The Week 1528

For a man who claims to be a master of the “art of the deal”, Donald Trump has made an “unpromising start” to his negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, said The Independent. In his 1987 business guide, he wrote that his dealmaking style was to “aim very high” and then “keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I am after”. But when it comes to Ukraine, the US president has been handing concession after concession to Vladimir Putin. Before America and Russia’s foreign ministers even held their first meeting in Saudi Arabia this week, his administration unilaterally declared that there was no prospect of Ukraine regaining its pre-2014 borders or being admitted into Nato. After the meeting, Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and echoed…

Archaeologists have hailed the discovery of the remains of a 2,000-year-old basilica as one of the most important pieces of Roman history unearthed in the City of London. The structure would have been at the heart of a bustling forum the size of a football pitch, and would have functioned as a sort of town hall. The site was discovered at 85 Gracechurch Street, under the basement of an office block that is being redeveloped; the plan is for the site to be eventually opened to the public. A Venezuelan kayaker had a narrow escape when he was sucked into the mouth of a humpback whale. Adrián Simancas, 23, was paddling in waters off southern Chile with his father when the whale surfaced, jaws gaping, and swallowed him up, along…

Plenty of “consequential speeches” have been delivered at the Munich Security Conference over the years, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian – not least Vladimir Putin’s 2007 address, in which he announced that Russia would never accept “a subordinate role in the new world order”. But last week’s tirade by US Vice-President J.D. Vance might just prove to be the “most consequential” of them all: “the moment the world order against which Putin railed fell apart”. To an audience already reeling from Trump’s dealings with Moscow, Vance unleashed an ideological assault on the US’s allies, said The Daily Telegraph. He claimed that free speech is “in retreat” in Europe where, he said, “entrenched interests” were silencing alternative viewpoints by using “ugly, Soviet-era words” such as “disinformation”. He accused mainstream politicians…

American presidents, of all political hues, have long urged Europe to take more responsibility for its own security, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. Even Dwight Eisenhower, “not prone to inflammatory rhetoric”, warned Europe way back in 1959 not to “make a sucker out of Uncle Sam”. In the years since, European leaders have consistently promised to do better – while continuing to let the US “pick up the tab” for maintaining Nato’s strength in defence of their freedom. And even though the main threat to the continent’s security is neighbouring Russia, European countries have looked on passively as Moscow’s defence spending has rocketed. The result is that Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s, now spends more on defence than all European nations combined, amounting to 6.3% of…

Controversy of the week In a turbulent period in British politics, there has been one constant: an agreement that the UK’s defence spending should increase. Now, that “consensual background hum has suddenly become an ear-splitting alarm”, said Peter Walker in The Guardian: Washington has made it brutally clear that the US can no longer be relied upon to defend Europe, making our failure to boost our own military capabilities look dangerously complacent. Britain’s Armed Forces have been hollowed out by years of underfunding, said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. In the 1980s, we spent around 5% of GDP on defence; today it is just over 2.3%. And it isn’t enough. Keir Starmer has suggested putting UK boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a mooted peacekeeping force. That…

A council meeting about a proposed new low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) in Lambeth, south London, became so heated that councillors were reportedly left “in tears” – and were offered a day off to recover. “Following Saturday’s event and the horrid time that was had by all, I wanted to offer you all a free day of well-being leave,” read an email from Lambeth’s head of transport strategy. They were once dismissed as the preserve of celebrities and the super-rich, but the British public is increasingly in favour of pre- and post-nuptial agreements, a survey has found. According to YouGov, 55% of adults think the agreements on how to split assets are a good idea, up from 42% two years ago. 41% think they make divorces less stressful.…