It’s Monday, it’s a new week, and while we won’t pretend to know everything that’s going to happen over the next seven days, we have some sense of what’s coming up.
Here’s your briefing on some of the most important and interesting stories happening in the week ahead.
1) Twenty for 2020
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Getty Images
Michael Bennet, this is your moment
There are only 498 days left until the next US election, which is about as long as the gestation period of a white rhino.
On Wednesday and Thursday, 20 candidates for the Democratic nomination will take part in TV debates – 10 candidates each night. There are more candidates running than that, it’s just that there’s no more room left on the stage. (The alternative, correct, explanation is the other candidates’ low standing in the polls meant they didn’t qualify for the debates).
Will the crowds swoon as Mayor Pete issues a witty retort in fluent Norwegian? Will Joe Biden accidentally offend someone? Who even is Michael Bennet? Watch this space.
2) A whole lotta husting going on
In case you haven’t been following, we still haven’t decided who’s going to be our next prime minister here in Britain, but the process appears to be nearing some sort of conclusion.
After a process of elimination that was a bit like the last rounds of MasterChef, just with fewer fondant potatoes, we now know it’s going to be either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt.
It’s now up to these two men to impress the members of their party around Britain, and they’ll do this by travelling across the country and talking a lot. Ancient words like “hustings” will be bandied about by the media.
Those hustings pick up steam this week, and there’s a lot more husting to come after that. When everyone can hust no more, Conservative party members (more on them here) will vote on which of the two men has dazzled them to such a extent they feel he should lead the country.
That won’t be until the week of 22 July (this year).
3) Flip-flop tan-lines
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PA
That’s not a filter on this photo, it’s sunburn
Fact: there are 700 metres of male urinals at Glastonbury festival.
This won’t be the reason tens of thousands of people, some music fans inevitably scattered among them, will descend on this little corner of Somerset from Wednesday. But what an interesting fact.
Another fact: it takes five months to install all 5,500 toilets at the festival.
On the music front, because this is Europe’s largest music festival after all, The Vaccines and The Cure will be doing their bit for medical advancement and in the battle for the best band named after a fried breakfast item, it will be a close-run thing between The Egg and Beans on Toast. This year’s animal-inspired acts include Giant Swan, Ed the Dog and Emma-Jean Thackray’s Walrus.
The headliners – the ones who’ll be up there on the Pyramid Stage – will include Stormzy, Liam Gallagher and Miley Cyrus. And the weather? It’ll be glorious. Come Sunday, flip-flop tan-lines will abound.
4) Welcome to Osaka
We know what you’re thinking. Surely, you’re asking, it’s only seven months since the last G20 summit, so why are we having another one so soon?
The truth is, you can’t have too much of a good thing. And so here we are again, on the eve of another gathering of the world’s 19 most industrialised nations, plus the European Union, which is nice for them.
At the end of the week, world leaders will gather in Osaka in Japan, seven months after meeting in Buenos Aires. As ever with these things, there are lots of intriguing sub-plots to the main action. One of them involves the tit-for-tat trade row between two participants, the US and China (both of whose presidents will meet in Osaka).
And the reason we’ve had two G20s in only seven months? There isn’t one, really. They usually take place between September and November, but every now and then they… don’t.