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The battle lines for next year’s general election are being drawn, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. In January, Rishi Sunak published his five pledges (halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing public debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping the Channel migrants). Last week, Keir Starmer followed suit with a speech in Manchester in which he set out Labour’s “five missions”. Starmer “hates” being in opposition, said Ben Nunn in The i Paper. “He finds it painfully frustrating.” He’s impatient for power, and he has a very clear idea of what he’d do with it. He “knows from history that the most transformative governments are in it for the long haul”. This is what we saw last week, a two-term plan focused on missions: he wants Britain to have the…

Royal Mail, with new figures showing that in the three months to 4 December, it only managed to deliver 54% of first class post on the next working day – far below its 93% target. The company apologised for its poor service, blaming days of strikes. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, with reports that they’ve been asked to give up Frogmore Cottage – their ten-bedroom home in the grounds of Windsor Castle – so that it can be offered to Prince Andrew instead. The King is reported to be planning to cut his brother’s grant, leaving Prince Andrew unable to afford his current 30-room home near Windsor. Churchill Insurance, which was urged to “retire” its popular nodding bulldog mascot. Animal rights group Peta said its use of Churchill promotes…

Brussels TikTok ban: The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has banned its thousands of staff from using TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing app, on their work phones. A Commission spokesperson cited the risk of “cybersecurity threats and of actions which may be exploited for cyberattacks” as the reason, but declined to say whether the Commission itself had been subject to any such attacks. ByteDance – the privately owned parent company of TikTok – insists there are no security concerns with its products, but TikTok has recently come under scrutiny from governments around the world concerned that Beijing could use it to harvest users’ data or influence its content. In December, the US senate passed a bill to bar federal employees from using TikTok on government-owned devices, and Canada approved a…

1 Meet Me on the Corner by Rod Clements, performed by Lindisfarne2 Help Me Make It Through the Night by Kris Kristofferson, performed by John Holt3 Caught You in a Lie by Lee Diamond, performed by Louisa Mark4 Psycho Killer by David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, performed by Talking Heads5 Wolves and Leopards by Winston Holness and Dennis Brown, performed by Dennis Brown6* Is That Jazz?, written and performed by Gil Scott-Heron7 Put Your Records On by Corinne Bailey Rae, John Beck and Steve Chrisanthou, performed by Corinne Bailey Rae8 Love and Affection, written and performed by Joan Armatrading Book: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl Luxury: champagne * Choice if allowed only one record…

International visitors had limited access to the USSR under Stalin. Heavily stage-managed visits persuaded the likes of George Bernard Shaw that Stalin’s Five-Year Plan was a great success. After being shown round in 1933, the former French PM Édouard Herriot declared that Ukraine was “like a garden in full bloom”. Walter Duranty, the bureau chief of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer for his Russia coverage in 1932, almost certainly knew better, but for mysterious reasons – some suspect he was being blackmailed – publicly insisted that “any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda”. The main exception was a Welsh freelancer called Gareth Jones, who secured an invitation from the German consul-general in Kharkiv in March 1933, got off the train…

Why things cost more in the South Andrew Van Dam The Washington Post Why is it that the worst credit scores in the nation are to be found in the American South? It can’t be explained by poverty, says Andrew Van Dam, as the lower scores persist across every income bracket. Nor by racism, as the problem holds for Southerners of every race. No, what jumped out when researchers looked at data from credit scores and credit-card borrowing across the nation, was the high level of medical debt in the South. Partly that’s because it’s “simply less healthy than any other region”. But it’s also because of the reluctance of the region’s mostly Republican governors to participate in the 2014 expansion of Medicaid under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. In…

Scientists at the University of Oxford are coordinating a major study into whether cannabis-based medicine can be used to treat psychosis or psychotic symptoms. “Cannabidiol [CBD] is one of the most promising new treatments for people with psychosis,” Prof Philip McGuire, who is leading the trial, told The Guardian. “Many people with psychosis are open to trying cannabidiol, and previous smaller-scale studies have indicated that it has beneficial effects.” Although CBD does not contain the ingredient in marijuana that creates its “high”, it is only prescribed in Britain for a limited number of conditions, including severe epilepsy. The trial will involve 1,000 people, including some who are at risk of psychosis, and others with psychosis who’ve not responded to antipsychotic drugs. As well as not working for everyone, these can…

