Australia gifts us a new marsupial to lighten our dark, dysfunctional times

Where to start in a week so fraught with major events you could hardly draw breath for the news flashes?

- Emma Brockes

Monday It started with Trump's alleged contribution to Jeffrey Epstein's "birthday book", shared by the Democrats on social media on Monday and leading to the discovery of a name not widely recognised in the US but of intense interest in the UK - Peter Mandelson. The British ambassador to the US had proffered an undiplomatically warm birthday message to the child sex offender and financier, starting a press scramble that ended, on Thursday, with Keir Starmer firing him.

That was just the beginning. As Russian drones entered Polish airspace and were shot down by Nato jets, forecasts of world war three gained pace and in the US, Charlie Kirk, a rightwing political activist, was assassinated in front of a crowd in Utah. Another firing followed: at MSNBC, the analyst Matthew Dowd was swiftly booted for suggesting that Kirk, who had a history of making racist and sexist remarks, had learned the hard way that, "hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions". On the Christian right, meanwhile, Kirk instantly rose to the status of an American martyr.

If it was a week in which America looked, once again, like an increasingly dysfunctional and unhappy place and Europe slid towards darker days, it was left to Australia to cheer us up, which it did with - what else? - the discovery of a new marsupial: a tiny, previously unknown relative of the kangaroo, a sort of mouse-wallaby hybrid species of "bettong", identified by its fossil remains because, in keeping with the general state of the world and because we can't have nice things, it turns out it is already extinct.