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1 week ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
Future-guessing. April 2025: Trump buys Ukrainian mineral rights from Kyiv. May 2025: Trump sells Ukrainian mineral rights to Moscow. Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.comand on Freeview 262 or Freely 565In the wimpish spirit of our age, tickets for the National Theatre's new production of Hamlet come with trigger warnings of madness, grief and coercive behaviour. Given Ophelia's watery demise, I'm surprised there isn't a warning about falling into rivers.
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1 week ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
This was the week when Kneecap had its Winnie Mandela moment. Kneecap, charmingly named after the IRA's preferred method of torture and maiming (a bullet through the knee), is an Irish Republican band which has a bit of a downer on British colonialism, Israel and politicians in general.
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2 weeks ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
It was typical of that most irritating pressure group Just Stop Oil that they announced they were giving up blocking roads by holding one last road-blocking event in London. Somehow, I don't think we've seen the last of them.
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2 weeks ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
According to the old gag, in just a millisecond a computer can make make a mistake that would take a team of humans years. The sheer speed of computers is dazzling. So why do some things still take ages? Consider, for example, the edict from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper that a breakdown of crimes committed by migrants must be on her desk “by the end of this year".
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3 weeks ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
May I apologise for some of my colleagues in journalism who have been agonising over the felling of an ancient oak near a Toby Carvery in Enfield. Each outbids the other with claims to be heartbroken, traumatised and outraged at the spiritual vacuum left by the felling. We have all got a little overwrought. Reality check, please. The oak was judged by Mitchells & Butler's tree experts to be dying and seriously dangerous.
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3 weeks ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
Our extended family was down from Scotland for Easter, travelling in the now-obligatory electric SUV. The driver made a good point: “Remember in the 1990s how we used to worry about radiation from mobile phones? Now we drive around sitting on two tons of battery.”He may have a point. In this paranoid world of ours, I suspect there may be a market for electromagnetic bottom shields. Do not leave home without one.
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1 month ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
It is a truth universally acknowledged that once you have opened a tube of Pringles, you can't stop eating them. This scientific fact may lie behind the curious tale of the woman escorted from an airliner at Bristol for being “unruly” and “disruptive.”Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.comand on Freeview 262 or Freely 565Her offence seems to have been consuming Pringles which were technically not her property, as the plane's payment machine would not accept her card.
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1 month ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
Star columnist gives his opinions on wolves, hippos and a curious case of two-tier talkingAnother event I missed entirely. Tuesday was Pygmy Hippo Day. Looking at an image of a pygmy hippo, it seems about the right size to provide lunch for the three little dire wolves, extinct for 12,000 years and now successfully “de-extinctioned” by a Texas-based gene company. These adorable white cubs will grow to an estimated 10 stone. What will they eat then?
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1 month ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
In preparation for the upcoming Third World War (come as you are, date to be confirmed), “security advisers” across Europe are urging us to stockpile essentials such as tinned food, bottled water, a first-aid kit and a Swiss Army knife. Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.comand on Freeview 262 or Freely 565If you've ever tried to open all the tools on a multi-bladed knife, you won't need telling what the first-aid kit is for.
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1 month ago | 
expressandstar.com | Peter Rhodes
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and also dog poo. The fashion for ESAs, Emotional Support Animals which began, of course, in America, is causing all sorts of problems in British courtrooms with reports of dogs biting witnesses and fouling the floors.
