Table of contents for 1487 in The Week

What happened Rishi Sunak insisted that the result of the general election was not a “foregone conclusion”, despite his party’s worst set of local election results in decades. The Tories lost 473 councillors across England in last Thursday’s elections, securing just 515 seats overall, compared with Labour’s 1,158 and the Lib Dems’ 552. In a by-election in Blackpool South, held on the same day, Labour won back the seat from the Tories with a 26-point swing, the third-largest recorded post-war. The results of the mayoral contests were also grim for the Tories (see page 21). Their hopes of an upset in London faded as Labour’s Sadiq Khan easily won a third term, and Andy Street lost by a narrow margin in the West Midlands. The sole Tory victor was Ben…

“I have changed.” So declared John Swinney, the new SNP leader, when he was sworn in as Scotland’s First Minister on Monday – after winning the backing of 64 MSPs, a narrow majority. Swinney said that he would discard the partisan politics that had dominated the SNP and Holyrood in recent years, and take a more collaborative approach. The new First Minister has a reputation both as a “deal-maker who can work across parties” and as “a ferocious heckler of opponents”, said Kieran Andrews and John Boothman in The Times; he promised that there would be no more “shouted put-downs from the front bench or heckling from a sedentary position”. Swinney’s path to the leadership was cleared when his main competitor, Kate Forbes, stepped aside (see page 14). He is…

Inbound travellers, after the passport e-gates failed at airports all over the country on Tuesday, leading to long delays. The Home Office said the glitch at Border Force was fixed within four hours, and confirmed that it was not the result of a cyberattack. Southern Water, which faced criticism after thousands of properties in Hastings and other parts of East Sussex were left without water for up to four days, due to a burst water main. Many residents faced long queues at bottled water stations. Some resorted to collecting seawater in buckets to flush their toilets. Boris Johnson, who fell foul of the photo ID rule he introduced as PM when he went to vote. Having failed to persuade officers that his name and address on a mailed copy of…

Paris Bruni questioned: Carla Bruni, the wife of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, has been questioned as a suspect by French police as part of the criminal case brought against her husband. Already convicted of corruption and influence peddling, Sarkozy now faces charges of having accepted €5m in illegal campaign contributions from the late Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, and with pressurising a witness to retract allegations that he had done so. Bruni, 56, a model and singer, was quizzed for nearly three hours over claims she’d deleted messages incriminating her husband in the witness tampering. Sarkozy is due to stand trial next year. Madrid Bullfighting blow: To the consternation of conservative Spain, the left-wing coalition of Pedro Sánchez has scrapped the national bullfighting prize. Bullfighting was declared part of Spain’s “cultural…

“The keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, is suddenly de rigueur for lots of left-wing students, many of whom are white. Which is fascinating because, for ages, left-wing students have been telling us, loudly and angrily, that white Westerners shouldn’t wear the traditional clothing of other ethnic groups, as it is ‘cultural appropriation’. To be clear: I’ve got nothing against white people wearing the keffiyeh. I just wish they had let the rest of us know. A memo, perhaps, saying: ‘Cultural appropriation is no longer considered a heinous offence against marginalised and oppressed minorities. Instead, it is now considered a noble expression of solidarity with them.’” Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph…

For the love of God, Forbes had to give way Sarah Ditum The Times Poor Kate Forbes. She could have made a great SNP leader, says Sarah Ditum, but once again she’s been overlooked – and “largely because of the God thing”. Asked last year about her views on social issues, the devout Christian made the mistake of answering honestly. She’d have voted against same-sex marriage, she said, and was against pre-marital sex. She made it clear these were just personal views, not a prospectus for government, but critics swiftly cast her as a “retrograde menace”. That Humza Yousaf, the man who beat her, was “also a person of committed faith” didn’t seem to matter: evangelical Christians are singled out for censure, not just because they offend against our national…

“American voters have never been more polarised,” said John Hendrickson in The Atlantic, but there’s one thing they still all agree on: shooting puppies is wrong. That much is clear from the outraged reaction to Kristi Noem’s new political memoir. In No Going Back, the governor of South Dakota – and would-be Trump running mate – recounts how she disposed of a rambunctious puppy named Cricket. She describes how the “untrainable” 14-month-old wirehaired pointer ran wild on a pheasant shoot, and attacked a neighbour’s chickens. “I hated that dog,” Noem writes, before detailing how she led Cricket to a gravel pit on her family farm and shot it dead. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.” For good measure, she then shot a family goat…