“Thank God for common sense and for the views of the British people being respected for once,” said Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. Since the British government revoked Shamima Begum’s citizenship four years ago, the former “jihadi bride” has been busily lobbying to be allowed back into the country. The BBC has assisted her “attempted reinvention” by running a recent documentary about her, along with a ten-part audio series entitled I’m Not a Monster. But this media campaign has failed to help Begum win an appeal against the loss of her passport. Her lawyers argued that the former home secretary, Sajid Javid, acted unlawfully when he revoked her citizenship, because she had been a victim of child trafficking when she travelled to Syria in 2015 as a 15-year-old to…

They may not have ended up with a series victory, said Nick Hoult in The Daily Telegraph. But England’s cricketers won’t have been too downhearted as they flew home from New Zealand this week. For they knew that in the second Test at the Basin Reserve, they’d taken part – and mostly performed brilliantly – in “one of the greatest Test matches ever played”. It ended shortly after 4pm on the fifth day, when England’s last man, 40-year-old James Anderson, feathered an attempted flick to leg. The wicket meant that England were dismissed for 256 in their second innings – an agonising two runs short of victory. For only the second time ever, a Test match had been decided by a single run. For the capacity crowd – who’d been…

Football In the Carabao Cup final, Manchester United beat Newcastle 2-0 to earn their first piece of silverware for five years. In the Premier League, Tottenham beat Chelsea 2-0 and leaders Arsenal beat Leicester 1-0. Snowboarding Mia Brookes, 16, won gold medal in the slopestyle event at the World Championships in Bakuriani, Georgia – she is the first British winner in this category. Boxing Tommy Fury – Tyson’s half-brother – beat YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul by a split decision in Saudi Arabia. Fury has now won all nine fights of his career.…

Blaze of Glory!, Welsh National Opera’s terrifically entertaining new production, is not – strictly speaking – an opera, said Rian Evans in The Guardian. Set in a Welsh Valleys community in the 1950s, it tells the story of a small group of miners who re-form their male voice choir to raise local spirits following a mining disaster. For her libretto, Emma Jenkins drew on real-life histories, and composer David Hackbridge Johnson used Welsh hymns as his cornerstones, while incorporating everything from jazz, pop and doo-wop to Gilbert and Sullivan and 19th century French choral works. Bowling along with “a warm, often suitably blazing, energy”, the evening becomes a “remarkable” testament to community spirit, and the restorative power of music-making. It’s also “properly laugh-out-loud funny”, said Rebecca Franks in The Times,…

For ten weeks, an articulated lorry will tour the Liverpool area “with the simple aim of making great art accessible to everyone”, says Mark Brown in The Guardian. Inside the trailer are 21 works from the Tate’s national collection, including a Turner, a Barbara Hepworth, “a beautiful 1918 John Nash landscape of a cornfield [pictured], and Peter Kennard’s powerful photomontage of cruise missiles poking out of John Constable’s Hay Wain”. The theme of the travelling exhibition is “radical landscapes”: the works are taken from an exhibition shown at Tate Liverpool last year; the project is a collaboration between the gallery and Art Explora, an international art foundation. About 5,000 schoolchildren are expected to visit it, but anyone is welcome to come, as the lorry tours in communities in St Helens,…

Lee’s daughters are enjoying spending time with Helen’s boys, but Helen is worried that Lee will feel bereft when they leave for America. Alice confesses to Susan that she’s thought about drinking because of the stress around the funeral. Susan comforts her and later tells Brian that he needs to be a father and make some decisions. Lee is thrown when Helen suggests he could move to America with the girls. Brian overstays his welcome with Kirsty and Roy. When Lee tells Tony he thinks Helen’s trying to end their relationship, Tony sets him straight, and Lee decides he’s staying in Ambridge. Adil chides Roy for moaning about Brian. Lee urges stubborn Lilian to make up with Tony. Later, Brian has Kirsty and Roy over for dinner and admits he…

