You wouldn’t believe how fast these things can move until you try to lock them up. How long until the next jailbreak?

We have entered the season marked in our household by the battle of wits between human and tortoise. All spring, my husband (dexterous, resourceful, engineer) pours his ingenuity into trying to keep the four tortoises (prehistoric, pea-brained, no opposable thumbs) in the garden, while the tortoises, out of the greenhouse and warmed to a point where they are unnervingly speedy, FYI, do their utmost to escape. It makes no sense – here they have a spacious all-you-can-eat buffet; out there it’s cars, cats and chaos. But the reptile heart wants what it wants.

We’re already had one jailbreak by our worst recidivist. Despite double wooden sleepers corralling her and in defiance of all physical laws, she’s been apprehended previously trundling down the street, destination unknown; wedged, thwarted, under a gate, still fighting to free herself; and repeatedly in our neighbours’ garden, demolishing her summer-flowering annuals (sorry, J). We’ve tried a GPS tracker; she rubbed it off in minutes.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

The latest victims of the culture wars? Woke white goods. Because, apparently, energy efficiency and lower electricity bills are unAmerican

If you’ve ever wished your dishwasher used more water, or found your fridge too cheap to run, help is at hand. US Republicans have their sights set on one of the greatest scourges of our age: woke white goods.

You may or may not remember last year’s “induction hobs are unpatriotic” idiocy. For the mercifully uninitiated, one of 2023’s more niche culture war moments crystallised around an allegation that “the Feds” were going to “take away” gas stoves. This was demonstrably untrue: despite plentiful research demonstrating gas stove emissions are hazardous to human health, there was no proposed ban, just a statement from a consumer safety commissioner that “any option is on the table” with harmful products; the White House almost instantly clarified that it would not support a prohibition. Shame: imagine the bootleg methane speakeasies.