Personalised jab for skin cancer Doctors in the UK have begun a phase-three trial of the world’s first “personalised” vaccine against the deadliest form of skin cancer. For the trial, led by a team at University College London Hospital, scores of patients in Britain will have jabs designed to stop their cancer from returning. Based on mRNA technology, the treatment works by priming the patient’s immune system to identify the specific proteins known as neoantigens that are found on their tumour – so that they attack any cells bearing them. To create the custom-made treatment, scientists analyse tissue from the tumour extracted during surgery; the idea is that the jab will lead to any cancer cells left behind after the surgery being wiped out, so that the cancer cannot return.…

“An awful lot of people” today seem to believe that slavery made Britain rich, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. It is, if you think about it, a strange claim. Slavery has existed since the dawn of time. Britain exploited slaves only for a couple of hundred years, and then abolished slavery. Yet there is a feeling Britain benefitted from it uniquely – and was “uniquely wicked”. The Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, has recently taken to challenging this belief, arguing in a speech last month that the UK’s wealth is not entirely down to slavery and colonialism, and “white privilege or whatever”. Far more important, she suggested, were Britain’s institutions – its democracy, rule of law, free markets and banks. She was, of course, shouted down. But if you…

The final of this year’s Snooker World Championship was the first since 2005 “to have a guaranteed first-time winner”, said Elgan Alderman in The Times. It pitted English 12th seed Kyren Wilson – a defeated finalist in 2020 – against Welsh qualifier Jak Jones. Jones had “needed almost 46 hours of play to reach his first major final” – nearly double the amount required by his opponent – and “he was on fumes” as the match began: as a result, he lost the opening seven frames. Though he displayed great “gumption” thereafter, Jones could never recover from his terrible start, and Wilson maintained a significant lead throughout, said Charles Richardson in The Daily Telegraph. When, on Monday night, the Englishman went 17-11 up, the match seemed as good as over,…

Vive la différence To The Times Your article about the gastronomic differences between UK and US armed forces reminded me of even greater ones with our friends across the Channel. The late Hubert Dunn QC told me years ago that when he was a young officer in Suez in 1956, he was shown a French army cookery book that had 100 or so recipes for potatoes. The British Army’s equivalent offered six: boiled, mashed, baked, fried, roasted and chipped. Years later I came across an account of the expedition across central Africa between 1896 and 1898 by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Included in the 100 or so tonnes of “necessities” for this long and perilous journey were generous quantities of paté de foie gras, galantine laced with truffles and tripes à…

Yunchan Lim: Chopin Études Op. 10 & Op. 25 Decca £13 At the tender age of 20, South Korea’s Yunchan Lim has secured a global reputation as a “prodigiously gifted, immensely exciting pianist”, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian. Now he has produced his debut studio recording – “thrilling performances of Chopin’s studies, the technique dazzlingly immaculate and the musical impulses propelling it often startlingly original”. If there are moments of youthful impetuosity, they are few and forgivable: the more consistent impression is one of breathtaking brilliance. It’s fascinating, said Richard Fairman in the FT, to compare Lim’s recordings with those of Maurizio Pollini, the late Italian pianist whose Chopin Études remain a lofty benchmark. It turns out that Pollini and Lim “are polar opposites: where Pollini is coolheaded perfection,…

Between 1911 and 1914, an international collective of painters calling themselves Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”) instigated “a revolution in modern art”, said Daria Hufnagel in The Independent. Although based in Munich, the movement’s leading lights hailed from all around Europe and shared a belief that art could be used to express “personal experiences and spiritual ideas”: they used colour and compositional structure not to record objective reality, but to evoke mood and feeling. The group numbered several artists – including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the German Franz Marc and the Swiss Paul Klee – who would be remembered as icons of modernism, plus many others who have since been “overlooked”. Though they exhibited together just twice, their efforts paved the way towards abstraction and made an immense impact…

Sula by Toni Morrison, 1973 (Vintage £9.99). I love all of Toni Morrison’s extraordinary work, including her essays. But Sula is my comfort read. Every time I return to it, I marvel at the depiction of the friendship between Sula and Nel, at the creation of the place called the “bottom”, at the notion that without a creative outlet Sula’s creativity turned to destruction. So much packed in. So rich the prose. The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde, 1978 (Penguin £8.99). I return often to Audre Lorde – her essays, Zami, The Cancer Journals – but this is the book that stole my heart. It is the most unified of all her collections of poetry and explores motherhood, sexuality and her African heritage in a startling way. Lorde was a…

