What happened
Keir Starmer has signalled a shift towards an “even closer alignment” with the EU’s single market if it proves to be “in our national interest”. Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the prime minister said this would be preferable to rejoining the customs union as it would help safeguard prospective trade deals with countries such as India and the US.

Who said what
This is the “starkest signal yet” that Starmer wants a “radically softer Brexit deal”, said The i Paper. It’s being seen as an attempt to “appease unruly Labour MPs posing a threat to his leadership”.

The comments set up a “political fight" with Nigel Farage that Starmer “hopes will help turn his government’s fortune around”, said Ellen Milligan on Bloomberg. Labour strategists think Reform’s economic and foreign policies are Farage’s “weakest areas” and they want to “exploit this”.

The PM has “doubled down” on his desire to see Britain “back under the thumb of eurocrats”, wrote Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, in the Daily Express. His plan will “shatter” Labour’s “clear and unambiguous election pledge” to “never accept freedom of movement”.

What next?
The Liberal Democrats have said they will try to force a parliamentary vote on a new customs union, by tabling an amendment to the EU Reset Bill, expected to be brought forward by the government in the coming weeks.

What happened
Hundreds of people took part in a silent march yesterday to honour the victims of the Crans-Montana fire, as the owners of Le Constellation bar face a criminal investigation. Local authorities have now identified all of the 40 people who died in the New Year’s Eve blaze at the Swiss ski resort.

Who said what
“Mourners gathered in sub-zero temperatures” for a multilingual service at St Christopher’s Church in Crans-Montana, said The Times. Then, “under a clear blue sky with the snow-covered Alps glistening in bright sunshine”, the crowd silently walked up to the site of the tragedy.

The Rev Gilles Cavin talked about the “terrible uncertainty” that families had faced. The forensic work to identify the victims had been “particularly slow-going due to the horrific burns sustained” by most of them, said The Guardian. The youngest of the dead were a Swiss girl and a French boy, both 14-years-old.

What next?
Prosecutors said Le Constellation owners Jacques and Jessica Moretti were under investigation for negligent homicide, negligent bodily harm and negligent arson. No detention or travel ban has been imposed. “Until there is a conviction,” said Béatrice Pilloud, attorney-general of the Valais region, “there is a presumption of innocence which prevails.”

Artificial intelligence increasingly requires so much space and power that we may run out of both on Earth. As a solution, tech companies are looking to create data centres in space that harness solar power. While this would demand less cooling, it could create other costs and problems.

The enormous amount of data required by AI has led to data centres being built across the world, and “global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models”, said Scientific American. A move to space could “resolve long-standing challenges around powering data centre computation in a carbon-efficient manner”.

The sun’s rays are “direct and constant for solar panels to collect”, said The Wall Street Journal. There are “no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime”, and “demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space”.

Tech giants, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are “running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth”, said The Verge, but launch costs are “still prohibitively expensive”.

Space-based computing will “not become cost-effective unless rocket launch costs decline substantially”, said Scientific American. Experts also warn that these systems could have “even bigger environmental and climate effects than their earthly counterparts”.

Data centres “visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk” could disrupt astronomers who “rely on twilight to hunt for near-Earth asteroids” and it could worsen the space junk problem, as “more hardware is launched and more debris and fragments fall back through the atmosphere”.