The Ministry of Defence and the NHS are among the bodies that rely on US tech giant Palantir, which sells software that “processes large sets of data to help clients”, including governments, “find patterns and make operational decisions”, said The Times. But many are now questioning the transparency of such deals, as well as the company’s ties to the Israeli military, US immigration enforcement and Peter Mandelson.

What is Palantir’s relationship with the MoD?
The government is under pressure to review a £240 million MoD contract awarded to Palantir in December. It continues an existing data analytics relationship, but costs about “three times more” than a previous agreement, signed in 2022, said the Financial Times.

Mandelson, co-founder of a lobbying firm that worked with Palantir, helped to arrange a visit by Keir Starmer to Palantir’s showroom in Washington last year, while serving as ambassador to the US. Kemi Badenoch told the FT this should be “looked at very, very closely”, and said the MoD deal was a “direct grant of £240 million – not a tender, not a bid”.

What is its relationship with the NHS?
In 2023, a consortium led by Palantir won a seven-year £330 million contract to help manage NHS patient data. But doctors are being advised on “how to limit engagement” with the company’s Federated Data Platform amid concerns about Palantir’s “controversial” deals with the Israeli military and Ice operations in the US, said the British Medical Journal. Given the company’s “track record” with immigration enforcement and “risks to patient trust” and “data security”, there must be a “complete break” between Palantir and the NHS, British Medical Association chair of council Tom Dolphin told the BMJ.

The number of NHS organisations using Palantir’s technology has  increased from 118 to 151 since June last year, which is still “well short of the target of 240 by the end of this year”, said The Guardian. A spokesperson for Palantir said its software is “helping to deliver better public services in the UK”, including “delivering 99,000 more NHS operations and reducing hospital discharge delays by 15%”.

The International Olympic Committee boasts that Milano-Cortina 2026 is “the most gender-balanced” Winter Games yet, with the highest level of female participation. But there is one glaring exception.

The door to the Nordic combined is “slammed shut” to women, said The Independent. The three Olympic events in which athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing are strictly men-only, despite equivalent women’s World Cup and World Championship events.

‘Misogynistic mindset’
Nordic combined has been part of the Winter Olympics since the Games debuted in 1924. The “daredevil thrill” of ski jumping combined with the “physically exhausting cross-country ski race” makes for a “two-day event unlike any other”, said The Associated Press.

Cross-country skiing has centuries-old origins in Scandinavian military training, which could explain the “misogynistic mindset”, said ABC News. But ski jumping seems to be the decisive factor: women have been competing in cross-country events since 1952, but were barred from ski jumping until the early 2000s. For decades, they were “deemed too fragile to stand up to the rigours of repeatedly hurtling themselves off the side of a mountain”.

To complicate matters, the IOC has “put the entire sport on notice”, said The New York Times. It must boost its small following and increase the number of participating athletes or “risk falling off the Olympic programme”. The women of Nordic combined aren’t just “stuck sitting on the sidelines”; they are “relying on the men’s performance to keep the sport’s future in the Games alive”.

‘Glacial pace’ of change
Women were excluded entirely from the first modern Summer Olympics in 1896. Since then, the bans have slowly been eliminated, but the Winter Olympics has changed “at a glacial pace”, said The Independent.

Female athletes at the recent Nordic combined World Cup in Seefeld, Austria, staged a protest, holding up their ski poles in the shape of an X to symbolise “no exceptions”. “I do what every single other athlete does,” US Nordic combined skier Annika Malacinski told The Washington Post. “I work my ass off to be where I am. And yet there’s one group of people telling me I’m not doing it hard enough.”

Crowds celebrate outside London’s High Court following a ruling that the government’s ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. The protest group’s co-founder Huda Ammori brought the challenge against last year’s anti-terror proscription, under which at least 2,700 people have been arrested.

Tolga Akmen / EPA / Shutterstock

Wiltshire: The Manor, Chitterne
This characterful Grade II Jacobean house with far-reaching views over Salisbury Plain is set in 9 acres of mature gardens and woodland. Period features include stone mullion windows, some with historic glass etchings. 6 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 5 receps, garden, barn, paddocks, parking. £1.895 million; Strutt & Parker.

Isle of Wight: Cliff Dene, Bonchurch
Part of a charming Victorian villa (the ground floor and part of the first floor), the house is surrounded by mature gardens and enjoys an elevated position with panoramic sea views. 3 beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, garden, parking. £650,000; Spence Willard.

Wiltshire: Dial House, West Lavington
An elegant William & Mary Grade II country house with lovely formal gardens. 6 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, swimming pool, tennis court, outbuildings, garden, parking. £1.85 million; Savills.

Highland: Tulach Ard, Loch Alsh
An 18th century farmhouse in a spectacular setting with approx. 5 acres of land. 6 beds, 4 baths, kitchen, recep, 1-bed annexe, sauna, garden, outbuildings, parking. OIEO £825,000; Inigo.

Clackmannanshire: Cowden House, Dollar
A handsome 1960s house, boasting a turreted folly, in a glorious rural setting on the former Cowden Castle estate. 5 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, garden, parking. OIEO £1.195 million; Savills.

Why you hate Keir Starmer
Clive Martin in The New Statesman
Our “prime minister has become profoundly unpopular”, writes Clive Martin, and such a “scale of dislike means the political is entwined with the personal”. However hard he tries, Keir Starmer is not “slick, dynamic” or “showy”; he’s the “anxious, awkward, appeasing kind of type”. This “technical, institutional, sensible” man is floundering on a “global stage” that is “particularly chaotic”. It feels like someone “trying to practise cognitive behavioural therapy at a coke-induced Aintree brawl”.

The paranoid bunkum behind Jimmy Lai’s conviction is a wake-up call for Britain
Chris Patten in The Telegraph 
The sentencing of pro-democracy advocate and UK national Jimmy Lai to 20 years in a Hong Kong prison is a “litmus test” of Britain’s “ability to stand up for itself”, writes Chris Patten, the territory’s last British governor. The idea that Lai was the “secret ‘mastermind’ behind” mass protests makes a “mockery” of any judicial independence from Beijing. Our government is trying to “play nice” with China, but “enough with the cringing respect”; we should “demand justice”.

If you can’t stop looking at your phone in the cinema, stay at home
Fiona Mountford in The i Paper
I love “hunkering down in the darkness” to enjoy “January’s joyous celluloid overload”, writes Fiona Mountford. But of my eight cinema trips last month, not one was free from phones “lighting up with texts” or “smart watches flashing or beeping”. People need to“understand the subtle damage this endless flickering causes”. It rips us from “our total immersion in the world of the story” and lands us “with an unwelcome thump back in the tumult of the present day”.