Programmes The Lost Scrolls of Pompeii: New Revelations Professor Alice Roberts investigates the work of a computer scientist attempting to read ancient unopened scrolls with the aid of groundbreaking AI software. Sun 12 May, C5 21:00 (60mins). The Jennings v Alzheimer’s Moving film about the Jennings family, who carry a genetic mutation that causes early onset Alzheimer’s, and their contribution to Alzheimer’s research. Mon 13 May, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). The Gathering New six-part thriller about a Merseyside community rocked by an attack on a teenager at an illegal rave; each episode is told from the perspective of a different character. Tue 14 and Wed 15 May, C4 21:00 (60mins each). Storyville: Praying for Armageddon Documentary about America’s Evangelical Christians, and their impact on US politics. Tue 14 May, BBC4 22:00…

Paul Auster 1947-2024 Paul Auster, who has died aged 77, was a prolific novelist and memoirist whose work – with its fractured narratives, unreliable narrators and deconstructions of identity – could seem “primed for analysis” by students of literary theory, said The New York Times. A leading figure in the New York literary scene, he was described as the “dean of American postmodernists”, and the “most meta of American meta-fictional writers”. But his books were still highly readable, said The Times, and there was something dazzling, and dizzying, about the way he oscillated “between highbrow and lowbrow”. As one reviewer observed: “If the avant-garde gestures bore you, a gunshot will soon ring out, or some unfortunate will have his brains bashed in with a baseball bat.” Paul Auster was born…

Shari Redstone Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, Shari Redstone watched her irascible father, Sumner, transform a “small cinema chain into a global media conglomerate” he called Viacom, said the FT. It was a tough upbringing. Redstone, now 70, later wrote that her mother was “verbally and physically and financially abused by him every day of her life”. Shari herself was deemed her father’s favourite child, but their relationship was volatile and equally insult-ridden. He “publicly dangled” the idea she would succeed him, “then said the opposite”. When the old man died in 2020, she finally took over – changing the name of the business to its best-known asset, Paramount, and laying out an ambitious strategy “to take on Netflix” in the streaming wars. It has been a rocky…

In the 2007 animated film Ratatouille, the rodent protagonist, Remy, is taken by his father to see the shop window of a Parisian rat catcher for a lesson in the laws of the universe. Alongside shelves packed with lethal rodenticides, dead rats swing by their necks from a makeshift gibbet. This, Remy is warned, is what happens when rats dare get too close to humans. Their world is one that belongs to an enemy. The inspiration for the shop portrayed in the film is Maison Aurouze, said to be the oldest rat catcher’s in Paris. Founded in 1872 and still going today, the shop’s polished glass frontage displays assorted taxidermy rats that have been collected in various states of misfortune. Any passing rat would be wise to heed the warning,…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1413 Two Connell Guides and three Week-branded items will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 20 May. Send it to The Week Crossword 1413, 121-141 Westbourne Terrace, London W2 6JR, or email the completed grid/listed solutions to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) This week’s winner will receive Week-branded items including a notebook, coffee mug and tote bag, as well as two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 1 Talk endlessly about right look for a tart (9) 6 Composer in catalogue heard (5) 9 Pamphlet seen in vehicle or shed (5) 10 Sweet drink with sorbet (9) 11 Loose madam with nice rear is aspiration abroad (8,5) 14 One record agent brought back support…

Nearly one in four 18- to 34-year-olds never answer their mobile phone, a survey has found. Just over half say that if they receive a call out of the blue from family or friends, they assume it must mean “bad news”. Almost half prefer to communicate on social media platforms such as Instagram rather than receive a call. There are nearly 40% fewer sex scenes in major films than there were at the start of the millennium, research commissioned by The Economist has revealed. It shows that the 250 highest-grossing films released in the US last year had around 60% of the erotic content found in the top 250 in 2000. The decline was steepest in the action genre, which became around 70% less erotic over that period.…

