Table of contents for 1463 in The Week

What happened Jeremy Hunt announced a cut to national insurance this week in an Autumn Statement geared to boosting long-term economic growth. The two-percentage-point reduction will benefit 27 million workers and will start in January. The Chancellor also permanently extended the “full expensing” scheme that allows companies to claim back 25p for every £1 they invest in IT, machinery and equipment. Claiming it was worth more than £10bn a year, he called it the “biggest business tax cut in modern British history”. He also announced reforms to planning rules, pensions, the minimum wage and savings accounts (see page 42), as well as welfare reforms to get more people back into paid work. In an earlier speech, Rishi Sunak had indicated that the Autumn Statement would mark a pivot in the…

WFH, after half-a-million civil servants were ordered to spend at least three days per week in the office, in the first central Whitehall guidance on the issue. Previously, government departments were free to set their own rules. James Cleverly, the new Home Secretary, who was caught on a mic apparently referring to the Stockton North constituency as a “shithole”. In the Commons, the local Labour MP had asked why child poverty rates in his County Durham constituency were so high. Cleverly allegedly said: “because it’s a shithole”. Top Gear fans, with news that the BBC has decided to “rest” the show indefinitely. Its future had been uncertain since presenter Freddie Flintoff was badly injured in a high-speed crash last year.…

Paris Senator drug arrest: A French senator is being investigated by police for allegedly drugging an MP with the intent to sexually assault her. Joël Guerriau, 66 – a senator for the centre-right Horizons party, which is part of President Macron’s ruling coalition – was arrested last Thursday, two days after the alleged incident. Sandrine Josso, 48, a member of the centrist MoDem party, says Guerriau invited her to his home in Paris where he gave her a glass of champagne. She says she started to feel odd, and having seen him handling a plastic bag containing something white, suspected he’d spiked her drink. She left the flat, and tests later showed the presence of the drug ecstasy in her body. Her lawyer said that she felt bewildered and betrayed…

1* Kathy’s Song by Paul Simon, performed by Simon & Garfunkel2 Ek Ladki Ko Dekha by Rahul Dev Burman and Javed Akhtar, performed by Kumar Sanu3 Back to Life (However Do You Want Me) by Jazzie B, Caron Wheeler, Nellee Hooper and Simon Law, performed by Soul II Soul4 Melt by Neil Barnes and Paul Daley, performed by Leftfield5 Andmoreagain by Arthur Lee, performed by Love6 Black (feat. Norah Jones) by Brian Burton and Daniele Luppi, performed by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi7 The Power of Love by Holly Johnson, Peter Gill, Mark O’Toole and Brian Nash, performed by Frankie Goes to Hollywood8 Hometown Glory by Adele Adkins, performed by Adele Book: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry Luxury: chilli sauce * Choice if allowed only one record…

“Parsa’s vision was, at least in the broadest of strokes, not wrong,” said Danny Fortson and Shaun Lintern in The Sunday Times. “He pushed telehealth years before Covid forced us into it, and turned it into a pillar of the healthcare model that will not be reversed.” And AI looks set, in time, to transform healthcare. At a relatively simple level, GPT-4 (an advanced version of ChatGPT) can be used to turn a patient consultation into clinician’s notes in seconds, which the doctor can then edit. And various studies have shown that deep-learning algorithms can be used to assess diagnostic scans with a high level of accuracy and sensitivity in the detection of small abnormalities. AI in healthcare has “nearly limitless potential”, said Dr Corey Scurlock on Forbes. But the…

An Oxford University team has devised an AI program that can predict the ten-year risk of a fatal heart attack. Every year, around 350,000 people with chest pain are given CT scans to check if fatty plaques are narrowing their coronary arteries. In three-quarters of cases, there is no clear sign of narrowing, and so the patients are discharged. Many patients, however, will go on to suffer fatal heart attacks in the next few years, owing to small narrowings that were not visible on the scan. To address this, researchers trained AI to detect changes in fat around inflamed arteries – an indicator of future risk – and fed it data on narrowing arteries. They then gave doctors AI-generated risk scores for 744 patients. In 45% of cases, the doctors…