Gigantes – or large white butter beans – are popular throughout Greece and are mostly grown in the country’s northwest region, says Carolina Doriti. Typically, the beans are baked; it’s quite common to add sliced sausage, spinach or other seasonal leafy greens, such as chard and sorrel, along with plenty of aromatic herbs. Using high-quality dried beans is important for this dish: I make sure they are from the same year’s harvest. The amount of time you need to boil them for will vary depending on their quality and freshness. Serves 4 250g dried giant beans (butter beans) 1 bay leaf 250ml olive oil, plus 3 tbsp 1 large onion, roughly chopped 1 leek, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced 200g fennel bulb, roughly chopped 1 tsp ground coriander 2 garlic…

The Land’s End Coaster, Cornwall is an almost four-hour circular route on an open-top bus that offers dramatic views of the region’s rugged coastline. Departs Penzance bus station (firstbus.co.uk). The Coastliner 840 Leeds to Whitby, North Yorkshire is a 75-mile journey that takes in York’s old city, market towns and wild moorland as it wends its way to Whitby, with its gothic abbey rising over the harbour. Departs Leeds bus station, approx. 3hrs 40mins (transdevbus.co.uk). Travel on the open-top 599 Bowness to Grasmere, Cumbria route and you’ll start at Lake Windermere and take in Ambleside and Rydal Water. Departs Bowness Pier, approx. 45 minutes (stagecoachbus.com). Bus A Cambridge to St Ives is the world’s longest guided busway, running mostly on concrete tracks from Cambridge, via RSPB Fen Drayton Lakes, to…

A sporty winter break in Estonia With its bleakly beautiful landscape and long Baltic coast, Estonia is a wonderful (and wonderfully affordable) place for a holiday in the winter snow, says Jane Anderson in The Daily Telegraph. It has lovely seafront saunas (the Iglucraft pods in Tallinn can be recommended), but offers lots of more unusual thrills too, including snowshoeing in the peat bogs of Põhja-Kõrvemaa, kicksled hiking (like riding a scooter on ice) in Soomaa National Park, and winter kiteboarding (“strapping on a snowboard or skis and being carried along by a kite”) on Pärnu Beach. Stylish accommodation is not in short supply, either – you might look up the 19th century Villa Friedheim (a good base for ice-sailing in Haapsalu), the Hedon Spa & Hotel in Pärnu, and…

Simone Segouin 1925-2023 Simone Segouin was a French resistance fighter who became a “symbol of female defiance” after being immortalised in photographs by Robert Capa, said The Daily Telegraph. Capa and the Life magazine reporter Jack Belden had entered the embattled northern French city of Chartres with soldiers from General Patton’s Third Army in August 1944, and spotted Segouin, then 18, carrying a captured German submachine gun, eating a baguette, and wearing an armband bearing the letters FTPF – indicating that she was a member of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans resistance group. The next day, they saw her again, leading 25 German soldiers she had helped capture. Capa’s photographs were published in Life under the headline “The Girl Partisan of Chartres”, and “subsequently syndicated around the world”. In the piece,…

It’s been three years since Goldman Sachs held its first-ever “investor day”, said Carleton English in Barron’s. Then, it promised to deliver “more reliable returns” and proclaimed “its ambition to build a digital consumer bank to achieve that goal”. Hopes were high. But the 154-year-old Wall Street bank has trodden a “rocky” path since. After a year in which profits slumped by half, its consumer banking strategy unravelled, and morale was dented by big job cuts, CEO David Solomon this week faced his critics at Goldman’s second-ever investor day. The stakes were high, said the FT. “The bank whose dominance was once so assured it gained notoriety as the ‘Vampire Squid’ is now more of a damp squib” – trailing its arch rival Morgan Stanley. Solomon can point to continued…

Far “the most cheerful bit of economic prognostication” this week is the “eye-catching” claim by Citigroup that UK inflation could fall to 2% by November, says Patrick Hosking in The Times. Given the current 10.1% rate, that would be “a phenomenal outcome”. The mainstream consensus is for 4% to 4.5% by year-end. But even that might be optimistic – for the following reasons: The still-hot labour market What started out as an energy-price shock is now feeding through into wage pressures. Getting away with it Firms are still able to push through big price increases, without great customer resistance. Doveish bias The Bank has pushed up the base rate to 4% to tackle inflation, “but that’s still pretty low and still stimulative by historic standards”. Wonky machinery Monetary policy “isn’t…