It has been widely reported that China was behind a cyberattack that targeted the payroll records of up to 270,000 current and former British military personnel. Hackers are believed to have accessed a Ministry of Defence contractor’s IT system that contained the names and bank details of all serving regular military personnel and reservists, as well as those of thousands veterans. A small number of addresses were also on the system. On Tuesday, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps told MPs that the Government had reason to believe the hack was the work of a “malign actor”, but said that “for reasons of national security” no further details about the incident would be released at this stage.…

Vancouver, Canada Charges brought: Canadian police have charged three Indian nationals with the murder of a Sikh activist who was gunned down outside a Sikh temple in Vancouver last June. A few weeks after the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar – a Canadian citizen who had advocated for an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab – Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, claimed there were “credible allegations” of Indian intelligence involvement in the killing. New Delhi dismissed the claim as absurd, and requested that Canada withdraw many of its diplomats from India. However, in November the US revealed that it had foiled a plot to murder a Sikh separatist in New York, and also linked it to a government official. The three suspects, all in their 20s, were arrested in Edmonton,…

IRAN “Corrupting the Earth” is a capital offence The Globe & Mail (Toronto) Iran’s rulers are forever imposing new “red lines” that govern life there, says Samira Mohyeddin. The latest crime they’ve come up with is “corrupting the Earth”. That’s the implausible-sounding offence that Toomaj Salehi, the hugely popular 33-year-old rapper, has been jailed for. Salehi has never been able to perform his songs about clerical corruption live in Iran, yet has nonetheless become the voice, not just for his generation, but for all Iranians: pensioners have joined protests calling for his release; the Iranian diaspora has held similar demonstrations in cities across the world. In 2022 he was jailed for his support for women’s rights, and when released, he broadcast a video revealing he had been tortured. That he…

Victoria Beckham isn’t known for her sunny disposition, but the designer reckons she smiles more now than she used to. “In the past I’ve always looked at those red-carpet pictures of me and seen a woman who looks nervous and insecure,” she told The Sunday Times. “Everyone else saw a woman who looked grumpy and stern – I suppose that’s how I got the reputation of being such a miserable cow.” Silvio Berlusconi did not relish a hunting trip he once went on with Vladimir Putin, an ally of the late Italian PM has claimed. According to Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator, the incident took place in 2013, at one of Putin’s dachas. Putin proposed the hunting trip, and when he spotted two deer, he urged Berlusconi to take aim…

“The problem with people who have no vices is that you can be sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.”Elizabeth Taylor, quoted in The Knowledge “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at.”Charlie Munger, quoted on Foundation for Economic Education “Truth is what you and people like you believe, and can compel others to accept.”John Gray, quoted in The Spectator “You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.”Robert Frost, quoted in Forbes “Why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder, but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?”Ha-Joon Chang, quoted in…

To The Guardian I cannot agree with Andy Beckett’s condemnation of voter ID. The basic principle of voter ID is not objectionable: voter ID laws are commonplace across Europe. Are all these EU members also enemies of democracy? Furthermore, it is difficult to square claims that the progressive vote was suppressed with the fact that the Conservative vote collapsed and Labour – and left-wing politics in general – were hugely successful last week. Clearly, the hypothetical fears that the progressive vote would be curtailed were simply not borne out in reality. Anecdotes of people being turned away for lack of ID are mostly just a small handful of dozy Tories forgetting their own laws, which does not make an election-rigging conspiracy. Voter ID is simple to apply and reinforces confidence…

by Kaliane Bradley Sceptre 335pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99 “It is only May,” said Ed Cumming in Literary Review, “but Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time might well be the loudest debut of the year.” Sold in 20 languages, and soon to be adapted by the BBC, it is a “gleeful romp across genres” that “might have been specially bred to leap into holiday-bound tote bags”. In a near-future Britain where time travel is possible, the government has established a Ministry of Time, which recruits “expats” from different historical eras to undertake various tasks. The narrator, an unnamed British-Cambodian woman, works for the ministry as a “bridge”, or expat-minder, and is assigned Graham Gore, a real-life polar explorer who perished c.1847 on HMS Terror. This is not only a…

Leo Park at Carl Kostyál The Swedish painter Leo Park’s current exhibition at the delightful, wood-panelled Carl Kostyál gallery on Savile Row is not for the fainthearted. Drawing heavily on first-wave surrealism – excellent as they are, some of the works here are near-larcenous borrowings from Masson and Dalí – Beyond Pleasure plunges the visitor into a weird and frightening world in which disjointed body parts are perforated by stylised orifices and covered with runic tattoos. Park (b.1980) sets his apparently random formulations of flesh and bone against backgrounds that veer from matte black to generic Magritte-style blue skies, depicting painted fingernails as inflamed red traffic lights and rashes as something like mountain ranges glimpsed on Google Earth. Nipples become lava lamps, bottoms resemble the slit canvases of the Argentinian-Italian…