Keir Starmer is “up against it”, said The Times. The crisis in Gaza is “prompting the kind of bloodletting that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003”. Dozens of Labour councillors have resigned over his position on the war, and last week Starmer suffered a Commons revolt that might, in other circumstances, “have imperilled his position”. Fifty-six Labour MPs (more than a quarter of the total), including ten frontbenchers, defied the whip by backing an SNP motion calling for a ceasefire. The shadow ministers, who included Jess Phillips, all quit. Nevertheless, Starmer should stick to his policy of broadly supporting Israel’s military campaign to eliminate Hamas, while calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting, to allow vital aid to reach Gaza’s civilian population. In shadowing Washington’s line, Starmer rightly argues…

“If God had meant us to tell the truth, he wouldn’t have given us so many words with which to disguise our thoughts.”Talleyrand, quoted in the Daily Mail “Every once in a while, I make a mistake – like, well, once a speech.”Joe Biden, ibid. “The main preoccupation of politicians is what taxes look like, not what they actually do.”Mark Littlewood in The Daily Telegraph “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”Wisława Szymborska, quoted in The Marginalian “It’s far better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone.”Marilyn Monroe, quoted on Yahoo Finance “Try your best to make goodness attractive.”Fred Rogers, quoted on CBS News Pittsburgh “If I had to live my life all over again, I’d do it exactly the same – only I wouldn’t…

Cricket Australia won the World Cup, beating India in the final by six wickets. Travis Head top-scored with 137. Football France beat Gibraltar 14-0 in their Euro qualifier – the biggest-ever victory margin in the competition. England beat Malta 2-0 and drew 1-1 with North Macedonia. Tennis Novak Djokovic won the ATP Tour Finals for a record seventh time, beating Jannik Sinner 6-3, 6-3 in the final. The Serb finishes the year as world No. 1 for a record eighth time, and at 36, is the oldest year-ending world No. 1 in history.…

Kiln Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000). Until 20 January Running time: 2hrs 10mins Christmas is coming, and the nation’s playhouses are filling up with festive productions, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph. If it’s A Christmas Carol you’re after, the Old Vic’s winning staging is back (this time with Christopher Eccleston as Scrooge) while Mark Gatiss’s adaptation is at Alexandra Palace in north London, with Keith Allen starring as the miser. Fans of Peter Pan can choose between a traditional staging at the Rose Theatre, Kingston; Peter Pan Goes Wrong in the West End; or lavish pantomimes at the London Palladium and the Bristol Hippodrome, the latter starring David Suchet as Captain Hook. Other hot tickets include Irving Berlin’s White Christmas at the Crucible in Sheffield; The Lion, the…

Uneven psychological thriller with shades of Brideshead Revisited Dir: Emerald Fennell 2hrs 7mins (15) An “exuberant satire on class and privilege”, Saltburn is made by Emerald Fennell, who won wide acclaim for her 2020 debut Promising Young Woman, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Set in 2006, this “flawed, but at times wildly enjoyable” film follows Oliver (Barry Keoghan), a working-class teenager from Merseyside who feels “like a fish out of water” when he arrives at Oxford University. Soon, however, he has “burrowed his way into the affections” of dishy, wealthy Felix (Jacob Elordi); and is invited to spend the summer at Felix’s country pile. The film starts as a kind of “Brideshead with gags”, but in the second half turns into a “dark psychosexual thriller” – at which…

Collecting Nature at Eagle Gallery This group show brings together the work of six artists working in different media, but with a pronounced interest in recording plant life and the natural world. Any sense that we might be in for the artistic equivalent of Autumnwatch, however, will be quickly disabused. Almost everything here is elegiac in mood, with many exhibits alluding to the spectre of climate change: Marisa Culatto’s photographs, for instance, picture plants cast in blocks of ice, like records of what might be lost in the wake of an ecological catastrophe; the same is true of Mandy Bonnell’s exquisite drawings of British plants and, more explicitly, Tracey Bush’s painstakingly-produced 3D images of indigenous butterfly and moth species that are either listed as extinct or critically endangered. Perhaps most…

Lovage 115 St George’s Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne (01914-293750) In spite of the “cost-of-living crisis” and all the economic uncertainty, “brave, risk-taking self-believers” are still opening restaurants in Britain, says William Sitwell in The Daily Telegraph. One such new opening is Lovage, in the fashionable Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, which specialises in “seasonal, Mediterranean-style” dishes that are “delicate, exact, good and honest”, and which sometimes include vegetables grown in the owners’ garden. Our meal starts with a couple of snacks: a single oyster with a slice of gooseberry and lovage oil; and hummus “made fragrant with mint and courgette flower”, served with “shards” of Italian crackers. Then come a pair of “mystically melting” soft-shell crabs, served with a “circle of dreamlike aioli”. Confit duck sits on a round dollop…

