Tech companies will be given access to NHS data under new plans set out by the government to make Britain a “world leader” in artificial intelligence. The health service’s unrivalled archives of scans, biodata and anonymised patient records will be used to help train AI models in the hope of attracting billions of pounds of investment from American tech firms. Forecasters in Los Angeles have issued a rare red flag warning for strong winds today, with firefighters still struggling to contain the city’s two biggest fires. The blazes have killed at least 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 buildings and cars. Wind speeds are due to drop on Thursday. Red grape juice could be a drug-free alternative to Viagra. A Chinese study of more than 1,500 men found that those who consume the beverage five times a week have an 80% reduced risk of erectile dysfunction, says the Daily Star. Talk about a “stiff drink”.

Why we look away from acts of evil

The first response of most human beings to “irredeemably evil acts” is to ask who committed them, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, “we tend to move on pronto”. As a Catholic, my initial reaction to sex abuse in the church was to feel “numbed and incapacitated”. And as a “passionate enthusiast” for the Iraq War, I flatly rejected the first rumours of alleged war crimes by American troops. I didn’t believe that the US military would stoop to such barbarism, but more importantly I didn’t want it to be true, because it would undermine my whole rationale for the invasion. It took the images of Abu Ghraib for me to “wake the fuck up”.

This is why the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape gangs has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry was conducted years ago, but the “sheer scale and depravity” of what happened is only finally sinking in. Tens of thousands of poor white girls were targeted by Pakistani men, with the justification that these non-Muslims were “sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt”. Racist insults were common; these weren’t just rapes, but “hate crimes of a grisly sort”. It’s not that the British media covered this up. But imagine the response if it were gangs of white nationalists singling out Pakistani-heritage girls for rape and abuse, with racist and Islamophobic slurs thrown in. Just as I couldn’t bear the truth about the Catholic Church and the US military, so the British elite initially rejected this threat to the orthodoxy of multiculturalism. Elon Musk has done Britain a favour by bringing it back into focus.

🚓🤐 One reason the police were so keen to downplay all this was that they were terrified of a repeat of the 2001 Oldham race riots, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times, when white and Asian youths went at each other in the former mill town, with the violence soon spreading to Burnley and Bradford. A West Midlands police report in 2010 showed that local authorities knew about the Pakistani rape gangs – including that they would brazenly approach girls at the school gates. Not only did police disgracefully fail to protect these children, but they even went after media outlets that tried to shine a light on the depravity, including demanding that Channel 4 pull a documentary on the subject. Any future inquiry should start with these bent coppers.

With Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK all polling at around 25%, the incentives for the two right-of-centre parties to do some kind of deal at the next election are obvious, says Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. But I don’t see it happening. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s normally “pleasant and personable” chairman, rejected the suggestion recently by saying the Tories under Boris Johnson had “embraced communism”. More importantly, Nigel Farage says he is out to destroy the Conservatives – and, having known the man for 20 years as a fellow MEP, “I believe him”. Can you imagine Farage serving in a Tory cabinet? As Milton’s Lucifer puts it: “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.”

Rod Stewart may be worth around £200m but he’s still got an eye for a deal, says Patrick Kidd in The Times. A gardener was once working at his estate when the singer came out and asked to borrow his van. He handed over his keys and half an hour later Stewart returned with the van packed full of crates of lager. “Thanks,” the rocker told him. “The local shop was selling these off cheap because they’re out of date and I couldn’t get them in the Lamborghini.”

Who is to blame for the LA fires?

America’s conservatives wasted no time in identifying the real villains in the Los Angeles fires, says David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times: liberal politicians. They blamed LA mayor Karen Bass for cutting the city’s fire department budget (she hadn’t) and for the fire hydrants running dry (the system simply wasn’t designed for fires at this scale). Donald Trump falsely claimed that the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had deprived Southern California of water as part of a scheme to protect an “essentially worthless” fish called a smelt. None of them is willing to acknowledge that the devastation is really the result of climate change, which has exacerbated the conditions that fuel these fires, and “an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought”.

If Democrats “believe their own advertising” about the dangers of climate change, says The Wall Street Journal, why haven’t they done more to protect against it? LA’s antiquated firefighting system clearly isn’t up to the job – many of its 7,337 miles of pipes are more than 60 years old. Yet rather than investing in improvements, California’s liberal politicians prefer to spend cash on the likes of green energy subsidies. Last year, the governor’s budget included only $2.6bn for “forest and wildfire resilience”, compared to $14.7bn for zero-emission vehicles and the “clean energy” transition. What gives? “Rooftop solar subsidies are no consolation for people who lose their homes.” California’s virtue-signalling green policies won’t make the slightest bit of difference to global temperatures, because their CO2 emissions reductions are “dwarfed by increases elsewhere”. It’s time for Democrats to choose which is more important: “their climate obsessions or citizens”.

America’s surgeon general Vivek Murthy has recommended placing warning labels on alcoholic drinks, to highlight the fact that boozing raises the risk of some cancers. But the risk is minuscule, says The Economist. And while there’s no doubt that overdoing it is unhealthy, there are plenty of studies showing that the heart benefits of moderate drinking outweigh the additional cancer risk. In any case, nothing good is risk-free. Murthy wrote a book encouraging more Americans to walk, but 7,500 US pedestrians were run over and killed in 2022. Millions of perfectly rational people decide the enjoyment of good wine, or a few pints with friends, is easily worth the tiny risk. Cheers to that.

It’s a massive piece of space junk that crashed to earth in a Kenyan village last month, says BBC News. Locals in Mukuku, south-east of the capital Nairobi, were preparing to celebrate New Year’s Eve when they heard an “eerie whizzing sound” followed by a big boom. They later discovered the eight-foot metal ring, which was glowing red and piping hot, sticking out of a field. Engineers from the Kenya Space Agency confirmed that the 500kg object was the separation ring from a launch rocket, which had likely been orbiting the Earth for years before making landfall.