La Follia 2 Newts Folly, The Square, South Harting, West Sussex (01730-923831) There’s an “essential simplicity” to this small Italian café, in the West Sussex village of South Harting, says Tom Parker Bowles in The Mail on Sunday. The room is “cluttered in the best possible way” – all fairy lights, antique dressers and vintage kitchen equipment. And the food, prepared by chef Lucy Green, is at once sophisticated and charming. You won’t find bowls of pasta or tagliata here; instead, just sandwiches and toasties, as well as a selection of excellent cicchetti (small plates). Of the latter, you might be offered “oozingly lactic” burrata with a “whisper of chilli and shards of preserved lemon”; or bruschetta topped with cacio e pepe beans, in an “inspired take on the Roman…

Declutter before cleaning. With clothes, ask yourself: does it fit? Do I love it? Do I have room for it? Try an app such as Ziffit to help turn unwanted books, DVDs and CDs into cash. Just scan in the barcode via the app to see what you could get for your old stuff. Clean room by room to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Start from the top and work down: ceilings, walls, furniture, floors. Put baking soda in your washing machine drum to deodorise it. Run a dishwasher cycle with a bowl of vinegar in the top and clean the filter with a toothbrush. Clean your keyboard using a toothbrush dipped in a solution of half-vinegar, half-water, and scrub between the keys. Boil white vinegar and water in your kettle to…

Duane Eddy 1938-2024 Once described as “the first real guitar superstar of the rock’n’roll age”, Duane Eddy, who has died aged 86, emerged in the late 1950s, after the first flush of Elvis Presley’s fame, and his instrumental recordings dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic until the mid-1960s. He sold tens of millions of records, and pioneered a new sound, which was signalled in the names of his albums, said Michael Hann in The Guardian. His 1958 debut was called Have “Twangy” Guitar Will Travel, and was followed by The “Twangs” the “Thang” (1959), $1,000,000 Worth of Twang (1960), Twistin’ ’N’ Twangin’ (1962), “Twangin’” Up a Storm! (1963), and The Biggest Twang of Them All (1966). Twang, he once said, was “a silly name for a non-silly…

Specialist managers Peel Hunt likes Syncona – a FTSE 250 “closed-ended” investment trust, linked to the Wellcome Foundation – with a portfolio of cell and gene therapy startups. It’s done well in “commercialising” the sector, but shares trade at a 30% discount to assets. Paul Angel of AJ Bell rates the Worldwide Healthcare Trust, managed by New York-based OrbiMed, which holds “a nice mix” of healthcare and emerging biotech stocks. Again, recent performance has been disappointing. London-listed International Biotechnology Trust (IBT) is committed to small UK biotechs – some 15% of the fund is managed by former vaccine tsar Kate Bingham’s SV Health Investors. Also trading at a discount. Open-ended funds and ETFs Buying units in “open-ended” biotech funds, such as Axa Framlington’s or Polar Capital’s, is “less complicated” and…

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Women, who can now join The Garrick Club – provided they have the necessary connections and can afford the membership fees. In a ballot this week, almost 60% of the club’s members are believed to have voted to drop the men-only rule. Previous attempts to change the rule had failed, but this resolution only required a 50% majority, rather than a two-thirds one. Madonna, who ended her greatest hits world tour with what may have been her biggest-ever concert. An estimated 1.6 million fans crowded onto Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach for the free event; others leaned out of nearby apartment blocks, and watched from boats. Some 3,000 police were deployed, and firefighters sprayed water at the crowd to keep people cool.…

56% of British adults think that Charles is doing a good job as King. 60% believe that Britain should keep the monarchy, though only 46% think that it would be worse for Britain in the future if the monarchy were to be abolished. 28% say Britain should become a republic. Ipsos/The Mail on Sunday 71% of adults in England believe that smacking, hitting, slapping or shaking a child is unacceptable, up from 67% in 2023. 52% support a ban on the use of physical punishment, up from 50%. YouGov/NSPCC 23% of adults in Great Britain think that public protests are effective at achieving their goals. 63% think they’re ineffective. The rest don’t know. YouGov…