WithU has more than 1,000 audio-based workouts for everything from Boxercise to barre, strength training, yoga and meditations, and can sync with Apple Watch (80% of workouts are free, WithU unlimited £10/month or £80/year; withutraining.com). Nike Run Club has audio-guided runs to match any mood, such as “A rainy run” and “Don’t wanna run run”. It logs metrics, has challenges, and syncs with Spotify or Apple Music (free; nike.com/gb/nrc-app). Aaptiv gives access to thousands of different workouts, with 30 new classes added each week. There are also guided sleep meditations (7-day free trial, then £93 year; aaptiv.com). For something a bit different, Apocalypse Survival Training combines sci-fi and fitness to take you on an immersive adventure during an alien invasion. Choose from three workouts: speed, strength or control (one episode…

A winter break in North Yorkshire With half as much winter rain as parts of the West Country, the Yorkshire coast is a great place for a “bright, bracing” off-season break, says Liz Boulter in The Guardian. Scarborough makes a good base, with its 12th century castle and two “huge” sandy beaches where you can see the fossilised footprints of giant dinosaurs in the rocks. Fifteen minutes by train to the south lies the lovely old resort town of Filey, and beyond that, Bridlington. (It is “a silent place” in winter, wrote T.E. Lawrence, who was stationed here in 1934, “where cats and landladies’ husbands walk silently down the middle of the streets”.) In between is the RSPB reserve at Bempton, where the 100-metre cliffs are home to thousands of…

Rosalynn Carter 1927-2023 Rosalynn Carter, who has died aged 96, rose from an impoverished childhood in rural Georgia to take up residence at the White House in the late 1970s. The most politically active US First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, she worked so closely with her husband, Jimmy Carter, that he described her as an “extension of myself”, said The Times. Petite and softly spoken, she cultivated the image of a down-home southern Baptist: she famously wore a six-year-old dress to her husband’s inauguration ball, and often referred to their practice of reading the Bible together. Yet she was very much his political partner. She was the driving force of the campaign that won him his “improbable” victory in 1976, and she became the first First Lady to have her…

Europe’s plan for a “mega-exchange” Matthew Lynn The Daily Telegraph The president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, has outlined an ambitious plan to create a Frankfurt-Paris-Amsterdam stock exchange to challenge New York. “It remains to be seen whether it actually happens”, and whether the proposed combo really could “take on the might of the Dow and the Nasdaq”, says Matthew Lynn – or the rising power of Shanghai and Shenzhen. But the prospect of being “buried by a powerful continental rival” ought to ring alarm bells in London. It shouldn’t be hard, though, for the City to offer a more “light-touch” alternative. A pan-European exchange created by bureaucrats “is certain to be weighed down by a vast, poorly designed rulebook”. Why not bulk up, too? An alternative alliance…

What happened Israel and Hamas agreed a deal to secure the release of 50 of the civilian hostages that were seized during the attacks of 7 October, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four-day pause in the fighting. Under the terms of the agreement, which was brokered by Qatar and Egypt and approved by Israel’s cabinet early on Wednesday, Hamas will free about 12 women and children per day over four days. In return, assuming the truce holds, Israel will release Palestinian women and children held in its jails, and allow 300 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day. Hostilities were expected to be put on hold on Thursday morning. However, the Israeli government stressed that its military campaign would only end with the “complete elimination of Hamas”.…

A growing number of luxury chicken hotels, or “hennels”, are opening to cater to a new generation of owners who want their hens to be pampered when they go on holiday. At one five-star all-inclusive resort in Kent, which costs £3 a day per bird, hens are played music from Classic FM or the Disney film Up, and are promised fruit treats, soft bedding and unlimited access to a play area with swings and a Wendy house. Microsoft has unveiled an AI tool that remote workers can use to “clean up” their homes during video calls. The “decorate your background” feature, which will be rolled out on Microsoft Teams next year, eliminates mess and clutter, and can be used to add house plants, lights and even a Christmas tree.…