Mathias Döpfner The Axel Springer boss is a polarising figure in Germany, says The Economist. That’s partly due to “the aggressive gutter journalism” of his flagship title Bild, partly to sour grapes. “Jealous types” envy Döpfner’s “transformation from music critic to media mogul”, eased by a gift of shares worth €1bn from Friede Springer, widow of the publisher’s founder. Döpfner may soon provoke similar passions across the Atlantic if he achieves his ambition of turning Axel Springer into the top digital publisher in the US, building on recently acquired news sites: Politico, Insider and Morning Brew. US rivals are unlikely to cede more ground willingly. Soon after the acquisition of Politico, The New York Times splashed a story detailing “Allegations of Sex, Lies and a Secret Payment” at Bild. No…

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1352 An Ettinger pass holder and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 13 March. Send it to The Week Crossword 1352, 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 an Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass holder in assorted colours, which retails at £115, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com). ACROSS 5 Cut fruit for a sovereign (6) 6 Extremely exciting sort of poker? (3,3) 9 Mostly bad-tempered English poet (6) 10 Cheap yet correct optical accessory (8) 11 Old tower long forgotten providing honey (4) 12 Very fast percussion playing (10) 13 Cosmetic lotions from…

What happened In the first formal stage of a contest that has already revealed deep divisions within the SNP, three MSPs secured places last week on the ballot to succeed Nicola Sturgeon both as party leader and as Scotland’s first minister. Health Secretary Humza Yousaf, Finance Secretary Kate Forbes, and the former community safety minister Ash Regan each secured the required nominations from SNP members to stand. The winner is due to be announced on 27 March. The race to succeed Sturgeon, who announced her resignation last month, has so far been dominated by controversy over Forbes’s religious beliefs. Initially the bookmakers’ favourite, Forbes lost support after saying that she’d have voted against the 2014 law that legalised gay marriage in Scotland. Yousaf, a practising Muslim, has also faced scrutiny…

Middle-aged and older workers are increasingly adopting Gen Z slang in a bid to connect with younger colleagues, a survey has found. Expressions that are moving up the generational chain include “I’m feeling it”, to express approval, “hits different”, to describe something being better than usual (as in, “Lunch hits different when someone else is paying”) and “extra”, meaning over the top. The Young Vic in London has issued a warning that its new production of the 1999 play Further than the Furthest Thing features “the handling of cooked egg” on stage. The notice, which was posted online to protect theatregoers with allergies, also warned of the play’s strong language, “moments of loud music” and “depictions of pregnancy”.…

Two men, aged 71 and 47, were being questioned by police this week over the shooting of an off-duty police officer in Northern Ireland last week. Four other men who had been detained in connection with the attack were released without charge. Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, 48, was shot multiple times in front of his young son outside a sports complex in Omagh, County Tyrone, where he had been coaching a youth football team. Days later, the dissident republican group the New IRA indicated that it was behind the shooting. Caldwell – who has led investigations into terrorist groups and organised crime – remains critically ill in hospital.…

Pleasanton, California Cartoonist axed: Leading newspapers have dropped the long-running Dilbert comic strips, about a put-upon office worker, in response to racist remarks made by their author. Speaking on YouTube, Scott Adams urged white people to “get the hell away” from black people. He made the comment while discussing a survey in which 26% of black respondents said they disagreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white” – a phrase that originated in an alt-right trolling campaign and which has been described as a “hate slogan”. Adams characterised these respondents as a “hate group”. Los Angeles, California Weinstein sentenced: Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to an additional 16 years in jail last week for raping and sexually assaulting an unnamed actress in LA in 2013. The 70-year-old former film producer…

“Exactly when the tide turned, I don’t know. Perhaps it was last week, when Penguin bowed to pressure to keep Roald Dahl’s sometimes cruel work in print. Or with the fall of Nicola Sturgeon over, among other things, a gender bill. But the cultural Left, it is clear, has peaked. Dissent is often a fair-weather pastime; identity politics thrived during benign conditions. It is hard to care that Augustus Gloop is called ‘fat’ at a time of double-digit inflation. It is hard to deplore micro-aggressions while Ukraine is enduring a rather macro one. The cultural Left hasn’t been defeated so much as demoted: in salience, in moral urgency. Grievances that once had force now seem beside the point.” Janan Ganesh in the FT…

