Table of contents for 1561 in The Week

It wasn’t all bad

A vaccine for a virus that can kill elephants in 24 hours has been developed by a team of researchers. Endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV) is one of the most serious threats to Asian elephants, which are endangered. Dormant in nearly all adults, it was first recorded in the 1980s and has since killed dozens of the animals in the wild and in captivity. Now, the team, partly based at Chester Zoo, says its vaccine has proved effective in a six-year trial, and is ready for wider use. Two large-scale Hogarth paintings that have hardly been seen for decades can now be visited by the public. The artist painted the giant murals, depicting two Biblical stories – The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan – free of charge on the walls…

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The Week|1561

Politics

Controversy of the week The right to protest “In Britain, protest is no longer a right,” said Owen Jones in The Guardian. That’s the implication of the Government’s stringent new proposals, announced in the wake of the heinous synagogue attack in Manchester, to place limits on lawful demonstrations. Under the plans, police forces will be able to dictate the length and location of repeated protests; the Home Office is also reportedly looking at introducing outright bans on protests that risk intimidating minorities. Let’s be clear: Labour is directly targeting the ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations against the “erasure of Gaza”. Keir Starmer said that this week’s protests should be called off, claiming that it was “un-British” to hold them after the Manchester attack. But these gatherings are a legitimate expression of outrage…

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The Week|1561

Bad week for:

Mobile phone thieves, after the Metropolitan Police claimed to have disrupted a major criminal gang suspected of smuggling 40,000 phones – up to 40% of all those stolen in London – from the UK to China in the past year. The operation involved raids on 28 properties, and led to 46 people being arrested. The NHS, which is having to contend with a growing wave of elderly cocaine abusers. Although the highest rate of cocainerelated fatalities is among men in their 40s, 723 over-65s sought medical treatment for cocaine-related health problems in the year to March, eight of whom were in their 90s.…

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The Week|1561

Europe at a glance

Paris PM quits: President Macron was facing growing pressure to step down this week following the resignation of his prime minister. Sébastien Lecornu had only been in post for 28 days, and was France’s fifth PM in two years. Like his two immediate predecessors – Michel Barnier and François Bayrou – he had been charged with steering an austerity budget through parliament, to cut France’s spiralling national debt. This task has proved extremely challenging, owing to Macron’s fateful decision to call a snap parliamentary election in July 2024, which resulted in a hung parliament, split three ways. Lecornu (pictured) had promised that he would meet with opposition leaders, and not follow Bayrou’s approach, which had been unpopular, but then he appointed a cabinet very similar to Bayrou’s. Calls for Macron…

What happened The Manchester attack Police stepped up patrols in areas with large Jewish populations last week, following an attack on a synagogue in Manchester that left two victims dead and three more seriously injured. It occurred in Crumpsall, an outer suburb of the city, as people gathered at the Heaton Park synagogue to mark Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. A man in a fake suicide belt – later identified as Jihad al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent – rammed his car into a guard at the gates before attacking congregants with a knife. Police shot him dead as he tried to force his way into the building. Keir Starmer said he would do everything in his power to guarantee the security of Britain’s Jewish…

What happened In her speech at the Conservative Party conference, Kemi Badenoch made a pitch to win back voters tempted by Reform UK’s anti-immigration agenda. Among other things, she said her government would deport 150,000 migrants a year, via a US-style “removals force”, and withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). However, the speech was largely focused on the economy. Badenoch pledged £47bn in spending cuts, and said that under a new “golden rule”, half such savings would be used to reduce the deficit. She also promised to scrap stamp duty on primary residences in England and Northern Ireland. The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick – who used his speech to attack “activist judges” – was heavily criticised for comments he’d made after a recent trip…

Bari Weiss In the current maelstrom of the US media industry, every big appointment is politically charged. Still, the outcry greeting Bari Weiss’s move to become editor-in-chief of CBS News has been loud. “A throwing-up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here,” one staffer told The Guardian; others were reportedly “literally freaking out”. A journalistentrepreneur, who founded The Free Press news site after leaving The New York Times amid acrimony over her conservative views in 2020, Weiss is the season’s big story, said James Warrington in The Daily Telegraph. CBS owner Paramount – recently bought for $8bn by David Ellison’s Skydance in a deal bankrolled by his father Larry – is paying $150m for her company in a “takeover that embeds a news startup at…

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