The former chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, and the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, both gave evidence at the Covid inquiry this week. Vallance said that Boris Johnson had struggled at times to understand the significance of the data when assessing the Covid threat. He also said that he and other scientific advisers had not been asked for their views on Rishi Sunak’s “eat out to help out” idea before it was introduced. Whitty said the Government had not been “electrified” by the threat of the pandemic, in early 2020, partly because it was more used to dealing with threats such as terrorism. He said the “downsides” of locking down were taken into account, and that he felt the UK had been a bit slow to act. All…

Washington DC Lying congressman quits: The controversial New York Republican congressman George Santos has announced that he won’t be seeking re-election next year. Following his election to the House last November, Santos was forced to admit that he had fabricated many aspects of his past – from suggesting that his mother had been killed in the 9/11 attacks to claiming on his CV that he’d once worked for Goldman Sachs. This year, following scrutiny of his campaign finances, he was indicted on 23 federal criminal charges, including laundering funds and identity theft. Last week, a report by the House ethics committee revealed that Santos had spent campaign contributions on luxury goods, Botox treatments and pornography. Santos, 35, dismissed the report as a “disgusting politicised smear”, and said that he wouldn’t…

“Questioned at the Covid inquiry about Rishi Sunak’s ‘eat out to help out’ idea, the Government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said that this meant extra deaths – inspiring the headline ‘Sunak wanted to “let people die”.’ This is tendentious. Relaxations of lockdown always meant more deaths. Everything short of solitary confinement for the entire population meant more deaths. Ministers had to balance lives against livelihoods. To ascribe quasi-murderous intent to those who struck the balance somewhere short of paralysing the economy is misleading and cheap.” Matthew Parris in The Times…

A shedload of money and a waste of talent James Marriott The Times Amazing what companies will shell out these days to secure the best young talent, says James Marriott. Get a job with the multinational law firm Akin Gump and you can earn £179,000 in your mid-20s as a newly qualified lawyer – a high, but not untypical, sum. New traders can rake in even more. And that’s the tragedy of our generation, laments a Facebook employee in Michael Lewis’s new book on Sam Bankman-Fried: its “smartest minds” are buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an ad. Hard to blame graduates for chasing well-paid jobs given the pressures of student debt and the housing crisis, but it’s draining talent from more socially useful careers. “This…

An Alzheimer’s blood test by 2028 Securing an Alzheimer’s diagnosis involves multiple tests including brain scans, and can take months – or even years. But that could be about to change: several blood tests for the disease are in the late stages of development, some of which can pick up traces of Alzheimer’s proteins up to a decade before symptoms appear. Now, the NHS, in conjunction with Alzheimer’s charities, is launching a £5m project, involving 1,000 patients, to assess the viability of these tests in a real-world setting. The hope is that one might be available on the health service as soon as 2028. Earlier diagnosis would ensure that patients have earlier access to care and support; it would also enable them to be treated with new drugs. Two drugs,…

Doctor Who is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, but Tom Baker, who played the role in the 1970s, has crushed hopes that he might take part in a reunion of Time Lords. “I avoid them,” he told Radio Times. “Not with any malice. A degree of contempt, perhaps.” Informed that three of the Hollywood stars who played Tarzan used to meet up for lunch, Baker, 89, replied: “Unthinkable! Fancy being round a table with old Doctor Whos. Though I’d quite like to walk into a restaurant and find 12 of them around the table – I’d enjoy doing that double take, as I desperately tried to remember who they were.” Emmanuel Macron was 15 when he fell for his teacher Brigitte Auzière, who was then 40. Now, France’s First…

Was I alone in feeling a deep “sense of relief” at the sight of David Cameron marching along Downing Street last week, asked David Waywell on Reaction. To me, Cameron’s return imparted a “sense of long-absent normality”, of centrist moderation, after the political chaos of recent years. It ran counter to the prevailing recent trend of each Tory ministerial appointment “getting progressively worse than the last”. Commentators have offered all sorts of interpretations of the appointment of the new Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton as Foreign Secretary, said Tim Shipman and Caroline Wheeler in The Sunday Times. But Tory strategists say that Rishi Sunak gave him the job for two fairly straightforward reasons: to benefit from Cameron’s “political competence”, and to “subcontract most foreign affairs matters to him, so Sunak…

