Chas Newkey-Burden

An American influencer called Sam Jones has been roundly denounced after she posted a video of her snatching a wild baby wombat from its distressed mother in Australia. The video, since deleted, showed Jones picking up a joey by the road and running with it to a car, while its poor mother ran after them. A man can be heard laughing callously as he films, saying: ‘Look at the mother, it's chasing after her!’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm7TdUJ0UvE Social media users, conservationists, animal rights campaigners, and even Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, have condemned Jones, who has now left Australia voluntarily amid calls for her deportation. It's easy to see why so many people are so angry.

For me, even the thought of running late for a flight is absolutely blood-curdling. The prospect of sweating it out in the back of a cab, with red traffic lights and zebra crossings conspiring against me as the clock ticks down, seems like torture. I'd rather miss a bin collection day.  Thanks to TikTok, people are starting to arrive late for flights deliberately. The 'airport theory' trend sees passengers show up to the airport just 15 or 20 minutes before departure time to see if they still get to board, making a mockery of the advice to arrive two hours before a short-haul flight and three hours before longer ones.

An animal rights activist has exposed extreme cruelty at a slaughterhouse in Arley, Warwickshire. Joey Carbstrong's secretly recorded footage shows staff slamming sheep hard onto concrete floors, dismembering sheep while they are still alive and playing recordings of wolves to the terrified animals as they were dying. The shock here is not just the cruelty itself: repeated investigations have found hideous savagery in UK abattoirs. When the animal welfare group Animal Aid secretly filmed inside eleven randomly chosen UK slaughterhouses several years ago, their undercover researchers found clear evidence of cruelty and law-breaking in ten of them.

We all know the nursery rhyme about "this little piggy": one little piggy went to market, one little piggy stayed home and so on. A modern rewrite could also include the little piggy that got injected into a rich man's body. The "super-rich" are using pigs brains to try and "biohack their way to immortality," according to a report in the Daily Telegraph. Wealthy coffin-dodgers have regular injections of Cerebrolysin, a mixture of compounds taken from pig brains, to boost their brain health. Wealthy coffin-dodgers have regular injections of Cerebrolysin, taken from pig brains, to boost their health This isn't the only way that pigs are being exploited in modern healthcare.

In the 1930s, Sir John Betjeman wrote a poem calling for bombs to fall on it, in 2001 David Brent poked fun at it in The Office and in 2024, the Telegraph named it the UK's 'ugliest town'. Now, it's been branded as 'the unhappiest place to live' on Rightmove. Times change and public attitudes evolve, but everyone seems to keep agreeing that Slough is an absolutely awful place.  The town's Brutalist architecture, decaying high street, widespread poverty and crime aren't the stuff of many poets' dreams and only this week, the Daily Mail said that Slough is 'plagued with drugs, boarded up shops and even human faeces'. It does sound a bit short of ideal, doesn't it?

I'll always remember a conversation I had with someone just after I'd interviewed the footballer Frank Lampard. ‘What was he like? I bet he was as thick as mince,’ they said. The reality was rather different: the former Chelsea captain was a thoughtful, intelligent and beautifully well-mannered man. Footballers: ‘super clever’? This will shock some, but it doesn't surprise me at all Lots of people assume that footballers like Lampard lack intelligence, but a new study has found otherwise. Scientists studied 200 professional players in Brazil and Sweden, putting them through tests exploring various aspects of cognition, from working memory to executive function and problem-solving. They found that footballers consistently outperformed the average.

Veganuary is with us again, the annual reminder that veganism is now mainstream. But us steak-dodgers still face a fair bit of curiosity and scepticism about our lifestyle choice. One question is particularly familiar: 'Oh, but I hope you're not a preachy, judgemental vegan?' we're asked. Well, it's funny you should ask because that that's exactly what I am and you can emblazon it across my headstone: I'm a preachy, judgemental vegan.  Let's have a good old-fashioned debate and each drop our respective truth bombs  Why would I not be? I think it would be really odd to be so opposed to animal slaughter that I've taken the drastic step of stopping eating meat, fish, eggs and milk, but then to say I've no issue with other people consuming those things.

The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East keep raging, Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold required for Moscow to nuke Europe and Donald Trump is shadowboxing ahead of his return to the ring. You'd need almost divine reserves of Zen to not worry about where all this is heading. Some people are really worried: they're paying 'eye-watering' and 'extortionate' prices of up to £48,000 for nuclear bunkers in case the bomb drops, according to Metro. But surviving a nuclear war 'doesn't have to set you back thousands of pounds', said the Daily Mail. You can build a shelter with 'objects commonly found around the home' like internal doors and shower curtains, according to the paper. So your 'only expenditure' should be 'around £72', on plastic sheeting and 'a few broom handles'.

There must be carnage in the countryside. That's the only explanation for a stampede of anxious headlines about the danger of cows. 'Are these the UK's most dangerous animals,' asked the front page of the Guardian this week alongside a picture of a bemused bovine. The Daily Star was at it too: the paper called cows 'mooing killers' and quoted a campaign group which suggested that the true number of cow attacks was being wildly underestimated. You'd be forgiven for thinking twice about going for a walk in the British countryside. So let's all take a deep breath before turning to the data: between March 2019 and March 2023, cows were responsible for 22 deaths in England, Scotland and Wales, or an average of around five a year.