Keir Starmer has chosen Peter Mandelson as Britain’s new ambassador to the United States, says The Times, the first politician to be given the role in almost half a century. The PM thinks the New Labour veteran has the “trade expertise and networking abilities” to bolster the UK’s interests during Donald Trump’s presidency. The Bank of England has warned that the economy is stagnating, after businesses responded to Rachel Reeves’s budget by raising prices and cutting jobs. Officials say they now expect “zero growth” in the final three months of 2024. The oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments has sold at auction for more than $5m. The 52kg marble slab (pictured), which dates from 300 to 800 AD, was unearthed on the southern coast of Israel in 1913 but used as a paving stone at a local home for 30 years before a scholar recognised its historical significance.

Why even “Never Trumpers” are changing their tune

Tech barons from Apple CEO Tim Cook to Google co-founder Sergey Brin have made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Donald Trump said this week. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” He’s not kidding. After the Jan 6 uprising on Capitol Hill, Mark Zuckerberg suspended Trump’s Facebook account. Last month, Zuckerberg stood, “hand-on-heart”, while the Mar-a-Lago speakers played the national anthem sung by imprisoned Jan 6 rioters. He has also donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, as have ChatGPT boss Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Partly, of course, this is cynical self-interest. But the “Great Capitulation” is also a sign that the “air is going out of the old liberal order”.

I’ve always been a “Never Trump” conservative, says Bret Stephens, also in The New York Times. And there’s plenty to fear about a second Trump term. But the “heavy moralising and incessant doomsaying” that has typified so much of the Never Trump movement has rendered it “politically impotent”. It is Trump’s “sulphurous contempt” for elites that makes him a hero to his followers. And some of that anger is correctly directed at a self-satisfied class that “thinks it knows better but often doesn’t”, be it on Covid, immigration, or how to get our allies to pony up for their own defence. He talked to voters about rising prices and border chaos, while we banged on about “the soul of the nation”. Of course he won. So here’s a thought for perennial Trump critics like me: let’s drop the “lurid historical comparisons to past dictators”, stop sounding paranoid about the “ever-looming end of democracy”, and wish the new administration well.

♊️🤷 It’s hard to gauge how disruptive Trump will be in his second term, says Edward Luce in the FT. As his one-time White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci puts it: “Trump is a classic Gemini. You could get the genial, joking, golfing Trump, or you could get his evil, vengeful twin. Maybe we’ll see both.”

If you want to understand how solar power is changing the world, says Christian Stöcker in Der Spiegel, just look at Pakistan. The state electricity supply, which relies primarily on old coal-fired power plants, is useless: there are frequent power cuts and prices have risen by 155% in the past three years. So millions of people are taking matters into their own hands, buying cheap, easily available solar panels from China, bypassing the national grid altogether. It’s been a huge success: solar is by far the cheapest form of power, cutting bills by as much as 80%, and the amount of electricity generated that way has risen from 0.6 to 17 gigawatts in just two years.

Games Workshop – the company that makes the dinky, paintable figurines for the nerdy tabletop battle game Warhammer – is about to join London’s flagship FTSE 100 index, says the FT. The geeky firm is worth a whopping £4.6bn, more than easyJet, Burberry, Tate & Lyle, Greggs, ITV and Manchester United. It’s roughly twice the value of the 282-year-old investment firm Rathbones, and more than three times the size of Aston Martin.

China’s industrial might is its secret weapon in war

Most people think about China’s manufacturing dominance in purely economic terms, says Noah Smith on Substack, but really we should think about it in military terms. In pretty much any war, as in Ukraine right now, the big question is “who can produce more munitions and get them to the battlefield in time”. And that’s obviously much easier when you have an existing manufacturing base. By 2030, China will account for an estimated 45% of all global manufacturing, “matching or outmatching the US and all of its allies”. In other words, if a future conflict becomes an “extended war of production”, there is “no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone”.

This is no accident. Beijing has lavished industrial policy spending on raising production in “militarily useful” industries: cars, batteries, electronics, chemicals, ships, aircraft, drones, semiconductors and so on. This not only raises Chinese production, it also creates a flood of overcapacity elsewhere – pricing American, European, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies out of the market. China is, in effect, “forcibly deindustrialising every single one of its geopolitical rivals”. Most western countries, stuck in their free market ways, are fine with this. They think about manufacturing in terms of “economic efficiency”: if China wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it and steer your own workers towards doing something more profitable, like making chat apps. And that’s fine in peacetime. But then a war comes along. And suddenly you realise those chat apps “aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms”.

This time lapse video of a pinecone growing into a pine tree, over the course of almost two years, has racked up nearly a million views on YouTube. Watch the full video here.

Seventeenth-century women went to drastic lengths to stay healthy, says Daniel Brooks in The Daily Telegraph. One of the grizzliest home remedies was “viper wine”, which some desperate ladies glugged down daily in a bid to preserve their youthful looks. The recipe is simple: “Capture 30 or so poisonous snakes and seal them in a large cask of your best wine. Let this sit for a few months until the snakes have mostly disintegrated. Optionally, strain before serving.” Possible side effects included intense headaches, dilated pupils, and death.

It’s an example of a “small but growing field” of professional back scratchers, says The Wall Street Journal, many charging $100 or more an hour to do what a “wooden spoon will do for free”. At Toni George’s salon in Miami, a former hair stylist drags her three-inch nails across clients’ backs, arms and legs, as well as scratching their scalps and ears, for $130 an hour. At the Soft Touch ASMR spa in Pasadena, California, Julie Luther charges $110 for a 50-minute treatment that also involves rooster feathers and soft makeup brushes.