When Farhad Moshiri became Everton’s owner in 2016, he made it clear that he wanted to turn the club into one of the Premier League’s “top five”, said Jonathan Northcroft in The Sunday Times. To this end, the British-Iranian businessman embarked on an “extraordinary” spending spree – his logic being that a “big initial outlay” would be certain to recoup itself, as the club’s revenues would be substantially boosted by the team’s improved performances. A string of expensive players were duly signed; a series of big-name managers were hired and, in turn, fired as each failed to deliver; and millions were ploughed into the club’s new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium, due to be completed next year. By the end of Moshiri’s first five years at the helm, Everton’s net transfer spend…

by Philip Norman Simon & Schuster 560pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99 George Harrison, aka the “quiet Beatle”, was always overshadowed by his more attention-grabbing bandmates, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. And as Philip Norman shows in his “authoritative” biography, they often weren’t very nice to their lead guitarist. “Who’s that bloody kid who’s always hanging around?” an “acid-tongued 17-year-old John Lennon” remarked when Harrison, then 14, started attending the fledgling band’s rehearsals. Things didn’t improve once they became The Beatles: “Harrison lost his virginity in a Hamburg bunk bed”, with his jeering bandmates watching on. Nor did they take his musical gifts seriously: he was “forever struggling” to get his songs on Beatles records, and even when, in the wake of the group’s split, his 1970 solo album…

Daring drama starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman Dir: Todd Haynes 1hr 57mins (15) In 1995, director Todd Haynes and actress Julianne Moore made their “dual breakthrough” with Safe, a portrait of a housewife “made ill by contemporary life”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. Now, almost 30 years on, they have reunited for May December, “an expertly arch comic drama with Moore again undone in suburbia”. Here, her character is Gracie, who more than two decades ago had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old boy. “Scandal and prison followed, before a slow return to obscurity.” But now, there is talk about her case being made into a film, with Gracie played by a movie star (Natalie Portman). “Watching Portman watch Moore, and Moore watch her back, is fascinating”,…

Recent years have seen “a reappraisal of Picasso’s legacy, particularly concerning his treatment of women”, says Julia Binswanger in the Smithsonian Magazine. “These concerns, however, don’t appear to have harmed the value of Picasso’s art on the market.” His 1932 painting Femme à la montre (or Woman with a Watch) sold for $139.4m (£112m) at Sotheby’s in New York on 9 November. The portrait, which depicts Marie-Thérèse Walter, his “golden muse”, was part of a $400m sale from the late philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau’s collection. Three collectors from around the world bid for it, before the anonymous buyer placed the winning offer. It was the highest price for an artwork at auction this year—and the second-highest-ever sale price for a Picasso. That it achieved such a high price was a…

During an argument, Kate accuses Jakob of not being a team player; they later make up. At Diwali with Usha’s family, Alan is inspired to have a fundraiser at St Stephen’s. Lilian is visited by one Harry Chilcott, angry owner of the injured horse; Lilian tells him to return tomorrow so that Alice can explain. Miles tells Helen that Rob is dying; she must bring Jack to see him tomorrow, with Joy for support. The next day, Harry is impressed by Alice and apologises; flustered, she declines his lunch invitation. At Rob’s flat, Jack refuses to go in. Lilian convinces Alice to give Harry a chance. At Ruairi’s party, Jakob persuades Kate to be a “team player” by helping him and Usha at St Stephen’s. Alice worries about her baggage…

Mabodofu is the Japanese version of the Chinese dish mapo tofu, says Sylvan Mishima Brackett. It gets its distinctive flavour from tobanjan, a Japanese-made Sichuan-style paste of fermented broad beans and chilli peppers, which is available in most Japanese grocery shops. And you should choose the best ground pork you can find. Although you can make mabodofu with medium or firm tofu, I prefer the lush texture of the silken variety. Like a curry, it is incomplete without rice Makes 6-8 servings 2 packs silken tofu 2 tbsp vegetable or other neutral oil 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil 3 tbsp minced ginger 3 tbsp minced garlic 1-3 Thai bird’s eye chillies, stemmed, seeded and sliced 450g ground pork ½ medium yellow onion, finely chopped 8 tbsp red miso 2 tbsp…