How we all got hoodwinked by a chatbot Andrew Orlowski The Daily Telegraph Amazing what an air of authority and a plausible manner lets you get away with, says Andrew Orlowski. We keep relearning this lesson after being conned by fraudsters, and today we’re being taught it by another imposter: the artificial intelligence software ChatGPT. This chatbot’s ability to generate plausible-sounding text has been hailed as a game-changer by its many prestigious backers. Yet ever since Microsoft integrated ChatGPT with its Bing search engine, the mask has started to slip: the platform’s chat function seems to have gone haywire (see page 14). Over the past fortnight, Bing Chat has assured users they can safely eat ground glass, claimed the US has had four female presidents, and generated false citations. The…

Mark it down as a red-letter day: 16 February 2023, said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. It was the day Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – America’s most-watched cable news network – was finally exposed as the empty fraud it always has been. Fox News is being sued by the voting-machine company, Dominion Voting Systems (DVS), for constantly repeating Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud. In particular, Fox had suggested that DVS’s vote tabulators may somehow have been rigged, and hinted at a link with corruption in Venezuela. But last week, as part of its $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox, DVS publicly revealed internal texts and emails among Fox News hosts and executives, showing that they all knew full well that…

Restoring movement after strokes A woman who was left partially paralysed by a series of strokes in 2012 has had the movement in her hand restored, thanks to electrodes implanted in her neck. By disrupting connections between the brain and the spinal cord, strokes often cause paralysis and muscle weakness in the arms in particular. Although some signals can still get through, they’re too weak to trigger activity in the motor neurons that control movement of the muscles. In the journal Nature Medicine, a US team explained that they’d sought to restore movement by using electrodes to stimulate the sensory neurons that communicate with the motor neurons, and so make the latter more receptive to brain signals. Heather Rendulic said that since her stroke, aged 22, she had been “living…

“In retrospect, we shouldn’t have wasted that lettuce on Liz Truss,” said Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times. The “hapless vegetable” that became a symbol of the PM’s short-lived administration “could have fed one of the shoppers now staring at bare shelves, as supermarkets ration salads”. This week Lidl became the fifth big supermarket to place restrictions on items including peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers – typically two or three per shopper – due to ongoing supply shortages. The chief cause, said Jack Clover and Louise Eccles in The Sunday Times, is extreme weather in southern Spain and Morocco, which provide much of our salad produce. Normally, UK producers would take up the slack, but the sky-high cost of heating greenhouses means that they’ve been growing much less. A secondary factor,…

England’s Six Nations clash against Wales was “the match that almost never happened”, said Stephen Jones in The Sunday Times. In dispute over delays to new contracts, the Welsh players threatened to boycott the contest and only called off their strike last Wednesday when granted last-ditch concessions by the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU). The match itself proved “energetic and watchable”, but the result won’t have pleased the Welsh. England won 20-10. England, on the other hand, must be feeling they are moving in the right direction under new head coach Steve Borthwick, said Gavin Mairs in The Sunday Telegraph. They made hard work of this, their first victory at Cardiff since 2017 – but there were “major plus points”: their defence was resolute; Freddie Steward’s fine display “underscored his status…

The centre-right’s appeal To The New Statesman In his superb assessment of contemporary conservative parties, Jeremy Cliffe missed a chance to distil their enduring appeal to many voters. First, the centre-right understands many citizens’ hybrid view of state intervention and collectivism: sometimes involving more in the name of security and stability, but sometimes involving less in the name of liberty and individualism. Second, mainstream conservative parties seem to embody a common view of “the nation” akin to filial affection rather than jingoism, combining a recognition of imperfection with firm loyalty. Anti-imperialist leftists and supra-nationalist liberals might be more mindful of such moderate patriotism. Third, centre-right parties are sceptical of liberal attempts to “re-educate” the electorate: a preference for Edmund Burke’s “crooked timber of humanity” over John Stuart Mill’s vision of…

by Paul Johnson Abacus 320pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99 You might assume this would be a “rather dull book”, said Emma Duncan in The Times. It is, after all, a work about tax policy, written by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies – a man who “pops up a lot at Budget time”, and whose “job is to keep the Government honest on matters of taxing and spending”. Yet such an assumption would be wrong: Follow the Money is “brilliant”. Written in clear, honest prose, it explains in “gripping and horrifying” detail why it is that the nation’s finances have been so badly mismanaged over the decades. Paul Johnson is particularly good at highlighting unfair and inefficient aspects of the system – and the “ill-considered decisions” that…

