Image of the week: Scorching heat
This is not a fun time to be living, breathing and attempting to go about daily life in Europe, unless that daily life involves lying on a poolside lounger under the shade of a sun umbrella with iced drinks and gelato on tap. Even in those circumstances, rising dread of imminent climate catastrophe will feel all too visceral. Heatwaves have become more frequent, more intense and longer in duration as a result of climate change, with droughts and forest fires engulfing Spain and Portugal, and this week’s Bastille Day fireworks cancelled in France to reduce the risk of blazes. In Britain, where amber and red weather warnings have been extended, schoolchildren are not yet on holiday, while health services anticipate a surge in heat-related hospital admissions amid record temperatures. Ireland will escape the most extreme highs, but a sweltering Monday is unlikely to be a feast of productivity.
In numbers: Heardle hurdles
6
Guesses that players of the daily online music game Heardle have to identify a song from its intro, with the snippet they hear extending in length with each incorrect or skipped answer.
6
Heardle is currently only available in this number of countries – Ireland, Britain, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – following its acquisition by Spotify, which insists it is “a tool for musical discovery” and not just a Wordle-style trivia game.
16
Seconds of the song players can hear before they must make their final guess. Sadly for many Heardle fans proud of their win streaks, their historical data got lost in the switch to Spotify’s platform.
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Getting to know: John Holland-Kaye
Vying furiously with other airport bosses for 2022′s “you had one job” award is Heathrow Airport chief executive John Holland-Kaye, the man recently dubbed “Lord Doom” by Virgin Atlantic Airways boss Shai Weiss after he predicted it would take the aviation industry 12-18 months to fully recover its pre-pandemic capacity. But Holland-Kaye was right to be downbeat, at least about Heathrow, which this week took the eyebrow-raising step of implementing a departing passenger cap of 100,000 per day from July 12th until September 11th.
While cancellations will now follow, the move will “protect flights for the vast majority” this summer, he wrote in an open letter to passengers – and would-be passengers. Presumably, it will also help avoid future repeats of the “luggage carpet” scenes that have been witnessed at Heathrow and other airports, including Dublin. Chief executive since 2014, Holland-Kaye previously worked in brewing – an industry many air travellers will be turning to for their personal post-flight recovery this summer.
The list: Twitter v Elon Musk
Twitter is suing Elon Musk for trying to get out of his deal to buy the social media company – that deal he so publicly fought for in the first place. The 62-page lawsuit does not hold back on how it describes its interactions with the richest man in the world.
1. Charge of hypocrisy: Musk’s exit strategy is “a model of hypocrisy” because he has gone from saying he wanted to buy Twitter to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!” to claiming there were too many such bots to go ahead with the deal.
2. Bad faith behaviour: In his “bad-faith pursuit”, Musk has made “material misrepresentations” about Twitter’s business to regulators and investors, the company’s lawyers say.
3. Disparaging tweets: Seeking an “out” after a decline in the share price of electric vehicle giant Tesla, his main source of wealth, Musk engaged in “repeated disparagement” of Twitter. To remind everybody of how this went, the lawsuit reproduces a screenshot of one Musk reply to chief executive Parag Agrawal: the poo emoji.
4. Details, what details: In a conversation with Twitter’s chief financial officer on June 30th, Musk “acknowledged he had not read” a detailed summary of the sampling process Twitter uses to measure the prevalence of spam accounts, which he had been sent in May.
5. Reality check: Two letters sent by Musk’s lawyers “described an alternative reality in which Twitter had failed to co-operate” with his information requests, “apparently in the belief that repeating a falsehood enough can make it true”. It is a trick that’s worked for others, to be fair.