Beachfront Cyprus stay Stay 7 nights at the Chrysomare Beach Hotel, overlooking the Mediterranean sea. From £518pp all-inclusive (incl. flights). 020-3474 0372, blueseaholidays.co.uk. Depart 6 March. Half-board in Montenegro Enjoy this 7-night escape at the 4-star Hotel Rivijera, a chic bolthole between twinkling seas and rugged hillside. From £261pp (incl. flights). 01234-230440, loveholidays.com. Depart 21 April. Eight nights in Thailand Relax on this sunny getaway with a stay at Phuket’s chic Nipa Resort, and enjoy a Koh Phi Phi ferry trip. From £899pp b&b (incl. flights). 020-3883 2859, holidaybuzz.co.uk. Depart 8 March. Two-night Dublin city break Explore the cobbled lanes of Temple Bar, stroll through Trinity College and stay at Cassidys Hotel. From £119pp room-only (incl. flights). 020-3883 8236, travelzoo.com. Depart 12 February.…

Bayer: double trouble The German pharma giant Bayer is perhaps best known for launching aspirin in 1899. Right now, it could probably use a bottle or two, said Tim Loh in Fortune. Bayer suffered “its worst day ever” on stock markets this week, losing nearly 20% of its value (about €7.6bn) thanks to two big headaches. The first was a drugs disappointment: Bayer has aborted a late-stage trial of the anti-thrombotic medicine asundexian – described by one investor as “the pearl” in its pipeline – due to “efficacy” concerns. The second was renewed pain from an old injury: Roundup – the allegedly carcinogenic weedkiller Bayer acquired in 2018 as part of its $63bn buyout of the US agrochemical corporation Monsanto. This week, a Missouri jury ordered Bayer’s Monsanto unit to…

Sir Alan Parker Keir Starmer has left most of Labour’s business schmoozing to his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. But he’s now trying to build relationships of his own, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. Hence his decision to cosy up to one of the City’s top “spin doctors”, Sir Alan Parker of Brunswick, who has invited the bosses of several FTSE 100 companies – including Barclays, Rolls-Royce and Aviva – to meet Starmer in December. Under Parker, Brunswick has grown from a small City firm into a global communications colossus. He has links to Labour dating back years (his father, British Rail boss Sir Peter Parker, knew an earlier generation of Labour leaders). Brunswick’s “partnership” with Labour is apparently pro bono, but it’s “hard to think that Brunswick will…

Punctuation, after the residents of St Mary’s Terrace in the Hampshire village of Twyford won their battle to have its apostrophe restored. Last year, the street was given a new sign minus the proper punctuation. Winchester Council later informed residents that its policy was to remove apostrophes from street “signage”, to make names clearer for emergency services and prevent glitches in computer systems. However, in light of the strong feelings on the matter, it has now returned the old sign. Shakira, the Colombian pop star, who reached a deal to end her long dispute with the Spanish tax authorities. She was accused of failing to pay £12.64m in income tax in 2012-2014, when tax officials claimed she was “ordinarily resident” in Spain. To avoid a trial, and possible prison time,…

39% of voters in Great Britain think that the Government should abandon the Rwanda migrant policy entirely, in light of the Supreme Court ruling it unlawful. 29% believe it should try to make a similar agreement with a different country. YouGov/The i Paper 15% of adults in the UK say they’ve had to take a significant period of time off work while they waited for NHS treatment or surgery. Savanta/Liberal Democrats In a poll taken before the Autumn Statement, 51% of voters said that taxes should be cut now, rather than in the Spring Budget. 32% of voters associate Labour with lower taxes; 23% associate the Tories with them. Redfield & Wilton Strategies/Daily Mail…

Billie Jean King’s vigilance When the tennis legend Billie Jean King was growing up in California, the daughter of a fireman and a housewife, money was tight – which meant that what food she ate was scrutinised. She would find relief in the occasional cheap candy bar, and as an adult she became prone to binge-eating. She kept her weight under control during her tennis career, but by 1995, when she checked in to an eating disorder clinic, she was often eating ten bars of candy a day, and almost a litre of ice cream. She is now 80, but she doesn’t think her problems are behind her. “Every morning when I wake up I say, ‘I have an eating disorder,’” she told Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. “Just…

A burglar in China was arrested after he fell asleep mid-robbery and woke up the houseowner with his snoring. The man, surnamed Yang, slipped through a window of a home in Yunnan province around midnight on 8 November. When he heard the residents talking, he decided to smoke a cigarette as he waited for them to go to bed. He then fell asleep himself and the homeowner was woken by the man’s snoring, which she initially assumed was coming from a neighbour. When she realised it was coming from her own home, however, she found the man sleeping soundly, and rang the police. A wigmaker from Lagos has set the Guinness World Record for making the longest wig. Helen Williams constructed the 351m-long wig in 11 days, using 1,000 bundles…

