Axel Rudakubana is being sentenced today for the murders of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last July. The 18-year-old has pleaded guilty to 16 offences, including two terrorism-related charges, but is unlikely to receive a whole-life order because he was a minor at the time of the attack. The Royal Navy has sent a warning to a Russian spy ship after it entered UK waters for the second time on Monday. Defence Secretary John Healey said the Yantar was spotted in November “loitering over critical undersea infrastructure”. More than 100 Olympians from last summer’s Paris Games have returned their medals to the French mint due to rust and flaking. The Gallic goldsmiths blamed faulty varnish, with bronze medals affected most severely. Sacré bleu!

US presidents now have “king-like powers”

The past week has seen the power of the American presidency stretched to “once-unimaginable dimensions”, say Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen in Axios. Before the inauguration, Donald Trump stunned the cryptocurrency world by launching two “meme coins” – $TRUMP and $MELANIA – that immediately vaulted him to “crypto billionaire status”. This is all perfectly legal, as there are “basically no limitations” on presidents profiting from their position – it’s just that none of the others dared do so. Equally astonishing is Trump’s pardoning of roughly 1,500 people convicted or charged over the January 6 attack on the Capitol. They included violent criminals who attacked police officers with metal batons, fire extinguishers and tear gas, as well as Enrique Tarrio, leader of the openly fascist Proud Boys group, who was given a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy.

Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans aren’t at all comfortable with this. But they think, in the words of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, that Joe Biden “opened the door” for it by using his last moments in office to pre-emptively pardon five members of his family. Even Bill Daley, a longtime Biden friend who was White House chief of staff under President Obama, calls the pre-emptive pardons “disgusting”, saying Biden will never be able to wipe this “stain” from his legacy. Between them, Biden and Trump really have pushed America into uncharted waters. This country doesn’t have a king. “But we’re dancing close to king-like power.”

♻️🤯 It’s worth noting that there’s an “apparent loophole” in America’s constitutional limit on two presidential terms: Donald Trump could in theory run as the vice presidential nominee, with the clear understanding that he would take back power from whoever joined him on the ticket once they were elected. It’s just “one of the once-unthinkable scenarios that seem more thinkable than ever”.

Donald Trump isn’t the first US president to set his sights on reclaiming the Panama Canal, says Joshua Zeitz in Politico. When Ronald Reagan challenged incumbent Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, he used the “fringe issue” to animate his conservative base and briefly reignite his flailing campaign. “When it comes to the Canal,” Reagan said in one speech, “we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” It wasn’t quite enough to get him over the line against Ford, but “helped him defeat Jimmy Carter four years later”.

One of Seoul’s biggest tourist attractions is a former highway, says Raphael Rashid in The Guardian. Just over 20 years ago, the vast elevated road above what was previously the Cheonggyecheon river carried 168,000 cars into the South Korean capital each day. But in 2002 the mayor decided to remove the highway and restore the stream beneath it. Today the 3.5-mile, tree-lined waterway has helped transform the city: air pollution levels and temperatures have dropped, monsoon rains are easier to contain and wildlife has returned. “Initially, everyone thought it would cause gridlock,” says one local. “Now we can’t imagine the highway ever being here.”

What Hitler’s “pet toffs” got wrong about Britain

Unity Mitford’s newly unearthed 1930 diary reads almost like a satire, says Libby Purves in The Times. Much of it is spent describing the young aristocrat’s “affluent loafing”: continental trips; hairdos; taxis to lunch at the House of Lords and dinner at Eaton Square; sisterly squabbles. At one point she “buys a monkey in Munich and takes it out to dinner before returning it and demanding a refund”. Yet among the “debutante innocence” are rhapsodies about her “very very sweet” friend Adolf Hitler, her excitement about donning a uniform at a Nuremberg rally, and a chilling fervour for being a “Jew-hater”. It would be tempting to see all this as evidence of the theory – pushed on Hitler by Unity, Oswald Mosley and the Duke of Windsor – that Nazism could find popularity in Britain. But I think the Führer was misled by his “pet toffs”.

Anti-Semitism was certainly apparent in 1930s Britain, with Jews “othered” in a repellent way. But they were also part of the nation’s fabric. When Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marched against East End Jews, five local mayors protested and the blackshirts were blocked by “ordinary locals” – dockers, Muslim Somali seafarers, and women hurling chamber pots. After reading Mein Kampf in 1939, the future Queen Mother wrote to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, and other friends, urging them to see the danger of Hitler’s “mentality, ignorance and utter sincerity”. Today, as the far-right spreads across the West, I find all this heartening. Once Britain notices the reality of fascism, the general instinct – from the monarchy to the docks – is “to throw a chamber pot at it”.

🙋‍🙄 PG Wodehouse famously mocked Mosley in his books as “Roderick Spode” with his “black-shorts” brigade. “You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People,” he wrote in his 1938 book The Code of the Woosters. “That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is, ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”

The premise of the game “Pop the Confetti” is simple: use your cursor to click the “pop” button as quickly as you can, to see how fast you can do it. You’ll be rewarded with the celebratory sound of a party blower and, unsurprisingly, a screen full of confetti. Try it here.

Chinese boffins have begun constructing a “giant celestial solar farm”, says Dezeen: a kilometre-wide array of photovoltaic panels that will be launched into orbit 36,000km above the planet’s surface. Unlike their earthbound counterparts, space-based solar panels can harvest sunlight continuously, unaffected by seasons, weather or the day/night cycle. Given there is no atmosphere between them and the sun, they are also thought to be around 10 times more efficient at energy collection. The plan is for the array to transmit energy back to the planet’s surface using microwaves, in theory producing as much energy in a year as the “total quantity of oil that can be extracted from the Earth”.

They’re soup-flavoured lozenges, says Delicious. The food company Progresso’s new stomach-churning snack is inspired by its classic Chicken Noodle Soup, with comforting hints of savoury broth, chicken, vegetables, soft egg noodles and parsley. “When you’re sick, nothing is truly more reassuring than Chicken Noodle Soup,” says the firm’s business director. “So, we thought, why stop at the soup bowl?”