Max Jeffery

Dan Pena has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage – Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out the sky, hellfire on the horizon and, the final layer, a red and murderous photograph of the man himself superimposed on to the right-hand side. ‘Allegedly I used to hit my students in the 1990s.

Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They took a 6,000-mile Air Mauritius flight to Gatwick airport to start a new life, then settled just a mile from the runway. Why so close? I was visiting Crawley to meet these people I didn’t understand, to find out what they made of our government handing over their islands to Mauritius. On the train I clicked through a few Facebook groups and found a man named Maxwell Evenor who said he was around to talk.

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope. ‘That’s what I do over Christmas, when no one else is working,’ D’Souza says.

Worldwide, computers are saying no. GPs can’t access appointments and medical records, banking apps have been knocked offline, flights are grounded, laptops won’t work. Technology across Europe and America has been toppled by what appears to be a glitch in a software update for some popular anti-virus software from a company called CrowdStrike. ‘Biggest IT fail ever,’ tweeted Elon Musk. ‘CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,’ George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, said in a statement this morning. ‘Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.