ETHIOPIA The warlike dreams of a peacemaker Al Jazeera (Doha) Four years ago, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping secure peace with Eritrea. Today, Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, is spouting the sort of imperialist rhetoric that endangers the whole of east Africa, says Tafi Mhaka. When Eritrea gained independence in 1993, Ethiopia lost all of its Red Sea ports and became the world’s largest populous landlocked nation. Ever since, it’s had to rely on neighbours – Djibouti in particular – for access to ports and shipping lanes. Alarmingly, however, Abiy is now starting to insist that permanent access to a Red Sea port is an “existential matter” for Ethiopia. It may come via deals with other nations, he suggested in a speech last month; but then again,…

Javier Milei has had a weird career, said Richard Lapper in The Daily Telegraph. Among other things, he has been a semi-professional footballer, the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band, a tantric sex coach and an economics pundit. On 10 December, he’ll add another job to that list: president of Argentina. The self-described “anarcho-capitalist” secured the role last weekend, with his second-round victory against the centrist Sergio Massa. In a rumbustious campaign, Milei had often brandished a chainsaw to highlight his plans to slash the state. He wants to shut down many government departments, sell off state companies, and cut public spending from 38% to 23% of GDP. He has also talked of abolishing Argentina’s central bank, which he once described as “the worst thing in the universe”.…

Once, it was regarded as a stately piece of prestige TV, said Michael Hogan in The Guardian. Seven years on, Peter Morgan’s The Crown is a “trashy”, unwittingly comical melodrama that borders on exploitative. Critics of the new season, which covers the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, have called it “crass”, “pointless”, and a “new low”. Let’s just say the reviews have been “mixed”. So what went wrong? One problem is that when the show started in 2016, few viewers knew a great deal about the postwar events being dramatised, or had strong views about them, and many of the people involved were dead. The Crown was part lavishly produced soap opera, “part history lesson”. But with each season since then, it has got closer to the present day…

Last weekend, Formula 1 rolled into Las Vegas for the first time in 41 years, said Rebecca Clancy in The Times. The organisers billed it as the “biggest sporting event on Earth” – but much of the build-up was “farcical”. Residents and business owners fumed about the disruption caused by the construction of the 3.8-mile circuit, which took in a section of the Strip. The first practice, on Thursday, was called off after eight minutes, when Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari was damaged by a dislodged drain cover. A second practice was then delayed for hours while thousands of other manhole covers were checked. When the practice session finally got under way at 2:30am, spectators were sent home because Nevada’s labour laws meant that security staff couldn’t continue to work. Angry fans…

To The New Statesman I enjoyed Melissa Denes’ piece on private schools (“What are private schools really selling?”). However, it misrepresents the racial diversity of the sector. It uses Katharine Birbalsingh’s views on the “wokeness” of private schools to portray diversity initiatives as inauthentic. But private education has a higher proportion of ethnic-minority pupils than state schools. Part of private schools’ raison d’être is to preserve class divides. But the story on race is not so simple. Ethnic-minority parents are increasingly seeing private schools as a way for their children to succeed. Labour should examine this, rather than pretend it isn’t happening. Dan Johnson, London To The New Statesman Melissa Denes if anything understates the degree of state support for private schools. Most private-school teachers are trained at state-supported higher…

by Samantha Harvey Jonathan Cape 144pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £11.99 From a novel about Alzheimer’s to medieval crime, Samantha Harvey is a novelist who “reinvents her career with each new book”, said Alice Jolly in The Sunday Times. Her latest journey into “unexplored territory” is a “poetic and powerful” account of a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. Because the astronauts inhabit an “orbiting laboratory” that is travelling at 17,000 miles an hour, they orbit Earth 16 times per day, and so “see 16 dawns and 16 sunsets”. Harvey’s ability to capture this “constantly unravelling world” – “Asia come and gone. Australia a dark featureless shape against this last breath of light” – is the novel’s most remarkable feature. Such passages are also…

