UK inflation has risen to 2.3% in October, the highest rate for six months. The spike, driven by the increase in energy prices following the 10% lift in Britain’s energy cap last month, cements expectations that the Bank of England will not drop interest rates again this year. The US and several other western countries have temporarily closed their embassies in Kyiv after receiving information that a “significant air attack” could be imminent, says The Daily Telegraph. The threat comes a day after Ukraine fired US-supplied long-range missiles deep into Russia for the first time. “Manifest” has been named the word of the year by the Cambridge Dictionary. In its modern usage the word means to “dream or will something into existence”, and has seen a “surge of celebrity-inspired popularity”, says The Guardian. Pop star Dua Lipa and US gymnast Simone Biles both attribute their success to the woo-woo practice.

What Treasury bean counters get wrong about farmers

You can see why a Whitehall economist might think imposing inheritance tax on farmers was a good idea, says Will Dunn in The New Statesman. While the new headline threshold is £1m, for married couples that can effectively rise to £3m – and even then the 20% rate is half what it is for everyone else. But farmers really are different. The key distinction is that a farm’s assets – land, machinery and so on – are vastly disproportionate to its earnings. The CEO of a normal company with, say, £10m in assets would expect to earn a “very decent salary”; the equivalent family farmer might earn less than minimum wage. The other big difference is that most farmers – as many as 70%, according to one online poll – “wish their assets were worth less”. Try finding a start-up founder who “wishes their share price was lower”.

The government has clearly been taken aback by the anger over these changes, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Treasury bean counters thought only 500 estates a year would be affected; farming groups say those sums are wrong and that the real figure will be much higher. Crucially – and unlike with the VAT change for private schools – inheritance tax is “reviled” by most of the public, so farmers enjoy widespread sympathy. And Labour only has itself to blame. Keir Starmer won office in part by promising not to enact more wide-ranging, universal tax rises. That has left the chancellor “overly reliant on fiddly, precision-targeted revenue raids” – each of which carries the risk of annoying some particular interest group. First it was pensioners, with the cuts to winter fuel payment; now it’s farmers. With more of these to come, it’s going to be hard for Labour to get out of its “defensive crouch”.

You can always rely on your children to keep you grounded, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. During a ceremony on Sunday where Richard Curtis received an honorary Academy Award for his humanitarian work, the director overheard his son Charlie tell his girlfriend it was “the Oscar for people who never made a movie good enough to win an Oscar”. Curtis hoped the Academy’s montage of people paying tribute to his career – including his wife, the broadcaster Emma Freud – might stir up more admiration. No such luck. “You couldn’t get anyone else to be nice about you?” Charlie asked afterwards. “You had to get mum?”

Absinthe is back, says The Observer. The emerald spirit – beloved by “history’s most bohemian creatives, from Oscar Wilde to Vincent van Gogh” – was nicknamed the “green fairy” thanks to its supposed hallucinatory properties (possibly something to do with its whopping 70% alcohol content). In 1915, French officials banned the drink for almost a century, but an EU rule change overturned the ban, and in recent years the harsh-tasting liqueur has become something of a staple at in-the-know bars. Award-winning London establishment Lyaness serves the “safety frappé”, a cocktail made from shiso absinthe, Hendrick’s gin, mint, anise and peach wine; while the Three Sheets bars in Soho and Dalston serve the “sazzaquack”, which contains rooibos-infused lemon absinthe.

Even Trump fans are balking at some of his cabinet picks

I’m willing to defend Donald Trump on most things, says Michael Goodwin in the New York Post, but two of his cabinet picks really are beyond the pale. The president-elect’s choice for attorney-general, Matt Gaetz, is a “quicksilver provocateur” with a reputation in Congress for being untrustworthy – quite some feat, “given the competition”. Gaetz is the subject of a litany of unsavoury allegations, including that he had sex with an underage girl at a party. As for Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s choice for secretary of health, he is a conspiracy theory nutjob about pretty much everything: vaccines, food, medicine, water, even “the air”.

They’re just the half of it, says Edward Luce in the FT. Trump’s nominee for defence secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, was removed from his National Guard duties during the January 6 riots in 2021 because his tattoos marked him out as a far-right Christian nationalist. Tulsi Gabbard, slated to oversee 18 US intelligence agencies, has parroted so many of Moscow’s talking points that in “normal times” she’d be unlikely to get even a low-level security clearance. The pity of all this is that the US government really is in desperate need of reform – “Washington power is by the lawyers, of the lawyers, and for the lawyers, not the people” – but Trump’s picks are instead out to destroy. (Gaetz reportedly secured his nomination by declaring: “I’ll go over there and start cutting fucking heads.”) Optimists point out that the US republic survived one Trump administration. But what will his successor inherit?

In 1982, the BBC show That’s Life asked members of the public for their thoughts on edible underwear. They weren’t hugely impressed. “If they stick to your bum like they stick to the roof of your mouth, you’re in trouble,” concludes one sensible shopper. “They wouldn’t be any good to me,” says another. “They’re not uplifting enough.” One chap is more open-minded. After taking a chunk out of a cherry-flavoured bra, he declares: “It goes good with a pie.” Watch the full video here.

Britain has long been a pioneer in telecoms: we built the first commercial telegraph in 1837; made the first transatlantic phone call 90 years later; and sent the first text message to a mobile phone in 1992. But today the industry “lags rather than leads”, says The Economist. According to new research, Britain ranks 46th for mobile network download speeds out of the 56 developed and developing countries for which data exists – “the worst mobile service in the rich world”.

It’s Louis Vuitton’s flagship New York store, which has been covered in a façade resembling the brand’s famous luggage while renovations take place underneath, says Dezeen. The colossal cases showcases the brand’s “Trianon Grey” pattern, which dates back to the 19th century, and were created by 3D scanning normal sized bags and scaling them up a few thousand times. The stack features 840 hand-finished rivets, and the largest of the handles weighs over 2,200kg.