Wildfires ripping through southern California have forced more than 30,000 people to evacuate their homes. Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency as extreme winds have fanned the flames across more than 3,000 acres, including the affluent Pacific Palisades neighbourhood where residents include Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg says third-party moderators are “too politically biased” and that it’s time to get back to “free expression”. Users will be able to comment on the accuracy of posts using X-style “community notes”. Morning-only coffee drinkers have a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a new decade-long study of more than 40,000 people. Researchers found that pre-lunch caffeinators are 31% less likely to die from heart-related issues than those who drink no coffee at all, a benefit which for some reason vanishes in those who chug the black stuff all day long.

What Musk gets wrong about the rape gangs

It’s amazing to think that just three weeks ago Nigel Farage and Elon Musk were “posing adoringly at Mar-a-Lago”, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. That “holiday romance” is now toast, seemingly due to Farage’s refusal to make nice with the “imprisoned career criminal” Tommy Robinson, who Musk sees as a hero for shining a light on a supposed conspiracy of silence over Britain’s rape gangs scandal. It’s good that this national disgrace is back in the headlines, but some facts are worth restating. For one thing, there has already been an inquiry into child sexual exploitation, which led to a “searing report and a number of urgent recommendations” in 2022. Those recommendations should have been adopted by the Conservative government of the day; they should be adopted now by the Labour government.

Thanks to Musk, there is now a deep, “if belated”, conviction that the rape gangs scandal – in which predominantly white girls were abused by predominantly Pakistani men – has not been properly understood or reckoned with. “This is correct.” Gangs are still operating, and there are credible allegations that police and local politicians may have been complicit in cover-ups. But there’s plenty Musk gets badly wrong, not least the fact that Robinson is a villain in this horrific tale, not a hero. Britain has sensible laws that restrict reporting on live trials, to avoid influencing juries. Robinson “very deliberately” nearly derailed a grooming trial by breaking these laws, which would have put the victims through the horror of having to testify twice. Besides, people threaten to rape and kill women “pretty much every second” on Musk’s social media platform, X. Perhaps instead of demanding the imprisonment of Jess Phillips, who spent her pre-parliamentary career helping abused women, he should clean up his own streets.

🗳🤐️The real reason Labour don’t want another government inquiry is because they’re “terrified of offending the Muslim community”, says Dan Hodges in the Mail on Sunday. Huge numbers of Muslim voters turned on the party at the last election: shadow frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth lost his 22,000 majority in Leicester to a pro-Palestinian independent; large majorities were overturned in similar circumstances in Blackburn, Birmingham and West Yorkshire. You can see why Jess Phillips, whose majority in Birmingham Yardley is just 693 votes, doesn’t want to talk about it.

In opposition, Labour had an “eagle eye” for Tories’ reliance on rich friends to enhance their lifestyles, says Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. This attitude appears to have deserted them in office. The latest senior Labour figure to get caught out is Treasury Minister Tulip Siddiq. She is reported to have lived in at least two properties given to her family by allies of her aunt Sheikh Hasina, who ran an autocratic regime in Bangladesh until she was ousted and exiled last summer, leaving a trail of “embezzlement and human rights abuses”. It’s typical of Labour’s naivety and incompetence that such dodgy connections didn’t raise alarm bells when vetting a minister whose job is literally “rooting out financial misdoings”.

As the son of a former Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau was initially viewed as just another nepo baby cashing in on his father’s name, says The New York Times. The moment that “distinguished him forever from his papa” came when he challenged Patrick Brazeau, a Conservative senator known as “Brass Knuckles”, to a charity boxing match in 2012. Trudeau got “clobbered” in the first round, before unleashing a “Rocky-style” comeback and winning the bout. “I can hear it already,” said the commentator. “Trudeau for leader.” Watch the fight here.

Are we entering a new historical era?

There is a grainy photograph that sometimes goes viral showing a young girl in front of the shining twin towers of the World Trade Centre, with the caption: “the world you were born in no longer exists”. It’s not a subtle message, says James Marriott in The Times, but it speaks to a broader truth. We are living through the “passing of an age” – the end of the “technocratic, good-mannered, optimistic and consensual” politics that has prevailed since World War Two – and the arrival of a different world. The most obvious marker is the re-election of Donald Trump, confirming that his rise is not an aberration. Nigel Farage may become leader of the opposition, or even Britain’s prime minister, at the next election. Across the West, liberalism is being “swept from the scene” by populists, demagogues and strongmen.

But epochal changes aren’t merely political. We’re coming to the end of the century-long dominion of the internal combustion engine, which may become symbolic of the era the way hansom cabs became “emblems of Victorian London”. Another defining aspect of the 20th century was mass literacy – newspapers, magazines, popular classics, airport bestsellers – yet adult reading proficiency is now falling across the world. And whereas the first smartphone owners used their 21st-century tech in a distinctly 20th-century way – reading articles and looking at photos – the arrival of apps like TikTok has created a new video-based culture that is “truly indigenous to digital technology”. Gen Z may well be the first generation since the 18th century not to produce a bestselling literary novelist. Historical epochs are obviously arbitrary and subjective. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that “we are watching the page of history turning”.

The “rules of conversation” in Cecil Hartley’s 1875 book A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette still ring remarkably true, says the lifestyle website The Art of Manliness. They include: never anticipate the point of a story someone else is telling, or “take it from his lips to finish it in your own language”; don’t, unless requested, speak of your own business or profession (it is “low-bred and vulgar”); to “listen with an air of interest” is as good an accomplishment as speaking well; and avoid pedantry, which is “a mark, not of intelligence, but stupidity”. Read the rest here.

Diplomacy, or indeed the lack of it, often gets lost in translation, says Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics. After an attack by insurgents during the Malaya uprising in the 1950s, the British High Commissioner, Gerald Templer, roared into the village in a jeep, jumped out with his translator and gave the guerrillas a good tongue-lashing. “You are a bunch of bastards,” he told them. “But let me tell you: I can be a bastard too.” The translator duly conveyed this ominous message as: “None of your parents were married when you were born. But don’t worry – mine weren’t either.”

It’s the new design for Denmark’s royal coat of arms, which has been changed in an apparent rebuke to Donald Trump. The polar bear and the ram, which symbolise the two autonomous Danish territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, have been given their own fields on the heraldic display rather than sharing one. Trump suggested that the US should buy Greenland during his first term and has recently returned to the idea, saying he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it didn’t sell up. The president-elect has also suggested retaking control of the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, “which has a beautiful ring”.