Rollicking epic about the French emperor Dir: Ridley Scott 2hrs 38mins (15) “If, at 85, Ridley Scott has reached the final season of his filmmaking career, Napoleon is the ideal work of wintry grandeur to mark it,” said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. His biopic of the French emperor is a “magnificently hewn slab of dad cinema with a chill wind whistling over its battlefields”, and a palette so cold, “even the red in the tricolore is often the shade of dried blood”. Spanning 32 years, from the start of the Revolution in 1789 to Napoleon’s lonely death in 1821, the film casts Boney’s “rise, reign and downfall as both a prickly psychodrama and a sweeping military epic, in which the intimate lives of its central players and the…

The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London SW1 (0303-123 7300; rct.uk). Until 14 April When we visualise the court of Henry VIII, it is probably a picture by Hans Holbein that springs to mind, said Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard. His “unforgettable” portraits of figures including the king, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, are extraordinarily lifelike: it is as if Holbein’s hand “picked up character”, effortlessly transplanting personality onto paper. Born in Augsburg in 1497, Holbein spent most of his working life in London, eventually becoming the king’s painter. As a result, our Royal Collection is “especially rich” in his work, a treasure trove of wonders now on display at The Queen’s Gallery. This “fine” show brings together a number of “exceptionally beautiful” paintings alongside miniatures and 40 preparatory drawings…

When Gossips Meet by Bernard Capp, 2003 (OUP £76). I simply love this book. It’s a mine of information about the informal and usually unrecorded meeting places and power sources of medieval women, from rituals in the closed women-only childbirth chambers, to traditions at the water pump, and the arrival of the spinning wheel. It reveals the normal life of women, and you can almost hear the voices on the page. Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences by Cordelia Fine, 2010 (Icon Books £10.99). If you’ve ever been stuck in a pub, arguing about whether women can park a car, this is the book you need. A thoughtful analysis of the pseudo-science about the sexes, it nails the “delusions” of male superiority in biology and society and…

Programmes Concorde: The Race for Supersonic Two-part documentary about the airliner and its Anglo-French developers’ race to beat JFK’s America and Soviet Russia. Sat 25 Nov, C4 20:30 (60mins). Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator New docuseries: in a bid to become consul, the most powerful position in Rome, Caesar makes risky alliances and courts the public vote. Mon 27 Nov, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). Walter Presents: Off Season French crime drama. A police captain returns to investigate a murder in the ski resort where her daughter died three years earlier. Tue 28 Nov, C4 00:05 (65mins). Louis Theroux Interviews… Raye Theroux talks to the award-winning singer-songwriter in her south London home and follows her during a busy year. Tue 28 Nov, BBC2 21:00 (45mins). Berlin 1933 Three-part German documentary…

● If you think you have been scammed, immediately call your bank or card provider. If you think you are being scammed, hang up the phone and call 159, to be connected quickly and securely to your bank (assuming it has signed up to the scheme). ● Check your banking app, as you can often freeze cards and report a stolen card online. If an unauthorised payment has been made, you should get your money back. ● If you bought something from a scammer with a credit card, you may be able to get your money back under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. If you used a debit card, you can try a chargeback scheme. ● Complain to the Financial Ombudsman if you feel your bank failed to…

A.S. Byatt 1936-2023 A.S. Byatt was a writer and critic who made little effort, in the first part of her career, to inspire “narrative greed”, said The Daily Telegraph – the term she coined for the reader’s compulsion to turn the pages. Dense, complex and “consciously intellectual”, her novels from that period (unlike those of her younger sister Margaret Drabble) did not trouble the bestseller lists. Then, in 1990, she surprised the literary world by producing Possession – which used techniques that she had borrowed from her “beloved Georgette Heyer”, and from the detective stories she’d read as a child, as well as those of her more “usual models, Proust and D.H. Lawrence”. Pacy, witty and sensual, Possession was about a secret affair between two fictional 19th century poets, and…

The week’s best shares Bioventix The Sunday Times This niche “tiddler” creates antibodies from sheep – selling them in liquid form to pharma groups, including Roche, to test conditions from vitamin D deficiency to drug abuse. Risky, but with promising opportunities. Buy. £37.50. Cake Box The Mail on Sunday Profits are rising at the egg-free cakemaker, which was hit by higher costs and falling sales. Aiming to expand its 214 franchise stores to 400. Cheap shares and a popular product could attract a predator. Buy. 148p. Informa The Times Revenues and profits are improving at the exhibitions and events juggernaut as the core events business rebounds. Improving cashflow and extending its buyback programme. There’s scope for margins to fatten. Buy. 739.6p. Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust The Mail on Sunday Orit…