Holy Bible: The Book of Genesis (John Murray £8.99). The opening book of the Bible is all about ecological and environmental change – from Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden to Noah’s flood, a story that also appears in Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature. Fears about the transformation of the Earth go back a long way. A Buddhist Ritual Manual on Agriculture by Gergely Hidas, 2019 (De Gruyter £47.50). A glorious text written around 1,500 years ago with advice on how to influence the weather by calming winds, and preventing thunder, lightning, and the spread of “stinging insects, flies, locusts and worms”. This too is part of a long tradition of trying to control the climate. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death…

Programmes Paris Police 1905 Follow-up series of the Belle Époque French crime drama. On Christmas Eve, Inspector Antoine Jouin tries to identify a corpse in the Bois de Boulogne. Sat 4 Mar, BBC4 21:00 (60mins). Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Rivers The comedian and fisherman travels around England and Wales to find out why waterways are in decline. Sun 5 Mar, BBC2 20:00 (60mins). We Need to Talk About Cosby A candid exploration of Bill Cosby’s life and work and how his exploitation of his status ultimately led to his downfall. Sun 5 Mar, BBC2 21:00 (60mins). George Michael: Outed Two-part look at the arrest and outing of the pop star in 1998, and the pressures that led him to hide his sexuality in the first place. Mon 6 and Tue…

5-star Latvia escape Spend 4 nights at the Grand Poet Hotel in the heart of Riga, just steps from the rambling old town. From £269pp, b&b (incl. London flights). 020-8175 1145, loveholidays.com. Depart 17 April. Scandinavian adventure Forget the guide book and tour Scandinavia for 7 days with a local expert. From £1,311pp, with planned activities (incl. meals and hotels; excl. flights). 020-8004 8886, theadventurepeople.com. Arrive 26 March. Regency romance in Bath Overlooking Queen Square, the romantic Francis Hotel is ideally located to explore Bath’s historical attractions. Two nights cost from £310pp, b&b. 020-8175 1145, francishotel.com. Depart 19 March. Apartment in Portugal Stay in Placid Village, Algarve, for 7 nights – a short walk from restaurants, bars and sandy beaches. From £560pp, self-catered (incl. Manchester flights). 020-3451 2688, tui.co.uk. Arrive…

John Lewis/M&S/Ocado: middle-class meltdown It’s a tough time to be a high-street retailer, said Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph. Just ask Pippa Wicks, who has been sacked as head of John Lewis’s department stores, after just three years, as the group struggles to stay relevant to its pinched middle-class target market. Much of the running is now being made by a revitalised Marks & Spencer, which, in “a major change of fortunes”, is expected “to leapfrog” the John Lewis Partnership in the rankings of Britain’s largest retailers before year end. In the battle for affordability, Primark has also emerged as a winner, said Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. In a buoyant trading statement this week, it announced trading and profits “well ahead of expectations”. It seems Britons are “shopping…

Don’t put all lithium eggs in China’s basket Lex Financial Times “Coping with crackdowns has become a normal part of doing business in China,” says Lex in the FT. And the latest in a long list of targets to feel the lash from Beijing is lithium mining. A probe into environmental rule-breaking has resulted in shutdowns in the country’s largest mine and production hub – at Yichun in the Jiangxi province. Since the area’s mines produce “about a tenth of the global supply of lithium” – and China controls two-thirds of processing capacity – that’s likely to have implications for the price of the metal, which is crucial to the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries. Previous crackdowns on other sectors by Beijing have followed a pattern: “harsh scrutiny follows share…

