The Syrian rebel flag has been raised over the country’s embassy in Moscow, hours after deposed tyrant Bashar al-Assad fled to the Russian capital. The White Helmets rescue group say they are searching the feared Sednaya “torture prison” outside Damascus with specialist wall-breaching teams and “iron door-opening crews”, looking for hidden underground cells rumoured to house disappeared dissidents. Scientists are baffled after a new study suggested that the odd pain au chocolat might be good for you. Swedish boffins who tracked the sugar intake of around 70,000 people over 22 years found that while fizzy drinks increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, those who consumed most of their sugar from pastries, chocolate and cake, or from toppings like marmalade and honey, had reduced risk of heart problems of all kinds. Donald Trump has launched a new range of fragrances called “Fight Fight Fight”. The scents are priced at $199 each, with “rich, robust notes” for men and “delicate floral notes and a burst of citrus” for women. Order yours here.

Why Assad fell so fast

The “lightning speed” of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall has been astonishing, says Max Boot in The Washington Post. Just two weeks ago, the Syrian civil war was considered a frozen conflict and Assad was thought to be “firmly entrenched in power”. How did he fall so quickly? One reason is that when Iran and Russia came to his aid in 2015, Assad failed to use the resulting “breathing space” to reach out to rebels. Instead, he continued to “rule through terror”, killing or imprisoning opponents and subjecting dissidents to gruesome torture. The other big factor is external. Assad was no doubt counting on Moscow and Tehran to “save him from his own people” once again. But they have been totally consumed by their own problems: Russia in Ukraine, Iran with Israel. Without foreign help, “Assad was a goner”.

The big question is what happens next, says Simon Tisdall in The Observer. The Islamist rebel leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is no shrinking violet: he’s a former al-Qaeda-linked jihadist now “rebranded as national liberator”. His militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has a record of human rights abuse and authoritarian rule in the city of Idlib. Rival groups are already moving to “exploit the crisis”. And the thirst for retribution will be deep: the civil war left an estimated 500,000 people dead, and around 100,000 are believed “missing or forcibly disappeared”. The Syrian people are rightly celebrating the end of more than 50 years of brutal dictatorship. The danger now is that, as in Iraq after Saddam Hussein and Libya after Muammar Gaddafi, Assad’s removal will “trigger an uncontainable descent into chaos”.

Jolani himself is “educated, sophisticated and politically astute”, says David Patrikarakos in UnHerd. He seems to understand that international terror is a “busted flush”, and has shifted HTS towards political pragmatism and moderation. His troops seem to have minimised civilian casualties and taken control of airports, police stations and so on without the use of brute force. The Islamist group “remains problematic”: not so long ago its followers were “selling foreigners to Islamic State to behead on YouTube”, and the US has a $10m bounty out for Jolani’s death or capture. We must hope that his conversion away from jihadism is indeed “Damascene”.

What’s really worrying Labour MPs isn’t the debate over farmers or soaring immigration, says Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. It’s the decision to means-test the £300 winter fuel allowance. “We’re all getting flak – on the doorsteps, in our inboxes, even at the constituency surgeries,” says one minister. “It’s cut through more than any other issue.” Insiders say the party’s own analysis suggests that 100,000 people could be driven into poverty by the decision. The big fear is what happens when a pensioner dies alone in the cold. “It happens every year,” says another minister, “but this year it will be blamed on us.”

The Cut has interviewed 150 “seasoned wedding guests” – their mates, presumably – to compile a list of things we all “secretly despise” at other people’s nuptials. They include “weddings that pretend they aren’t weddings” (no, it’s not a “commitment ceremony”); open-mic toasts; kids under 10 on the dance floor; paper-only invitations (they get lost too easily); poorly orchestrated buffet dinners; temperature extremes (“if a blanket needs to be provided at the ceremony, it shouldn’t be outside”); and shuttle rides lasting over 15 minutes (the drunken slog back from the venue should be “as short as humanly possible”). See the rest here.

Europe is living in “fantasy land”

What will confound future historians most, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, is “how loudly the alarm bells have been ringing”. France, Germany and the UK – “the great pillars of the old European order” – are crumbling. The rest of the world can see this, “and is, frankly, astonished”. After the defenestration of French PM Michel Barnier, the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s coalition, and the “absurdist relaunch of Keir Starmer” last week, one wag wrote on X: “It’s like witnessing the fall of Rome but with wifi.” That’s overegging it, but what’s baffling is how incapable the elites of old Europe are at “even diagnosing the rot, let alone addressing it”.

For five decades, French governments of all stripes have delivered policies of “stunning consistency” – and chunky fiscal deficits – because it is the “immovable will of the French people to live beyond their means”. In the UK, similarly delusional voters demand Scandinavian public services with American tax rates, “gleaming new energy infrastructure but not in my backyard”, and triple-locked pensions “but not the bill”. Germans live in their own “dreamworld” – ripping off the US on defence and relying on Russia for cheap gas. Looking around the world amplifies the sense of “creeping unrealism” in Europe. India is “building like crazy”; Vietnam is securing huge inward tech investment and growing faster than England in the 19th century. Poland and Romania have been backwaters for centuries, but “their time is coming” – people there don’t talk about “rights and entitlements” as we do in the West, but of “responsibilities and duties”. Old Europe is still the best place in the world to live, but we’re drifting ever further into “fantasy land”. Time to wake up.

Elton John’s revelation that he has lost his sight is desperately sad, says Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph, but I’m not sure “a little thing like blindness” will keep him down. Over the decades, the 77-year-old has had battles with pneumonia and prostate cancer, along with joint issues that have restricted his mobility and required several operations. “I don’t have tonsils, adenoids or an appendix,” he said recently. “I don’t have a prostate. I don’t have a right hip or a left knee or a right knee. In fact, the only thing left of me is my left hip. But I’m still here.”

The new names for the London Overground – the Lioness Line, the Windrush Line, and so on – have upset a lot of people, says Brad Gray in Tortoise. But line names often make no sense. On the Underground, the Northern line “goes further south than any other Tube line”, the Central line stretches all the way into Essex, and the Bakerloo goes well beyond both Baker Street and Waterloo. The Jubilee line didn’t open during a jubilee year (it was 1979, two years after the Silver Jubilee). And if we’re being really pedantic, remember that the London Underground network is “mostly above ground”.

It’s a racetrack in Norfolk, according to a new Netflix series about the racing driver Ayrton Senna, which has been widely mocked online after fans spotted a massive mountain range in the background of the famously flat county. Senna spent the early part of his career racing at Snetterton, near Norwich. A Facebook post pointing out the geological gaffe – joking that the “monumental, Himalaya-rivalling peaks of Old Buckenham are frequently visible on a clear day” – has been shared more than 3,000 times. Comments include “that’s my next skiing holiday sorted”, and “worked at Snetterton circuit and lived just over that mountain, hell of a bike ride!”

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