The Week 1529

What happened Trump and Ukraine Days before he was due to fly to Washington to meet President Trump on Thursday, Keir Starmer announced plans to raise UK defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP by 2027. The PM said that the foreign aid budget would be cut to fund the increase. Earlier, France’s President Macron had visited the White House, and in a touchy feely meeting with Trump, sought to make Europe’s case on the war in Ukraine. Afterwards, Macron suggested that a truce in the conflict could be feasible within weeks. Trump said Vladimir Putin had “no problem” with European peacekeeping troops being stationed in Ukraine – but the Kremlin later rejected this. Last week, Trump shocked European leaders by siding with Russia against Ukraine and calling President…

What happened Germany’s federal election on Sunday delivered victory to the conservative CDU – and gave the far-right AfD its best results ever. Led by Friedrich Merz, who is set to become the next chancellor, the CDU took 29% of the vote, on a record 83% turnout. The AfD came second with 21%; Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD trailed third on 16%; the Greens won 12%; and the Left Party, boosted by strong support among the young, took 9%. Merz, a former lawyer with no government experience, will(with the CDU’s sister party the CSU) seek to form a coalition with the SPD. That would leave his coalition with a majority of 12 in the 630-seat parliament. Mainstream parties are expected to maintain the “firewall” against the hard-right, and freeze the AfD…

A village in West Lancashire has been hailed as the culinary capital of Britain after winning its fifth Michelin star (across three restaurants). With just 8,300 residents, Aughton, near Ormskirk, now has the highest per capita number of stars in the world – an accolade previously held by the Japanese city of Kyoto. “We’ve had people from the States plan their honeymoon around dinner here,” Mark Birchall, the chef at the newly three-starred Moor Hall, told The Guardian. A collection of some of the earliest and finest photographs of England and its landscapes has been acquired by Historic England. The collection, of more than 8,000 black-and-white images, covers every English county and was put together by Janette Rosing, a renowned photographic consultant who died in 2021, after dedicating her life…

Controversy of the week Has Volodymyr Zelensky patched up his fractured relationship with Donald Trump? News that the Ukrainian leader was due to fly to Washington on Friday, to sign a minerals deal with the US, certainly suggests a rapprochement. And we must hope it lasts, said Robyn Dixon in The Washington Post, because the “feud” that erupted last week – when Trump froze Ukraine out of peace talks with Russia, called Zelensky a “dictator” and blamed him for starting the war – threatened to destroy the relationship between Ukraine and its most powerful ally. Trump’s diatribe “landed like a bombshell”, said Robert Tait in The Guardian. “But it did not come out of nowhere.” The pair have a history, dating back to Trump’s first presidency, when he was impeached…

Children now enjoy listening to stories more than reading them, a survey by the National Literacy Trust has found. More than two in five children aged eight to 18 in the UK say they enjoy listening to audiobooks or podcasts outside school, whereas only a third say they read books, magazines or newspapers for pleasure. Weight-loss drugs are fuelling demand for “body lift” operations, The Sunday Times reports. With more than 500,000 people in Britain taking drugs such as Wegovy on a weekly basis, plastic surgeons say they’ve seen a “noticeable increase” in patients asking for procedures to have saggy excess skin removed. This surgery “not only enhances body contour but also boosts confidence”, one surgeon told the paper.…

Climate campaigners, after the Transport Secretary indicated that she was poised to approve a second runway at Gatwick. Describing herself as no “flight-shaming eco-warrior”, Heidi Alexander said aviation was “critical to the economy”, and noted that Gatwick has capacity problems. Its proposal is to make its standby emergency runway fit for permanent use, to allow an extra 100,000 flights a year by the end of the decade. Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway once admired for its efficient service, with a new analysis showing that, after years of decline, its trains are now less punctual than those of the worst operator in the UK. Tesla, after shares in the electric car maker slumped 9%, in response to figures showing that sales in Europe fell by almost a half in January.…