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Rod Stewart has cut waiting lists for scans at his local hospital in Essex by 10%, by funding a mobile scanning unit for a day. In January, the singer had called a phone-in on Sky News, to air his views about NHS waiting lists. He said it was “ridiculous” that people were having to wait so long for treatment, and that he’d pay for some scans to help. Visiting the hospital last week, he said he was there to “prove I’m not all mouth and trousers”, and added that he’d like to fund more units across the country. A sociologist who could not read or write until he was 18 has been appointed the University of Cambridge‘s youngest black professor. Jason Arday, 37, was diagnosed with autism and global development…

Roald Dahl, as Puffin Books rowed back on its plans to amend his children’s stories following a storm of criticism. Under the new plan, the original texts will be published by Penguin as a “classic collection”; while the amended texts, excised of references to fat children, ugly women and black tractors, will be issued under the Puffin imprint aimed at younger children. Easyjet passengers, after a pilot performed a 360º turn over the North Sea, on a flight from Iceland to Manchester, so that they could enjoy a spectacular view of the Northern Lights from 37,000 feet. Owing to unusual conditions, the Aurora Borealis was also visible from as far south as Cornwall this week.…

54% of British adults think that the UK’s target of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 is “unachievable”. 14% think it is achievable. 32% don’t know or are undecided. Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now A year on from the invasion of Ukraine, 49% of adults say the UK should remain as involved in the conflict as it is now. 16% say it should be more involved; 27% less. Survation/The Daily Telegraph The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are now more unpopular in the US than Prince Andrew. Prince Harry’s net approval rating stands at -10, and Meghan’s at -17; by contrast, Prince Andrew is on -2. Redfield & Wilton/Newsweek…

A comic’s harsh lesson In person, Jamie Demetriou comes across as bright and articulate, says Alex Moshakis in The Observer. Yet the comedian, known for writing and starring in the Bafta-winning sitcom Stath Lets Flats, thinks of himself as thick. “Deep down, I think I’m operating on a lower level than most people,” he explains. He struggled at school, left with no A levels, and failed his auditions for various drama schools – “never understanding the texts, never getting a callback”. Finally, he won a place to read drama at Bristol University, only to discover, in his second year, that he’d only got in thanks to a clerical error. “I was de-rigging a stage with one of my tutors and we had a heart-to-heart.” When he mentioned that he hadn’t…

Why is this still so significant? A man-made famine ravaged the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1932 to 1933, killing several million people. While it was officially denied by the Kremlin for more than 50 years, it “dramatically changed Ukrainian society and culture, leaving deep scars in the national memory”, writes Serhii Plokhy, the eminent Ukrainian historian. It is known as the Holodomor, derived from the Ukrainian words for “hunger” (holod) and “killing” (mor) – and it has long been a matter of dispute between modern Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine officially declared the famine a genocide in 2006, and has lobbied the international community to do the same. Twenty-four countries have done so, including, in recent months, Germany, Ireland, Romania and Bulgaria. How did the famine come about?? In 1928,…

BELGIUM How Central America came to Antwerp Politico (Brussels) Picture this. A justice minister being placed under 24-hour guard after receiving kidnap threats from “narco gangs”; security officials “bribed for tip-offs” about customs operations; illegal drugs being seized on such an “industrial scale”, incinerators can’t cope with the volume. I’m not talking Central America, says Stephen Rae: I’m talking Belgium. And what lies behind this appalling chain of events? “The answer is, of course, cocaine.” Antwerp, once Europe’s diamond capital, is now the gateway for drugs entering the EU from South America. And Europe’s insatiable appetite for cocaine means drug mafias have vast quantities of cash with which to buy off prying eyes. Customs officers can earn up to €80,000 for a single tip-off; billions of euros are being laundered…

Peter Andre, who has just turned 50, is adjusting to his fading star wattage. Whenever he wants to “stay humble”, he told Woman’s Own, he remembers an awkward encounter in Rome a few years ago. A British couple came up to him and his wife Emily and asked for a photo. “Sure,” said Andre. “Just with me or with my wife as well?” The couple were bemused. “No,” the woman replied. “Do you mind just taking a photo of me and my husband?” Betty Boothroyd (pictured), the former House of Commons speaker who has died aged 93, was much admired for her withering put-downs. Her skills were on full display on the eve of a Brexit vote in 2019, when she reminded the House of Lords of Harold Wilson’s belief…

