The Week

A 23-year-old from Cheshire has cycled 15,534 miles from Derby to Sydney, retracing a route his father took at the same age in 1984. Jamie Hargreaves set off in May, took a ferry to France, then headed across Europe to Turkey. He wasn’t able to follow his father’s path through Iran, and instead cycled through Russia and the “Stans” to rejoin the route in Pakistan. He visited Everest Base Camp in Nepal, before cycling through Southeast Asia – arriving in Sydney in mid-December. For decades, Craig the elephant was a tourist favourite in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya, says The Times. Now his death, aged 54, is being hailed as a victory for local efforts to curb ivory poaching. Craig was believed to have been one of Africa’s largest…

Caracas raid: Trump rips up the rulebook I never thought I’d feel nostalgia for the Iraq War, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. But it turns out that the run up to that conflict, when America did at least strive to convince the world of the righteousness of its cause, was the “good old days”. There was no such effort to legitimise the US strike on Venezuela and the abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro (see page 14). Nobody sought consent from any international body or Congress. And while a flimsy legal case was made for the coup – a court charged Maduro this week with, inter alia, “narco-terrorism conspiracy” and possession of machine guns – the Trump administration’s predatory objectives were transparent. The US will “run” Venezuela, said Trump;…

A day after toppling Maduro, Donald Trump started to drop hints that he had settled on his next target. Greenland, he said, “is covered with Russian and Chinese ships”, and the US needs it “from the standpoint of national security”. His message was amplified by his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who said that no one would fight the US military over Greenland. The real world, he added, is “governed by strength …. by power”. By Tuesday, the White House was openly stating that it retained the option to use force to seize the semi-autonomous Danish territory, which is six times the size of Germany. Trump isn’t wrong about Greenland’s strategic importance, said The Washington Post. Controlling the territory would give the US a vital foot hold in the…

Controversy of the week The Fattah fiasco “What would you like the priorities of His Majesty’s Government to be?” asked Douglas Murray in The Spectator. “I have quite a long list”, starting with the economy and borders. But according to Keir Starmer, Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s case has been “a top priority for my government since we came to office”. Whose case, I hear you ask? Fattah is an Egyptian activist, a popular leader in the Arab Spring of 2011, who was later sentenced to 15 years by General Sisi’s regime. He was awarded British citizenship in 2021 through his mother, who was born in the UK, and governments both Conservative and Labour have lobbied hard to free him; he finally arrived in Britain on Boxing Day. What ministers did not…

In the drinks industry, the new buzzword is “coasting”, reports The Guardian. Reflecting the growing trend for moderation, it refers to choosing wines, spirits and lagers that have about half the alcohol content of the normal version of that drink. Ocado reports that, in 2025, its sales of wines with an alcohol volume of around 3% to 9% soared 4,000%. In a third of postcode areas in England, dogs now outnumber children, according to an analysis by The Times. It says this is partly due to a rising number of couples who are “dinkwads” – dual income, no kids, with a dog. The UK’s estimated canine population has risen from nine million to 13 million since 2019; the number of children has flatlined lately at around 14.5 million.…

Innovation, after Lego announced that it was keeping up with the times by including “smart” bricks in some of its Star Wars sets. With lights and miniature speakers embedded within them, the bricks will make an appropriate range of whooshing sounds when used in Luke Skywalker’s fighter plane, and will enable a model of R2-D2 to issue the droid’s trademark bleeps. Hull, which emerged as the only place in the UK to be included in National Geographic’s annual list of the top 25 places in the world to visit this year. Its inclusion comes as the city’s £30m maritime renovation project – Hull Maritime – nears completion. The FTSE 100, the index of the UK’s 100 largest companies, which capped a stellar 12 months on the year’s first day of…