Clarkson’s local councillor Dean Temple never wanted to become Jeremy Clarkson’s local councillor, says Liam Kelly in The Daily Telegraph. A Tory, he only stood in the election in West Oxfordshire in 2021 to fill a vacancy for the party. “I was told it was a nice, quiet place where nothing ever happens,” he recalls. Nothing could have been further from the truth: his ward includes Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm; Clarkson’s Farm premiered on Amazon a month later; and soon the council and its officials were being cast as the villain of the piece, for refusing to rubber stamp Clarkson’s various plans for a restaurant, shop and car park. With his contact details easily found online, Temple (pictured) came under siege from fans; at one point, it got so bad…

On 24 April 1932, about 400 walkers committed “one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in British history”, says Ben Mayfield on The Conversation. Kinder Scout, a moorland plateau in the Derbyshire Peak District near several industrial cities, had in the past been popular among ramblers, but was by the 1930s fenced off by landowners who used it for shooting. On Saturday 24 April, Benny Rothman, the 20-year-old Lancashire secretary of the British Workers’ Sports Federation (and a Young Communist) led a mass trespass: ramblers from Manchester met up with groups from Sheffield at Kinder Scout. The sight, Rothman later recalled, was a striking one: “hundreds of young men and women, lads and girls” gathered “in their picturesque rambling gear”. About four miles from Kinder peak, the ramblers…

The growing threat from bird flu Zeynep Tufekci The New York Times America hasn’t learnt many lessons from the Covid epidemic, says Zeynep Tufekci. If it had, it would be taking the threat from H5N1 avian influenza far more seriously. The bird flu virus has already killed millions of birds and wild mammals around the world, and has now spread to at least 33 dairy herds in eight US states. Fragments of the virus have been detected in the commercial milk supply. Public health officials don’t know how many farmers have tested their cattle (they’ve only just made it mandatory even to report positive cases), and they’re still trying to work out how the virus is spreading. One theory is that it’s through cows’ feed, owing to the “fairly revolting…

More than a third of children in England aged 11 say they have had an alcoholic drink – a higher proportion than in any other of 44 countries examined for a report by the WHO. In France, which came 12th on the list, the figure was 25% for boys and about 17% for girls. Across all the countries studied, in Europe, central Asia and Canada, the average proportion of 11-year-olds who had had a drink was 15%. The survey also found that 12% of 13-year-old girls in England, and 9% of boys of that age, had been drunk at least twice in their lives. More than half of 15-year-old girls had drunk alcohol in the past 30 days, and around 30% of them had vaped, as had 17% of 15-year-old…

When he was chancellor, George Osborne pushed for England’s big urban regions to have their own directly elected mayors, because he thought it would serve his party’s interests, said The Independent. The idea was that strong “metro mayors” would grab the Tories a foothold in Labour-dominated areas, as Boris Johnson had done as London mayor. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. In last week’s elections, Labour won nine out of ten metro-mayor contests. Some Labour victories verged on the “North Korean”; in Liverpool City Region, Labour’s Steve Rotheram took 68%. The results from two newly created mayoralties, in particular, will “terrify” Tory MPs because of what they say about next year’s election, said Paul Waugh in The i Paper. Labour won in the key parliamentary battleground of the East…

Tennis Andrey Rublev battled a virus to win the Madrid Open, beating Felix Auger-Aliassime in the final. In the women’s final, Iga Świątek saved three match points against Aryna Sabalenka before winning 7-5, 4-6, 7-6. Rugby union Toulouse beat Harlequins 38-26, to set up a Champions Cup final against Leinster, who beat Northampton Saints 20-17. Football In the Premier League, leaders Arsenal beat Bournemouth 3-0, while Manchester City beat Wolves 5-1. Elsewhere, Chelsea beat West Ham 5-0 and Crystal Palace beat Man United 4-0.…

by Orlando Whitfield Profile 336pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99 In 2020, the American art dealer Inigo Philbrick was arrested by the FBI on the Pacific island of Vanuatu “and brought to Manhattan in handcuffs”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. The 33-year-old was “wanted for his part in one of the biggest art frauds in history”: through a complicated series of scams, including forging legal documents and “double-dealing priceless works of art”, he was accused of duping art investors out of around $86m. Philbrick (pictured) pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven years in prison; he served just four, and was released earlier this year. Now, Philbrick’s former friend and business partner, Orlando Whitfield, has written a “compulsively readable” memoir, which charts his rise and fall in “thrilling detail”.…