“I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong.”Bertrand Russell, quoted on The Browser “I’m sorry, but you can’t always be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average. That’s not how averages work.”Twitter user @Kit_Yates_ Maths, quoted in The Times “It’s like magic. When you live by yourself, all your annoying habits are gone!”Writer Merrill Markoe, quoted in The Knowledge “Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.”Benjamin Franklin, quoted in The Wall Street Journal “If you don’t have fun in your 20s, you’re never going to have fun.”Fran Lebowitz, quoted on NorthJersey.com “Middle age is an expensive time. One is old enough to have taste and still young enough to have appetite.”Simon Raven, quoted in The Guardian “Civilisation is like a thin layer of…

To The Guardian The Roald Dahl Story Company says it has updated his books “so they can continue to be enjoyed by all”, but maintain the “sharp-edged spirit” of the originals. Some of us never enjoyed or celebrated Dahl’s books, including his eminent contemporary, the children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff, who was my godmother. As she pointed out to me when I was young, Dahl’s books are not so much “sharp-edged” as mean and nasty. Furthermore, Dahl is also on the record as having expressed abhorrent antisemitic views. No amount of judicious editing can remove for some of us the mean spirit embodied in his stories, nor eradicate the stain of antisemitism. Anthony Lawton, Church Langton, Leicestershire To The Times Dahl held repulsive views, especially on race. His work is powered…

by Sophie Mackintosh Hamish Hamilton 192pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99 Sophie Mackintosh’s third novel is “inspired by a 1951 mass poisoning in a French commune”, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. This event, in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, left seven people dead and 50 in asylums, and is thought to have been caused by a local baker. Using these facts as a starting point, Mackintosh crafts a mysterious tale which centres on Elodie, the baker’s wife, and her “voyeuristic obsession” with a glamorous newcomer called Violet. A “shimmering fever-dream of a novel”, Cursed Bread is also “refreshing” in its brevity: at less than 200 pages, it “contains more riches than many a novel twice its length”. The story of the poisoning was “begging to be turned into a…

at Michael Werner Gallery For most of his professional life, the French painter Eugène Leroy (1910-2000) worked full time as a teacher of Latin and Greek. Yet as this rare UK exhibition of his work demonstrates, he was no artistic dilettante. Leroy cleaved to classical tradition, focusing on still lifes, landscapes and portraits; but his work revolved around the act of gradually eliminating representational imagery by slathering it in paint. Indeed, the impasto in some of the 25 works here rivals even Frank Auerbach’s weightiest efforts in terms of thickness; in some cases, it has a depth of more than 20cm. There’s nothing in this exhibition, entitled The Materiality of Light, Paintings 1950-1999, that can truly be described as a masterpiece. Even so, there’s much to admire: in spite of…

● Specsavers and Boots will recycle contact lenses and packaging, and also take glasses. Lions Clubs International (lionsclubs.org) sends glasses to the developing world. ● If you can’t reuse them, take pump bottles plus any old cosmetics and toothpaste tubes to any Boots store for recycling. Boots guarantees nothing goes to landfill or is incinerated. Boots and Superdrug also take old insulin pens with the PenCycle scheme. ● Black plastic is widely recyclable, but check your local authority: recyclenow.com has a guide to what can and can’t be recycled in your postcode. Local recycling centres normally take foil; scrunch it up first. ● Supermarkets will recycle carrier bags, crisp and biscuit packets and food pouches – anything that springs back when you crumple it; but make sure they‘re clean. ●…

Philip Ziegler 1929-2023 Urbane and genial, with “the air of the old-style gentleman publisher” he had been, the writer and historian Philip Ziegler produced a string of critically acclaimed biographies, in which he made “the best possible case for his subject while not hesitating to show [them] in the worst possible light”, said The Daily Telegraph. These subjects ranged from Harold Wilson and Edward Heath to Edward VIII, Osbert Sitwell, Laurence Olivier – and the aristocrat and former socialite Lady Diana Cooper. Styling herself by then as “the wrong Lady Diana”, Cooper was one of his only subjects who was still alive at the time of his writing. Ziegler, who has died aged 93, said that he had got around this problem by simply not thinking about what she’d make…