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BBC News

Paragliders almost end up in Peak Wildlife's polar bear enclosure

The park director says the outcome could have been tragic had the gliders not made a late turn.

A pair of pilots made a lucky escape in Staffordshire after they were able to avoid landing inside a polar bear enclosure by a matter of inches. The incident happened at Peak Wildlife Park in Leek on Tuesday with staff at the park claiming they witnessed two powered paragliders heading directly towards the enclosure, which contained two males, Nanook and Nori. It caused keepers to rush towards the compound armed with non-lethal firearms in case the worst happened, which park director James Butler said had looked "almost certain". But both gliders managed to divert their landing just to the right side of the bears' border.

Bridget Phillipson is putting trans activism above the law

The women and equalities minister is determined to let men into women’s spaces.

Phillipson insists she is merely ensuring the guidance is ‘legally watertight’. This is nonsense. The law has not changed; it has been authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court. The delay in publishing the guidance serves no legal purpose, though it may serve a political one. A Supreme Court judgement is not a consultation exercise for activists who didn’t get the answer they wanted. It is the law. By stymying its implementation, Bridget Phillipson is institutionalising a lie that demands women and girls surrender their rights to appease angry trans activists. When the minister charged with protecting equality treats reality as negotiable, she makes clear whose interests truly count.

This is very good. Read the whole thing.

The Spectator

AI will take jobs – the wrong ones

As those of you familiar with this column will know, I am always eager to distinguish between an option and an obligation. For instance, a dinner p...

Along with the useful phrase ‘enshittification’, we need a phrase for that ineluctable process by which technologies and behaviours first emerge as an attractive and novel alternative only to end up as an imposition. I propose ‘Joni Mitchell Syndrome’, or JMS: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ Ticket machines at railway stations are an example of JMS. They arrived as a welcome alternative option to the manned guichet, and often they were: if you knew precisely what ticket you wanted and some dithering nitwit was holding up the queue at the ticket window, they were great. That was wonderful until some tragic accountants decided they could now close down the manned ticket office. Suddenly, if you were unsure about which ticket to buy, there was no one to ask. […] It has played out many times. Mobile phones were great until people expected you to answer them. Email, social media, parking apps, open-plan offices, self-checkout tills at supermarkets, messaging apps, the spreadsheet, presentation software, sourdough bread, 24-hour rolling news and even smartphones are the grey squirrels of the innovation world. They arrive as a novelty and end up destroying the very thing they were meant to improve. https://archive.ph/eUZbN

The Spectator

The glorious weirdness of Christmas in Thailand

Bangkok Christmas in Thailand is one of the strangest festivities of the modern world. A country that is almost entirely Buddhist, which does not r...

Christmas in Thailand is one of the strangest festivities of the modern world. A country that is almost entirely Buddhist, which does not recognise Christmas as a public holiday, whose people have almost no idea what the event means, nevertheless erects giant glittering Christmas trees in its malls and intersections. These are larger and more numerous than the ones you see in London. It’s not difficult to imagine a future where British tourists fly to Bangkok to rediscover the mood of Christmas, not in shopping but in pagan feeling. December shoppers in the Bangkok mega-malls are greeted by choirs of small girls in Santa hats who ring bells and sing about the Wenceslas and the feast of Stephen. The eerie strains of ‘Silent Night’ echo down floors of office furniture and electronics. No one seems to ask why the night is silent or why a man named Wenceslas went out on the feast of Stephen. No one here knows why we farangs sing songs about him. But then does anyone in England? The words are lost, meaningless in both places, but here the overall mood is lighter. The fun is there. Perhaps because Christians are only 1 per cent of the population. An animist spirit prevails and the trashy, globalised, commercial holiday somehow, strangely, doesn’t feel as trashy, globalised or commercial as it does in many other places. Purists will argue that it’s all empty – a cynical misunderstanding. All right. But something else is there. https://archive.ph/m8IbS

The Spectator

What links Jeffrey Dahmer to the Spice Girls?

The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men – is a circuitous and unusual one. It invol...

The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men – is a circuitous and unusual one. It involves the establishment of Mothercare and Harold Wilson’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the New York underground of the early 1980s. The thread that joins the ends is a 76-year-old Ohioan called Chris Butler. https://archive.ph/SjuEi

I’m always crap at these, but I usually at least get some of them!

Freezer Tetris: success!