Hanif Kureishi, who was left tetraplegic by a fall in Rome in 2022, has “spoken movingly” about the sustenance he has drawn from the prospect of this RSC staging of his debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), a coming-of-age tale set in 1970s London. So it’s a relief and a pleasure, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph, to be able to report that director Emma Rice, who also adapted the book, “has nailed it”, creating a funny, engrossing evening that you’ll leave feeling on a “rare high”. Studded with comic sex scenes and the pop music of the period, it is a “glorious” production, said Clive Davis in The Times. I found the novel’s prose “laborious at times”, but this staging is “preternaturally light and nimble”, combining as…

Azra meets Lynda, who tells her about Ambridge’s many community events; Azra says she won’t be getting involved. Chelsea grills Emma on which job offer she should take. Alice wakes to Jakob banging on the door, sent by a worried Kate. He spots an empty wine bottle and insists he’ll tell Kate, but Alice convinces him not to. Chelsea ruffles feathers on her first day at the Tea Room. Jim agrees to stay at Ambridge Hall for a night, and encourages Alistair to spend the evening with Denise. When their date night doesn’t quite work out, Denise suggests a weekend away. Jakob checks up on Alice, who lies about having talked to her sobriety buddy Lisa. Against George’s wishes, Eddie starts charging visitors for messages from Bartleby the horse. At…

At 114cm long, the Sonos Arc is a beast, with spectacular audio quality. It has 11 digital amplifiers and eight woofers for an immersive Dolby Atmos experience. If space is tight, the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) is “a brilliant little soundbar”, which, like the Arc, works with Alexa and Google Assistant (£899 and £499 respectively; sonos.com). For a more budget option, the sleek Polk Audio React is also Alexa-compatible and works like a smart speaker. It doesn’t have Dolby Atmos support, but is certainly an upgrade from a TV speaker set-up, with clear, sharp sound (£119; amazon.co.uk). If budget allows, the 126.5cm Sennheiser Ambeo Max is an exceptional home audio system for a cinematic experience, with a ton of features and Chromecast support (£2,211; global.sennheiser-hearing.com) For gamers, the tiny Panasonic…

Casa Lucia Buenos Aires Housed in the 20-storey Edificio Mihanovich (a “neo-classical icon” that was South America’s tallest building on its completion in 1928), the Casa Lucia is “Buenos Aires’s most exciting hotel launch in forever”, says Stanley Stewart in Condé Nast Traveller. With contemporary art on display, and a wonderful cocktail terrace on the Calle Arroyo, it is both fabulously glamorous and as soothing as an embrace. Rooms are “spacious and modern”; many have balconies with great views; and there’s a spa, a 16-metre pool, and a restaurant “where the steaks would impress a hungry gaucho”. Doubles from £475 b&b; hotelcasalucia.com.…

Apple: AI iPhone? Until now, Apple boss Tim Cook has been “reluctant to talk about artificial intelligence”, said Lex in the Financial Times. All change. During last week’s quarterly earnings call, he declared that generative AI was a critical opportunity for the company. “The implication is obvious: an iPhone with generative AI capabilities is coming.” Frankly, Apple could use the boost. Despite having to contend with a US Department of Justice suit for running a smartphone monopoly, its long-awaited virtual reality set, Vision Pro, hasn’t contributed enough to the company’s $90.8bn quarterly revenues “to ameliorate a 10% drop in iPhone revenue”. Facing “saturated” markets in rich countries, and “growing competition from national champions” in emerging markets, Apple needs “to breathe new life” into its core business, agreed The Economist. This…

What’s behind China’s gold-buying spree? Julian Jessop The Daily Telegraph The People’s Bank of China has been at the forefront of the recent central bank gold-buying spree – making purchases for 17 successive months. “This is not necessarily anything sinister,” says Julian Jessop: “the Chinese authorities may just have been playing a rising market extremely well”. But there could equally be more to this story. There are clear strategic advantages to China – a massive investor in US Treasury bonds – diversifying out of American assets. As Russia has shown, the switch to gold provides “a war chest safe from US sanctions”. Perhaps more significantly, China’s stockpiling also conveys a tacit warning. If it were to dump US bonds, it “could drive up the cost of borrowing”, not just in…