designed to trick people online. The account’s owner has also created chocolate-dipped Pringles and pistachio Nutella – both hoaxes made in his kitchen and dressed up on Photoshop. Confectionary companies have been so inundated with requests to buy the treats that he has agreed to start labelling the posts as fake. See more of his creations here.